America's “Fifth Column”

By Rich Kozlovich

In 1936 Emilio Mola, a Nationalist general during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil war referred to a fifth column at his disposal when it was clear there were only four columns of troops marching on Madrid.  What did it mean?  These were supporters who would undermine the enemy from within the city.  A population who had loyalties they hid from the group.  Individuals who supported efforts against the group they claimed to be a part of.  We would probably call them terrorists today, but most certainly traitors.

Until Trump was elected, and SCOTUS overturned Chevron with the Loper Bright decision, it became the duty of society to obediently ignore obvious, ignore what they could see going on before them, and provable realities.  Inculcated deep within the collective psyche of America we were expected to accepting every bit of horsepucky which the so-called experts, the media, leftist politicians, consultants, activists, and academicians heaped upon us. 

Now it's our duty and responsibility to stand up against things which are unproven or improvable.   To end support of things that are not true, while having the courage to stand up for those things which are true.

Academia is constant groveling before that “sacred cow”, known as government grant money, which has corrupted the universities, and we now know the media has been funded by the bureaucrats to support their continued tyranny over America. 

 

Think about this.  What if the only grant money available was for the purpose of proving there was no such thing as anthropogenic climate change?  I'll tell you what would happen, there'd be a dramatic shift in gears and the information coming out of these self same universities would change overnight.  On August 4th, 2006 an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal by Shirley S. Wang, reporting on a study that researched the potential of bias in science when it is tied to funding.  The finding? 

 

“Studies show that even small gifts create feelings of obligation, and that those feelings can influence subsequent decisions, so why do many researchers feel they're immune to conflicts of interest?” “Just as we fool ourselves into thinking we're more ethical, kind and generous than we are, so scientists can be blind to the very real possibility that their work is inappropriately influenced by financial ties. These psychological processes usually operate so subtly that people aren't aware that such ties can bias their judgment.”

 

Based on the tone of her article she was attacking the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, and her points were well made.  However, what about research that is tied to a regulatory agency such as EPA?  Are these researchers any less affected by this same kind of bias? 

The activists have no problem finding problems to whine about.  That's easy, especially when these problems are usually speculative.  You know the kind I am talking about.  So much of their whining is filled with Weasel-words and Phrases.

This could happen or that could happen or maybe something could possibly cause something, someday, somewhere by someone doing anything or something or maybe no one doing nothing or anything anywhere.   

Wow, get your mind around that!  Whining about speculative problems is one thing, fixing real problems is another.  We must remember that every action triggers the law of unintended consequences.  Some consequences are positive and some are negative.  Sometimes both.  

What happens when the fixes they impose on society leads to unintended negative or even vile consequences?  Usually people die.  Yet they go on their merry way as if this is normal or worse yet, acceptable.  DDT is a case in point.  Tens of millions have died unnecessarily over the last 52 years since the ban on DDT and yet they still fight to maintain this ban.  These are adherents of a neo-pagan secular religion.  "Ecotheologians, demanding 'death' on a crowded planet."

“Fifth Columnists” are heroes when they win.  If they lose, they are traitors, either way they undermine society and civilization while proclaiming to the world they are bringing enlightenment, promising utopia, but consistently delivering dystopia.  

We need to start shedding ourselves of these so-called in the media, academia, scientific advisors, government consultants, and bureaucrats, who don’t know whose side they are on.  Then again, maybe these “Fifth Columnists” really do know what side they’re on, and it's not the side of humanity.

 

Judicial Boundaries Need to be Imposed

By Rich Kozlovich

The Supreme Soviet of Minnesota, aka, the Minnesota Supreme Court, has decided the interior of your car is a “public place if it is driven on public roads."  Okay, if that's a valid interpretation of the Fourth Amendment against "unreasonable search and seizures by the government", then perhaps the government should be allowed to search any private property without a warrant that borders on public streets, calling that property "public space"?  Or perhaps your wallet, a suitcase, a briefcase, or anything you're carrying on while walking on a public sidewalk next to a public street should also be considered "public space"?  Right?

How does this kind of insanity become policy?  How can any American jurist believe such nonsense?  How does judicial corruption such as this infest the thinking of America's judiciary? 

I’ve been organizing my draft files and came across this piece written by Andrea Widburg in 2023, America’s top law schools are openly abandoning the Constitution.  While academia has become a festering sore on the body America, academia’s law schools are a cancer. These institutions have abandoned the rule of law and openly support rule by judicial tyranny, and this is the time for a constitutional confrontation with the judiciary.

The Constitution says it’s the Congress who decides the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary, and it’s time they exercised that power. Furthermore, there needs to be sanctions on jurists who exceeded their authority and twist logic and reality like a pretzel to fit their vision of how the world should work. And that sanction should be the ability to fire them, and not with things like a two thirds vote (67 Senators) in support of impeachment, which is now unattainable in the Senate. 

It's time Congress stops sitting with the thumbs and pass legislation that creates punishments for radical out of control judges.  They may have lifetime appointments, but I don't see anything in the Constitution that prevents the Congress from imposing penalties for conduct where the judiciary exceeds their jurisdiction.  And again....it's the Congress that determines their jurisdiction, not the judiciary.

The English Barons forced King John to sign the Magna Carta saying there had to be limits to his power. Congress needs a Magna Carta for the judiciary, i.e., a Constitutional Amendment for term limits, and that amendment needs to define the boundaries of the federal judiciary's authority. Term limits and the definition of the power of SCOTUS was a failure on the part of the Founding Fathers which needs fixing.

Minnesota is just a symptom of a national chronic infection in the judiciary, but not only in the United States.  When it comes to making judgements against Trump's policies, it seems to be an international infection.

Remarkable, perhaps he didn't get the memo.  Joe Biden isn't President any longer, and this judge has no say in the matter, just like so many of these judges in the United States that think they are going to determine policy for the federal government.  And that includes this foreign born Muslim who Biden appointed as a Federal District judge, says Trump has not complied with his ruling on Trump's suspension of foreign aid saying:

“The Court was not inviting Defendants to continue the suspension while they reviewed contracts and legal authorities to come up with a new, post-hoc rationalization for the en masse suspension.........” 

This judge has ordered the resumption of hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid all over the world, way beyond his judicial authority, and the administration has appealed his ruling.  It seems to me that alone should obviate his decisions until the case has run it's course.  

It appears an Egyptian judge has decided he will determine American policy, and has ordered Trump to unfreeze aid to Egypt!    The latest good news is SCOTUS has temporarily blocked this lunatic's order, and it's time for SCOTUS to stop sitting on their hands and bring this to a screeching halt.... permanently!  

All these leftist Anti-American judge's rulings are a part of a national effort by leftists to handcuff the President, and those he appoints from doing their Constitutionally mandated jobs, forcing the administration to waste money, and preventing the administration from seeing where that money is going and to whom.  These arrogant misfit judges need to be told to shove it where the sun doesn't shine.  

Perhaps the President needs to send an official letter, signed by as many members of Congress as are willing, telling SCOTUS and each and every federal judge these rulings are out of bounds, they're out of control, and any further rulings inappropriately interfering with Executive privileges and responsibilities will be considered a seditious effort to undermine the boundaries created in the Constitution between the three branches of government, and action will be taken.  

It's time for a Constitutional confrontation.

Amy Wax Is the Rock in the Current!

Heterodoxy isn't for the faint of heart

By Rich Kozlovich / Tags:  

For years I've stated the two groups mostly considered to be leaders are Ph.D.'s and military officers.  But the fact is both got to the top by being part of the go along to get along crowd, and to the vast majority of them rowing against the tide, or being a rock in the current is totally alien to their thinking, or their character.  But there are exceptions, and they pay a price.  I've added her to the John Boyd Legion of Honor.

In 2019 I posted a link to this article, In Defense of Penn Law Professor Amy Wax, and to my surprise I got thousands of hits on this piece, saying:

The hard left doesn’t want to nominate another white male for president in 2020, or in the words of Politico, “a candidate that looks like Bernie or Joe.” In fact, according to most liberals, police departments would be better off with more nonwhites and fewer whites, as would fire departments, school districts, small businesses, Hollywood,Major League Baseball, U.S. Congress, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, to name a few places.

Whether this is ultimately true is debatable. What’s not is the fact that it’s perfectly okay to call for more diversity in America -- to publicly state things would be better off with more nonwhites and less whites.    

Then back in 2022 this article appeared, Edunomics, which I thought was a great article with a really dumb title, discussing how academia has been totally corrupted with leftist dogma totally destroying free speech.  Amy Wax is at the heart of that discussion saying:

The law school currently has her under review with the hope, it would appear, of taking away her tenure and then her job. Why is this occurring? Dr. Wax is doing what lawyers are taught to do: ask simple but hard questions, relying on facts that result in hard truths and more difficult questions. Dr. Wax has had the audacity to ask if bourgeois culture, which includes hard work, studiousness, delayed gratification, work, marriage, and having children in, rather than out of wedlock might be a good thing. 

She has questioned if it is problematic that most black students in the Penn law school are at the bottom of their classes. She has had the nerve to suggest that some cultures might be superior to others. For asking these impertinent questions, the dean of the law school has her under review.  Apparently, the principle of freedom of expression at Penn is good for me but not for thee. Wax has apparently crossed a “line,” transgressed “appropriate expression,” is a “racist” and a “white supremacist,” and she has yet to receive a “comprehensive and complete statement of all the charges lodged against her.” One can only describe the situation as Kafkaesque. 

I published that piece and tagged these articles thinking her plight wouldn't be much of an issue down the road.  That was a serious error in judgement, and since I had so many hits on the first piece, I should have known better! 

Here we are again, The Amy Wax Inflection Point for 'Elite' Higher Education, saying:

Higher education has been a cesspool of anti-Americanism, censorious leftism and cultural radicalism for longer than I have been alive. The moral rot is, and always has been, particularly acute at Ivy League or otherwise putatively "elite" institutions. The pro-Hamas "protests" that have rocked university campuses since Oct. 7 are indicative.....

......there was the triumvirate of "elite" university presidents who testified before Congress last December that the permissibility of campus calls for the genocide of the Jewish people "depends on the context."......But perhaps the single biggest disgrace to rock academia in recent years has been the University of Pennsylvania's years long crusade against its own tenured law professor, Amy Wax.

It appears it's perfectly acceptable to promote the genocide of Jews in Academia, but to declare mass immigration and multiculturalism is destructive to America and state factually that "black students rarely finish in the top half of graduating law school classes" is totally unacceptable.  Facts and history are anathema to leftists.   

When you consider that in one New York university it's been claimed about 90% of the student freshmen needed remedial reading classes, it's clear questions need to be raised.   How does someone graduate from high school and be incapable of reading?  That alone justifies questioning a lot about what's going on in education in America, including academia, and make no mistake, culture is king, and if that's true, and it was when Herodotus said it 2500 years ago, and it's still true today, then the culture that molded these kid's performance, activity, and attitude, must also be brought into question.

