Self-Righteous Cant And It's Dangers

What a Wunnerful World

A serious problem has come to light in the Tasman District Council.  We salute Tasman District councillor Dana Wensley who is in the midst of a thorough going expose.  What is the problem?  It is the alleged bias of some books contained in the library.  

Some books about the Treaty of Waitangi on the shelves of Tasman District libraries are "very right-wing extremist", says Tasman District councillor Dana Wensley.  Some material “that I know we've got in our library ... is by a publisher that is not academically robust," Wensley last week told a meeting of the council operations committee.

“There's a number of these books in our library that are actually very worrying to me because they're free of charge,” she said. “The academic presses are more expensive for those books to buy but I think there's something to us having a mind to making sure that material in our library that has gone through that academic rigour of peer review is readily accessible.”

Wensley said she was concerned people were “picking up these books on our shelves that are very right-wing extremist ... and I think we should have zero tolerance for that”.

Material in the Tasman District Council library must be approved by approved people. If they are not thus approved by approved people it is likely that some books will contain unapproved bias--and clearly we should have ZERO TOLERANCE for that.

No More Chinese Propaganda in the Telegraph

Enough Said

British Newspaper Finally Stops Publishing Paid Propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party

Kurt Zindulka
Breitbart London

A leading British newspaper has decided to stop running paid propaganda articles from a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) amidst a global effort by the regime in Beijing to influence Western opinion on the Wuhan virus pandemic.

The Daily Telegraph has removed its longstanding ‘China Watch’ section, which the paper has run for over ten years. The segment featured propaganda articles from the Chinese state-sponsored media outlet China Daily. Another part which ran articles from the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, has been removed as well.

According to The Guardian, some examples of articles that have since been deleted by the paper include: “Why are some framing China’s heroic efforts to stop coronavirus as inhumane?”; “Traditional Chinese medicine ‘helps fight coronavirus'”; and “Coronavirus outbreak is not an opportunity to score points against China”.

It Aint True--And Never Has Been

Alarmists Propose Rebranding ‘Climate Change’

Seek Greater "Shock Value" While Truth Flies Out the Window

Thomas Williams
Breitbart News


Climate change alarmists are pushing for a change in vocabulary to scare people into taking global warming more seriously, starting with terms like “global meltdown” and “climate collapse.”
Writing for AdAge this week, Aaron Hall argues that in order to get people to “take action” against climate change, “rebranding” is crucial, since people have gotten too used to the idea that climate is changing and need to be shocked into the notion that the world as we know it is ending.

“Is there a better way to convey the urgency of the situation, while also encouraging folks to take action? Could the tools of branding and brand naming create a more resonant, powerful name?” Mr. Hall asks.  What he and his marketing team came up with was a series of much more frightening labels to stick on climate change in the hope of jolting people into meaningful engagement.

Very, Very Strange

Theresa May's Words Evoke the Style of Soviet Propaganda

For our readers who remain deeply puzzled over the antics of British Prime Minister, Theresa May we commend your attention to a couple of articles by John O'Sullivan of the National Review.

In the first article entitled "Theresa May’s Brexit Plan Is Likely to Hit the Wall"  O'Sullivan addresses May's strange, almost Soviet-like contradiction between her words and reality.

The prime minister has tried to trick Brits into believing that her Brexit is the one they voted for.  On December 11, after a year of secret negotiations and political prestidigitation (or conjuring), Theresa May’s attempt to craft a Brexit will be put to its final test.  . . .

In keeping with the progress of May’s very own, very own Brexit so far, this final test is now said by the Downing Street smoke-and-mirrors machine to be only the first final step, because May’s EU deal now seems likely to end in a Commons defeat. That defeat, if it happens, will be mainly at the hands of rebels from her own party.

