Utopia, you are standing in it!

Dr. Arnd Bernaerts in a recent article provides the historical context necessary to get our bearings straight despite today’s overheated, bizarre media-drenched tirades.

As he explains, climate has always been particular and personal, not global or objective. And that has led us into our current impasse, unable to talk productively about weather and climate. It is as though we can not come to grips with the climate issue because our very language and terminology is itself a prior problem preventing any progress. In brief, the terms “weather” and “climate” are loaded with emotion, but not with clear, definitive scientific meaning. IOW plenty of connotation (heat) and very little denotation (light). Dr. Bernaerts faults scientists for failing to develop a rational framework for discovery and research, and instead opting for an actiivist agenda which benefits from the ambiguity and misrepresentation.

The article is Weather and climate are everyday slang words and…

Posted by Sara M. Butler, 16 May 2019.

A more familiar gang of medieval outlaws: Robin Hood, Will Scarlet, and Little John.

The Folvilles of Ashby-Folville (Leics.) played a key role in persuading me to devote my life to researching crime in medieval England. As an undergraduate, reading Edward Stones’ 1957 study of the infamous crime family opened my eyes to the medieval common law’s broad potential for manipulation and creative application of the laws.[1] For those of you unfamiliar with the family, their story comes across as a medieval rendering of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, with a little bit of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid thrown in for good measure. John de Folville, lord of Ashby-Folville, fathered seven sons. Only one of the seven, John the younger, led the typical life of the medieval gentry, obtaining appointments as commissioner of array and keeper of…

This is the fourth in a series of posts by CAMERA Arabic (part 1, part 2, part 3) showing how Arabic language news networks, including those affiliated with Western media outlets, frame the topic of Jews who originate from or live in the Middle East and North Africa, by attempting to distinguish between ‘loyal’ Jews and ‘treacherous’ Zionists.  (All translations, emphasis and in-bracket remarks are by CAMERA Arabic unless otherwise specified. Almost all links lead to English websites, unless no reliable translation was found.)

In previous posts we sought to reveal how some Arabic-speaking journalists and commentators frame the existence (or more commonly, lack thereof) of Jewish communities in Arab states. Through an analysis of three news items, originating in Egypt and Tunisia, we demonstrated that they approached this volatile topic in the following ways:

• Labeling Jews from Arab states, in the pejorative, as “Zionists” or…

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Dr. Thomas Sowell published a book entitled Intellectuals and Society. In his book, Sowell examines a group of people who influence public policy, debates and other institutions. The talk Dr. Sowell gives in this video goes into elements of his book. It includes discussion of some of the personalities profiled in it along with a look at President Barack Obama.

Dr. Sowell also discusses environmentalists too as they are very much intellectuals in that they think they are the enlightened ones who know what is best for everyone else. The only difference is that environmentalists can back their words up with activism in order to make you do their bidding. Not only is the road to hell, as Dr. Sowell quips, paved with Ivy League degrees but hell on Earth is achieved by people thinking they know what is best for others.

Think Tank host Ben Wattenberg converses one-on-one with author Thomas Sowell about his (then) new book, The Vision of the Anointed, which argues that the assumptions and beliefs of America’s liberal elite have created thirty years of disaster. This book can be seen as a precursor to Intellectuals and Society.

In his book, Sowell states: “Whether the issue has been overpopulation, Keynesian economics, criminal justice or natural resource exhaustion, a key assumption is that the public is so irrational that the superior wisdom of the anointed must be imposed to avert disaster. The anointed do not simply happen to have a disdain for the public. Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the decisions of others.”

Before providing examples of Guardian op-eds, cartoons and letters that obfuscated, covered for or excused Jeremy Corbyn’s well documented record of aiding, abetting and, at times, personally engaging in antisemitism, let’s begin with some numbers:

• 87 – The percentage of British Jews who believe Corbyn is personally antisemitic.
• 47 – The percentage of British Jews who would have seriously considered leaving the UK if Corbyn became prime minister.
• 6 – The percentage of Jewish voters who said they would even consider voting for Corbyn.
• 39 – The percentageof all Britons who believe Corbyn is antisemitic.
• 1 – The number of British political parties, other than Corbyn’s Labour, that have been investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission – the public body responsible for the enforcement of non-discrimination laws in England, Scotland and Wales – for institutional racism.  (That other party was the far-right British National Party)

In February

The fragmentation of the US Democratic Party’s field of presidential pre-candidates exaggerates the weakness–real though it is–of the clear front-runner, Joe Biden.

Taking two poll trackers, Economist and FiveThirtyEight, here are those polling at five percent or more:

It is noteworthy that even with so many candidates and different methodologies, the two trackers agree on the order. The only really substantial difference between them is in the estimate for Bloomberg. Not shown here, the two trackers also agree in the order of the next three: Yang, Klobuchar, and Booker. After that they diverge on the farther trailing candidates. (Economist has both Gabbard and Steyer at 1% but lists her ahead of him; perhaps we could say they agree on the order of the top ten.)

In the

Antifa thugs outside Munich Conference Center.

Thanks to Andreas Müller for writing at his blog hintermbusch on four key presentations at the EIKE Climate Conference on Nov. 23, 2019. As many have read, eco-terrorists forced the sessions out of the scheduled venue, but the gatherings went on elsewhere.  So much for dialogue in search of scientific truth. Here are some excerpts in italics with my bolds to encourage readers to read his informative report. (link in red above).

In this blog post, I summarize these lectures and add links to the video clips for you to follow the lectures on your own and in full detail (Only the first talk was in German and is not easily accessible for most of the international public).

Christian Schlüchter, Switzerland

Prof. em. Christian Schlüchter is a geologist and has studied the glaciers of the Alps in great detail. He reports the findings of…

On July 29^th Amnesty International released yet another one of its reports concerning last summer’s conflict between Israel and assorted terrorist groups based in the Gaza Strip. Predictably, the BBC News website’s Middle East page quickly came up with an article headlined “Gaza: ‘Israeli war crimes’ followed soldier’s capture – Amnesty” and viewers of BBC television news programmes saw a filmed item which was also posted on the website under the title “Gaza conflict: Amnesty report says Israel committed ‘war crimes’“.

There is of course nothing surprising about that: the BBC has faithfully and unquestioningly amplified the Amnesty International material produced on that subject since the hostilities came to a close, just as it also blindly reproduced statements made by that NGO during the conflict itself. And there was also nothing unexpected about that because Amnesty International is one of the NGOs most regularly promoted…

On December 12 I reported on what has to get the award for Dumbest Pecksniffery of 2019. A group of 16 computer scientists wrote a letter to Nature saying that their colleagues (and everyone) should stop using the phrase “quantum supremacy”, a term that refers to the ability of a quantum-computing device being to do what conventional computers simply cannot. The language police, always sniffing about for something to condemn, decided that the word “supremacy” was unpalatable: the title of their Nature letter was “Supremacy is for racists—use ‘quantum advantage’.” (I see the title has now been changed to simply “Instead of ‘supremacy’ use ‘quantum advantage.” That already shows they knew they overstepped.)

At any rate, here’s a bit of the Pecksniff’s plaint:

In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science…

Listeners to the December 20^th edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The World Tonight’ heard the following (from 06:01 here) in the opening news bulletin read by Luke Tuddenham. [emphasis in italics in the original]

Tuddenham: “The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor says she will launch a full investigation into alleged war crimes in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories at the earliest opportunity. Fatou Bensouda says she believes serious offences have been committed but Israel has questioned whether she has the jurisdiction to open an inquiry. Our Middle East analyst Alan Johnston reports.”

Johnston: “The ICC prosecutor has conducted a preliminary investigation of Palestinian complaints regarding the situation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Now she says she’s satisfied that war crimes have indeed been committed there. But she’s asked the court to confirm that it has jurisdiction over these areas before she…