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July 2016

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Tony Thomas: Green $cience’s Ugly Growth

By on July 1st, 2016

They certainly are a smart bunch at the Australian Academy of Science, where great minds can hold two contradictory opinions at the same time. Two years ago the goal was an end to planet-wrecking growth. Now they want more taxpayer dollars to promote it
The federal electoral urgings of the Australian Academy of Science are pretty much what you’d expect. It wants more funding for science, technology and engineering. This will ‘drive innovation and growth into the future’, it says.

The Academy is oh-so-keen on economic growth. It says, “More than three decades of exponential growth in Australia’s per-capita GDP is tapering, and if nothing changes Australia will fall out of the G20 within 15 years.”

But wait! Wasn’t this same Academy sponsoring a Green anti-growth agenda as it cranked up its Fenner Conference on the Environment less than two years ago? The conference, at the University of NSW, was titled, “Addicted to Growth? How to move to a Steady State Economy in Australia.” The Academy approves, brands and seed-funds these annual Fenner gigs at up to $10,000 a time.

The conference flier reads: “Novelist Edward Abbey once noted that ‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell’. Our economy is meant to be a ‘servant of society’, not its master, yet is this true today? On a finite planet nothing physical can keep on growing forever – yet that is the ideology of the ‘endless growth’ neoclassical economics that now dominates the thinking of most governments and business. This has led to a rapidly worsening environmental crisis that degrades the nature on which we all depend. We cannot keep avoiding talking about this issue – hence the need for such a conference…”

The Academy has no economics expertise. But it promotes the eco-catastrophism of the global warming religion, having failed to notice that there has been negligible warming for two decades,[i], contrary to all the scary stuff from the IPCC computer modelling.

When common-sense flew out the Academy windows, the leadership became suckers for any variety of green ideology, such as divestment last year of its fossil fuel shares (but continued unprincipled use of fossil-fuel-powered electricity).

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What law? Obama just goes around the laws he does not like By Silvio Canto, Jr.

By on July 1st, 2016

From ObamaCare to executive orders legalizing illegal immigrants, President Obama has shown us that he does not understand the role of the executive branch under our Constitution.

So let me remind you. This is directly from the U.S. Constitution:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The president is the chief executive officer. He must enforce and obey the laws of the U.S. He does not avoid the ones he dislikes and enforces the ones he likes.

The U.S. embargo is apparently a law that President Obama does not like. Therefore, he must enforce it or call on Congress to repeal it. On immigration, we see a similar situation. President Obama does not like that Congress has not passed the immigration reform that he likes. So he is going around Congress and running into the Supreme Court.

We just read that a U.S. company is going to run a hotel in Cuba. They are partners with the Cuban government because that’s the only option for a foreign company in Cuba.

I agree with Capitol Hill Cubans:

This week, the agreement between the U.S.-based hotel company, Starwood, and the Cuban military’s tourism entity, Gaviota, was consummated.

Under the deal, Starwood will manage the Hotel Quinta Avenida in Havana for the Cuban military.

First and foremost, this arrangement is clearly inconsistent with U.S. law — it’s illegal and should be challenged as such.

Moreover, it proves Obama has not been forthcoming.

Allowing U.S. companies to partner directly with the most repressive security apparatus in the Western Hemisphere neither “empowers the Cuban people,” nor “promotes their independence from the Cuban authorities.”

It’s simply repulsive.

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Child Sexual Assault Cover-Up in Idaho By Janet Levy

By on July 1st, 2016

The recent sexual assault of a five-year-old girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, and the reaction by public officials and the media amounting to a cover-up dramatically illustrate, yet again, how the West battles against the harsh reality of unlimited Islamic immigration. The incident occurred June 2 at the Fawnbrook Apartments in Twin Falls where prosecutors allege a 5-year-old girl was sexually assaulted. Two juvenile suspects, boys, ages 14 and 10, were detained, charged and released. A third, a 7-year-old boy involved in the incident, was not charged. The boys are from Iraqi and Sudanese families, but it’s unclear if they are refugees or how long they’ve been in the community.

Public officials released few details about the incident, stating that the suspects are juveniles about whom information is routinely withheld. This only caused outcry from locals who were incensed by the incident itself, failure of officials to provide information, lack of media attention and release of the boys from a juvenile detention center within six days of their arrest. Outraged residents reignited calls to close the Twin Falls refugee center, a drive that failed a year earlier.