. . . . There is some debate as to whether May maneuvered herself into this position or was maneuvered by others into it. She says the latter. The WA ["Withdrawal Agreement"] is the Brexit she always wanted. Also, it’s taken most of the year for the consequences of her Brexit strategy to play out. In fact, they haven’t fully played out yet. Given the strong coalition of Cabinet Remainers, establishment worthies, and media enterprises supporting a less-than-Brexit outcome, or even an outright Remain, we can’t rule out a come-from-behind victory for May, the EU, and their WA deal. But it seems unlikely for two reasons.

Censorship and Media Manipulation in Gaza, Part I

Hamas In Control

A couple of days ago we posted a piece on the strategy of Hamas in the recent turmoil in Gaza.  Further to that theme, we direct your attention to an article in The Atlantic back in November 2014 by Matti Friedman, then a member of the "Press Corps" covering Israel.  

That year was in the midst of yet another "Gaza War".  The "War" has began again: same issues, same actors, same duplicity, and same prejudice on the part of the media covering the events.  They are now the "useful idiots" on the scene, to take up Lenin's alleged phrase.

During the Gaza war this summer, it became clear that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.

An essay I wrote for Tablet on this topic in the aftermath of the war sparked intense interest. In the article, based on my experiences between 2006 and 2011 as a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news organizations, I pointed out the existence of a problem and discussed it in broad terms. Using staffing numbers, I illustrated the disproportionate media attention devoted to this conflict relative to other stories, and gave examples of editorial decisions that appeared to be driven by ideological considerations rather than journalistic ones. I suggested that the cumulative effect has been to create a grossly oversimplified story—a kind of modern morality play in which the Jews of Israel are displayed more than any other people on earth as examples of moral failure. This is a thought pattern with deep roots in Western civilization. [Matti Friedman, The Atlantic.]

He goes on to describe the incestuous relationships between the omni-present NGO's, the media and  the UN in Israel.  This leads to an institutional blindness to the activist roles played by NGO's and the UN.  It is only recently that some "bad press" has emerged on the immorality and moral depredations of the staff of organizations like Oxfam.

Confusion over the role of the press explains one of the strangest aspects of coverage here—namely, that while international organizations are among the most powerful actors in the Israel story, they are almost never reported on. Are they bloated, ineffective, or corrupt? Are they helping, or hurting? We don’t know, because these groups are to be quoted, not covered. Journalists cross from places like the BBC to organizations like Oxfam and back. The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man. A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office, and was close friends with a few reporters I know. And so forth.

These organizations long ago ceased to be "neutrals"; rather they became partisan actors doing the bidding of the Islamic extremists in the region.

Why Has Gaza Got All Wound Up Again?

Human Shields

Gaza is in the news once again.  It is not the first time.  It will almost certainly not be the last.  What we see on display--as we have so many times before--is the ruthless, hate-filled machinations of Hamas, using its own population as human shields.  

To be sure, when the citizens of Gaza get on the bus and ride to the border fence with Israel, then start storming the fence, they are face to face with deadly force that could well kill them.  But what you don't see is armed Hamas guerrilla fighters up front and centre.  That is not the objective.  Their objective has a propaganda point to make.  Their citizens are little more than "useful idiots".  The objective of Hamas is to isolate Israel and turn the rest of the world into an Israel-hating phalanx in the hope that Israel will be ultimately be destroyed.

Just how much the civilian bus-riders believe in Hamas and its violent extremism is hard to tell. What is clear us us is that Hamas could not care a fig for the citizens it is supposed to protect and nurture.  Using them as human shields and front-line cannon fodder does not really fit the bill of protecting and nurturing.

Global Warming Junk Science

How Global Warming Became the Biggest #FakeNews Scare of All Time (Part 2)

James Delingpole
Breitbart News

Here is this week’s latest eructations in "Climate Stupid" Groupthink:

Let’s “solve” climate change by halting economic growth, argues a paper from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, published in Nature Climate Change.

Texas Tech professor Katharine Hayhoe tells a summit in Edmonton, Canada that climate change is “the greatest humanitarian crisis of our times”; confides how shocked she was on discovering, six months into her marriage, that her husband did not believe in global warming. “You have somebody you respect and you also love and you also want to stay married. I said well, ‘Let’s talk about it.’” Apparently it took two years to convince him.

