Do 97% of climate scientists agree that man made global warming is true?

Here is Joseph D'Aleo at ICECAP.
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My colleagues and I have given many lectures about the myths, misconceptions and outright lies in the global warming arena the last few decades. After an hour of graphs, charts and pictures detailing how a tiny trace gas, carbon dioxide, has no relationship to whatever warming and cooling or weather extremes has occurred we get the inevitable statement from someone in the audience.

“How can you deny that man made global warming and its effects are real when 97 percent of climate scientists agree that it is true?”

At that point we have to explain that the 97 percent figure is not what it appears to be. It is a convenient fiction to imply a consensus.

It is now the rule in the schools. Our students are not being taught the scientific method. In the classroom they are taught what to think and not how to think.

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE PHONEY CONSENSUS

The scientific method does not involve a poll or vote by scientists (that is in the realm of politics where you vote on a law or candidate), but validation of a theory with facts.

Michael Crichton, PhD, MD, famous author, producer, screenwriter and lecturer often talked about claims of a consensus.

“Historically the claim of consensus is the first refuge of scoundrel; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming the matter is already settled”. “Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus… Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.”

The fact that a VP and a failed presidential candidate who had a D in the only science class he ever took produced the movie An Inconvenient Truth seen by our children numerous times in schools even in gym class should raise eyebrows. It did in the UK where the courts ruled in order for the film to be shown that teachers must make clear that the film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument, and if teachers present the film without making this plain they may be in breach of the 1996 Education Act and guilty of political indoctrination. They required the eleven most egregious inaccuracies had to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

WHAT DO SCIENTISTS REALLY THINK?

There have been many polls and declarations that demonstrate a large percentage of real scientists believe in climate change BUT that natural factors are the primary driver.

Climatology wasn’t a recognized specialty or profession even at colleges when I first taught weather and climate in the 1970s into the early 1980s. It was mostly a small part of introductory classes on weather or in geography or geology courses. When climate change became part of an anti fossil fuel agenda and big money suddenly appeared, teachers never trained in climate suddenly became ‘climate scientists’. Environmental sciences emerged as a career path.

The UN, politicians, industry and the mainstream and on-line media would want you to believe that all scientists have now seen the light, that there is a consensus. That is not the case. Most honest scientist know so. Many are forced into silence or if they vocalize their dissent, find their careers endangered or even destroyed. Still many when past the stage of their career where they can speak the truth, do.

A Global Warming Petition was signed by 31,487 scientists including 9,029 with PHDs in their fields. The petition states that: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth”.

1100 Climate Realists signed ‘’The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change” from 40 countries demanding an end to climate hysteria. 1000+ International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims to the U.S. Senate, 300+ Eminent Scientists Reject U.N. Climate Change Treaty (Paris Accord). A recent survey found 1350 peer review papers questioning global warming and 1000 papers believing cooling has begun. See my team’s effort to fact-check popular alarmist claims here. We have many other peer review papers disprove the theory.

Scientists are aware of the failures too and now have proposed 54 excuses and counting as to why their models have failed. See this interesting series on the Great Scientific Fraud here.

IGNORED OPINION POLLS

There are many well-educated people who do not agree with the survey and its 97% figure. In a 2011 Scientific American opinion poll on the state of climate science provided the eye-opening results cast by their “scientifically literate” readership. With a total of 5190 respondents, a consensus of 81.3% think the IPCC is “a corrupt organization, prone to group-think, with a political agenda” and 75% think climate change is caused by solar variation or natural processes vs. 21% who think it is due to greenhouse gases from human activity. 65% think we should do nothing about climate change since “we are powerless to stop it,” and the same percentage think science should stay out of politics. When asked, “How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change?”.76.7% said “nothing.” Scientific American removed the poll when pressured by environmental groups.

In a 2013 Forbes article, it was reported only 36 percent of earth scientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. The survey results show earth scientists and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists.

Even a global UN survey of the public, received over 9.7 million votes and found in prioritizing what should be focused on, action on climate change finished last.

SO WHERE DID 97% COME FROM?

The first quoted source was an online survey that was published in 2009 by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman from the University of Illinois. The survey was sent to 10,257 scientists to, which 3,146 scientists responded to.

There were two primary questions in the survey. The first “When compared to pre-1800 levels, do you think mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant? ”

History has recorded a prolonged global cold era know as “The Little Ice Age” that lasted from about 1400 to 1850 AD. Since that time the global average temperature has risen. I know of no meteorologist, climatologist or anyone involved in the study of the earth’s temperature, who would argue this point.

Question number two asked “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”

BUT what constitutes “human activity”? The burning of fossil fuels to make energy is one. The changing of land surfaces to make cities, farmland and deforestation is “human activity” that can change temperature as well. Changing mean temperature can be accomplished by changing the environment around a climate recording station. This is also “human activity”. As rural stations are increasingly surrounded by urban sprawl, roads and buildings, the temperature of the site will warm due to the “Urban Heat Island (UHI)” effect. This has nothing to due with fossil fuel. The results from the survey do not address just what constitutes “human activity”. A “yes” response to question two implies the responder is referring to fossil fuels but that is not necessarily the case. It is however, what the survey likely wanted to convey.

Question number two also does not address what the word “significant” means to each individual respondent. What constitutes significant can be very different from person to person.

The 97% figure from the on-line survey comes from a whittling down of the accepted number of responses from 3,146 to 79. The 79 scientists are those that said they have recently published 50% of their papers in the area of climate change. Of these, 76 of 79 answered “risen” to questions one (96.2%). How this number is not 100% was a surprise. As to question two, 75 of 77 answered ‘yes” (97.4%).

An attempt at a more rigorous approach to confirm the 97% number followed and failed. Cook et al. (2013) attempted to categorize 11,944 abstracts [brief summaries] of papers (not entire papers) to their level of endorsement of AGW. They found 7930 (66%) held no position on AGW, while only 64 papers (0.5% of the total) explicitly endorsed humans are the primary (50%+) as the cause. This was 97% of those who explicitly identified a cause. A later analysis by Legates et al. (2013) found there to be only 41 papers (0.3%) that supported this definition.

Cook et al. (2013) was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters (ERL) which conveniently has multiple outspoken alarmist scientists on its editorial board (e.g. Peter Gleick and Stefan Rahmstorf) where the paper likely received substandard “pal-review” instead of the more rigorous peer-review. The paper has since been refuted five times in the scholarly literature by Legates et al. (2013), Tol (2014a), Tol (2014b), Dean (2015) and Tol (2016).

All the other “97% consensus” studies: e.g. Doran & Zimmerman (2009), Anderegg et al. (2010) and Oreskes (2004) have been refuted by peer-review.

In the race to the bottom, the Democrats win

Here is Jonathan Turley - once again on target.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. ------------------------------------------------
Below is my column in The Hill on the recent disclosure of a document showing that the FBI used an agent to gather information for Crossfire Hurricane during campaign briefings of Trump during 2016. The document directly contradicted the long-standing denial that the investigation to Russian collusion was ever used to gather intelligence on Trump or his campaign. At the same time, the credibility of the Steele Dossier was further undermined this weekend with the release of new information that Steele misrepresented the sources and information used as the basis for this report, which was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The source for the most alarming allegations was revealed as Igor Danchenko, 42, as confirmed to The New York Times, He was not the “Russian-based” source claimed by Steele and the FBI learned that Steele took third-hard rumors and presented them as hard intelligence in the report used to help justify the Russian collusion investigation. This source was used in the last two renewal applications to the FISA court as a “truthful and cooperative” and “Russian-based,” according to the Justice Department Inspector General report found. So it turns out that the primary “source” of Steele’s dossier was “not a well-connected current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian-based contract employee of Steele’s firm.”

