Climate change alarmists get more desperate every day. Small wonder when you consider that the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970 and all the gruesome predictions about the climate that came out about that time have failed to come true.
We were told that civilization would end by 2000, that the environmental crisis would make the earth uninhabitable, that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death by 1980, that nitrogen buildup would filter light out of the atmosphere and render land unusable, that fish would die and polar bears would drown, that rain forests would disappear, and there would be a new ice age in which gas stations would no longer have gas. None of those things have come to pass.
However, there is one prediction made in 2000 by Ronald Bailey, author of The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century, that did come to pass and ahead of the predicted time. Bailey predicted that, by Earth Day 2030, “There will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future—and the present—never looked so bleak.”
By the turn of the 21st century, the American people were already afflicted with climate grievance hustlers. It would be laughable to hear AOC tell us that the world has only twelve years left if she didn’t have so much influence in the world of politics. It would be beyond hysterically funny to see Greta Thunberg hiding from her prediction in 2018 that the world would end in five years if we didn’t stop using fossil fuels—except that this disturbed girl is worshiped all over the world in the church of climate change.
It’s worth noting that both these women enjoy very posh lives. AOC wears designer clothes worth more than I make in a month when she goes to functions where tickets cost more than I make in a year. She doesn’t pay for these things. She just gets them from people who adore her. Greta Thunberg travels the world in a luxury yacht because she refuses to fly. She didn’t work to earn the yacht. It’s just supplied to her with a crew. The crew flies to get to the yacht when Greta gets wanderlust, and they fly home when she’s done traveling. That’s a lot of carbon emissions to support Greta’s carbon-free traveling, but I digress.
Now, climate alarmists are warning that squirrels are “splooting” too much. Splooting is when an animal lies on its stomach with its legs kicked out, and the alarmists claim it’s because climate change is making the squirrels so hot they’re trying to cool off. That’s right. Relaxed squirrels are an indicator of impending doom.
Before you laugh too hard, I recommend you check out this video of a talk show host, John Oliver, demonstrating what he calls a representative climate debate (language warning):
It all looks rather like a lynch mob to me. It’s worth remembering that history has many examples, like the Salem witch hunts and the Holocaust, where the screaming mob was wrong, and the voices that were drowned out were correct.
The leader of Germany’s CDU opposition party, Friedrich Merz, has walked back the suggestion his party may work with the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party at a local level after ferocious backlash from members of his own party.
Speaking on Sunday to the broadcaster ZDF, Merz said that in areas where AfD candidates are elected, “it is natural to look for ways to continue to work in that city.”
He added that “results should be respected” amid attempts by some establishment politicians to discredit the recent electoral successes of the AfD following its first mayoral election in Raguhn-Jeßnitz, a small town in the state of Saxony-Anhalt earlier this month, and Robert Sesselmann’s municipal victory in Thuringia last month.
Germany’s mainstream parties have long insisted there is no possibility of ever working with the AfD, considered by establishment politicians and the media to be a fringe organization rebuked for its opposition to Germany’s liberal mass immigration policies.
However, with the party now rising exponentially in national polls, this resistance to working with them is beginning to be tested in reality, and the CDU risks relinquishing control of municipalities to Germany’s left-wing parties should they continue to hold such a hard line.
Despite this, a number of high-profile CDU officials publicly criticized the position Merz appeared to be moving towards.
“The AfD only knows opposition and division,” said Kai Wegner, the CDU mayor of Berlin. “The CDU cannot and will not work with a party whose business model is hatred, division and exclusion,” he added.
Others reminded Merz of a party congress resolution stating that cooperation with the AfD meant consciously tolerating “right-wing extremist ideas, anti-Semitism, and racism.”
“No cooperation with the AfD means no cooperation with the AfD. On any level. Very simply. Not now and not in the future,” added CDU federal executive board member Serap Güler, while former CDU Prime Minister of Saarland Tobias Hans called the move a “creeping watering down of party congress decisions following electoral successes by the extreme right.”
On Monday, Merz swiftly changed tack, taking to Twitter to spectacularly U-turn on his previous remarks.
“To make it clear once again, and I have never said it differently: The resolution of the CDU applies. There will be no cooperation between CDU and the AfD at the municipal level,” he tweeted.
AfD co-chair Alice Weidel responded to Merz’s correction on the same platform.
“I already said it weeks ago: The CDU will not come around. It leads the CDU into the left trap and turns it into a mere pawn of the Greens. That Frederick Merz is once again afraid of his own courage and backtracks again is characteristic of his wavering course. In any case, the AfD remains willing to work with all parliamentary parties who care about our country and support a turn back to reason,” she tweeted.
Weidel’s party has soared in popularity due to its objections to Russian sanctions, which contributed to a cost-of-living crisis in Germany, and its opposition to mass immigration.
The party, which has always performed well in the east of Germany and is leading in polls in all but one state, is now becoming more popular in the west, with a recent poll placing it third in Baden-Württemberg at a record 19 percent, behind the Green Party (24 percent) and the CDU (26 percent).
If only the Biden administration fought illegal migration half as hard as it’s fighting Texas.
Thus far, the open borders regime is investigating efforts by Texas to prevent illegal border crossings after the state stepped in once the Biden administration had turned CBP into coyotes enabling illegal migration.
It’s also suing Texas for putting up floating barriers on the Rio Grande to prevent illegal invaders from swimming across.
The Justice Department warned officials in Texas on Thursday that the federal government will sue the state unless it removes border barriers it recently set up in the middle of the Rio Grande to repel migrants from entering the U.S.
In a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s interim attorney general, two Justice Department lawyers said the floating barriers authorized by Abbott earlier this month violate federal law, threaten to impede the work of federal law enforcement and create “serious risks” to public safety and the environment.
“Texas’s unauthorized construction of the floating barrier is a prima facie violation of the Rivers and Harbors Act. This floating barrier poses a risk to navigation, as well as public safety, in the Rio Grande River, and it presents humanitarian concerns,” wrote Todd Kim, an assistant attorney general, and Jaime Esparza, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas. CNN first reported the letter.
The only navigation it poses a risk to is the navigation of illegal invaders. That’s what the Biden regime is concerned with.
A Biden administration official told CBS News the floating barriers have interfered with Border Patrol efforts to patrol the river and process migrants who reach U.S. soil.
Interfering with illegal invaders now undermines Biden’s “border enforcement plan.
“Governor Abbott’s dangerous and unlawful actions are undermining our effective border enforcement plan and making it hard for CBP to do their jobs of securing the border,” White House spokesperson Abdullah Hasan said in a statement.
Abdullah Hasan is lecturing Texas on immigration enforcement.
The Biden administration had previously sued Arizona for using shipping containers to stop illegal invasions.
The Biden administration sued Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) on Wednesday over his construction of a barrier made of double-stacked shipping containers along parts of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The new lawsuit asks the court to order Arizona to stop building the barrier and remove the containers in the San Rafael Valley, citing operational and environmental concerns. Arizona “is trespassing on federal lands,” the complaint states.
“In installing shipping containers on National Forest System lands, Arizona has widened roads and cleared lands for staging areas … cut down or removed scores of trees, clogged drainages, and degraded the habitat of species listed under the Endangered Species Act.”
The Biden administration did not care about the so-called environmental damage. If it had, the mass migration of invaders would be doing far more damage.
Similarly, the illegitimate regime does not care about the navigability of the Rio Grande. The mass crossing of illegal alien invaders poses far more of a threat to navigation than floating barriers.
The Biden administration is ruthlessly fighting any efforts to stop the illegal invasion because it wants the invasion to go on.
A Canadian pastor has “exiled” his family to Kenya after his government invoked emergency war measures to punish citizens who attended a protest where he prayed and sang the national anthem.
Harold Ristau, a decorated veteran and seminary professor, participated in the “trucker convoy” against lockdowns last February, when The Federalist interviewed him last. He is now party to a lawsuit arguing the government’s response to Covid that included treating dissent as terrorism violated Canadians’ fundamental rights.
“The fight is far from over,” said Marty Moore, a lawyer for the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), which is litigating Ristau’s case. More than 14 months after the protest, police arrested another convoy leader this May. Lockdown litigation will likely continue for several more years, Moore said. The same is true across the West.
For peaceably assembling to petition his government for one day last year, Ristau says, he was threatened with the removal of his security clearance and government confiscation of his retirement nest egg, kids’ college funds, and other life savings. Ristau says he’s also experienced serious damage to his reputation, career, and friendships after the government used anti-terrorism measures against peaceful protesters.
“There’s no protection, if a pandemic started tomorrow, from future mandates. So that’s why I was really open to coming here,” his wife, Elise Ristau, said, sitting beside her husband in a recent video interview from Kenya.
Besides dealing with overbearing health restrictions, their children were mocked at school for their family’s religious and political views, Elise Ristau told The Federalist. After enduring more than two years of severe social and government repression, the Ristaus moved outside Nairobi with their five children last August.
“I don’t know that I can go back and be a Christian in Canada. So that’s why we’re here in Kenya,” Harold Ristau said. There, the former chaplain with a Ph.D. in philosophy trains Kenyan pastors at the Lutheran School of Theology.
Confiscating Dissenters’ Life Savings
Government use of “debanking” to punish dissent is growing in the West. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government used it on essentially every convoy participant authorities could identify, said Moore.
“As soon as they knew your name if you were on the ground [protesting] in Ottawa, they froze your bank account,” Moore told The Federalist. “…The federal government met with the banks, they gave the [protesters’] names to the banks, and the banks were then pushed to freeze the bank accounts of anyone with that name in their banks. It was a fascist collaboration.”
In May, American whistleblowers disclosed the FBI obtained, without any warrants, “a huge list” of citizens’ private banking data in its Jan. 6, 2021 capitol riot investigation. Investigators targeted any American who legally bought a firearm using a Bank of America account all the way back to the 1990s, the whistleblower testified.
Treating a Veteran Like a Terrorist
After the Canadian government announced it would freeze the bank accounts of convoy protesters and their mostly small-dollar donors without legal due process, rumors of bank runs spread. Multiple large Canadian banks appeared to shut down online operations soon after the announcement.
Elise withdrew their family’s savings that Friday, too, she and Harold said. Like thousands of Canadians, they had donated to the convoy. Yet Ristau was the only one of the four plaintiffs in his lawsuit whose accounts were not frozen. He thinks it’s because of his military record.
“Some of the measures that were at least attempted to be invoked are the kind of measures you find to freeze terrorist financing,” Moore noted. “So peaceful protesters were the equivalent of terrorists and the government leaned on banks in the guise of a national emergency to freeze their bank accounts.”
Leftist activists also filed a class-action lawsuit against every Canadian who donated to the convoy. It seeks $300 million in damages. When before the convoy Canada experienced multiple race protests that included violence against stores and police, no class action was filed.
Christians Assisting Government Persecution
Canadian lockdowns kept gyms, restaurants, and liquor stores open but closed churches. Leftist protesters were allowed to yell and sing without masks, and the prime minister kneeled to them, all while provinces banned Christians from singing and chanting in church for years.
Rev. Johannes Nieminen wasn’t allowed to cross provincial borders to perform his pastoral duties, while other Canadians could do so for work, he told The Federalist. After he was denied border entry several times, he said, police finally let him through — but told him he wasn’t allowed to meet with parishioners or hold church services.
“If I’m going to go to the grocery store for physical food, I’m going to the church for spiritual food. If I’m going to the doctor’s office for physical medicine, I’m going to church for the medicine of immortality,” Nieminen said. His denomination believes Jesus Christ’s body and blood are physically present in the wine and bread of communion, and that Christians are commanded to physically eat these — impossible without gathering in person.
