Given his dismal track record, it’s stunning that Christopher Steele has again surfaced, just before the U.K. election that will decide Brexit, to claim that Johnson is a Russian asset.

Readers will remember that Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit hired by a law firm called Perkins Coie, to manufacture ties between Trump and Russia. Meanwhile, Perkins Coie was hired by, and working closely with, the Clinton campaign and other Clinton operatives.

Steele paid a British national with ties to Russia—Edward Baumgartner—to create a “dossier” tying Trump to Russia via wild and unsubstantiated claims, which Baumgartner created using unknown russRussian sources. Once the dossier was created, Steele and other Clinton operatives, including the infamous Sid Blumenthal, injected the allegations of the dossier into the Obama administration. This included getting the dossier circulated at high levels within the State Department, and within the Department of Justice and FBI.

Eventually, using the dossier, the FBI secretly spied on the Trump campaign. And the Clinton campaign tried to use the FBI’s investigation to smear Trump, which amounted to interference in the 2016 election by the Clinton campaign, using Russians to assist her efforts. Using Steele, the Clinton campaign planted media stories smearing Trump as a Russian agent, then responded to them as if they had appeared organically.

In the U.K., which has stricter libel laws than does America, Steele wouldn’t even back up his dossier in court. Instead, he emphasized that he never wrote it, which is of course true, because Baumgartner and unknown Russians wrote it.

Read the whole thing. The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax is not just an American, it's a worldwide Liberal conspiracy meme.

2 out of 3 "hate crimes" are hoaxes

As white America becomes less and less racist and anything short of admiration for LBTGQ individuals leaves one open to instant termination, the Left needs to invent more and more hoaxes to keep the narrative alive. Jussie Smollett is just the latest and most flamboyant example of a hoax that touched all the bases: race, sex, and politics.

Mr. Reilly is a professor of political science at Kentucky State University, and his interest in hate crimes dates to his graduate-school days, when he became aware of several widely reported incidents in the vicinity of his hometown that turned out to be fake. In 2012 a popular gay bar in suburban Chicago was destroyed by fire, and the owner cited homophobia as the reason. The same year, black students at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside reported death threats from hate groups and found a noose hanging from a dorm room door. Ultimately, the owner of the bar pleaded guilty to arson and insurance fraud. And a black student at the university fessed up to sending racist threats and planting a noose....

Reilly eventually compiled a database of 346 hate-crime allegations and determined that less than a third were genuine. Turning his attention to the hoaxes, he put together a data set of more than 400 confirmed cases of fake allegations that were reported to authorities between 2010 and 2017. He allows that the exact number of false reports is probably unknowable, but what can be said “with absolute confidence is that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is indisputably large,” he writes. “We are not speaking here of just a few bad apples.”

Read the whole thing.

Roger Simon: "Does It Matter Which Crazy Sent the Bombs?"

Even if Brennan was misspelled, Occam's razor is beginning to spell "HOAX" correctly. But by and for whom? Here as well we don't know, but again followers of William of Ockham would tend to point you toward the left wing -- a single leftie nutcase or some Antifa types, perhaps. After all, cui bono? With Kavanaugh and the caravan, things were not looking good for the Democrats. The subject had to be changed before it was too late and the blue wave turned red. So far, however, it's not working.

No wonder the reliably left-leaning Chuck Todd is suddenly pointing toward Russia, not some MAGA-hatted redneck with a Confederate flag tattooed on his chest, as the perpetrator. It's a dead giveaway. He's probably hoping for the Russians now. Because if it goes as it's currently looking, it's bad news for his team.

But back to my opening paragraph. In a rational world, this does not matter. Certainly whoever is responsible for this heinous activity should be taken off the streets for life as soon possible for the protection of the public. But their identity and motivation mean very little ultimately. Quite simply, whatever "side" they're on or think they're on -- they're nuts.

In a giant country like ours, simple math tells us there always will be a percentage of truly aberrant individuals on all sides ready to act out. The politically correct thing to say is we should "cool our jets." But, in truth, even if the rhetoric dies down, even if Schumer and Pelosi find it in their hearts to forgive Donald Trump (not likely) or Donald promises to throw away his iPhone, forego Twitter, and invite Rosie O'Donnell to have her wedding free of charge at Mar-a-Lago, it will not change. Such disturbed people will always exist. The Unabomber pre-dated all the contemporary online noise. There's no way around this behavior unless we start controlling our DNA, not an appealing prospect, except perhaps to the late Margaret Sanger.

In a very odd way, this whole event is not news. It's a sideshow.

Read the whole thing.

Science Fraud and Bogos Experts

Global cooling, global warming, climate change, have all been predicted with various levels of alarm for 50 years.  When global temperatures stopped dropping and began to rise the alarmists switched scenarios.  The one thing they didn’t change was the assumption that industrial civilization must somehow be destroying the whole planet.

If you are old enough you may recall that Newsweek, Time, Life, National Geographic all predicted that global cooling would kill billions.  University of California professor Kenneth Watt predicted a new Ice Age as the earth cooled by 11 degrees by the year 2000. What caused this prediction?  Simple, the temperature record showed global temperatures generally declining from about 1940 to 1970.  

In 1971 Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich predicted that “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.”  This did not come to pass, and today the predictions are exactly reversed.

Today he’s warning that Global Warming will lead to cannibalism.

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) predicted that, by 2010, 50 million “climate refugees” would be frantically fleeing the Caribbean and the Pacific islands. In 1989, the AP reported that “UN Official Predicts Disaster, Says Greenhouse Effect Could Wipe Some Nations Off Map.” The UNEP predicted “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”  It’s now 2018.

The Pentagon got in on the act, in 2003 predicting that in 10 years (2013) California would be flooded with inland seas, parts of the Netherlands “unlivable,” polar ice all but gone in the summers, and surging temperatures would result in resource wars and all sorts of other horrors. The Pentagon report claimed there was “general agreement in the scientific community” that the scenarios would come to pass.

James Hansen headed NASA’s Goddard and is one of the best known “climatologists” in the world.  In 1988 he predicted – among other things - that NY City’s West Side Highway would be under water, tape would cover the city’s windows because of high winds and crime would rise because of the heat.  In 1986, Hansen also predicted in congressional testimony that the Earth would be some two degrees warmer within 20 years.  It’s not.

Princeton professor and lead UN IPCC author Michael Oppenheimer, in 1990 predicted that within 5 years the heartlands of North America would be desolated by drought, the Platte River of Nebraska would be dry and Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.  Perhaps Mexico should build a wall.

Al Gore, the BBC and the UN all predicted that the North and South poles would be ice free before now.   They’re not.  

Predictions of man-cause disaster are not exclusively related to climate.  

There’s the Population Bomb.  When environmentalists said that we were destroying the Earth, they meant it directly and literally. The biggest problem was the very existence of humans, the fact that there were just too darned many of us. We were going to keep growing unchecked, and we were going to swarm the surface of the Earth like locusts, destroying everything in our path until we eventually used it all up.

There were going to be an inconceivable seven billion people on Earth by the year 2000, and there was just no way we could support them all.  It took us a bit longer, until 2012, to reach a global population of seven billion—who are better off than the population of Earth has ever been.

Mass starvation.  Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness predcited that by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.  On reality, obesity has created a shortage of men and women fit enough to join the military.

Resource depletion.  Not only were we going to run out of food, we’re supposed to run out of pretty much everything else such as nickel and copper, and above all we were running out of oil.  Remember “Peak Oil?”  

Here’s our friend Kenneth Watt again, with his present trends continuing: “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”  Watt also got the demise of gas station attendants wrong.  

 Everyone knows the sad story of Cassandra, the woman given the gift of true prophecy by the gods and simultaneously cursed to have no one believe her. The Global Warmer/Changers/End of the Worlders problem, up to now, is like that but reversed. Always off, but generously credited. I think that string has run out. They can play Wagner and whistle the Ride of the Valkyries all they want from here on. People are tired of that music, and sick of the band.

References to Federalist and New American

The Age of the Nothing Burger

Worth a read.

Van Jones, now at CNN, famously referred to the Trump/Russia collusion scandal as a “nothing burger,” in other words, a fantasy designed to serve a political agenda. But that particular scandal is only a kind of subset, a mere franchise of a much more comprehensive enterprise -- namely, the ideologically driven perversion of fact. The nothing burger is the Big Mac of the Western appetite for dissembling truth in the interest of institutional deception.

Consider a representative few of the major issues and preoccupations of the contemporary era: global warming, gender fluidity, the Palestinian nation, rape culture, and Islam as the “religion of peace.” None of these entities exist in the way in which we have been instructed to understand them and none can justify the righteous fury they apparently inspire. They are all nothing burgers.

What Fake Hate Crimes Reveal About the Left’s Bubble

After fumbling around in court for nearly three months, Michigan resident Halley Bass admitted recently to faking a hate crime against herself in November, following Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory.

Bass claimed that a middle-aged white man had attacked her with a safety pin in an alleyway near a downtown Ann Arbor movie theater. Since she was wearing an anti-Brexit solidarity pin at the time, she told the police that she believed the man had slashed at her because her pin indicated she did not support Trump.

Although it was later revealed that Bass has mental disorders and fabricated the incident to hide the fact that she had scratched herself, fake hate crimes have become common in the wake of Trump’s presidential victory. Several other incidents occurred in Ann Arbor alone—which is home to the University of Michigan—most notably that of a female Muslim college student who claimed a man had threatened to set her hijab on fire if she did not take it off. Police later determined that this, too, was a hoax. In an even more recent incident, a Muslim man made false bomb threats against Muslim students at Concordia University in Montreal on March 2.

We can't recall a "hate crime" committed by as assumed Trump supporter that was not a hoax.

4Chan Claims To Have Fabricated Anti-Trump Report As A Hoax

Good Lord, if this is true, the CIA and FBI have no credibility left.

>/pol/acks mailed fanfiction to anti-trump pundit Rick Wilson about trump making people piss on a bed obama slept in
>he thought it was real and gave it to the CIA
>the central intelligence agency of the united states of america put this in their official classified intelligence report on russian involvement in the election
>donald trump and obama have both read this pol/acks fanfiction
>the cia has concluded that the russian plans to blackmail trump with this story we made up
just let that sink in what we have become.

 


PUTIN DENIES LEAK 

Russia slams ‘nonsense’ claims it has ‘compromising’ info about Donald Trump’s ‘perverted hooker romp’ in Moscow hotel room’ – and warns it will damage relations

SHE MADE IT UP: NYPD Arrests Muslim Girl Who Claimed Attack by Trump Supporters

If it were not for hoaxes, there would be no "fake news" of anti Muslim attacks.

The 18-year-old Seweid caused quite the media stir with her sensationalized account of Trump supporters attacking her on the subway. She claimed three men attempted to pull off her hijab while calling her a terrorist and yelling Trump’s name. All this happened, she said, while New Yorkers sat idly by and watched her get assaulted.

The many media outlet’s initial reporting of the fake hate crime did not include qualifiers like “alleged” and “claimed.” Instead they reported the hoax crime as a fact like with Buzzfeed’s story, “Drunk Men Yelling “Donald Trump” Attempt To Remove Woman’s Hijab On NYC Subway.”

NY Times Upset that racist attack of black girls on a white girl was really a racist attack by black girls on a white girl and the attackers are under attack.

Racism Charges in Bus Incident, and Their Unraveling, Upset University at Albany

ALBANY — The allegation set social media ablaze, sowing shock and outrage as it went: Three black students at the University at Albany had been attacked on a city bus by a group of white men who used racial slurs as other passengers and the driver sat silently by.

The Jan. 30 episode, reported to the police, would draw hundreds of people to a campus rally against racism; an emotional response from the university’s president; and even the attention of Hillary Clinton, who condemned the attack on Twitter.

“We are shocked, upset, but we will remain unbroken,” one of the young women who reported the assault, Asha Burwell, said at the rally, on Feb. 1. “We stand here with strength because we value our worth as black women and as human beings in general.”

But only a few weeks later, what seemed to be the latest iteration of a now-familiar debate about race on campus — the protests, the anguished soul-searching, the calls for greater faculty diversity and administrative changes — has metastasized into a controversy of an even more scorching kind: the allegation, the authorities said, was a lie.

Surveillance videos did not support the accounts of the young women, Ms. Burwell, Alexis Briggs and Ariel Agudio. Neither did the statements of multiple fellow passengers. Rather than being victims of a hate crime, the authorities said, the women had been “the aggressors,” hitting a 19-year-old white woman on the bus....

...

The trauma for the NY Times writer was intense. The old familiar theme of white racists lynching blacks- and in New York yet - was tailor made for rallies and marches; an opportunity to signal their virtue and renounce again the imaginary KKK that they "know" is in their midst. Now the signs, the banners, all the carefully rehearsed chants, the drumming and the synchronized finger snapping will have to be put pack in the closet until the next hoax can be organized.

It was a turnabout tailor-made to delight conservative media outlets and to ignite social-media recriminations. There were calls for the university’s president, Robert J. Jones, to apologize for his remarks, and for Mrs. Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, to remove her post on Twitter.

For students and activists in Albany and elsewhere, the stakes were greater. Many feared that the hard-won dialogue over racism on campus, the fragile moment of unity, would disappear under a wave of finger-pointing.

“People were forced to think about things that they didn’t think about, maybe, before,” said Amberly Carter, a coordinator at the university’s Multicultural Resource Center who helped organize the rally. “So do we now stop defending black women because of what happened?”

The Feb. 1 rally, in front of a campus fountain, had seemed to signal an awakening for a university that had watched the University of Missouri, Yale and other institutions grapple with protests over racial discrimination without quite erupting into its own. Young black women spoke of the subtle racism that stamped their daily lives. Students, faculty members and staff members of all races listened intently.

But whatever solidarity emerged has fractured over the charges against the young women, putting their supporters on the defensive. Behind the rush to declare the matter a hoax, they say, is an ingrained prejudice against taking the concerns of minority women seriously.

It's time we stopped treating all men as sex pests

“The law is a ass – a idiot,” declared Mr Bumble in Charles Dicken's classic novel Oliver Twist, which was released 178 years ago to the month.

Bumble would have no doubt have added some choice expletives to his observation if he’d been in Blackfriars Crown Court in London last week, to witness the unjust case brought against Mark Pearson.

Mark Pearson said he had endured a year-long "Kafkaesque nightmare" as a result of the complaint.

Pearson, a 51-year-old artist, was tried for a sex crime simply because he brushed past a female film star during rush hour at Waterloo Tube station without even breaking his stride.

His accuser (who shall remain anonymous for life) claimed Pearson penetrated her with three fingers for “two or three seconds”.

CCTV of the footage irrefutably backs Pearson’s account; it took a jury of nine women and three men just 90 minutes to unanimously reject the accuser’s version of events and find Pearson innocent.

After the case, Mr Pearson, who still suffers anxiety attacks, said, “This could have happened to anyone. For me, half a second turned into a year of hell. I feel I have undergone a form of mental torture sanctioned by the state. Why couldn’t the CPS have used common sense?”

Which begs the bigger question: why, despite having seen the CCTV evidence (there were also no witnesses nor forensic evidence), did the Crown Prosecution Service still see fit to push for prosecution?

Twitter threats to black Kean students made by black alum, police say

Color us not surprised.

ELIZABETH — A recent Kean graduate has been charged with being responsible for a series of tweets threatening black students at the school two weeks ago, acting Union County Prosecutor Grace H. Park announced Tuesday.

Kayla-Simone McKelvey, 24, of Union – a black alum who graduated in May – was charged by summons with third-degree creating a false public alarm.

Park said an investigation by the Union County Prosecutor's Office's Special Prosecutions Unit and Kean University police found that McKelvey, a self-proclaimed activist, participated in a student rally to raise awareness of racism on college campuses on Nov. 17, but left midway through and walked to a computer station in a university library.

Once there, McKelvey allegedly created an anonymous Twitter account – @keanuagainstblk – and began posting threats of violence against black Kean students.

The first message around 10 p.m. said "kean university twitter against blacks is for everyone who hates blacks people" and a tweet about there being a bomb on the campus, and then continued with several other tweets about shooting black students at the university.

i will kill every black male and female at kean university

— kean university (@keanuagainstblk) November 18, 2015

After making the posts, McKelvey returned to the rally and attempted to spread awareness of the threats, authorities said.

You knew it had to come: "global warming will ruin your sex life" sounds exactly like the kind of slogan that the global warming choir would sing.

Too Darned Hot by Bud Norman discusses the latest ditty from the Global Warming Climate Change songbook. Still, we wonder why the birth rate in countries where the temperature rarely gets below 100 degrees is so high.

...we notice that even in the most war-torn and un-air-conditioned hellholes of the Middle East the birthrates remain high enough to have lately posed a problem for all those northern Europeans who are somehow reproducing at lower than replacement levels.

The infamous Irving Texas clock--challenging the story's foundation

If it's Racism, It's Probably Fake

Black Suspect Arrested After Racist Message Discovered Outside Predominately Black Church

Senator For Gurlz (TM) Kirsten Gillibrand: Don't Blame The "Victim" Who Invented The UVA Gang-Rape Hoax Out of Whole Cloth Just To Get the Attention of a Boy She Had a Crush On

Ace of Spades goes off on the execrable Kirsten Gillibrand.

We need a National Conversation explaining how fake victims of hoax-rapes are just as much victims as victims of actual rape, I guess.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who is pushing for stronger laws against rapes on college campuses, today warned against people criticizing the woman at the center of a University of Virginia sexual assault case...

But Gillibrand said the ire over the case shouldn't shift blame onto victims, who already have a hard time coming forward to authorities.

"Victim blaming or shining the spotlight on her for coming forward is not the right approach," Gillibrand said on "The Capitol Pressroom," a public radio show in Albany. "In fact, what we have to focus on is how do we keep these campuses safe? How do we have better trained personnel on campuses so they can tell a survivor what her options are and so they can have all the facts?"

She came forward with a horrible lie, you stupid twat.

Gillibrand said it would be wrong for some to call on the female student in the UVA scandal to face criminal charges.

"I think it's inappropriate," she said. "One of the challenges with survivors of sexual trauma and rape is that they often don’t want to actually participate with law enforcement because they don’t think justice is possible. They don't think they will be believed; they think they’ll be blamed."

Are you on Mars, you fucking idiot? She shouldn't be "believed" because, get this, she made it all up.

This is a major theme of the Feminist Cultists. Just yesterday Jessica Valenti claimed we shouldn't engage in "victim blaming" here. Again, forgetting that "Jackie" is not a victim. She instead is a perpetrator, of spreading a vicious slander against complete strangers just to get A Boy's Attention.

I can't say she's guilty of filing a false police complaint because she seems to have completely refused to discuss her Fake Gang Rape with the police.

Let me suggest the obvious here: Feminist Cultists like Gillibrand and Valenti may be speaking, ostensibly, about not blaming the "victim" "Jackie" here, but what they're really most determined is that they themselves not be blamed for believing such a grotesque and stupid lie, nor of cursing those who (wisely) doubted it.

I don't know what these two fine Cultists said, but I know when the first guy to raise questions raised some questions, he was attacked by the flock of harpies as a woman-hating rape-loving monster.

Well, now it's proven that these Cultists were in fact the monsters, and foisted a lie on the nation to aggrandize themselves.

And they don't want to be called out for that (despite the fact that "calling out" is a favorite tactic of the left).

Stupid, evil or both? Like the Ferguson "hands up don't shoot" lie The left is extremely upset that Darren Wilson is NOT a racist who killed a black kid for no reason. They are equally upset that no gang rape took place at UVA. They continue to claim that they are victims even as real people have their lives ruined by false accusations. Like Communists need class enemies, Nazis need Jews, the Left needs evil white men, killer cops, and raping frat boys. And if they can't find a real one, they'll make one up.

Global Warming

Sun quiet again during weakest solar cycle in more than century...



MORE ARTIC BLAST SET FOR EAST...

Winter Storm Grips South...

Sinkhole Swallows Snow Plow...

CHILL MAP...

MSNBC Chris Hayes: Global Warming Is 'Single Most Important Thing We Face'...

Bill Nye: Say 'Climate Change' When Cold Out...

About that "warmest year" hoax.

The Nasa climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true.

In a press release on Friday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record’.

The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all.

Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C. The margin of error is said by scientists to be approximately 0.1C – several times as much.

As a result, GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt has now admitted Nasa thinks the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38 per cent. However, when asked by this newspaper whether he regretted that the news release did not mention this, he did not respond. Another analysis, from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, drawn from ten times as many measuring stations as GISS, concluded that if 2014 was a record year, it was by an even tinier amount.

Its report said: ‘Numerically, our best estimate for the global temperature of 2014 puts it slightly above (by 0.01C) that of the next warmest year (2010) but by much less than the margin of uncertainty.

And here's the kicker:

‘Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year… the Earth’s average temperature for the past decade has changed very little.’

The earth's average temperature has changed very little over the last decade.  When skeptics say this they're compared to Holocaust Deniers.

Global Warmer Ship Stuck In Ice

It turns out that the "research" vessel, the Russian flagged MV Akademik Shokalskiy is really an expedition of "global warming" hoaxers who decided to go to the South Pole during the pole's summer to bring us film of polar bears drowning because of you car. Unfortunately for the hoaxers, their ship got caught in the growing ice and the rescue ships that tried to free them failed ... because of too much ice.

Chinese icebreaker turns back from Antarctic rescue mission

The Diplomad has a good laugh at it.

Where was I? Oh, yes, in Antarctica. I am sure that by now all of you have read about a "research" vessel has become trapped in the ice in Antarctica and how various rescue efforts have run afoul of "bad weather" and ice. At least two ice breakers have had to give up efforts to rescue the trapped ship because of the thick ice. The media, of course, is downplaying the real nature of the trip by the "research" vessel, the Russian flagged MV Akademik Shokalskiy. On board this ship is an expedition led by well-known Australian global warmist scientist, Chris Turney. Who is he? Just so happens he has a website where he lays out his views on climate change. He also happens to be a founder of Carbonscape, a company which helps "fix" carbon, and bills itself as "carbon negative" and all sorts of other greenie mumbo-jumbo (read it for yourselves). So he, like Al Gore, has a vested interest, a vested financial interest in promoting the global warming hoax. Do you expect balanced scientific research from Professor Turney? Hmmm . . ..

Anyhow, he got funding from the UK's BBC and Australia's ABC, to charter a ship and head for the Antarctic where he was going to report on the declining sea ice. Just as the warmists make assumptions, I think we can make some, too. He was going to provide all sorts of moving testimony of how manmade global warming is ruining Antarctica--conveniently skipping over that it is summer in Antarctica. He would have given us some touching film of a baby penguin drifting off to sea on a melting chunk of ice, crying for his parents as poor chick broiled in the merciless heat caused by my Chevy Tahoe. He found something else. He found what even the Washington Post had to acknowledge, that Antarctic sea ice has reached a record level.

And over at Newsbusters, they are pointing out that the MSM is doing their best to deny what's really going on.

Somewhere far, far to the south where it is summer, a group of global warming scientists are trapped in the Antarctic ice. If you missed the irony of that situation, it is because much of the mainstream media has glossed over that rather inconvenient bit of hilarity. As an example here is an Associated Press story that avoids mentioning the real mission of the scientists aboard the icebound Russian ship:

The Snow Dragon icebreaker came within 7 miles (11 kilometers) of the Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy, which has been stuck since Christmas Eve, but had to retreat after the ice became too thick, said expedition spokesman Alvin Stone.

The Akademik Shokalskiy, which has been on a research expedition to Antarctica, got stuck Tuesday after a blizzard's whipping winds pushed the sea ice around the ship, freezing it in place. The ship wasn't in danger of sinking, and there are weeks' worth of supplies for the 74 scientists, tourists and crew on board, but the vessel cannot move.

So what was the exact mission of these scientists? AP is rather vague about this reporting only:

The scientific team on board the research ship — which left New Zealand on Nov. 28 — had been recreating Australian explorer Douglas Mawson's century-old voyage to Antarctica when it became trapped. They plan to continue their expedition after they are freed, expedition leader Chris Turney said.

Um, there is a bit more to the expedition than merely following in the footsteps of a century-old voyage. But what that mission really is, AP won't say. If AP is vague about the mission's purpose, Reuters provides even less information.

Read the whole thing.

A good reason not to leave a cash tip

It appears that the waitresses of the "oppressed minority" persuasion may be faking being stiffed by bigots in order to generate sympathy and get cash sent to them after they spread their stories.

Example:  Dayna Morales is a lesbian and appears to have victimized a couple she waited on.

Dayna Morales, a former Marine and a server at Gallop Asian Bistro in Bridgewater, posted a photo on Facebook earlier this month, showing the bill with a line through the space for a tip. The photo of the receipt showed someone had written, “I’m sorry but I cannot tip because I do not agree with your lifestyle.”
Morales indicated in her Facebook post and in subsequent media interviews . . .that the customer wrote that line.
But a family contacted NBC 4 New York claiming their receipt from the restaurant shows they did leave a tip, and provided what they said was a credit card statement as proof.
The husband and wife, who asked to remain anonymous, showed. . .a receipt that appeared to be printed at the same minute, on the same date, for the same $93.55 total, except with an $18 tip. They also provided a document they said was a Visa bill, which appears to indicate their card was charged for the meal plus the tip, for a total of $111.55.

So, who are you going to believe?

The Anchoress makes the point that you can't ever prove that you left a cash tip and could be victimized by his new wave of fraud and deception.

Because my mother was a waitress who worked for mainly for tips, when my husband and I dine out we will very often strike a line through the “tips” portion of the bill, and leave our gratuity in cash. We do this for a couple of reasons — because often food-servers need the cash to pay the babysitter when they get home; because keeping track of what tips should show up on a paycheck is difficult; because why not let people access their tips immediately?
Well, we may decide to stop leaving cash.

 Another example of self-victimization that netted the server over $10,000 in cash gifts.

Chad Henderson Exposes The Media

Via Media-ite

There is no greater hatred than that born out of affection spurned and trust betrayed. Yesterday, the media loved Chad Henderson. Today, they hate him.

 

He, along with a handful of other individuals, were recently the subject of profiles in the press demonstrating both how navigable the exchange system is and how they are benefiting under the Affordable Care Act. It’s difficult to overstate how absurd the media coverage of Henderson’s reportedly successful effort to sign up to health care exchange has been.

 

Henderson’s story was particularly attractive. He was precisely what the media, and the White House, needed: a young, ostensibly healthy individual willing to pay a substantial portion of the meager income into the system so that it can support older, more chronically ill patients who will be partaking in health care services regularly.

In the media’s rush to make a star out of Henderson, they failed to vet him thoroughly. Most of the press missed the fact that Henderson is a current political activist and Organizing for America volunteer. Somewhat more egregiously, they also missed the fact that Henderson’s story was not true.

 

According to Henderson’s father, Bill Henderson, neither he nor his son have enrolled in any plan associated with the ACA. “As of yet, however, the pair had not picked a plan or completed enrollment,” reported Reason’s Peter Suderman. “ But he hoped they would shortly.”

