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November 2015

The Burden of Proof on Climate Change By S. Fred Singer

The burden of proof for Anthropogenic Climate Change falls on alarmists. Climate Change (CC) has been ongoing for millions of years – long before humans existed on this planet.

Obviously, the causes were all of natural origin, and not anthropogenic.

There is no reason to believe that these natural causes have suddenly stopped; for example, volcanic eruptions, various types of solar influences, and (internal) atmosphere-ocean oscillations all continue today. (Note that these natural factors cannot be modeled precisely.)

Let’s call this the “Null Hypothesis.” Logically therefore, the burden of proof is on alarmists to demonstrate that the Null Hypothesis is not adequate to account for empirical climate data; alarmists must provide convincing observational evidence for Anthropogenic CC (ACC)
– by detailed comparison of empirical data with GH models.

I am not aware of such proofs, only of anecdotal info – although I admit that ACC is plausible; after all, CO2 is a GH gas, and its level has been rising, mainly because of burning of fossil fuels.

However, ACC appears to be much smaller than predicted by GH models; there is even believed to be a period of no warming [“hiatus”] during the past 19 years – in spite of rapidly rising atmospheric CO2 levels [1].

Tet, Take Two: Islam’s 2016 European Offensive By Matthew Bracken,

More than a decade ago I wrote my first novel, Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Part of my motivation was to establish my bona fides at forecasting social, political and military trends. I didn’t like the direction America was heading, and I wanted to warn as many readers as possible about some of the dangers I saw coming. At the end of 2015, I hope that my past success at prognostication will encourage people to pay heed to this essay.

As we roll into the New Year, we are witnessing the prelude to the culmination of a titanic struggle between three great actors. Three great social forces are now set in motion for a 2016 showdown and collision that will, in historical terms, be on par with the First and Second World Wars.

Two of these great social forces are currently allied in a de facto coalition against the third. They have forged an unwritten agreement to jointly murder the weakest of the three forces while it is in their combined power to do so. One of these two social forces would be content to share totalitarian control over large swaths of the globe with the other remaining social force. One of these social forces will never be satisfied until it achieves complete domination of the entire planet. So what are these three great social forces? They are Islam, international socialism, and nationalism.

Allow me to explain the salient aspects of each, and how they relate to the coming 2016 cataclysm.

German Officials Warn of New Security Risk: Local Extremists Recruiting Refugees Migrants are increasingly ending up at mosques attended by Islamist radicals, authorities say By Anton Troianovski And Ruth Bender

BERLIN—The Paris attacks have raised fears of terrorists slipping into Europe by posing as refugees. But in Germany, the top migrant destination, security officials have another worry: Local extremists will recruit the newcomers to join the Islamist cause once they arrive.

German authorities warn that migrants seeking out Arabic-language mosques in search of the familiar are increasingly ending up at those attended by Islamist radicals. In interviews, security officials from Berlin to the southwest German state of Saarland said they have registered a sharp rise in the number of asylum-seekers attending mosques they believed attracted extremists.

Federal officials said they have counted more than 100 cases in which Islamists known to them have tried to establish contact with refugees. According to state and local agencies across the country, Islamists have offered migrants rides, food, shelter and translation help. In some cases, they have invited them to soccer games and grill parties, or brought them copies of the Quran and conservative Muslim clothing.

Scientists Dispute 2-Degree Model Guiding Climate Talks Many scientists say the benchmark underpinning talks in Paris is an arbitrary threshold based on tenuous research by Gautam Naik

The single most important benchmark underpinning this week’s talks in Paris on climate change—two degrees Celsius—has guided climate-treaty discussions for decades, but scientists are at odds on the relevance of that target.

Many researchers have argued that a rise in the planet’s average global air temperature of two degrees or more above preindustrial levels would usher in catastrophic climate change. But many others, while convinced the planet is warming, say two degrees is a somewhat arbitrary threshold based on tenuous research, and therefore an impractical spur to policy action.

“It emerged from a political agenda, not a scientific analysis,” said Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College London. “It’s not a sensible, rational target because the models give you a range of possibilities, not a single answer.”
Policy makers tend to assume the two-degree target expresses a solid scientific view, but it doesn’t. The exhaustive reports published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are considered to be the most comprehensive analysis of the science of global warming. Yet the two-degree limit isn’t mentioned in a single IPCC report.

Reforming Immigration One State at a Time Several states, red and blue, want the federal government let them craft their own guest-worker programs.By Shikha Dalmia

With Congress stuck among the contradictory demands of labor, business and talk-radio restrictionists, neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama has been able to move the needle on immigration reform. Meanwhile, as the economy gathers steam, states face a tight labor market at all skill levels.

There might be a way forward, if Congress enacts legislation to give states standing waivers or permission to craft their own guest-worker programs. It sounds radical, but several states, red and blue, have already been trying to do this.

California, New Mexico and Kansas have passed resolutions or drafted legislation to issue guest-worker visas to undocumented aliens. Three pending bills in Texas would let state employers hire foreign workers from abroad on temporary work visas. Utah’s conservative legislature overwhelmingly approved legislation in 2011 to let undocumented workers obtain a two-year visa. But Utah’s program has been postponed, because immigration is a federal function and states would need federal waivers. President Obama has stonewalled Utah’s waiver request.

One way to release states from the partisan whims of administrations would be for Congress to erect a statutory architecture under which states could implement their own guest-worker programs. Canada has done this through its highly successful Provincial Nominee Program.

Judith Bergman: Knowledge is still power

A new Brandeis University study shows that over half of all Birthright candidates do not know how to answer even ‎the most basic questions about the Jewish state, making them functionally illiterate concerning Israel. The ‎study seeks to understand and assess Israel literacy and is a continuing project with participation of ‎researchers from the university’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and Cohen Center for ‎Modern Jewish Studies. ‎

The study found that regardless of the students’ background — for example, whether they had attended Jewish ‎day school or not — and the ranking of their university, relatively few Jewish students were Israel literate. ‎This is among students who are interested enough in Israel to apply to go on a Birthright trip; results would most likely be even more depressing among those who were not ‎Birthright candidates.‎

The results are truly disconcerting at a time when anti-Israel motions and boycott, divestment, and sanctions activity are rampant on U.S. college ‎campuses and Jewish students are met by an unprecedented wave of anti-Semitism. As the authors of ‎the study say, Israel literacy is “the requisite knowledge to participate in productive conversations about ‎Israel.” Without knowledge, it is going to be near impossible to participate in any kind of meaningful ‎conversation about Israel. The authors go on to say that “we were surprised that Jewish graduate ‎students, including some who were training to become Jewish professional leaders, lacked some of the ‎foundational knowledge that would equip them to engage in Israel-related activity and education.”‎

David Goldman Reviews: If You Really Want to Change the World, by Henry Kressel and Norman Winarsky.

Henry Kressel for thirty years was the senior partner in the technology practice of Warburg Pincus, one of the most successful private equity and venture capital firms, after a distinguished scientific career at RCA Labs. Norman Winarsky runs the venture capital division of SRI International (originally founded as Stanford Research Institute), one of Silicon Valley’s great idea factories. In this compact volume they offer a step-by-step guide to creating world-shaking new companies with billion-dollar market valuations. Why reveal their secrets? In fact, there are no secrets, only a set of filters that eliminate the vast majority of contenders from the running.

This is a cautionary tale more than an inspirational one, and many of the book’s deepest insights are found in its diagnosis of what went wrong with seemingly bulletproof ventures. Great new companies require the right technology for the right market niche, the right management for the right customers, the right investors for the right executives, the right financial controls for the right take-off trajectory. It sounds simple, and it is. It requires vision, experience, contacts and common sense to bring all these elements together in one venture. There are very few venture firms with the brains and bandwidth to do it all, but the ones who do produce a remarkably high number of hits.

Kressel and Winarsky have no use for the popular notion that start-ups should fail until they succeed, “pivoting” to things that work by trial and error. They write:

Failure has become de rigeur, particularly in software start-ups that initially require little capital and small teams. The idea seems simple enough: you start with an initial venture concept, put together a team, and launch the venture. You develop minimally viable products, keep testing different market and product hypotheses, and pivot based on the market feedback you get. You expect to fail repeatedly and hope to eventually get to product-market fit.

Obama losing his battle to close Gitmo terrorist prison downplayed by media: Jim Kouri

Despite losing his battle to officially close the controversial detention center that he promised the leftists would be one of his first acts when he was elected to office in 2008, President Barack Obama stepped back from his threat to veto a bill after seeing it pass in the House of Representatives with some Democrats joining the Republicans. However, the President’s news media friends downplayed the vote and it outcome not for Obama but for their “cause,” according to police officers opposed to the propect of bringing Gitmo detainees to the U.S.

Obama has ended up signing a defense bill into law just before the Thanksgiving holiday with little fanfare and even littler media coverage. The bill appropriates $607 billion in defense spending and includes stipulations that would make very difficult to close the military prison — located at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — that houses some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists.
Guantanamo is the small piece of Cuba in which U.S. Marines and Naval personnel maintain a military base. With Obama’s recent concessions to communist Cuba’s rulers, Fidel and Raoul Castro, there has been talk that the U.S. may remove its military from that Caribbean island and turn over Guantanamo Bay back the Castro brothers.

Muslim Convert to Christianity Gives Politically Incorrect Talk on Islam :Andrew Harrod

This was an interesting briefing by the Endowment for Middle East Truth.

“There is something wrong with Islam as a faith itself,” stated human rights activist Reverend Majed El Shafie at a videoed November 16 Washington, DC, Endowment for Middle East Truth presentation on Capitol Hill. Addressing over 25 people, mostly congressional and think tank staff, the Egyptian Muslim convert to Christianity Shafie provided personal insight into the Middle East’s various Islamic threats.

Shafie began his presentation by describing his Christian conversion as an 18-year old in a prominent Egyptian Muslim family and subsequent life-changing persecution. Imprisoned in Egypt for his Christian profession, he endured torture that resulted in recurrent nightmares and an abiding aversion to lemons, once rubbed along with salt by jailors into his wounds. After his dramatic escape from Egypt to Israel and asylum in Canada, he became a religious freedom advocate by founding One Free World International (OFWI) in his newfound home. “I decided I would not be a victim and I would be a victor,” Shafie stated. “I decided that I would fight, not fighting back by machine guns or weapons, but fight back with the truth, fight back with forgiveness and love and helping others who used to be in the same position as myself.”

This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University! Dr. Everett Piper, President Oklahoma Wesleyan University see note please

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2015/11/18/college-professors-remarkable-speech-in-view-of-the-spoiled-brats-tantrums-on-campus-it-is-worth-reading/
“This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love! In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic! Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims! Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience! An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad! It is supposed to make you feel guilty! The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization!