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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Clinton Global Initiative’s Ignominious End The Clinton Foundation just vindicated its critics. By Jim Geraghty

By on January 17th, 2017

The Clinton Foundation filed papers this week warning that 22 staffers will be laid off on April 15, when the Clinton Global Initiative is formally shut down.

The CGI is a program of the Clinton Foundation, centered around an annual meeting described as “the networking event of choice for corporations, nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations and wealthy philanthropists.” Before the election, when Hillary Clinton’s victory in the presidential race appeared likely, the Clinton Foundation declared that it would wind down the initiative no matter how the election turned out.

At the time, those plans made sense: It would be unseemly to say the least if a corporate- and foreign-government-funded networking event was directly connected to the sitting president. But there was never much official explanation of why CGI would need to shut down in the case of a Clinton defeat. After all, the world didn’t run out of poor people or sick people on November 8.

But after the election, some of the foundation’s donors acted as if the causes CGI supported were no longer worthy. The Australian government said it did not intend to continue its donations to the Clinton Foundation; it had given $88 million over ten years. After dramatically increasing its yearly donation in 2014 and 2015, the government of Norway chose to reduce its donation by 87 percent after the election.

Why would foreign governments suddenly lose interest in the charitable work the Clinton Foundation purported to do? They wouldn’t, unless the Clinton Foundation and CGI had existed to give foreign governments and businessmen a way to curry favor with a future president from the beginning. The April shutdown, then, makes complete sense: Why keep operating if there’s no influence left to peddle?

Clinton fans will vehemently deny that there’s anything to this cynical explanation, but the behavior of many foundation partners suggests that selling access and goodwill was a big part of the organization’s operations. Right before the election, one of the infamous WIkiLeaks documents revealed just how blurry the line was between the foundation’s non-profit activities and Bill Clinton’s for-profit activities.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Putin, Obama — and Trump Let’s hope that the era of ‘lead from behind’ and violated red lines is over. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 17th, 2017

For eight years, the Obama administration misjudged Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as it misjudged most of the Middle East, China, and the rest of the world as well. Obama got wise to Russia only when Putin imperiled not just U.S. strategic interests and government records but also supposedly went so far as to tamper with sacrosanct Democratic-party secrets, thereby endangering the legacy of Barack Obama.

Putin was probably bewildered by Obama’s media-driven and belated concern, given that the Russians, like the Chinese, had in the past hacked U.S. government documents that were far more sensitive than the information it may have mined and leaked in 2016 — and they received nothing but an occasional Obama “cut it out” whine. Neurotic passive-aggression doesn’t merely bother the Russians; it apparently incites and emboldens them.

Obama’s strange approach to Putin since 2009 apparently has run something like the following. Putin surely was understandably angry with the U.S. under the cowboy imperialist George W. Bush, according to the logic of the “reset.” After all, Obama by 2009 was criticizing Bush more than he was Putin for the supposed ills of the world. But Barack Obama was not quite an American nationalist who sought to advance U.S. interests.

Instead, he posed as a new sort of soft-power moralistic politician — not seen since Jimmy Carter — far more interested in rectifying the supposed damage rather than the continuing good that his country has done. If Putin by 2008 was angry at Bush for his belated pushback over Georgia, at least he was not as miffed at Bush as Obama himself was.

Reset-button policy then started with the implicit agreement that Russia and the Obama administration both had legitimate grievances against a prior U.S. president — a bizarre experience for even an old hand like Putin. (Putin probably thought that the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq were a disaster not on ethical or even strategic grounds but because the U.S. had purportedly let the country devolve into something like what Chechnya was before Putin’s iron grip.)

In theory, Obama would captivate Putin with his nontraditional background and soaring rhetoric, the same way he had charmed urban progressive elites at home and Western European socialists abroad. One or two more Cairo speeches would assure Putin that a new America was more interested in confessing its past sins to the Islamic world than confronting its terrorism. And Obama would continue to show his bona fides by cancelling out Bush initiatives such as missile defense in Eastern Europe, muting criticism of Russian territorial expansionism, and tabling the updating and expansion of the American nuclear arsenal. All the while, Obama would serve occasional verbal cocktails for Putin’s delight — such as the hot-mic promise to be even “more flexible” after his 2012 reelection, the invitation of Russia into the Middle East to get the Obama administration off the hook from enforcing red lines over Syrian WMD use, and the theatrical scorn for Mitt Romney’s supposedly ossified Cold War–era worries about Russian aggression.

As Putin was charmed, appeased, and supposedly brought on board, Obama increasingly felt free to enlighten him (as he does almost everyone) about how his new America envisioned a Westernized politically correct world. Russians naturally would not object to U.S. influence if it was reformist and cultural rather than nationalist, economic, and political — and if it sought to advance universal progressive ideals rather than strictly American agendas. Then, in its own self-interest, a grateful Russia would begin to enact at home something akin to Obama’s helpful initiatives: open up its society, with reforms modeled after those of the liberal Western states in Europe.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The delusional war on warmth By Viv Forbes

By on January 17th, 2017

For decades, global warming scaremongers have been stealing energy from the environment using windmills, solar collectors, and biofuels, force-fed by carbon taxes and emission trading schemes. Their delusional dream is to cool the globe.

However, there has been no global warming for nearly 20 years. Right now, the great ice sheets are growing thicker, and record snow is blanketing much of the climate change leader, the Northern Hemisphere landmass. Solar panels are blinded by snow, and turbines don’t turn in the cold still air, or else they have to be shut down because of icing or high winds. Like all green things, wind and solar power often hibernate in winter.

Meanwhile, the unloved all-weather energy producers (coal, gas, and nuclear) are straining at their limits, as families huddle around heaters fearing the first flickers of failure from overloaded power grids.

No food is produced from land smothered in snow – farmers fear late frosts and welcome early spring rains and warmth.

For the last million years, Earth has experienced long cycles of ice separated by short warm inter-glacials. Today’s warm era is already a mature twelve thousand years old, and Earth’s climate is fluctuating naturally toward the next glacial cycle in which many animals and plants will perish. Only fools would assist the return of the ice.

Warmists are making a massive mistake by assuming that global cooling is better than global warming. They are ignoring their precious “Precautionary Principle.”

A frigid ice house is far more dangerous and destructive than a warm greenhouse.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tony Thomas Earth Hour in 3D: Dim, Dark and Dopey

By on January 17th, 2017

For the past decade legions of the gullible have been signalling their eco-virtue by candles’ glow, turning off the lights for 60 minutes as an offering to poor, overheated Gaia. It makes little sense, but promoters are delighted the faithful can still write cheques in the gloom.
World Wide Fund for Nature (Australia) is gearing up for its tenth idiotic Earth Hour at 8.30pm on Saturday, March 25. Once again it will be urging people to turn off lights (but not fridges, freezers, TVs, dishwashers, computers, aircons and smart-phones). If WWF is aware that satellite data shows no atmospheric warming for the past 18 years, that information figures nowhere in its literature.

Of course, any large-scale lights-off actually increases CO2 emissions because generators have to do inefficient ramping-up of power when the lights go on again. Such quibbles have never worried WWF.

Earth Hour is run by national manager Anna Rose. She is co-founder and former head of the Youth Climate Coalition, and spouse of Simon Sheik, former national director of GetUp, failed Greens candidate and, most recently, promoter of a fossil-fuel-free superfund.[1] Rose claims, on the basis of sample surveys from consultancy AMR, that a quarter (nearly 6m) of the Australian population took part in Earth Hour 2016.[2] That’s a big call. In 2015, she was claiming one in three Australians (7.7m) took part in 2014.

The media-savvy WWF has been theming its annual Earth Hours. Last year’s theme was “Protect the Aussie places we love” with sub-texts about global warming destroying the Barrier Reef by 2050 and other alarmist mantras (the Reef made it safely through previous eras of strong warming). The 2017 Earth Hour theme is “the voice of the future generation”, taking into overdrive WWF’s propaganda assault in schools.

