Via ACE OF SPADES: The Media Told You For Two Years That Everything About the FISA Was Perfect and Beautiful: The Supercut IG Michael Horowitz’s testimony erases Democratic talking points about the FBI’s handling of the outset of the sprawling Russia investigation.
Author: Papa Giorgio
Boris Johnson Protests Mirror Trump Protests
Same crazy Leftists upset they lost in the election, so violence is the way… or creating false narratives to oust Boris.
There is a hint that Boris Johnson is in a Fusion GPS shit storm (via RED STATE):
HOLY SHIT THIS IS SHAMELESS: Fusion GPS offering its Russia Conspiracy services to the Labour Party on the night of their epic loss. Hey, it’s worked out for the Democrats. https://t.co/svgMP4obya
— David Reaboi (@davereaboi) December 13, 2019
Phil Johnson Discusses Beth Moore’s “Orthodoxy” (Wretched)
Wretched speaks to Phil Johnson regarding Beth Moore and orthodoxy:
The following is from an old post I did on Moore:
BETH MOORE
So the question is, 1) who is BRENNAN MANNING that so influenced Beth Moore to have evoked her to [highly] recommend his book, RAGAMUFFIN GOSPEL? and 2) where does he fall on the major doctrines we hold so dear to? This is where a decent study of theology comes in and should make aberrant teaching smoother to spot. I wish to allow Dr. Norman Geisler to lead off a quick summation of some of the doctrines the postmodern movement Mr. Manning finds himself in the thralls of:
Pastor GARY GILLEY, after bullet pointing some of the problems in Manning’s book introduced to many people through Moore’s book, says this:
Add all of this up and we have a book that makes some good points, especially about God’s grace, but distorts so much about God and truth as to render it worse than useless—it is downright dangerous.
[…here are the bullet points that preceded the above…]
✦ The sources for his philosophy of life range from Catholic mystics to Paul Tillich to Norman Mailer to Carl Jung.
✦ His use of Scripture is scanty but when he attempts to support his views from the Bible he usually goes astray (e. g. pp. 37, 142, 166-7, 220).
✦ He confuses “loving sinners” with “accepting their sin” (p. 33) and believes that forgiveness precedes repentance (pp. 74, 167, 181). This leads to continuous hints of universalism (pp. 21, 29, 31, 33, 37, 74, 223, 232) although he never directly claims to be a universalist.
✦ He is heavily soaked in pop-psychology which taints all he says: accepting self (pp. 49, 152, 229); self-intimacy (p. 49); loving ourselves (pp. 50, 168); inner child (p. 64); forgiving yourself (p. 115); self-image (pp. 147-148); self-worth (p. 148).
✦ He accepts a postmodern worldview and calls for us to be open-minded about truth, reality and Christ (p. 65).
✦ He consistently presents a lopsided view of God. God is loving and forgiving but never a judge, disciplinarian or punisher (p. 75), contrary to the clear teaching of Scripture.
✦ God is not man’s enemy, contrary to Romans 5 that says we are the enemy of God if we are not saved (p. 76).
✦ We are told that God does not test us or promote pain (p. 76).
✦ He believes that God speaks today outside of Scripture (pp. 94, 117, 186-187, 229) and that the presence of God is a felt experience that we should seek (pp. 45, 46, 94, 162, 229).
(READ MORE — empahis added)
This short critique (above) by a pastor should send up some warning flares and stir in us an apologetics bent to understand more how these associations can lead a weak Christian astray. For instance, let us “rabbit trail” some positions of this Catholic mystic. Manning recommends highly and even quotes the mystic/New Ager, Beatrice Bruteau in one of his books:
See:
In Abba’s Child, Brennan Manning says that Dr. Beatrice Bruteau is a”trustworthy guide to contemplative consciousness.” Who is Beatrice Bruteau and what does she believe? She is the founder of The School for Contemplation, and she believes God is within every human being. She wrote the book, What We Can Learn from the East,
“We have realized ourselves as the Self that says only I AM, with no predicate following, not “I am a this” or “I have that quality.” Only unlimited, absolute I AM” [A Song That Goes On Singing – Interview with B.B., one can read the entire section under “Human Choice” to understand just how New Age Beatrice is].
(Source)
“I AM,” of course, is one of the biblical names of God (EXODUS 3:14). Why would Manning recommend Bruteau with no warning if he does not agree with this blasphemy?
This isn’t “guilt by association” — so one knows the difference — it is “guilt by proxy.” A much more powerful legal term.
In The Signature of Jesus, Manning gives this quote from the mystic Catholic priest William Shannon and the Catholic Buddhist Thomas Merton:
“During a conference on contemplative prayer, the question was put to Thomas Merton: ‘How can we best help people to attain union with God?’ His answer was very clear: WE MUST TELL THEM THAT THEY ARE ALREADY UNITED WITH GOD. CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER IS NOTHING OTHER THAN COMING INTO CONSCIOUSNESS OF WHAT IS ALREADY THERE” (p. 218).
Merton was a Trappist monk who promoted the integration of Zen Buddhism and Christianity. The titles of some of his books are “Zen and the Birds of the Appetite” and “Mystics and the Zen Masters.” He is of course famous for saying, “I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity … I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can.” I CRITIQUED MERTON because of an associate pastor at a local Bible centered church (in Castaic) saying he loved Merton. Mentioning that his professor at Biola was using a book in class that he didn’t find anything wrong with.Very sad and maddening at the same time. Simple care in learning our doctrines in fun ways (evangelism) can be a big help in leading us away from heresy. (Video in case it drops off YouTube: “Brennan Manning Explains His Emergent View of the Christian Faith”)
As with many such teachers who gain popularity by tickling ears, Manning overemphasizes the love and grace of God while ignoring His attributes of justice, righteousness and holiness. He teaches that Jesus has redeemed all of mankind. His “good news” is that everyone is already saved. Manning quotes David Steindl-Rast approvingly in his book, The Signature of Jesus (pp. 210, 213-214). Steindl-Rast, a contemplative Roman Catholic priest, said:
“Envision the great religious traditions arranged on the circumference of a circle. At their mystical core they all say the same thing, but with different emphasis”
(“Heroic Virtue,” Gnosis, Summer 1992).
Manning quotes Matthew Fox approvingly in two of his books, Lion and Lamb (p. 135) and A Stranger to Self Hatred (pp. 113, 124). Fox says:
“God is a great underground river, and there are many wells into that river. There’s a Taoist well, a Buddhist well, a Jewish well, a Muslim well, a Christian well, a Goddess well, the Native wells-many wells that humans have dug to get into that river, but friends, there’s only one river; the living waters of wisdom”
Quoted from John Caddock, “What Is Contemplative Spirituality,” Journal of the Grace Evangelical Society, Autumn 1997.
Even Manning’s approach to prayer is aberrant. In The Signature of Jesus Manning promotes the dangerous practice of centering prayer, which involves chanting “a sacred word” to empty the mind and allegedly enter into silent experiential communion with God within:
“[T]he first step in faith is to stop thinking about God at the time of prayer. … enter into the great silence of God. Alone in that silence, the noise within will subside and the Voice of Love will be heard. … Choose a single, sacred word … repeat the sacred word inwardly, slowly, and often” (pp. 212, 215, 218).
This is a New Age/Eastern concept of prayer.
Not a Christian concept of it.
So where does this example leave us? It leaves us at a couple of places. Some of the critique I use above comes from a book that I would recommend to a friend/believer, but with a caveat. The author can be very legalistic and I would point out that some aspects of how the author applies their understanding of the Gospel is dealt with in Galatians (maybe mentioning Luther’s commentary on Galatians as a resource to better grasp this concept of the freedom we have in Christ). The book is Contemplative Mysticism: A Powerful Ecumenical Bond, by David Cloud.
Likewise, I am sure the believer who is well moored in the foundational beliefs and how they work themselves throughout our culture can read Beth Moore and glean from it helpful input into one’s faith. Should it be at the top of a recommend list for one God fearing woman to recommend to another, no. Can it be of benefit as a resource for a woman struggling with issues, of course, as long as the person doing the recommending adds a cautionary note. Like I did with my recommended resource.