Activists at Cambridge University warn of “large scale disruption” if the university’s £6.3 billion endowment fund ignores their demands that it should divest itself of its fossil fuel investment holdings.

An ex-White-House staffer from the Obama era tells Washingtonian  about the time her date with a man came to a sudden end when he said he didn’t believe in global warming: “I started laughing, because I’m from Colorado and didn’t realize people actually didn’t believe in global warming. But he was serious.”

Climate industrial complex in UK has wasted £100 billion and shut down debate to no useful purpose, warns Peter Lilley – one of Margaret Thatcher’s former ministers.

‘Stop blaming both sides for America’s climate failures’, argues Guardian columnist. ‘The fault lies entirely with the GOP.’

‘Blame consumers not China for climate change‘, warns Clinton-Climate-Initiative-backed pressure group.

I could go on but I wouldn’t want to bore you. Or myself. When you’ve been covering the climate/environment/energy beat for as long as I have, every day is Groundhog Day. Every day it’s the same bunch of troughers, spivs, second-raters, crooks, liars, half-wits, chancers, bottom-feeders and eco-fascists churning out the same old propaganda.

Western Intelligentsia and the New Jerusalem

Omelettes, Eggshells, and Propaganda

We have commented upon this subject before--yet in our view it is a topic which needs to be revisited constantly, lest (as the saying goes) we forget.  We have in mind the near wholesale acceptance of the Left in the UK in the 1920's and 30's to the propaganda issuing forth from Soviet Russia.  

Strikingly, these are the very same folk whom the media, and the establishment viewed as the intelligentsia of the country.  It is one of the most degrading instances of "groupthink" seen in modern times.  Here was Uncle Joe, systematically grinding the bones of millions of people in his beloved Gulags, whilst the clever, educated, and sophisticated elites in the United Kingdom clapped and cheered the Soviet Union as representing the great promise and glorious future of mankind.

Many of these sophisticated folk believed Marxist doctrine, of course.  In 1929, the great stockmarket crash was followed by the Depression.  This, to many a Marxist mind in the UK, confirmed the Marxist dialectic: capitalism would fall apart to be replaced by the reign of the working classes, the Proletariat.

Communism . . . especially after the Wall Street Crash, attracted many intellectuals, not a few with public-school, Tory and Oxbridge backgrounds, dazzled by the contrast between a "successful" Soviet Russia and a faltering capitalist world.  The Communist Party never attracted more than a few thousand full members in England, but progressives--led by an elite of economists, political scientists, composers, actors, artists and writers--hailed Moscow as the New Jerusalem.  [Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), p. 672.]

It is not that all these talking heads were unaware of the horror and oppression, the famines and the cannibalism.  Many were, but rationalised them away as being little more than teething problems.  H. G. Wells went further and admitted the Soviet Union's  permanent Terror, yet he still believed that the Soviet Union represented the glorious future of mankind.  The USSR remained "something splendid and hopeful".

Tombs continues the indictment:

More Climate Change Charlatans

The Ugly Truth About that Dying Polar Bear

James Delingpole
BreitbartNews




Have you seen the footage of that dying polar bear yet?  It’s sad. Very sad. You can see why it has gone viral and been all over the media from the Mail (“soul-crushing footage”) to CBC to the Washington Post (“we stood there crying”).

It’s the kind of sad thing you want to share it with your friends so they can wallow in the same pool of helpless misery you’re wallowing in.  For example, that bit where the emaciated bear reaches with his sad paw into that rusting trash can in search of something, anything, to eat. As you watch, you want so desperately to help him….

