Chemistry Papers Are Retracted Mostly Due to Plagiarism, Data Manipulation

By Alex Berezow — May 28, 2019 @ American Council on Science and Health

Retractions in science are a fact of life. Sometimes, the published literature is wrong, and when it is discovered, the paper is often stricken from the scientific record.

We would like to believe that most retractions are due to honest errors, for example, accidentally mixing up control and experimental groups. We don't want to believe that most retractions are for nefarious reasons, like fraud.

Unfortunately, new research by François-Xavier Coudert published in the journal Chemistry of Materials does not reveal happy data. Dr. Coudert found 331 papers in the fields of chemistry, materials science, and chemical engineering that were retracted in 2017 and 2018. The overall retraction rate (about 3 per 10,000) is low, which is good news, but the reasons for the retractions were disheartening.

Dr. Coudert learned that 229 of the 331 papers (69%) were retracted for plagiarism and "data manipulation," which, more often than not, is a nice way of saying "fraud." (See chart.) Only 54 of the papers (16%) were retracted due to "honest errors."

Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater

Obviously, this is not good news, but there could be another explanation for the data: Systematic bias in which papers are retracted.

Plagiarism is relatively easy to catch. If somebody copies and pastes entire tracts of text, often somebody will notice. (Besides, we now have software that screens for plagiarism.) Fabricated data is much harder to catch, but an eagle-eyed scientist might notice irregularities with digital images that may indicate manipulation or data that looks "too good to be true." If detected, plagiarism and data manipulation are slam-dunk reasons to retract a paper.

That isn't necessarily the case for "honest errors" for two reasons. First, honest errors are exceedingly difficult to catch. Second, if scientists believe that the authors of another paper committed an error, they often address it by performing a better experiment and/or publishing a response. In this way, the scientific record is self-correcting, and there isn't as compelling a reason to retract a paper just because something in it is wrong. In this way, a systematic bias in retractions may be responsible for Dr. Coudert's findings.

If this analysis is correct, the good news is that fraud is still likely a minor problem. The bad news, however, is that there are a lot of honest errors out there in the published record which have yet to be detected.

Source: François-Xavier Coudert. "Correcting the Scientific Record: Retraction Practices in Chemistry and Materials." Chem. Mater. 31(10): 3593-3598. Publication Date: May 28, 2019 DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.9b00897
 

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scientific journals

Retraction

chemistry

Remaking the 9th Circuit Court from the ‘nutty 9th’ to Respectability

April 8, 2019 Posted by Sid Bowdidge

Three decades ago, former President Jimmy Carter transformed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Carter appointed some of the most liberal judges ever appointed to any court. The 9th has expanded to 29 appellate judges, from 23 then, and the majority have stayed left leaning ever since. As we’re finding with nearly every liberal politician, their viewpoint on issues can be very radical. So goes the same for the majority of the judges on the 9th.

Some of the more outrageous court decisions for example have been a decision in 2012. The Second Amendment doesn’t recognize an individual’s right to bear arms. And in one of the court’s most outrageous rulings in 2002, they ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance’s “under God” clause is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. These were overturned by the Supreme Court.

The other point which reflects how out of touch with reality the 9th Circuit Court is. The Supreme Court overrules approximately 80% of the cases they get from the 9th Circuit. This is why when President Trump makes decisions such as the asylum law and the Muslim country travel ban, lawyers run to the 9th Circuit Court because they know they can get an injunction to stop him, even if it gets overturned by the Supreme Court several months later.

Hence the 9th has earned the nicknames, the “nutty 9th” or the “ninth circus”.

In contrast to the Supreme Court, which was established by Article III of the Constitution, the circuit courts were established by Congress. Our forefathers wanted the federal court system to be limited to the Supreme Court. There is no constitutional requirement that Circuit courts exist at all. However, the first Congress created the Circuit court system which is still in place today. There are 13 appellate courts, each have several states which fall under their respective jurisdiction. These sit below the U.S. Supreme Court, and they are called the U.S. Court of Appeals............To Read More....

Cartoon of the Day

An Emerging Anti-Socialist Wing of the Democratic Party?

June 2, 2019 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
 
Since I’m a policy economist, I rarely comment on political matters.

But I am worried that the Democratic Party is veering too far to the left. Bernie Sanders, an out-of-the-closet socialist is leading the way, followed closely by other leading Democrats with hard-left policy agendas, such as Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.

But not every 2020 candidate is hopping on the socialism bandwagon. Some of the major candidates, such as Joe Biden, have avoided saying anything favorable about socialism.

And two of the candidates have explicitly rejected the poisonous ideology.  Interestingly, they’re both from Colorado.

CNN reports that the former governor, John Hickenlooper. received a very hostile reception when he rejected socialism.

The welcoming cheers 2020 presidential hopeful John Hickenlooper received when he first graced the stage at California’s Democratic Convention quickly crumbled into boos and jeers after he rejected socialism as the answer to Democrats’ problems. “If we want to beat Donald Trump and achieve big progressive goals, socialism is not the answer,” Hickenlooper said to a crowd of more than 4,500 delegates and observers on Saturday.Before he could get finish his next sentence, a chorus of boos…overtook his speech, lasting for more than 30 seconds. …The former Colorado governor is one of 15 Democratic candidates to address the San Francisco crowd, which is known to be home to some of the party’s furthest left progressives.

