Students Take Picture With Confederate Battle Flag, People Freak And Want Something Done

By William Teach May 7, 2015 – 7:05 am

Offended. I see that Memeorandum has a big pull from ABC11 here in the Triangle. entitled “CONFEDERATE FLAG PHOTO UPSETS CHAPEL HILL STUDENTS” (love the all caps), but, I like the WRAL article better

Chapel Hill man says daughter’s controversial photo taken ‘out of context’

The father of a student at East Chapel Hill High School said Wednesday that his daughter did not mean to offend anyone in late April when she posted a photo to social media of two Confederate flags with the caption “South will rise.”

(Photo from the ABC11 article)

A contentious scene unfolded outside the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools offices Wednesday morning when Ronald Creatore arrived to defend his daughter and ask questions of concerned students, parents and community members who were holding a news conference to call for punishment in the incident. Creatore said the meaning of his daughter’s post was taken out of context.

Remember that in bold for a few minutes

The picture was taken during a school trip to the Gettysburg National Battlefield, and it was uploaded to the photo-sharing mobile app Instagram.

A comment on the photo reading “Already bought my first slave” also drew criticism from many students and parents at the school, including Creatore, who said it was unacceptable.

The daughter wrote an apology

“I’m sorry that my picture offended people and especially since my initial caption (that I changed once I realized people took it seriously), but I’m currently on the Civil War trip learning about the history of our country and this just so happens to be a pretty (expletive) important part of it. We were reenacting Pickett’s charge in which the South lost 85% of their soldiers. These aren’t the Confederate flags in fact, they’re the North Carolina regimental flags. I’m proud to be a part of my state and I’m sorry my photo was so offensive but I find it appropriate in that I’m honoring heroes that fought to protect their home and families. Thanks though.”

We can debate the meaning of the flag, which, really, I understand has negative connotations to Blacks, but, to most whites, especially in the South, it simply stands for Southern pride and freedom from a powerful Central government, and has nothing to do with hatred of Blacks. Not all Confederates were pro-slavery, nor were all Union soldiers anti-slavery. Most Confederates had nothing to do with slavery, and couldn’t have cared less. Different mindsets from different races. But, certainly, the comment about “buying first slave” is beyond the pale, but wasn’t written by the students in the picture. At least no article has made that claim.

Many who were offended are trying to turn this into a racism issue, and that is their right. Even though these are young kids who are young kids (and, strangely, have been stuck in an uber-liberal education system).

What we do have, though, is calls for punishment because people are Offended, despite no law being broken, unless we want to consider Thought Crime laws. This is law by mob rule. This is Rule Of Men, rather than Rule Of Law. People should be very concerned by this trend, where the Law is arbitrary. Because those calling for punishment could be the next recipient if they Offend someone.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Superintendent Tom Forcella told WRAL that the students are not likely to be punished because it does not fall under the system’s definition of cyberbullying.

In fact, the person who seems to be the recipient of bullying, both cyber and real world, is the daughter. There are some seriously nasty comments written about her at Talking Points Memo and Raw Story, among others. Parents screaming at the girls about “white privilege” is abusive and bullying. Calling for the girl to be arbitrarily punished for Offending is bullying and abusive.

You have a right to be offended. You don’t have a right to criminalize being offended.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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Salon Totally Tells Us How To School Climate Deniers

By William Teach May 6, 2015 – 7:42 pm

We’re like, so burned, ya know, per Salon’s Lindsay Abrams

Here’s how you school climate deniers: The anti-science movement’s biggest fallacies, debunked

If you want to defeat climate deniers, the first thing you need to know, without a shadow of a doubt, is that global warming is, in fact, happening.

I already know that — I’d like to think we all do, deep down — but there are people who continue to insist that the data is wrong. That’s why, after a week spent learning why climate deniers insist that human activity isn’t responsible for the rise in global temperatures, the second week of online class at Denial101x was dedicated to understanding how we know what we know: that temperatures are increasing, sea level is rising and glaciers are melting.

And yes, those basic facts remain true even when it’s snowing outside.

OK, you’re welcome to read the rest, but, let’s debunk a Warmist fallacy: Skeptics aren’t saying that there hasn’t been any warming, nor that there won’t be more during the Modern Warm Period. What we are saying is that Mankind is not mostly/solely responsible for the warming, particularly as it applies to the entire globe. If CO2 was the primary driver, then we would have continued to see a rising global temperature in accord with all the models, instead of 95% of the models being wrong. We wouldn’t hear about the oceans eating the warming. There wouldn’t be 66+ excuses.

Oh, and if there was such a concern, Warmists would actually take measures in their own lives to reduce their own carbon footprints, even going carbon neutral or negative, instead of demanding that Other People be forced to Do Something at the barrel of Government rules, regs, and laws.

BTW, these people seriously take 2 week classes as written in the excerpt? Good grief. 1st World Problems.

Read: Salon Totally Tells Us How To School Climate Deniers »

Posted in AGW Idiocy, Global Warming | 1 Comment | Trackback URL

Bummer: Climate Change Implicated In Tibet Collapse 4000 Years Ago

By William Teach May 6, 2015 – 4:16 pm

Doooooooom!

(Science 2.0) Climate change may have been be responsible for the abrupt collapse of civilization on the fringes of the Tibetan Plateau around 2,000 B.C. – but it wasn’t the modern political connotation of climate change, with man-made carbon dioxide causing warming, it was global cooling.

At the end of the Holocene Climatic Optimum, a 4,000 year period of warm weather, it was no longer possible for ancient people on the Tibetan Plateau to cultivate millet, their primary food source, and after productivity declined most left. Not forever, a few hundred years later they were growing wheat and barley. That’s because wheat and barley have higher frost tolerance and a lower heat requirement than millet, making them better suited for the high altitudes and suddenly colder weather of eastern Tibet. In a new paper in PNAS, a team argues that the change in climate led to the change in culture still evident today. 

Damn that climate change….wait, what? An article actually mentioned that it was cooling that caused this problem? That’s weird. They usually just mention “climate change” without mentioning which type. I actually just deleted a few articles out of Pocket that were doing just that in regards to the end of the Mayans.

Intriguing speculation is that if the climate heats up the way leading computer models say it will, millet may be en vogue again.

So, what they’re saying is that it was much, much warmer previously? Huh.

Read: Bummer: Climate Change Implicated In Tibet Collapse 4000 Years Ago »

Posted in Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 6 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach May 6, 2015 – 1:00 pm

…is a rising sea cutting across the land, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Laughing Conservative, with a post on ER visits increasing under Ocare.

Yes, it’s still sunglasses week.

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Bummer: Climate Change Doom Passed Us By Two Days Ago

By William Teach May 6, 2015 – 10:12 am

Warmists are forever predicting DOOOOOOM, and are always surprised when it fails to come to pass

(Daily Caller) After today, there’s no point in trying to stop the warming of the global climate. If you disagree… why do you hate science?

From the miserable communists our good friends at The Guardian, eight years ago today:

Of course, Warmists will argue that we are already seeing the worst effects. And they’ll drive big fossil fueled vehicles and take long fossil fueled flights to attend protests to tell us this. And they’ll tell us that we need to pass lots of Government rules, regulations, and laws to fight the scourge of 18+ years of now atmospheric warming.

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Posted in Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 8 Comments | Trackback URL

Mother Jones Unintentionally Explains How Liberalism Fails Blacks

By William Teach May 6, 2015 – 7:48 am

Let’s recap: many on the Right simply blame Liberalism overall for the failure of big cities. There are those that the Southern Poverty Law Center refers to as “White Nationalists” (which is apparently a Bad Thing, but not a Bad Thing when people are Black Nationalists and Hispanic Nationalists) who simply blame Blacks, saying they are “reverting to the mean” when gathered in large groups. They make a very interesting and compelling case, but, are they right? Warmists make a compelling case, too, yet they are pretty much wrong. Liberals blame pretty much everything and everyone but themselves. But, could it be that Liberalism is simply bad for Blacks? There are many, many areas and cities where middle class and higher White liberals are doing A-OK, such as Portland, Oregon (you can see more of the breakdown on that in this post). Mother Jones highlights how bad things are in Baltimore

7 Charts Explaining Baltimore’s Economic and Racial Struggles

In the wake of Baltimore’s upheaval, President Obama, among others, reminded the country that the city’s longstanding economic inequality was beneath the response to Freddie Gray’s death. “This is not new,” Obama said. “This has been going on for decades.”

In a new study published this week, a group of Harvard economists quantified Baltimore’s problem with economic mobility. Of the 100 largest counties in the country, they found, Baltimore was where children in low-income households faced the worst odds in terms of upward mobility, followed by Mencklenburg, North Carolina; Hillsborough, Florida; Orange, Florida; and Cook, Illinois.

Perhaps we’ll have to expand the notion that Liberalism is bad for Blacks to include “Liberalism is bad for poor people”.

That’s just one of many sobering measures of life for some in Baltimore, as theWashington Post, FiveThirtyEight, and others have pointed out in recent days. Here are a few examples:

Life expectancy in 15 Baltimore neighborhoods, including the one where Freddie Gray lived, is shorter than in North Korea, according to an analysis by theWashington Post. In eight Baltimore neighborhoods, the life expectancy rate is worse than in Syria.

Baltimore teens between 15 and 19 years old face poorer health conditions and a bleaker economic outlook than those in economically distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China, and South Africa, according to recent research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Teens in Baltimore, along with Johannesburg, saw the highest prevalence of sexual violence, substance abuse, depression, and PTSD. They were also most likely to report witnessing community violence.

Yay, Liberalism?

When it comes to income inequality between blacks and whites, Baltimore is not alone. As FiveThirtyEight reported, this racial disparity is common in cities where at least 10 percent of the population is black.

Baltimore is over 63% Black. Like most Liberal cities, there is a yawning gap between the top 5% of earners and the bottom 5% of earners. In Baltimore, that lower 5% is mostly Black. Good thing that Liberals have been running their war on poverty for over 50 years, eh? And patronizing Blacks for 40 years. Both have been marvelous successes.

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LA Times Joins In On Victim Blaming/Shaming Pam Geller

By William Teach May 6, 2015 – 7:07 am

As I’ve written and stated in person, people can bear responsibility for their actions. If, say, you’re a reporter or photographer and you get assaulted while covering a riot in a heavily Democratic city, you bear some responsibility since you knew it would be dangerous and still went. But, you do not bear the blame for the assault. That belongs to the person(s) doing the assaulting. You should not be blamed or shamed. The media has decided that that doesn’t apply when it comes to Conservatives who have insulted Islam, and are taking a stand against the hardcore Islamic extremists

(Breitbart) On May 5 the LA Times ran a column claiming cartoons of Muhammad were “verbal attacks” on Islam that resulted in the actions of the two alleged gunman, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi. Rather than see the attack as another of example of Islam’s war against the West, the Times suggested the lessons to be drawn from it are in learning the difference between free speech and “hate speech.”

They quoted Garland Police spokesman Joe Harn saying of the gunmen, “Obviously, they were there to shoot people,” yet the difference between attending an event to draw cartoons and attending an event to kill never seemed to take root.

Instead, the Times described Pamela Geller and the cartoon contest in a way that made it look like Geller brought this on herself:

The cartoon contest was organized by Geller as a rallying point for cartoonists and conservatives united in their belief that verbal attacks on radical Islam are a form of free speech.

Geller has posted bus ads and billboards condemning Islam. In 2010, the same year the FBI was investigating Simpson’s vows to fight “kafirs,” or nonbelievers, Geller cofounded American Freedom Defense Initiative, also known as Stop Islamization of America. The organization, considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, hosted the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon contest, offering $10,000 for the best cartoon of the prophet.

At the same time, the Times pointed to the existence of a Twitter account called “Shariah Is Light” which seemed to predict the Garland attack 15 minutes before it occurred. TheTimes reported that “the Middle East Media Research Institute… believed the Twitter account belonged to Simpson” and that the account “was frequently shut down for spreading jihadist content.”

It’s mentioned briefly in the first paragraph, but the actual headline of the article is “Texas attack refocuses attention on fine line between free speech and hate speech“. Regardless, either one is Constitutionally protected, especially since “hate speech” is simply speech that Liberals/Progressives/Democrats and their pals the extremist Muslims do not like and want criminalized. Much of the article, especially the latter half, is dedicated to attempting to paint a picture of Geller as an “Islamophobe”, extremist, and hater. Something they rarely do with the Islamic extremists. They also attempt to denigrate her personally as unqualified to talk about Islamic extremism. As if anyone needs a degree to understand that the Islamists are savages.

What we have here is victim blaming and shaming, going well beyond the notion of responsibility.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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Posted in Dhimmitude, Wonky Media | 17 Comments | Trackback URL

UK Guardian Explodes Hotcoldwetdry Myths

By William Teach May 5, 2015 – 1:21 pm

And create a few of their own

Climate change: the big myths that need to be exploded

THE EARTH IS WARMER NOW THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN
In the distant past, temperatures were far warmer than even the most extreme warming scenarios predicted by the end of the century. Fifty million years ago, during the Eocene, it was on average 10C hotter than today. Forests stretched from pole to pole, the Arctic was inhabited by alligators and squirrel-like primates, and palm trees grew in what is now Alaska.

However, after exploding that myth

Unlike the current warming trend, though, most natural warm periods in the past developed over thousands, if not millions, of years. “It’s not how much the temperature has gone up – that’s only around 1C over the past 100 years,” says professor Adam Scaife of the Met Office. “What’s unprecedented is the rate of change.”

There is no hard evidence to prove that. In fact, it seems that most of the flips in climate during the Holocene have come on rather fast. It did not take thousands of years for the Little Ice Age to develop, nor thousands for the Medieval Warm Period to develop. Nor the other warm periods, such as the Roman Warm Period. Both of which were warmer than today.

EXTREME WEATHER IS CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE
The floods that gripped Britain in the winter of 2013-14 led to a stronger public belief in human-induced climate change. The storms marked the wettest December to January period since 1876. But some years will always be hotter, wetter or stormier than others.

I really didn’t expect the Guardian to explode that myth.

THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON WARMING
Scientists disagree about how much warming there has been in the past century, how much there will be in the future and what the environmental impacts might be. The fundamental idea that the world is getting hotter due to human activity is not seriously disputed, however.

Who’s pushing that one? Of course, consensus is not science, it’s politics

A survey of the peer-reviewed literature shows that more than 97% of published work supports the idea that warming trends are linked to human activity. After investigating, scientists also found no evidence that papers with a sceptical slant were being systematically rejected by journals.

Ah. Of course, the myth of that 97% has been proven time and time again.

They fail to mention that human caused climate change is mostly a myth, too.

More: Jo Nova digs deep into each myth, well worth the read.

Read: UK Guardian Explodes Hotcoldwetdry Myths »

Posted in Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 6 Comments | Trackback URL

If All You See…

By William Teach May 5, 2015 – 1:00 pm

…are sunglasses needed to stop the reflection off the seas that are rising because Other People refused to give up fossil fueled travel, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Datechguy’s Blog, with a post on defying the Islamists.

Read: If All You See… »

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Having Nothing Better To Do, Rutgers Snowflakes Call For Diversity With Mascot

By William Teach May 5, 2015 – 9:26 am

Special Snowflake Syndrome meets Social Justice Warriors meets someone needs a part time job

(NJ.com) A bill passed by the the Rutgers University Student Assembly calls for more gender and ethnic diversity in the mascot costume, according to a report by The Daily Targum, the school’s student newspaper.

Emmet Brennan, student assembly parliamentarian, came up with the idea after noticing the mascot is light-skinned with blue eyes, which he said isn’t representative of the school’s diversity.

“What we were thinking — the way the bill’s laid out — it’s not defined that we need an Asian knight, a black knight, a Latino knight,” Brennan told The Daily Targum. “That we would really leave it up to the different student organizations … and basically the student body as a whole to determine how many knights they’d like and what these knights would represent.”

So “Something Must be Done” because we are Offended, but, these Special Snowflakes have now passed the buck on actually doing something.

BTW, if you think everyone in NJ is a raging Progressive, read the comments at the story. (I use DevilUKnow as a screen name )

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