Monday, April 14, 2014

Mucking Around in Monday's Globe

Forgive me for feeling melancholy again, what with the SNOW IN CHICAGO and the regular muck:

"UN climate panel says critical action can avert disaster; Deep divisions remain between rich, poor nations" by Justin Gillis | New York Times   April 14, 2014

BERLIN — The countries of the world have dragged their feet so long on global warming that the situation is now critical, analysts appointed by the United Nations reported Sunday, and only an intensive worldwide push over the next 15 years can stave off potentially disastrous climatic changes later in the century.

It remains technically possible to keep planetary warming to a tolerable level, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found, according to a report released here. But even in parts of the world such as Europe that have tried hardest, governments are still a long way from taking the steps that are sufficient to do the job, the experts found.

“We cannot afford to lose another decade,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and cochairman of the committee that wrote the report. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.”

What is the phrase they use, pi$$ing in the wind? 

I'm getting a little pissed, but I'm not complaining anymore. I recognize my agenda-pu$hing pre$$ in all its ab$olute lunacy and contradiction of itself and ones own senses. The pri$m of the pre$$ is an illu$ion and and lie.

The report is likely to increase the pressure to secure an ambitious new global climate treaty that is supposed to be completed in late 2015 and take effect in 2020. But the divisions between wealthy countries and poorer countries that are making such a treaty difficult, and have long bedeviled international climate talks, were on display yet again in Berlin.

Some developing countries insisted on stripping charts from the report’s executive summary that could be read as requiring greater effort from them, while rich countries, including the United States, struck out language implying they needed to write big checks to the developing countries.

Both points survived in the full version of the report, but they were deleted from a synopsis meant to inform the world’s top political leaders.

The SBD omission stinks even worse.

The report did find some reasons for cautious optimism. The costs of such renewable energy as wind and solar power are now falling so fast that their deployment on a large scale is becoming practical, the report said. In fact, extensive use of renewable energy is already starting in countries such as Denmark and Germany, and to a lesser degree in some US states, including California, Iowa, and Texas.

Moreover, since the intergovernmental panel issued its last major report in 2007, many more countries, states, and cities have adopted ambitious climate plans, an indication that the political determination to tackle the problem is growing in many parts of the world.

They include China and the United States, which are both doing more domestically than they have been willing to commit themselves to in international treaty negotiations.

Then why the need for any treaty at all?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a UN body that includes hundreds of scientists, economists and other experts. The group periodically reviews the science and economics of climate change and issues major reports every five to six years.

And they have been covered in scandal and lies since Climategate, as well as a period of record-setting winters. It's why I now completely dismiss fart mi$t, the last of the propaganda pre$$ pillars to fall for me.

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On to the war on $elf-$erving $ocila $ciences:

"GOP pushes funding cuts for social science work" by Tracy Jan | Globe Staff   April 14, 2014

WASHINGTON — If Republicans have their way, a Harvard University anthropologist would not be using tax dollars to study the impact of China’s one-child policy.

Fine with me.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist would not have the money to research how Medicare changes might shape seniors’ political attitudes.

Yeah, so?

And a Brown University archeologist would not be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars examining textiles from the Viking Age.

Good.

This is the latest front in a GOP-led war against the federal funding of social science and other research, including the study of climate change, in an age of fiscal austerity.

Well, the $elf-$erving tone by the Globe and the political $how fooley narrative sure has been set, huh?

House Republicans are questioning millions of dollars in National Science Foundation grants awarded to researchers across the country by singling out dozens of projects for extra scrutiny.

They have recently proposed a bill — titled the “Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (First) Act of 2014” — that would cut foundation spending for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences by more than 40 percent. The bill would shift some $160 million that the federal government has allocated for the social sciences and geosciences toward Republican priorities in the physical and biological sciences, as well as engineering.

While on the surface it might seem like the usual partisan bickering, the proposal raises deeper questions about what role the government should play in funding science where the payoff is more difficult to discern than, for example, the quest for the genetic codes that could unlock the mysteries of cancer.

Time to take a pill, no que$tions asked.

It also pits the interests of politicians, who control the scientific purse strings, against the judgments of the scientific community, which selects projects to fund through peer evaluations.

In this context, it is $cienti$ts.

“We have to question spending nearly $700,000 of taxpayer dollars to fund a climate change musical or over $220,000 to study animal photos in National Geographic,” said US Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, in a statement to the Globe. “It’s the role of Congress to make sure we’re using limited federal funds for the highest priority research.” 

Which I'm fine with, except it is of no concern and no never mind when it is weapons cost overruns, bailout loot funneled to Wall Street, aid to Israel checks, all sorts of corporate welfare, and the maintenance of lavish political lifestyles. That's all biparti$an.

The actions have prompted Democrats and many in the scientific community to accuse Republicans of meddling in science — a dangerous precedent, critics say, because it would allow politicians to decide what areas to prioritize based on their own partisan ideologies, over the expertise of scientists.

Like imposing a cash-grabbing carbon tax, right?

****************

This House effort follows a budget amendment by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma last year to temporarily restrict the funding of political science research to projects that promote US national security or economic development. The amendment was adopted, leading the foundation to cancel a round of political science grant competitions.

In recent weeks, Democrats were able to amend the new House bill and boost social science funding by $50 million.

But FOOD STAMPS get CUT in a farm bill conservationists are sucking sod over! 

And with all the flood and drought damage, the corporations will be accessing those expanded government insurance accounts.

****************

Obama’s proposed budget for social science research accounts for far less than 1 percent of the agency’s $5.8 billion total research funding, a “very, very modest proportion,” said John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, at a recent House Science Committee hearing on science agency budgets.

“Some of the funny-sounding titles, when you look into them, do make a lot of sense,” said Holdren, an environmental policy and earth and planetary science professor at Harvard. “I just don’t feel that most people in this room are well qualified to second-guess NSF’s superb peer review committees.”

Social science research helps the nation understand poverty, control the spread of infectious diseases, reduce human trafficking, understand the conduct of other nations and the effectiveness of sanctions, and optimize disaster response, among other benefits, Holdren said.

Yeah, let's do studies on poverty brought about government policies. That makes $en$e. Aboput as much sense as paying for studies to see how sanctions can be applied to nations, and then analyzing the effect of the sanctions on the target country. 

As for diseases, trafficking, and disaster response, same old ineffectual government despite all the $tudies. Maybe the money could be put to better use.

“This is an attempt to politicize the grant-making process instead of leaving it up to the experts,” said Wendy Naus, executive director of the Consortium of Social Science Associations in Washington. “Even for the scientific disciplines that would actually see an increase at the expense of social sciences, it’s a slippery slope. It may work out for them this year, but in future years, who’s to say?”

I'm not up for agenda-pu$hing experts and $cienti$t priests solving any problems anymore.

Fact is, they are the ones that created most of them so they could grab cash. 

The economic experts at the central banks have really done a great job, huh? (I suppose they have if you occupy to top 5% of wealth). 

And those war plans by experts have all gone to form, right? (Especially with the mouthpiece media megaphone promoting them with front-page lies). 

Btw, Congre$$ politicizes everything. It's called a budget. That's why corporations have lobbyists.

Already Republicans have raised concerns about the merits of some biological research, including a $385,000 study by Yale University ornithologists on the sexual behavior of ducks, which landed on a House science committee spreadsheet of nearly 100 questionable projects.

Patricia Brennan, an evolutionary biologist at University of Massachusetts Amherst who had been awarded the grant to study sexual conflict in ducks when she was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, said basic research like hers is easy to poke fun at because it does not have clear real-world applicability.

The mother of all $ocial $cienti$ts.

“A lot of the research we fund has to do with topics that may not be immediately apparent why it’s important to human beings,” but it can prove to be, said Brennan.

How? 

And beyond that, why should taxpayers be picking up the tab for someone's sick sexual fetish of watching ducks fuck??

Brennan and other scientists from around the country descended upon Washington last week to talk with lawmakers about the importance of NSF funding for basic research. 

First I've seen of it in my Globe, and although I do not post or read everything on a given day I do note everything.

Michelle McKinley, a law professor at the University of Oregon, said she almost fell off her chair when she discovered in March that House Republicans had been citing her $50,000 grant to study lawsuits in Peru between 1600 and 1700 as an example of waste. McKinley said her research was funded only after surviving two rounds of rigorous reviews by other social scientists. She uses historical records to study the institution of slavery to answer questions about social justice and inequality — work she defends as valuable “even if it’s not going to give us clean energy.” 

Yeah, forget about the record inequality and lack of social justice four-hundred years later.

I mean, I'd love to investigate my personal interests with a grant from the government, like the impact of the Western Massachusetts basketball tournament on the the state economy over its entire history and the correlation between exciting tournaments and increased economic activity and its correlation with larger economic forces. Whaddayathink? Where's my grant!?

“It doesn’t usually have great results for the production of knowledge when Congress starts questioning why certain things are receiving funding,” McKinley said.

She wants to keep feeding at the federal trough.

Coburn, an obstetrician who is retiring from Congress in December, has for years tried to eliminate funding for political science research, and he targeted social science in his annual “Wastebook.” Coburn has gone a step further than House Republicans, proposing the elimination of funding altogether for social, behavioral, and economic research within the National Science Foundation to save the nation about $255 million a year.

“Rather than ramping up the amount spent on political science and other social and behavioral research, NSF’s mission should be redirected toward truly transformative sciences with practical uses,” Coburn wrote in a scathing 2011 review of the National Science Foundation.

One of Coburn’s targets has been research on how members of Congress engage their constituents, conducted by David Lazer, a professor of political science and computer and information sciences at Northeastern University. In 2009, Coburn accused the NSF of wasting tax dollars on helping “members of Congress improve their dismal approval ratings” instead of using the money for cancer and other disease research.

Yeah, YOU are PAYING FOR THAT, too, taxpayers!!

“Coburn was the opening wedge of the attack on the more general social sciences, science that may be producing conclusions that are disliked by particular political players today,” Lazer said.

Coburn also went after waste at the Pentagon, but that is neither mentioned here and has been dispatched down the memory hole.

“The hope is that academia can help speak truth to power, but that doesn’t work when the powerful turn the lights out on those academics.”

They can't in the face of fart-mi$ting contradiction, so why would they regarding anything else?

--more--"

Yeah, they passed the corporate tax breaks, though. 

No word on the unemployment bill that is languishing.

Another front-paged war:

"In a sign of how competitive the Boston-area housing market has become, the maneuver is becoming part of the area’s bidding war landscape, brokers and other real estate executives say. Skeptics say the clauses are potentially risky and a needless ploy that could backfire by alienating some sellers. The use of escalation clauses raises an obvious question: Couldn’t a seller make up a fictitious high-bid figure to command even more money from someone promising to top the best offer? That’s possible but unlikely, brokers say."

Just take it on the mortgage broker's word? We are back to that again after the mortgage-backed securities swindle destroyed the economy and enriched Wall Street?

First in the Nation after the flip:

"Gunman kills 3 at Jewish centers in Kansas; Suspect alleged to have history of racist statements" by Maria Sudekum | Associated Press   April 14, 2014

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — The man accused of killing three people in attacks at Jewish-related sites in a Kansas City suburb on Sunday is a well-known white supremacist who has run for public office on a white power platform and who once was the subject of a nationwide manhunt.

This is an expansion of the cover story since it is an update from what I received in print, and the white supremacist angle already screams government involvement.

Frazier Glenn Cross was booked into Johnson County jail in Olathe on a preliminary charge of first-degree murder after the attacks in Overland Park.

At a news conference, Overland Park police Chief John Douglass declined to publicly identify the man suspected of carrying out the attacks. But a jail official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the case, identified the suspect as 73-year-old Frazier Glenn Cross, of Aurora, Mo.

Something just flared up in my mind.

‘‘Today is a sad and very tragic day,’’ Douglass said at the news conference. ‘‘As you might imagine we are only three hours into this investigation. There’s a lot of innuendo and a lot of assertions going around. There is really very little hardcore information.’’

According to police, the attacks happened within minutes of one another. At around 1 p.m. a gunman opened fire on two people in the parking lot behind the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City. He then drove a few blocks away to a Jewish retirement community, Village Shalom, and gunned down a woman or girl there, Douglass said. Officers arrested the suspect in an elementary school parking lot a short time later.

Authorities also declined to release the victims’ names pending notification of their relatives, but the family of the first two victims released a statement identifying them as Dr. William Lewis Corporon, who died at the scene, and his 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, who died at Overland Park Regional Medical Center.

They were both Christian, and the family thanked members of their church congregation, among other people, for their support.

He missed the Jews and shot Christians?

‘‘We take comfort knowing they are together in Heaven,’’ the family said. It asked for privacy to mourn.

Rebecca Sturtevant, a hospital spokeswoman, said family members said Corporon took his grandson to the community center so that the boy could try out for a singing competition for high school students. Reat was a freshman and an Eagle Scout.

Douglass said the suspect made several statements to police, ‘‘but it’s too early to tell you what he may or may not have said.’’ He also said it was too early in the investigation to determine whether there was an anti-Semitic motive for the attacks or if they will be investigated as hate crimes. The Jewish festival of Passover begins Monday.

Yeah, what a "coincidence."

‘‘We are investigating it as a hate crime. We’re investigating it as a criminal act. We haven’t ruled out anything. ... Again, we’re three hours into it,’’ he said.

Although the suspect was booked under the last name Cross, he is probably better known as Frazier Glenn Miller. A public records search shows he has used both names, but he refers to himself on his website as Glenn Miller and went by the name Frazier Glenn Miller in 2006 and 2010 campaigns for public office.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, said it reached Miller’s wife, Marge, by phone and that she said authorities had been to their home and told her that her husband had been arrested in Sunday’s attacks. Calls by The Associated Press to a number listed as Miller’s on his website were met by a busy signal.

Related: Is the SPLC An American Arm of the Mossad? 

Whether it is or not it is pushing the same agenda.

According to the law center, Miller has been involved in the white supremacist movement for most of his life. He founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and was its ‘‘grand dragon’’ in the 1980s before the center sued him for operating an illegal paramilitary organization and using intimidation tactics against blacks. He later founded another white supremacist group, the White Patriot Party.

So how long has he been on the FBI payroll?

Miller, an Army veteran and retired truck driver, was the subject of a nationwide manhunt in 1987 after he violated the terms of his bond while appealing a North Carolina conviction for operating a paramilitary camp. The search ended after federal agents found Miller and three other men in an Ozark mobile home, which was filled with hand grenades, automatic weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Miller tried running for U.S. House in 2006 and the U.S. Senate in 2010.

President Barack Obama released a statement expressing his grief over the attack, and Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback vowed to bring those responsible to justice.

‘‘My heart and prayers are with all those who were affected by today’s events,’’ Brownback said in a statement. ‘‘We will pursue justice aggressively for these victims and criminal charges against the perpetrator or perpetrators to the full extent of the law.’’

Michael Siegal, chair of the Jewish Federations of North America, also said in an emailed statement that ‘‘no community should have to face a moment such as this one.’’

‘‘Today, on the eve of Pesach, we are left to contemplate how we must continue our work building a world in which all people are free to live their lives without the threat of terror,’’ he said."

--more--"

While mucking around:

"3 dead in shootings at Kansas Jewish centers

OVERLAND PARK — A man in his 70s opened fire Sunday outside of a Jewish community center and nearby retirement community, killing three people, authorities said.

Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass said at a news conference Sunday evening that it was too early in the investigation to determine if the shootings were hate crimes. The Jewish festival of Passover begins Monday.

"We know it was a vicious act of violence, and we know obviously it was at two Jewish facilities. One might make that assumption," Douglass said.

He described the suspect as a white man in his 70s who is not from Kansas. He said the suspect is being held at the Johnson County Detention Center, but did not provide further information.

"We have no indication he knew the victims," Douglass said, adding that the suspect was not known to Kansas City-area authorities before the shootings. Douglass said a shotgun was used, and investigators were trying to determine whether a handgun and assault-style rifle also were involved.

The Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in Overland Park posted on its Facebook page Sunday afternoon that a "shooting incident" happened near its White Theater entrance.

"Everyone participating in JCC programming has been released to their homes," the center posted later Sunday.

There was a heavy police presence at the campus, which spans several acres in an affluent area of Johnson County, Kan. Police had also taped off the entrance to Village Shalom on Sunday afternoon, and several patrol cars and a crime scene unit van were parked in front.

The article I got in print also seemed to be trying to link the guy to this.

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UPDATE:

"SITE said Monday that the suspect is a prominent member of the Vanguard News Network and has posted thousands of messages - including frequent calls for genocide against Jews - on the neo-Nazi forum's website. His most recent post was Saturday."

Now we know this is total and bogus bullshit! SITE is involved!

NEXT DAY UPDATE:

Some commentators are exposing the fraud, and once again it looks like we have been treated to another false flag or hoax with the appalling regularity of mind-manipulating reinforcement.

NEXT DAY UPDATE:

"Prosecutors to charge suspect with hate crime in Kansas shooting" by Timothy Williams and Emma G. Fitzsimmons | New York Times   April 15, 2014

NEW YORK — Frazier Glenn Cross Jr., 73, of Aurora, Mo., had spoken and written frequently over the years about his hatred for Jews, blacks, immigrants, and others.