The footage was filmed on Baffin Island in Canada. Surely, if you or I had been there, we could have found something edible to push that stricken bear’s way: maybe a visiting delegation of performance poets, abstract artists and avant-garde musicians who arrived by antique sailing ship on a Rockefeller-Foundation-funded arts project to “raise awareness” of melting icecaps; or a group of Greenpeace activists(aren’t bears attracted by strong smells?) on a No To Arctic Drilling protest; or one of the plethora of explorers on another of those deep and meaningful eco-expeditions, sponsored by one of those big reinsurance companies whose business model largely depends on scaring potential clients into thinking global warming is a serious problem.

OK, perhaps I shouldn’t be so flippant. Watching a once-mighty beast in its death throes is never a pretty sight.  I’ll tell you what’s a lot uglier, though: the way that polar bear’s death has been completely misrepresented for political ends by the usual suspects in the climate alarmism lobby.

The Ironies of Free Trade

Free Trade and Intellectual Freedom Don't Mix--Apparently

It seems that for at least some Chinese students studying abroad, a Western education is not all it's cracked up to be.  Chinese students are not used to basic human rights such as freedom of speech, liberty of thought and conscience.  When confronted with views and opinions which are implicitly critical of the Chinese regime or contrary to its propaganda, often Chinese students are alarmed and disturbed by such heretical notions.

Tensions are rising at some Australian universities amid concerns that the Chinese government is infiltrating teaching methods across the faculties, according to a report from news.com.au.

The concerns have arisen after multiple incidents of Chinese students demanding changes to teaching methods, as well as demanding apologies from lecturers about the way they explore certain topics. The trend has led to concern across Australia of the growing threat of the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian ideology infiltrating universities and potentially influencing other students.

Some students have even posted footage online of lecturers going against the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology.  Last week, a student at the Chinese University of Newcastle uploaded footage of him arguing with a lecturer who referred to Hong Kong and Taiwan as independent countries.  “You are making us feel uncomfortable,” the student tells business professor Nimay Khaliani. “You have to consider all the students.”  “Exactly, all the students, not one set of students,” replied Khaliani. [Breitbart]

No doubt the Chinese government will attempt to put pressure on Australian schools and universities via the much vaunted free-trade agreement between Australia and China.  We anticipate the exchange will go something like this.

Media Effluent

She Was Just a Concerned Random

Some years ago when we were foolish enough to take courses on media at Auckland University we were informed that journalists were generally lazy.  Rather than being both investigators and reporters they tended, as a group, to dress up press releases as if they were the produce of an independent investigation by the media.  Rather cynical, non?  Let's see.

It's school holiday season in New Zealand, so public libraries are full of school aged children.  Apparently one lady believes that's a terrible indictment upon our society.

Libraries are being inundated with unsupervised children during the school holidays.  Clendon woman Therese Luxton said her local library is teeming with unsupervised kids who have been dropped off by parents who can't afford childcare.  She said she met a "very frazzled" librarian who said they were being used as a free babysitting service. Children had come without food and the librarians had not budgeted for food.

"After returning to the library with bags of feijoas I was met at the library door, by an unattended little chap who was all of six," Luxton said.  "He asked for a bag with no hesitation at all and took it by himself with a bag on his back."  Luxton believed this was the consequence of expensive child-minding which resulted in the over-extension of a community facility having to double as a social agency.  [NZ Herald]

So far we have been led to believe that a random person, called Therese Luxton, is making a general complaint that libraries are full of unsupervised children.  This lady believes (apparently) that it is due to parents not being able to afford childcare for their kids during school holidays.  Implication: the gummint is ultimately at fault.

Who is Therese Luxton, we hear you ask?

Elephants in the Room

A Big Begged Question

The following piece was recently republished in Patterico.  Whilst Mr Sullivan is not a reliable guide in all things, the following excerpts below are right on point.  

Our old friend Andrew Sullivan seems to be trying on his conservative hat once again. In a column at New York magazine titled “Why Do Democrats Feel Sorry for Hillary Clinton” (a sensible essay, if fairly predictable), he includes an interesting criticism of people who have apparently been trying to spin the whole United Airlines kerfuffle as a battle in the social justice wars:

Do you know the real reason Dr. Dao was so brutally tackled and thrown off that United flight? It was all about white supremacy. I mean, what isn’t these days?

Greenies Don't Do Science

Only Gullible Fools Believe that the Great Barrier Reef Is Dying

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon

The Great Barrier Reef is dead. It has ceased to be, expired and gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and gone to join the bleedin’ choir invisible. It is an Ex Great Barrier Reef.  Well, at least it is if you believe the left-wing media such as the Guardian, which claims today that the reef is at “terminal stage” because of damage allegedly caused by “climate change”.

Lots of eco loons have been rending their garments and throwing their (recyclable, organic, gluten-free) toys out of the pram in horror at this hideous disaster.

But it’s OK. As I keep trying to explain here to anyone who’ll listen – and obviously, also, to annoy the greenies – is that the Great Barrier Reef isn’t in the remotest danger.

Career Suicide

Did the Obama White House Collude with a Politically Motivated Scientist?

A former scientist at the NOAA has exposed a shoddy report on global warming. Judicial Watch is suing to learn more.

By Julie Kelly
National Review Online

Following allegations of impropriety over the handling of a controversial climate change report, a government watchdog group now wants to know whether there was any collaboration between the report’s lead author and a key Obama adviser. On March 27, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit seeking “all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement.”

The FOIA specifically requests correspondence between Tom Karl, the former head of the climate-data program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and John Holdren, the director of Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren is from that species of Baby Boomer global catastrophists who make changing predictions each decade about how we will all die. He also happens to be the science guy who had the president’s ear for eight years.

Holdren’s buddy, Tom Karl, authored a report in 2015 attempting to disprove the hiatus in global warming that had been widely acknowledged by many scientific groups, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The warming pause threatened to undermine the justification for a costly climate-change pact that was being negotiated at the time: How could world leaders commit trillions in tax dollars to stop global warming if it wasn’t actually happening?

Karl’s report came to the rescue just months before the Paris Climate Conference. In announcing his findings, Karl said the “new analysis suggests that the apparent hiatus may have been largely the result of limitations in past datasets, and that the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century.” How convenient. His analysis was eagerly accepted by the international science community, but others were leery about its timing; the House Science Committee has been leading an inquiry into the report for nearly two years.

But a retired top official at NOAA has now confirmed suspicions about the veracity of Karl’s research and about whether politics — not science — were at play.

Peter Hitchens Letter From the UK

Amid the Bombs of Aleppo 

All you can hear are the lies

Peter Hitchens's
Mail on Sunday column

I AM the opposite of a war junkie. I loathe the sound of fireworks because they remind me of a bloody night in Lithuania in January 1991, where I lay down in dirty snow to save my skin from Soviet bullets. I was also frozen with fright in lawless, gang-ruled Mogadishu in December 1992, waiting for US marines to arrive.

In Bucharest at Christmas 1989, I crawled under the bed as tracer fire whizzed past my hotel-room window, and – because my long-delayed call home came through just then – I dictated my account of events to my wife. No heroics for me, thanks.

I was in all these dreadful places by accident. I never meant to be there. I take great care not to get caught in such things again.   But I learned a bit from it, mostly that the old cliche ‘the first casualty of war is truth’ is absolutely right, and should be displayed in letters of fire over every TV and newspaper report of conflict, for ever.

Almost nothing can be checked.

Letter From the UK (About The Baddest of Bad Taste)

Exploiting Jo Cox's Murder

I want Jo's killer to hang. The Left want to use him for propaganda 

Peter Hitchens
Daily Mail Australia

I think the man who murdered Jo Cox MP should be hanged. I think it a great pity that we no longer have this powerful deterrent against cruel violence.  So let no Leftist propagandist try to smear me as an apologist for her killer, whose dishonoured name I shan’t even repeat here in case he relishes his notoriety.

But I am repelled and disturbed by the attempt to pretend that this deranged, muttering creep was in any way encouraged or licensed to kill a defenceless, brave young mother, by the campaign to leave the European Union.