WWF’s partner in the schools’ Earth Hour exercise is Cool Australia, a green/left outfit founded and run by Jason Kimberley of the wealthy Just Jeans clan. Cool Australia claims more than 52,000 educators whose lessons reached more than 1,050,000 students in 2016. (It is a national scandal that schools have become such hotbeds of green/left indoctrination).

The Cool Australia material has much in common with the views of the Left Renewal faction of the Greens Party, and its “fight to bring about the end of capitalism”. Cool’s anti-capitalism curriculum is based on the rantings of far-left Canadian author Naomi Klein and her agitprop book, This Changes Everything. Klein views conventional green policies as way too conservative. Her goal is to marshall a green activist horde to subvert Western civilisation at grassroots level.

Cool Australia offers Years 9 and 10 no fewer than ten lesson units based on the Klein book and video. One lesson, for example, is titled,“This changes everything – climate change vs capitalism”. Cool Australia counsels the kiddies, “…an opportunity for a new economic model that accounts for both people and the planet in a just and sustainable way.” The film of the same title has Klein saying, “I’ve spent six years wandering through the wreckage caused by the carbon in the air and the economic system that put it there.” A title comes up, “Capitalism” with a voiceover, “We are going in completely the wrong direction.” It ends with a narrator’s question: “What if global warming is not only a crisis? What if it is the best chance you are ever going to get to build a better world? Change or be changed!”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Walter Starck The Climate Confabulators’ Sinking Ships

By on January 17th, 2017

Global temperatures’ refusal to rise has obliged warmism’s comfortably settled scientists to once again fiddle the data, something they do always with aplomb and no coherent explanation. Ah, but not so fast! One of the fulcrums on which they spin their latest legerdemain is absolutely worthless.
In the late 1990s, as the idea of global warming began to attract widespread public attention and research funding, the claim that recent warming was unprecedented and dangerous was conflicted by extensive evidence of a preceding Little Ice Age (LIA) and, before that, a Medieval Warm Period (MWP) that was as warm or warmer than the present. As later revealed in the Climategate email leak, leading proponents of the warming threat privately discussed a need to get rid of the LIA and MWP. Soon thereafter this was achieved by publication of what became known as the Hockey Stick graph (Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998), which purported to show no statistically significant trend in average global temperature over the previous millennium until a sudden steeply increasing rise over the 20th century. In the accompanying study the LIA and MWP were dismissed as only unimportant local fluctuations limited to north-western Europe.

The Hockey Stick was based primarily on estimates of temperature from variations in growth rings from a few dozen pine trees in two very localised and extreme environments. This data, presented as representing the global pattern, was analysed using a statistical treatment which has been shown to result in a hockey-stick shape even with random input data. In addition, a lack of any indication of ongoing warming in the 20th century part of the tree ring record was hidden by overwriting this portion with selected data from the instrument record. The whole hokey confection was published in a leading journal, received banner treatment by the news media and was subsequently adopted by the IPCC as the iconic image for their Third Assessment Report in 2001.

All this blatant chicanery has been thoroughly exposed, the infamous Hockey Stick graph being refuted by hundreds of peer reviewed studies, as well as numerous historical records which confirm the LIA and the MWP as having been real, distinct and global in scope. Even so, rather than just let the Hockey Stick graph die and be forgotten, the alarmists have chosen to make fools of themselves by vigorously, even viciously, defending it. They still argue for its validity, despite it having been no less discredited than Piltdown Man or phlogiston.

Now, having learned nothing from the Hockey Stick debacle, the alarmists are setting out to further their discredit by attempting to refute the so-called hiatus or pause in warming marked by no statistically significant trend in global temperatures for the past two decades. This new hokey hockey stick is being fabricated by “adjusting” the temperature record of the past century. It started with unannounced and unexplained “adjustments” to the records from weather stations. When noticed and questioned, the only explanation offered has been generic and hypothetical reasons for needing to make adjustments with no specific details as to what or why anything was done in any particular instance!

Although this approach has forestalled critical examination, an ongoing lack of warming is making it impossible to maintain any pretense of scientific credibility by continuing to adjust the temperature record from weather stations.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The “Peace Conference”: An Outright Admission of Failure by Shoshana Bryen

By on January 17th, 2017

After 23 years and billions of dollars, the Palestinians still lack “infrastructure for a viable… economy.” They cannot manage “service delivery.” And there is no “civil society” in Palestinian Authority (PA) areas able to express dissent or disapproval of Mahmoud Abbas’s 12-year power grab of a 4-year presidential term. Gaza under Hamas is worse.

Even the Europeans and John Kerry acknowledge that the Palestinians have no capacity for self-government. This is, in part, because there has been no demand by the donor countries for such things as budgetary accountability and transparency, or a free press and civil society in PA areas to demand more and better of its leaders.

The PA also pays terrorists and their families with foreign donations. And then there’s the matter of Palestinian corruption and outright stealing.

The Trump Administration will have a lot on its plate beginning this week. But if it really wants to help the cause of Israel’s security, legitimacy and acknowledged permanence in the region, it would do well to insist that U.S. taxpayer dollars be spent accountably or not at all, until the Palestinians get their financial, as well as political, house in order.

The Paris Peace Conference was not as bad as it could have been. The British and Russian governments sent low level delegations. Some of the wording in UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2334 disappeared, and the assembled agreed to resolve “all permanent status issues on the basis of United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), and also recalled relevant Security Council resolutions.” Resolution 242 is the benchmark for Israel’s security requirements and its right to legitimacy and permanence in the region. And “recalling” is somewhat different from “planning to enforce.”

Most interesting, however, is a three-part section toward the end. The mostly-European plus American gathering:

Expressed their readiness to exert necessary efforts… ensuring the sustainability of a negotiated peace agreement, in particular in the areas of political and economic incentives, the consolidation of Palestinian state capacities, and civil society dialogue. Those could include:

A European privileged partnership; other political and economic incentives and increased private sector involvement… continued financial support to the Palestinian Authority in building the infrastructure for a viable Palestinian economy;
Supporting and strengthening Palestinian steps to exercise their responsibilities of statehood through consolidating their institutions and institutional capacities, including for service delivery;
Convening Israeli and Palestinian civil society fora, in order to enhance dialogue between the parties, rekindle the public debate and strengthen the role of civil society on both sides.

This is an outright admission of failure.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Islamization of France in 2016 “France has a problem with Islam” by Soeren Kern

By on January 17th, 2017

“I am not an Islamophobe. Women have the right to wear headscarves, but I do not understand why we are embracing this religion [Islam] and those manners that are incompatible with the freedoms that are ours in the West.” — Pierre Bergé, French fashion mogul.

French security officials rejected an Israeli company’s offer of terrorist-tracking software that could have helped them identify the jihadist cell that carried out the attacks. “French authorities liked it, but the official came back and said there was a higher-level instruction not to buy Israeli technology,” a well-placed Israeli counter-terrorism analyst revealed.

Jacques Hamel, the priest who had his throat slit by two Muslims in Normandy, had donated land adjacent to his church to local Muslims to build a mosque, and they had been given use of the parish hall and other facilities during Ramadan.

At least five of the jihadists who carried out the attacks in Paris and Brussels financed themselves with social welfare payments: they received more than €50,000 ($53,000).

Muslim employees at Air France have repeatedly attempted to sabotage aircraft, according to Le Canard Enchaîné. “Concerning Air France, we have seen several anomalies before the departure of commercial flights,” an intelligence official said.

“There will be no integration until we get rid of this atavistic anti-Semitism that is kept secret. It so happens that an Algerian sociologist, Smain Laacher, with great courage said that ‘it is a disgrace to maintain this taboo, namely that in Arab families in France and elsewhere everyone knows that anti-Semitism is spread with the mother’s milk.'” — Georges Bensoussan, sued for alleged hate speech against Muslims for having made that statement.

The Mayor of Beziers, Robert Menard, was charged with incitement to hatred for tweeting his regret at witnessing “the great replacement” to describe France’s white, Christian population being overtaken by foreign-born Muslims. “I just described the situation in my town,” he said. “It is not a value judgement, it is a fact. It is what I can see.”

The Muslim population of France was approximately 6.5 million in 2016, or around 10% of the overall population of 66 million. In real terms, France has the largest Muslim population in the European Union, just above Germany.

Although French law prohibits the collection of official statistics about the race or religion of its citizens, Gatestone Institute’s estimate of France’s Muslim population is based on several studies that attempted to calculate the number of people in France whose origins are from Muslim-majority countries.

What follows is a chronological review of some of the main stories about the rise of Islam in France during 2016:

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Revisit the ‘One-China Policy’ A closer U.S. military relationship with Taiwan would help counter Beijing’s belligerence.By John Bolton

By on January 17th, 2017

The People’s Republic of China sent its aircraft carrier, Liaoning, through the Strait of Taiwan early this month, at least in part responding to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s phone conversation congratulating President-elect Donald Trump.

That’s Beijing’s style: Make an unacceptable long-distance phone call, and an aircraft carrier shows up in your backyard. It is akin to proclaiming the South China Sea a Chinese province and constructing islands in international waters to house military bases; to declaring a provocative Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea; and to seizing Singaporean military equipment recently transiting Hong Kong for annual military exercises on Taiwan.

It is high time to revisit the “one-China policy” and decide what America thinks it means, 45 years after the Shanghai Communiqué. Mr. Trump has said the policy is negotiable. Negotiation should not mean Washington gives and Beijing takes. We need strategically coherent priorities reflecting not 1972 but 2017, encompassing more than trade and monetary policy, and specifically including Taiwan. Let’s see how an increasingly belligerent China responds.

Constantly chanting “one-China policy” is a favorite Beijing negotiating tactic: Pick a benign-sounding slogan; persuade foreign interlocutors to accept it; and then redefine it to Beijing’s satisfaction, dragging the unwary foreigners along for the ride. To Beijing, “one China” means the PRC is the sole legitimate “China,” as sloganized in “the three no’s”: no Taiwanese independence; no two Chinas; no one China, one Taiwan. For too long, America has unthinkingly succumbed to this wordplay.

Even in the Shanghai Communiqué, however, Washington merely “acknowledges” that “all Chinese” believe “there is but one China,” of which Taiwan is part. Taiwanese public opinion surveys for decades have shown fewer and fewer citizens describing themselves as “Chinese.” Who allowed them to change their minds? Washington has always said reunification had to come peacefully and by mutual agreement. Mutual agreement hasn’t come in 67 years, and won’t in any foreseeable future, especially given China’s increasingly brutal reinterpretation of another slogan—“one country, two systems” in Hong Kong.

Beijing and its acolytes expected that Taiwan would simply collapse. It hasn’t. Chiang Kai-shek’s 1949 retreat was not a temporary respite before final surrender. Neither the Shanghai Communiqué nor Jimmy Carter’s 1978 derecognition of the Republic of China persuaded Taiwan to go gentle into that good night—especially after Congress enacted the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.

Eventually Taiwan even became a democracy, with the 1996 popular election of Lee Teng-hui, the peaceful, democratic transfer of power to the opposition party in 2000, and further peaceful transfers in 2008 and 2016. So inconsiderate of those free-thinking Taiwanese.

What should the United States do now? In addition to a diplomatic ladder of escalation, we can take concrete steps helpful to U.S. interests. Here is one prompted by China’s recent impoundment of Singapore’s military equipment. Spoiler alert: Beijing will not approve. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama’s ‘Scandal-Free Administration’ Is a Myth By John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky

By on January 17th, 2017

Even a prominent Trump adviser accepts the false premise that there has been no ‘ethical shadiness.’
You often hear that the Obama administration, whatever its other failings, has been “scandal-free.” Valerie Jarrett, the president’s closest adviser, has said he “prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself.”

Even Trump adviser Peter Thiel seems to agree. When the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd observed during an interview that Mr. Obama’s administration was “without any ethical shadiness,” Mr. Thiel accepted the premise, saying: “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

In reality, Mr. Obama has presided over some of the worst scandals of any president in recent decades. Here’s a partial list:

• State Department email. In an effort to evade federal open-records laws, Mr. Obama’s first secretary of state set up a private server, which she used exclusively to conduct official business, including communications with the president and the transmission of classified material. A federal criminal investigation produced no charges, but FBI Director James Comey reported that the secretary and her colleagues “were extremely careless” in handling national secrets.

• Operation Fast and Furious. The Obama Justice Department lost track of thousands of guns it had allowed to pass into the hands of suspected smugglers, in the hope of tracing them to Mexican drug cartels. One of the guns was used in the fatal 2010 shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Congress held then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt when he refused to turn over documents about the operation.

• IRS abuses. Mr. Obama’s Internal Revenue Service did something Richard Nixon only dreamed of doing: It successfully targeted political opponents. The Justice Department then refused to enforce Congress’s contempt citation against the IRS’s Lois Lerner, who refused to answer questions about her agency’s misconduct.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Bonfire of Pieties Will his nasty rhetoric shake things up or crack their already shaky foundations? Bret Stephens

By on January 17th, 2017

This column has previously observed that few things are as dangerous to democracy as a demagogue with a half-valid argument. The president-elect has offered at least a half-dozen such arguments, and that’s merely in the last week.

First we had Donald Trump’s press conference attack on CNN’s Jim “You Are Fake News” Acosta. Then a salvo against the pharmaceutical industry, which, he said, is “getting away with murder.” Mr. Trump also accused intelligence agencies of leaking a smear against him, asking in a tweet: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

This was followed by an interview with British and German newspapers, in which Mr. Trump called NATO “obsolete,” dismissed the European Union as “basically a vehicle for Germany,” and threatened to slap a 35% tariff on BMW for wanting to build a plant in Mexico.

Oh, and the feud with John Lewis. The congressman from Georgia had accused Mr. Trump of being illegitimately elected on account of Russian meddling. Mr. Trump fired back on Twitter that Mr. Lewis should spend his time fixing his “crime infested,” “falling apart” district in Atlanta.

Say this for Mr. Trump: He has no use for pieties. Mr. Lewis is routinely described in the press as a “civil rights icon.” The next president could not care less. Wall Street Journal Republicans believe that business decisions should be left to business. As of Friday those businesses will do as Mr. Trump says. NATO? Too old. The EU? Not salvageable. The fourth estate? A fraud. The folks at Langley? A new Gestapo.

All this baits Mr. Trump’s critics (this columnist not least) into fits of moral outrage, which is probably his intention: Nobody in life or literature is more tedious than the prig yelling, “Is nothing sacred anymore?” Liberals intent on spending the next four years in a state of high-decibel indignation and constant panic are paving the way to Mr. Trump’s re-election.

But the main reason the president-elect’s attacks stick is that they each have their quotient of truth.

Mr. Trump is not wrong that NATO’s European members don’t carry their weight. He isn’t wrong that the EU is in deep trouble no matter what he says. He isn’t wrong that Mr. Lewis’s attack on the legitimacy of his election was out of line, or that the congressman’s courage in the 1960s should not insulate him from criticism today. He isn’t wrong that drug companies price-gouge.

Nor is he wrong to be infuriated by BuzzFeed’s publication of an unverified opposition dossier regarding his Russia ties. He isn’t wrong, either, to suspect that outgoing CIA Director John Brennan may have leaked that the president-elect had been briefed on the contents of the dossier. In his previous incarnation as President Obama’s top counterterrorism aide, Mr. Brennan developed a reputation as a leaker and spinner of the first rank.

But the opposite of not wrong isn’t necessarily right. There’s a distinction between “unverified” and “fake.” There’s a difference between BuzzFeed’s unethical decision to publish the unredacted dossier and CNN’s appropriate efforts to report on what Mr. Trump knew about it. To complain that our European allies don’t spend enough on defense is one thing. To conclude that NATO is obsolete is a non sequitur, reminiscent of the old joke about lousy food and small portions.

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