Prosecutors declined to say when Cross, who is also known as Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., will be formally charged but said the case would be presented to a federal grand jury.

“We believe this to be a hate crime,” the Overland Park police chief, John Douglass, said. “We believe his motivation was to attack a Jewish facility.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, said Cross was the founder and grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

The shooting, Douglass said, was the result of Cross’s hatred for specific races or ethnic groups. Although Douglass has had run-ins with police before, including charges involving weapons and threats, there is little evidence that the Army veteran and retired trucker ever resorted to violence before Sunday.

Now this is really starting to stink.

The FBI and police have not offered any public explanation for what triggered the rampage on the eve of the festival of Passover. Though Cross appeared to have wanted to target Jewish people, none of the three people who died were Jewish.

He didn't kill any Jews? Come on!

Word of the shooting brought an outpouring of condolences and concern from around the world. Speaking at an Easter prayer breakfast, President Obama said Monday that religious violence had no place in America.

Only when he and they need to start a war against a Muslim country does it have a place.

The authorities said the hate-crime charges would be bolstered by “statements that were made” by Cross after the shooting, although they would not confirm whether he had shouted “Heil Hitler” after his arrest, as he appears to have done in a video taken by KMBC, a local television station....

Really hamming it up to sell this psyop, 'eh?

The Associated Press reported Monday that there was no answer at Cross’s last known address in Aurora, Mo. The single-story house is bordered on three sides by barbed-wire fences. A red Chevrolet pickup truck with two Confederate flag stickers was parked in front of the house....

Cross also served three years in federal prison for weapons charges and for plotting robberies and the assassination of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s founder, Morris Dees. As part of his plea bargain, he testified against other Klan leaders in a 1988 trial.

Which outed him as an FBI informant and gave him a reputation as a traitor in the "movement."

Cross made several unsuccessful runs for public office, including a run for the US House in 2006 and one for the Senate in 2010.

Sort of an odd thing for a KKKer to be doing.

He kept a website where he espoused views of white supremacy and eschewed racial mixing. He was a fan of David Duke, a white nationalist and a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Louis Farrakhan, the former leader of the Nation of Islam who blamed Jews for slavery in America.

Well, that is throwing to groups that threaten Jewish supremacism in the same boat, and who benefits, huh? Never mind that Duke moved on and became a college professor. It's like being judged for something you did as a teen for the whole rest of your life, but that's the narrative you are going to get from the pos AmeriKan media.

In a 2010 radio interview with Howard Stern, who is Jewish, Cross was asked whom he hated more, Jews or African-Americans.

Cross answered “Jews. A thousand times more. Compared to our Jewish problem, all other problems are mere distractions.”

Prodded to explain, he said Jews controlled the federal government, mass media, and the Federal Reserve Bank. “And with those powers, they’re committing genocide against the white race,” he said.

Ah, yes -- so anyone who espouses the truth is now smeared by this jackass. Nice psyop, but tired play guys!

--more--"

That post threads through to this:

"Israeli negotiator optimistic on talks" | Associated Press   April 14, 2014

JERUSALEM — Israel’s chief peace negotiator on Sunday accused a hard-line faction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly unwieldy coalition government of undermining her efforts, while Jewish settlers moved into a sensitive West Bank building that has been a flashpoint of violence.

RelatedJewish settlers clash with Israeli police

The problems inside Netanyahu’s coalition were the latest signs of infighting that has hampered Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace efforts.

Yeah, blame it on that.

Related:

Israeli settlement plan derailed peace talks, Kerry says
Israel ‘deeply disappointed’ by John Kerry’s remarks
Netanyahu, Abbas must be statesmen, not politicians

The proof is in the poof. 

While committed to conducting talks, Netanyahu’s coalition is dominated by hard-liners who oppose making significant concessions or reject the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Netanyahu’s chief negotiator, Tzipi Livni, said she was optimistic that the sides would get through a crisis that left the talks on the brink of collapse.

Why would she feel that way?

‘‘I believe we are close enough that decisions on both sides will be made, with American encouragement, to continue the talks,’’ she said on the Ynet website. She also accused the hard-line ‘‘Jewish Home,’’ a pro-settler party, of trying to thwart her efforts.

I wonder what that encouragement could be?

--more--"

Sorry I've gone so sour on the coverage. 

NEXT DAY UPDATE:

Israeli families gather for ritual Passover meal

It is a jewspaper. They prove the point themselves!