And, as reported by the Hill, one of the state’s U.S. Senators, Michael Bennet, also condemned socialism for being contrary to American ideals.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), a 2020 presidential hopeful, said on Sunday that his dismissal of socialism as a solution for America is not out of the mainstream for the Democratic Party. “I don’t think I’m out of step,” Bennet told ABC’s “This Week.” “I think we have 230 years of being the longest-lived democracy on the planet. That’s something we need to preserve.” …Bennett made the comments in response to a viral moment in which his fellow Democratic presidential candidate, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, was booed at the California Democratic Convention over the weekend …Bennet…is on the moderate end of the Democratic primary field.

I hope Joe Biden and other Democrats join Hickenlooper and Bennet.

In my fantasy world, the next Democratic president will turn out to be another Bill Clinton who presides (either intentionally or unintentionally) over an expansion of economic freedom in the United States.

But at the very least, I don’t want the country to take a big step toward statism, which was the mistake the United Kingdom made under Clement Attlee after World War II.

P.S. I realize many Democrats today don’t really have a firm understanding of socialism. Many of them don’t realize it implies government ownership, central planning, and price controls. Heck, some of them probably think the market-oriented Nordic welfare states (which have similar levels of economic freedom as the United States) are socialist. Regardless, they definitely want government to get bigger at a faster rate, so I’m hoping they’re not the majority of the Democratic Party.

My Thoughts on Doxxing

By Rich Kozlovich

Good article by Alex Berezow,  Doxxing: The Newest Strategy to Destroy Scientists. This needs far more exposure. Most scientists are ill equipped to deal with these kinds of personal attacks because most of them just want to be left alone and do research and report their findings. This tactic has been played forever in many arena's by those who wish to impose their will on the rest of humanity.

During Roman times Julius Caesar was at one point made a Consul of Rome. During what remained of Rome’s Republican period there were two co-equal Consuls appointed for a year. Caesar didn’t like sharing power so he had his thugs attack his Co-Consul Bibulus to the point he remained in his house for the rest of his term, in effect making the two Consuls Julius and Caesar.

Now this kind of intimidation can be done on line. Mann and his SLAPP suits against Ball, National Review, Mark Steyn, Competitive Enterprise institute and Rand Simberg is another example of this kind of intimidation to silence critics attempting too expose leftist corruption in science, effectively forcing them to stay out of the public arena, and stop doing research in particular subjects that would bring controversy to them. You may wish to view my article, Let Me Tell You about Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.

All this Lysenkoism isn’t anything new, it’s the mode of operation that’s new, but it’s just as effective and potentially deadly.

At some point the scientific world, and those in this arena fighting for “Truth, Justice and the American Way”, need to organize and start rooting out these people and sue them personally, and if it can be found they’ve committed some crime or other, they need to be prosecuted. There’s nothing like a good civil or criminal penalty to educate these vile people.

To be a leftist is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.

Doxxing: The Newest Strategy to Destroy Scientists

By Alex Berezow — May 23, 2019 @ American Council on Science and Health

Social media in general, and Twitter in particular, is an absolute sewer pipe. While its role in sharing news is useful, the rumors and lies that it spreads, as well as the mob-like behavior that it encourages, has turned social media into a dangerous weapon.

In October 2015, I wrote an article for RealClearScience that detailed how activists were abusing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by requesting that universities turn over private e-mail correspondence from professors. FOIA is meant to uncover wrongdoing by elected officials and bureaucrats, but activists use it to selectively extract quotes out of context in order to create controversy where none exists.

Nobody knows that better than plant geneticist Dr. Kevin Folta, who has had hundreds of pages of private e-mails published online for all to see (shockingly, by a group of anti-biotech activists who work for UCSF). For years, he has been viciously targeted in a coordinated cyberbullying campaign aimed at destroying him personally and professionally. His crime? He supports GMOs and once accepted money from Monsanto. Quelle horreur!

It doesn't matter that Dr. Folta never acted illegally or unethically. The only thing that matters is Monsanto. In the minds of activists, Monsanto = bad, therefore anyone who has ever worked for, supported, received funding from, or merely said anything nice about the company is also bad. In the midst of the FOIA controversy, Nature Biotechnology wrote an editorial in support of Dr. Folta. Ominously, it warned:

"This is how demagogues and anti-science zealots succeed: they extract a high cost for free speech; they coerce the informed into silence; they create hostile environments that threaten vibrant rare species [i.e., gifted communicators] with extinction.

Things only got worse. Social media mobs continued to harass not only Dr. Folta but anyone who voiced support for biotechnology. Stephan Neidenbach is a middle school science teacher who runs a popular Facebook page called "We Love GMOs and Vaccines." The activist mob disapproves, so they tried to get him fired. As I wrote at the time:

Their most recent tactic is to try to get Mr. Neidenbach fired from his school, so they have accused him of stealing from his students and mocking people with intellectual disabilities. Of course, neither of these are true, but that hardly matters... Then, the trolls took it to another level: They targeted his family.

Such abuse, by the way, is not limited to those who support biotechnology. Any researcher who publishes information with which activists disagree is ruthlessly targeted. Reuters details the story of Michael Sharpe, who has been harassed because of data he published on chronic fatigue syndrome that the patient-activist community disliked.

Believe it or not, things have gotten worse yet again.

Doxxing: The Newest Strategy To Destroy a Scientist

Having failed to destroy Dr. Folta professionally, the activist mob is now going after him personally in a particularly twisted away. Michael Balter, a journalist who was fired from Science due to a "breakdown of trust," just published incredibly private information about Kevin Folta, including Dr. Folta's address and bank account information. (I refuse to link to the blog post. Dr. Folta confirmed in an e-mail to ACSH that Balter must have received hacked or stolen documents.)

Publishing someone's private information is known as "doxxing," and there is one and only one reason to do it: To encourage the mob to engage in intimidation, identity theft, violence, or worse. And it looks as if Balter may be getting his wish. This is what one of the activists posted on Twitter in response to Balter:



Balter's justification for his actions is that the information is old and no longer used, but Dr. Folta denies this. Even if Balter is telling the truth, disclosing somebody's personal data without their consent is outrageously unethical. Credit checks and other systems used to verify a person's identity often use older private information, such as the addresses of former residences. And what if some deranged person shows up to that address? What Balter did was a gratuitous act of pure malice.

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Folta announced that he intends to close his Twitter account. He says Twitter is not a safe place for scientists. Having personally received death threats on Twitter, I can verify that he is correct.

Update (May 23, 2019 @ 4:34 pm PT): Michael Balter was found to have violated Twitter's rules. Yet, he's still tweeting because apparently there are no consequences for bad behavior.

 

Democrats Must Stop Living in a Fantasy World

By Rich Logis

Remember the 1998 film The Truman Show, when Jim Carrey was actually a good actor? When his character, Truman Burbank, discovers that his entire life had been scripted for television from birth, he forgoes his life of fantasy for reality.

From teeth cleanings to haircuts to sniffing hair to cracking open beers in your kitchen to men kissing their "husbands," Democrats have created for their voters a world where truth and reality are indefinitely suspended, supplanted by fairy tales.

Yes, all the world's a stage, and the men and women in it mere players, and irrespective of influence and propaganda, adults are responsible for their own actions and decisions. But the Democrat delusions of grandeur pervasive throughout the republic — buttressed by lies, conspiracy theories, and myths that the DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex) rarely challenge — are dangerous and deadly.

Men are women. Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential election. Inequality is the new equality. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. On and on. Democrats live in a politically manufactured world akin to Truman Burbank's reality TV world........ To Read More

My Take - Let's face it.  If the left didn't have a fantasy world they'd have no world at all.

Exposing the RINO Underground By Smoking Out the ‘Never Trumpers’ One-by-One

Soon enough Ana Navarro will be biting her nails.

by Dov Fischer June 2, 2019

Oh, Rep. Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, wants the President impeached? Oh. Wow!But, uh, who exactly is Justin… a Rash? Like, really. Whoisthis character? Beto O’Rourke with the ear hairs still inserted?

Indeed — who are these characters and circus clowns who show up on CNN, MSNBC, and similar organs presenting themselves as Republicans committed to ousting the President? Are these really Republicans — or simply circus acts for new gigs now that Barnum & Bailey permanently has closed down?

Honestly — really, honestly — who ever heard of Ana Navarro before she became a CNN “expert Republican” on what is wrong with Trump and with the entire Republican political agenda?

Sure, Mitt Romney reviles Trump, but at least Romney is conservative on several issues, even if he is the Father of Obamacare and soft on many other areas. But he is not against the entire Republican conservative agenda. The Mormons of Utah would not stand for it. Honestly — he believes in capitalism, the right to life, even spoke of self-deportation.......To Read More.....

Dr. Drew Pinsky compares L.A. health crisis to Third World country: 'This is medieval'

'No city on Earth tolerates this. The entire population is at risk'

By Jessica Chasmar - The Washington Times - Saturday, June 1, 2019

Celebrity doctor Drew Pinsky said Thursday that the city of Los Angeles is comparable to a Third World country because of its public health problems and lack of sanitation.

“This is unbelievable. I can’t believe I live in a city where — this is not Third World, Laura, this is medieval,” Dr. Pinsky told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on “The Ingraham Angle.”

“Third World countries are insulted if they are accused of being like this. No city on Earth tolerates this. The entire population is at risk,” he said.

Dr. Pinsky’s criticism followed news Thursday that a Los Angeles police detective had been diagnosed with typhoid fever, a rare bacterial infection typically spread through contaminated food or water. At least five other officers who work in the same Central Division station are showing symptoms of the same dangerous illness..........To Read More....

California's jails are so bad some inmates beg to go to prison instead

By Abbie Vansickle and Manuel Villa, The Marshall Project and Los Angeles Times

 Ever since he stole his first car at age 10, Cody Garland has spent much of his life behind bars. Now 35, he has served time at eight different California prisons.  But the hardest stint, he says, was not in a state penitentiary. It was in a Sacramento County jail, where in 2016 he was sentenced to serve eight years for burglary, identity theft and other charges.  Medical care at the jail was even worse than in prison; untreated glaucoma left him legally blind, he says.

Solitary confinement — in a windowless room — was a common punishment; Garland says he lost track of whether it was day or night during a spell in solitary and began to hear voices.  Mental health help was hard to get, he alleged, even after he started swallowing shards of metal and tried to hang himself. He detailed the treatment in a lawsuit accusing the county of subjecting inmates to inhumane conditions — a claim the county denies.

“I’ve done a lot of prison time,” he says, “and this was the worst time I’d ever done.”............To Read More..

My Take - Why are we accepting the word of a man who has spent his entire life committing crimes against honest, hard working citizens who've been forced to pay this man's freight for most of  his life?  I mean, what kind of 10 year old steals a car? 

I don't know how true any of this is, but one thing everyone keeps forgetting is these people aren't being sent there for medical reasons and treatment, whether it's mental of physical.  They're being sent there to be punished because they've committed crimes and have proven they're unfit to live in civilized society.    

Is that really so hard to get?


     

LAPD says officers are coming down with typhoid fever, as rats and homeless multiply

June 1, 2019 By Monica Showalter

Cops are people who sometimes have to take on thankless dirty jobs, because someone has to take out the trash, but now that they're coming down with typhus-like illnesses, based on the multiplication of the homeless population and the accompanying rats, one wonders how fair this is — or, more to the point, if maybe leftists making policy wanted it this way.

According to ABC News::

At least one officer with the Los Angeles Police Department has contracted the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, Salmonella typhi, and another one is showing typhus-like symptoms, the police department announced on Thursday. 

The officer who had contracted the illness is being treated, and the other officer has yet to be confirmed to be infected, according to the LAPD. Both officers work at the LAPD's Central Division, according to a statement released by the department

 California's blue-state Democrats can thank themselves for this one, based on all their laws to "protect" the homeless to be homeless, inadvertently creating conditions for a plague.

 The Left doesn't like cops, of course, nor any enforcement of laws, so the idea of cops coming down with medieval illnesses rather fits into their scheme of things. Typhus in fact means that some cops won't enforce the vagrancy laws at all. Good times for the plague.............. Leftists can stand up and take a bow for this. It's almost as if they wanted it this way.........this is just the beginning..... To Read More.....

The Obama economic disaster revealed in one glance

June 2, 2019 By Russ Vaughn

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has produced a summary report showing key performance measurements of America’s economy during the eight years of Obama/Democrat malfeasance. It’s another trip through the looking glass where everything that should be up is down while everything that should be down is up, and in the case of student loans, food stamps and federal debt, up stratospherically. Here’s the snapshot from Gateway Pundit:  ............Read more

Baylor University Prayer Denounces Straight White Men

By Todd Starnes May 24, 2019

Get a load of the racially-charged prayer delivered at Baylor University’s 2019 commencement by Dan Freemyer, a minister at Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth.

“God, give them the moral imagination to reject the old keys we are trying to give them  to a planet that we are poisoning by running it on fossil fuels and misplaced priorities – a planet with too many straight, white men like me behind the steering wheel while others have been expected to sit quietly in the back of the bus,” the minister prayed.

Did you notice the cheers from the crowd?............. To Read More....



 

Clarence Thomas Speaks the Truth for SCOTUS on Abortion

By Mario Diaz

In today's concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Justice Clarence Thomas dared speak the truth about the abortion industry in an area of law and policy infested with euphemisms, deception, and distortion. That "the Constitution itself is silent on abortion," for example, is a most obvious observation that anyone old enough to read can confirm. But to write it plainly in a Supreme Court opinion, as he did, is nothing short of an act of courage in today's day and age, when the darkness of abortion has such a firm grip on our political, legal, and cultural environments.

The case dealt with an Indiana law that contained two provisions. The first dealt with the "disposition of fetal remains by abortion providers," and the second barred "sex-, race-, or disability-selective abortions by abortion providers." In a Per Curiam opinion (meaning it comes from the Court as a whole and not signed by any particular justice) the Court granted cert. on the first question and reversed the lower-court ruling that had invalidated the law. But it denied hearing on the second question, leaving in place the lower court's ruling that invalidated it. .......... To Read More

Mueller is A Disgrace

By Rich Kozlovich

I've not posted much in the last week or so because I'm really busy.  But there's a second reason.  Even a newsie like me can only stand so much. 

Today's edition is dealing solely with the corrupt leftist Deep State inspired Mueller investigation, and the consequences that are going to follow.  But not to Trump.  It's the Deep State operatives who pushed this narrative on the nation against a duly elected President who are now in trouble.

It seems clear to me as the investigations into these corrupt officials (many high officials, all Obama people who are already pointing fingers at each other) starts to get to the bottom of who did what and when, we may find what I've believed from the beginning - this is criminal conspiracy that may well be interconnected throughout the Obama administration, and all the law enforcement and intelligence agencies.  With Obama at the top of that corrupt criminal and treasonous enterprise.  All of whom are going around spouting off in a vain attempt to excuse their treason.  And we should be grateful, because the more they're talking the deeper they're digging their hole.

As for Obama, he had to know it was going on, or those closest to him had to know.  Which leads to this question - “What did the President know and when did he know it!  As for Hillary, she will face the same problem. 

These people don't do the dirty work, they have minions who do it for them.  When push comes to shove, these "little" people involved in all this criminal activity will not willingly go to jail for them.  If the top people think the "little" people are going to take the hit for them while they live the good life on the outside, shooting off their mouths about how terrible a President is Donald Trump, they're in for a rude awakening.  We're going to see a lot of "Let's Make a Deal" very soon. 

There's an old axiom that says, "If you're going to shoot the King you had better not miss".  Well, the left has taken their shot at the President and irrespective of the multitude of investigations the Democrats are still attempting to conduct, their shots have missed. 

Now it's his turn!

I've been intending to outline in an article of my own as to just how corrupt Mueller has been during his long career in government, along with the rest of that corrupt cabal in the Obama administration, but some of the articles below are amazingly well documented and will serve you better than anything I would've written. 

Please enjoy!

• How a Special Counsel Disgraced Himself and the US Government
• Mueller and Obstruction of Justice
• Trump Let the Dogs Out
• Prelude to Trump’s Take Down of Obama’s Henchmen and Spies
• A Made Man (Mueller) Unmakes Himself
• Mueller Report busted for doctoring transcript and misleading on obstruction of justice evidence
• Anti-Trump Traitors Rip Blindfold Off Lady Justice
• A Bastardized Investigation – 7 Reasons Why Mueller Should Have Never Happened
• Robert Mueller Stirs the Pot – Again!
• A Made Man (Mueller) Unmakes Himself
• Traitors Must Be Prosecuted To Stop The Coup
• America Compromised by the Crooked Cabal
• Mueller Was Trapped by the Constitution

How a Special Counsel Disgraced Himself and the US Government

June 2, 2019 By Spike Hampson

In his recent public statement, Robert Mueller admitted he was on a witch hunt. He didn't mean to do so, but his own words reveal as much:

And as set forth in the report after that investigation, if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.

By talking about whether or not the president was guilty of committing a crime, Mueller revealed the fact that he was not investigating whether or not the president committed the crime. Mueller would never confess to trying to pin any old crime on the president, but the way he expressed himself in those two sentences is a dead giveaway: he failed to identify the specific crime being investigated and thus telegraphed the fact that for the purposes of his investigation, any crime would do............. Read more

Mueller and Obstruction of Justice

June 1, 2019 By Daniel John Sobieski

The irony was that Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn was charged with and plead guilty to making false statements to the FBI.   By his own standards Robert Mueller was guilty of making “false statements” in his parting gift to Democrat impeachment seekers. He was not, however, under legal oath, which is maybe why Democrats did not want him to be questioned by Congress in a hearing beforehand.

Mueller has had to walk back his lie about Office of Legal Counsel policy keeping him from indicting a sitting president. In his alleged “farewell” address, former Special Counsel Mueller managed to channel former FBI Director James Comey.

Where is it written that former FBI directors get to recite a litany of possible charges against someone they are not going to charge? If, as Mueller had said, you could indict a sitting President, and that is why he was not indicted, then why did he spend some $40 million the past two years pursuing an indictment? Just what happened to the presumption of innocence? ..........To Read More....

Trump Let the Dogs Out

Those responsible for the coup attempt against the president can run but they can no longer hide. 

By Jed Babbin   

The Democrats, stumbling down the road to impeachment, were stunned by President Trump’s executive order on Thursday.

 

The order is in two parts. First, it directs the intelligence agencies to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation that was the vehicle used to spy on candidate Trump’s campaign and President Trump’s administration when it was new.

 

The second part of the order delegates to Barr the president’s authority to declassify — or reduce the level of classification of — anything that the intelligence agencies will give him.

 

Leaving on his trip to Japan on Friday, Trump said “We want to be very transparent, so as you know, I declassified everything. We are exposing everything.” He specifically mentioned that Barr would be looking at the involvement of several nations including the UK, Australia, and Ukraine.
 

Trump let the dogs out. The necessity for this action has been comprehensively clear for more than a year, and I have been advocating it for that long.

 

While he was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Devin Nunes tried to get the FBI to testify truthfully and provide him the documents that show how it abused its law enforcement powers to investigate Trump. Nunes’s January 2018 memorandum — of which the FBI fought declassification as long as it could — revealed enormous abuses of power by the FBI in seeking and obtaining — on false grounds — surveillance warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from the FISA Court.

 

As I wrote last year (here and here), Nunes demonstrated that what the FBI did in the Trump investigation was worse than Watergate. Nunes also demonstrated conclusively that nothing other than a presidential order to declassify the documents and testimony the FBI was concealing could overcome the FBI’s stonewalling.........To Read More....

Prelude to Trump’s Take Down of Obama’s Henchmen and Spies

May 29, 2019 Posted by Col Jim Waurishuk, USAF (Ret.), National Security Analyst

Once again, for those of you who follow me on America Out Loud, for the past two plus years I’ve been writing about the Russia Collusion scandal, the abuse and criminal use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants, and the politicization and weaponization of intelligence – from General Flynn’s deceptive, frivolous, and fraudulent illegal charges against him, to the fabricated and unadulterated bullshit of the fake dossier against President Trump. This article begins the final prologue of the end of the Obama administration’s orchestrated plan to take down candidate, then President Donald J. Trump, well before he was the preeminent Republican candidate and nominee for the Presidency.

This article begins with the henchmen who devised, planned, and implemented the actual ‘silent coup d’état’ against candidate Trump, and now President Trump. You also need to remember and recall that I have been predicting what is currently happening, nearly exactly as it is going down, since most Americans became aware of it in late 2016.

With the forthcoming next set of shoes to drop; the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Report, the full Mueller Report, and President Trump’s declassification and release of the FISA documents, comprised of the initial FISA applications and there justification, and the actual warrants – ominous dark clouds are moving in around Washington, DC. The feeling among many is threatening and inauspicious — giving the impression that something bad or unpleasant is going to happen. 

So with that, the first question many are asking is who should we be watching and be aware of who perhaps will be the first to fall. To answer that question, we must fully understand what has been going on for the last nearly two and a half years..........To Read More......

 

A Made Man (Mueller) Unmakes Himself

June 2, 2019 By Clarice Feldman

In common parlance, a made man is someone whose path to success was greased by circumstances. It also refers to someone formally inducted as a full member of a criminal outfit -- the Mafia. In the political atmosphere in which Robert Mueller was born, he, like John Kerry, was virtually assured of a prestigious place in society: He was a tall white man with a hatchet jaw who (like his classmate Kerry) went to an expensive private school – St. Paul’s -- and came from a well-connected and well-off family.

His wife, Ann Cabell Standish Mueller, is related to Charles Cabell, once deputy director of the CIA. Richard Bissell, formerly the CIA’s director of plans, is his cousin. Both men were fired by President Kennedy for their roles in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

His own public service career includes a number of spectacular failures as well:

He kept four innocent men in jail for years (one for 35 years) to protect the vicious criminal Whitey Bulger, who had at times been an FBI informant............. To Read More

Mueller Report busted for doctoring transcript and misleading on obstruction of justice evidence

June 2, 2019 By Thomas Lifson

It’s all downhill now for Robert Mueller and the very costly report fashioned by his team of Trump-hating lawyers. They have been exposed as propagandists attempting to falsely implicate President Trump’s team in obstruction of justice by doctoring a transcript of a telephone call, omitting exculpatory words.

Because they were paid tens of millions of dollars by taxpayers to accurately assess the Russia hoax charges only to come up with nothing, obstruction was their fallback option to fuel impeachment talk among House Democrats and thereby obstruct the performance of the duties of the presidency by the elected incumbent, Donald John Trump. But now we can plainly see that they stacked the deck out of sheer animus to the president.

On Friday, following an order from Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is tasked with sentencing General Michael Flynn for his guilty plea in a dubious process crime the Mueller Team charged him with, the government filed “on the public docket ‘the transcript of the voicemail recording’ from President Trump’s attorney John Dowd to Michael Flynn.” That recording -- in doctored form -- had been part of the Mueller Report section on obstruction of justice. The first to notice the discrepancy between the report’s version and the actual transcript was Rosie Memos:..............: Read more

Anti-Trump Traitors Rip Blindfold Off Lady Justice

By Lloyd Marcus

What anti-American zealots in government and media are doing to president Trump is unprecedented and should scare the heck out of every American. They have created a parallel universe void of truth and reality. In the midst of Trump actually making America great again, millions of Americans believe Trump is a Russian agent, mentally ill, and leading America to destruction.

Trump brought back jobs that Obama decreed were gone forever. Black, Hispanic, and female unemployment are at historic lows. Trump pulled us out of bad deals with foreign governments. Thanks to Trump eliminating absurd regulations and oppressive taxes, businesses are coming home to America building factories. The average American wage is $27 per hour. Americans are enjoying an economic boom. All this incredible good news is for the most part being hidden from Americans.

 

Instead, Democrats, fake news media, Hollywood, and social media flood the airwaves with their lie that Trump is horrible for America. They claim he obstructed justice in the Mueller investigation. Hogwash! The truth is the Mueller so-called investigation was really an illegal witch-hunt, a silent coup undermining Trump's presidency; to reverse the 2016 presidential election............Read more

A Bastardized Investigation – 7 Reasons Why Mueller Should Have Never Happened

March 8, 2019 Posted by Lt Joseph Pangaro, Investigator, Hostage/Crisis Negotiator

Every criminal investigation begins with the belief that a crime has been committed. That belief comes to an investigator from a victim who experienced the crime, from a witness who saw or otherwise knows about the crime or sometimes it comes from an informant or an anonymous source.

Once the investigator gets the initial report of a crime, they will conduct an analysis of the information and where it came from to decide as to the veracity of the report.

 

Seasoned investigators know that just because a report comes in, no matter the source of the report, it has to be vetted because you know that people will lie for all kinds of reasons. People lie for financial gain, revenge, to move suspicion away from themselves or to other wise cause a problem for another person.

 

All of these motives must be examined closely before a full-on criminal investigation can begin, after all, the mechanics of a criminal investigation involve many hours of police work, the use of other resources and the difficulty an investigation can cause to the person that is the subject of the investigation. Just running amok to investigate rumors is not appropriate and unprofessional.

When vetting a possible informant there are many steps to be taken:.........To Read More.....

Robert Mueller Stirs the Pot – Again!

May 30, 2019 Posted by Ilana Freedman, Intelligence Analyst

Robert Mueller makes an unsolicited, very public statement at the Department of Justice, which, he said, would be his last as a public official. It was on the subject of the now highly controversial Mueller Report. His statement was unnecessary, because there was absolutely nothing new in what he said. He simply repeated the findings of his team’s 488 page Mueller Report, and announced his upcoming resignation from public life.

But in his carefully crafted speech, he managed to stir the political, anti-Trump pot once again and gave the Democrat pro-impeachment crowd, which seemed to be losing ground until this morning, a big push forward once again.