There's one thing abundantly clear, America's schools are failing to teach students fundamental skills.  They can't read, they can't write, they can't work basic math.  Then it must also be clear no matter how much money we're told to keep throwing at the teachers - teachers are failing to do their jobs.  Ergo-----they're overpaid, underworked and need to be fired, starting at the administration level!   If kids never learn to read why in the world would we think they're learning how to think? The socialist goal of making sure the apple falls as far away from the tree as possible is now a leftist success story - students are now too stupid to resist any stupidity the leftists promote. 

In Chicago teachers are being told to pass migrant children irrespective of their performance.  That's an outrageous abuse of these children.  If they can't do the basics how are they be expected to succeed in society?  Turn to crime?  That's not a long term success story.  

Here's what's acceptable to this corrupt cabal of so-called educators these days:

• Democrats are intentionally dumbing down the kids - For decades, most of the media and other Democrats have lied to the public, insisting that they, and not Republicans, care about our children… but their actions and policies show that this propaganda is clearly not true. They only care about money and power, a fact clearly seen when you look at the results in the public education sector. According to a report from US News, the Los Angeles school district spends over $18,000 per student; yet after thirteen years of schooling, only 46% of high school students could read at grade level, and a measly 18% were at grade level in math......
  
• Arizona State University prof claims current abortion policies could lead to forced breeding camps and cannibalism - Arizona State University professor of English Jennifer Irish recently used a school workshop called “A Speculative Future for Reproductive Rights” to express her concern that the country’s current abortion policies could somehow lead to “forced breeding camps” and “cannibalism,” according to a story in The College Fix.  Our abortion policies will lead to cannibalism?! WTH?! Ms. Irish, is it not enough to kill your kids, do you want to eat them, too? English professor Irish, (not to be confused with Irish professor English) stated: “So much of our reality points toward those futures.” Say again. Like what, precisely?......
•  Major Medical School Claims Timeliness, Individualism, And Professionalism Are Part Of White Supremacy  Radical leftism is a disease that, if left unchecked, will destroy our medical system.   Imagine a medical school that believes being on time, acting professionally, and displaying individualism is a display of white supremacy. Duke Medical School claims it is "White supremacy culture" to expect people of color to be on time in a strategic plan for creating an "Anti-Racist Workforce.".....
• The Double Standard on Campus Speech -  After weeks in which college students at campuses from Columbia to Harvard to UCLA celebrated murders and rapes, waved the flags of Islamic terrorist organizations and assaulted Jewish people, one student has finally been held accountable........While no amount of calls for the destruction of America or assaults on Jewish students led to any outrage in the media or actual consequences.....Knocking a Jewish female UCLA student unconscious didn’t do it. Barring Jewish students from being able to go to their classes didn’t do it. Assaulting staff members and faculty at universities didn’t do it. But call a fat black female activist Lizzo” and it’s an instant nationwide outrage.......

But for Amy Wax who calls into "question the academic ability of Black students" question the culture they represent, and invite Jared Taylor to speak in her classroom, who is being classified as a "white supremacist" saying, .... the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration, is unacceptable, and she must be punished.  

Whether you agree with his views or not, that's not the issue.  If academia can spew out all kinds of vile speech about Jews, whites, Christians, and traditional values in America, why should this be prohibited?  Why should she be punished and none of these other academics vile views be found acceptable?  Well, it's simple.  Statistics are racist, and so for "two and a half years, a period spanning successive Penn Law deanships, Wax has been subject to a probe into her alleged wrongthink and misdeeds.", which as "made Penn a pariah among academic freedom advocates."

The judgment finally came this week: Penn Law suspended Wax for a year, reduced her pay for that year by 50%, permanently stripped her of her endowed chair and summer pay, and publicly reprimanded her. Interestingly.......Penn Law had previously offered Wax a settlement that would have lessened her penalty on the condition that she not "disparage the University," not sue Penn and not publicly disclose the exculpatory evidence she had presented during the years long probe. Translation: Shut your mouth and this problem will go away quickly.

One thing is clear, Amy Wax is one tough cookie, and I've no doubt there will be an lawsuit in the near future, and I've no doubt she will win, and there will be another article about this here in P&D.  

Update 11:15 AM:  This College Just Got an Anonymous $100 Million for Defending Free Speech. - A whopping $100 million donation from an anonymous benefactor found its way into the coffers of the University of Chicago this week, intended to help the university bolster free speech on campus following a case in which a student claims an academic tried to get him expelled over controversial remarks..........The gift comes after a high-profile case involving student Daniel Schmidt, who stated last year that a professor at the University of Chicago was trying to get him expelled for highlighting an anti-white class called “the problem of whiteness.” The professor claimed the student, who has tens of thousands of social media followers, was bullying her. Earlier this week, the president of the university said Schmidt was free to talk about controversial topics like race and IQ, as Schmidt has previously claimed low IQs are the reason  "black people are murdering and mugging my classmates."

Posted by Rich Kozlovich at 7:25 AM

 

Universities may drop algebra graduation requirement because students find algebra too difficult

December 18, 2022 By Eric Utter

Kansas universities may soon dispense with their algebra graduation requirement because too many students fail the courses. NPR Kansas recently reported: “About one in three Kansas students fails college algebra the first time around. Some take it several times before they pass. Others get so frustrated that they drop out altogether. And that cuts into university graduation rates.”  NPR added that this prompted the Kansas Board of Regents to consider alternative requirements under what’s called a “Math Pathways program.”  Regent Wint Winter (yes, that's his name) said the new Pathways program is critical as a way to fight declining enrollment.

He stated: “It’s incumbent on us to be aware of all the roadblocks that are out there for students … reasons why they’re leaving, reasons why they’re not graduating. So I would urge us all to … find ways to find the bandwidth to keep this moving along.”  If graduation rates are now more important than what students are taught, than why not only offer gender and women’s studies courses…and underwater basket-weaving? Is algebra—algebra!— really too hard for today’s young scholars to handle? In my day, many of us took advanced placement calculus…in high school no less…with credits often transferring to the college of our choice. If calculus, geometry, and even algebra are too difficult for those enrolled in bastions of “higher education” today, perhaps the schools can offer Remedial Addition and Subtraction in their Math pathways programs, assuming they can find “the bandwidth.” What do you think about that, Regent Wint Winter? (Not to be confused with Regent Summ Summer.)

Higher education’s emphasis on enrollment over substance and mission is sadly of a piece with Christian churches’ abandonment of traditional doctrine in favor of a policy of “we must do whatever the hell it takes to put more butts in the pews, no matter how spectacularly amoral and secular.” Hence, we have drag queens flouncing around in our churches and teaching Sunday school. Helps attendance, you see.

What comprises current college curriculum? The classics? Right out. Western Civilization/Canon? Hah, racist/sexist/transphobic! Chemistry? Too hard. Rhetoric? Why? Debate? Triggering! Engineering? A field of endeavor by and for white supremacists! English Literature? I mean, hello, “E-lit” fairly reeks of yesterday’s dead white male patriarchy. Business instruction? Only if all classes are as anti-capitalist as they are anti-racist. An examination of post-modern, intersectional, non-binary, polyamorous, BIPOC poetry, as seen through a lesbian lens? Yeah, baby! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! Good to go! That’s why you spend $50,000 a year to send your kids to college! Is it not?

So what if your kid doesn’t know a constant from a variable? Does anyone really care if their children can understand algebraic expressions, as long as they can express their lived gender?.....................To  Read More.....

Delingpole: Bestselling Author Fired for Mocking Publisher’s Diversity Policy

James Delingpole 13 Jun 2018 @ Brietbart

Publishing giant Penguin Random House has announced that its authors are no longer to be chosen on literary merit but according to a politically correct quota system “taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability”.

This is mad, stupid, and insulting. But not nearly as mad, stupid, and insulting as the decision by the Mslexia Short Story Prize, a literary competition for women authors, to sack one of its judges Lionel Shriver as a punishment for daring to criticise the new policy.

Shriver (who, despite her misleading first name, is a woman) is the American-born, UK-resident novelist best known for her bestseller We Need To Talk About Kevin.

She also has a column in the Spectator which this week she used to mock Penguin Random House’s new diversity policy.

It begins:

I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The email cites the publisher’s ‘new company-wide goal’: for ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’ (Gotta love that shouty boldface.) ‘This means we want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.’ The email proudly proclaims that the company has removed ‘the need for a university degree from nearly all our jobs’ — which, if my manuscript were being copy-edited and proof-read by folks whose university-educated predecessors already exhibited horrifyingly weak grammar and punctuation, I would find alarming.

Then she really gets going:

Drunk on virtue, Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books. Rather, the organisation aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision. Thus from now until 2025, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual preference and crap-education boxes. We can safely infer from that email that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling. Good luck with that business model. Publishers may eschew standards, but readers will still have some.

Eminently sensible stuff. But the diversity police didn’t like it.

In another blast at Shriver in the Independent (formerly a newspaper), an “LBGT screenwriter and filmmaker” called Amrou Al-Kadhi – who specialises “in avant-garde attempts to queer mainstream institutions” – explains why choosing authors on literary merit is homophobic, disablist, sexist, and racist.

How we are taught to judge “good work” is inextricably rooted in the structures of social and racial privilege. Unconscious biases sit at the heart of invisible prejudices, and when we have been fed on a culture defined by the privileged, it leads to a cultural taste of works from the privileged – and so the vicious cycle perpetuates.

Shriver seems to believe that there is some sort of abstract ideal of good-quality writing, but this is a complete and utter fallacy dripping with privilege. This “ideal” no doubt upholds writing that has benefited from a high-quality education, and with this comes the perils of class and racial privilege.

This is the kind of post-modernist, neo-Marxist gobbledegook they teach you at Cambridge (where Amrou Al-Khadi studied). It is of a piece with the campaign being conducted by woke students at Cambridge (Oxford too, unfortunately) to “decolonise” the curriculum, by replacing dead, white male philosophers, writers, historically significant talents you’ve heard of with second-, third-, and fourth-raters you haven’t heard of but who fit the right diversity profile.

One of the many problems with choosing your talent on criteria other than talent is that the people you end up with aren’t necessarily that talented.

Consider as Exhibit A, this open letter to Shriver, purportedly written by the “inaugural cohort of writers from the Penguin Random House WriteNow scheme”.

Shriver seems to view diversity and quality as mutually exclusive categories. We are compelled to ask: does she truly believe that diverse writers are incapable of penning good books? That women of colour are incapable of working editorially? That marketing is a job limited to individuals who identify as cis, white and straight? Does she believe that someone with a disability, or from a working-class background, does not have what it takes to grasp the concepts of plot, dialogue and use of language? If she truly does believe these things, we ought to be having a very different conversation.

That word “seems” is carrying an awful lot of freight.

The letter accuses Shriver of something she never actually said. Besides being sloppy, unobservant, ungenerous, and intellectually dishonest, the letter is also smug, virtue-signalling, self-righteous, pompous, worthy, hectoring, patronising, tendentious, dull, and an absolute torture to read.

If the dreary letter is in any way representative of the stuff we can expect in future from Penguin Random House’s new list of diversity-compliant authors, it doesn’t augur terribly well for their bottom line. The company is co-owned by Bertelsmann (75 percent) and Pearson (25 percent). Glad I don’t own any shares in either…

 

Eisenhower's Less Famous Warning: Government-Controlled Science

By Hank Campbell — December 26, 2017 @ American Council on Science and Health
 

From Dr. Strangelove. Credit: Columbia Pictures

A few times per year we have a meeting of the Trustees of the American Council on Science and Health, to discuss issues like finances (1), to discuss nominees for our Board of Scientific Advisors, and our general direction.
 

Among our Trustees is Fred Smith, the founder of Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which promotes the benefits of free markets. I certainly agree with them on that (2). At our November meeting Fred asked for a spot on the agenda to talk about how we can better talk about science policy without getting into politics.

That is obviously tricky. Science is both corporate and political, when it comes to basic research the private sector and government fund about half each, so if you defend science you are implicitly defending corporations and engaging in politics.

It wasn't always that way. Ernest Lawrence, whose name is now on both Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, ushered in the era of academic Big Science. He found that if you did what government wanted, they would throw money at you. And then you could use some of that money to do what you wanted. It really caught on after the Manhattan Project, which was the ultimate use of government guiding academic research to create applied science. People whose entire labs were funded with less than $20,000 per year saw Lawrence getting hundreds of thousands, and then millions, from Uncle Sam and the race was on: Government was firmly in the science business and academics wanted to be in business with politicians. (3)

Not everyone was pleased by that. Most famous of the concerned about this new control of basic research by the government was President Dwight David Eisenhower - "Ike." Ike was someone so concerned about keeping politics out of strategic resources he refused to vote while he was a military officer. To him, it was a conflict of interest because he was paid by the government. His concern only grew while he was president during the bulk of the 1950s and government took more and more control of science funding. As politicians funded more of it, he believed, academia was going to self-select for those who also believed in big government and it would no longer be non-partisan. And corporations were going to control academic science by controlling politicians. Academics who "play the game" were going to get more funding and head up grant committees and panels. (4)

The concern about the growing "military-industrial complex" from Ike's 1961 farewell address - most alarming because he was a career military man who won War World II in Europe before he became President partly thanks to the military-industrial complex - became part of the cultural lexicon. But less well known is his second warning, about manipulation of academia by political interests, which Fred discussed in 2011 and passed around at our meeting.

President Eisenhower surrounded himself with brilliant academics, he knew that science ended World War II without costing another million American lives, but by 1961 he also knew "we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

He worried about that government control over funding would change the nature of the “free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery.” And it has. If you want to find happiness in academia, find a humanities professor at a small college. If you want to find pressure, go to a biology lab at Johns Hopkins, which needs $300 million a year from the NIH if it's going to put up new buildings and recruit key names who can then raise more money from NIH.
Ike was right about culture as well.

A decade after his speech, academia was still politically balanced and conservatives had the most trust in academic science, but by the 1980s they had begun to self-select for people who liked government funding. They even began to suggest that corporate science - the companies who put men on the moon and develop the vaccines and antibiotics and the GMO insulin that have saved hundreds of millions of lives - meant less independence. Academia meant freedom. You're a liberal because you're just smarter. (5) It's reality that when people know you are partisan, they trust your objectivity less even if you are on their side. Today, only liberals retain historical high levels of trust in the impartial nature of academic science. Conservatives, libertarians, and progressives do not.

But now that tide is turning again. A new generation of science academics are starting on their third post-doc position and questioning the Old Guard's claims that corporate funding is wrong and only government is right and you can't be a scientist unless you are a liberal.

They realize that taxes are finite and that billions of dollars in federal government marketing about STEM careers in academia have led to a glut in Ph.D. supply, and there are academic jobs for just 16 percent of graduating scientists. They have become pawns for scientific-technological elites with little chance of getting a seat at the table, just as President Eisenhower warned.

Given that milieu, how can we discuss policy without getting into partisan politics? It isn't easy.

Virtually 100 percent of health and two-thirds of science policy are dictated by politicians. And it shows. For example, Syngenta makes an herbicide known as atrazine and when the Obama administration came into office, they convened two separate assessments on it to see if it was an endocrine disruptor in frogs.

That was not science, the EPA during the Bush administration had already checked that claim when it got publicity in the New York Times in 2002. That EPA was again forced to revisit the same product twice in just President Obama's first time certainly smacked of politicization of science.

In early 2016, our CDC began promoting a condition termed "prediabetes", which other countries claim is ridiculous, especially at the arbitrary blood sugar level our government chose. The CDC also declared that nicotine won't stop smoking - unless it's in a patch sold by pharmaceutical giants - and that the opioid epidemic was caused by the medical community and pain patients rather than recreational users.

EPA declared that small micron particulate matter was causing acute deaths even though there were none, not even during the entire history of EPA. US Fish and Wildlife Service told a landowner in Louisiana to tear down their forest and build a new one for a frog they declared endangered - in Mississippi. We have to talk about those bad policy decisions if we are going to honor our mandate to be trusted guides for the American public on complex issues.

Government-controlled science may be here to stay but that doesn't mean we have to accept rule by a scientific-technological elite that likes thrives on social authoritarianism. There are 300 members of the American Council on Science and Health Board of Scientific Advisors, and if a scientist or doctor wants to put politics first, they are not participating in our work exposing merchants of doubt who manufacture fears about trace chemicals, food, energy, and medicine.

So you can trust them, and going into our 40th year of separating health scares from health threats, you can be certain we'll continue to earn your trust as well.

NOTES:

(1) Never good - environmentalism is 1000X more lucrative because people send money when they are petrified, but 'your food is safe' is a terrible call to action.