Dear friends, I’ve dropped everything to write you about this life of salvation that we have in common. I have to write insisting—begging!—that you fight with everything you have in you for this faith entrusted to us as a gift to guard and cherish. What has happened is that some people have infiltrated our ranks (our Scriptures warned us this would happen), who beneath their pious skin are shameless scoundrels. Their design is to replace the sheer grace of our God with sheer license—which means doing away with Jesus Christ, our one and only Master. (JUDE 3-4, The Message)
As one studies all the facets of apologetics, rabbit trails will appear, but in them all remember a key thing, harkening back to Dr. Ganssle when he mentioned that our sinful condition has even effected our reasoning skills. Building on that take note that even if we have thought through a matter, worked on it, got it to line up with orthodoxy and have sound reasoning… often times our intentions in presenting it as well as the delivery and how the other corrupted person hears it are all at play. Which is why we say the Holy Spirit must be the Prime Mover at the deepest levels for a person to be moved by a truth, by thee Truth. Quoting Dr. Ganssle again:
Each one of the three angles or themes concerning apologetics is legitimate and fruitful. Each is worthy of careful study. Despite this fact, there are two trends I wish to point out First, most of the thinking about apologetics has been on the academic themes. While this weight of attention is not in itself a bad thing, it may allow us to forget the other angles of apologetics. Second most of the criticisms of the usefulness of apologetics find there root in confusing the academic angle of apologetics with the entirety of the apologetic enterprise. Those of us who work in the academic angle bear much of the blame for this confusion. Sometimes we are overzealous about the strength of our arguments or how interesting they ought to be to nonbelievers. [This includes discussions with fellow Christians and topics.] Sometimes we neglect the large distinction between arguments that are technically strong and those that might be persuasive to a given person. Sometimes we neglect the missional themes in the apologetic task and thereby reinforce the notion that coming to believe that Christianity is factually true is the main task in our witness. By articulating the importance of the missional angle, as well as of the theological angle, we can defuse many criticisms of apologetics. (emphasis and addition in box quotes mine.)
I hope this short introduction to apologetics was and is helpful. There are three books I highly recommend as great starter points to both understanding the importance of apologetics as well as seeing the differing models of thinking in the world compared. These three resources are technical enough to invigorate the thinker as well as great introductions to the subject accessible to the layman.
Flashback: Al Gore vs Reality (11-years ago today)
…Deadlines Come and Go
Recently, in 2014, the United Nations declared a climate “tipping point” by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming. “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” reported the Boston Globe.
But way back in 1982, the UN had announced a two-decade tipping point for action on environmental issues. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, that the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” According to Tolba, lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”
In 1989, the UN was still trying to sell that “tipping point” to the public. According to a July 5, 1989, article in the San Jose Mercury News, Noel Brown, the then-director of the New York office of UNEP was warning of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the Herald, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”
But in 2007, seven years after that supposed tipping point had come and gone, Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared 2012 the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his own deadline in August 2009, when he warned of “incalculable” suffering without a UN climate deal in December 2009. And in 2012, the UN gave Planet Earth another four-year reprieve. UN Foundation president and former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth called Obama’s re-election the “last window of opportunity” to get it right on climate change.
Heir to the British throne Prince Charles originally announced in March 2009 that we had “less than 100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change.” As he said during a speech in Brazil, “We may yet be able to prevail and thereby to avoid bequeathing a poisoned chalice to our children and grandchildren. But we only have 100 months to act.”
To his credit, Charles stuck to this rigid timetable—at least initially. Four months later, in July 2009, he declared a ninety-six-month tipping point. At that time the media dutifully reported that “the heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.”
At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Charles was still keeping at it: “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.”
As the time expired, the Prince of Wales said in 2010, “Ladies and gentlemen we only—we now have only 86 months left before we reach the tipping point.”
By 2014, a clearly exhausted Prince Charles seemed to abandon the countdown, announcing, “We are running out of time. How many times have I found myself saying this over recent years?”
In the summer of 2017, Prince Charles’s one-hundred-month tipping point finally expired.26 What did Charles have to say? Was he giving up? Did he proclaim the end times for the planet? Far from it. Two years earlier, in 2015, Prince Charles abandoned his hundred-month countdown and gave the world a reprieve by extending his climate tipping point another thirty-five years, to the year 2050!
A July 2015 interview in the Western Morning News revealed that “His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.” So instead of facing the expiration of his tipping point head on, the sixty-nine-year-old Charles kicked the climate doomsday deadline down the road until 2050 when he would be turning the ripe age of 102. (Given the Royal Family’s longevity, it is possible he may still be alive for his new extended deadline.)
Former Irish President Mary Robinson issued a twenty-year tipping point in 2015, claiming that global leaders have “at most two decades to save the world.”
Al Gore announced his own ten-year climate tipping point in 2006 and again in 2008, warning that “the leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” In 2014, with “only two years left” before Gore’s original deadline, the climatologist Roy Spencer mocked the former vice president, saying “in the grand tradition of prophets of doom, Gore’s prognostication is not shaping up too well.”
Penn State Professor Michael Mann weighed in with a 2036 deadline. “There is an urgency to acting unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Mann explained. Media outlets reported Mann’s made a huge media splash with his prediction, noting “Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036.”
Other global warming activists chose 2047 as their deadline, while twenty governments from around the globe chose 2030 as theirs, with Reuters reporting that millions would die by 2030 if world failed to act on climate: “More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2% of GDP by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday. As global avg. temps rise due to ghg emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by the humanitarian organization DARA.”
As we saw in chapter five, top UK scientist Sir David King warned in 2004 that that by 2100 Antarctica could be the only habitable continent.
Tipping point rhetoric seems to have exploded beginning in 2002. An analysis by Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey found that tipping points in environmental rhetoric increased dramatically in that year…..
Some More Commentary On IG Related Stuff
(Hat-Tip to OK BOOMER) Trey Gowdy shares his biggest takeaways from the DOJ Inspector General’s FISA abuse report on ‘The Story with Martha MacCallum.’
The next article is thanks to AMERICAN GREATNESS: “Ratcliffe: Dems Withholding Transcript That Reveals How ‘Whistleblower Got Caught With Chairman Schiff’”
…Ratcliffe pointed out that Democrats keep using the word “demand” do describe Trump’s suggestion to the Ukraine president that corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden should be looked into.
“Guess which word isn’t anywhere in the transcript?” Ratcliffe asked before informing the committee that the word is “demand.”
“Nowhere in that transcript does the president make a ‘demand,’” he declared. “Do you know where the word ‘demand’ came from? It came from the whistleblower. That’s the first time we heard the word demand,” Ratcliffe explained.
When he notified the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community, he said President Trump made a demand! He thought he could do that because he thought no one would ever be able to prove that because what president would take the unprecedented step of releasing a transcript with a foreign leader. This president did! Something that the whistleblower never expected.
President Trump, we keep hearing, got caught. President Trump, we keep hearing, is obstructing justice. The president that took the unprecedented step of releasing a transcript so that everyone could see the truth is not obstructing congress. The president didn’t get caught. The whistleblower got caught. The whistleblower made false statements. The whistleblower got caught with Chairman Schiff!
Ratcliffe noted that rather than run the impeachment inquiry out of the House Judiciary where it belonged, Democrats put the highly conflicted chairman of the Intelligence Committee in charge of the case.
“The person who got caught with the whistleblower!” Ratcliffe exclaimed.
The Texas Republican recalled how Schiff had initially denied having any contact with the anti-Trump complainant identified online as Eric Ciaramella (seen below shaking hands with former president Barack Obama).
[….]
The president took the unprecedented step of releasing a transcript so everyone could see the truth.
Here’s another transcript everyone should see: sworn testimony confirming that the whistleblower didn’t tell the truth both verbally and in writing. But Schiff won’t release it. pic.twitter.com/uRCvDPK1rg
— John Ratcliffe (@RepRatcliffe) December 12, 2019
When questioned by Ratcliffe during his closed door testimony on October 4, Atkinson revealed information about a potential link between Schiff or his staff and the whistleblower.
Responding to a question about the transcript on Twitter last month, Ratcliffe said: “It’s because I asked IG Atkinson about his ‘investigation’ into the contacts between Schiff’s staff and the person who later became the whistleblower. The transcript is classified ‘secret’ so Schiff can prevent you from seeing the answers to my questions.”