While confirming that there were “multiple, systematic efforts” on the part of the Russians to interfere with the 2016 Presidential elections, he confirmed that his team had not found any evidence to charge the President with collusion with a foreign power. He also repeated that his team had also not found sufficient evidence to accuse the President of obstruction of justice.

But – and here is the key to his underlying purpose – he was very careful to make a clear distinction between innocence and suspected guilt......To Read More...

A Made Man (Mueller) Unmakes Himself

June 2, 2019 By Clarice Feldman

In common parlance, a made man is someone whose path to success was greased by circumstances. It also refers to someone formally inducted as a full member of a criminal outfit -- the Mafia. In the political atmosphere in which Robert Mueller was born, he, like John Kerry, was virtually assured of a prestigious place in society: He was a tall white man with a hatchet jaw who (like his classmate Kerry) went to an expensive private school – St. Paul’s -- and came from a well-connected and well-off family.

His wife, Ann Cabell Standish Mueller, is related to Charles Cabell, once deputy director of the CIA. Richard Bissell, formerly the CIA’s director of plans, is his cousin. Both men were fired by President Kennedy for their roles in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

His own public service career includes a number of spectacular failures as well:

He kept four innocent men in jail for years (one for 35 years) to protect the vicious criminal Whitey Bulger, who had at times been an FBI informant........... Read more

Traitors Must Be Prosecuted To Stop The Coup

Cliff Nichols  Jun 02, 2019

Mueller’s press conference this week should be giving the president a good reason to be asking, how long can his administration afford to allow this coup d’ état to continue before a quorum of public opinion takes hold in this country that will wrongfully compel him by force of some unlawful process, if not arms, to be removed from office?

Undeniably, America is in the midst of a civil war. The only things not yet flying are the bullets.

• Liberals in Congress are demanding our president be impeached for undefined offenses. Liberal federal judges are letting themselves be used to thwart his policies at every turn.
• A complicit liberal media, with the help of Hollywood, is doing its very best to enable the president’s enemies to foment in the public’s mind — without evidence — that he is a liar, a cheat and a criminal who must be removed from office.
• And Mueller's press conference brought this tempest to an even greater boil than when the president was first elected over two years ago.

Why?...............In a word, they committed treason..........To Read More.....

America Compromised by the Crooked Cabal

May 30, 2019 Posted by Ray Brookstein, Author, Poet and Show Host

As we wait in anticipation for the declassification of documents, to begin the expose’ of exactly what precipitated deep state spying, well before and after the election of Donald J. Trump, we must ask ourselves a fundamental question…

 

Can we ever again allow a small crooked cabal of upper echelon bureaucrats to foist a plot against a sitting President, for their political pleasure and greed?

 

If it can be proven that they abused the power that ”We the People” entrusted to them, to be used for nefarious deeds, there must be severe consequence for every evildoer. This would include the previous administration, right up to and including the top.

 

Our Republic is greater than any President, political party or any government agency⏤the future is at stake. 

 

This is not a time for sympathy and compassion against the evildoers. These traitors are treasonably dead wrong. 

Our Founding Fathers knew that the power belongs to ‘We the People’, not the crooked bureaucrats and their silver tongue lies..........To Read More....

   

Mueller Was Trapped by the Constitution

Editorial of The New York Sun | May 30, 2019

Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's swan song illustrates nothing so much as the constitutional illogic of having a special prosecutor set up to investigate the president in the first place. Mr. Mueller sought to create the impression that he was doing everything by the book. He was, though, playing against Washington, Madison, Adams, and the other Framers of the Constitution. So it ended in check mate...........All these probes or prosecutions were crosswise with the logic of the Constitution. Only the president is authorized and required to take care that our laws be faithfully executed. To ensure he is able to do that, only the president is given the power to commission the officers of the United States. ...............Throughout this drama, we have lurked in a small minority — perhaps of one — arguing that the President should have fired Mr. Mueller the moment he learned of his appointment. He should have done so precisely because the president didn’t commission him. ............... To Read More....

A Government Environmentalist Experiment in Brainwashing Parents Through Children in North Carolina

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 6 Comments Wednesday, May 22, 2019 @ Sultan Knish Blog

#C02Kult.

That’s the hashtag for it in Germany, where they know a bit about mass hysteria and brainwashing. It shows up every time students are manipulated into another school strike for the “environment”.

The Joan of Arc of C02Kult is Greta Thunberg, the daughter of two Swedish celebrities, and a 15-year-old suffering from Aspergers, who became a popular lefty figure for leading environmental school strikes.

“I overthink. Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad," Greta said. "I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.”

Greta claims that she began to suffer from depression when she was only 8-years-old because of global warming. She claims to have gotten her mother to stop flying and her father to turn into a vegetarian.

The autistic teenager spends a lot of time being afraid and sharing her fear. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she told leaders in Davos.

As with all child activists, some see a passion for social responsibility, while others see child abuse.

Had Greta been born in another time and place, she might have been just as afraid of witches or subversives. Terrified teens who were encouraged to act on their fears were responsible for everything from the Salem witch trials to the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. The fault lies with the adults who traumatize children and then unleash them on society to win their political battles.

There’s a name for that. Child soldiers.

A recent paper in Nature is titled, “Children can foster climate change concern among their parents” which suggests that the best way to influence adults is by brainwashing their children.