 

Suderman goes on to note that the other details Henderson provided the press were “difficult to verify.”

He told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that he got his coverage through Blue Cross Blue Shield. But the cheapest unsubsidized Bronze exchange plan at Blue Cross Blue Shield’s online Quick Quote system offers for a 21-year-old in Flintstone, Georgia is $225.09 a month.

Additionally, Chad could not have purchased a separate plan for his father from his own login to HealthCare.gov, the website for the federal exchanges. A customer assistance representative on HealthCare.gov’s LiveChat system told me that purchasing separate plans for a son and a father in Georgia would require two separate logins. Which means that Chad would have had to successfully create two different accounts, and complete enrollment twice, at a time when almost no one was able to get through on the system.

This is not say that Henderson is not still valuable to the press. On Thursday, his story provided Mediaite readers with entertainment after reading the comically absurd deluge of press interest he was exposed to for simply being able to complete the reportedly three hour process of signing up for a health care exchange. On Friday, Henderson provided the nation with another service: exposing the media’s interest in painting the ACA in a positive light regardless of the facts.

 

RELATED: Chad Henderson Signed Up for Obamacare and Every… Single… Media Outlet Is on It!

 

“Just moments after writing a blog post Thursday morning, about the lack of information on Obamacare enrollees, Enroll America reached out with contact information for Chad Henderson, a 21-year-old in Georgia who had successfully enrolled in coverage on the federal marketplace,” wrote Washington Post WonkBlog reporter Sarah Kliff.

“I’ve read a few articles about how young people are very critical to the law’s success,” he told me. “I really just wanted to do my part to help out with the entire process.”

Kliff notes that Henderson told her that he purchased an insurance plan with a $175 per month premium – higher than Henderson would have liked, but still affordable. The end.

“Reporters are clogging Henderson’s voicemail, pro-Obamacare forces are holding him up as a poster child of the health law and administration officials are giving him shout-outs on Twitter,” reported POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney. “He has been uninsured since he was around 6 years old when his father, a single parent, could no longer afford coverage.”

“It is such a huge honor,” Henderson, a student with a part-time job at a day care center, said of the flood of attention. “The fact that the White House shared my story and Enroll America asked me for some help is a major blessing to me.”

“Enrollment took three hours, mostly because the system crashed every time he tried to create an account,” Cheney continued. “Once he got through that step, he said the process was simple.”

“It’s like looking at a Verizon Wireless phone comparison,” Henderson told POLITICO.

The father and son signed up for a bronze plan in Georgia’s federal exchange, the lowest cost, least generous level of coverage available, Henderson said. Anything more comprehensive would’ve been too costly.

This is an impressive level of detail for a story that is entirely false, according to the subject of this paragraph.

 

“We stood on there until about 3 in the morning,” Henderson told The Huffington Post. “Once I created an account, there were hardly any glitches at all after that.”

“I can’t remember a time when my dad has gone to the doctor,” Henderson continued, leading HuffPost’s Jeffrey Young by the nose. “He’s just sucked it up.”

He described his father, who reportedly makes just $24,000 as a shaved ice salesman, as “old school” who wants Henderson to “take responsibility” for his own health coverage.

Young lamented that, due to the lack of Medicaid expansion in Georgia and Henderson’s above the poverty line income threshold, Chad would have to pay his own premiums.

“This is more of a benefit for me and more of a security thing for him, because he’s getting to that age where anything could happen at any time,” Henderson concluded, touchingly.

 

According to Reason, that’s all bunk. But it was a story too good to check out. And it was exactly the story the media needed at precisely the time they needed it.

Henderson’s tale is a blistering critique of how the press operates today. If you invented Henderson and the story of how his actions stripped the media naked, you would be accused of making up a wild fabrication that no one could possibly believe. It’s all too fantastic, the media too credulous, the principal subject too sloppy to be believed.

In fact, as it appears now, how Chad exposed the media is the only part of his story that’s true.