The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
The March for Science Fiction
By Louis DeBroux
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Wait, Tariffs Cost Consumers Money?
When Democrats propose health insurance mandates, or a carbon tax, or a higher gas tax, or energy regulations, or a minimum wage hike, or a tax increase on "the wealthy" (i.e., small business owners), or any number of other burdensome costs on the economy, the Leftmedia can only coo about how fair and good those things are. But when Donald Trump slaps a tariff on Canadian lumber, the Leftmedia blares headlines about how much it's going to cost American homebuilders — between $1,200 and $3,000 per house.
Now, to be clear, they're not wrong about the cost, but these fair-weather free marketeers are profound hypocrites.
Whenever you tax or regulate something, and a tariff is a tax, the price of that thing goes up and the consumer pays more. This is economics 101. Yet leftists only see this when Trump's at work.
So what's going on here? First of all, Trump has long argued that NAFTA is a terrible trade deal for the U.S. and needs to be renegotiated. Without going through the whole history of that deal, suffice it to say that he has a point about other nations not always trading fairly — and there's definitely a difference between free and fair. For example, Canada and Mexico both subsidize goods more than the U.S. does, which undercuts American producers.
In this case, Canadian lumber is subsidized, and it's a dispute that has been ongoing since the early 1980s. Trump's Commerce Department calculated its tariff rates on how much various Canadian lumber producers are subsidized. But the tariff also has to do with Canada's own tariffs on imported dairy products, which the Trump administration argues particularly hurts Wisconsin dairy farmers. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said, "The Trump administration has been much more focused on enforcement than had been true previously."
And whether it's trade or immigration or foreign policy, Trump the dealmaker is all about sending signals that he means business. Yes, this lumber tariff will cost Americans money, and we're not arguing in favor of tariffs. But Trump has set about to seek what he believes are fair trade terms. Don't think Mexico and China aren't also getting the message. ~The Patriot Post
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liar-nObama Lied, Released Iranian
Nuke Traffickers Who Belonged In Gitmo
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Steve Doocy opens the discussion, asking if we remember when Hussein liar-nObama made one of his innumerable false promises, this one regarding the prisoners in the Iranian swap deal... liar-nObama said, “These individuals were not charged with terrorism, or any violent offenses, they’re civilians and their release is a one-time gesture to Iran, given the unique opportunity offered by this moment in the larger circumstances at play. He uses the words “not charged with terrorism” or any “violent” offenses in order to create the impression that they’re not dangerous or that their crimes are not serious. He asks us to let him make this one time, minor, insignificant offering to Iran to show them we’re good partners in his destructive, anti-American plotting. Ainsley Earhardt, not one for mincing words, describes the pretend ‘president’s’ comments, saying, “That is really not true. That turns out, what he was just saying – a total lie, and they were a potential threat, these individuals, to national security...http://rickwells.us/napolitano-obama-lied-released-iranian-nuke-traffickers-belonged-gitmo/
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.Veteran faces 21 years in prison for
possession of pistol magazines
by Michael Filozof
{americanthinker.com} ~ Simeon D. Mokhiber, a Niagara Falls, N.Y. Army veteran, was convicted April 21 on three felony counts of possessing "large capacity ammunition feeding devices" under Gov. Andrew Cuomo's SAFE Act... Mokhiber served nine years in the U.S. Army and participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He subsequently worked as an armed private security contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan and was formerly licensed as an armed security guard in New York. He is the father of an eight-year-old with disabilities and had no prior criminal record. Mokhiber was pulled over for speeding in April 2016. Although Mokhiber had not been drinking, police performed field sobriety tests. When Mokhiber requested that officers turn on body cameras, he was arrested, and his vehicle was searched without a warrant...This is insane. http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/04/veteran_faces_21_years_in_prison_for_possession_of_pistol_magazines.html
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Climate Hoax Swamp Creatures
Pitch Profiteering, Wealth Redistribution...
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ It is beginning to appear that decisions were made, contrary to the will of the American people, when a collection of exploitative charlatans were entertained on February 8th by President Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn... Swamp scum is increasingly becoming a common sight at the White House. Some of it, like former Goldman Sachs Partner Cohn, has even “taken root.”, Why are these crooked fat cats being allowed on property, let alone to make their presentation for the fleecing of the American people once again? They made the arguments we’ve heard so often before, the ones we thought we were free of under President Trump. The economic suicide of remaining in and becoming active participants in the Climate Hoax agreement is now being revived by the establishment swamp vermin who have been allowed into and are becoming part of, the Trump administration. They have to be stopped and the question that should be on everybody’s lips is “Why?”...http://rickwells.us/climate-hoax-swamp-creatures-pitch-profiteering-wealth-redistribution-carbon-tax-white-house/
.Where Are the Moderate Muslims?
by Truth Revolt
{truthrevolt.org} ~ After every new Jihadist attack against the West, politicians reassure us that the atrocity does not represent the true nature of mainstream Islam... Of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, they constantly reassure us, the overwhelming majority are as law abiding as any members of any other monotheistic faith. Only a tiny fraction engage in terror. And Islam is a religion of peace. Furthermore, we are told, the great majority of Muslims hold moderate views. But what does that mean? How moderate are moderate Muslims? Given the threat of radical Islam, it would seem to be a fair question. Let me start to answer it by telling you something of my own story...http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/prager-u-where-are-moderate-muslims
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The March for Science Fiction
By Louis DeBroux: One of the asinine yet oft-repeated phrases in the modern progressive lexicon is "settled science," an oxymoron that is the antithesis of the scientific method. The literal definition of the scientific method is "a method of procedure ... consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses." Modification means alteration or change. Meaning that in science, many, many things are never "settled."
Among the most well-known theories that have been debunked over time are that the world is flat, that the universe is geocentric (it is heliocentric), that the physical world is made up of four elements (rather than more than a hundred currently known elements, including four new elements discovered just last year), and that atoms are the smallest units of matter. Each and every one of these was once universally accepted as infallible truth.
This makes the recent "March for Science" in Washington, DC, not only ludicrous, but an indictment of those marching while claiming to believe in science. It was not about science, but about publicly rebuking President Donald Trump behind the thin patina of ideology masquerading as science. The leftist mainstream media played its part well, praising the event while ignoring dissent from actual scientists.
With scathing wit, Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, exposed the hypocrisy and lunacy of the march — in the lefty rag Slate, no less. He observed, "Being 'pro-science' has become a bizarre cultural phenomenon in which liberals (and other members of the cultural elite) engage in public displays of self-reckoned intelligence as a kind of performance art, while demonstrating zero evidence to justify it."
Instead of elevating the quality of, and respect for, actual science, says Faust, this march "revealed the glaring dissonance of opposing that trough of ignorance by instead accepting a cringe-worthy hive-mind mentality that celebrates Science as a vague but wonderful entity. ... There was an uncomfortable dronelike fealty to the concept — an oxymoronic faith that information presented and packaged to us as Science need not be further scrutinized before being smugly celebrated en masse. That is not intellectually rigorous thought — instead, it's another kind of religion."
Indeed, progressive Democrats claim to be the "Party of Science" yet, mind-bogglingly argue that sex/gender is determined by how one "feels" rather than by DNA and plumbing. They accept man-made global warming (now known as "climate change" to free themselves of the pesky fact that the Earth stopped warming for nearly two decades) as inarguable fact. These are the same people who chain themselves to trees to protest the "destruction" of Mother Earth, but refuse to acknowledge that a baby in utero is a living human being.
In short, they are modern-day pagans, worshipping "Gaia" while denying observable truths that conflict with their secular religion, and seeking punishment for the heretics who dare challenge their belief system with something so coarse, so crude and as unenlightened as mere facts.
The ultimate goal of the progressive religionists is to force compliance with their worldview, either through the coercive power of rigid, politically correct orthodoxy, or through punishment such as jail time for "climate change dissenters/deniers," a position embraced by leftist celebrity and fake TV scientist Bill Nye "The Science Guy."
CNN, in an interview with Nye and an actual scientist, physicist William Happer of Princeton, inadvertently displayed the truth behind the march with a caption that read "March for Science: Scientists Rally for EPA, Govt Funding and More." Climate change hysteria is a big business. If you are a scientist, you have access to billions of dollars in federal grants so long as you produce "research" that proves the claims of the alarmists. Politicians pushing climate hysteria can usurp tremendous power over the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the name of saving the world from cataclysmic disaster.
The reality is that "science," across a broad spectrum of disciplines, is not nearly as "settled" as its advocates would have us believe. In fact, the most-repeated claims have a habit of turning out to be spectacularly wrong. For example, as we've noted previously, leftist climate alarmists have been trying to scare us into giving up the abundant energy and higher standard of living that comes with industrialization. They warned that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years" (Harvard biologist George Wald, 1970), and that (due to scarce food supplies), "The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years" (Paul Ehrlich, 1970), and that by 1980 "urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution."
They are often insanely wrong in their predictions, and are so wedded to their ideology that they can't even identify fake science even when it is specifically written to be obviously wrong. Time after time, robotically generated "gibberish papers" were accepted in supposedly peer-reviewed journals.
As amusing as this can be, it's actually dangerous. The beauty of science is that it is ruthless. It cares not for sex, race, education or socio-economic status. It cares only about replicable fact. But when science — actual science — is hijacked by partisans and ideologues, and propaganda is passed off as science, it undermines our faith in science, and therefore the truth.
And that is never a good thing. ~The Patriot Post
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