Of all the low, dishonest tricks used by Remainers in this continuing contest, this slimy innuendo is the worst.

Useful Deceits

The Short Answer is No

The "Climate Change" catastrophe has become boring.  It's hard for folk to maintain a sense of deadly danger, as if perpetually perched on the edge of a cliff, adrenaline pumping through twitchy veins, whilst a maw of jagged rocks below awaits our flailing descent.   That kind of fear cannot be sustained.  Exhaustion quickly follows.  

So it has come to pass that the world finds itself exhausted over the "catastrophe" of climate change.  To be sure, the climate isn't helping us.  There's plenty of ice at both polar caps.  Temperatures are all over the place.  Meanwhile life goes on.

We are now entering the theatrical phase of the fight against anthropogenic global warming.  Governments all around the world are reduced to going through the motions of trying to get rid of carbon dioxide.

Propaganda Justified in a Good Cause

Awash With Fallacious Deceit

Liar, liar pants on fire.  It seems we live in a world when parsimonious truthfulness is the norm.  Whether it's zealots pushing the global warming apocalypse or partisans pushing "public health" causes, the order of the day is dissembling and lies.  A lot of this sort of stuff comes spewing forth from overpaid academics who could not identify a fallacious argument if it came up and introduced itself.

Thus, as an exemplar of the genre, consider a "scientist" from Otago University who claimed that new, groundbreaking research "proved" that alcohol consumption led to cancer.  Well, actually, the proof rested on the fallacy of co-incidence being confused with causation, otherwise known as the "fallacy of false cause".

Professor Jennie Connor, of the University of Otago Medical School in New Zealand, reviewed recent studies and found alcohol is estimated to have caused 500,000 deaths since 2012, which is 5.8 per cent of all cancer deaths.  She said: "There is strong evidence that alcohol causes cancer at seven sites, and probably others." She added the risks are reduced for some cancers when people stop drinking altogether.  The supposed health benefits of drinking - such as red wine being good for the heart - were "seen increasingly as disingenuous or irrelevant in comparison to the increase in risk of a range of cancers."  [NZ Herald]

Here is an academic in search of a sensational headline probably with the intent to generate more funding for her activities.  Meanwhile, another academic, equally in search of headlines and funding, put forward the argument that ninety percent of  males who died from cancer wore trousers.  Ergo, male attire was carcinogenic. The research and data are infallible.

The SS Global Warming Is On the Verge of Sinking

The Turning of the Tide?

David Siegel is a convert to global warming scepticism. He is one of the lefty-cool set.  After extensive secondary source research he has concluded that global warming is a charade perpetrated upon the masses by an elite few.  He has written a very well reasoned and presented piece laying out his reasons for his paradigm shift from global warming advocate to principled sceptic.  

The entire essay is worth a calm, reflective read.  You can access it here.

If you want the short version, his concluding remarks provide an effective summary of his entire article:

The Great Squirmarama

Propaganda

We have blogged about the squirmarama underway with liberals trying to defend the Planned Parenthood videos, showing the secret and illegal trade in illicit baby body parts.  Front and central is the claim that the videos were "doctored". 

Yes, it's now been proven by an independent party.  The videos were indeed edited.  There are some parts that have been edited out.  Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and the gang are insisting that the whole nation be allowed to see the parts which put Planned Parenthood in a far more positive light. 

5 Shocking Scenes The Planned Parenthood Video Creator Doesn’t Want You To See

A forensic audit reveals what was left on the cutting room floor.

September 29, 2015 By Mollie Hemingway

The Federalist

In late August, Planned Parenthood officials released a report they paid a shady Democratic opposition research firm to produce. The report focused on the scandalous videos showing high-level Planned Parenthood officials engaged in the fetal organ harvesting trade. Unlike the videos themselves, the report was quickly and credulously covered by the Washington Post, NPR, Politico and the New York Times, and claimed that the videos were missing key footage. Here’s how NPR put it: