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April 2016

Deep-sixing another useful climate myth by David Legates

The vaunted “97% consensus” on dangerous manmade global warming is just more malarkey

By now, virtually everyone has heard that “97% of scientists agree: Climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.” Even if you weren’t one of his 31 million followers who received this tweet from President Obama, you most assuredly have seen it repeated everywhere as scientific fact.

The correct representation is “yes,” “some,” and “no.” Yes, climate change is real. There has never been a period in Earth’s history when the climate has not changed somewhere, in one way or another.

People can and do have some influence on our climate. For example, downtown areas are warmer than the surrounding countryside, and large-scale human development can affect air and moisture flow. But humans are by no means the only source of climate change. The Pleistocene ice ages, Little Ice Age and monster hurricanes throughout history underscore our trivial influence compared to natural forces.

As for climate change being dangerous, this is pure hype based on little fact. Mile-high rivers of ice burying half of North America and Europe were disastrous for everything in their path, as they would be today. Likewise for the plummeting global temperatures that accompanied them. An era of more frequent and intense hurricanes would also be calamitous; but actual weather records do not show this.

It would be far more deadly to implement restrictive energy policies that condemn billions to continued life without affordable electricity – or to lower living standards in developed countries – in a vain attempt to control the world’s climate. In much of Europe, electricity prices have risen 50% or more over the past decade, leaving many unable to afford proper wintertime heat, and causing thousands to die.

The Outrageous Campaign against Exxon Mobil By Rich Lowry —

It’s not easy to make one of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel companies a sympathetic victim, but a collection of state attorneys general, led by Eric Schneiderman of New York, has managed it.

They have launched a campaign against Exxon Mobil that is a transparent — nay, an explicit — attempt to punish dissent on climate change. The members of the self-described “Green 20” are demonstrating a banana-republic-worthy understanding of the law and their responsibilities. They shouldn’t be entrusted with the power of a meter maid, let alone a top position in law enforcement.

Schneiderman subpoenaed Exxon Mobil last year, in what purports to be a fraud investigation. The alleged offense is having less alarmist views on global warming over the years than the green clerisy deems acceptable. How this would constitute fraud is unclear.

Investors would have found Exxon Mobil alluring even if the company had maintained that the planet was in danger of becoming uninhabitable, for no other reason than oil is a miraculously efficient source of energy that we aren’t close to replacing. Consumers would have filled their cars with Exxon Mobil’s product regardless, and surely felt defrauded only if the gasoline didn’t get them to work or to their kids’ soccer practice as advertised.

Usually, officials charged with law enforcement at least try to obscure their political motivations. Not the attorneys general who stood with Schneiderman at a saber-rattling press conference a few weeks ago. Dispensing with any pretense of disinterestedness, they dubbed themselves “AGs United for Clean Power.” Al Gore appeared at the presser, not as a legal expert, but as a totem of the green Left. Schneiderman said that President Barack Obama’s climate agenda has been frustrated, so he and his colleagues would work “creatively” and “aggressively” to advance it.

Diversity as Chaos Whereas the Founders prized unity, 21st-century America has embraced diversity. By Victor Davis Hanson

Diversity is a neutral term, no more positive or negative than its array of antonyms such as homogeneity and uniformity. Iraq is certainly diverse. So is Syria or the Balkans; Japan and South Korea are not. Yet uniformity seems a virtue in the latter while difference in the former has birthed tragedy.

In other words, diversity as a positive demographic idea depends on how it is manifested within a particular political landscape. In the U.S., diversity was traditionally a word less fondly used than unity. Our coins, after all, do not bear the motto E singulis plures. And the Confederacy failed in its effort to allow the states their own diverse cultures without yielding to federal unity. The German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was certainly one of the most diverse coalitions in history, the invaders eventually including, besides the Germans themselves, Finns, Hungarians, Italians, Romanians, and Spaniards, in opposition to a mostly unified Soviet Red Army.

How, then, did diversity become the mantra of the American 21st century? A few reasons stand out.

First, during the 20th century the U.S. was steadily moving toward a multiracial, intermarried, integrated, and assimilated society. As a result, the 1960s idea of “affirmative action” had largely become played out after a half-century of canonized use; by the 2000s it was beset with a variety of class and racial paradoxes. The country was no longer the 90/10, white/black binary that dealt with the issues of the Civil Rights era.

RUTHIE BLUM: SHAME ON THE U.S. AT THE UN

At an open debate on the Middle East at the United Nations Security Council in New York on Monday — as a bus was being blown up in Jerusalem — Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon told his Palestinian counterpart, Riyad Mansour, that he ought to be ashamed for not denouncing terrorism and incitement.

Danon had brought Natan and Renana Meir to the session to personify the devastation that Palestinian Authority incitement to violence against Jews continues to wreak. Natan is the widower of Dafna Meir, a 38-year-old nurse who was murdered three months ago by a Palestinian teenager at the entrance to her home in Otniel, a settlement south of Hebron. Renana is Natan’s 17-year-old daughter, who not only witnessed her mother being stabbed to death, but tried to help fend off the assailant.

The 15-year-old terrorist later told Israeli interrogators that he had been inspired to commit his heinous act from broadcasts on PA television and social media.

Mansour did not condemn any of it, of course. Instead, he berated Israel for imprisoning and killing Palestinian children. No surprise there, which is why Danon — who should be lauded for standing alone in the hornets’ nest of hypocrisy and deceit that the Security Council occupies — was wasting his breath. As Natan Meir said later in a small press conference after the event, it hurt him to hear a diplomat referring to jailed Palestinian kids as victims, when one of those “kids” had slaughtered his wife in cold blood.

Danon already knows that the PA is a lost cause in every possible respect. So his finger-pointing at Mansour was a gesture aimed elsewhere — but hopefully not at the United States, which is just as deserving of a tongue-lashing as the PA that it morally equates with Israel.

Indeed, “disgraceful” doesn’t begin to describe the statement made by David Pressman, the U.S.’s “alternative representative to the U.N. for special political affairs,” at the session in question. Condemning terrorism and settlements in the same sentence, Pressman talked about America’s “steadfast” efforts to “advance dialogue and progress,” which, he said, “will be borne from hard choices made by both leaders to advance the cause of peace over parochial politics.”

Thus, he continued: “We remain very concerned by the wave of terrorism, violence and the utter lack of progress the parties have made toward a two-state solution. It is important that both sides demonstrate, with concrete policies and actions, a genuine commitment to achieving a two-state solution to reduce tensions and restore hope in the possibility of peace. What we have seen on the ground, and what families like the Meir family present here today have experienced first-hand, is absolutely unconscionable.”

Why I Support Ted Cruz By Roger Kimball

In his 1944 opus “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” the philosopher Johnny Mercer provided some bracing imperatives that, rightly understood, explain why I am supporting Ted Cruz for the presidency of the United States.

“You’ve got to accentuate the positive,” Mercer argued.

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.

Quite right. These imperatives, while not quite categorical, are sufficiently compelling to command our attention. Ted Cruz is the only candidate who accentuates the positive, who latches on to the affirmative.

1. Executive power. Even many ardent supporters of President Obama have been taken aback by his style of governance, which has increasingly relied on two extra-constitutional expedients: a) executive diktat and b) regulatory hypertrophy.

Regarding the first: Every president, on taking the oath of office, promises to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution and “faithfully execute” the laws. But Barack Obama has conspicuously failed to do this. Item: When enacting some provisions of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) turned out to be politically inexpedient, Obama simply declined to enforce them, “legislating,” as one report put it, “from the White House.” Item: When the state of Arizona sought to enforce immigration laws that were on the books but that Obama did not like, he ordered Border Patrol agents to ignore the law. This is just the beginning of a very long list.

Regarding the second: the Obama administration has vastly expanded the prerogatives of such agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency (just one example), which presides over a budget in excess of $8 billion and a workforce of more than 15,000. Increasingly, this alphabet soup of regulatory agencies, whose minions are unelected and essentially unaccountable to the public, impedes economic growth and harasses citizens with a burdensome regimen of bureaucratic paperwork and often pointless oversight. As Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, a low-level government bureaucrat wields much more power over our lives than a billionaire who might happen to be our neighbor or even our employer, for he comes bearing the coercive power of the state.

Ted Cruz is the only candidate, Democrat or Republican, who understands and is prepared to address the twin dangers of executive overreach and the stealth statism of regulatory bloat.