I know why @paulsperry_ It’s because I asked IG Atkinson about his “investigation” into the contacts between Schiff’s staff and the person who later became the whistleblower. The transcript is classified “secret” so Schiff can prevent you from seeing the answers to my questions
— John Ratcliffe (@RepRatcliffe) November 30, 2019
This article excerpt comes by way of RED STATE: “Kimberley Strassel: ‘Buried in the IG Report is a Line that Poses an Enormous Question, Central to Everything’”
On Wednesday evening, the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel noticed something peculiar in the IG report and posed a question via a twitter thread:
Buried in the IG report is a line that poses an enormous question, one that is central to everything, and really must be answered. Remember: According to all relevant players, prior to July of 2016, nobody had a Trump-Russia collusion narrative on their minds.
Indeed, the FBI says it was only the Downer tip-off at end-July that spurred the investigation. Downer for his part says it was public revelation in July of the DNC hack that caused him to finally wonder about collusion and connect his spring conversation with Papadopoulos.
Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson, meanwhile, in Senate testimony, “stress[ed]” he hired Steele in May to look at Trump’s “business activities” in Russia….By Simpson’s telling (under penalty of perjury), Steele just sort of stumbled on this much “broader” “political conspiracy.”
But here is what Steele told the IG: That in May 2016, Simpson approached Steele to “assist in determining Russia’s actions related to the 2016 election”; “whether Russia was trying to achieve a particular election outcome”; and…
“whether there were any ties between the Russian government and Trump and his campaign.” (Page 93) Seems Simpson had a pretty good bead on the “narrative” long before the govt. claims to have had it and before even his own source had reported it to him. Huh.
Let’s hope Attorney John Durham provides some answers on who exactly knew what in the spring of 2016.
The answer could be that Glenn Simpson and his wife, Mary Jacoby, wrote the script a long time ago.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) appeared on Fox News’ “Hannity” in the spring to discuss the origins of the Steele dossier. He said it should really be called the “Simpson” dossier. Although Christopher Steele likely contributed “stories” to the dossier, and his years of experience in British intelligence lent credence to the document, Nunes said he believed that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson may actually have written the majority of it.
[….]
Simpson hired Christopher Steele in June 2016. According to Smith, Steele had been “identified as a British spy in 1999.” He had been chief of the “Russia desk when Russian assassins killed FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko in London and was hardly in a position to make discreet inquiries. Still, Simpson must have thought Steele’s name at a minimum would be useful in marketing whatever his firm pulled together. Reportedly, Steele had a good relationship with the FBI, and journalists love spies who spill secrets.”
Carter Page On IG Report
(I have said for a long time he will be a rich man.)
Former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page discusses the details of the IG report, allegations of FISA court abuse and his meeting with Russians in 2016.
Sydney Powell weighs in:
Lindsey Graham and IG Horowitz
This first video is the opening statement by Sen. Graham. And it is important because he details the bias of agents and others involved in the case against Trump and his campaign:
What followed by Lindsey Graham was an excellent Q&A, which I detail a few parts of:
Here is the transcript of a few spots:
- Sen. Graham (2:58): “There are five people in that interview, right?”
- IG Horowitz (3:01): “Correct”
[….]
- Sen. Graham (3:09): “Did they have a duty to report to their supervisors and eventually to the court this [ex]sculpatory information?”
- IG Horowitz (3:16): “Absolutely”
- Sen. Graham (3:17): “They did not”
- IG Horowitz (3:18): “They did not”
- Sen. Graham (3:19): “Why”
- IG Horowitz (3:20): “That’s the question, um, I can’t specifically answer for you”
- Sen. Graham (3:25): “Can you it wasn’t because of political bias?”
- IG Horowitz (3:28): “On decisions regarding those FISA matters, I do not know their state of mind at this point.”
[….]
- Sen. Graham (11:33): “Would you have submitted the warrant application as a lawyer?”
- IG Horowitz (11:38): “Let me put it this way, I would not have submitted the one the put in… no doubt about it it had no business going in with that…” (audio trail off, Sen. Graham continues)
- Sen. Graham (11:45): “So what I want you to know is that in January 2017 the whole foundation for surveilling Carter Page collapses. Exculpatory information is ignored. They lie to the [FISA] court about what the interview was all about – is that a fair summary so far?…”
- IG Horowitz (12:05): “Um… I’ll ahh… they certainly misled the… [stammering] … it was misleading to the [FISA] court.”
- Sen. Graham (12:12): “Okay. Fair enough. And in January – about six months later – when they find more information that could be helpful to Mr. Page, they lie about it. You feel like MR. Page was fairly treated by the Department of Justice and the FBI?”
- IG Horowitz (12:27): “Um… I don’t think the Department of Justice fairly treated these FISAs, and he was on the receiving end of them.”
- Sen. Graham (12:32): “You would not want to be on the receiving end of this, would you?”
- IG Horowitz (12:35): “I would not want agents or anybody failing to put forward all the information their obligated to tell the [FISA] court…”
Graham’s closing statement as well is worth while:
BONUS ~ TED CRUZ:
BONUS ~ THE FIVE
Earth-Day Fails! Prince EA’s Video is Full of Hot Air
(Originally Posted Apr 22, 2015 | New Audios)
I wanted to play the video in whole, then go through 6-points it makes to shed more light on them.
Okay, lets deal with them in order.
- Deforestation [below/left]
- Native-Americans
- Polar Bears
- Sea Level Rise
- China v. Sarah Palin
- Ice Melting
- Rockets
An external point-by-point critique:
(I recently added to this next section)
DEFORESTATION
Prince EA’s mentioning that a future generation of people will not know what trees are is JUST LIKE people telling us kids will not know what snow is like:
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
Monday 20 March 2000
Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.
Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.
[….]
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
Funny thing is, some record breaking snow-fall followed in the years after… so much so that kids wished they forgot what it was.
But in all seriousness we are seeing similar dire predictions fail about the deforestation of trees. Keep in mind this is not a polemic proving all stories of deforestation false. I merely wish to bring some balance to the issue. For instance, in the Amazon, well over 95% of deforestation comes from cattle ranching, commercial agriculture, and infrastructure improvements. Less than 5% is from legal and illegal logging. Take note as well that The New York Times makes the point that,
- “…for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.”
I love balance.
William Shatner, Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame, mentioned in a National Geographic video that, “rainforests [are] being cleared at the rate of 20 football fields per minute.” If this were truly the case, the forests would have been completely wiped out years ago. In Prince EA’s video he said 40 football fields! In an interview with Dr. Evaristo Eduardo de Miranda (one of the world’s leading experts on deforestation in the Amazon, is a professor of ecology at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest institution of higher learning, and president of ECOFORCE, a private, nonprofit, environmental research/educational institution), he was asked where these numbers come from:
Q. There have been many reports by environmental groups in the U.S. claiming that the Amazon rain forest is being destroyed at a frightening pace. Many conflicting statistics are given concerning the alleged rate of destruction — 4 million hectares per year, 8 million hectares per year, 50,000 acres per day, etc. What are the facts and where are these statistics coming from?
A. A good example of this is the report released at the Earth Summit by the FAO [United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization]. FAO claims that the world tropical deforestation rate is 16.9 million hectares per year. FAO has up to the present been still using their discredited 8 million hectares per year rate for deforestation in Brazil. But when pressed at the summit they conceded to the 2.1 million hectares annually that the INPE, the Brazilian national space agency, has asserted is the real rate. This is an admission that they were inflating the deforestation rate by nearly 300 percent.
But they also said that deforestation for all of South America is 6.9 million hectares annually, which raises an obvious problem. Since Brazil has 70 percent of South America’s tropical forests, it would be incredible to suggest that other countries are deforesting at the levels necessary for the FAO figures to be valid. If you subtract the 2.1 million [Brazilian hectares] from the [FAO’s] 6.9 million, you have 4.8 million hectares being cut down annually in the 30 percent of South American tropical forests outside of Brazil. That is far greater than any data shows.
There is a similar problem with their annual 16.9 million hectares statistic for world deforestation. If you subtract Brazil’s 2.1 million, then you must ask who deforests the other 14.8 million hectares. When they were asked these questions, the FAO could not answer. They could not break the numbers down country by country or show any other means by which they arrived at this figure.
Q. No maps, no satellite photos, no national data ? Where did they conjure up these figures?
A. They were put in a very bad light because they could produce nothing to substantiate these fantastic figures. This is an important example, because if the FAO cannot sustain these numbers, then you can imagine that these eco-groups — the NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] — could not either. They always use these big numbers to make sensational news stories, but they never can break the aggregate numbers down to show where they come from, and they never produce maps with alleged areas of deforestation specified so that they can be independently verified.
