(DAILY CALLER) Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported Thursday night on email evidence that President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, may have perjured herself under oath.
A lie is only a lie if you get caught. Otherwise, it’s treated in the same regard as the truth, especially regarding sensitive issues such as the impeachment inquiry. We’ve already seen a flurry of lies coming from Adam Schiff and his office, including the strangely-suppressed whopper that he repeated multiple times, saying he didn’t know who the Ukraine whistleblower was. We later learned through leaks that he not only knew the whistleblower but actually consulted with him before the complaint was filed.
But the latest lie appears to be even more significant, not based on the lie itself but the situation surrounding it. Tucker Carlson’s team learned President Obama’s Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, appears to have perjured herself under oath when asked about an email from a Democratic congressional staffer. The email was seeking a meeting to discuss information that would eventually become the basis for the impeachment inquiry. When asked if she responded to the email by Representative Lee Zeldin (R-NY), she said she didn’t.
This turned out to be a lie.
Here’s the content of the email:
According to Carlson, Yovanovitch replied, “looked forward to chatting with you.”
The apparent perjury is big, but what’s more important is this reveals Democrats were well aware of the contents of the whistleblower complaint over a month before the public was made aware.
Larry Elder dispatches quickly the idea that Obama received an abnormal amount of death threats:
“The incidents of threats against (President Barack Obama) are greater than for any other president in modern times.” — Julian Bond on Wednesday, March 6th, 2013 in an interview (No Evidence To Support Claim About Threats Against Obama)
He also discusses *Michael Brown and some of the candidates for the 2020 race saying he was murdered. Then I add-in Larry’s montage of media and Democrats saying Trump said “there were good Nazis.” (See more here: “Trump Is Right – Good People On Both Sides“) That begins at the 5:03 mark of the audio. More here. Enjoy:
*
* Here are other audios I have uploaded to my site on the topic:
I just wanted to go through this and note all the untruths in this paragraph-screed by a friend. Now, granted, she is merely reacting emotionally — as we all are disgusted by the actions from this past weekend. I will tease out the logical consequences with new information gleaned from the killer[s] manifesto/life. Here is the “offending” (raw emotion) post:
Why dont any of my fellow Republicans ever post a post condemning these mass murders committed by our own home grown, radicalized, racially motivated white males who use AKs to kill as many people regardless if they are elderly, adults, or children? Rather attacking posts like mine that point out the ever repetitive act of mass murder with the same MO. And refuse to acknowledge that our president’s words and actions have fueled these murders. The FBI and police chiefs around the country have stated that hate crimes have been on the rise since he took office. Its not a secret. (OP)
Keep in mind in other areas of her posts she called these semi-automatic long-rifles machine guns (assault weapons, which the military uses — select fire). “Machine guns” have been outlawed since the 1930’s with thanks to Al Capone and others like him.
Okay, I noted that in fact, many of the “mass killers” and politically motivated persons wishing to cause harm are not in fact “right-leaning.” One lady mentioned after a response to the OP regarding reading that “Reading does most assuredly NOT make one a Republican.” I agreed but said:
Reading would stop people from saying assault weapons are used (machine-guns), and, allow one to know that a “Fascist” is really a socialist. A radically left leaning takeover of energy production, universal healthcare. and the Like. Not “right wing” in the least.
Now, since the shooting, we have come to find out that the killers manifesto was named after Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth,” with passages in the manifesto that really could have been lifted from almost any 2020 Democrat candidate’s campaign site regarding Corporations and Climate. He said his racist views pre-dated Trump (so if he acquired them — say — during Obama’s Presidency, should we blame him?). The killer also mentions Dr. Seuss’s book the Lorax.
Okay, some fixing and commentary of the above paragraph.
Why don’t any of my fellow Democrats ever post a post condemning these mass murders and political violence since they are overwhelmingly committed by Left-leaning radicals? Since the KKK and other white supremacist organizations overwhelmingly voted for Obama and other Democrat before and after him since they are essentially socialist in their political and economic views. Racially and environmentally motivated and violent males of all colors and backgrounds who primarily use handguns to kill as many people regardless if they are elderly, adults, or children? Rather attacking posts like mine that point out the ever repetitive act of mass murder with differing MO’s… And refuse to acknowledge that our president’s words and actions have fueled these murders as wrongly encapsulated by the likes of CNN, Democrats, and MSNBC (and NPR, ABC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets) as well as recognizing that there has not been an increase of hate-crimes at all but an increase in reporting them as more-and-more police precincts are added and definitions of what a hate-crime is considered is changed. Its not a secret. (EDITED-OP)
Just a day after this shooting another shooter who considered himself a socialist, voted in Democrat primaries, wanted Elizebeth Warren as president, killed people as well.
Almost all violent acts, racism, hated, and political assignations all the way to fist-to-cuffs — have been perpetrated by Democrats or radical Lefties:
The Killer railed against corporations, was rabidly pro-environment in a UNIBOMBER WAY, wanted large government programs like a universal income/livable-wage, and universal healthcare. Mentioned a book that influenced (obviously) his radical thing, The Lorax by Dr. Seuss:
People are amazed (really, due to the fact that they think history and facts are what CNN and other media sources tell them it is) that 3-of-the-4 leaders of the largest white supremacist groups told their followers to vote for Obama. That most leaders of the Klan (KKK) voted for Hillary. The idea that these groups are “right-wing” is due to a lack of knowledge regarding what fascism is:
“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.”
Mussolini, Diuturna (1924) pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.
Why do they vote Left… I give a breakdown of why in the “Trump Sized Myths” linked above:
Again, let’s recap for clarity some of my reasons white racist/nationalists cults vote Democrat:
They are typically socialist in their political views, and thus support the welfare state for personal financial reasons (poor) and ideological reasoning (socialist); or for the reason that it is a way of controlling minorities (racist reasoning). A modern plantation so-to-speak; There is a shared hatred for Israel and supporting of groups wanting to exterminate the Jews (Palestinians for instance).
Also, hate-crimes are not on the rise under Trump:
A recent study from the University of Pennsylvania finds that racism in America has significantly decreased since President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, directly contradicting the narrative pushed among many academics and mainstream media personalities.
The Rise of Trump, the Fall of Prejudice? Tracking White Americans’ Racial Attitudes 2008-2018 via a Panel Survey was authored by UPenn political science professor Daniel J. Hopkins and research assistant Samantha Washington.
Hopkins, in an article for FiveThirtyEight, detailed on Tuesday the study, which used 13 waves of panel surveys to gather data and determined that white racial prejudice against African Americans and Hispanic Americans has declined since 2016, when Trump was elected president.
[….]
“Latino approval of President Trump has skyrocketed to 50 percent. We’ve had the lowest Latino unemployment in history under President Trump,” Joel Valdez, a Mexican-American and recent student at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. “Latinos and African-American[s] are prospering under the Trump Administration.”
“Racist” Perceptions
In fact, most hate-crimes one sees plastered in newspapers or in a chyron on CNN/MSNBC are later to be found out to be hoaxes… but the front-page coverage on TV or papers leaves a lasting impression (which is what the news orgs want, a narrative to be swallowed):
Although not mentioned, I am sure my friend thinks that America leads the world in mass shootings. THIS IS ALSO NOT THE CASE. Neither are the shootings of 4-or more ppl (mass shootings) done by white people primarily (just in 2019):
As you can see. Almost everything in the ORIGINAL OP was false. But people, because of their biases, want them to be true. This is nothing new however… ever since Goldwater we have heard the same tired “race-card” used on the GOPs peeps. Take Reagan for instance:
Steven F. Hayward, author of “The Age Of Reagan” wrote: “Liberals hated Reagan in the 1980s. Pure and simple. They used language that would make the most fervid anti-Obama rhetoric of the Tea Party seem like, well, a tea party. Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was ‘trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.'” (LARRY ELDER)
People are SICK OF IT!
In another post the same person wrote:
Another radicalized young white man with a gun that kills many quickly…. AK? Probably. So sick of these killings. Sick of hearing how our president and government officials are offering their prayers. Its not enough!!! We need stronger laws with these type of automatic and simi automatic weapons. Hey i love shooting them like many others but im more sick of hearing of our own home grown terrorists killing so many innocent men weomen children and elderly and NOTHING BEING DONE ABOUT IT!!!! Totall bullshit.
To which I respond:
The void of faith and prayer in this nation turning to paganism and secular fixes for the void in them and the “expectation” of government to make their ills disappear IS the problems with this country right now. NOT ENOUGH prayers to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are being made.
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God himself.
Blaise Pascal (Pensees 10.148)
Since 51% of the mass shootings (if all are considered — i.e., gang violence) are by black people, and only 29% by white… I wonder if people will write:
✦ Another radicalized young black man with a gun that kills many quickly…. AK?
Somehow I doubt it. Bemoaning white men and people of faith (read here: Christians) is the only acceptable whipping boy today [and ignoring the pain and suffering in the black community seems habitual]. Maybe these young men being told they have the burden of slavery, are privileged, and attacked daily in the news and taught crazy stuff throughout high school and college — IS THE ISSUE.