None of this has made any difference to the coverage. On ABC Sunday, George Stephanopoulos had Chris Christie as a guest but his involvement in the very meeting discussed in the document did not merit a single question from the host. In the meantime, Democratic leaders, who once mocked the idea of any investigation of Trump or targeting of the campaign, now say that it really doesn’t matter. Rep. Eric Swalwell says that it was actually “the right thing to do.”

Here is the column:

The Washington press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful blindness, or deliberately ignoring the facts, following the release of yet another declassified document which directly refutes prior statements about the investigation into Russia collusion. The document shows that FBI officials used a national security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.

It is astonishing that the media refuses to see what is one of the biggest stories in decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The mocking “wow” response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage.

The new document shows that, in summer 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie over national security issues, standard practice ahead of the election. It had a discussion of Russian interference. But this was different. The document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed several days after that meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.

Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer responsible for the FISA surveillance conducted on members of the Trump campaign. He opposed Trump and sent an email after the election declaring “viva the resistance.” He is now under review for possible criminal charges for altering a FISA court filing. The FBI used Trump adviser Carter Page as the basis for the original FISA application, due to his contacts with Russians. After that surveillance was approved, however, federal officials discredited the collusion allegations and noted that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith had allegedly changed the information to state that Page was not working for the CIA.

Strzok is the FBI agent whose violation of FBI rules led Justice Department officials to refer him for possible criminal charges. Strzok did not hide his intense loathing of Trump and famously referenced an “insurance policy” if Trump were to win the election. After FBI officials concluded there was no evidence of any crime by Flynn at the end of 2016, Strzok prevented the closing of the investigation as FBI officials searched for any crime that might be used to charge the incoming national security adviser.

Documents show Comey briefed President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on the investigation shortly before the inauguration of Trump. When Comey admitted the communications between Flynn and Russian officials appeared legitimate, Biden reportedly suggested using the Logan Act, a law widely seen as unconstitutional and never been used to successfully convict a single person, as an alternative charge against Flynn. The memo contradicts eventual claims by Biden that he did not know about the Flynn investigation. Let us detail some proven but mostly unseen facts.

First, the Russia collusion allegations were based in large part on the dossier funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The Clinton campaign repeatedly denied paying for the dossier until after the election, when it was confronted with irrefutable evidence that the money had been buried among legal expenditures. As New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wrote, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it and with sanctimony for a year.”

Second, FBI agents had warned that dossier author Christopher Steele may have been used by Russian intelligence to plant false information to disrupt the election. His source for the most serious allegations claims that Steele misrepresented what he had said and that it was little more than rumors that were recast by Steele as reliable intelligence.

Third, the Obama administration had been told that the basis for the FISA application was dubious and likely false. Yet it continued the investigation, and then someone leaked its existence to the media. Another declassified document shows that, after the New York Times ran a leaked story on the investigation, even Strzok had balked at the account as misleading and inaccurate. His early 2017 memo affirmed that there was no evidence of any individuals in contact with Russians. This information came as the collusion stories were turning into a frenzy that would last years.

Fourth, the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and inspectors general found no evidence of collusion or knowing contact between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. What inspectors general did find were false statements or possible criminal conduct by Comey and others. While unable to say it was the reason for their decisions, they also found statements of animus against Trump and his campaign by the FBI officials who were leading the investigation. Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified he never would have approved renewal of the FISA surveillance and encouraged further investigation into such bias.

Finally, Obama and Biden were aware of the investigation, as were the administration officials who publicly ridiculed Trump when he said there was spying on his campaign. Others, like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, declared they had evidence of collusion but never produced it. Countless reporters, columnists, and analysts still continue to deride, as writer Max Boot said it, the spinning of “absurd conspiracy theories” about how the FBI “supposedly spied on the Trump campaign.”

Willful blindness has its advantages. The media covered the original leak and the collusion narrative, despite mounting evidence that it was false. They filled hours of cable news shows and pages of print with a collusion story discredited by the FBI. Virtually none of these journalists or experts have acknowledged that the collusion leaks were proven false, let alone pursue the troubling implications of national security powers being used to target the political opponents of an administration. But in Washington, success often depends not on what you see but what you can unsee.

Herd immunity to COVID-19 may be reached much earlier than thought

Nic Lewis updates his thoughts about why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought.

If NL is right, the current alarm about a resurgence of COVID-19 may be excessive.

NL's work and that he references also suggests that COVID-19 should not a basis for failing to reopen schools in the Fall.
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I showed in my May 10th article Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought that inhomogeneity within a population in the susceptibility and in the social-connectivity related infectivity of individuals would reduce, in my view probably very substantially, the herd immunity threshold (HIT), beyond which an epidemic goes into retreat. I opined, based on my modelling, that the HIT probably lay somewhere between 7% and 24%, and that evidence from Stockholm County suggested it was around 17% there, and had been reached. Mounting evidence supports my reasoning.[1]

I particularly want to highlight an important paper published on July 24th “Herd immunity thresholds estimated from unfolding epidemics” (Aguas et al.).[2] The author team is much the same as that of the earlier theoretical paper (Gomes et al.[3]) that prompted my May 10th article.

Aguas et al. used a SEIR compartmental epidemic model modified to allow for inhomogeneity, similar to the model I used although they also considered further variants. They fitted their models to scaled daily new cases data from four European countries for which disaggregated regional case data was also readily available. In all cases they found a better fit from their models incorporating heterogeneity to the standard homogeneous assumption SEIR model. They found that:

Homogeneous models systematically fail to fit the maintenance of low numbers of cases after the relaxation of social distancing measures in many countries and regions.

Aguas et al. estimate the HIT at between 6% and 21% for the countries in their analysis – very much in line with the range I suggested in May. They also found that their HIT estimates were robust to various changes in their model specification. By contrast, if the population were homogeneous or were vaccinated randomly, the estimated HIT would have been around 65% –80%, in line with the classical formula, {1 – 1/R0}, where R0 is the epidemic’s basic reproduction number.[4]

Aguas et al.’s Figure 3, reproduced below, shows how the HIT reduces with increasing variation either in susceptibility (given exposure) or in connectivity, which affects both an individual’s susceptibility (via altering exposure to infection) and infectivity. The coloured dots and vertical lines show the inferred position of each of the four countries they analysed in each of these (separately modelled) cases.

Aguas et al. Fig. 3 Herd immunity threshold with gamma-distributed susceptibility (top) or connectivity related exposure to infection (bottom). Curves generated with the SEIR model (Equation 1-4) assuming values of R0 estimated for the study countries assuming gamma-distributed: susceptibility [top]; connectivity (and hence exposure to infection) [bottom]. Herd immunity thresholds (solid curves) are calculated according to the formula 1 − (1/R0)1/(1 + CV^2) for heterogeneous susceptibility and 1 − (1/R0)1/(1 + 2 CV^2) for heterogeneous connectivity. Final sizes of the corresponding unmitigated epidemics are also shown (dashed).