Further outrage occurred when the Justice Department stepped in, allegedly to address the concerns of distressed residents. Obama-appointed U.S. Attorney Wendy J. Olson threatened the community and media with federal prosecution if they “spread false information or inflammatory statements about the perpetrators.” Although Olson later explained that her comments were made because Twin Falls City Council members had received threats of violence against them, her statements convinced many critics that she was attempting to silence the community and not merely quell outrage or assuage the concerns of locals that the incident will be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice.

The crisis in Twin Falls is understandable given its history of refugee immigration. The small city has only about 47,000 residents, yet is has became a beachhead for Muslim immigration as a result of the work of a refugee center there managed by the College of Southern Idaho. The CSI refugee center dates back to the 1980s and is one of four agencies in Idaho working with refugees over the years.

Together they have brought in refugees from countries spanning the globe, including Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, the Congo, Bhutan and more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some put the total number of refugees in the state at 20,000 since 1970. Since September 2001 alone, the U.S. State Department has sent more than 11,000 refugees to Idaho, more than 96% Muslim, from Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan and Syria.

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FBI—for Burying Information The bureau seeks “to prevent disclosure” in Orlando. James Taranto

By on July 1st, 2016

The FBI is trying to control what the public learns about the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, the Orlando Sentinel reports:

A June 20 letter from the FBI, attached to the City [of] Orlando’s lawsuit over withholding 911 calls and other records from 25 media outlets including the Orlando Sentinel, was also sent to the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office with instructions pertaining to how they should respond to records requests.

The letter requests that agencies deny inquiries and directs departments to “immediately notify the FBI of any requests your agency received” so “the FBI can seek to prevent disclosure through appropriate channels, as necessary.”

The Seminole County Sheriff’s Office sent the Sentinel the letter Tuesday night in response to a request for documents, video and audio recordings from the early morning hours of June 12.

A spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office said the FBI sent them the letter Monday night and “instructed us to forward it to anyone requesting records.”

Seminole County is to the north and east of Orange County, which includes Orlando. On Twitter, Sentinel reporter Gal Tziperman Lotan posted the full letter, signed by Tampa-based Special Agent Paul Wysopal. “He refused comment Wednesday,” according to the Sentinel report.

The FBI’s position here is not without logic. The investigation of a terrorist attack is primarily a federal responsibility, so one might expect decisions related to the case, including about public disclosure of information, would be made centrally. The Sentinel notes that the lawsuit—which seeks a declaratory judgment as to what documents should be released—was moved from Orange County Circuit Court to federal court after the city named the U.S. Justice Department as a defendant.

But one is inclined to view the FBI’s actions with suspicion, in light of last week’s hamhanded nondisclosure. As we noted, the bureau released a transcript of one of the attacker’s calls to 911 with his declarations of fealty to the Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, censored. (He made other calls, whose content has yet to be made public.)

After enduring several hours of ridicule, the FBI released the transcript. It was surely no coincidence that the nondisclosure was consistent with the Obama administration’s agenda, both political (playing down terrorism during an election year) and ideological (denying that Islamic terrorism is Islamic).

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Obama’s Climate Policy Is a Hot Mess The president hails the Paris Agreement again—even though it will solve nothing and cost trillions. By Bjorn Lomborg

By on July 1st, 2016

When President Obama flew to Ottawa, Canada, on Wednesday to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, promoting their climate-change policies was near the top of the agenda. “The Paris Agreement was a turning point for our planet,” the leaders’ joint statement said, referring to the climate pact signed with fanfare in April by nearly 200 nations. “North America has the capacity, resources and the moral imperative to show strong leadership building on the Paris Agreement and promoting its early entry into force.”

Attracting rather less attention than the Ottawa meeting was a June 22 hearing on Capitol Hill. Testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy extolled the Paris Agreement as an “incredible achievement.” But when repeatedly asked, she wouldn’t explain exactly how much this treaty would actually cut global temperatures.

The Paris Agreement will cost a fortune but do little to reduce global warming. In a peer-reviewed article published in Global Policy this year, I looked at the widely hailed major policies that Paris Agreement signatories pledged to undertake and found that they will have a negligible temperature impact. I used the same climate-prediction model that the United Nations uses.

First, consider the Obama administration’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan. The U.N.’s model shows that it will accomplish almost nothing. Even if the policy withstands current legal challenges and its cuts are totally implemented—not for the 14 years that the Paris agreement lasts, but for the rest of the century—the Clean Power Plan would reduce temperatures by 0.023 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

President Obama has made grander promises of future carbon cuts, beyond the plan’s sweeping restrictions on the power industry, but these are only vaguely outlined now. In the unlikely event that all of these extra cuts also happen, and are adhered to throughout the rest of the century, the combined reduction in temperatures would be 0.057 degrees. In other words, if the U.S. delivers for the whole century on the very ambitious Obama rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century.