(2) I was in the nascent physics software business when Japan was heavily subsidizing the semiconductor industry. Academics insisted our government needed to also subsidize it or we would "lose leadership" to Japan. I argued that the moment government got involved, RAM was going to cost $1 a MB because historically that was true.

In that same vein, delivering a brutal hit against the government mentality at the National Institutes of Health, Samuel Broder, former Director of the National Cancer Institute, once said, "If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program instead of independent investigator driven discovery, you'd have the best iron lung in the world, but not a polio vaccine."

It has gotten no better today. We are funding a ridiculous "cancer moonshot" without using what made the Apollo program successful - corporations who competed to create the lowest price. The federal government had little to do with it. If you look at the spec for the original Mercury program from the government, it was laughable. Companies made it happen.

(3) And the private sector happily gave way where they could. Why fund expensive basic research, where only 1 in 1,000 things may work out, and put your shareholders at risk when you can get hundreds of millions of taxpayers to do it? Bonus: academics will believe they are more independent if we get government to approve the grant lobbyists said should be the direction of science funding.

(4) He seems to have been right. Look at the outrage when EPA declared that EPA-funded scholars could not be on panels determining EPA policy. Outraged academics did not see it as mitigating an obvious conflict of interest, they ridiculed that EPA did not even want research it funded. Do these same academics also insist corporate scientists be on government committees approving their drugs and chemicals?

(5) At SUNY-Albany Ron McClamrock summed up the common belief, which reached its apex in the mid-2000s. "We outnumber them because academic institutions select for smart people who think their views through; and if you're smart, open-minded, and look into it carefully, you're just more likely to end up with views in the left half of contemporary America. Which is just to say: Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we're just f-ing smarter."

That sentiment is now considered laughable because "lefties" deny the science behind medicine, food, energy and chemicals so reliably you can predict someone's voting habits based on if they buy organic food, supplements, think fracking will cause the earth to deflate, and that BPA is an endocrine disruptor.

The UN Wants to be Our World Government By 2030

By E. Jeffrey Ludwig October 27, 2018

In the 1960s, an informed but naïve undergraduate, I was walking across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania with the Chairman of the Chemistry Department, Prof. Charles C. Price. He told me that he was president of the United World Federalists, and asked if I knew what that organization was. When I said that I did not, he replied that they believed in a one-world government that would grow out of the United Nations. I was nonplussed as I had never heard anyone suggest that idea before. To me, the United Nations was a benevolent organization dedicated to pressuring the world community in the direction of peace, and to operating charitable programs to help the struggling, impoverished peoples of the world. I imagined the UN as a kind of United Way on a worldwide scale.

How would Prof. Price’s vision of a new world government emerge? Although there was a socialistic thread in its founding document, the United Nations was formed based on a vision of human rights presented in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UDHR) which placed the concept of rights at the forefront for the progress of the world body. And rights are the mainstay for uplifting human freedom and the dignity of the individual. The UDHR document followed many amazing documents that presented rights as the central concept of the post-feudal world: the English Declaration (or Bill) of Rights of 1689, the U.S. Declaration of Independence with its important and forceful assertion of inalienable natural rights, the powerful U.S. Bill of Rights enacted in 1791, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789)...............United Nations was formed based on a vision of human rights presented in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UDHR) .............The word “rights” appears in almost every sentence of the 1869-word UN document. The document is literally obsessed with rights ...........To Read More.....

Prof touts 'ecosexuality' as 'environmental activist strategy'

Zachary Petrizzo Aug 30, 2018

 A St. Mary’s College of Maryland professor published a scholarly article exploring how “queer environmentalism” and “ecosexuality” can make environmentalism more appealing.

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies professor Lauran Whitworth wrote “Goodbye Gauley Mountain, hello eco-camp: Queer environmentalism in the Anthropocene,” a study which seeks to convey the “effectiveness of queer environmental ethics in the Anthropocene, a word increasingly used to describe the anthropogenic destruction of ecosystems that marks our current geological era.” The academic journal Feminist Theory published the article.

"Many ecosexuals encourage erotic encounters that are not just nature-friendly but with nature itself."
 

“What do ecosexual encounters with nonhuman nature offer current discussions of environmental ethics?” she asks. “Can ecosexuality’s posthumanist tendencies queer our speciesist modes of belonging and foster an environmentalism that is not foundationally anthropocentric nor steeped in ‘reproductive futurism’?”

“Ecosexuality celebrates the carnal and grotesque, particularly in some of its campiest moments,” Whitworth explains, offering the example that some “wedding performers wear dildos outside their clothing and don costumes that accentuate and exaggerate their genitalia.”...........To Read More.....

Hate speech, bias and intolerance at UDel

Paul Driessen

University of Delaware students, faculty, administrators and trustees must truthfully answer a simple, but important question: Would this conduct have been ignored or excused if the targets had been Muslim?

A recent article by the editor-in-chief of the school’s student newspaper proclaimed “Green Dragon slayer for hire, in a geography department near you: To members of the Cornwall Alliance, environmentalists are satanic ‘Green Dragons,’ sent from the bowels of hell to threaten world order and harm the needy.”

Caleb Owens’ article links tenured UDel geography and climatology professor David Legates and his Christian faith to “far-right American evangelicals,” fossil fuel funding and the “anti-environmentalist” Cornwall Alliance. Legates is pilloried as a “listed speaker and trusted affiliate” of the Alliance.

The article relies heavily on Iliff School of Theology sociology professor Antony Alumkal, whose book Paranoid Science Owens asserts “charts the long and complicated relationship between science and the American Christian evangelical movement, examining the intra-religious tensions that have accompanied various strands of science denial, including the intelligent design and anti-environmental movements.”

Expanding on this, Owens falsely claims “far-right American evangelicals have been responsible for some of the most radical opposition to scientific positions regarding topics such as climate change and evolution, working in close tandem with secular free-market idealogues.” [sic]

“To find religious justification for their activity,” he says, “Christian anti-environmentalists” and groups like Cornwall “claim a specific literal interpretation of Genesis, finding free market justification in passages that describe God giving humans unrestricted reign over [the] earth. According to the interpretation, God granted humans dominion over the planet and the license to exert power over earth’s resources. From here, environmentalist attempts to regulate fossil fuel use, for instance, stand contrary to man’s God-given destiny.”

Underscoring his bias and intolerance, a cartoon accompanying the article depicts a cute, frightened green dragon carrying a “recycle” placard being attacked by members of a Christian mob dressed in nineteenth century garb straight out of a Frankenstein movie, and brandishing a cross, torch and pitchfork.

In his imagined coup de grace ,Owens claims that “groups like” Cornwall have received “indirect” funding from fossil fuel companies, such as Exxon Mobil – and “government officials and climate activist groups have questioned Legates’ funding and motivations, possibly traceable to fossil fuel industries.”

Owens didn’t even give his target organization its proper name, and clearly didn’t review its actual policy and religious positions. I’ve co-authored articles with Professor Legates and know him, the organization, Cornwall founder and national spokesman Calvin Beisner, and many of its staff and advisors very well.

First off, it’s the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

Those final four words underscore what this fine organization is, what it stands for – and how disingenuous Owens’ article is.

In no way does Cornwall or anyone affiliated with it promote or condone “unrestricted reign” over our Earth or a license to exploit its resources without legal or regulatory constraints. They hold that people are integral and rightful inheritors and stewards of our planet, with a God-given right to utilize its energy and other resources to nourish and sustain humanity – responsibly, for this and future generations.

“Godly dominion,” Beisner explains, “means enhancing the fruitfulness, beauty and safety of the Earth, to the glory of God and benefit of our neighbors and humanity. Because humans are imperfect, and some take impermissible advantage of opportunities, government rules against fraud, theft, violence, pollution, and harm to other people’s health and property are necessary and proper restrictions on our dominion.”

Nor is Cornwall anti-environment or against environmental groups, though it definitely opposes extremist forms of environmentalism. Cornwall’s DVD lecture series “Resisting the Green Dragon” makes that distinction and, as Beisner notes, clearly and persuasively explains that “much radical environmentalism is indeed an alternative to the Christian religion, is thus acceptably termed ‘pagan’ in its nature-focused views. It also often does indeed strive to establish a powerful, dominant one-world government.”

The “Green Dragon” DVD series prompted the title for the Owens article, and some of its misguided criticisms. In his own Dragon lecture, Legates says segments of the scientific community improperly engage in “post-normal science,” altering or distorting facts to advance political goals. Owens suggests that this is not happening and claims Legates is in denial about human-caused climate change.

However, even Dr. Mike Hulme, a former member of the IPCC and University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (and an evangelical Christian), said post-normal science focuses on “the process of science – who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy makers” – rather than on what should be an honest, transparent, evidence-based scientific method. Hulme called the IPCC “a classic example.”

Moreover, like many other scientists, Legates has explicitly affirmed that climate change is frequent and recurring, and people play a role, especially at local levels but even on global scales. What he denies is that carbon dioxide emissions are the primary driver and manmade change is likely to become disastrous.

All this puts Cornwall at odds with political activist groups that use sustainability and climate change to justify their positions against fossil fuels and economic development. All people, Cornwall says, should be able to develop the natural resources needed to maintain or improve their health and wellbeing.

It is especially immoral to tell Earth’s most destitute, diseased, malnourished, energy-deprived countries and families that they can improve their ghastly situations only at the margins. Or only to the extent that they can do so only with renewable energy – and without fossil fuels, genetically engineered crops like Golden Rice, insecticides to combat disease-carrying insects, and other technologies that wealthier nations have used to give billions of people living standards that few could even dream of a century ago.

Caring, ethical students, universities, environmental groups and people of faith do not politicize or pervert “sustainable development” concepts in ways that ignore the needs of current generations. They do not say people living today must refrain from using natural resources, based on completely unpredictable raw material requirements of completely unpredictable, constantly evolving future technologies. They do not seek to protect people from exaggerated future dangers that exist mostly in bald assertions, questionable science and computer models – while perpetuating dangers that are very real, even lethal, right now.

Caring, ethical people do not condemn fossil fuel, nuclear and even hydroelectric energy, while promoting energy that is land-intensive, destructive to wildlife and habitats, expensive, weather dependent, unpredictable, sporadic, and completely inadequate to power modern industrialized economies, lift people out of poverty – or even manufacture more wind, solar and biofuel installations.

These principles put David Legates and the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation firmly on the side of humanity, evidence-based science, and mainstream environmental and Christian thinking.

Finally, as to funding, Legates and Beisner have told me neither they nor Cornwall ever received “one dime” from any fossil fuel company. Owens’ slick, crafty suggestions that they did could have meant he has a job waiting for him at MSNBC – except that the claims are libelous, especially in the context of the headline claim that Legates is “for hire” by Cornwall or an oil company. (Meanwhile, six progressive-climate alarmist religious groups received over $3 million in nine years from liberal foundations, some of which have clear financial stakes in renewable energy policies. Why is there no problem with that?)

The University of Delaware cannot let this biased, deceitful, defamatory hate speech go unchallenged – especially in an official campus newspaper, housed in a UDel building, funded by Delaware taxpayers.