For instance, that kid that shot up Walmart — this was in his screed:
✦ a basic universal income ✦ wanted universal healthcare ✦ complained about cost of college ✦ talked about how oil companies polluted water ✦ how we wasted resources — trees for overuse of paper-towels ✦ railed against BOTH Democrats and Republicans ✦ said corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over-harvesting resources ✦ corporations wanted illegal immigration for cheap labor
That sounds like my kids being shown “An Inconvenient Truth” in the classroom in middle-school. (The movie the manifesto was named after by the Walmart shooter.) THANKFULLY I countered all the crazy ideologies spoon fed to my boys… here is my cut-n-paste (saved) challenge to others — I own and have watched (some of the below are shown in high-school classes):
I often bump into people that have watched some or most of the following “documentaries”
Bowling for Columbine
Roger and Me
Fahrenheit 9/11
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
Sicko
An Inconvenient Truth
Loose Change
Zeitgeist
Religulouse
The God Who Wasn’t There
Super-Size Me
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
But rarely do I meet someone of the opposite persuasion from me that have watched any of the following (I own and have watched):
Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain Dies
FahrenHYPE 9/11
Michael & Me
Michael Moore Hates America
Bullshit! Fifth Season… (where they tear apart the Wal-Mart documentary mentioned above)
Indoctrinate U
Mine Your Own Business
Screw Loose Change
3-part response to Zeitgeist
Fat-Head (a response to “Super Size Me”)
Maybe balance, reading countering viewpoints, faith, something greater than just you, the Imago Dei (the Image of God we all should honor), etc. Instead it’s blame corporations, white people, pushing environmental scare tactics, wanting socialized programs, livable wages, etc. etc. — as if THAT fixes the human condition
Since this Patrick Crusius is in custody and cooperating with authorities. I will update his info below. People hate posting his name… but usually the people not wanting to post his name are also the one’s trying to place people like this at Republicans feet — as if we created and encouraged him and others. (His whole manifesto is here).
PATRICK CRUSIUS
EL PASO WALMART
Patrick Crusius, the shooter that killed 20 people at a Walmart in Texas (may be more depending on the medical condition of these persons — all this is really sad to type. The devastated families and grief of loved ones. Man.) This is with thanks to GATEWAY PUNDIT and the DAILY SIGNAL, who notes the following: “This is not to say he’s a Democrat or a Republican, but he is without question a progressive.” Continuing… this scumbag wanted to lessen the weight of the welfare state to “achieve ambitious social projects” in:
a basic universal income
like universal healthcare
complained about cost of college
talked about how oil companies polluted water
how we wasted resources — trees for overuse of paper-towels
railed against BOTH Democrats and Republicans
And said,
Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources
Corporations wanted illegal imigration for cheap labor
Here are some of the portions of the above:
“In the near future, AMERICA WILL HAVE TO INITIATE A BASIC UNIVERSAL INCOME to prevent widespread poverty and civil unrest as people lose their jobs (to automation). Joblessness is in itself a source of civil unrest. The less dependents on a government welfare system, the lower the unemployment rate, the better. ACHIEVING AMBITIOUS SOCIAL PROJECTS LIKE UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE AND UBI would become far more likely to succeed if tens of millions of defendants are removed.”
[….]
“The decimation of our environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. CORPORATIONS ARE HEADING THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR ENVIRONMENT BY SHAMELESSLY OVERHARVESTING RESOURCES.”
[….]
This is why corporations lobby for even more illegal immigration even after decades of it of happening. They need to keep replenishing the low-skilled labor pool. Even as migrant children flood skilled jobs, Corporations make this worse by lobbying for even more work visas to be issued for skilled foreign workers to come here. Recently, the senate under a REPUBLICAN administration has greatly increased the number of foreign workers that will take American jobs. Remember that both Democrats and Republicans support immigration and work visas. Corporations need to keep replenishing the labor pool for both skilled and unskilled jobs to keep wages down. So Automation is a good thing as it will eliminate the need for new migrants to fill unskilled jobs. Jobs that Americans can’t survive on anyway. Automation can and would replace millions of low-skilled jobs if immigrants were deported. This source of competition for skilled labor from immigrants and visa holders around the world has made a very difficult situation even worse for natives as they compete in the skilled job market. To compete, people have to get better credentials by spending more time in college. It used to be that a high school degree was worth something. Now a bachelor’s degree is what’s recommended to be competitive in the job market. The cost of college degrees has exploded as their value has plummeted. This has led to a generation of indebted, overqualified students filling menial, low paying and unfulfilling jobs. Of course these migrants and their children have contributed to the problem, but are not the sole cause of it.
[….]
For example, this phenomenon is brilliantly portrayed in the decades old classic “The Lorax”. Water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted. Fresh water is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just wipe water off our hands. Everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn’t willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience. The government is unwilling to tackle these issues beyond empty promises since they are owned by corporations. Corporations that also like immigration because more people means a bigger market for their products. I just want to say that I love the people of this country, but god damn most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.
He also wrote in the very first sentence of his manifesto this: “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.” I posted on the influences on this shooter. A Pagan nationalist named, Alain Benoist. A secular (pagan/New Age) philosopher. (More on my site.)
Lastly, he mentioned in his manifesto that he had started to hate Hispanics after reading a book back in 2011-2012 (LONG BEFORE TRUMP) The DAILY SIGNAL notes this:
…The author expresses explicit support to the shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who killed 51 people at a mosque in March. The author also gained inspiration by reading “The Great Replacement,” a book by a white nationalist French author who claims European elites are conspiring to replace their native populations with non-European immigrants.
The manifesto ticks off a number of far-right grievances. However, the author also devotes a significant portion to overpopulation and its contribution to environmental degradation.
“The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heaing [sic] the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over harvesting resources,” it reads, saying Americans are unwilling to change their lifestyle to save the environment.
“Fresh water is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent.”
The author concludes that the “next logical step” is to decrease the population. “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable,” the manifesto says….
That book discusses the Muslim immigration issue of France… and here Patrick swapped out Hispanic. Since he is in custody, and cooperating… he also noted the following (GATEWAY PUNDIT). He said he expected the media to blame the attack on President Donald Trump, noting: “This is not the case” — “My ideology has not changed for several years. My opinions… predate Trump and his campaign,” he wrote (DAILY MAIL).
…Steve Hooper is a 30 year veteran of the FBI. Hooper said the El Paso shooter, during interviews, says he was triggered after watching the DNC debate where all the candidates raised their hands to provide “health insurance” to illegal immigrants.
It was the insanity at the Democrat Presidential debates that triggered the shooter, not Trump’s language.
So Democrats, and NOT TRUMP according to Patrick… and not CNN / MSNBC.
THE MAIN POINT?
You cannot pigeon hole these guys as “Republicans,” and the use of RIGHT-WING is more akin to the progressive socialism of pre-war Germany. Just add these guys to the LONG LIST OF LEFTIST POLITICAL KILLERS and terrorists I note HERE.
By now most everyone knows that the Covington Catholic High School boys didn’t mob and harass a revered “tribal elder” at the Lincoln Memorial following the March for Life on January 18. The boys were actually targeted and harassed by two groups of protesters: the Black Hebrew Israelites (who hurled hateful, racial, homophobic slurs at them) and Native American activists from the American Indian Movement, led by “tribal elder” Nathan Phillips.
A nationwide media frenzy erupted after the Covington boys were falsely accused of mocking Phillips, spurring hundreds of threats against the school and the school’s students from across the country by phone, email, and social media.
Not everyone who helped perpetuate the initial fake story has retracted their claims or apologized, and lawyers for the Covington families are working hard to make sure people are held accountable.
A new fourteen-minute video of the incident in Washington, D.C., last month emphasizes the starring role Phillips took in spreading the fraudulent narrative and the supporting roles the uncritical media took in smearing the innocent kids.
The video was released Saturday by L. Lin Wood, the high-profile attorney who was retained by the family of Nicholas Sandmann, the 16-year-old who smiled at Phillips while the activist banged on a drum and chanted in his face. The initial viral video clip of that confrontation spurred widespread condemnation and death threats against the 16-year-old. Wood’s specialty is bringing “aggressive libel and slander suits against media organizations,” reportedly….
2 weeks ago, the mainstream media, politicians, church officials, commentators, & celebrities rushed to judgment to wrongfully condemn, threaten, disparage & vilify Nick Sandmann based solely on a few seconds of an out-of-context video clip. It only takes 15 minutes to learn the truth. Here it is.
‘Empire’ Star Jussie Smollett Brutally Attacked By Anti-Gay Trump Supporters Who Put Noose Around His Neck:
mpire star Jussie Smollett is the victim of an apparent hate crime in Chicago. The star of television show “Empire” was reportedly beaten overnight by two men who yelled “This is MAGA country,” reports TMZ.
They then put a noose around his neck, according to police, who described the attack as a “racially-charged assault and battery.”
According to the TMZ report, “Sources directly connected to Jussie tell TMZ, the actor arrived in Chicago from New York late Monday, and at around 2 AM he was hungry and went to a Subway. We’re told when he walked out, someone yelled, ‘Aren’t you that f***ot ‘Empire’ n*****?’”
The reports states that both the men were white and wearing ski masks and attacked the actor. “Jussie as he fought back, but they beat him badly and fractured a rib. They put a rope around his neck, poured bleach on him and as they left they yelled, ‘This is MAGA country,’” TMZ reported…..
This story sounds fantastical. Here is some funny, over-the-top, commentary by the HODGE-TWINS showing this obviously concocted story:
….BuzzFeed is standing by its story accusing President Trump of urging Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, but it has been substantially discredited by that once-in-a-blue-moon denial from Robert Mueller’s office, saying the information was “not accurate.” Making a charge of that magnitude based on two unnamed sources, without being able to cite a single e-mail, text or document, is very risky business. The story was thin at best, especially when you consider the two reporters didn’t talk to Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress over the Russian Trump Tower project and is facing a three-year prison term on that and other charges.