You are always hearing, even from those who do not support him, that Ted Cruz is “a constitutionalist.” In other words, he believes that the governance of this country should be guided by that amazing, 8000-word document the Constitution of the United States. At the center of the Constitution are two ideas: 1) that power should be dispersed and decentralized and 2) the People are sovereign. It is sometimes forgotten that the Constitution is essentially a prophylactic instrument, designed to protect the people from the state. The Founders were careful to frame a government in which the executive exists to execute, not to make the laws. That is why the first thing you come upon, in Article I, is a discussion of Congress, into whose hands the Founders intended to invest the essential law-making power of the government. There is some irony, perhaps, that Ted Cruz wishes to assume the office of the president in order to circumscribe the power of that office. But the fact that something is ironical need not detract from its truth. Barack Obama is the fulfillment of a long process of power consolidation in the hands of the president. He has not governed so much as he has ruled, partly by fiat, partly by intimidation. I believe that Ted Cruz would reverse that decades-long process whereby the president of the Untied States mutated into a sort of imperial bureaucrat. His ambition to limit the scope of presidential ambition would alone be sufficient reason to support Ted Cruz.

The Global World Hits a Snag By Richard Fernandez

The impeachment of Brazilian president Dilmah Roussef is an example of what happens when a political ecosystem collapses. Just a few years ago, Brazil was hailed as the wonder model of the developing world. “It was called the ‘Brazil model’, or simply ‘the Lula model’, back when this country’s economy was roaring and its president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was a superstar of the developing world. By balancing support for big business with big social-welfare programs, the union boss turned statesman presided over an era of growth that lifted tens of millions of Brazilians out of poverty. Lula’s presidency cut a new template for a Latin American left that had long insisted class struggle and revolution were the only road to fairness.”

Then the wonder model ran out of money for reasons that are easy in retrospect to understand. Brazil’s boom years attracted corruption on a massive scale. Soon the leeches were sucking more blood out of the host than its body could replace. Once the economy collapsed and the middle class had been beggared an angry public went looking for a scapegoat and found one in current president Dilma Roussef.

The same catastrophe maybe happening on a global scale. The music has stopped and the petrostates who have long bankrolled Western politicians have run out of money. “The petrostates assembling in Doha to discuss a potential output freeze two days from now aren’t coming together in a show of solidarity or out of some sense of duty towards one another, but rather as an act of desperation. Bloomberg ran the numbers, and found that the oil price collapse has collectively cost the 18 countries involved in this meeting nearly one third of a trillion dollars.”

The Washington Post says OPEC “has lost control of the oil market.” Caught between the desire to cut production to raise prices and pump to earn ready cash, the oil producers are unable to cut production for long term gain with some members, like socialist Venezuela, forced to keep pumping at all costs to barely keep afloat. What’s different about the present situation — and why it represents a political ecosystem collapse — is that Saudi Arabia and Russia are essentially in the same boat with Venezuela.

Saudi Arabia has reached out to Russia, primarily to discuss the war in Syria but also to discuss oil. Russia is also producing oil at near-record levels, but top officials said earlier this week that Moscow is not contemplating cuts.

“Clearly Saudi Arabia needs the money and so does Russia,” said Kenneth Rogoff, an economic professor at Harvard University. “Russia is really hurting. The standard of living has plummeted and if it lasts that will eventually undermine [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s poplarity no matter how effective his propaganda.

“But Saudi Arabia has its failed war in Yemen, gigantic population growth and all kinds of internal political problems. So neither place is in a fantastic position to cut back.”

Congressman Dave Trott (R_MI) Blasts Obama for Not Designating Muslim Brotherhood a Terror Group By Patrick Poole

Congressman Dave Trott (R-MI) blasted the Obama administration during a hearing last week for not designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Trott noted the group’s role in the targeting of Coptic Christians in Egypt, and how it continues to incite violence against minorities and U.S. allies.

Rep. Trott also expressed disbelief at the State Department’s excuses for continuing to meet with the group.

Both the House and the Senate are considering bills calling on the administration to designate the Muslim Brotherhood. Last November, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) introduced H.R. 3892, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2015, which now has bipartisan support.

A Senate companion bill, S. 2230, was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

On February 24 the House Judiciary Committee voted 17-10 to pass the bill and move the measure to the full House.

As a cosponsor of the House bill, Rep. Trott slammed the administration. He posted the video to his Facebook page:

Several U.S. allies in the Middle East have taken action against the Muslim Brotherhood, including U.A.E., Egypt, and Israel. Last week, Jordan closed the group’s headquarters in Amman:

Obama (See no Evil)Leaves Aggression by Russian Aircraft Out of Conversation with Putin By Bridget Johnson

The White House said President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin chatted on the phone today — but Obama did not bring up Russia’s too-close-for-comfort aerial actions near a U.S. ship and a reconnaissance plane.

U.S. European Command said Saturday that a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane over the Baltic Sea was barrel-rolled by a Russian Su-27 on Thursday.

“The unsafe and unprofessional actions of a single pilot have the potential to unnecessarily escalate tensions between countries,” Danny Hernandez, a spokesman for U.S. European Command, told CNN, noting that the plane “performed erratic and aggressive maneuvers” within 50 feet of the U.S. RC-135.

A week ago, two Russian SU-24 jets made “numerous close-range and low altitude passes” that led the U.S. ship to suspend flight operations until the Russian planes were gone. Last Tuesday, a Russian KA-27 Helix helicopter “conducted circles at low altitude around the ship, seven in total, at approximately 5 p.m. local.”

“The helicopter passes were also deemed unsafe and unprofessional by the ship’s commanding officer. About 40 minutes following the interaction with the Russian helicopter, two Russian SU-24 jets made numerous close-range and low altitude passes, 11 in total. The Russian aircraft flew in a simulated attack profile and failed to respond to repeated safety advisories in both English and Russian,” U.S. European Command said in a statement.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Obama had a conversation with Putin today about Ukraine and abiding by the Minsk talks.

“The United States continues to believe and President Obama continues to make a forceful case that Russia needs to abide by their commitments, and by doing so they can begin to relieve some of the isolation they have sustained as a result interfering in the sovereign activities of their neighbors in Ukraine,” Earnest said.

Jewish prime minister elected in Ukraine By Arnold Cusmariu

On 14 April 2016, by a vote of 257 to 50, Ukraine’s Parliament elected Volodymyr Groysman prime minister, replacing Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was forced out by public dissatisfaction and allegations of corruption surrounding his government.

At 38, Mr. Groysman is the youngest Ukrainian prime minister ever elected and the first Jew to hold such a high position.

Here are some basic facts about him:

– Born in Vinnytsia into a Jewish family on 20 January 1978.

– Grandfather Isaac survived the Holocaust by pretending to be dead after being dropped into a mass grave by Nazi troops.

– Started his career in 1994 as a commercial director of the small private business company “ОКО” and as a commercial director of the private enterprise “Youth.”

– 2003 graduate of the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management with a specialty in jurisprudence.

– Elected mayor of Vinnytsia in 2006.

– 2010 graduate of the National Academy of State Administration with a specialty in community development management.

Is Obama plotting yet again to harm embattled Israel? By Victor Sharpe

According to a report dated April 16, 2016 in the sometimes reliable Debka Special Report, “Israel’s top political leaders and military commanders were stunned and shocked last weekend when they found out that US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed to support the return of the Golan to Syria.”

If this is true, Barack Hussein Obama is plotting yet again a way to torment the Jewish state with yet another vile edict, one which clearly has nothing to do with enlightened statecraft but much more to do with evil witchcraft.

The occupant in the Oval Office cannot salivate enough at the prospect of harming Israel’s security and survivability. No doubt he is fulfilling a malevolent pact he has made with a cabal of Islamists and extreme leftists; both of which ideologies have satanic hatred for Israel.

With this threat hanging over the strategic territory known as the Golan Heights, it is time once again to learn its history and Biblical significance. Even as modern day Syria is convulsed in a murderous and bloody civil war with untold thousands dead and maimed; even as its tyrant, Bashir al-Assad, fights for his political and physical life; even with all this, he nevertheless spews forth his hatred of Israel and his call to take away the Golan Heights from the Jewish state.

But so do those “rebels” who are fighting him and thus remind us of the famous aphorism: “better the devil you know,” or better still, “a plague on all your houses.”

Those of us who have stood on the Golan’s 1,700 foot steep escarpment, are struck by its immense strategic value overlooking Israel’s fertile Hula Valley and the beautiful harp-shaped lake below, called in Hebrew, Kinneret (better known as the Sea of Galilee.)

But during Syria’s occupation of the territory, no agriculture of any significance took place and no restoration of its terrain was ever undertaken. Instead, the Golan was a giant Syrian army artillery encampment whose sole purpose was to deliberately rain down upon Israeli farmers, fishermen and villagers an endless barrage of shells.