One comment from the inter-webs noted: “The Amazon is just fine, as the people are moving out of the jungle to the cities and the jungle is raging back quite nicely. It’s in Indonesia and the area that the forests are being cut down for palm oil/biofuel productions.” Yep
In fact, the co-founder and long-time director of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, said: “All these save-the-forests arguments are based on bad science…. They are quite simply wrong… [Phillip Stott and I] found that the Amazon rainforests is more than 90% intact. We flew over it and met all the environmental authorities. We studied satellite pictures of the entire area.” Phillip Stott, who has 30 years of studying tropical forests under his belt as well as being professor of biogeography at London University mentioned that, “there are now still – despite what humans have done – more rainforests today than there were 12,000 years ago.”
Conventional wisdom is often challenged as well by climatologists and specialists in their field. The NEW YORK TIMES passes along the complexity of an issue most people take for granted:
…Deforestation accounts for about 20 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide. The assumption is that planting trees and avoiding further deforestation provides a convenient carbon capture and storage facility on the land.
That is the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is wrong.
[….]
Planting trees and avoiding deforestation do offer unambiguous benefits to biodiversity and many forms of life. But relying on forestry to slow or reverse global warming is another matter entirely.
The science says that spending precious dollars for climate change mitigation on forestry is high-risk: We don’t know that it would cool the planet, and we have good reason to fear it might have precisely the opposite effect. More funding for forestry might seem like a tempting easy win for the world leaders at the United Nations, but it’s a bad bet.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN gets a bit more detailed regarding the above. But this is a very complicated issue… especially since chopping down massive forests is being posited as a boon to fight “global warming” – to wit:
…A 2007 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that global-scale deforestation would result in a net cooling, as the changes in albedo and evaporation would overwhelm the impact of all that carbon being released into the atmosphere. But that doesn’t mean we should go about chopping down every tree we can—on the whole, preserving tropical forests and even adding more trees in the equatorial latitudes will be beneficial for the climate, not to mention the biodiversity that depends on rainforests. But large-scale reforestation or afforestation projects in the north may not be the best idea, as Lee says:
People are debating whether afforestation is a good idea in high latitudes. If you plant trees you sequester carbon, which is a benefit to the climate system. At the same time, if you plant trees you warm the landscape because trees are darker compared to other vegetation types. So they absorb solar radiation.
The study is another reminder of just how devilishly complicated the climate system really is….
(TIME)
Here are some other FLASHBACK articles regarding trees and the varying ideas of their effects on our climate:
Plant or not plant trees to fight “global warming?! It’s all so confusing! This is what the (allegedly) settled science says:
Update: BBC: Climate change: Planting new forests ‘can do more harm than good’
Like I said – challenging conventional wisdom. In reality, what throws many of these studies of deforestation off is the urban heat island effect and rural cold island effect. For more on this see Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy’s (bio) book/chapter: “Climate Change: Myths & Realities”, 2008 — Chapter 7: Ecological changes.
NATIVE-AMERICANS
The second point I wish to comment on, and it is Prince EA’s mentioning of the Native-Americans. I do not doubt that Prince was taught these things in school. However, like many other issues cornered in the monopoly of the government, balance is needed.
For instance, I wrote a response to an in-class supplement to my sons elementary class lesson [he is now married and lives in Florida] about HOW the Settlers treated the New World versus how the Indians treated it. I made sure each parent got a copy and this engendered a visit to see the principle. Here is a quote from that post:
From James Fenimore Cooper to Dances with Wolves and Disney’s Pocahontas, American Indians have been mythologized as noble beings with a “spiritual, sacred attitude towards land and animals, not a practical utilitarian one.”[16] Small children are taught that the Plains Indians never wasted any part of the buffalo. They grow up certain that the Indians lived as one with nature, and that white European settlers were the rapists who destroyed it.
In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown University, strips away the myth to show that American Indians behaved pretty much like everyone else. When times were bad they used the whole buffalo. When times were good, “whole herds” of buffalo might be killed only for their tongues or their fetuses.[17] Although American Indians adapted to their environment and were intimately familiar with it, they had no qualms about shaping it to their needs.
Indians set fires to promote the growth of grasses and make land more productive for the game and plants that they preferred. Sometimes fire was used carefully. Sometimes it was not. Along with the evidence that Indians used fire to improve habitat are abundant descriptions of carelessly started fires that destroyed all plant life and entire buffalo herds.[18]
Nor were American Indians particularly interested in conserving resources for the future. In the East, they practiced slash and burn agriculture. When soils became infertile, wood for fuel was exhausted, and game depleted, whole villages moved.[19] The Cherokee, along with the other Indians who participated in the Southern deerskin trade, helped decimate white-tailed deer populations.[20] Cherokee mythology believed that deer that were killed in a hunt were reanimated.
In all, contemporary accounts suggest that many Indians treated game as an inexhaustible resource. Despite vague hints in the historical records that some Crees may have tried to conserve beaver populations by allocating hunting territories and sparing young animals, Krech concludes that it was “market forces in combination with the Hudchild’s Bay Company policies [which actively promoted conservation]” that “led to the eventual recovery of beaver populations.”[21]
Those who blame European settlers for genocide because they introduced microbes that ravaged native populations might as well call the Mongols genocidal for creating the plague reservoirs that led to the Black Death in Europe.[22] Microbes travel with their hosts. Trade, desired by Indians as well as whites, created the pathways for disease.
[16] Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, W.W. Norton & Company; New York: NY (1999), p. 22.
[17] Ibid., p. 135.
[18] Ibid., p. 119.
[19] Ibid., p. 76.
[20] Ibid., p. 171.
[21] Ibid., p. 188.
[22] For a discussion of the effect of the Mongol invasions and their effect on European epidemiology see, William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Doubleday; New York, NY (1977).
These little historical facts changes the narrative just a tad, doesn’t it? Like when the Iroquois directed their most furious attacks against the Hurons during the Beaver Wars. One Jesuit missionary wrote, “it is the design of the Iroquois to capture all the Hurons, if it is possible; to put the chiefs and great part of the nation to death, and with the rest to form one nation and one country.” American Indians, alongside the Settlers, accelerated their hunting of the American Bison (Buffalo) that contributed to the near extinction of this plains beast. All in the name of the Mighty Buck! (READ MORE)
POLAR BEAR BREAK
(An UPDATED POST on an old one can be found showing the bottom line is that the current population is at record highs.) While not dealt with well in Prince EA’s video, his presentation shows a computerized Polar Bear[s] walking in the background while intimating extinction or low numbers. Again, he probably learned about this in school, so you cannot really blame him fully. He is the product of indoctrination. However, this just isn’t the case. In fact, there are a record number of Polar Bears. Here Is The Bottom Line:
1) It confirms the global population size I published in May 2015 (20,129-32,558; average 26,344). See the graph below, now amended to reflect this point. If global numbers do decline over the next 35 years, it will be from a high point not previously acknowledged by the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG).
2) The current population trend is listed as: ? Unknown. [NOT declining – if anyone claims it is, send them here: IUCN Red List U. maritimus]
- For the latest – see: FAILED AMSTRUP POLAR BEAR PREDICTIONS HAVE CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNITY IN A PANIC
(MS) WINNIPEG, Canada (Globe and Mail 4/2012) The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.
[….]
But many Inuit communities said the researchers were wrong. They said the bear population was increasing and they cited reports from hunters who kept seeing more bears. Mr. Gissing said that encouraged the government to conduct the recent study, which involved 8,000 kilometres of aerial surveying last August along the coast and offshore islands.
Mr. Gissing said he hopes the results lead to more research and a better understanding of polar bears. He said the media in southern Canada has led people to believe polar bears are endangered. “They are not.” He added that there are about 25,000 polar bears across Canada’s Arctic. “That’s likely the highest [population level]there has ever been.”
[Editors note: perhaps to 27,000-32,000?]
Again, this throws a monkey wrench into the narrative, and makes the next proposition trues if the counter proposition can be true:
Look, it is simple:
- Either polar bears are dying because of CO2 emissions via man ~ hence, we should stopproducing high levels of CO2;
or [following the train of thinking FROM Al Gore],
- Polar bears are at their highest recorded population levels because of CO2 emissions via man, hence, we should produce high levels of CO2.
If “a,” why not “b”?