But the many news outlets that breathlessly promoted the BuzzFeed scoop, until it imploded, with an avalanche of segments and stories also have a black eye. The same goes for the Democrats who raced on the air, and onto Twitter, to talk about impeachment, based on uncorroborated allegations that were not matched by any other journalists.
Throwing in a couple of “if true” disclaimers doesn’t let you off the hook. And some journalists adopted the BuzzFeed allegations as true with even thinner caveats than that. The story, said MSBNC host Lawrence O’Donnell, “essentially” says that “here is the president of the United States in the Oval Office, presumably, on the phone, telling Michael Cohen to commit federal crimes and do it right there in the House of Representatives.”
Keep in mind that BuzzFeed reported that Mueller’s office had evidence and testimony about Trump allegedly suborning perjury, and that is what the special counsel knocked down. We now know, thanks to the reporting of Fox’s John Roberts, that Rudy Giuliani played a role in the denial, since he was on the phone with Mueller’s office Friday and both sides agreed parts of the story were false.
When CNN’s Anderson Cooper said that at least some other news organizations didn’t jump on the bandwagon, New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, to her credit, said: “No, but we all ran with it saying ‘if true.’ That was not that huge an asterisk, frankly.”
All this plays into Trump’s barrage of “fake news” criticism, and he didn’t hesitate to call the Buzzfeed story a “disgrace to journalism.”
Now to the other rush to judgment, involving students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky. They were caught up in a confrontation with Native Americans at the Lincoln Memorial. It just so happens some of the students were Trump fans wearing red MAGA hats, feeding a certain narrative. And there was a video, that went viral, of student Nick Sandmann smiling as he’s standing right next to Indian activist Nathan Phillips, which some interpreted as mocking.
An online mob took over, calling the students bigots and convicting them without a trial. Unfortunately, this was amplified by the media echo chamber.
But interviews and hours of earlier video made clear the story was more complicated. The students were shouting “school spirit” chants (with the approval of their chaperones) to drown out racially charged chants by a third group of black protestors, the Hebrew Israelites.
Sandmann, rather than inciting the confrontation, was actually approached by Phillips, who says he was being peaceful but whose story has been shifting. Sandmann said he smiled to show he meant no harm.
In a statement, Sandmann said that Philipps “began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face. I never interacted with this protester. I did not speak to him. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors.”
Once the broader context was clear, some journalists began deleting tweets and expressing regrets.
Kara Swisher, the tech writer and New York Times contributor, wrote: “I was a complete dolt to put up this and several other obnoxious tweets yesterday without waiting to see the whole video of the incident and I apologize to the kids from Kentucky unilaterally.”
Swisher had earlier posted her desire to be “finding every one of these s***ty kids and giving them a very large piece of my mind.”
According to a Mediaite roundup, the New Republic’s Jeet Heer deleted a tweet arguing the Trump-supporting students were “racist.” CNN’s Bakari Sellers deleted a tweet suggesting the kids should be “punched in the face.”
CNN’s Ana Navarro deleted one denouncing the “asswipe” parents of the students for teaching them “bigotry” and “racism.”
And CNN host S.E. Cupp posted this yesterday: “Hey guys. Seeing all the additional videos now, and I 100% regret reacting too quickly to the Covington story. I wish I’d had the fuller picture before weighing in, and I’m truly sorry.”……
Dennis Prager reads from THE ATLANTIC’S article entitled, “Germany’s Leading Magazine Published Falsehoods About American Life” This well written piece should be a nail in the biased coffin of the MSM. Here are some key points that stuck out to me (and Dennis) — EXCEPT I will change the sentence a bit (capitalized):
…THE AMERICAN LEFT repeated the hoary “Blood for Oil” charge as the rationale for the Iraq War, and, in the run-up to George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, asked, “Will America Be Democratic Again?”
CNN, I submit, was able to get away with his con for so long because THEY (MSNBC, ABC, CBS, ETC.) confirmed the preconceived notions of people who fashion themselves worldly yet are as parochial as the red-state hicks of their imagination.
The… MSM SOUND exactly like what you would expect a snotty, effete, self-righteous, morally superior, latte-sipping DEMOCRAT to say about America. Pardon the stereotype.
…Der Spiegel has cracked, and revealed ugliness within the publication as well as German society more broadly.
On December 19, the magazine announced that the star reporter Claas Relotius had fabricated information “on a grand scale” in more than a dozen articles. Relotius has been portrayed as a sort of Teutonic Stephen Glass, the 1990s New Republic fabulist. “I’m sick and I need to get help,” Relotius told his editor. While that may very well be the case, his downfall is about more than just one writer with a mental-health problem.
A motif of Relotius’s work is America’s supposed brutality. In one story, he told the macabre tale of a woman who travels across the country volunteering to witness executions. In another, he related the tragic experience of a Yemeni man wrongly imprisoned by the United States military at Guantánamo Bay, where he was held in solitary confinement and tortured for 14 years. (The song that American soldiers turned on full blast and pumped into the poor soul’s cell? Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”) Both stories were complete fabrications.
And they should have been easily invalidated. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Der Spiegel’s fact-checking department is the largest in the world, besting that of the vaunted New Yorker. (In 2013, I spent several months on a fellowship working for a now-defunct English-language unit at Der Spiegel). A diligent checker would have at least contacted the purported death-row roadie to confirm her existence. And the U.S. government keeps scrupulous records about the inmates imprisoned at Guantánamo. Yet Relotius’s inventions escaped the scrutiny of his colleagues.
Der Spiegel is conducting an internal review to explain what went wrong. But it seems to me that the blame lies not only with Relotius or a few careless checkers or even the publication’s research methods, but with the mentality of its editors and readers. Relotius told them what they wanted—what they expected—to hear about America; this is a case of motivated reasoning if I’ve ever seen one.
Consider the story Relotius published in March 2017, “Where They Pray for Trump on Sundays.” In 7,300 words, the German correspondent described the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, in the manner of an explorer recounting his visit to a remote island tribe untouched by civilization. Some of the “facts” Relotius reported, like his claim that the city voted 70.4 percent for President Donald Trump when the actual figure was 62.6 percent, could have been exposed as false with a few minutes’ research. The same goes for other, too-good-to-be-true details, like the sign warning “Mexicans Keep Out” and a throwaway line about a resident who had “never seen the ocean.” Most of the story was, according to a devastating analysis written by the Fergus Falls residents Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, “uninhibited fiction.”
An open-minded editor would have doubted this astonishing tale about a town so jingoistic that its only cinema continues to sell out screenings of American Sniper years after the film’s release (another easily disproven lie). The fact that these blatant deceptions were not exposed until nearly two years after publication speaks to the ignorance about America that characterizes a wide swath of elite German society. Relotius, I submit, was able to get away with his con for so long because he confirmed the preconceived notions of people who fashion themselves worldly yet are as parochial as the red-state hicks of their imagination.
Though it is respected abroad as an authoritative news source, Der Spiegel has long peddled crude and sensational anti-Americanism, usually grounded in its brand of knee-jerk German pacifism. Covers over the years have impugned the United States as “The Conceited World Power” (with an image of the White House bestriding the globe), repeated the hoary “Blood for Oil” charge as the rationale for the Iraq War, and, in the run-up to George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, asked, “Will America Be Democratic Again?” When Edward Snowden leaked information detailing U.S. surveillance practices several years ago, Der Spiegel went on a crusade unlike anything in its recent history, railing about U.S. intelligence cooperation with Germany and demanding that Berlin grant Snowden asylum. (The magazine demonstrated none of the same outrage when, two years later, Russia hacked the German parliamentary computer network). Last year, Der Spiegel notoriously featured a cartoon of Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty on its cover. And this May, one of its columnists misappropriated the memory of those who struggled against Nazism by calling for “resistance against America,” quite a demand for a magazine from the country that started World War II.
[….]
When Trump was elected president, it seemed to confirm every negative impression Europeans hold about Americans. Here, in the shape of our reality-TV leader, was the ur-American: vulgar, crass, ignorant, bellicose. Trump may be all those things, but to depict his supporters with such a broad brush is akin to writing off half of Germany as a bunch of goose-stepping, would-be fascists. The wildly popular work of Relotius reads exactly like what you would expect a snotty, effete, self-righteous, morally superior, latte-sipping European to say about America. Pardon the stereotype.
(There are really two “apologetics” [streams of arguments] below. The first is a refutation of Chimp/Human similarities; the second is a dealing with the underlying presuppositions and the self-defeating aspects of them [Jump To This]. And this post spawned a “SISTER POST” of sorts. Enjoy.)
UPDATED MEDIA
TIMELINE CHAPTERS
0:35‘They’re 99% the same’
1:56 70% aligned and verified
3:55 Time needed for evolution
5:29Chromosomes don’t add up
6:57 What else is similar?
9:07 More than merely DNA
10:27 Useful in witnessing
11:52 These facts convince scientists
Here I want to offer a somewhat short refutation [NOT] of the perpetual myth about human and chimpanzee DNA being 99% similar. One friend included it in a comment to me:
A cat shares 85 percent of our DNA along with dogs. Plants 15-20 percent . We share 90% of the genome with a banana. Chimpanzees 99% nearly…
Here is my short response:
Not only that, but your idea of 99% is not a real stat as well. Many things have changed since that 1975 claim.* One example is that junk DNA is roundly refuted, and 2001 and 2005 Nature and Science Journal articles make clear that we share from 81% to 87% of DNA with chimps. That shouldn’t be a surprise since we both have eyes to see, stomachs to digest food, etc. So again, when I see you make claims above, rarely are they rooted in anything either current or true.