Imagine the outrage it would have generated if the professor’s conservative, environmental and climate views were rooted in the Koran and his Muslim faith. Or the cartoon had featured a woman in a hijab and a bearded man waving a banner emblazoned with a star inside a crescent moon.

And it’s not just the double standards. This is yet another attempt to intimidate and silence unwelcome voices on campuses. It has to end – and be replaced by open, robust, respectful, tolerant free speech for all.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for theCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT,org ) and author of articles and books on energy, climate change, carbon dioxide and economic development

This ancient Chinese tomb held a royal, her extinct ape — and a warning

Ben Guarino

A long-forgotten species of ape has been found buried in a 2,300-year-old tomb. It's a type of gibbon, which scientists named Junzi imperialis. Gibbons are the smallest apes, chatty and as lanky-limbed as Kermit the Frog. They're also more closely related to humans than they are to any monkey. And humans, the scientists say, are the likely agents of these gibbons' extinction.............Turvey scanned the gibbon bones and sent the images to Chatterjee. With their students, the scientists began to pick apart the gibbon's features. Their analysis “revealed it to be significantly different from living gibbons,” Chatterjee said. All of these features combined, the authors say, make a strong case that the gibbon is not just a new species but a new genus. (A genus, you'll recall, ranks above a species — it's the Homo in Homo sapiens.)

Living gibbons are split into 20 species over four genera. What's more critical, in Garber's mind, is the gibbon's extinction………To Read More…..

My Take - Okay, they're predicting doom again. Thirty years has passed since Dr. Hanson told Congress and the world we had less than thirty years to fix Anthropogenic Global Warming or we were doomed. One thing we need to understand is when these "experts" spout doom and gloom it has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Rachel Carson predicted everyone was going to contract cancer due to pesticides and chemicals in general. That didn't happen either. The other thing we need to understand is extinction is the rule not the exception. Over 95% of all species that's ever lived have gone extinct. We're told the world is so biologically interconnected that the loss of one species will doom the world.  Baloney!  Name one disaster that occurred when this ape went extinct. You can't because there wasn't one.  We didn't even know it existed before this their loss was so meaningless- and yet - we're still here. For that matter, name one disaster that was ever created by the loss of any of the millions of species that's ceased to exist. You can't! Why? Because there wasn't any. Environmental disasters create extinctions. Extinctions don't create environmental disasters.

As for mankind being responsible ...... how do they know that? They don't! That's why they weasel word that position by saying humans are "likely" responsible. So why did they say that? They have no evidence. But just like Pavlov's dogs they only have preconditioned responses created by group think in that echo chamber of arrogant self righteous head nodders known as academia.

University sued after censuring a scientist for criticizing great barrier reef alarmism

February 1, 2018 by Michael Bastasch, 1 Comment @ CFACT

 

            

Professor Peter Ridd, a noted coral reef expert, is suing an Australian university for violating his academic freedom by censuring him for being critical of research hyping the “death” of the Great Barrier Reef.
James Cook University, where Ridd works, issued a “final censure” against the geophysicist for not acting in a “collegial” manner during an August interview with Sky News over the quality of science on the Great Barrier Reef.

This isn’t the first time James Cook University has censured Ridd for being critical of scientists hyping the “death” of the Great Barrier Reef. But this time, Ridd is fighting back.


Ridd has filed suit against his employer, arguing they are violating his academic freedom. Ridd said the censure “is unacceptable” and “flies in the face of my instinct for truth and honesty, and my academic freedom,” according to a GoFundMe.com page to raise money for his legal fight.

 The whole controversy started in 2016 when a strong El Nino warming event pushed up ocean temperatures surrounding the Great Barrier Reef, causing a massive bleaching event that consumed much of its northern reaches.
 

Scientists studying the reef came out with studies warning the bleaching had affected 93 percent of the reef, and follow-up studies claimed 67 percent of northern shallow reefs had died. The news coverage only heightened the alarm, pointing the finger at man-made global warming.

ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies put out some of the more alarming studies on the reef that got the most media coverage. ARC reef expert Terry Hughes was quoted in many papers warning about the impacts of global warming.

“Climate change is not a future threat,” Hughes told The New York Times last year. “On the Great Barrier Reef, it’s been happening for 18 years.”

 Ridd criticized the quality of ARC’s research in an interview with Sky News in August 2017. Ridd was invited to come on air to discuss a chapter he wrote for the book “Climate Change: The Facts 2017,” which was published by the Institute of Public Affairs, an Aussie think tank.
 

“The basic problem is that we can no longer trust the scientific organisations like the Australian Institute of Marine Science, even things like the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies – a lot of this is stuff is coming out, the science is coming out not properly checked, tested or replicated and this is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions and the fact is I do not think we can any more,” Ridd told Sky News.

“I think that most of the scientists who are pushing out this stuff they genuinely believe that there are problems with the reef,” Ridd said. “I just don’t think they’re very objective about the science they do, I think they’re emotionally attached to their subject and you know you can’t blame them, the reef is a beautiful thing.”

James Cook University said Ridd’s comments denigrated the university’s reputation, despite no individual researchers being mentioned nor the fact that Ridd worked for the school.

“At no point in my Sky News interview did I name the university where I work or any of my colleagues. Nor did I make any statements which I believe to be untrue,” Ridd wrote on his fundraising page.

Ridd said his comments in the interview were based on peer-reviewed research he published and are shared by other experts in the field.

“My point was about academic integrity and scientific research, which I am entitled to make under the intellectual freedom provisions of my employment agreement,” Ridd said.

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This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller