Tag Archives: The Guardian

Pot, Meet Kettle

Posted on by

On January 24th, The Guardian posted the following headline:

Tim Scott’s behaviour around Trump is ‘humiliating’, says the Rev Al Sharpton

Not only is the criticism undeserved, the fact that it comes from Al Sharpton is ridiculous.

Just to refresh your memory, here is part of an NPR article from August 2013:

It was 1987 when a black teenager, Tawana Brawley, said she had been raped and kidnapped by a group of white men in Dutchess County, N.Y.

Her story of being attacked, scrawled with racial slurs, smeared with feces and left beside a road wrapped in a plastic bag made front pages across the nation — especially after the Rev. Al Sharpton took up her case.

But, as The Associated Press reminds readers, “a special state grand jury later determined that Brawley had fabricated her claims, perhaps to avoid punishment for staying out late.”

In 1998, Steven Pagones, who was the county prosecutor at the time, won a defamation suit against Sharpton, Brawley and Brawley’s attorneys. They had accused Pagones of being among Brawley’s attackers.

“Sharpton has since paid off his [$65,000] debt with money raised by his supporters,” the Village Voice says. Brawley was ordered to pay $190,000.

It’s been 15 years. With interest, the judgment against the now 40-year-old Brawley has grown to more than $430,000. Finally, the Poughkeepsie Journal reports, Pagones is receiving some of the money: $3,700, or about 1 percent of what he’s now owed.

Snopes also notes:

Sharpton himself owes New York state $806,875 and has federal liens for unpaid personal income taxes against him totaling $2.6 million, records show.

The Harlem-based NAN owed $813,576 to the federal government at the end of 2012, according to the most recent filings for the group.

Sharpton’s company, Rev-Al Communications, owes $447,826 to the state. His Bo-Spanky Consulting firm has only $18.21 in outstanding debt, according to state records.

This is the person who is criticizing Tim Scott. This is also The Guardian giving credence to that criticism. Always consider the source when it comes to news.

 

Slouching Toward Banana Republic Status

Posted on by

Evidently in modern-day America when you stand before a judge, it doesn’t matter what you did, it matters which side of the political aisle you favor.

On Sunday, Trending Politics reported:

Two far-left rioters who pleaded guilty to burning down an Atlanta Wendy’s during the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020 have been sentenced to five years of probation by a Fulton County judge.

The Wendy’s was the site of the fatal, officer-involved shooting of Rayshard Brooks on June 12, 2020. Brooks had fallen asleep in the drive thru and attacked the responding Atlanta Police Officer, Garret Rolfe, when he was detained. Brooks was shot and killed after he tried to grab Rolfe’s taser, leading to riots not long after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis.

Atanta’s BLM chapter, along with other chapters and far-left activists nationwide, called for Rolfe to be charged. He ultimately was charged with murder by then-Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, though charges were dropped in 2022 by a special prosecutor.

The article concludes:

On Saturday, 11 Alive reported that two suspects charged with torching the Wendy’s had accepted generous plea deals. Chisom Kingston and Natalie White were each sentenced to five years of probation, court records show.

Both Kingston and White will also be forced to complete 150 hours of community service and pay a $500 fine. A third suspect, John Wade, was indicted for his role in starting the blaze this past January.

According to an analysis from The Guardian, upwards of 99 percent of charges brought against Black Lives Matter rioters in 2020 were dropped by local prosecutors.

Meanwhile, people who did nothing more than walk through the Capitol on January 6th are rotting in Washington, D. C. jail

The United Nations Has A Dietary Plan For America

Posted on by

On Tuesday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about one United Nations Agency’s plan to fight climate change.

The article reports:

The United Nations agency that is pushing wealthy nations to curb their meat consumption in the name of climate change is led by a top Chinese Communist Party official who is known for using the agency to serve Beijing.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization—which counts CCP official Qu Dongyu as its director—is set to release a plan next month that calls on “the world’s most-developed nations” to fight climate change by curbing “their excessive appetite for meat,” Bloomberg reported Saturday. It’s unlikely, however, that the directive will apply to China. The United Nations still considers China a developing country, and Qu himself has long faced criticism for using his U.N. post to advance Beijing’s interests.

The article explains one possible motive for the push toward eating less meat:

A reduction in global meat production, meanwhile, could help alleviate Chinese concerns over food security and land scarcity. China is the world’s largest meat importer thanks in part to “scarcity of land for feed and forage” and “rising production costs” that have limited its production, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report published in July. China experienced large-scale food shortages in 2022, prompting protests in more than a dozen cities.

In August 2023, The Guardian reported the following:

China is approving new coal power projects at the equivalent of two plants every week, a rate energy watchdogs say is unsustainable if the country hopes to achieve its energy targets.

The government has pledged to peak emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2060, and in 2021 the president, Xi Jinping, promised to stop building coal powered plants abroad.

But after regional power crunches in 2022, China started a domestic spree of approving new projects and restarting suspended ones. In 2022 the government approved a record-breaking 106 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity. One gigawatt is the equivalent of a large coal power plant.

So why is a country that is building coal plants to generate electricity at the rate of two a week complaining that Americans eat too much meat?

It really is time for America to leave the United Nations, take over the building in New York and turn it into condominiums.

Carbon Credits Are Unraveling

Posted on by

On Friday, WattsUpWithThat posted an article about the very predictable unraveling of carbon credits. This is not a new phenomena.

In 2003, CCX (Chicago Climate Exchange) was founded. It was assumed that when Democrats got control of Congress, they would pass Cap and Trade legislation and carbon credits would be exchanged through CCX. Some major Democrat figures were heavily invested in CCX. Cap and Trade never passed and the CCX began laying off employees in 2010. (article here)

Yesterday WattsUpWithThat reported:

The world of carbon credits has long been presented as a major tool for supposed climate woes. Advocates of this system have been quick to sing its praises, positioning it as the ultimate solution for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. But skeptics, like yours truly, have long pointed out the inherent flaws in such a system. Now, even The Guardian, a publication that has been a staunch advocate of climate alarmism, seems to be having second thoughts. It’s almost as if they’re saying, “Oops, maybe the skeptics had a point.”

The Guardian’s Late Awakening

The article from The Guardian delves deep into the world of carbon credits, questioning their actual impact on reducing emissions. It’s almost amusing to see them now asking:

“Carbon credits are supposed to offset the emissions caused by companies and individuals. But do they really reduce greenhouse gases?”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/19/do-carbon-credit-reduce-emissions-greenhouse-gases

A question that should have been asked and critically examined long before jumping on the carbon credit bandwagon.

The Mirage of Offsetting

The Guardian highlights a significant concern: the illusion of offsetting. Purchasing carbon credits doesn’t necessarily equate to genuine offsetting of emissions. Many of these credits are tied to projects that would have been executed regardless, meaning no real reduction in emissions.

“Many of the projects supported by carbon credits, such as the construction of windfarms and solar parks, would have been built anyway.”

In essence, it’s a system that allows companies to parade their “green” credentials without making any tangible changes to their carbon footprint.

The Inconsistencies of Carbon Credit Accounting

The article also sheds light on the convoluted and inconsistent world of carbon credit accounting. With no unified standard and a lack of rigorous oversight, it’s a system rife with potential for manipulation.

“There is no single standard for carbon credits, and critics argue that this has allowed projects that do not deliver real-world emissions reductions to flourish.”

It’s a system that skeptics have long warned about, and it seems these concerns were not unfounded.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. People are beginning to wake up.

Food And The Green Movement

Posted on by

The radical environmentalists don’t seem to be aware of the unintended consequences of their extreme goals. Balance seems to be a concept that has long since left the building. On Monday, John Hinderaker posted an article at Power Line Blog illustrating one aspect of the problem.

The article quotes an article from The Guardian on May 1:

Northern Ireland will need to lose more than 1 million sheep and cattle to meet its new legally binding climate emissions targets, according to an industry-commissioned analysis seen by the Guardian.

The large-scale reduction in farm animals comes after the passing of the ​​jurisdiction’s first ever climate act, requiring the farming sector to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and reduce methane emissions by almost 50% over the same period.

… Analysis by KPMG, commissioned by industry representatives including the Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU), estimates more than 500,000 cattle and about 700,000 sheep would need to be lost in order for Northern Ireland to meet the new climate targets.

Separate analysis by the UK government’s climate advisers suggests chicken numbers would also need to be cut by 5 million by 2035.

So we are going to destroy the food supply, starve massive numbers of people, and call it saving the planet? For whom are we saving the planet? Is that a question that needs to be asked–do you think the ruling class will starve?

The article at Power Line Blog concludes:

So if you do away with cows, sheep, chickens and pigs, you are basically doing away with agriculture in Northern Ireland. But people will still need to eat. The environmentalists don’t care, of course. But others do:

Although farm labour only accounts for 7% of the country’s labour force, many more depend on the rural economy. Altogether the rural population makes up about 40% of the total in N Ireland. Destroying a large part of farming sector there would be catastrophic for the rural sector. Replacing the meat and dairy sector with, for instance, potatoes would decimate incomes and lead to mass migration out of the countryside.

My guess is that no democracy will actually go through with the idiotic “green” promises that governments have made. I hope not, anyway. As for the autocracies, they have been careful not to promise anything meaningful, and they wouldn’t follow through in any event. This gives them a huge economic and human advantage to the extent that democracies fulfill their irrational commitments.

Do you still believe that environmentalism is actually about the environment?

 

Much Ado About Nothing?

Posted on by

Big media is panicked over the new variant of Covid coming out of Africa. There seems to be some question as to whether or not they should be. Yesterday The Western Journal posted an article about the Omicron variant of the virus. I will mention at this point that someone on Facebook this morning pointed out that omicron is an anagram for moronic.

The article reports:

As panic circles the globe over a new coronavirus variant first reported in South Africa, the doctor who first noticed the variant is asking for a dose of calm.

Dr. Angelique Coetzee said that the unusual infections she was seeing in her private practice in Pretoria earlier this month presented “unusual but mild” symptoms, according to the Telegraph.

Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, said it was “premature” to say the virus was going to mushroom into a global health crisis, according to the Guardian. On Friday, the World Health Association dubbed the Omicron variant a variant of concern. President Joe Biden then slapped travel restrictions on multiple African countries.

The article notes the unusual symptoms:

Coetzee said she would like more people to get vaccinated.

“Unfortunately, it’s not only the responsibility of the government; it’s the responsibility of the public as well … You can only ask people so many times to go and get vaccinated, and if you don’t listen, then there’s consequences, and then you have to take the consequences,” she said.

She said that the patients she treated came from very different backgrounds and had intense fatigue. None had a loss of test or smell. A 6-year-old child she treated had a high pulse rate.

“Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before,” she said, according to the Telegraph.

Coetzee said that after she treated a family of four who tested positive for the virus and had complete exhaustion, she alerted South Africa’s vaccine advisory committee.

As someone who has recovered from the original coronavirus, I can state that exhaustion was part of the the original virus. It took my husband and I almost two months to get our energy back. Exhaustion is not fun, but if that is the major sympton of the virus, we should be okay. Everyday living in today’s world is exhausting!

Something That Needs To Be Looked Into

Posted on by

I don’t usually use articles from The Guardian, but even a blind squirrel finds an acorn occasionally. On November 8th, The Guardian posted an article about a French couple who won a lawsuit claiming health issues caused by a nearby wind farm. This is not the first time that wind farms have been cited for creating various health problems (article here).

The article at The Guardian reports:

A French court has recognised “turbine syndrome” after a couple complained their health was damaged by living near a windfarm.

In what is believed to be the first judgment of its kind in France, Belgians Christel and Luc Fockaert were awarded more than €100,000 in compensation by the judge in Toulouse.

The couple claimed they experienced a range of health problems including headaches, insomnia, heart irregularities, depression, dizziness, tinnitus and nausea for more than two years, insisting these were caused by six wind turbines set up 700 metres from their home at Fontrieu in the Tarn, southern France.

The turbines had been installed in 2008. However, it was reported that the couple’s health problems started five years later. The Fockaerts believed this was because woodland between their property and the nearest turbine was cut down.

They singled out the noise, which they said was “comparable to a washing machine continually turning”, and the “white flashing lights” on the turbines, as particularly detrimental to their health.

“We didn’t understand straight away, but little by little we realised the problem came from the turbines,” Christel Fockaert said. “The turbines flash every two seconds … we had to have outside lights to counter the effect of the flashes.”

The couple moved away from the area in 2015 and said their health problems disappeared shortly afterwards.

Doctors failed to find any health problem, but a court expert said turbine syndrome had been previously identified by scientific research.

There are also other problems with wind turbines. They don’t biodegrade and are so large that it only takes a few of them to fill up a landfill. There is also the matter of bird kills. In October 2020, a website called CFACT posted the following:

Wildlife conservationists hate Wind turbines for their infamous role as bird killer, a fact that is very rarely mentioned in the news media.

Pro-renewable lobbies argue that there are many causes for bird mortality and that the mortality contribution from Wind Turbines is quite insignificant. However, people who do actual ground work in protecting these birds–biologists, bird conservationists, wildlife ecologists, and non-profit organizations–disagree with this argument.

According to experts, Wind turbines pose a significant risk to birds, especially to large raptors, birds of prey, and other migratory soaring birds. Even in a very high quality habitat, Wind turbines cause disproportionate increases in collision mortality. Besides direct injury and deaths, Wind farm turbines also cause functional habitat loss for migratory soaring birds, leading to significant damage to flocks.

In the U.S., the government is well aware of the Wind turbine potential to kill birds in large numbers. So much so that Wind operators have been allotted bird-kill quotas which indicate the number of birds that the wind operator is allowed to kill in a year.

It is a fact that is so well established, that researchers no longer ponder if Wind turbines kill or not. They have moved on to addressing how to minimize these deaths and finding solutions for more efficient ways to calculate the collision mortality rates. Countries like India are even planning to introduce guidelines to protect birds from wind mills.

A 2019 study estimated that wind turbines affect the life and habitat of around 150,000 birds in the U.S. annually. But the numbers are only going to get higher, as more wind turbines will be installed in the U.S. (Installed wind energy capacity in the United States doubled from 2012 to 2020). The American Bird Conservancy predicts that if 20 percent of the nation’s electricity comes through wind power it will potentially kill at least one million birds per year by 2030.

I think we need to do more research before we decide that wind farms are the answer to our energy needs.

It’s Not Safe To Be A Grandma In The Netherlands

Posted on by

On Friday, The Guardian posted an article about a recent court case in the Netherlands that resulted in a change to the law.

The article reports:

Doctors euthanising a patient with severe dementia may slip a sedative into their food or drink if there are concerns they will become “disturbed, agitated or aggressive”, under a change to the codes of practice in the Netherlands.

The review committee for cases of euthanasia refreshed its guidance in response to the case of a former nursing home doctor, Marinou Arends, who was prosecuted for murder and cleared after putting a sedative in her 74-year-old patient’s coffee before giving a lethal injection.

Arends was given a written reprimand by the Dutch medical board for acting on the basis of two “advance directives” in which the patient said only that she wished to die when she considered the time was right.

But in April the supreme court ruled that no laws had been broken and dismissed the medical board’s decision, ruling that if a patient is no longer capable of giving assent, a doctor need not take a literal interpretation of an advance directive if the circumstances do not match the eventual scenario.

In response to the court, Jacob Kohnstamm, the chair of the euthanasia review committee, said his body needed to update its code for doctors involved in euthanasia.

The new code says that in cases where a patient has advanced dementia, “it is not necessary for the doctor to agree with the patient the time or manner in which euthanasia will be given”.

The article concludes:

Since 2002, doctors have been able to euthanise adults in the Netherlands in cases where it is regarded as a voluntary and well-considered request in the context of unbearable suffering from which there is no prospect of improvement or alternative remedy.

Last year there were 6,361 cases of euthanasia in the Netherlands – just over 4% of the country’s total deaths. Of these, 91% were in cases of terminal medical conditions. The remainder of the cases involved severe psychiatric illness, including dementia.

This month the Dutch government said it would change the regulations to permit doctors to euthanise terminally ill children aged between one and 12, after months of debate within the ruling coalition government.

The health minister, Hugo de Jonge, said a change in regulations was necessary to help “a small group of terminally ill children who agonise with no hope and unbearable suffering”.

No one wants to see a child or an elderly person suffer. However, I am not sure that gives anyone the right to take an innocent life. This is frightening to me. I hope it frightens you as well. I do wonder how doctors reconcile this with their Hippocratic Oath.

Truth In Comedy

Posted on by

There is a bit of a dust up going on right now between China and the National Basketball Association. It seems that Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a tweet showing support for Hong King’s freedom movement. Obviously, the Chinese are not a big fan of free speech. Mr. Morey has deleted his tweets and apologized, but that does not seem to be enough for the Chinese.

In an article posted today, CNBC reports:

  • Searches for “Houston Rockets” and “Rockets” in Chinese on Alibaba-owned Taobao and Tmall and another site JD.com, yielded no results.
  • It comes after Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted support for the anti-government protestors in Hong Kong. The tweet was quickly deleted.
  • Chinese broadcast partners Tencent and state-owned CCTV said they would no longer show Rockets games.

We need to remember that China is NOT a free country.

Meanwhile, enter Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park” fame.

Scott Johnson at Power Line Blog posted an article today about their response to the dust up.

The article quotes an article in The Guardian:

South Park’s creators have responded with a mock apology to reports that China has censored the programme, ridiculing the country and comparing President Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh.

The “apology” from Trey Parker and Matt Stone comes after reports on Monday that China had scrubbed all episodes, clips and content related to the long-running comedy cartoon from Chinese streaming and social media platforms in response to a recent episode that was critical of the country.

The episode, called Band in China, took aim at what it portrayed as a tendency in US culture to adjust content to accommodate Chinese censorship laws. “It’s not worth living in a world where China controls my country’s art,” says one character in the episode.

The episode also includes a plot line in which a character is caught selling drugs in China and as punishment is sent to a work camp, similar to the mass internment camps in Xinjiang where an estimated one million people, including Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are detained.

The article also includes the non-apology apology from Trey Parker and Matt Stone:

I think that is called ‘speaking truth to power.’

I Guess They Did Take Him Seriously

Posted on by

In June 2015, real estate mogul Donald Trump announced that he was running for President. I must admit I wasn’t impressed. There was nothing in his record to indicate he believed in anything I believed in, and he was a totally inexperienced candidate. What I didn’t realize was that experience comes in many different forms–successfully doing business in a city known for corruption, creating a television show that ordinary people enjoyed, and navigating the social waters of the elite–attending Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, etc. (I guess the political left didn’t hate him until he was a Republican and ran for President.) I really didn’t take him seriously. I suspect a lot of other people shared that opinion. The White House was supposed to go to Hillary Clinton–that was her reward for stepping out of the 2008 Democrat primary election, so it really didn’t matter who the Republicans ran. However, the economy was stuttering, unemployment was high, and Americans didn’t seem to have a lot of spending money in their pockets.

Well, around the summer of 2016 the Democrats began to take Donald Trump seriously as a candidate. So seriously in fact that they decided to use the power of government (on an international scale) to keep him from being elected and to prevent him from doing anything if he was elected.

The Guardian posted an article on July 30 about those efforts.

The article reports:

Two of the most senior intelligence officials in the US and UK privately shared concerns about “our strange situation” as the FBI launched its 2016 investigation into whether Donald Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia, the Guardian has learned.

Text messages between Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI at the time, and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, now the head of GCHQ, also reveal their mutual surprise at the result of the EU referendum, which some US officials regarded as a “wake-up call”, according to a person familiar with the matter.

While Russia had previously been viewed as a country that would seek to interfere in western elections, the Brexit vote was viewed by some within the FBI as a sign that Russian activities had possibly been successful, the person said.

Their exchanges offer new insights into the start of the FBI’s Russia investigation, and how British intelligence appears to have played a key role in the early stages.

In one exchange in August 2016, Fleming noted that members of the FBI and MI5 had “met on our strange situation”, a veiled reference to discussions about Russian activities, according to the source.

…The exchanges underscore a sensitive issue in the US – namely the role foreign intelligence services played in the FBI’s decision to initiate an investigation into the Trump campaign.

On 31 July 2016, the FBI opened a covert counterintelligence investigation codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane” into the then presidential candidate’s possible collusion with Russia.

The investigation was eventually taken over by the special counsel Robert Mueller, who has said there were “multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election” by Russia.

Mueller’s 448-page report did not establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but it did identify incidents in which Trump attempted to obstruct justice in the investigation, and did not clear the president of wrongdoing.

US and UK intelligence agencies frequently share information, but the exchanges between McCabe and Fleming appear to reflect a desire for a direct line of communication given what was seen as a developing problem on both sides of the Atlantic.

This is the key paragraph:

In his text message about the August 2016 meeting, Fleming appeared to be making a reference to Peter Strzok, a senior FBI official who travelled to London that month to meet the Australian diplomat Alexander Downer. Downer had agreed to speak with the FBI about a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, who had told him that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee in the race. The meeting was first reported by the New York Times.

This is the context of these activities–the British ‘deep state’ wanted Brexit to fail, and the American ‘deep state’ wanted Donald Trump not to be elected. The FBI was using overseas sources to do spying on political candidates that would have been illegal if it had been done domestically. The Russians did not interfere in the 2016 election other than placing ads and fake comments on Facebook. The real interference came from the American intelligence community–something that is totally illegal. Those involved need to be held accountable.

The Court Gets It Right

Posted on by

The Guardian is reporting today that an Australian court ruled James Cook University had unlawfully sacked a professor who had criticised scientific research about the climate change impact on the Great Barrier Reef. Peter Ridd was a professor at James Cook University in Australia before he was fired for his criticism of some of the research on climate change.

The American Thinker posted an article today noting the following:

The greatest “tell” for non-scientists evaluating the likelihood that the anthropogenic global warming theory is a fraud is that instead of critically examining the facts, warmists try to silence skeptics, with some of them even demanding jail for the thought-crime of questioning their unproven theory.  So thorough has been the pressure to keep the fraud going and keep the billions of dollars a year in research funds flowing to universities and other research institutions pushing the party line that skeptics are under threat of firing — and some have been fired.

The Guardian explains:

Judge Salvatore Vasta ruled on Tuesday the 17 findings made by the university, the two speech directions, the five confidentiality directions, the no satire direction, the censure, the final censure and the termination of Ridd’s employment were all unlawful.

…Judge Vasta said the university has not understood the whole concept of intellectual freedom.

“[The] university has ‘played the man and not the ball’,” he said.

 “Intellectual freedom is so important. It allows academics to express their opinions without fear of reprisals. It allows a Charles Darwin to break free of the constraints of creationism. It allows an Albert Einstein to break free of the constraints of Newtonian physics. It allows the human race to question conventional wisdom in the never-ending search for knowledge and truth.”

The Townsville-based university’s provost professor, Chris Cocklin, noted the judgment does not refer to any case law.

“We disagree with the judgment and we maintain we have not taken issue with Dr Ridd’s nor any other employee’s rights to academic freedom,” Cocklin said in a statement.

“Dr Ridd was not sacked because of his scientific views. Dr Ridd was never gagged or silenced about his scientific views, a matter which was admitted during the court hearing.”

The case has been adjourned for a further hearing to award a penalty.

My biggest problem in science classes was jumping to conclusions without examining all the facts. I think the entire concept of man-made global warming rather than natural climate cycles is a result of that sort of thinking.

 

A Lie Can Travel Half Way Around The World While The Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes

Posted on by

The above quote is from Mark Twain. He definitely knew what he was talking about. In America there are six major companies that control our media. Five of them lean left, one tends toward the center right. That is called balance. The alternative media is really the only chance most Americans have to get a balanced picture of what is actually happening.

The Washington Examiner posted an editorial today which listed the stories major media had misreported regarding the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh.

Here is a summary of those stories:

“Accuser’s schoolmate says she recalls hearing of alleged Kavanaugh incident,” NBC News trumpeted on Wednesday and Thursday. The casual reader would believe that someone had corroborated the accusation against Kavanaugh. Instead, the piece was based on a tweet, which was later retracted, by a woman who admits, “I do not have first hand knowledge of the incident.”

NPR followed up on the schoolmate’s claim, reporting that she says she has “no idea” if the assault happened or not. That misleading and suggestive NBC News headline is still drawing in duped readers, popping up on social media and Google News homepages.

On Sept. 20, the Guardian published a salacious article claiming that a “top professor at Yale Law School” told students last year that it was “not an accident” that Kavanaugh’s female law clerks all “looked like models.” This professor also reportedly said she “would provide advice to students about their physical appearance if they wanted to work for him.”

It’s not until the 10th paragraph of the story that Guardian readers are told, “There is no allegation that the female students who worked for Kavanaugh were chosen because of their physical appearance or that they were not qualified.”

CNN, MSNBC, and Politico circulated a dishonestly edited video this week of Kavanaugh saying in 2015, “What happens at Georgetown prep, stays at Georgetown prep.” The remark came in the larger context of a joke, but MSNBC and CNN viewers weren’t shown that. Neither were Politico’s readers. Audiences are left instead with the impression that Kavanaugh was somehow admitting bad behavior.

These are only a few examples of misleading stories. There are some real questions as to what happened 30-some years ago. There are some real questions as to the timing of introducing this story into the confirmation process. There are also some real questions as to whether or not we will ever know the entire truth about this matter. The accuser has stated that she can’t remember where or when this incident happened–she just knows it was Judge Kavanuagh. How good is your memory on 30-years old incidents.

Politicizing And Misleading The Public On A Tragedy

Posted on by

Yesterday there was an horrific shooting at a church in Texas. The Guardian posted a story yesterday about how the gunman was stopped. An armed citizen engaged the gunman and another citizen pursued the gunman in a vehicle with the armed citizen. The police arrived after the two citizens chased the gunman and held him at bay with a rifle. It took the police between five and seven minutes to arrive. How many more people would have been killed but for the actions of the armed citizen?

There is another aspect to this story. Breitbart is reporting today that the man who shot up the church had been denied a Texas concealed carry permit.

USA Today failed to mention that in their rather biased reporting

Breitbart reports:

USA Today chided Texas for “lax” concealed carry laws after the Sutherland Springs church shooting but the attacker, Devin Kelley, was denied such a permit.

Mr. Kelley had been denied a concealed carry permit–stricter gun laws would not have mattered in this case because he was not interested in following the gun laws (or the laws against murder). Other sources indicate that he should not have been able to pass any kind of background check to purchase a weapon as he had previously been convicted of domestic violence. There is no way under current gun laws he should have been able to purchase a gun. His rampage was stopped short by a citizen with a gun permit.

Unfortunately we will never find a way to stop criminals (or those with criminal intent) from obtaining guns illegally. Therefore it makes no sense to deny law-abiding Americans the ability to defend themselves. Thank God there was a legally armed citizen to stop the rampage.

I Really Like The British

Posted on by

Steven Hayward at Power Line posted an article today about a very interesting comment made by Owen Paterson, Britain’s secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs.

The Guardian posted his remarks today:

The cabinet minister responsible for fighting the effects of climate change claimed there would be advantages to an increase in temperature predicted by the United Nations including fewer people dying of cold in winter and the growth of certain crops further north.

Owen Paterson told a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference on Sunday night that predictions by scientists – that there could be major increases in temperature resulting in melting ice caps and worldwide flooding – should not be seen as entirely negative.

…”People get very emotional about this subject and I think we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries.

“I think the relief of this latest report is that it shows a really quite modest increase, half of which has already happened. They are talking one to two and a half degrees.

“Remember that for humans, the biggest cause of death is cold in winter, far bigger than heat in summer. It would also lead to longer growing seasons and you could extend growing a little further north into some of the colder areas.

“I actually see this report as something we need to take seriously but I am rather relieved that it is not as catastrophic in its forecast as we had been led to believe early on and what it is saying is something we can adapt to over time and we are very good as a race at adapting,” he said.

Needless to say, those supporting drastic action to combat climate change that has not occurred for the past fifteen years are a bit upset at the comments. The science of climate change is questionable at best. When you listen to the solutions suggested by those offering solutions, you discover that they simply involve the transfer of wealth from democracies to countries ruled by tyrants. Their solutions have nothing to do with climate and a lot to do with taking money from free countries that have developed their resources through the free market and giving it to countries where the money will go to corrupt leaders. Somehow that doesn’t seem like the answer to anything.

Enhanced by Zemanta