*(CREATION.COM)The original 1% claim goes back to 1975.2This was a long time before a direct comparison of the individual ‘letters’ (base pairs) of human and chimp DNA was possible—the first draft of the human DNA was not published until 2001 and for the chimp it was 2005. The 1975 figure came from crude comparisons of very limited stretches of human and chimp DNA that had been pre-selected for similarity. The chimp and human DNA strands were then checked for how much they stuck to each other—a method called DNA hybridization. (2.Cohen, J., Relative differences: the myth of 1%, Science 316(5833):1836, 2007; doi: 10.1126/science.316.5833.1836)
Even a recent 2006 TIME article continues the mantra when they say, “Scientists figured out decades ago that chimps are our nearest evolutionary cousins, roughly 98% to 99% identical to humans at the genetic level.” So while science moves on and corrects itself, our culture is stuck in what was said to be a proof, and reject what ACTUALLY an evidence against the evolutionary proposition. Similar refutations of evolutionary positions that Richard Dawkins and “Junk DNA.”
What do I mean by that? I mean that if something is said to be evidence and is used to promote [FOR] the evolutionary paradigm… and then it is shown not to be the case… wouldn’t it then logically be an evidence AGAINST this said paradigm? I think so.
MOVING ON… SORTA
Before zeroing in on the Chimp issue, one other quick note regarding a recent discovery that undermines this “similarity” idea. That is this study:
A study published in the journal Human Evolution is causing quite the stir. In the words of Phys.org, “The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.”
So startling, in fact, that according to David Thaler, one of the lead authors of the study, “This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could.”
The study’s very own author was so disturbed by how the conclusions challenged current scientific dogma that he “fought against it as hard as [he] could.” His “fight” gives credence to the study’s conclusions. His eventual acceptance, not to mention publication, of the conclusions speaks well of Thaler’s commitment to being a scientist first and an ideologue second.
According to traditional evolutionary thinking, all living things on Earth share common ancestry, with species evolving through a slow process of random mutation, natural selection, and adaptation over roughly 3.8 billion years. The idea that humans and most animals suddenly appeared at the same time a mere 200,000 years ago or less does not fit with that model.
(See more from my post, “Major DNA Study Undermines Evolution ‘In A Big Way’“) Obviously we differ on time-scales… but it sure seems like they are getting closer to mine over said time. But if one wishes to keep it ecumenical, here is a quote I love:
“While thoughtful investigators may disagree about the precise age of the universe, we can be confident about its finite nature”
>>J Warner Wallace, God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2015), 37.
Okay, back to the refutation of the 99% similarity. Here, Dr. Thomas Seiler, Ph.D., Physics, Technical University of Munich refutes compelingly this outdated TIME magazine article… and my friend:
…Most of you may have heard the statement that chimpanzees and humans are having 99% of their genes in common. However, what you are usually not told is that this result was not based on comparing the entire DNA of man and ape but only on comparing a very small fraction of it (ca. 3 %). The function of the other 97% of the genetic code was not understood. Therefore, it was concluded that this DNA had no function at all and it was considered “leftover junk from evolution” and not taken into consideration for the comparison between man and ape. Meanwhile, modern genetics has demonstrated for almost the entire DNA that there is functionality in every genetic letter. And this has led to the collapse of the claim that man and chimpanzee have 99% of their DNA in common.
In 2007, the leading scientific journal Science therefore called the suggested 1% difference “a myth.” And from a publication in Nature in 2010 comparing the genes of our so-called Y-chromosome with those of the chimpanzee Y-chromosome we know now that 60% of human Y-chromosome is not contained in that of the chimpanzee. This represents a difference of one billion genetic letters, known as nucleotides.
And modern genetics has recently made another important discovery which was very unexpected. Researchers found that all of the different groups of humans on earth, wherever they live and whatever they look like, have 99.9% of their genes in common. This leads to a problem for the hypothesis of evolution because if humans really were descended from the apes, then how could it be that we only have 40% of our Y-chromosome in common with the apes but at the same time there is almost a complete genetic identity among all humans? If there had been an evolution from ape to man then it should still go on among men and reveal significant genetic differences. These recent discoveries therefore drastically widen the gap between man and the animals. And they confirm that there are in reality no such things as human “races”. Asians, Europeans, Africans and Indigenous people from America and Australia only have superficial differences like color of skin or shape of the nose but they are all extremely similar on the genetic level.
And these recent breakthrough discoveries even go further. Today, because of the extreme similarity of the human genome, it is considered a well-established fact among geneticists, that all humans living on earth now are descended from one single man and from one single woman. In order to convince yourself of this you only have to search in the internet for the terms “mitochondrial Eve” or “Y-chromosome Adam”. These names were given by evolutionists in an ironic sense but now many regret that choice of name because this discovery perfectly confirms the Catholic Doctrine of Creation which has taught for 2000 years that all humans are brothers and sisters descended from one single human couple, the real historical persons Adam and Eve, not from a multitude of subhuman primates….
Wow. Enough said? Or will this myth still infect the brains of people wishing something to be true that continue to lose evidences for? One other noteworthy exchange from that conversation I wish to note here.
Switching Gears
My friend said many things, which is convenient… many skeptics of young earth creationism or Christianity for that matter have paragraphs of bumper sticker [what they think are] facts strung together… like a lullaby to prove to themselves they are right. (What they ironically they call the GISH GALLOP [“it’s far easier to raise numerous unsubstantiated points than it is to refute them properly”] in referring to us.) Which is why I like to stop, and discuss one issue at a time. Which the above is.
When you do that, rarely does the position of the skeptic hold water.
Here is what my friend said:
I also see damage being done to children when you teach them things that are scientifically inaccurate. The earth is not 10000 years old…
ATHEOPATHS: in an evolutionary universe, concepts like “good” and “evil” are just illusions of our brains conditioned by millions of years of Darwinian evolution.
Also ATHEOPATHS: Christianity is evil child abuse.
While the main driver of the topic is a PSYCHOLOGY TODAY article that posits Christianity is harmful to children — just Christianity mind you…
It is a form a Christophobia – a fear of anything related to Christianity/Christ, A bias against one “particular” religious expression. A word I used in one of my first “conversation series” posts on my old blog (November of 2006): “theophobia” – a fear of “the belief in one God as the creator and ruler of the universe”.
… is telling. The point that Doc Sarfati makes is Yuuuge. That is,
skeptics of the Faith like to use moral positions to refute the absolute morality of Christianity, or a position they attribute truth to and expect others to grasp said truth as, well, true — is not in fact the case if their worldview is reality. They pay no attention to the underlying aspect of where these laws or stated facts are reasoned from — mind or matter.
While the whole conversation is a bit drawn out, a refuting principle I used in it which is the same principle Dr. Sarfati taps into (i.e., the Laws of Logic), is this quote by J.B.S. Haldane
“If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”
It is the same as this reflection by Stephen Hawkings noted by Ravi Zacharias:
One of the most intriguing aspects mentioned by Ravi Zacharias of a lecture he attended entitled “Determinism – Is Man a Slave or the Master of His Fate,” given by Stephen Hawking, who is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Isaac Newton’s chair, was this admission by Dr. Hawking’s, was Hawking’s admission that if “we are the random products of chance, and hence, not free, or whether God had designed these laws within which we are free.”[1] In other words, do we have the ability to make choices, or do we simply follow a chemical reaction induced by millions of mutational collisions of free atoms? Michael Polyni mentions that this “reduction of the world to its atomic elements acting blindly in terms of equilibrations of forces,” a belief that has prevailed “since the birth of modern science, has made any sort of teleological [a reason or explanation for something in function of its end, purpose, or goal] view of the cosmos seem unscientific…. [to] the contemporary mind.”[2]
[1] Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2004), 118, 119. [2] Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago, IL: Chicago university Press, 1977), 162.
John Cleese explains the above in a Monty Python view for the layman:
Here is Ravi again, but this time at a Q&A at Yale being challenged by a graduate student:
To be clear, my friend has no idea that what he has said is internally self-refuting. To show this working out with yet another skeptic of the Faith, here is apologist Frank Turek dispensing in similar fashion to Jonathan Sarfati (see below), Daniel Dennet:
Atheist Daniel Dennett, for example, asserts that consciousness is an illusion. (One wonders if Dennett was conscious when he said that!) His claim is not only superstitious, it’s logically indefensible. In order to detect an illusion, you’d have to be able to see what’s real. Just like you need to wake up to know that a dream is only a dream, Daniel Dennett would need to wake up with some kind of superconsciousness to know that the ordinary consciousness the rest of us mortals have is just an illusion. In other words, he’d have to be someone like God in order to know that.
Dennett’s assertion that consciousness is an illusion is not the result of an unbiased evaluation of the evidence. Indeed, there is no such thing as “unbiased evaluation” in a materialist world because the laws of physics determine everything anyone thinks, including everything Dennett thinks. Dennett is just assuming the ideology of materialism is true and applying its implications to consciousness. In doing so, he makes the same mistake we’ve seen so many other atheists make. He is exempting himself from his own theory. Dennett says consciousness is an illusion, but he treats his own consciousness as not an illusion. He certainly doesn’t think the ideas in his book are an illusion. He acts like he’s really telling the truth about reality.