Until moving to pastor in New Mexico this summer, Nieminen was clergy in the same denomination as Ristau, the Lutheran Church Canada. He said lockdowns sharply divided many churches, and even though most Covid measures are now lifted, church leaders have largely failed to seek reconciliation and repentance, as commanded in the Bible.
“We need to repent. There’s been crazy division here, and we need to actually talk about it,” he said.
State-Run Western Churches
Nieminen said pastors who obeyed the government to treat churches worse than liquor stores and gyms taught lay people church is non-essential or can be conducted online. The Bible commands keeping a day of worship, meeting in person, singing hymns and psalms, and physically receiving the bread and wine of communion. Christians have done all these every week since the time of Christ.
Communion is a “sacrament,” an action God commands that produces faith and eternal salvation. Only pastors can deliver it, a tradition going back to Christ’s commissioning of His apostles. In all the great pandemics of history, priests and pastors knowingly braved death to bring the sacrament to the dying desperate for the peace and unity with God it promises.
Nieminen said he saw Canadian Christians publicly plead for the sacrament amid lockdowns that nearly lasted three years. They received no response from their pastors, who told Nieminen the pleading parishioners didn’t use the “proper channels.”
“There’s that lack of trust in pastors and a church that they see as giving up on them and basically persecuting them,” Nieminen said. “…They’re being coerced by tyrants to do something against their conscience, and then they go to church and then they’re hearing the same thing from the church.”
Within days of him praying at the protest, says Harold Ristau’s sworn affidavit, fellow clergy began refusing to let him preach and to take communion with him. Some checked with superiors on whether to commune him. Refusing communion to a church member is tantamount to excommunication.
Praying at the protest “demonstrated I was this political insurrectionist” to some clergy whose beliefs about Covid were shaped by state-funded, anti-Christian media, Harold Ristau said: “Prior to Covid, everyone recognized the media were a bunch of liars who hated Christians, but with Covid suddenly we trust them entirely.”
A Political Decision, Not a Health Decision
So far, “none of the [legal] challenges to worship restrictions on church services have succeeded” in Canada, said John Sikkema, a lawyer at the nonprofit firm ARPA Canada.
“Culturally, people find going to the gym very important and less so going to church,” Sikkema noted. “Especially when some churches don’t seem to care and don’t think it’s necessary.”
To secular authorities, keeping the economy going easily trumps the church’s work of caring for human souls, Sikkema noted. That’s why they opened restaurants while restricting churches despite similar health risks: “That’s not really a health decision, it’s a political decision about what’s important to the health of your society.”
Police regularly showed up at churches on Sunday mornings and fined pastors whose parking lots had too many cars, he said. ARPA Canada and JCCF litigated a number of those cases and were often able to get pastors’ fines negotiated down to charitable donations.
Most churches that capitulated to government discrimination against Christians were already declining before lockdowns, and disproportionate percentages of their members didn’t go back to church afterward. Churches that kept to historic orthodoxy, on the other hand, tend to have recovered better from post-lockdown membership losses and many have even grown, Nieminen and Sikkema noted.
Religious Freedom Better in Africa
The difficulty of raising their children in rapidly apostatizing Western culture also affected the Ristaus’ decision to move across the globe.
“Things are normal here, people have traditional values,” Elise Ristau said of Kenya. “It’s inconceivable to think of transgender mutilation. As a mother and father, we do our very best to keep our kids Christian.”
In Canada, Christians are often required to lie or betray their faith to access government grants and licensing credentials, and avoid punishment in many professions, Sikkema said. Many Canadian doctors, lawyers, and teachers, for example, are required to endorse abortion and LGBT sexual acts.Canadian doctors and many other health care workers must help patients obtain an abortion or doctor-assisted suicide.
In 2018, Canada’s Supreme Court banned a Christian law school from opening over Christian sexual standards. The Canadian military is also working to eject chaplains over Christian sexual ethics. Just about every Canadian business sports a government-provided pride flag, Nieminen said. Churches that object to transgender mutilation of children have faced naked protesters as families arrive to worship, Sikkema said.
“Canadians are very aware that we don’t have freedom of religion, we don’t have freedom of speech, we don’t have the right to assemble if that’s in disagreement with the regime,” Nieminen said. “Pastors and teachers cannot speak about the morality of human sexuality. That is a reality Canadians live in, and I think that’s partly why they’re afraid to speak out.”
Christians Welcome in Kenya
The Ristaus had been invited to their current post before lockdowns, but Elise hadn’t wanted to uproot after moving the family so many times for Harold’s military career. They had bought land in Canada for their dream home and planted more than 1,000 trees on it.
“I had dreamed of this perfect life for myself in Canada,” Elise said. But then “there was a kind of turning point where I said, ‘We can go. Nothing is holding us here.’ It was a ‘shake the dust off our boots’ moment.”
From Toronto to Nairobi is approximately 7,500 miles. Flying commercially between the two takes 16 hours or more.
“In Kenya, I know it’s poor, and there’s corruption, but we’re not getting arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics,” Elise said. “For a Christian in Canada, it’s pretty bleak.”
Islamist extremist preacher Anjem Choudary charged under terrorism act in UK. (Image Source – The Sun)
A radical Islamist preacher, Anjem Choudary was charged with three offences under UK’s terrorism act, the Metropolitan Police said on Monday, 24 July. He has been charged under different sections of the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000. The charges include membership of a proscribed organisation, addressing meetings to encourage support for a proscribed organisation, and directing a terrorist organisation.
He was arrested in London last week and has been in police custody since then. He will be produced before a court in London, late on 24 July. He holds dual nationality of Britain and Pakistan.
Apart from UK-born Choudary, the Metropolitan Police also arrested a Canadian man, Khaled Hussein (28). He has been charged with membership of a proscribed organisation.
The police said, “On Monday, 17 July (a week ago), Met counter-terrorism detectives investigating alleged membership of a proscribed organisation arrested a 56-year-old man in east London and a 28-year-old Canadian national at Heathrow Airport, after he arrived on a flight.”
The statement added that they were held under Section 41 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and detectives were granted warrants of further detention allowing them to detain the men until Monday, 24 July.
According to a report in the Guardian, 56-year-old, Anjem Choudary who hails from east London, was charged on Sunday with three offences. These include –
Membership of a proscribed organisation — violation of section 11 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
addressing meetings to encourage support for a proscribed organisation — violation of sections 12(3) of the Terrorism Act 2000.
directing a terrorist organisation — violation of section 56 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
British Pakistani, Choudary was once a high-profile Islamist preacher in Britain. However, it was found that he has been associated with several radical outfits. He was the former head of the now-banned Islamist organisation al-Muhajiroun.
The extremist Islamist preacher was convicted by the Old Bailey court in London in September 2016 for preaching radical ideology and calling Muslims to support the terrorist organisation, Islamic State.
He was released from London’s high-security Belmarsh prison in 2018 after serving half of his five-and-a-half-year sentence. In the past, he has been spewing venom against Hindus on multiple occasions and his name cropped up during last year’s violence in Leicester city. In several of the post on his website, Anjem has been spreading vicious propaganda against Hindus and called upon them to convert to Islam. He claimed that it is the “only way” of living.
Additionally, he had once praised the men responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the United States and said that he wanted to convert Buckingham Palace into a mosque.
Further, his followers have been linked to numerous plots across the world.
Violent crime on the streets of Hamburg has reached unprecedented levels according to the latest figures from the state’s interior ministry.
In the first half of 2023, there were 193 reported stabbings across the city, up 23.7 percent from the 156 reported in the same period of 2022.
The number of shootings also soared, up 30.9 percent from 55 to 72 from January to the end of June.
Hamburg-Mitte was the borough with the most violent crime, recording 27 shootings and 85 stabbings in just six months. Harburg was second with 15 shootings and 28 stabbings, while Wandsbek recorded 24 stabbings and Nord 11 shootings.
Dennis Thering, the opposition CDU’s parliamentary leader who requested the data from the government, described the figures as “alarming” and called on SPD Interior Senator Andy Grote to “finally act to stop such Wild West excesses” in the region.
“We need more no-weapons zones, more video surveillance, and organized crime must be fought more intensively,” he added.
Some of the incidents this year have made national headlines. Remix News previously reported on the high-profile mass shooting inside a church in Hamburg’s Groß Borstel district back in March, which killed seven people and injured 17 others.
Other incidents in the German port city saw two men die in a stabbing attack in Harburg and another two men shot dead in the Tonndorf district back in January when more than 20 bullets were fired at their moving vehicle.
According to data published last month by Statista, Hamburg is the region ranked third-highest in Germany for crime, with 11,394 crimes recorded per 100,000 people. Only Berlin (14,135) and Bremen (11,784) rank higher than the city, although all are significantly higher than the 6,762 German average.
There is not much new about media hyperbole in weather reporting, but July’s climate alarmism may be more breathless than usual.
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media were inundated with posts containing flaming red maps of Southern Europe and Northern Africa.
Like these:
Media hysteria on ‘record’ heat in Europe has been fed by the European Space Agency which recently switched to using ground temperatures rather than traditional air temperatures. So it claimed eg that last weekend in Sicily was 48, not 32 as it really was. https://t.co/HVcktEp29C
“July 2023 will probably be the world’s hottest month in hundreds, if not thousands, of years,” said top NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt. One Twitter user (with 22,000 followers) claimed, “After the hottest day and week, we are now experiencing the hottest month ever (in about 120,000 years, based on paleoclimatology). As we keep warming the planet, we will soon experience global temperatures not seen in the past million years!”
When questioned about the justification for his claims, the tweeter responded that scientists had “discovered there was a glacial period, which many people know about from a movie called Ice Age.” Imagine substantiating scientific claims by referencing a Hollywood movie! Such is the sorry state of critical thought.
These commentators conveniently ignore below average temperatures in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and large swaths of Russia. In fact, people in my city here in India were wearing sweaters during the same week despite it being the middle of a tropical summer.
Even in the U.S., temperatures have not been as dangerous as portrayed. Chris Martz, a meteorologist, notes that “the entire Lower 48 is only nine-hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit above average [relative to 1991-2020]. Month-to-date temperatures are much cooler this year than just last year and are nothing compared to 1980 or 2011.”
Dr. Susan J. Crockford, an expert on polar bears and their habitats, observed that as for the Arctic: “Ice has not been steadily declining or rapidly melting as human-caused CO2 levels have increased.” Both the summer and winter Arctic Sea ice levels show no declining trend, since 2007 and 2003, respectively.
So, how do climate alarmists get away with constant fearmongering? An average person with little knowledge of paleoclimatology is easily misled by manipulated data. And there has been plenty.
For example, the notorious “hockey stick” graph that erased past warming to make modern temperatures appear unprecedented is viewed as scientifically accurate by many despite being thoroughly debunked. Between 2019 and 2021, 350 peer-reviewed papers showed that there is nothing unusual about today’s warmth.
Furthermore, the current dominant narrative about the relationship between CO2 and temperature is rooted more in politics than science. Temperatures were much warmer in earlier periods when CO2 levels in the atmosphere were well below today’s concentration.
Speaking to Australian media, geologist Ian Plimer, says, “We are being fed an enormous load of rubbish … If you look back in the past, we can see … that every time we’ve had an ice age, we’ve had more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than now, so it’s clear that carbon dioxide cannot drive global warming.”
Also central to the debate over modern warming is the accuracy of temperature readings that have been compromised by artificial heating from urban landscapes that have grown around thermometers that once resided in rural locations. This well-established phenomenon is known as urban heat island (UHI) effect.
Dr. Roy Spencer has shown how most of the temperature increase in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) is influenced by UHI. “UHI warming is virtually the entire GHCN-reported warming signal since 1880,” with little land-based warming until 1980, says Dr. Spencer.
The scary weather stories of the dozens of state-funded and left-leaning media outlets across the globe have as much reality to them as children’s tales of ghosts and goblins.