Or consider the Paris Agreement promises from the entire world using the reduction estimate from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization responsible for the Paris summit. The U.N.’s model reveals a temperature reduction by the end of the century of only 0.08 degrees Fahrenheit. If we generously assume that the promised cuts for 2030 are not only met (which itself would be a U.N. first), but sustained throughout the rest of the century, temperatures in 2100 would drop by 0.3 degrees—the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years at the end of the century. A cut of 0.3 degrees matches the finding of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis of the Paris Agreement last year.

The costs of the Paris climate pact are likely to run to $1 trillion to $2 trillion annually throughout the rest of the century, using the best estimates from the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum and the Asia Modeling Exercise. Spending more than $100 trillion for such a feeble temperature reduction by the end of the century does not make sense.

Some Paris Agreement supporters defend it by claiming that its real impact on temperatures will be much more significant than the U.N. model predicts. This requires some mental gymnastics and heroic assumptions. The group doing climate modeling for the U.S. State Department assumes that without the Paris Agreement emissions would be much higher than under any realistic scenario. With such an unrealistically pessimistic baseline, they can then magically show that the agreement will cut temperatures by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit—with about 1.5 degrees of the drop coming from a reduction of these fantasy carbon emissions. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Hillary’s Strange Security Adviser How did a big-money Clinton donor get on an expert panel next to nuclear scientists? By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on July 1st, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been forced to acknowledge over the past week that the former secretary of state did not, as she had claimed, turn over all her work-related email to the State Department. The new story is that her deletion of these emails was an oversight. Team Clinton is hoping therefore that you won’t hear the story of Rajiv K. Fernando, which would suggest the oversight tale to be yet another untruth.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of Mr. Fernando, because you arguably never should have. Mr. Fernando is a one-time Chicago securities trader who in July of 2011 somehow found himself sitting on the International Security Advisory Board, with the ability to access the nation’s most sensitive intelligence.

Mr. Fernando had no background that would have qualified him to sit on the ISAB alongside the likes of former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Defense Secretary William Perry, a United Nations chief weapons inspector, members of Congress, and nuclear scientists. That Mr. Fernando didn’t belong was apparent. “We had no idea who he was,” one board member told ABC News. So how exactly did he get there?

We now finally know, thanks to State Department internal emails that the government was forced to turn over to the watchdog group Citizens United. And thanks to ABC News, which began digging into Mr. Fernando’s bizarre appointment when it first happened.

In August 2011, ABC requested a copy of Mr. Fernando’s resume from the State Department. This, the internal emails show, sent a press aide reeling to find answers to how a trader had ended up on the ISAB. Even the aide noted that it was “natural to ask how he got onto the board when compared to the rest of the esteemed list of members.”

The response came only a few hours later in an email from Wade Boese, chief of staff for an undersecretary of state: “The true answer is simply that S staff ( Cheryl Mills) added him,” Mr. Boese wrote. “Raj was not on the list sent to S; he was added at their insistence.”

S, in this situation, stands for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Mills, a longtime aide, was her chief of staff. Why would Hillary want to entrust the nation’s secrets to a man with no intelligence experience?

Here’s what we do know: Mr. Fernando, before his plum appointment, had given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation. He had been a top bundler for Mrs. Clinton in her 2008 presidential run, and later a major Obama fundraiser. He gave tens of thousands more to a political group that helped Hillary pay off her 2008 campaign debt by renting her email list.

The 2011 emails reveal that the State Department knew it had a problem on its hands. “We must protect the Secretary’s and Under Secretary’s name,” the press aide warned. Ms. Mills, the messages say, asked staff to “stall” the news organization. Damage control came in the form of Mr. Fernando’s quick resignation, on grounds of “additional time needed to devote to his business.” Uh huh. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Some of Erdogan’s best friends are terrorists by Ruthie Blum

By on July 1st, 2016

Following Tuesday’s multiple suicide bombing at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the world — the West in particular — to view the event as a “milestone for the joint fight against terrorist organizations, a turning point.”

He also said the attacks, “which took place during the holy month of Ramadan, show that terrorism strikes with no regard for faith and values.”

If 42 innocent people had not been brutally killed, along with hundreds of others seriously wounded, his words would be cause for a global guffaw on the part of friend and foe alike.

In the first place, as an authoritarian leader of a previously modern and democratic Muslim country, which he has spent the 14 years since his election turning into an Islamic state where critics in the press and political system are thrown in jail for any hint of opposition, he has more nerve than sense to pretend that he is in the same boat as the United States and Europe.

Secondly, as someone who is strongly tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, he has shown that it is only certain terrorists he wants eradicated; the others are his allies, who do the dirty work he welcomes and supports.

It was thus ironic that, on the morning after the airport attack, the Israeli security cabinet approved the reconciliation agreement it had reached with Turkey the day before. As is typical of any deal Islamist leaders ultimately sign with the Jewish state, this one is much more advantageous to the undeserving party.

According to the agreement, which has been negotiated since 2010 — when Turkey sponsored and dispatched a flotilla of armed, pro-Hamas activists to provoke an international incident by violating Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip — Israel will hand over $20 million to the families of the perpetrators killed and injured on the Mavi Marmara ship by IDF commandos who shot at their assailants in self-defense. In exchange, Turkey will cease its legal proceedings against Israeli forces connected in any way to what happened on that ship six years ago.

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A Bad Iran Investment The Obama administration’s promotion of Iran’s economy has prompted no change in Iranian behavior. by Lawrence J. Haas

By on July 1st, 2016

Stretching appeasement to the breaking point, Washington is working overtime to convince global institutions, nations, banks and companies to dismiss their well-founded concerns and do business with the America-hating, terror-sponsoring, nuclear weapons-pursuing regime in Tehran.

Washington’s efforts – which are coming despite no discernable change in Iranian behavior – extend a familiar script of recent years, in which the Obama administration kowtows to the regime, ignores the concerns of America’s regional allies and breaks its promises to monitor Iranian activities closely and act accordingly.

It’s an embarrassing spectacle that diminishes U.S. leadership and credibility in the region and beyond.

Nevertheless, the U.S. effort is having an impact. The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, which sets global standards for fighting money laundering and terror financing, responded to U.S. pressure by deciding last week to suspend for a year its measures to combat Iranian terror sponsorship because Iran has adopted a plan to address the problem – even though Tehran hasn’t actually implemented it. And the plan is meaningless to begin with because it excludes from “terrorism” any group that Iran says is “attempting to end foreign occupation, colonialism, and racism,” as Iran surely would say of its terrorist proxies Hezbollah and Hamas.

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Egyptian author Sayyid Al-Qemany: Islam in Its Present Form Is a Threat to the World, All Scorpions Sting See video

By on July 1st, 2016

http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/5542.htm
Egyptian author Sayyid Al-Qemany, speaking at the first convention of the
Adhoc organization, a London-based “secularist, modernist, pluralist”
international NGO, warned about the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism,
saying: “Any Muslim who believes that his religion is suited to all times
and places is a terrorist by definition.” Al-Qemany said that “all scorpions
sting” and that the only difference is that some have not yet had the chance
to perform “the best act that brings you close to Allah” by carrying out the
duty of Jihad. The convention, titled “The Roots and Causes of Islamic
Violence,” was held in Brussels on May 22, and Al-Qemany’s address was
posted on the YouTube account of the “I Think” Magazine.

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APPARENTLY BREXIT ISN’T THE “RIGHT” KIND OF REVOLUTION : BEN WEINGARTEN

By on July 1st, 2016

Popular democratic revolutions are all the rage, until they aren’t.

Remember the (inherently) progressive Establishment’s glee around the globe at the prospect of the Arab Spring?

Contrast its favorable reaction to the “democratic” jihadist takeover of the Middle East with the chaos and cringing that has ensued in the wake of Brexit.

What is clear is that regardless of the substantive impact of Great Britain’s referendum, its symbolic effect has been extraordinary.

Irrespective of #Leave’s implications on economics, immigration and national security, #Brexit is a direct rebuke to the bipartisan Establishment’s most cherished values and principles, and an indictment of its rule.

Too, by challenging the progressive status quo, Brexit has exposed some delicious double standards.

Here are just a few of them:
National Sovereignty and Self-Determination

As mentioned, recall that the Arab Spring was viewed by the global political class as an unalloyed good. Further, the political class always claims to be against meddling in the affairs of other nations, lest the West creates a 21st century wave of neo-colonialist blowback. And anyway, we are supposed to be non-judgmental. Who are we to tell others what is right and wrong?

The angered reaction of Western elites to #Brexit shows that the above is a farce. The Establishment believes in forcing its values and principles on others when it is in its political interest, in particular when it gives the Establishment more power and control. It is highly judgmental of those who do not toe its line and submit, as reflected in the stern warnings of Democrats and Republicans who lobbied for Brexit, and the talking heads exploding today.

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