When atheists have to call common sense “an illusion” and make self-defeating assertions to defend atheism, then no one should call the atheistic worldview “reasonable.” Superstitious is much more accurate.
Frank Turek, Stealing from God (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2014), 46-47.
Or when the same naturalistic position is used to make moral statements… it should be taken as illusory. Philosopher Roger Scruton drives this point home when he says, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely negative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” I agree.
QUOTE[s]
Here is the promised longer quote[s] by Jonathan Sarfati:
…if evolution were true, then there would be selection only for survival advantage; and there would be no reason to suppose that this would necessarily include rationality. After a talk on the Christian roots of science in Canada, 2010, one atheopathic* philosophy professor argued that natural selection really would select for logic and rationality. I responded by pointing out that under his worldview, theistic religion is another thing that ‘evolved’, and this is something he regards as irrational. So under his own worldview he believes that natural selection can select powerfully for irrationality, after all. English doctor and insightful social commentator Theodore Dalrymple (who is a non-theist himself) shows up the problem in a refutation of New Atheist Daniel Dennett:
Dennett argues that religion is explicable in evolutionary terms—for example, by our inborn human propensity, at one time valuable for our survival on the African savannahs, to attribute animate agency to threatening events.
For Dennett, to prove the biological origin of belief in God is to show its irrationality, to break its spell. But of course it is a necessary part of the argument that all possible human beliefs, including belief in evolution, must be explicable in precisely the same way; or else why single out religion for this treatment? Either we test ideas according to arguments in their favour, independent of their origins, thus making the argument from evolution irrelevant, or all possible beliefs come under the same suspicion of being only evolutionary adaptations—and thus biologically contingent rather than true or false. We find ourselves facing a version of the paradox of the Cretan liar: all beliefs, including this one, are the products of evolution, and all beliefs that are products of evolution cannot be known to be true.
*Atheopath or Atheopathy: “Leading misotheist [“hatred of God” or “hatred of the gods”] Richard Dawkins [one can insert many names here] often calls theistic religion a ‘virus of the mind’, which would make it a kind of disease or pathology, and parents who teach it to their kids are, in Dawkins’ view, supposedly practising mental child abuse. But the sorts of criteria Dawkins applies makes one wonder whether his own fanatical antitheism itself could be a mental pathology—hence, ‘atheopath’.” (Taken from the Creation.com article, “The biblical roots of modern science,” by Jonathan Sarfati [published: 19 May 2012] ~ comments in the “[ ]” are mine.)
“Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise.
“88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.
“It is noteworthy that no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size.
These results show that atoll and island areal stability is a global trend, whatever the rate of sea-level rise.”- Duvat, 2019
[….]
In other words, the Earth’s coasts gained more land area then were lost to rising sea levels.
“Earth’s surface gained 115,000 km2 of water and 173,000 km2 of land over the past 30 years, including 20,135 km2 of water and 33,700 km2 of land in coastal areas.” (Donchyts et al., 2016)
As a visual example, Ahmed et al. (2018) find that Bangladesh’s coastal land area grew by 7.9 km2 per year during 1985-2015.
“This paper draws upon the application of GIS and remote sensing techniques to investigate the dynamic nature and management aspects of land in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. … This research reveals that the rate of accretion [coastal land growth] in the study area is slightly higher than the rate of erosion. Overall land dynamics indicate a net gain of 237 km2 (7.9 km2annual average) of land in the area for the whole period from 1985 to 2015.” (Ahmed et al., 2018)
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):
Much like the “Polar Bear Scare” – Polar Bears reaching a record population since being measured, I tell my “warmist” friends that we should burn more CO2 because if we were worried about CO2 when the population was thought to be decreasing… why aren’t we lauding it as it increases?!
LIKEWISE – here is a report about the “disappearing islands due to “SEA RISE“:
“…the pair of New Zealand researchers set out to examine historical changes in 87 islands found within the Jaluit Atoll…over the period 1945-2010. During this time, the islands were subjected to ongoing sea level rise and the passage of a notable typhoon…which caused severe damage with its >100 knot winds and abnormal wave heights…caused a decrease in total island land area of approximately five percent, yet Ford and Kench write that “despite [this] significant typhoon-driven erosion and a relaxation period coincident with local sea-level rise, [the] islands have persisted and grown.” Between 1976 and 2006, for example, 73 out of the 87 islands increased in size, and by 2010, the total landmass of the islands had exceeded the pre-typhoon area by nearly 4 percent.”
Should we encourage China to build MORE coal plants? Hmmm?
An older challenge was about ANWR… and running a pipeline from Alaska to a port. Eco-fascists use to tell me that it was bad for the caribou species in the area. Then someone did a study and found the caribou population thrived as they used the pipeline to break the harsh elements. After that study came out, the challenge faded into history. But, it caused headlines that swayed public opinion… truth being hindmost in the Left’s arsenal. One last example of this statement for context:
“The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders…. Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010)
David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), [FN] 161.
JO NOVAcatches us up with the latest studies involving islans shrinking:
This should end all the Pacific Island climate claims right here. A new study of over 700 islands for decades shows that even though seas are rising faster than any time in the last million years, somehow no islands with people on are shrinking. This means there are no climate change refugees from any vanishing island. Plus it’s more proof that highly adjusted satellite data is recording sea levels on some other planet.
Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.
Look how closely these researchers are tracking the shores. Below on Tuamoto, French Polynesia, scientists can tell you that islets 12 and 14 (see pic) have disappeared since 1962. So we can track roving blobs of sand about 20 to 30 meters across.
No Habitable Island, None, Got Smaller:
The researchers reckon that 10 hectares is about the smallest island you’d want to plonk a resort on, that’s about that is about ten Rugby fields. Conveniently for us, no island bigger than 10 hectares shrank despite the world adding two thousand coal fired plants and a billion cars.
[….]
See the graph. All the larger islands are staying the same size or growing.
WATTS UP WITH THAT has the abstract and the conclusion of the study. Here is the abstract:
Abstract: Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted. Atoll islands affected by rapid sea-level rise did not show a distinct behavior compared to islands on other atolls. Island behavior correlated with island size, and no island smaller than 10 ha decreased in size. This threshold could be used to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy and to assess atoll countries and territories’ vulnerability to climate change. Beyond emphasizing the major role of climate drivers in causing substantial changes in the configuration of islands, this reanalysis of available data indicates that these drivers explain subregional variations in atoll behavior and within-atoll variations in island and shoreline (lagoon vs. ocean) behavior, following atoll-specific patterns. Increasing human disturbances, especially land reclamation and human structure construction, operated on atoll-to-shoreline spatial scales, explaining marked within-atoll variations in island and shoreline behavior. Collectively, these findings highlight the heterogeneity of atoll situations. Further research needs include addressing geographical gaps (Indian Ocean, Caribbean, north-western Pacific atolls), using standardized protocols to allow comparative analyses of island and shoreline behavior across ocean regions, investigating the role of ecological drivers, and promoting interdisciplinary approaches. Such efforts would assist in anticipating potential future changes in the contributions and interactions of key drivers.
ADDITION
(h/t to CLIMATE DEPOT)NEW SCIENTISThas an inconvenient article about some islands we have been warned of that sea rise will create “climate refugees” is not so:
Rising seas are eating away at small islands and will eventually turn their inhabitants into climate refugees, right? Not so for some of the world’s most threatened islands, which have grown despite experiencing dramatic sea level rise.
Funafuti atoll, which includes the capital of Tuvalu, is an islet archipelago in the tropical Pacific Ocean made from coral debriswashed up from an underlying reef by waves, winds and currents. Over the past 60 years the sea has risen by around 30 centimetres locally,sparking warnings that the atoll is set to disappear.
But Paul Kench of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and colleagues found no evidence of heightened erosion. After poring over more than a century’s worth of data, including old maps and aerial and satellite imagery, they conclude that 18 out of 29 islands have actually grown.
As a whole, the group grew by more than 18 hectares, while many islands changed shape or shifted sideways.
“There is still considerable speculation that islands will disappear as sea level rises,” says Kench. “Our data indicates that the future of islands is significantly different.”
Storms and other disturbances that churn up the sea seem to be more important than sea level in influencing stability, says Kench. Storms break up coral, which then gets deposited on the atolls. He says other coral reef islands are likely to evolve in the same way, and that the Maldives seem to be showing a similar effect.
“There is presently no evidence that these islands are going to sink,” says Virginie Duvat of the University of La Rochelle in France. She says that she and other researchers are trying to fight the widespread misconception that sea level rise will mean the end for atolls….
(Jump to new material) First, here are the two articles by David Bernstein Dennis Prager is reading from:
Has There Been a Surge of Anti-Semitism Under and Because of Trump? || In short, probably not. And about that ADL study everyone is citing… (REASON.org)
Correcting the ADL’s False Anti-Semitism Statistic || The spread of misleading information on hate crimes is counterproductive in the fight against real and rising anti-Semitism (TABLET MAGAZINE)
Dennis Prager is livid at the lies (The Fake News) we are “bathed in” on a daily basis. This is a great segment to pair with an earlier upload of mine, titled: “Antisemitism In America ~ #FakeNews” (DENNIS PRAGER).
…The ADL also reports that “college campuses saw a total of 204 incidents in 2017, compared to 108 in 2016.” How many of these incidents were of the alt-right nationalist variety, and how many were related to leftist anti-Israel activism? There is no way of knowing from the ADL study, but to the extent the latter was the cause, that could hardly be blamed on Trump.
Finally, it’s worth noting, that despite showing a 57 percent increase in incidents overall, from 1,267 to 1,986, the ADL study shows a 47 percent decrease in physical assaults, from 37 to 19. This is obviously inconsistent with the meme that 2017 saw a surge in violent anti-Semitism. Physical assaults are also the most objective sort of incident to document, which adds to concerns about the robustness of the rest of the data.
[….]
I have no desire to let Trump off the hook for his very real flaws, and I am not nor have I been a Trump supporter or apologist. But the Jewish community’s assessment of the dangers of anti-Semitism should be based on documented facts, not ideology, emotion, partisanship, or panic. And the truth is this: The claim that anti-Semitic incidents increased 57 percent in 2017 is contradicted by the very ADL study on which that claim is based.
There are several problems with relying on this study for Trump-bashing, however. The first is that the study includes 193 incidents of bomb threats to Jewish institutions as anti-Semitic incidents, even though by the time the ADL published the study, it had been conclusively shown that the two perpetrators of the bomb threats were not motivated by anti-Semitism. One can only guess why the ADL chose to inflate its statistics in this way, but none of the explanations speak well of it.
Second, the ADL report itself acknowledges that some of the rise in incidents may simply be due to better reporting (“more people are reporting incidents to ADL than ever before”).
Third, “college campuses saw a total of 204 incidents in 2017, compared to 108 in 2016.” How many of those incidents emanating from traditional forms of anti-Semitism that one might associate with Trumpian populism, and how many from leftist/pro-Palestinian sources? The ADL doesn’t say.
Fourth, the ADL counts ambiguous incidents as anti-Semitic incidents, so long as they were reported as such. For example, the report states, “Jewish graves or cemeteries were desecrated seven times in 2017. The desecration of Jewish headstones is a classic anti-Semitic act employed for hundreds of years. The majority of the cemetery desecrations occurred in the first months of the year, at the same time as the bomb threats were called in to Jewish institutions, which contributed to a sense that the Jewish American community was under siege.” The problem is that desecrations of cemeteries of all faiths is not uncommon, and are often the product of either bored teenagers or vagrants. In fact, at least some of the cemetery incidents counted by the ADL were ultimately determined by police not to be anti-Semitic in origin. The desecraton of a cemetery in St. Louis got a particularly large amount of attention. The police eventually caught the perpetrator, and determined that he was just “mad and drunk,” not anti-Semitic. The ADL has not updated its study or press release to reflect such facts. Other questionable “anti-Semitic” incidents I’ve seen reported include graffitti with a swastika and “TRUMP.” Is the “author” supporting “Trump the Nazi” or attacking Trump by accusing him of being a Nazi? My inclination would in most cases be to suspect the latter, but surely it’s at least unclear….
NEW STUFF
AMERICAN GREATNESS has an excellent rebuff of David French’s recent article claiming “white supremacy” is growing thanks to us honkies.
…But David French at National Review has other post-election targets in mind—namely, the imaginary cabal of white supremacists taking over the Republican Party.
Outlandish Claims, Distorted Evidence French’s November 15 column, “The White-Supremacy Surge,” is more cowbell to amplify the media’s nonstop drumbeat that Donald Trump and his supporters are bigots, anti-Semites, and neo-Nazis. (A despicable Washington Postcolumn over the weekend suggested that massacres and death squads might be in the offing because of Trump.)
Sadly, French’s incendiary analysis wasn’t far from that Post screed. It is a literary junk drawer of anecdotal evidence and conjecture scattered with overworn insults about Trump supporters.
In an attempt to boost his inaccurate claim that white supremacy is surging, French cited a sketchy study while overlooking exculpatory data in the very same report, and he mentioned random racial crimes that are vile but no indicator of a coordinated white supremacist movement. “Trump’s words have emboldened white supremacists,” French outlandishly declared, again without evidence.
In an effort to prove his case, French conflated a rise in white supremacy with a speculative rise in hate crimes. According to a May 2018 report from California State University’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism—the paper French cites in his column—hate crimes increased by 12 percent in 2017 in 10 major cities. (The report documents the number of allegations, not convictions, reported to police. Dr. Brian Levin, one of the authors, confirmed to me via email that the center’s data “cover hate crimes reported to police at time complaint is made and is not dependent on how it is eventually charged.”)
A closer look at the statistics included in the report not only fails to bolster French’s claim, the data show that whites are the third-most frequently targeted group of victims, after black and LGBT people. Jews, Mexicans, and Muslims are less likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a white person, according to the study. Further—and highly relevant here—there is no proof that white supremacists committed most of the offenses noted in the study.
Then this: “We are forecasting a small to moderate increase for hate crime for 2017. Only a small number of agencies have partial year data for 2018, but most are down significantly… we are forecasting a significant national decrease in 2018 but only for the first half of the year.” (Emphasis added.)
So, despite the hysterical warnings from French and his collaborators in the media, there was only a small increase in hate crimes last year and those numbers dropped significantly in the first half of the year. This means there is no “surge” either in hate crimes or white supremacy. (The synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh last month singularly will change that forecast for the year. Trump also has been blamed for that massacre by French’s NRcolleague, Jonah Goldberg, even though the shooter did not vote for Trump and criticized the president for being “surrounded by kikes.”)
[….]
…He slammed Breitbart and The Federalist for allegedly endorsing white supremacy. (The author of the Federalistpiece he misrepresents is Jewish.) Non church-going Trump voters are closet racists, French concluded, because not enough of them have “warm feelings” for blacks, according to one survey: “The white-supremacist surge is a symptom of a greater disease, and it’s a disease with no easy cure.”
[….]
…A greater threat to civil society, in reality, is contemptible pieces of writing like French’s, which are intended to malign innocent people based on race and political affiliation, and further divide the country he laughably claims to want to save.
Yet false allegations of rape, while relatively rare, are at least five times as common as false accusations of other types of crime, according to academic literature. (NEW YORK TIMES)
…Cory Booker explain[ed] on Tuesday that “ultimately” it doesn’t matter if Kavanaugh is “guilty or innocent,” because “enough questions” had been raised that it was time to “move on to another candidate.” (NEW YORK TIMES)
What the American public see is something entirely different than what the Dems see:
Brett Kavanaugh is no longer a mere Supreme Court nominee. His name is now a veritable conservative cause — one that has united the right for the first time since the 2016 primary sent Republicans quarreling over Trump and Never Trump.
Whatever the outcome of the immediate contest, it’s increasingly clear that Democrats and the media establishment made an enormous miscalculation by waging total war against Kavanaugh and his family.
Liberals set out to cast the federal judge — amiable, well-credentialed, mildly conservative — as a demon. In the process, they have reminded GOP voters and all but the most stubborn Never Trump intellectuals that there are worse things than Donald Trump’s outbursts and the ineptitude of congressional Republicans…..
Trump merely repeats the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford — BOOM STICK!
WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR:
Here are two good posts from Facebook I wanna share as well as some updated testimony by the “witnesses named.” Here is the first by COMMON SENSE SOAPBOX:
I don’t know whose house it happened at or even what year it happened. I don’t know if I got there before everyone else or after. I don’t know how I got there or how I got home over 8 miles away (at the age of 15).
My life time friend doesn’t remember any of this (and the other 3 people I said were there testified under oath they don’t know anything about this).
I have a fear of flying , but have no problem jet-setting all over the world while on vacation. I’ve been on airplanes more in the past two months than most people in a year, but my fear is completely legit.
I don’t know who paid for my hotel and polygraph test( the afternoon of my grandmothers funeral, or maybe it was the next day, who knows). And guess what? I flew there. Oh and that polygraph, it was only two questions, neither of which were about Kavanaugh. But hey, I passed so that’s all that matters. And my PhD in psychology definitely, in no way, helped me with it or my testimony today.
My friends on the beach encouraged me to continue contacting the media with my story (because we were running out of time). I can’t name them, so we’ll just call them beach friends. Yet while giving such great advice, none were willing to be character witnesses. Meanwhile, Judge Kavanaugh had hundreds of character witnesses step up in a matter of days.
My lawyers, out of the kindness of their hearts, are helping me for FREE yet I have a “needed” gofundme page that currently is sitting at $473,622. I’m so desperately in need of help there’s even a second gofundme with $209,987. I promise though I’m not getting anything out of my testimony, that money is just going to cover my expenses.
I’m super smart. I have a PhD and I teach graduate students. I know lots of big words, but it should be totally believable that I don’t understand basic questions.
I was the only person in the United States that didn’t know Congress agreed to come to me instead of me going to DC. They really do care about my flying phobia after all.
Get the picture yet, America?
CHANGING STORY
July 30 (to Dianne Feinstein): “It was me and four other people.”
August 7 (to polygraph examiner): “There were four boys and a couple of girls.”
September 16 (to Washington Post reporter): “There were three boys and one girl.”
The above graphic comes by way of POWERLINE (click it to enlarge), and here is the description: “…James Freeman observes that journalists seem to have lost interest in trying to ascertain whether Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was accurate. Her story is shot through with holes. [….] He made the graphic illustration below drawing on public sources – ‘mainly the Washington Post and public legal documents’.”
USA TODAY continues to zero in on the “credibility” issues Blasey Ford has:
…Ford’s Story Changed In Key Ways
Ford’s retelling of the alleged sexual assault also included several conflicting accounts of the number of individuals at the gathering. The therapist’s notes stated that four boys had attempted to rape Ford. (Ford claims her therapist confused the total number of boys at the party with the number of boys who had attacked her.)
Later, in her July letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Ford again placed the number of individuals at the party at five, stating the gathering included her and four other individuals. But Ford then identified the four by name, and that group included three boys and one girl. And finally, during her Senate testimony, Ford unequivocally stated that “there were four boys I remember specifically being there,” in addition to her friend Leland Keyser.
Another significant change in the scenario came when Ford testified about the location of the party. She had originally told the Washington Post that the attack took place at a house not far from the country club. Yet, when Mitchell revealed a map of the relevant locations and reminded Ford that she had described the attack as having occurred near the country club, Ford backtracked: “I would describe [the house] as it’s somewhere between my house and the country club in that vicinity that’s shown in your picture.” Ford added that the country club was a 20-minute drive from her home.
Finally, Ford altered her description of the interior layout of the home and the details of the party and her escape. A “short” stairwell turned into a “narrow” one. The gathering moved from a small family room where the kids drank beer (and which Ford distinguished from the living room through which she fled the house) when she spoke to the Washington Post, to a home described in her actual testimony as having a “small living room/family room-type area.” And in an obvious tell to the change, Ford suggested that she could draw a floor plan of the house.
These four points are significant. First, because Ford had waited 30-plus years to report the purported attack, a therapist’s notes from Ford’s sessions with her husband countered claims that Ford had invented the assault to derail Kavanaugh’s confirmation. But the notes did not name Ford’s attacker. And the timing of the assault summarized by her therapist, whom Ford saw individually the following year, conflicted with Ford’s current claims against Kavanaugh.
The final three contradictions are even more significant because in each circumstance Ford altered her story only after Kavanaugh and Senate investigators had obtained evidence to disprove her original tale. For instance, investigators had obtained statements from Kavanaugh and the two men and one female lifelong friend of Ford’s, and they all denied any recollection of the gathering.
These Contradictions Mean Ford’s Not Credible
Investigators also spoke with former classmates of Kavanaugh, including two men who showed staffers the “party houses” near the country club during the relevant time period. And the detailed description of the home interior Ford originally provided allowed investigators to compare her story to the layout of the homes of the individuals Ford identified. But then Ford changed her description of the house’s floor plan.
Since media leaks of Ford’s charges first broke, Kavanaugh and his supporters have stressed the impossibility of proving the negative: Kavanaugh could not prove he did not attack Ford. But Kavanaugh could prove that Ford’s story could not possibly have happened by showing that none of the individuals at the supposed party lived in a house near the country club, and that none of their houses matched that described by Ford. Kavanaugh and investigators were poised to do so when Ford changed her story.
Open-minded Americans of all stripes should see that — emotions aside — Ford’s testimony is completely devoid of credibility: so much so, that Mitchell told the Senate this week that Ford’s allegations do not even meet the preponderance of evidence standard. That standard, which governs in civil litigation, asks whether it is more likely than not that an event occurred.
Yes, victims must be believed. But Ford is not a victim — at least not of Kavanaugh.
Okay, it’s time to just blow this wide open. “We should believe Dr. Ford! She took a polygraph! That means she’s telling the truth!” Sorry, but that’s not how this really works. In fact, if anything, the polygraph results further destroy her already flimsy story and lack of credibility.
First, the examination didn’t happen at a police station or even an office. It was at Ford’s hotel. Bizarrely, the person conducting the polygraph — who was a third-party examiner and not a law enforcement official — had Ford scribble down her nearly 40-year-old memory of the drunken party, and then asked her two vague questions.
1) Is any part of your statement false? 2) Did you make up any part of your statement?
This is absolutely important to understand: Again, the polygraph test didn’t actually ask the main accuser any questions about Kavanaugh. His name was never brought up by the interviewer. Instead, Ford was simply asked if she she believed her own hand-written statement.
It gets even more strange, as nowhere in that written statement does the name “Kavanaugh” appear, either. Furthermore, she scratches out corrections on her own statement and if you listened to her testimony yesterday, her story has shifted once again from the statement posted here. Oh, and icing on the cake, the statement to the polygrapher also contradicts the July 30th letter to Diane Feinstein and then another contradiction to her Washington Post story.
July 30 (to Dianne Feinstein): “It was me and four other people.”
August 7 (to polygraph examiner): “There were four boys and a couple of girls.”
September 16 (to Washington Post reporter): “There were three boys and one girl.”
The fact that Ford “passed” the polygraph based on a statement that she later herself contradicted while telling the story to other people shows how unreliable this “evidence” truly is.
HOT AIR has a great post on this discrepancy: “Pull the other one, sir. It’s got bells on it. Ford’s story, confirmed by nobody else she claims was present, including her lifelong friend, has been shifting and getting dodgier by the day.”
Ford’s lawyer took her to a polygraph examiner who concluded she was not being ‘deceptive’ with claims about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh
Attorney sent the results to Senate Republicans but refuse to show them a therapist’s notes from the sessions where Ford first discussed it
The polygraph test consisted of two yes-no questions
Ford and Kavanaugh are scheduled to testify in a Senate hearing on Thursday
Polygraphs, so-called ‘lie detactor’ tests, are generally inadmissible in court
The California woman who first accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault passed a ‘lie detector’ test in August that consisted of two questions.
Christine Blasey Ford’s attorneys sent Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans a report from a polygraph examiner who interviewed her on August 10.
But they refused on Wednesday to provide the committee with copies of notes from her psychotherapy sessions. Ford has said she first spoke to a therapist in 2012 about her memories of an ordeal.
‘Any request that she expose her private medical records for public inspection represents an unacceptable invasion of privacy,’ attorney Debra Katz wrote.
Katz, however, handed over the polygraph results to buttress her client’s accusation.
The test examiner asked Ford to write down a description of what happened to her at a high school party in the early 1980s, where she claims a drunken teenage Kavanaugh groped her and tried to remove her clothing while pinning her to a bed and covering her mouth.
AFTER INTERVIEWING HER ABOUT HER STATEMENT, THE EXAMINER ASKED HER A PAIR OF YES-OR-NO QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WRITTEN NARRATIVE.
‘IS ANY PART OF YOUR STATEMENT FALSE?’ HE ASKED, FOLLOWED BY: ‘DID YOU MAKE UP ANY PART OF YOUR STATEMENT?’ FORD ANSWERED ‘NO’ TO BOTH QUESTIONS.
The report doesn’t mention questions about any specific parts of her story.
The polygraph examiner wrote that her two responses were ‘not indicative of deception,’ and that the chance she was lying was a tiny fraction of one per cent….
(DAILY MAIL | emphasis added | editor’s note: there were no comparison questions asked in differing ways to create a baseline)
Earlier today Allahpundit looked at the negotiations taking place between Christina Blasey Ford and the Judiciary Committee. The GOP agreed to push the date to Wednesday but is requiring that Ford testify first. A Politico story published today points to one additional factor which is apparently motivating Ford to push the date of the hearing back as far as possible: She plans to drive cross country to the hearing in Washington, DC.
Chairman Grassley, obviously losing patience with Ford’s lawyer, had said in a letter that his staff welcomed the opportunity to meet with Ford at a time and place convenient to her to facilitate Monday’s hearing. And as Sciutto mentioned above, that offer Wednesday included a flight to California. [….] Of course, Democrats will frame this as Grassley “bullying” Ford into speaking before there’s been the full FBI investigation she demanded, but it really does seem as though Republicans are bending over backward to get Ford’s testimony on the record.
Now, here is the issue, this goes to show that this is not genuine but merely political. And it shows as well that Dr. Ford is willing to lie about even small items regarding herself to make a political point (by stalling a hearing):
CONSTRUCTION and COUNSELING TIMELINE LIE
In her testimony on Thursday, Dr. Ford stated that she put a second door on her house in 2012. However, in dated pictures, the second door was already installed in March of 2011 (GATEWAY PUNDIT):
Real estate and other records undercut a key part of Christine Blasey Ford’s account of why she finally came forward with charges of attempted rape against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after some 30 years.
Ford testified last week that she had never revealed the details of the alleged attack until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. She said the memories percolated up as they revisited a disagreement they’d had over her insistence on installing a “second front door” when they had remodeled their Palo Alto, Calif., home.
The need to explain a decision her husband “didn’t understand,” Ford testified, pushed her to say she wanted the door to alleviate symptoms of “claustrophobia” and “panic attacks” she still suffered from an attempted rape allegedly perpetrated by Kavanaugh in high school during the early 1980s.
“Is that the reason for the second door — front door — is claustrophobia?” asked Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. “Correct,” Ford replied.
Ford never specified when the renovation took place, leaving a possible impression that it and the therapy session happened around the same time.
But documents reveal the door was installed years before as part of an addition, and has been used by renters and even a marriage counseling business.
“The door was not an escape route but an entrance route,” said an attorney familiar with the ongoing congressional investigation. “It appears the real plan for the second front door was to rent out a separate room.”
The discrepancy raises fresh doubts about Ford’s candor and credibility amid other inconsistencies, congressional and other knowledgeable sources say, including her purported “fear of flying.” Ford initially refused to submit to an interview with the committee because of an alleged airplane phobia, but investigators established that she had taken a number of flights back East this summer, and had previously flown to Hawaii, Costa Rica, French Polynesia and other South Pacific islands.
[…]
Since the second front door was installed, moreover, students from local colleges have lived in the additional room with the private door. In fact, under congressional questioning Thursday, Ford testified she has “hosted” various other residents there, including “Google interns.”
The attorney said the tenants call into question Ford’s claims about why she installed the additional exterior door in her home.
“Renters and a business operating out of Dr. Ford’s home would explain the added door,” he said. “Clearly, there were business purposes [for it], not just ones related to her anxieties.”…
NO WITNESSES
Here is Christina Ford’s claim:
One evening that summer, after a day of swimming at the club, I attended a small gathering at a house in the Chevy Chase/Bethesda area. There were four boys I remember being there:Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge, P.J. Smyth, and one other boy whose name I cannot recall.
REFUTED
All of Ford’s named witnesses of the party, both male and female, have now denied any recollection of attending such a party.
…”In fact, I have no memory of this alleged incident,” Judge said in his statement to the committee. “Brett Kavanaugh and I were friends in high school but I do not recall the party described in Dr. Ford’s letter. More to the point, I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.”
“I have no information to offer the Committee and I do not wish to speak publicly regarding the incidents described in Dr. Ford’s letter,” Judge added…
On Saturday night, Leland Ingham Keyser, a classmate of Ford’s at the all-girls school Holton-Arms and her final named witness, denied any recollection of attending a party with Brett Kavanaugh.
“Simply put, Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford,” lawyer Howard J. Walsh said in a statement sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
On Saturday morning, after President Trump authorized a one-week FBI probe into Ms. Ford’s charges, Mr. Walshagain repeated her denial in a new statement to committee staff.
“Ms. Keyser asked that I communicate to the Committee her willingness to cooperate fully with the FBI’s supplemental investigation of Dr. Christine Ford’s allegations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh,” Mr. Walsh said. “However, as my client has already made clear, she does not know Judge Kavanaugh and has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford.”
The fact Ms. Keyser says she didn’t know Mr. Kavanaugh in those days is another set back for Ms. Ford.
…On Saturday, Keyser said through her lawyer in a letter to the committee that she was willing to “cooperate fully with the FBI’s supplemental investigation” into Kavanaugh.
“However, as my client has already made clear, she does not know Judge Kavanaugh and has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford,” the letter from Howard Walsh, Keyser’s attorney, said. It continued that Keyser “does not refute Dr. Ford’s account, and she has already told the press that she believes Dr. Ford’s account.”
“However, the simple and unchangeable truth is that she is unable to corroborate it because she has no recollection of the incident in question,” the letter continued.
Mark Judge, a friend of Kavanaugh’s who was allegedly present during the assault, has also said that he will cooperate with the FBI investigation….
“I understand that I have been identified by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as the person she remembers as ‘PJ’ who supposedly was present at the party she described in her statements to the Washington Post,” Smyth says in his statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I am issuing this statement today to make it clear to all involved that I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh. Personally speaking, I have known Brett Kavanaugh since high school and I know him to be a person of great integrity, a great friend, and I have never witnessed any improper conduct by Brett Kavanaugh towards women. To safeguard my own privacy and anonymity, I respectfully request that the Committee accept this statement in response to any inquiry the Committee may have.” (TOWNHALL)
Other testimonies:
RACHEL MITCHELL
Arizona sex crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell told Republican senators in a conference meeting Thursday evening that she would not charge Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after hearing testimonies of the Judge or his accuser Christine Blasey Ford.
Mitchell, who took a leave of absence from Maricopa County’s Deputy County Attorney and division chief the County Attorney’s Office’s Special Victims Division to join the Senate Judiciary Committee’s team of attorneys for the hearing, “broke down her analysis” of both testimonies to GOP lawmakers. In a nearly 30-minute presentation, Mitchell went over the “facts that were established and not established” and concluded that not only would she not charge Kavanaugh based on the record of evidence from both parties, but would not even pursue a search warrant for the judge, which in virtually all cases would require the standard of probable cause to be met, Politicoreported.
NEW: Montgomery County (Md) police chief and prosecutor release letter “.. stand ready to investigate any sexual assault allegation from any victim where the incident occurred in our jurisdiction”
…Continuing…
Swetnick (and Ford) could go to local PD and demand a criminal investigation, in contrast to the FBI’s background investigation. Ford’s claim is likely too thin to lead anywhere, though. And if there’s anything at all to Swetnick’s claim, chances are that the FBI probe will turn up something and Kavanaugh will be borked long before Maryland police got around to looking at it.
Here’s Avenatti today trying again to answer the question everyone had about Swetnick’s affidavit, namely, why she didn’t tell the cops about multiple parties she attended where women were allegedly being drugged and gang-raped. Avenatti’s theory: She was young ‘n stuff. No wonder Senate Democrats are keeping their distance.
EDITOR’S NOTE:If these women walked into the police station and gave testimony for a police report, if found lying could be criminally prosecuted. WHICH IS WHY THEY HAVE NOT DONE THINS! They know that even if caught in a lie, politics ties the hands of Repoublicans going after Dr. Ford. But not a local Police Department.
Wednesday on the radio, Mark Levin addressed the latest sexual assault allegations raised against Judge Brett Kavanaugh and pointed out a pattern:
“No witnesses, no corroboration, no evidence. That’s the pattern.”
EDITORS NOTES
Just some separate responses to some Facebook comments:
BTW, just as a passing observation. With what the Left feels is the “bar to reach” as a nominee to the Supreme Court, they are insuring conservative, Evangelical, Catholic, and Mormon nominees in the future. People who were raised religiously from birth, went to private schools (or were home schooled, then off to religious based (Catholic or Protestant) type universities (like St. John’s or Biola). In other words, I would bet a person being “left of center” their whole life would have less “firewalls” to act out their passions as students. And so, open themselves up to similar tactics… which will succeed at a greater rate.
I was thinking about this. IF THIS happened (which I doubt) I have two thoughts. The first being perception versus reality. I heard a caller on a radio show mention this and it made a lot of sense. she said that her and her friends went to quite a few parties as young teenagers… and that if she asked each one of her friends about an event that happened that one of these parties they would all have differing perspectives of the real event. Especially an event from so many years ago. We even see this in the gospels where a lot of times the writers saw the same event but wrote differently about it based on the importance that they saw in it or who they were writing to. So to dr. Ford’s perceived reality is probably different than the actual event — again even if it took place at all.
…if this did happen, is, I imagine most girls that went to House Parties and indulged in drinking and hanging out with teenage boys, we’re felt up at one point or another. Not always, but the idea is not far-fetched. For her to be traumatized for an entire life by not even having any clothes removed is more a commentary on the constitution of left-leaning women. They are the founders of safe spaces and the “snowflake” generation. Modern feminism weakens the woman, and does not empower.
A book that deals with repressed memories in modern psychology entitled, “Confabulations: Creating False Memories, Destroying Families,” shows that bad memories come out of these sessions were repressed memories are supposedly remembered again. I had heard that this is how Dr Ford finally recalled these memories. Whether this is true or not I do not know, but the book is a good read.
MEMORY
UPDATE For years I have known that hypnosis as a psychotherapy is dangerous. Most of the “alien abduction” stories, or contacts with spirits or past historical figures comes from some altered state of mind. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus mentions hypnosis in her TED-TALKS which I edit into the below audio a bit. I mentioned to a cyber acquaintance that I wonder if part of her (Christine Blasey Ford) therapy included hypnosis. This is what he said (I will emphasize the main point):
The timing of the specificity of her memories is certainly disquieting, but unless we learn more about her therapy, it will be hard for this to be more than speculation. It seems very likely that the name “Kavanaugh” never in fact came up until this summer, despite reports to the contrary.
True dat. HOWEVER, new information has come forward to bolster the hypnosis angle. Here is a great post by GATEWAY PUNDIT:
Christine Ford has not turned over her therapist’s notes to the Senate regarding her suppressed memories about Judge Kavanaugh abusing her decades earlier. This may be because if the memories were revealed through hypnosis they would be “absolutely inadmissible” in the court of law in many states, including New York and Maryland.
>>>Editor’s Side Note: (1) Dr. Ford released any confidentiality when she shared her therapy notes with the Washington Post, and (2), the FBI needs to view her therapy notes.
[….]
One of Christine Blasey Ford’s research articles in 2008 included a study on self-hypnosis. The practice of self-hypnosis is used to retrieve important memories and “create artificial situations.”
My cyber acquaintance’s response after reading the story above? “Wow” Continuing on now with the previous post:
If I’ve learned anything from my decades working on these problems, it’s this: Just because somebody tells you something and they say it with lots of confidence, detail, and emotion does not mean that it really happened. We can’t reliably distinguish true memories from false memories; WE NEED INDEPENDENT CORROBORATION. Such a discovery has made me more tolerant of friends and family who misremember. Such a discovery might have saved Steve Titus. We should all keep in mind that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing. — Dr. Loftus
The only book I have read from years ago is “Confabulations: Creating False Memories, Destroying Families.” I would be curious to know if some of the counseling for Dr. Ford included hypnosis. I would also like to know the factors used to “recover” Ms. Ramirez’s memory. There have been many more studies based a lot more in control groups and the scientific method:
The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory
Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial
The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse
Memory Warp: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses to Die
Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives
National Review has an excellent article regarding the issue of false memories, “‘False Memories’ Are More Common Than You Think”. In this excellent radio segment by the JOHN & KEN SHOW I add video and end in humor to embolden the idea herein.