As Aguas et al. say in their Abstract:

These findings have profound consequences for the governance of the current pandemic given that some populations may be close to achieving herd immunity despite being under more or less strict social distancing measures.
The underlying reason for the classical formula being inapplicable is, as they say:

More susceptible and more connected individuals have a higher propensity to be infected and thus are likely to become immune earlier. Due to this selective immunization by natural infection, heterogeneous populations require less infections to cross their herd immunity threshold than suggested by models that do not fully account for variation.

The Imperial College COVID-19 model (Ferguson et al.[5]) is a prime example of one that does not adequately account for variation in individual susceptibility and connectivity.

Aguas et al. point out that consideration of heterogeneity in the transmission of respiratory infections has traditionally focused on variation in exposure summarized into age-structured contact matrices. They showed that, besides this approach typically ignoring differences in susceptibility given virus exposure, the aggregation of individuals into age groups leads to much lower variability than that they found from fitting the data. The resulting models appeared to differ only moderately from homogeneous approximations.

A key reason for variability in susceptibility to COVID-19 given exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing is that the immune systems of a substantial proportion (35% to 80%) of unexposed individuals have T-cells, circulating antibodies or other components that are cross-reactive to SARS-CoV-2 and can be expected to provide substantial resistance to it.[6] [7] [8] [9] Such components likely arise from past exposure to common cold or other coronaviruses, or to influenza.[10] Not being specific to SARS-CoV-2, and typically not being antibodies, such immune system components are not normally detected in seroprevalence or other tests for immunity to SARS-CoV-2.

I will end with a follow up to my June 28th article focusing on Sweden. In it, I concluded that it was likely the HIT had been surpassed in the three largest Swedish regions, and in the country as a whole, by the end of April notwithstanding that COVID-19-specific antibodies had only been detected in 6.3% of the population.[11] I also projected, based on their declining trend, that total COVID-19 deaths would likely only be about 6,400. Subsequent developments support those conclusions. Swedish COVID-19 deaths have continued to decline, notwithstanding a return to more travel and less social distancing, and are now down to 10 to 15 a day. According to the latest Financial Times analysis,[12] excess mortality in Sweden over 2020 to date was 5,500, or 24%. That is only about half the excess mortality percentage for the UK (45%), Italy (44%) and Spain (56%), and is also lower than for France (31%), the Netherlands (27%) and Switzerland (26%), despite Sweden not having imposed a lockdown or shut primary schools. Moreover, total mortality in Sweden over the last 24 months is now lower than over the previous 24 months, despite an upward trend in the old age population.

Nicholas Lewis 27 July 2020

[1] One example, further supporting my superspreader-based evidence of variability in social connectivity, is Miller et al: Full genome viral sequences inform patterns of SARS-CoV-2 spread into and within Israel medRxiv 22 May 2020 https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.21.20104521 This paper shows that 1-10% of infected individuals caused 80% of infections. That points to variability in social connectivity related susceptibility and infectivity quite likely being higher than I modelled .

[2] Aguas, R. and co-authors: Herd immunity thresholds estimated from unfolding epidemics” medRxiv 24 July 2020 https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160762

[3] Gomes, M. G. M., et al.: Individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to SARS-CoV-2 lowers the herd immunity threshold. medRxiv 2 May 2020. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v1

[4] The basic reproduction number of an epidemic, R0, measures how many people, on average, each infected individual infects at the start of the epidemic. If R0 exceeds one, the epidemic will grow, exponentially at first. But, assuming recovered individuals are immune, the pool of susceptible individuals shrinks over time and the current reproduction number falls. The proportion of the population that have been infected at the point where the current reproduction number falls to one is the ‘herd immunity threshold’ (HIT). Beyond that point the epidemic is under control, and shrinks.

[5] Neil M Ferguson et al.: Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand. Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team Report 9, 16 March 2020, https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk:8443/handle/10044/1/77482

[6] Grifoni, A.et al.: Targets of T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in humans with COVID-19 disease and unexposed individuals. Cell 11420, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.05.015

[7] Braun, J., et al.: Presence of SARS-CoV-2 reactive T cells in COVID-19 patients and healthy donors. medRxiv 22 April 2020 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.20061440v1.

[8] Le Bert, N. et al.: Different pattern of pre-existing SARS-COV-2 specific T cell immunity in SARS-recovered and uninfected individuals. bioRxiv 27 May 2020. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.26.115832

[9] Nelde, A. et al.: SARS-CoV-2 T-cell epitopes define heterologous and COVID-19-induced T-cell recognition. ResearchSquare 16 June 2020. https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-35331/v1

[10] Lee, C., Koohy, H., et al.: CD8+ T cell cross-reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 conferred by other coronavirus strains and influenza virus. bioRxiv 20 May 2020. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.20.107292.

[11] Such seroprevalence is likely to significantly understate the proportion of the population who have had COVID-19, since asymptomatic or mild disease often results in undetectably low antibody levels (Long, Q. X. et al.: Clinical and immunological assessment of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. Nat Med. 18 June 2020 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0965-6 . Such patients will nevertheless be immune to reinfection (Sekine, K. et al.: Robust T cell immunity in convalescent individuals with asymptomatic or mild COVID-19. bioRxiv 29 June 2020 https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.29.174888).965-6

[12] https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441. Data updated to 13 July

Yale epidemiologist says hydroxychloroquine is 'the key to defeating COVID-19'

From Just the News.
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An Ivy League epidemiology professor is claiming that hydroxychloroquine — the drug that has been at the center of a politicized medical debate for the last several months — is "the key to defeating COVID-19," and that medical officials should be widely prescribing it to save the lives of thousands of coronavirus patients.

Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at Yale as well as the director of that school's Molecular Cancer Epidemiology Laboratory, argues in a Newsweek op-ed this week that "the data fully support" the wide use of hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment of COVID-19.

"When this inexpensive oral medication is given very early in the course of illness, before the virus has had time to multiply beyond control, it has shown to be highly effective," Risch argues in the column.

Hydroxychloroquine has been the subject of a bitter and protracted political argument for the past several months, after President Trump in mid-March said the drug was showing promising effects in treating COVID-19. Media outlets and commentators shortly thereafter began touting numerous stories of the drug's alleged fatal dangers as well as its reported ineffectiveness in treating the disease.

Risch, at Newsweek, argues that multiple studies over the past several months have demonstrated that the drug is a safe and efficacious treatment method for COVID-19.

Among the successful treatment experiments, he writes, are "an additional 400 high-risk patients treated by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, with zero deaths; four studies totaling almost 500 high-risk patients treated in nursing homes and clinics across the U.S., with no deaths; a controlled trial of more than 700 high-risk patients in Brazil, with significantly reduced risk of hospitalization and two deaths among 334 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine; and another study of 398 matched patients in France, also with significantly reduced hospitalization risk."

Risch says the drug is most effective "when given very early in the course of illness, before the virus has had time to multiply beyond control."

Though according to Risch the benefits of the drug are clear, he nevertheless concedes that the subject "has become highly politicized."

"For many, it is viewed as a marker of political identity, on both sides of the political spectrum," he said. "Nobody needs me to remind them that this is not how medicine should proceed."

He also argues that "the drug has not been used properly in many studies," and that delays in administering the drug have reduced its effectiveness.

"In the future," Risch says in the column, "I believe this misbegotten episode regarding hydroxychloroquine will be studied by sociologists of medicine as a classic example of how extra-scientific factors overrode clear-cut medical evidence."

"But for now," he adds, "reality demands a clear, scientific eye on the evidence and where it points."

Is this discrimination or racism - or not?

From the New York Post.
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A top FDNY official says it’s “most definitely” acceptable to exclude a black firefighter from a ceremonial unit based solely on his skin color, The Post has learned.

Cecilia Loving, the department’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, is defending a decision to kick Lt. Daniel McWilliams — one of three firefighters in the iconic 9/11 Ground Zero flag-raising photo — off a color-guard procession so it would be all-white.

Loving testified at a state Divsion of Human Rights trial on McWilliam’s complaint that he was the victim of racial bias.

When McWilliams showed up at a 2017 memorial mass to honor deceased members of the Vulcan Society, a fraternal group of white FDNY firefighters, he was barred from holding a flag in the color guard.

Regina Wilson, then Vulcan Society president, asked McWilliams to “help in a different capacity” because he is not white.

Loving, who is white, testified there is nothing wrong with that.

“So, a request for an all-white color guard is not discriminatory?” McWilliam’s lawyer, Keith Sullivan, asked in the trial.

“No, it isn’t,” Loving replied.

Asked if it’s acceptable to request an all-white color guard, she said, “Most definitely.”

Loving said it’s okay to replace a black member with a  non-African-American to “uplift our identities and our separate ethnicities in order to instill a sense of pride and community and support for one another.”

In a written brief, Sullivan called the rejection of McWilliams “deplorable,” and evidence of a stark double standard in the FDNY.

“If you’re white and you discriminate against a black person in the workplace, you get a slap on the wrist at best,” he wrote. A black person who discriminates gets “heavy-handed discipline and punishment.”

Wilson received “one hour of counseling” as discipline for her treatment of McWilliams.

“The FDNY has created a policy and procedure for bending over backwards, coming up with excuses and accommodating members of the Vulcan Society … who commit racist acts, and it has to stop,” Sullivan wrote.

McWilliams declined to comment, but he was upset and “embarrassed” by the incident, Sullivan said.

After filing his complaint, McWilliams was the target of retaliation and intimidation by Wilson’s supporters, Sullivan argues. One put his hands on McWilliams, and said, ”I’ve heard about you, they told me you’d act this way, and now you know me.”

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At this point you may be incensed.  If so, please note that all the italicized references to race above have been reversed from the actual article.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

This is the title of Michael Shellenberger's new book. Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress.

Here is a comment of his about his book, himself, and the dishonesty of the alarmists.

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On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as expert reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

• The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

• Fires have declined 25 percent around the world since 2003

• The amount of land we use for meat—humankind’s biggest use of land—has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s

• The Netherlands became rich, not poor while adapting to life below sea level

• We produce 25 percent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this, imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions.

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.” Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change. Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened. I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

• Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress

• The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land

• The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium

• 100 percent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 percent to 50 percent

• We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities

• Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 percent

• Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did

• “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 percent more emissions

• Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon

• The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

Why were we all so misled?

In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism.

Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped. Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.

The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop. The ideology behind environmental alarmism—Malthusianism—has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power. The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, COVID-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including the World Health Organisation and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform. Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables. The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.

The invitations from IPCC and Congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.

I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

The truth about mass public shootings in the US versus the rest of the world

Here is a link to a video with the facts.

Obama, the media, and the anti-gun crowd based their claim that mass public shootings in the US were out of proportion with the rest of the world on a research paper by Professor Adam Lankford.

It turns out that the Professors research was wrong, so wrong that one can only conclude that Lankford is either incompetent or dishonest.

The link leads you to the truth.

Here is a comment about Lankford's research from the Crime Prevention Research Center.
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UPDATE: The video that we did with John Stossel on Adam Lankford’s false claims about his claim that 31% of mass public shooters have been in the United States. Despite massive international media coverage and repeated requests from the Washington Post, Real Clear Politics, various researchers on both sides of the gun control debate, and others, Lankford has refused to let anyone see his claimed list of mass public shootings nor answered questions about how he was able to obtain a “complete list” of these attacks around the world in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s. Lankford won’t even let people know what languages he used to compile his list. Compared to Lankford’s claimed list of 202 mass public shooters outside the United States from 1966 to 2012, we found over 3,081 over less than a third of that period from 1998 to 2012 (we have since updated the data up through 2015).

UPDATE 2: Lankford has finally revealed his list of mass public shootings, but it is clear why he refused to do this for 4.5 years. When he finally released his list of cases as a result of academic research that John Lott and Carl Moody published (here and here), it was clear why he had waited so long. He had over counted cases in the US and missed thousands of cases in the rest of the world. He had almost exclusively limited himself to only those cases where one mass shooter was involved (he did include one case in Russia where two shooters were involved) and he missed many cases where only one shooter was involved. He had also over counted cases in the United States.

Cuomo and DeBlasio continue to threaten another closedown, why?

Religion saves; BLM destroys

Here is Jonathan Rosenblum at the Jewish World Review.

Jonathan Rosenblum is founder of Jewish Media Resources and a widely-read columnist for the Jerusalem Post's domestic and international editions.

JR is on target.
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The May 25 killing of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white policeman in Minneapolis has plunged America into the maelstrom of identity politics to an unprecedented degree. So far the only victor is Black Lives Matter (BLM), which has garnered huge amounts of corporate support and from the Soros Foundation. But the price will ultimately be paid by blacks and whites alike, albeit not in the same ways.

BLM's primary policy prescription — defunding the police — has already been ratified by various cities and institutions. It will not make life safer for black Americans. Just the opposite, as Heather Macdonald points out in the July 1 City Journal.

Contempt for the police and physical assaults on cops have resulted in police withdrawing from the streets and a dramatic spike in gun-related crime. The same occurred after BLM's 2014 anti-police demonstrations, following the slaying of Michael Brown, who was attacking a police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri. The increase of homicides nationwide in 2015 and 2016 compared to 2014 resulted in 2,000 more black homicide victims.

In Minneapolis, ground zero of anger at police for George Floyd's killing, shootings have doubled this year compared to last year, and half of those shootings have taken place since May 25. New York City has experienced a 42 percent increase in homicides compared to the previous year, and Milwaukee a 132 percent increase. In Chicago, on successive weekends last month, 15 and 18 people were killed, with many more wounded, in drive-by shootings. Almost all those victims were black.

A time when the numbers of those killed or wounded by gunfire are swelling would not seem ideal for defunding of police, or getting rid of them altogether (as proposed by a unanimous Minneapolis City Council). If anything, there is a need for greater expenditures on police training, not a diminution of their presence on the streets.

And that is the position of most black Americans. Black sociologist Professor Michael Javen Fortner notes in "Hearing What Black Voices Really Say About the Police," (City Journal, July 5), that while blacks as a group are most critical of the police, a majority of blacks in every poll since 1970 express a desire for greater police presence in their neighborhoods, rather than less.

BLM's "systemic racism" rhetoric, which neatly divides the world into immutable categories of white oppressors, irremediably tainted with racism, and black victims, offers nothing in terms of addressing the real problems of the black community. As Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution writes, the greatest problem facing the black community is not victimhood, it is too many black boys growing up without fathers.

At least two-thirds of black children fall into that category. The absence of fathers is the best predictor of trouble ahead whether for blacks or whites. Children without fathers are 20 times more likely to end up in prison, 20 times more likely to drop out of high school, 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders, and nine times more likely to be institutionalized. And the list goes on.

The single motherhood rate in the black community was 22 percent in the 1960s and approximately 73 percent today. Economist Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution has written, "Centuries of slavery, generations of Jim Crow did not destroy the black family. One generation of the welfare state did." A collateral effect of the Great Society programs was to render fathers extraneous to financial support, and to create incentives for their absence.

THE REVITALIZED IDENTITY POLITICS of the Obama years will poison relations between the races, as it did then. Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, the number one book on Amazon's best-seller list, sets forth the central tenets of contemporary race theory. The book has many critics, among them journalist Matt Taibbi, who describes White Fragility as perhaps "the dumbest book ever written," and DiAngelo as the first to use "tricked up pseudo-intellectual horse manure... [to sell] Hitlerian race theory."

The book's simple message is that there is no such thing as a universal human experience; we are defined not by our individual moral choices, but only by our racial category. Martin Luther King's dream of a colorblind society is no longer even an aspirational goal; it is a racist tool.

Whites are born white supremacists, according to DiAngelo: "Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities.... Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness." The best whites can do is "strive to be less white."

These tenets convey a message of profound hopelessness about the possibility of genuine human connection between people of different races. Perhaps that is why minority students on college campuses are in ever-increasing numbers demanding to live in segregated housing.

One distraught white mother, who had fully imbibed the progressive Kool-Aid, wrote recently to the Slate advice columnist Michelle Herman to find out where she had gone wrong. Her son, who has black, Hispanic, and white friends, had expressed annoyance at being asked on a college-roommate preference form about race by writing, "I don't care about race." Herman assigned him a month-long lesson plan of readings from White Fragility.

The message that "race is everything" also sends a bad message to black youth: The deck is stacked against you, and nothing can change that. Six years after Barack Obama's 2008 election win, with the highest percentage of white support of any Democratic candidate in 40 years, and a 70 percent approval rate on inauguration day, black children were more likely to think of prejudice as a factor in their lives than they had in 2008. For they had heard repeatedly that opposition to any policy of the Obama administration from Obamacare to the Iran deal was attributable to nothing besides thinly veiled racism.

Playing along with notions such as inherent "white privilege" is costless for white elites, and affords ample opportunity for virtue signaling, but it comes at a high cost for whites not born into privilege. Comedian Adam Carolla, a high school dropout, raised by a single mother on welfare, once described to a congressional committee how he had to wait seven years to be invited to take the written exam to be a Los Angeles firefighter, while the black woman next to him in line waited three days.

The ever-expanding definition of racism — long lists of microaggressions — and search for racists under every bed turns every conversation into a fraught encounter. All social relations will become like the family gatherings of my youth, at which we always knew a certain eccentric relative would make an explosive scene at some point, the only question being when and what would trigger it.

The marauding Twitter mobs (primarily woke white kids) prowling social media for victims to shame and denounce, have been loosed. The New York Times recently wrote favorably of high schoolers searching their classmates' social media accounts for evidence of racism. Enough of people like this "becoming racist lawyers and doctors," wrote one member of the posse. Another expressed glee at the gathering of "info for us to ruin their lives... I love Twitter."

Once loosed, no one can know where the furies will stop. Not at a black, liberal social science researcher fired by his firm for retweeting a peer-reviewed study that showed non-violent protests are more politically effective. Or a popular Canadian writer drubbed out of the Canadian Authors Association for espousing the notion that human beings should strive to "imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." All cultural appropriation, you see. Nor at a Boeing executive forced to resign for a 33-year-old article arguing against female participation in combat units — a perfectly reasonable position then and today.

Progressive race theory that reduces all human experience to a function of race is the mirror image of the old Southern anti-miscegenation laws predicated on the view that members of different races have nothing in common and cannot possibly love one another and be allowed to marry.

I will never forget traveling to America once together with a biracial church group from Terre Haute, Indiana, in which the free intermingling and easy camaraderie of those whose religious belief brought them together was palpable.

That recognition of common humanity still remains the ideal for which to strive as individuals and as a nation.

NBC's Chuck Todd cannot be trusted to tell the truth

Here is Jonathan Turley on NBC's Chuck Todd.

JT is on target.
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We recently discussed the false tweet sent out by CNN’s White House reporter Jim Acosta that mocked White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for saying that “the science should not stand in the way of this.” That quote was artificially clipped to leave the diametrically opposite impression from what actually said. The clip suggests that McEnany was dismissing science when she was actually highlighting scientific work supporting the position of the White House. While Acosta later sent out another tweet noting the real meaning and his colleague Jake Tapper corrected the false narrative on the air, Chuck Todd on Meet the Press decided to play the misleading clip not once but twice on Sunday. It was not just running an overtly misleading clip but defiantly doing so after other journalists have challenged the erroneous impression left by the clip.

In Thursday’s briefing, McEnany repeated President Trump’s call for children to go back to school in the fall.

“The science should not stand in the way of this, but as Dr. Scott Atlas said — I thought this was a good quote, ‘Of course, we can do it. Everyone else in the Western world, our peer nations are doing it. We are the outlier here.’ The science is very clear on this. For example, you look at the JAMA pediatric study of 46 pediatric hospitals in North America that said the risk of critical illness from COVID is far less for children than the seasonal flu. The science is on our side here. We encourage localities and states to just simply follow the science. Open our schools.”

As noted earlier, she is clearly citing the science as supporting the position of the Administration. However, Acosta clipped the statement to make it sound like McEnany was dismissing the relevance of science: “The White House Press Secretary on Trump’s push to reopen schools: ‘The science should not stand in the way of this.’”

The quote was McEnany referring to a scientific study and, right after the line quoted, McEnany said “The science is very clear on this.” She then two lines later added “The science is on our side here.” The entire quote was McEnany raising a scientific study that supports their position. It is akin to a McEnany saying “National security is not relevant because the Defense Department report supports this policy” only to have Acosta tweet “The White House Press Secretary: “National Security is not relevant” in White House policy.

Tapper stood by the facts over the narrative when his colleague CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta repeated the same false narrative that McEnany was having an “alternative facts kind of moment.” Tapper responded: “If I could just say, Sanjay,. I think she was just trying to say that the science shouldn’t stand in the way because the science is on our side. I don’t know that all of the science is on their side- and certainly, this White House, their respect for science knows bounds, let’s put it that way, but I think that’s what she was getting at.”

As bad as that incident was, it is not nearly as bad as Chuck Todd ignoring the controversy and the correction to repeatedly air the same misleading quote. NBC was fully aware that the clip was not just misleading but that it conveyed the opposite of what actually was stated in the press conference. Todd shows clip of people denying the need to wear masks and says that Trump is just ignoring the risks to push to open schools. He then shows the clip of McEnany that is edited to cut off her reference to scientific data, making it sound that she was saying that the science was not important. The clip was played a second time later in the show.

If an ill-considered tweet is a venial sin for Acosta at CNN, this is a mortal sin for Todd at NBC. This was no careless tweet, but an airing made long after the false account was flagged during the CNN controversy. It is another example of how the echo-journalistic model not only undermines the faith in the media but actually undermines the effort to fully inform the public on the pandemic. Rather than focus on legitimate questions about the Administration’s efforts, Todd instead knowingly played a false gotcha clip.

I have previously criticized Todd for omitting facts that did not fit an attack on the Administration as well as his repeated disparaging comments on Trump supporters. These is a fundamental change in the media where such shaping of facts to fit a narrative is now commonplace. Indeed, it is essential to maintain an echo-journalistic model. The result however is the lost of reliable sources to unbiased news. Many disagree with this President and this White House, but they still want to receive an accurate account of what is being said and done in Washington. Instead, they are given news tailored to the preference of hosts who see facts as the a type of clay to be shaped into a preferred image for public consumption. There comes a point where you are not long informing but indoctrinating the public.

I was hoping that Todd would return to the earlier clips to offer some context to show that the clip was the opposite of what McEnany clearly meant. However, the show ended without any context, clarification, or correction. This week, many of us praised Chris Wallace for correctly challenging President Donald Trump for misstating the position of Joe Biden on defunding the police. Biden’s comment on shifting funds was widely defended in the media as not meaning that he would support the more radical calls to defund the police. Journalists objected that the statement was taken out of context in the interview. I agreed with that objection. Yet, those same voices in the media are silent on this false account against the White House and Todd goes further in replaying the clip twice on the air.

Fordham University's new theology: Repression of free speech

Here is an article by C. Douglas Golden at www.westernjournal.com.

CDG is on target.

I was a full time faculty member at Fordham University for several years. I do not support the University's action in this case.

It appears that Universities are leading the fight against our freedoms.
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Rising Fordham University senior Austin Tong made two posts to his social media account which intimidated no one and expressed no racial bias.

One, posted on June 4, showed him holding a rifle, a perfectly legal thing to do. The caption read: “Don’t tread on me. #198964.” That hashtag refers to June 4, 1989 — the date of the peak of the Tiananmen Square protests.

On June 3, meanwhile, he’d posted a picture of David Dorn, a black retired St. Louis police captain who was killed as he responded to an armed robbery at a pawn shop during a riot associated with Black Lives Matter protests in the city.

“Y’all a bunch of hypocrites,” Tong wrote.

For expressing those opinions and making a political statement with a firearm, Tong was found in violation of “Regulations relating to Bias and/or Hate Crimes” and “Threats/Intimidation,” according to a Tuesday letter from Keith Eldredge, Fordham University’s dean of students, that Tong posted to Instagram.

Welcome to America, where private universities now feel free to impose what Tong rightly pegged as “Soviet-style interrogation and punishment” over wholly inoffensive political speech.

“As part of Tong’s disciplinary probation, which will remain in effect until he graduates, Tong is forbidden from representing the university in any official capacity,” Campus Reform reported Thursday. “This includes a ban on him running for or holding leadership roles in student organizations and participation in varsity or club sports.

“Tong’s access to the university campus without permission from the dean has also been restricted and he is required to complete the rest of his courses online. Tong must also undergo implicit bias training with the Office of Multicultural Affairs and write an apology letter.”

In other words, he needs to be rehabilitated in order to receive his degree.

Tong says he was first notified of the university’s issues with his posts in a June 8 letter from Eldredge.

As for the David Dorn post, Tong told Campus Reform: “I expressed my disappointment in people that did not care about the death of a black policeman, something which never should’ve happened.”

Tong enumerated the same position in a letter to Fordham, saying: “I believe that Black Lives Matter means that all Black Lives matter, including the lost life of a patriotic police officer that dedicated his life to his family and country This post was not only expressive of my remorse that a police officer’s life was lost, but also to reaffirm my belief that the lives of everyone matter.”

As for Tong’s Tiananmen photo: “I want to honor the memory of an important Chinese Democracy Movement and the appreciation of the right to bear arms in America,” he told Campus Reform.

“As an immigrant, a big beauty of America to me is the right it gives its citizens to bear arms, not only to protect themselves but also to keep the government in check.”

Those are correct answers in the context of truth and logic. When it comes to academia, however, one is racked with an involuntary cringe after considering how those thoughts were received in Fordham’s Office of Multicultural Affairs.

They were also received poorly among certain Fordham students, some of whom expressed shock they shared space with someone who had an opinion that differed from theirs.

“Austin, I am extremely disappointed that you are actively utilizing your platform to invalidate the BLM movement rather than using your time to facilitate conversations about the issues at hand/trying to raise awareness,” one student commented on Tong’s Dorn post, according to Fordham’s student newspaper, The Observer.

The Observer pointed out that the University Code of Conduct prohibits “threats, intimidation, coercion, and/or other conduct which threatens or endangers the health or safety of any person.”

I’d be curious where someone found any of that here — but that’s beside the point, considering the same document also prohibits actions “which prevents or limits the free expression of the ideas of others.”

“Coming to this country as an immigrant, one would think that America is a nation of law and free speech. Yet that is no longer the case,” Tong wrote Fordham officials this week in an open letter posted to his Instagram account.

“I was forcibly silenced, faced verbal and assaulting harassment from mobs, and subjected to Soviet-style interrogation and punishment by a Jesuit university that claims in its own code of conduct, that it protects ‘freedom of expression and the open exchange of ideas.’”

Fordham, meanwhile, tried to reframe the issue as one of “hate speech” in a terse statement issued by Christopher Rodgers, dean of students at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

“Fordham University neither condones nor allows hate speech. After researching the background, symbolism and context of the University took steps to address the situation with the students involved,” the statement said.

In his open letter, Tong said the punishment “signaled to students nationwide, that free speech is a political trap that will destroy you.”

“America is under attack. Americans are being silenced,” he wrote. “I hope to use my punishment as a milestone and reflection of the Constitutional crisis we are facing today as a society. Coming to this country as an immigrant, one would think that America is a nation of law and free speech. Yet that is no longer the case.”

“I write this letter in hopes that Fordham University will change its mind and retract the punishments, apologize to me for smearing my reputation and obstructing my academic and professional future, and give society a just and reasonable answer,” Tong wrote.

“If not, I will be firmly taking legal action against Fordham University and relative decision makers for breaching its own code of conduct, and treading on the fundamental freedoms of this country.”

Fordham is, of course, a private university, which means it’s not bound by the First Amendment like state colleges and universities are. In saner times, it would be bound by a sense of shame and a dedication to free intellectual expression.

Austin Tong seems to rely on this bedrock assumption — that, at the very least, Fordham should feel itself bound by its own rules.

One look at the tuition it charges ($54,730 a year, according to Fordham’s website) should clue you in to the fact that, like most American institutions of higher learning, Fordham is bound not by the long-held ideals of the university but by the whims of its customers, occasionally referred to as students.

The most outspoken consumers of higher education — who not coincidentally have their beliefs blessed and amplified by the media — are the ones who don’t particularly want to shop with customers who have beliefs like Tong’s.

Academia’s store managers (occasionally referred to as the faculty) are almost universally in concurrence.

That line about prohibiting actions “which prevents or limits the free expression of the ideas of others” sounds great, but it’s not very pragmatic when the university’s cost structure depends on a coterie of noisy people who believe their $54,730 bought them respite from encountering people who blaspheme Black Lives Matter and still believe the Second Amendment means what it says.

My thoughts and prayers go out to Austin Tong.

As a conservative, I hope he’s able to successfully challenge Fordham and overturn this draconian, Orwellian punishment.

As an experienced conservative, I fear he’s about to learn an expensive lesson in what our country’s cultural institutions think of us and the impunity with which they’re able to act toward us.

Double talk on the climate change crisis

Here is a link to an article at the Government Accountability Institute titled "Green Fog: The Coming Climate Change Bond Crisis".

Politicians speak with a forked tongue.
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Politicians in many American coastal cities pull no punches about the threats posed by rising sea levels due to climate change. At times they even seem to read from the same script, repeating the phrase “existential threat” to describe the rising sea levels that menace their ports and coastlines.

But when they authorize selling municipal bonds to pay for local development, do they mention any of these risks to investors? Bonds are rated and their coupon interest rates are determined by financial officials in these cities who must disclose all significant risks to the value of the bonds, by law. Do bonds floated by cities at the greatest risks from climate change pay higher interest than bonds from cities at no risk?

Often, the answer is no.

For example, the City of Oakland, the City of San Francisco, and San Mateo County, in filing individual lawsuits against ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other major oil companies, made specified claims of damages to their cities due to the impacts of climate change caused, they claim, by the knowing actions of these companies. The statements made by Oakland in its official lawsuit are so definitive as to claim that “global warming has caused and continues to cause accelerated sea level rise in San Francisco Bay and the adjacent ocean with severe, and potentially catastrophic, consequences for Oakland.” The city claimed the threats were so real that “by 2050, a ‘100-year flood’ in the Oakland vicinity is expected to occur… once every 2.3 years … and by 2100 … once per week.” Further, the lawsuit filing said, “Oakland is projected to have up to ‘66 inches of sea level rise by 2100,’ which, along with flooding, will imminently threaten Oakland’s sewer system and threaten property, costing the city as much as $38 billion.

However, language used to disclose risks to investors in a 2017 bonds document states, “The City is unable to predict when seismic events, fires or other natural events, such as sea rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm, could occur, when they may occur, and, if any such events occur, whether they will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the City or the local economy."

San Mateo County made similar claims of certain environmental destruction, including the likelihood of “a 93% chance that the County experiences a devastating three-foot flood before the year 2050, and a 50% chance that such a flood occurs before 2030.” Yet, a bond disclosure from 2016 issued in San Mateo County expressed almost identical sentiments as Oakland did. “The County is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur, when they may occur, and if any such events occur, whether they will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the County and the local economy.”

This disconnect between describing dire climate-related consequences to a city in great detail when a payout is on the table, versus downplaying the same issues when these cities’ own funding is on the line holds true for not just these two counties but for six other California cities or counties seeking legal payouts. San Francisco, the County and City of Santa Cruz, Marin County, and the City of Imperial Beach all used very similar language in their own statements.

The disconnect applies to bond rates as well.

Bonds are rated and their interest rates are determined by financial officials in these cities who must, by law, disclose all significant risks the bonds entail. Are the bonds floated by cities with the greatest risks from climate change paying a better interest rate than bonds from cities on higher ground?

To answer these questions, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) reviewed bond disclosures from 40 cities. Twenty of these were cities in areas at high risk from rising sea levels or flooding, while the other 20 were mostly inland and freshwater cities not considered at such risk. We wanted to explore whether these threats affected the investment offerings of the cities claiming the highest risks. GAI also reviewed official statements and policy actions in several of the cities we reviewed. We found:

• There was no statistical difference between the interest rates and bond maturity terms for high-risk cities versus low-risk cities overall.

• New York City and its own Port Authority barely mentioned climate change or rising sea levels in any of their bond disclosures, despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s dire warnings that it is an “existential threat” and a “dagger aimed straight at the heart” of the city.

• Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has repeatedly railed against the dangers of Executive Summary (Continued) climate change, yet has presided over the permitting of multiple buildings that would flood if his own predictions about climate change were correct, while the City of Boston mentioned “climate change” just once in its disclosure statements.

• Three California coastal cities— San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego—failed to mention “climate change” or “sea level rise” even once in the disclosure statements for their bonds.

• The city of Oakland said in its 2017 bond disclosure statement that it could not predict when (or even whether) sea level rise or other natural events “will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the City or the local economy.” At the same time, Oakland joined a lawsuit against several major oil companies in which it claimed a projection of up to “66 inches of sea level rise by 2100” that “will imminently threaten” the city’s sewer system and property with a “total replacement cost of between $22 and $38 billion.”

• Low-lying Miami and Miami Beach paid lip service to sea level rise, but did not let it get in the way of lucrative building in flood-prone areas, especially where the mayor owns property. Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine specifically built his campaign for Florida’s governor on fighting sea level rise, yet has presided over recent permitting of numerous buildings that would be threatened by it.

• Miami and Boston invoke the threat of “climate change” to their cities when they seek “climate change” grant funds from the federal government that can be used for other purposes.

• New Orleans continues to face nature’s severest hurricanes with Executive Summary (Continued) flood prevention technology that is obsolete and woefully inadequate. Yet the city fails to budget sufficiently to fix its problems.

• The City of Honolulu and King County (Seattle) provided the most complete statements disclosing the risk of rising sea levels or climate change to their bond issues. But it did not affect their bond coupon rates in any way.

Today's United States in Perspective

A video that puts the news in perspective.

The Ideological Corruption of Science

Here is Lawrence Krauss in the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Krauss is a theoretical physicist.

LK is on target.

History suggests that a free society is not the normal state of nature.

The Ninnies' rapid destruction of our freedom is an example.
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In the 1980s, when I was a young professor of physics and astronomy at Yale, deconstructionism was in vogue in the English Department. We in the science departments would scoff at the lack of objective intellectual standards in the humanities, epitomized by a movement that argued against the existence of objective truth itself, arguing that all such claims to knowledge were tainted by ideological biases due to race, sex or economic dominance.

It could never happen in the hard sciences, except perhaps under dictatorships, such as the Nazi condemnation of “Jewish” science, or the Stalinist campaign against genetics led by Trofim Lysenko, in which literally thousands of mainstream geneticists were dismissed in the effort to suppress any opposition to the prevailing political view of the state.

Or so we thought. In recent years, and especially since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, academic science leaders have adopted wholesale the language of dominance and oppression previously restricted to “cultural studies” journals to guide their disciplines, to censor dissenting views, to remove faculty from leadership positions if their research is claimed by opponents to support systemic oppression.

In June, the American Physical Society (APS), which represents 55,000 physicists world-wide, endorsed a “strike for black lives” to “shut down STEM” in academia. It closed its office—not to protest police violence or racism, but to “commit to eradicating systemic racism and discrimination, especially in academia, and science,” stating that “physics is not an exception” to the suffocating effects of racism in American life.

While racism in our society is real, no data were given to support this claim of systemic racism in science, and I have argued elsewhere that there are strong reasons to think that this claim is spurious. The APS wasn’t alone. National laboratories and university science departments joined the one-day strike. The pre-eminent science journal Nature, which disseminates what it views as the most important science stories in a daily newsletter, featured an article titled “Ten simple rules for building an anti-racist lab.”

At Michigan State University, one group used the strike to organize and coordinate a protest campaign against the vice president for research, physicist Stephen Hsu, whose crimes included doing research on computational genomics to study how human genetics might be related to cognitive ability—something that to the protesters smacked of eugenics. He was also accused of supporting psychology research at MSU on the statistics of police shootings that didn’t clearly support claims of racial bias. Within a week, the university president forced Mr. Hsu to resign.

At Princeton on July 4, more than 100 faculty members, including more than 40 in the sciences and engineering, wrote an open letter to the president with proposals to “disrupt the institutional hierarchies perpetuating inequity and harm.” This included the creation of a policing committee that would “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty,” with “racism” to be defined by another faculty committee, and requiring every department, including math, physics, astronomy and other sciences, to establish a senior thesis prize for research that somehow “is actively anti-racist or expands our sense of how race is constructed in our society.”

When scientific and academic leaders give official imprimatur to unverified claims, or issue blanket condemnations of peer-reviewed research or whole fields that may be unpopular, it has ripple effects throughout the field. It can shut down discussion and result in self-censorship.

Shortly after Mr. Hsu resigned, the authors of the psychology study asked the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science to retract their paper—not because of flaws in their statistical analysis, but because of what they called the “misuse” of their article by journalists who argued that it countered the prevailing view that police forces are racist. They later amended the retraction request to claim, conveniently, that it “had nothing to do with political considerations, ‘mob’ pressure, threats to the authors, or distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly.” As a cosmologist, I can say that if we retracted all the papers in cosmology that we felt were misrepresented by journalists, there would hardly be any papers left.

Actual censorship is also occurring. A distinguished chemist in Canada argued in favor of merit-based science and against hiring practices that aim at equality of outcome if they result “in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates.” For that he was censured by his university provost, his published review article on research and education in organic synthesis was removed from the journal website, and two editors involved in accepting it were suspended.

An Italian scientist at the international laboratory CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, had his scheduled seminar on statistical imbalances between the sexes in physics canceled and his position at the laboratory revoked because he suggested that apparent inequities might not be directly due to sexism. A group of linguistics students initiated a public petition asking that the psychologist Steven Pinker be stripped of his position as a Linguistics Society of America Fellow for such offenses as tweeting a New York Times article they disapproved of.

As ideological encroachment corrupts scientific institutions, one might wonder why more scientists aren’t defending the hard sciences from this intrusion. The answer is that many academics are afraid, and for good reason. They are hesitant to disagree with scientific leadership groups, and they see what has happened to scientists who do. They see how researchers lose funding if they can’t justify how their research programs will explicitly combat claimed systemic racism or sexism, a requirement for scientific proposals now being applied by granting agencies.

Whenever science has been corrupted by falling prey to ideology, scientific progress suffers. This was the case in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union—and in the U.S. in the 19th century when racist views dominated biology, and during the McCarthy era, when prominent scientists like Robert Oppenheimer were ostracized for their political views. To stem the slide, scientific leaders, scientific societies and senior academic administrators must publicly stand up not only for free speech in science, but for quality, independent of political doctrine and divorced from the demands of political factions.

The Stone commutation is not unprecedented

Here is Jonathan Turley in The Hill newspaper. Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University.

If someone tells you Trump committed an unprecedented act by commuting Roger Stone - treat it as a sufficient condition for not considering him/her credible.

For me, the Government's treatment of Stone, e.g., the arrest circus, the CNN leak, and the failure to prosecute far more serious crimes by the Swamp's Favorites suggest a misuse of power that is far more important than  Stone's crimes.  Government misuse of power needs to be dealt with by all legal means.  Denying it the result it desires is a good start.
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Washington was sent into vapors of shock and disgust with news of the commutation of Roger Stone. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin declared it to be “the most corrupt and cronyistic act in all of recent history.” Despite my disagreement with the commutation, that claim is almost quaint. The sordid history of pardons makes it look positively chaste in comparison. Many presidents have found the power of pardons to be an irresistible temptation when it involves family, friends, and political allies.

I have maintained that Stone deserved another trial but not a pardon. As Attorney General William Barr has said, this was a “righteous prosecution” and Stone was correctly convicted and correctly sentenced to 40 months in prison. President Trump did not give his confidant a pardon but rather a commutation, so Stone is still a convicted felon. However, Trump should have left this decision to his attorney general. In addition to Stone being a friend and political ally, Trump was implicated in those allegations against Stone. While there was never any evidence linking Trump to the leaking of hacked emails, he has an obvious conflict of interest in the case.

The White House issued a statement that Stone is “a victim of the Russia hoax.” The fact is that Stone is a victim of himself. Years of what he called his “performance art” finally caught up with him when he realized federal prosecutors who were not amused by his antics. Stone defines himself as an “agent provocateur.” He crossed the line when he called witnesses to influence their testimony and gave false answers to investigators.

But criticism of this commutation immediately seemed to be decoupled from any foundation in history or in the Constitution. Indeed, Toobin also declared, “This is simply not done by American presidents. They do not pardon or commute sentences of people who are close to them or about to go to prison. It just does not happen until this president.” In reality, the commutation of Stone barely stands out in the old gallery of White House pardons, which are the most consistently and openly abused power in the Constitution. This authority under Article Two is stated in absolute terms, and some presidents have wielded it with absolute abandon.

Thomas Jefferson pardoned Erick Bollman for violations of the Alien and Sedition Act in the hope that he would testify against rival Aaron Burr for treason. After the intervention of powerful friends, Andrew Jackson stopped the execution of George Wilson in favor of a prison sentence despite Wilson’s guilt in a serious violent crimes (for which his co-defendant was executed). Wilson surprised everyone by opting to be hanged anyway. However, Wilson could not hold a candle to Ignazio Lupo, one of the most lethal mob hitmen who was needed back in New York during a mafia war. Warren Harding, who along with his attorney general, Harry Daugherty, was repeatedly accused of selling pardons. With the bootlegging business hanging in the balance, they decided to pardon “Lupo the Wolf” on the condition that he be a “law abiding” free citizen.

Franklin Roosevelt also pardoned political allies, including Conrad Mann, who was a close associate of Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast. Pendergast made a fortune off illegal alcohol, gambling, and graft, and helped send Harry Truman into office. Truman also misused this power, including pardoning the extremely corrupt George Caldwell, who was a state official who skimmed massive amounts of money off government projects (including the building fund for Louisiana State University).

Richard Nixon was both giver and receiver of controversial pardons. He pardoned Jimmy Hoffa after the Teamsters Union leader had pledged to support his reelection bid. Nixon himself was later pardoned by Gerald Ford, an act many of us view as a mistake. To his credit, Ronald Reagan declined to pardon the Iran Contra affair figures, but his vice president, George Bush, did so after becoming president. Despite his own alleged involvement in that scandal, Bush still pardoned those other Iran Contra figures, such as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.

Bill Clinton committed some of the worst abuses of this power, including pardons for his brother Roger Clinton and his friend and business partner Susan McDougal. He also pardoned the fugitive financier Marc Rich, who evaded justice by fleeing abroad. Entirely unrepentant, Rich was a major Democratic donor, and Clinton had wiped away his convictions for fraud, tax evasion, racketeering, and illegal dealings with Iran.

Unlike many of these cases, there were legitimate questions raised about the Stone case. The biggest issue was that the foreperson of the trial jury proved to be a Democratic activist and an outspoken critic of Trump and his associates. It was later discovered that she even wrote publicly about the Stone case. Despite multiple opportunities to do so, she never disclosed her prior statements and actions that would have shown disqualifying bias. Judge Amy Berman Jackson shrugged off all that, however, and refused to grant Stone a new trial, denying him the most basic protection in our system.

Moreover, I think both the court and the Justice Department were wrong to push for Stone going to prison at this time, because he meets all of the criteria for an inmate at high risk for exposure to the coronavirus. None of that, however, justifies Trump becoming involved in a commutation, when many of the issues could have been addressed in a legal appeal.

There is lots to criticize in this move without pretending it was a pristine power besmirched by a rogue president. Indeed, Trump should have left the decision to a successor or, at a minimum, to the attorney general. But compared to the other presidents, this commutation is not even a distant contender for “the most corrupt and cronyistic act” of clemency.