Timothy Birdnow

Oops, he did it again!

Pope Francis I, Argentina's Catholic pop icon, has again struck down a conservative in his endless effort to bring the Church into line with his National Enquirer style of moral teaching. Having demoted Cardinal Raymond Burk from the Chief of the Vatican's highest court to the doorman at the Malta Holiday Inn, the good Il Papa has now removed the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

From the Jerusalem Post:

'In a major shake up of the Vatican's administration on Saturday, Pope Francis replaced Catholicism's top theologian, a conservative German cardinal who has been at odds with the pontiff's vision of a more inclusive Church.

A brief Vatican statement said Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller's five-year mandate as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a key department charged with defending Catholic doctrine, would not be renewed.

Mueller, 69, who was appointed by former Pope Benedict in 2012, will be succeeded by the department's number two, Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer.

Ladaria, a 73-year-old Spaniard who, like the Argentine pope is a member of the Jesuit order, is said by those who know him to be a soft-spoken person who shuns the limelight. Mueller, by contrast, often appears in the media."

End excerpt.

Mueller was the last staunch conservative at the Vatican. He will take over as Patron of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, a post that largely makes him a custodian for the Sepulchre. I hear they are giving him a lot of keys...

His replacement is a lawyer who wrote his thesis in theology on The Holy Spirit in St Hilary of Poitiers. Not sure, but anyone who likes Hillary is not good in my book.

In the end Pope Francis has been systematically purging conservatives to make the world safe for moral relativism. His vision seems to be that Christ came to change the Law, not fulfill it. This guy is destroying the Catholic Church and with it the moral anchor of the Western World.

Great job!

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Selwyn Duke

It's a sad time when simple truths cause serious trouble. That time is now, and a good example is how former number-one tennis player John McEnroe is being excoriated for stating that Serena Williams, widely regarded as history's best women's player, would be, "like, number 700 in the world" on the men's tour. The story is also further proof of how the media are infested with arrogant, ignorant fake-news fetishists.

I do place a premium on honesty, however, and thus should confess my title's inaccuracy. McEnroe is wrong.

I don't think Williams would crack the top 1,000 men.

By the way, unlike the two-brain-cell media wonders bloviating about things they know nothing about, I'm not just a journalist: I once was a tennis professional who played the satellite circuit (tantamount to baseball's minor leagues) and competed against world-ranked players. This included being a sparring partner for a highly ranked woman.

Williams tweeted to McEnroe to "please keep me out of your statements[.]" But she should have sent the message to NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who broached the matter – posing what could win the Stupid Question of the Month Award – while interviewing McEnroe about his new book. Here was the exchange:

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/25/534149646/but-seriously-tennis-great-john-mcenroe-says-hes-seeking-inner-peace

Garcia-Navarro: Let's talk about Serena Williams. You say she is the best female player in the world in the book.

McEnroe: Best female player ever – no question.

Garcia-Navarro: Some wouldn't qualify it, some would say she's the best player in the world. Why qualify it? [Uh, maybe because the women and men don't compete together and that there's a reason for this? Just a thought.]

... McEnroe: Well because if she was in, if she played the men's circuit she'd be like 700 in the world.

End excerpt.

For not lying while answering a dumb question, McEnroe's reward was to be labeled guilty of "sexism" and misogyny. Question: Is it sexism to say the top female track stars couldn't beat the best 15-year-old boys?


Serena Williams and John McEnroe at the 2013 French Open with Rafael Nadal

Because the mile record for 15-year-old lads is in fact better than the women's world record. My, those darn misogynistic stopwatches.

For the record, Williams has essentially acknowledged the reality here. As the New York Daily News reported Thursday, in 2013, "Williams said she considered men's tennis and women's tennis to be two different sports. 'If I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10 minutes,' she said. ... I only want to play girls because I don't want to be embarrassed."

For the record, while the 1973 "Battle of the Sexes" match in which Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs was thrown in McEnroe's face, Riggs was a 55-year-old "jerk who dyes his hair, waddles like a duck and has trouble seeing," as King put it at the time. King was 29 and the world's number-two female player – and Riggs had beaten the number-one woman player, Margaret Court, earlier in the year, 6-1, 6-2.