Truth About Stranded Polar Bears Image
(SEE MORE)
FOX NEWS & SEA LEVEL RISE
Want to move on quick over this section? Here is my response to a Starbucks patron (of which I count myself) when they bring up sea rise:
- “I believe in sea rise? Hell, 10,000 years ago it was 350ft lower. That is how the American Indian populated the continent.”
Mic Drop!
This was interesting because he calls out a news network. Good for him! He is wrong, but I like his style. This section I will deal with sea level rise in general, and then deal with the Bangladesh portion of Prince EA’s claims. The general sea rise refutation of the school-house session can be seen here, but let us look at a graph:
I wanted to draw the people who believe this (rising oceans) attention to a very old photograph compared to a new one to compare La Jolla (California) sea levels from 1871 to Now (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
Also, Photographs show no change in Sydney sea level over the last 130 years (REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE):
But what interested me was his mentioning Bangladesh specifically… wrapped up in a challenge to Fox News.
Woa Whoa! Throwin’ down the gauntlet. I am going to answer this from various sources, but as you will see, this is another fail on the eco-fascists side. Here is a conservative source first:
It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than a month since the latest example of intellectual collapse at the IPCC. Now added to the fraudulent claims about Amazon rain forests, African crop harvests, and Himalayan glaciers comes the exposure of a very large error in the UN body’s warnings about flooding in Bangladesh. Turns out that the scientists screeching about the cataclysmic effects of sea-level rises forgot to consider sedimentary deposits (via Yid with Lid):
Scientists in Bangladesh posed a fresh challenge to the UN’s top climate change panel Thursday, saying its doomsday forecasts for the country in the body’s landmark 2007 report were overblown.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), already under fire for errors in the 2007 report, had said a one-metre (three-foot) rise in sea levels would flood 17 percent of Bangladesh and create 20 million refugees by 2050.
The claim helped create a widespread consensus that the low-lying country was on the “front line” of climate change, but a new study argues the IPCC ignored the role sediment plays in countering sea level rises. …
But IPCC’s prediction did not take into account the one billion tonnes of sediment carried by Himalayan rivers into Bangladesh every year, which are crucial in countering rises in sea levels, the study funded by the Asian Development Bank said.
“Sediments have been shaping Bangladesh’s coast for thousands of years,” said Maminul Haque Sarker, director of the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), who led research for the study.
Even if the sea level rises that far — a claim which is itself greeted with increasing skepticism — most of the coastline for Bangladesh won’t be affected.
WHAT’S UP WITH THAT calls this Bangladesh “THE POSTER CHILD,” and here is the end of their report:
Deltas are formed at the boundary of rivers and oceans. The rivers that build deltas flow to low and slowly sinking parts of the crust, where large volumes of sediment are being deposited. They will always be in balance with sea level but almost by definition increase in size, if rivers are allowed to follow their course. Deltas, by their very nature are building out and up. They also tend to flood frequently and seasonally, often with disastrous effects on the inhabitants. People living in deltas should learn to swim, have a boat and generally be aware of what can happen. Sea level rise is not an issue in large deltas; they have been proven to be able to keep up with any sea level rise. Flooding disasters are seasonally the result of excessive run-off, and occasionally due to unfortunate storm surges that result in breaks through natural barriers, but this has nothing to do with sea level rise. Bangladesh will be there, even if all the ice in the world has melted, with its people still fighting floods while farming the fertile floodplains.
Scientific American also takes a wholly different course and shows that current flooding is caused in big part to the Bangladeshi’s themselves:
Man-made flood protections, not climate change, are the main culprit in sea-level rise in southwest Bangladesh, according to new research conducted for the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research.
The report from a team of scientists at Vanderbilt University is the first part in a wide-ranging, $7.5 million analysis of environmental stress and human migration scenarios in the low-lying South Asian nation.
Published this week in Nature Climate Change, the initial study finds that embankments constructed since the 1960s are primarily to blame for lower land elevations along the Ganges-Brahmaputra River Delta, with some areas experiencing more than twice the rate of the most worrisome sea-level rise projections from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
OF COURSE the magazine then goes on to assert Climate Disruption is still a threat to Bangladesh (towing the line is tough!). But this problem is moot because they gain land from the delta and the flooding is mainly “man-made,” so are the solutions [technology].
CHINA vs SARAH PALIN
WOW, another challenge. Good for you Prince EA! But again, your understanding is wrong.
The Atlantic Monthly has a VERY interesting article I read a few years back. They note that in reality the pollution in China is at our 1980-levels.
Does China, in short, truly deserve its reputation as an environmental pariah?
Ramon Guardans, a biologist who studies air pollution and co-chairs a global monitoring plan on toxic chemicals for the United Nations Environment Program, is skeptical.
“The air concentrations of several pollutants in sites in China are certainly comparable to the levels observed in heavily industrialized areas in Europe and North America before the 1970’s,” he wrote by email. But pound for pound, person for person these pollutant emissions were, and generally still are, much greater than China’s.
“So in relation to the population density we see in China,” Guardans continues, “the U.S. and Europe did a much dirtier job industrializing.”
Beijing just happens to be, similar to Los Angeles, in a geographical bind. Bloomberg makes this point as well around the same time the Atlantic Monthly does:
Why is Beijing susceptible to these episodes? First, and uncontrollable by the authorities, are the peculiarities of Beijing’s geography. In particular, the capital is surrounded by mountain ranges that lead to the unfortunate phenomenon of an inversion layer—cold air settles on top of a warmer air mass, trapping the pollutants inside. This is the same problem that bedevils Los Angeles.
Beyond the misfortune of geography, though, lie a number of factors that have everything to do with China’s policies….
China is blessed and cursed with the world’s largest coal reserves, which means that the country sources some 80 percent of its electricity from burning coal—and much of that coal is of lower quality and highly polluting.
But as I have clearly shown… wind and solar energy is no cleaner. And the dream in peoples heads is truly just that, a dream… I mean when Google caves, you know the end-is-nigh.
- “Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.
And bio-fuels cause, literally, food riots and starvation in poor countries and raise the price of food which hurt the poorer people in the more well off nations: Ethanol is killing children around the world… Democrats! It takes 450lbs of Corn to fill one SUV tank… that is a years worth of food for multiple children, not to mention the rise of corn-based food for the poor worldwide. (SEE MORE)
ICE MELTING
Here is another fail on the part of the doomsayers who speak with a tongue very similar to the eschatology handed us at the most fiery southern Baptist church.
Prince EA is just relying on others work that have been either proven wrong or fraudulant in nature. Here for instance we see some predictions simlar to Prince’s:
“Peter Wadhams, who heads the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge… believes that the Arctic is likely to become ice-free before 2020 and possibly as early as 2015,” (YALE ENVIRONMENT 360 REPORTED IN 2012). Yet government data shows that arctic sea ice has increased since then….
Here I will post information from a PREVIOUS POST about Polar Bear population levels, in which I point the following out:
Recent Population Increase Partly Due To Lots of Sea-Ice
Canada (CBC News via the Canadian Coast Guard, 3/2014) [ARCTIC Sea Ice] The Canadian Coast Guard is pleading with merchant ships to plan their voyages well in advance this year as the organization’s icebreaker fleet confronts some of the worst ice conditions on the Atlantic Ocean in decades.
“Plan your voyage and we’ll all get through this,” said Mike Voight, the Atlantic region’s director of programs. “We’ve got a pretty bad or challenging ice year.”
The Canadian Ice Service, an arm of Environment Canada, said there is 10 per cent more ice this year compared to the 30-year average.
“We probably haven’t seen a winter this bad as far as ice for the past 25 years,” said Voight, referring to both the amount and thickness of the ice….
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Abstract (12/2014) [ARCTIC sea ice] Despite a well-documented ~40% decline in summer Arctic sea ice extent since the late 1970’s, it has been difficult to estimate trends in sea ice volume because thickness observations have been spatially incomplete and temporally sporadic. While numerical models suggest that the decline in extent has been accompanied by a reduction in volume, there is considerable disagreement over the rate at which this has occurred. We present the first complete assessment of trends in northern hemisphere sea ice thickness and volume using 4 years of measurements from CryoSat-2. Between autumn 2010 and spring 2013, there was a 14% and 5% reduction in autumn and spring Arctic sea ice volume, respectively, in keeping with the long-term decline in extent. However, since then there has been a marked 41% and 9% recovery in autumn and spring sea ice volume, respectively, more than offsetting losses of the previous three years. The recovery was driven by the retention of thick ice around north Greenland and Canada during summer 2013 which, in turn, was associated with a 6% drop in the number of days on which melting occurred – climatic conditions more typical of the early 1990’s. Such a sharp increase in volume after just one cool summer indicates that the Arctic sea ice pack may be more resilient than has been previously considered.
Talking About Weather (7/2014) [ANTARCTIC sea ice] Antarctic sea ice has hit its second all-time record maximum this week. The new record is 2.112 million square kilometers above normal. Until the weekend just past, the previous record had been 1.840 million square kilometers above normal, a mark hit on December 20, 2007, as I reported here, and also covered in my book.
Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, responded to e-mail questions and also spoke by telephone about the new record sea ice growth in the Southern Hemisphere, indicating that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the sea ice growth was specifically due to global warming.
Let us compare this to Al Gore saying the northern ice-caps will be gone
NewsBusters makes the point another way, in that the “media” is derelict in their duty:
The same year that former Vice President Al Gore predicted that the Arctic sea ice could be completely gone, Arctic ice reached its highest level in two years, according to a report by theDanish Meteorological Institute.
According to that report, which was cited by the Daily Mail (UK) on Aug. 30, “[t]he Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in a row.” The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)confirmed this trend, but didn’t go into as much detail as the Danish Meteorological Institute.
But an examination of ABC, CBS and NBC news programs since the Daily Mail story was published found that all three networks ignored news that Arctic sea ice was at a two-year high….
Remember, you can lead a horse to water but cannot make it drink.…read it all at Fox News.
“The West Antarctic ice sheet sits on bedrock which is below sea level. It formed during the ice age but the sea level rose 12,000 years ago and has been chipping away at it ever since. What happens to ice which sits on rock which is below sea level? Hint: it has nothing to do with CO2.” This is a comment from Real Science’s FLASHBACK to 1932 and how the ICe-Sheets were melting then (to the right).
AND FINALLY….
ROCKETS
I hate to break it to Prince EA, but that rocket to find other worlds would have to be powered by (in part) fossil fuels to break earths gravitational force. Not to mention the massive amount of energy (fossil fuels again) And often times the left kills innovation in areas (like nuclear) for ideological reasons. Keeping us dependent on fossil fuels.
You see, all of the above “sounds good,” and grand. But as Thomas Sowell says, liberals — unlike conservatives — do not ask three simple questions:
- compared to what?
- at what cost?
- what hard-evidence do you have?
FOR INSTANCE, as an example, Google came to the logical conclusion that such endeavors with alternative fuels is unattainable:
We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
[….]
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)
- What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change (SPETRUM)
- Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
- Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
- Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)
IG Report Slams FBI and Others (UPDATED)
JUMP to the FACEBOOK CONVO | JUMP to DAVID FRENCH
During that December 2018 hearing, Rep. Trey Gowdy posed this question to Comey: “Late July of 2016, the FBI did, in fact, open a counterintelligence investigation into, is it fair to say the Trump campaign or Donald Trump himself?”
“It’s not fair to say either of those things, in my recollection,” Comey retorted. “We opened investigations on four Americans to see if there was any connection between those four Americans and the Russian interference efforts. And those four Americans did not include the candidate.”
[….]
So, not only did the Obama administration’s FBI target the Trump campaign in the heat of the 2016 presidential election, but they used an intelligence briefing of candidate Trump to gather “evidence,” and even memorialized Trump’s comments in official FBI documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
Nonetheless, Comey lied to Americans in order to keep up the appearance that the Steele dossier was in some way legitimate or that he was unaware of it’s illegitimacy.
The new report from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed former CIA Director John Brennan lied to Congress about whether the dossier authored by Christopher Steele was used in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
An example of a lie by ADAM SCHIFF, which he KNEW was a lie when he said it:
FBI and officials did not “abuse” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.
In fact, DOJ and the FBI would have been remiss in their duty to protect the country had they not sought a FISA warrant and repeated renewals to conduct temporary surveillance of Carter Page, someone the FBI assessed to be an agent of the Russian government. DOJ met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet probable cause requirement, by demonstrating: contemporaneous evidence of Russia?s election interference;
Christopher Steele’s raw intelligence reporting did not inform the decision to initiate its counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016. In fact, the FBI’s closely-held investigative team only received Steele’s reporting in mid-September more than seven weeks later.
(DEF-CON)
An example of a JOHN BRENNAN lie… which he knew was a lie when he said it:
Mr. Gowdy: Do you know if the Bureau ever relied on the Steele dossier as any — as part of any court filings, applications, petitions, pleadings?
Mr. Brennan: I have no awareness.
Mr. Gowdy: Did the CIA rely on it?
Mr. Brennan: No.
Mr. Gowdy: Why not?
Mr. Brennan: Because we — we didn’t. It wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community assessment that was done. It was — it was not.
[….]
Except, on Page 179 of the FISA report we find that former FBI Director James Comey told investigators that he remembers being “part of a conversation, maybe more than one conversation, where the topic was how the [Steele] reporting would be integrated, if at all, into the IC assessment.”
Comey added that Brennan and other officials argued that the Steele dossier was found credible by intelligence community analysts, and that while they did not want to include it in the main body of the ICA, “they thought it was important enough and consistent enough that it ought to be part of the package in some way, and so they had come up with this idea to make an [appendix].
In an exclusive interview, Attorney General William Barr spoke to NBC News’ Pete Williams about the findings on the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the Russia investigation and his criticisms of the FBI.
U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr sits down with the Wall Street Journal to discuss the information released within the IG report on FBI 2016 election surveillance against candidate Trump; and FISA exploitation for use therein.
FACEBOOK MEANDERINGS
As I was driving around today in slow or stopped traffic, I gave my thoughts about what I was hearing today:
Just a quick note here. The four U.S. citizens spied on by the government we’ll have a great case to make in court to sue set government (during the whole Russian Collusion conspiracy against Trump). So not only did the original investigation cost many millions of dollars, it is possible that many millions more is going to be doled out.
Now… Adam Schiff has himself (against proper procedure) gone and gotten metadata from phone companies and then matched it up with journalist an opposing political persons phones. Without a warrant. I assume another criminal case will start around this… And, much like the other case millions of dollars may be doled out to these individuals who had their metadata illegally seized by the government.
BY THE WAY, you can read here “Democrats” when I say government. Ultimately all the taxpayers will have to — and have paid for it. But these incurred cost come by way of Democrats alone. (As well as never Trumper’s)
So two articles of impeachment have been put forward. Bribery was what CNN says was the Crux of the case a few weeks ago. However, remember all the terms changed over time: quid pro quo, to extortion, to bribery, to obstruction of justice. None of these are part of the impeachment articles. One impeachment article is “obstruction of Congress” (read here Democrats). What a joke! I think a bulk of the American voters see through this sham/witch Hunt.
RESPONSE:
After another quick link of mine linked to this REASON.ORG article, a friend said this on Facebook:
IG Report, Chapter 12: Conclusions & Recommendations (p. 411)–CHS refers to “confidential human sources”:
“We did not find any documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBI’s decision to conduct these operations. Additionally, we found no evidence that the FBI attempted to place any CHSs within the Trump campaign, recruit members of the Trump campaign as CHSs, or task CHSs to report on the Trump campaign.”
Yes, there were problems with some aspects of FISA, but those issues were later. The investigation began earlier, based on reports from a friendly government that there might be connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. Bottom line: the Trump accusation that this was all a witch hunt with political motives has been debunked.
This was my response[s], and it is solid!
JIM G. — two things, well, three. The first is, Horowitz had no subpoena power. So, for instance, he wanted to interview Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS. Glenn simply declined. In other words, Horowitz had an incomplete picture. (Durham and Barr traveled to Italy and other places to talk to what we [not you] know were players involved in those countries.) That is number one.
Number two… and this is a common sense one. Of all the mistakes documented plus the Woods violation… Why didn’t a single one break in Trump’s favor? In other words, FBI director Wray is putting forward 40-changes to stop this from happening again. (Which wouldn’t have happened is Hillary were elected.) If Director Wray were to say, “wow, that was something from this whole thing that worked well. We should keep that.” Or if half, or even a quarter of the mistakes broke in Trump’s favor, I wouldn’t be skeptical.
And third, remember, the Steele Report (as I said in the past) was almost the exclusive bulk of the info to obtain the FISA warrants. Prior to this multiple voices in the FBI warned against Steele. The CIA warned the FBI NOT to use it. Yet:
…DOJ IG Michael Horowitz, who assumed his position during the Obama administration, and his team reported that “Steele’s handling agent” in the FBI “told us that when Steele provided him with the first election reports in July 2016 and described his engagement with Fusion GPS, it was obvious to him that the request for the research was politically motivated.”
In addition, the “supervisory intelligence analyst who supervised the analytical efforts for the Crossfire Hurricane team (Supervisory Intel Analyst) explained that he also was aware of the potential for political influences on the Steele reporting.”
The Horowitz report explained that the FBI was still able to use the Steele dossier even if it was clear that it contained opposition research connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign….
(PJ-MEDIA)
I also just found out that Horowitz wanted to speak to Comey (supporting point #1). But he couldn’t because Comey didn’t sign back up for his top secret clearance, so he couldn’t be interviewed in depth. Durham has the ability to compel testimony.
ACE OF SPADES has this great
The IG report might have falsely claimed that there was no evidence of political bias in the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, BUT IT FOUND THAT ALL OF DEVIN NUNES’ CLAIMS ABOUT LIES TOLD TO SECURE THE FISA WARRANT WERE TRUE, AND ALL OF ADAM SCHIFF’S COUNTER-CLAIMS WERE FALSE:
The memo from the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee reported:
- A salacious and unverified dossier formed an essential part of the application to secure a warrant against a Trump campaign affiliate named Carter Page. This application failed to reveal that the dossier was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
- The application cited a Yahoo News article extensively. The story did not corroborate the dossier, and the FBI wrongly claimed Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier, was not a source for the story.
- Nellie Ohr, the wife of a high-ranking Justice Department official, also worked on behalf of the Clinton campaign effort. Her husband Bruce Ohr funneled her research into the Department of Justice. Although he admitted that Steele “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president,” this and the Ohrs’ relationship with the Clinton campaign was concealed from the secret court that grants surveillance warrants.
- The dossier was “only minimally corroborated” and unverified, according to FBI officials.
- All of these things were found to be true by the Inspector General Michael Horowitz in his December 9 report. In fact, Horowitz detailed rampant abuse that went far beyond these four items.
- The Democratic minority on the committee, then led by Rep. Adam Schiff, put out a response memo with competing claims:
- FBI and DOJ officials did not omit material information from the FISA warrant.
- The DOJ “made only narrow use of information from Steele’s sources about Page’s specific activities in 2016.”
- In subsequent FISA renewals, DOJ provided additional information that corroborated Steele’s reporting.
- The Page FISA warrant allowed the FBI to collect “valuable intelligence.”
- “Far from ‘omitting’ material facts about Steele, as the Majority claims, DOJ repeatedly informed the Court about Steele’s background, credibility, and potential bias.”
- The FBI conducted a “rigorous process” to vet Steele’s allegations, and the Page FISA application explained the FBI’s reasonable basis for finding Steele credible.
- Steele’s prior reporting was used in “criminal proceedings.”
Each of these claims were found by Horowitz to be false….
(EMPHASIS ADDED)
DAVID FRENCH FODDER
One of the many nuggets from ACE OF SPADES is this from MSNBC: National Review Writer On Why Nunes Should Step Down (March 2017). In the video from MSNBC we see David French retroactively go down in flames! ALSO:
— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) December 10, 2019
Suffice it to say, ACE destroys David French and Adam Schiff!
Here is more regarding the IG REPORT with thanks to FLOPPING ACES!
The DOJ Inspector General’s report disclosed a multitude of FISA violations by the FBI. As noted by John Solomon, there were 51 Woods violations and nine false statements made to the FISA Court.
To understand just how shoddy the FBI’s work was in securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant targeting the Trump campaign, you only need to read an obscure attachment to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report.
Appendix 1 identifies the total violations by the FBI of the so-called Woods Procedures, the process by which the bureau verifies information and assures the FISA court its evidence is true.
The Appendix identifies a total of 51 Woods procedure violations from the FISA application the FBI submitted to the court authorizing surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page starting in October 2016.
A whopping nine of those violations fell into the category called: “Supporting document shows that the factual assertion is
inaccurate.”
For those who don’t speak IG parlance, it means the FBI made nine false assertions to the FISA court. In short, what the bureau said was contradicted by the evidence in its official file.
More at the link.
Horowitz also identified 17 “significant errors or omissions” in the FISA application. Among them:
1. Omitted information the FBI had obtained from another U.S. government agency detailing its prior relationship with Page, including that Page had been approved as an “operational contact” for the other agency from 2008 to 2013, and that Page had provided information to the other agency concerning his prior contacts with certain Russian intelligence officers, one of which overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA application;
2. Included a source characterization statement asserting that Steele’s prior reporting had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings,” which overstated the significance of Steele’s past reporting and was not approved by Steele’s handling agent, as required by the Woods Procedures;
3. Omitted information relevant to the reliability of Person 1, a key Steele sub-source (who was attributed with providing the information in Report 95 and some of the information in Reports 80 and 102 relied upon in the application), namely that (1) Steele himself told members of the Crossfire Hurricane team that Person 1 was a “boaster” and an “egoist” and “may engage in some embellishment” and (2) INFORMATION REDACTED
4. Asserted that the FBI had assessed that Steele did not directly provide to the press information in the September 23 Yahoo News article based on the premise that Steele had told the FBI that he only shared his election-related research with the FBI and Fusion GPS, his client; this premise was incorrect and contradicted by documentation in the Woods File- Steele had told the FBI that he also gave his information to the State Department;
5. Omitted Papadopoulos’s consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in September 2016 denying that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russia or with outside groups like Wikileaks in the release of emails;
6. Omitted Page’s consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in August 2016 that Page had “literally never met” or “said one word to” Paul Manafort and that Manafort had not responded to any of Page’s emails; if true, those statements were in tension with claims in Report 95 that Page was participating in a conspiracy with Russia by acting as an intermediary for Manafort on behalf of the Trump campaign; and
7. Included Page’s consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in October 2016 that the FBI believed supported its theory that Page was an agent of Russia but omitted other statements Page made that were inconsistent with its theory, including denying having met with Sechin and Divyekin, or even knowing who Divyekin was; if true, those statements contradicted the claims in Report 94 that Page had met secretly with Sechin and Divyekin about future cooperation with Russia and shared derogatory information about candidate Clinton.
Do read the rest. 17 major “mistakes” and not one of them goes Trump’s way.
The FBI knew that the dossier was nearly 100% without substance, but acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe demanded it be used in the ICA. The CIA was reluctant….
INSTAPUNDIT notes the FBI campaign against Trump is not necessarily new:
“The FBI and the media joined together to launch an attack on me of unparalleled proportion in the history of his nation … It was all a lie … The Justice Department cannot be trusted to investigate itself.”
— Richard Jewell, July 30, 1997,
House hearing pic.twitter.com/DzDYAGtIWK— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) December 10, 2019
And I have noted before the same on my site:
This is the same tactic Andrew Weissmann used on Flynn (WASHINGTON TIMES | THE FEDERALIST)….
UPDATED POST by POWERLINE intros the video for us:
In the memoir Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO on the Feds’ Hit List (written with Stephen Saltarelli), Howard Root tells the story of his experience as chief executive officer of Vascular Solutions caught in the crosshairs of the federal government when prosecutors sought to put his company out of business and to send him to the big house. Howard touched on one aspect of his story in the Wall Street Journal column “Sally Yates’s legacy of injustice at the Department of Justice.”
Howard is one of the most amazing people I have ever met. Among other things, he is a corporate lawyer turned entrepreneur, inventor, and corporate executive.
Howard faced down the government. The jury didn’t think much of the government’s case. It returned with a verdict of acquittal on all charges after a day of deliberations, and that includes the time spent electing a foreman.
Howard’s case is important in its own way. The crimes charged were bogus. The government procured testimony through serious prosecutorial misconduct. The prosecution represented fruit of the poisonous Yates Memo tree. Howard had the resources to fight the government’s case against him and his company, but it exacted an enormous toll. The case cries out for study and reform.
Howard has thus sought to engage prosecutors in discussion of the case in person before professional audiences of lawyers and businessmen for whom it holds immediate relevance. The prosecutors and their superiors in the department have sought to keep Howard from speaking to such audiences. When I wrote the Department of Justice to request its explanation for what it was doing, it declined to comment (a week after I asked the question).
Former Assistant United States Attorney Andrew McCarthy was more forthcoming. He called out the Department of Justice’s behavior as “a disgrace.”
The Department of Justice declines to answer to Howard or me but it has at long last responded to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Utah Senator Mike Lee. Senators Grassley and Lee sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein seeking an update on the Justice Department’s inquiry into professional misconduct committed by prosecutors and higher-ups who brought the charges against Howard and have since sought to prevent him from being heard. I posted the Grassley/Lee letter in “Fear & loathing at the DoJ, cont’d.”
In their letter Senators Grassley and Lee noted that “reports suggest a pattern of threatened and actual retribution against defendants and witnesses borne out of the Department’s disappointment with the outcome of a particular case. This not only casts doubt on the Department’s ability to accept the results of judicial proceedings in a professional manner befitting the nation’s preeminent law enforcement agency, but it significantly undermines our confidence in its commitment to hold government attorneys accountable for questionable actions that may have occurred in the course of this case or other cases.” …..
The Crusades | Dr. Clay Jones (Apologetics315)
(Originally posted May, 2011)
APOLOGETICS315 INTERVIEWS Professor Clay Jones in regards to church history and the Crusades. He deals with some myths and corrects many historical errors in understanding. Apologetics315 interviews can be uploaded via i-Tunes for free:
Assistant Professor of Apologetics, Biola University
Dr. Clay Jones (D. Min and M.Div) is Assistant Professor of Apologetics in the graduate program in Christian Apologetics at Biola University. For several years, Jones was the host of “Content for Truth,” a weekly, call-in-talk radio program (nationally syndicated through the USA Radio Network), which sought to provide a forum for how to think Christianly about issues of the Bible, theology and culture. He has also authored Prepared Defense, an interactive apologetics software program, along with diverse encyclopedia articles on theodicy, evil, and suffering; journal articles on why God ordered the destruction of the Canaanites, and has a forthcoming book, Why God Allows Evil. Dr. Jones has been on the pastoral staff of two large churches and continues to speak widely on why God allows evil; how to think about the Crusades, Inquisitions, Witch-hunts, etc.; the glory that awaits the Christian in heaven; and related topics. (His blog can be found here: CLAYJONES.NET)
The above are these three combined:
- Clay Jones Interview: The Crusades – part 1
- Clay Jones Interview: The Crusades – part 2
- Clay Jones Interview: The Crusades – part 3
The article and books Dr. Jones recommends are here:
- Jonathan Riley-Smith “Rethinking the Crusades”
- Rodney Stark “God’s Battalions”
- Johnathan Riley-Smith “What Were the Crusades?”
- Thomas Madden “The New Concise History of the Crusades”
One should also visit my large post on the CRUSADES:
I deal — somewhat — with the beginning of the crusades and their cause in an older post, reproduced below:
THE CRUSADES
This is from a philosophy 101 class my son and I took at a local community college. Francis Collins, one of America’s leading scientists and head of the Genome Project for America – one of the most important scientific programs of our day, stepped outside his expertise and tried to don on a cap of a historian at times. Here is my critique of a portion of Collins book[5] for class:
b. Faith in God is harmful, since “throughout history terrible things have been done in the name of religion” (p. 39).
Another favorite of the skeptic. Here Collins drops the ball in my opinion. I will critique two aspects of his work: i. his understanding of Islam, and ii. His understanding of comparative crimes.
i. Collins is getting out of his genre a bit. If I met him I would probably hand him two books by Robert Spencer. Quickly, before I quote Spencer. Muhammad personally ordered (and partook in) the slitting of 900 throats of men, women, and children. Jesus, when Peter cut off the Roman soldiers ear, told Peter to put the sword away and healed the soldiers ear.
The nine founders among the eleven living religions in the world had characters which attracted many devoted followers during their own lifetime, and still larger numbers during the centuries of subsequent history. They were humble in certain respects, yet they were also confident of a great religious mission. Two of the nine, Mahavira and Buddha, were men so strongminded and self-reliant that, according to the records, they displayed no need of any divine help, though they both taught the inexorable cosmic law of Karma. They are not reported as having possessed any consciousness of a supreme personal deity. Yet they have been strangely deified by their followers. Indeed, they themselves have been worshipped, even with multitudinous idols.
All of the nine founders of religion, with the exception of Jesus Christ, are reported in their respective sacred scriptures as having passed through a preliminary period of uncertainty, or of searching for religious light. Confucius, late in life, confessed his own sense of shortcomings and his desire for further improvement in knowledge and character. All the founders of the non-Christian religions evinced inconsistencies in their personal character; some of them altered their practical policies under change of circumstances.
Jesus Christ alone is reported as having had a consistent God-consciousness, a consistent character himself, and a consistent program for his religion. The most remarkable and valuable aspect of the personality of Jesus Christ is the comprehensiveness and universal availability of his character, as well as its own loftiness, consistency, and sinlessness.[6]
Not to mention that just saying the Crusades were wrong is almost jeuvinile. Robert Spencer talks a bit about the lead up to Christendom finally responding — rightly at first, woefully latter.
The Third Crusade (1188-1192). This crusade was proclaimed by Pope Gregory VIII in the wake of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem and destruction of the Crusader forces of Hattin in 1187. This venture failed to retake Jerusalem, but it did strengthen Outremer, the crusader state that stretched along the coast of the Levant.[7]
The almost Political Correct myth is that the crusades were an unprovoked attack by Europe against the Islamic world.[8] I can see with quoting Tillich and Bonhoeffer, although worthy men to quote, they are typically favorites of the religious left. Robert Schuller and Desmond Tutu on the back of the cover of Collins first edition are also dead give a ways. So PC thought is entrenched in Collins general outlook on religion and life. Continuing:
The conquest of Jerusalem in 638 stood as the beginning of centuries of Muslim aggression, and Christians in the Holy Land faced an escalating spiral of persecution. A few examples: Early in the eighth century, sixty Christian pilgrims from Amorium were crucified; around the same time, the Muslim governor of Caesarea seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed as spies – except for a small number who converted to Islam; and Muslims demanded money from pilgrims, threatening to ransack the Church of the Resurrection if they didn’t pay. Later in the eighth century, a Muslim ruler banned displays of the cross in Jerusalem. He also increased the anti-religious tax (jizya) that Christians had to pay and forbade Christians to engage in religious instruction to others, even their own children.
Brutal subordinations and violence became the rules of the day for Christians in the Holy Land. In 772, the caliph al-Mansur ordered the hands of Christians and Jews in Jerusalem to be stamped with a distinctive symbol. Conversions to Christianity were dealt with particularly harshly. In 789, Muslims beheaded a monk who had converted from Islam and plundered the Bethlehem monastery of Saint Theodosius, killing many more monks. Other monasteries in the region suffered the same fate. Early in the ninth century, the persecutions grew so severe that large numbers of Christians fled to Constantinople and other Christians cities. More persecutions in 923 saw additional churches destroyed, and in 937, Muslims went on a Palm Sunday rampage in Jerusalem, plundering and destroying the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.[9]
A pastor once made mention to me that to paint a picture of the crusaders in a single year in history is like showing photos and video of Hitler hugging children and receiving flowers from them and then showing photos and video of the Allies attacking the German army. It completely forgets what Hitler and Germany had done prior.
While the church withheld the Bible from most, so the misuse of it wasn’t the case as much as a drive for political supremacy – and in fact was the catalyst for the Reformers and pre-Reformers getting copies of it into the laities hand so they could actually read what the Bible said on such matters – the response by the West’s only large organization to the Islamo-Fascism of the day was in fact a net-good. (Actually showing that God can bring good out of the bad.) This response may have been carried out wrongly at times engendering people’s fears and prejudices, however, the Bible played no role in these fears or prejudices. Mainly because the people involved in these atrocities had no access to a Bible. That aside, the totality of the Crusades [good and bad] was a net moral good for our planet and shows God’s providence over the course of history.
Read more: RPT Homosexuality-A Christian Ethic? (FYI, I need to update this post… a lot)
Democrat’s Expert Witness Fails Simple History
Larry Elder zeroes in on a known fact from impeachment history [that I even know] and wryly notes the failure of an expert witness on impeachment called to testify.
The Perpetual Impeachment (Rush)
Rush made some excellent analysis of the Democrats today… but I needed to make this consumable (short). So here are two separate points joined together to show this will not end when he wins in 2020 — and that this has been in the works (impeachment) since 2016.