Or, as its abstract states, “Child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents—may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern.” The ideological barriers are conservative politics.

What was put into practice was an “educational intervention designed to build climate change concern among parents indirectly through their middle school-aged children in North Carolina, USA.”

That reads like the title of a KGB project from the Cold War, but it’s an academic paper in America.

The study found that “parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group. The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents.”

They used to be your children and grandchildren. Now they’re a “treatment group”.

Some of the 10-14 year olds being targeted were exempt from human experimentation because they were in the “control” group. 166 students and 199 parents did get the “treatment”. After two years of this, the paper gloated that “parents who identified as male or conservative more than doubled their level of concern about climate change”.

Danielle F Lawson, a grad student at North Carolina State University, credited the level of trust between parents and children. It’s exactly this trust that environmentalists and all totalitarian ideologies exploit.

"We also found that the results were most pronounced for three groups: conservative parents, parents of daughters, and fathers," Lawson is quoted as saying in an NCSU press release.

This, the NCSU release informs us, “was noteworthy because conservatives and men are typically among the least concerned about climate change.”

"There's a robust body of work showing that kids can influence their parents' behavior and positions on environmental and social issues," Lawson asserts.

Scientific American’s article on the study is illustrated with a picture of, who else, Greta Thunberg.

The release thanks the Department of Interior's Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center for its support.

Lawson’s bio claims that she’s looking to build “climate literacy” through “intergenerational transfer in familial and community groups”. It’s not a new idea. The USSR’s educational system was built on the conviction that brainwashing children was an effective tool for controlling their parents.

The North Carolina grad student lists Kathryn Stevenson and Nils Peterson as the professors she's working under. Both of their names appear on the Nature paper. Lawson’s activities are creepy, but not original. Stevenson’s research reeks of a disturbing obsession with figuring out how to manipulate children into accepting her views that we would associate with the USSR or Communist China.

“Our findings suggest convincing teachers that climate change is real, but not necessarily human caused, may have profound impacts on students,” Stevenson insisted after the release of, "How climate change beliefs among U.S. teachers do and do not translate to students."

Her articles and publications obsessively focus on middle-school students and how to manipulate them into accepting her belief system. A 2015 article delves into "fostering climate change hope and concern and avoiding despair among adolescents". Another one explores "psychological factors". A third delves into the "role of significant life experiences" while a fourth explores the role of "friends and family".

A future article seeks to develop a "causal model for adolescent climate change behavior."

One of Stevenson’s favorite targets are the children of conservative parents. Or as one piece describes them, individualists as opposed to communitarians. “Kids are just developing their worldviews, their political ideologies," Stevenson says. The study is titled “Overcoming Skepticism With Education”. Its abstract admits that it targets children because "worldviews are still forming in the teenage years" and therefore "adolescents may represent a more receptive audience."

Not only is NCSU a public research university, but much of this creepy obsession with manipulating children into supporting a destructive partisan agenda is funded through massive government grants.

Kathryn Stevenson’s “Ensuring Readiness For Climate Variability And Change By Leveraging The Power Of Younger Generations” was a grant proposal funded by the USDA to the tune of $149,997.

An upcoming proposal, involving both Stevenson and Peterson, requests $120,000 for "Improving environmental decision making in coastal communities through giving children a voice".

The children don’t have a voice. The adults cynically manipulating them are the only ones who do.

The child soldier of the leftists running the Soviet Union was a boy named Pavlik Morozov who, Communist propaganda claimed, had been killed by his parents for informing on his father. In reality, the boy was murdered by other teens. But the leftist regime massacred most of the dead boy’s family, including his brother, and used his myth to encourage other teens to turn Thunberg.

Child soldiers have their youth, their sense of security and their future stolen from them. And it’s all done when they are still too young to understand the crime that has been committed against them.

Children don’t choose to advocate for political agendas. That choice is made for them. Sometimes those decisions are made by their parents. Other times it’s made by a totalitarian machine lubricated by hundreds of thousands in grant money stolen from their parents in order to brainwash their children.

Greta, depressed, terrified, angry, and traumatized, is the intended outcome of that machine.

A child soldier.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.

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Why Debt Won’t Spark Inflation

By John Mauldin May 24, 2019

Missing Inflation
Debt Rubicon
Velocity Falling
The Complex Debt and Currency Dance
“Too High and Getting Wider”
They Shall Not Grow Old

Modern technology was supposed to make travel less necessary. We can meet by phone, video, and now in virtual reality. But we’re still traveling more than ever. I certainly am.

The reason is simple: Technology can’t yet replace face-to-face conversation, and especially group conversations. It is genetically hardwired in our species. We spend more time on the phone and Skype than ever but technology also makes information more complex and nuanced. Conveying it often requires a personal presence, so we fly around and talk in person.

I thought of that last week at the Strategic Investment Conference. I’ve been writing about “Japanification” of the developed world economy, explaining what I mean by that as best I can in these letters. But in talking to conference attendees, I found that I have not effectively communicated some of the nuances.

To be clear, I don’t want Japanification, nor do I think it will deliver the desired results. I believe that in the next recession…...............To Read More....

Quote of the Day

"To their chagrin, more and more Americans are recognizing that there is no legitimate, scientific basis for dehumanizing unborn children.  The arguments for abortion are no longer biological; they are purely ideological". -Robert Arvay