For the record, Williams also tweeted, "I've never played anyone ranked 'there' [700] nor do I have time." This may be true if she means a player at exactly 700. But whom do you think the women practice against? Highly ranked junior boys, male college players, and male teaching pros – and they lose to the good ones.

I ought to know. I never lost a set to the woman, who'd been ranked 20 in the world, I sparred with (and I never had any kind of men's world ranking).

Yet the media wouldn't know any of this, partially because they couldn't care less. It's comical: in McEnroe they have a tennis legend. Yet instead of trying to learn while interviewing him – and informing their audience – they busy themselves attempting to extract an apology. I would ask them: I know you're professional agitators, but for how many years did you play the tennis circuit? Is it at all possible that McEnroe knows something you don't?

This reflects a wider issue: it's the exact same contempt for truth that brought us the CNN (Counterfeit News Network) scandal and reflects the sick, twisted worldview informing that entity. The truth is considered out of bounds if it contradicts the leftist agenda, and those uttering it must be brought to heel.

Speaking of which, McEnroe did finally capitulate, not apologizing, but saying he "regrets" his comments (between the lines: "because they elicited bad press"). And this is how fake-news fetishists guarantee fake answers.

By the by, on Tuesday's CBS This Morning, McEnroe responded to some members of the ignorati with one of my ideas. Said he, "Why don't you combine [the tours?] ... I'm sure the men would be all for this: The men and women play together. And then we don't have to guess." The answer?

Because that would reveal an inconvenient truth, and, again, the truth is not the media's business.

In the final analysis, McEnroe served an ace, and the media couldn't touch it, but they're also the linesmen and just called it out. You see, they cannot be serious – but they sure know how to cheat.

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Daren Jonescu

(Spoiler Alert: If you find slavery or infanticide disturbing, you may be too squeamish to read further.)

A perfect crystallization of the full heart and soul of socialized or "single payer" health care is on display in the story of Charlie Gard, a ten-month-old infant with a life-threatening genetic condition, and his parents, Chris and Connie, whose desperate efforts to save their child have been diverted, and finally thwarted, first by the British government and now by an entity with the perfectly Orwellian name "European Court of Human Rights."

http://therightscoop.com/europe-sentences-sick-child-to-death-rather-than-get-treatment-in-the-u-s/

The parents of terminally-ill baby Charlie Gard are ‘utterly distraught’ and facing fresh heartbreak after losing their final appeal in the European Court of Human Rights.

Chris Gard, 32, and Connie Yates, 31, wanted to take their 10-month-old son – who suffers from a rare genetic condition and has brain damage – to the US to undergo a therapy trial.

Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, where Charlie is being cared for, said they wanted him to be able to ‘die with dignity’.

End excerpt.

So in the name of "dying with dignity," Charlie has been denied his last hope of living with dignity, not to mention his last chance to live in the loving care of his parents, who have obviously put themselves through hell -- above and beyond the hell of watching their child die at the hands of a tyrannically impersonal "medical system" -- to try to save him. Meanwhile, his parents themselves are denied the dignity of taking responsibility for their beloved child's well-being and sacrificing everything to save him, as parents are (or used to be) wont to do.

So whose dignity is really at issue here? "Death with dignity" is the health care euphemism to end all euphemisms. What it really means is murder with dignity -- the state's dignity. Death with dignity is Marxist medicine's theoretical self-absolution for committing the ultimate heresy against the traditional concept of health care, i.e., forsaking life in the name of saving money, saving bed space, and saving face.

The doctors in Britain have decided, in their state-decreed omniscience, that "nothing can be done" to save this dying boy. So, having decided to do nothing, they are determined -- and supported in this determination by the full weight of Europe's progressive authoritarian regulatory apparatus -- to make sure no one else gets a chance to prove them wrong by saving Charlie's life after all.

What is the ultimate lesson in all of this, for all of us living under one degree or another of socialized medicine, throughout the allegedly civilized world?

No, it's not that a baby's life is less valuable to progressives than maintaining the necessary illusion of the State's infallibility, although that is true.

No, it's not that the wishes of parents who love their child are less important to the progressive State than the desire of the State's "experts" to make a problem (their failure) disappear, although that is also true.

The ultimate lesson, apparently a difficult one for some people to understand, is that what socialized health care means, above all else, is that the individual human being is property of the State.

The right to property carries with it the right to the use and disposal of what one owns. This is why property rights are so essential to any coherent concept of individual liberty, and why any clear theory of property begins with the right of self-ownership. And self-ownership is precisely what socialized medicine denies outright. If the government determines what can and cannot be done to preserve your life (short of harming others, of course), and furthermore has the final authority to decide when your life is no longer worth fighting to preserve, then all questions of who owns the individual citizen are answered unequivocally: the individual -- his living body, his human existence -- belongs to the State.

Under socialized health care, you are government property. The State may allow you some measure of proprietorship over your daily existence, in order to lull you into the sleepy compliance of the contented slave. But there is no doubt who holds the deed. Socialized or "single payer" medicine, a pillar of Marxist political philosophy, establishes the collectivization of the individual human being more clearly than any political structure imaginable -- except compulsory government-regulated schooling.
http://darenjonescu.com/download-the-book/

Together, those two political transformations -- government ownership of your spiritual development and your physical preservation -- establish the firmest and most comprehensive foundations of tyranny. All the rest of progressivism's panoply of hyper-regulation and micromanaging paternalism are mere baubles once the soul and body have been legally removed from individual and familial control -- removed both symbolically and, as Charlie Gard's unfortunate parents have just learned, removed in horrifyingly literal fact.

Chris and Connie wanted to save their baby's life, and were willing to do more for him than the government thought "worthwhile." That the government should have any place in determining what is worth doing to save this boy's life is absurd. That the government's judgment should be used as a billy club to beat back the parents' desperate efforts to give their last ounce of love to their baby, is as clear an indictment of progressive ethics, progressive politics, and the progressive mind in general, as can be conceived.

Charlie Gard, were he to be saved by the near-miracle his parents are willing to fight for, would probably live his whole life with brain damage. As a result, he would probably never be granted the right to vote. By contrast, millions of Britons and hundreds of millions of their counterparts throughout what used to be the modern world happily walk into voting booths and cede their and their neighbors' lives and liberty to progressive authoritarianism on a regular basis. And almost nobody blinks or wonders whether people that mentally deficient should be granted the vote.

Godspeed, Charlie, Chris, and Connie.

A NOTE FROM TIM:

I know of at least one instance where someone with mental retardation can vote (in Massachussetts, naturally) Don't discount little Charlie's vote - unless he favors brexit.

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This from Craig Rucker courtesy of Helen Dyer:

Former UN top climate official Christiana Figueres just told the world we only have "three years" to save the planet … and all it will cost is $1.5 trillion per year.

Gee, guess we should hurry and jump on that deal … not.

Call us suspicious, but this is the same Figueres who infamously in 2015 announced the UN's intention to replace free-market capitalism with bureaucratic control saying:

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

That Figueres would now make such a doomsday prediction and then ask for such large sums of money, especially in light of her ambitious stated goal to control and direct the economic path of the whole earth, should be enough to make anyone roll their eyes.

But not so with Fake News media. They eat this all up.

If they bothered to look, they’d see there's a long history of these so-called climate "tipping points" made by alarmists – all of which harmlessly passed without incident.

For those of us old enough to remember, the UN announced a 10-year tipping point way back in 1982, and then did so again in 1989. In both cases, these dates passed without any of the predicted doom-and-gloom taking place.

In 2006 Al Gore told us in An Inconvenient Truth the Arctic would be ice-free by 2014. He gave the planet only 10 years to escape before what, as Jim Morrison of The Doors might say, would be "The End.”

Not surprisingly, as CFACT’s undercover film review operative found out at the Sundance Film festival earlier this year, Al doesn't like it much if you ask him today how we survived.

Of course there’s more.

In 2008, ABC's Bob Woodruff hosted a program where scientists told us that agriculture would collapse by "2015," that a carton of milk would be $12.99, a gallon of gas $9 and large portions of NYC would be underwater.

And in 2009, Prince Charles declared we only had 96 months to save the Earth. That same year NASA's James Hansen said we only had until the end of President Obama's first term, though U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said we only had 50 days until the global warming apocalypse took place.

It goes on and on.

You’d think the embarrassment of potentially being labeled "false prophets” would make them, well, shut up. But no, the soothsaying doesn’t stop. It just gets more insane.

Marc Morano does a great job of keeping track of all the climate tipping points that came and went at CFACT's Climate Depot.

Our advice: If warming campaigners want to keep doing this Nostradamus gig, perhaps they should at least wait until they get one of their prophecies right before demanding a $1.5 trillion ransom.


For nature and people too,

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Paul Driessen

Agricultural and environmental economist Dennis Avery has studied climate history for years. But even he was amazed to learn how close humanity came to getting wiped out, not by too much carbon dioxide in our atmosphere – the bogeyman of climate alarmism – but by too little CO2.

As he explains, during the last Glacial Maximum, much-colder ocean waters sucked carbon dioxide out of the air; half of North America, Europe and Asia were buried under mile-high glaciers; and bitterly cold temperatures further retarded plant growth. Earth’s atmosphere had only about 180 parts per million CO2, compared to 400 ppm today. Most of Earth’s plants died. And according to recent Cambridge University studies, only about 100,000 humans were left alive worldwide when the current interglacial warming mercifully began.

It’s a fascinating, frightening historical drama

Nearly doomed by too little CO2

During the last ice age, too little atmospheric carbon dioxide almost eradicated mankind

Dennis T. Avery

Aside from protests by Al Gore, Leonardo Di Caprio and friends, the public didn’t seem to raise its CO2 anguish much above the Russians-election frenzy when Trump exited the Paris Climate Accords.

Statistician Bjorn Lomborg had already pointed out that the Paris CO2 emission promises would cost $100 trillion dollars that no one has, and make only a 0.05 degree difference in Earth’s 2100 AD temperature. Others say perhaps a 0.2 degree C (0.3 degrees F) difference, and even that would hold only in the highly unlikely event that all parties actually kept their voluntary pledges.

What few realize, however, is that during the last Ice Age too little CO2 in the air almost eradicated mankind. That’s when much-colder water in oceans (that were 400 feet shallower than today) sucked most of the carbon dioxide from the air; half of North America, Europe and Asia were buried under mile-high glaciers that obliterated everything in their paths; and bitterly cold temperatures further retarded plant growth.

In fact, Earth’s atmosphere had only about 180 parts per million CO2, compared to today’s 400 ppm: 0.018% then versus 0.040% today.

The Ice Age’s combined horrors – intense cold, permanent drought and CO2 starvation – killed most of the plants on Earth. Only a few trees survived, in the mildest climates. Much of the planet’s grass turned to tundra, which is much less nourishing to the herbivores prehistoric humans depended on for food and fur. Recent Cambridge University studies conclude that only about 100,000 humans were left alive worldwide when the current interglacial warming mercifully began.

The few surviving prey animals had to keep migrating to get enough food. That forced our ancestors to migrate with them, in temperatures that routinely fell to 40 degrees below zero (both Fahrenheit and Celsius). The Neanderthals had been living in relatively warm caves protected from predators by fires at the cave mouths. They had hunted their prey by sneaking through the trees – which no longer existed. They apparently couldn’t adapt, and starved. Cambridge found no evidence of genocidal warfare.

The most successful human survivors – who provided most of the DNA for modern Europeans – were nomads from the Black Sea region. The Gravettians had never had trees, so they invented mammoth-skin tents, held up by salvaged mammoth ribs. They also developed spear-throwers, to kill the huge beasts from a safe distance.

Equally important, Gravettians domesticated and bred wolves, to protect their tents from marauders, locate game animals on the broad tundra, and harry the prey into defensive clusters for easier killing. The scarcity of food in that Glacial Maximum intensified the dogs’ appreciation for the bones and bone marrow at the human camps.

When that Ice Age ended, moreover, CO2 changes didn’t lead the warming. The atmospheric CO2 only began to recover about 800 years after the warming started.

Carbon dioxide truly is "the gas of life.” The plants that feed us and wildlife can’t live without inhaling CO2, and then they exhale the oxygen that lets humans and animals keep breathing.

Our crop plants evolved about 400 million years ago, when CO2 in the atmosphere was about 5000 parts per million! Our evergreen trees and shrubs evolved about 360 million years ago, with CO2 levels at about 4,000 ppm. When our deciduous trees evolved about 160 million years ago, the CO2 level was about 2,200 ppm – still five times the current level.

There’s little danger to humans of too much CO2 in the air they breathe. Even the Environmental Protection Agency says 1000 ppm is the safe limit for lifetime human exposure. Space shuttle CO2 alarms are set at 5,000 ppm, and the alarm in nuclear submarines is set at 8,000 ppm!

If there’s little danger of humans having too much CO2 in their air, and a real danger to civilization from having too little, what’s the ideal level of atmospheric CO2? The answer? There’s a broad safe range – with far more risk of too little than too much. At low levels, with few or no plants, there’d be no people or animals, let alone civilization.

Human numbers, moreover, expanded strongly during the Holocene Optimum, with temperatures 4 degrees C higher than today! Even now, residents of the tropics keep demonstrating that humans can tolerate much higher temperatures than most of us experience. (As we utilize the new malaria vaccine, the tropics will prosper even more.) And far more people die from "too cold” than from "too warm.”

The crops continue to produce record yields in our "unprecedented” warming – and the extra CO2 in our air is credited with as much as 15% of that yield gain!

It’s not whether more CO2 in the air raises Earth’s temperatures. We know it does, by some small but still hotly debated amount. Both sides agree that a redoubling of CO2 in the air – by itself – would raise earth’s temperature by only about 1 degree C.

That’s hardly noticeable or measurable in the midst of all the local temperature variations, with the myriad of natural forces that govern planetary climate, with all the discrepancies among the various measuring systems, and amid all the errors, biases and missing or revised data that have crept in.

Moreover, 1 degree C of warming was obviously not enough to frighten the public.

So, the computerized models cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made another assumption: that a hotter world would hold more moisture in its atmosphere. Since water vapor is the most effective greenhouse gas, the climate modelers claimed Earth might heat by 5 or even 10 degrees C. One scientist (who supposedly advises Pope Francis) recently claimed 12 degrees C (21 degrees F) of overheating!

The awkward truth, however, is that NASA has monitored moisture in the atmosphere since 1980 – and water vapor has not increased despite the higher levels of CO2 in the air. Is that why the IPCC models have predicted more than twice as much warming as we’ve actually seen?

The year 1936 recorded the hottest thermometer readings of any year in the last 5,000. However, these days NOAA reports only its "adjusted” temperatures, which always seem to go only higher. In fact, the first surge of human-emitted carbon dioxide after World War II should have produced the biggest surge of warming – if CO2 is the control factor. Instead temperatures went down from 1940 to 1975.

Why did the computer models fail to predict (or even factor in) either the Pacific Oscillation’s current 20-year non-warming or the coming solar sunspot minimum?

Only one model has verified itself by back-casting the temperatures and weather we’ve had over the past century. That model is from Nicola Scafetta at Duke University, and it’s based on solar, lunar and planetary cycles. The latest data from the CERN particle physics lab have also produced a model based on cycling – and it foresees no runaway warming. Instead, it sees an impending cold solar minimum.

Is the long, wrong-headed war against carbon dioxide finally fading? Science certainly says it should. But perhaps there is still too much money, prestige and power in climate alarmism for that to happen.

___________

Dennis T. Avery is an agricultural and environmental economist and a senior fellow for the Center for Global Food Issues in Virginia. He was formerly a senior analyst for the U.S. Department of State and is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years.

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Dana Mathewson

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe is under mounting scrutiny and increasing calls for him to step aside amid allegations of politicized leadership, conflicts of interest and significant investigative missteps at the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

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