ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

It’s Not Easy Being Green Climate alarmism, cloaked in pseudoscience and moral posturing, masks a deeper agenda of power, profit, and control—often at the expense of truth and prosperity. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on April 13th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/13/its-not-easy-being-green/

Writing recently in The Spectator World, Joel Kotkin noted, “The crux of the green dilemma lies in part with the realities of physics as well as geopolitics.” You can say that again. The physics part has to do with “energy density.” Fossil fuels have a very high energy density; solar and wind power, not so much. Kotkin quotes Christian Bruch, the CEO of Siemens Energy, who estimates that green energy “requires ten times as much material to work effectively, regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.” The ineluctable pressure of that physical fact leads to subterfuge, fantasy, and outright lying. Kotkin also quotes John F. Clauser, a Nobel Laureate in physics, who tartly observed that “Climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”

Indeed. In 2019, the commentator Rob Henderson coined the phrase “luxury beliefs,” beliefs that confer social status because only the well-off can afford to entertain them. “In the past,” Henderson wrote, “upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs.” A belief that we are in the midst of a “climate emergency” is one such belief. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, can pretend that the sky is falling and promise to lead Britain into the promised land of “net-zero” emissions by 2050. But he won’t have to worry about heating his house or the cost of petrol for his car.

Al Gore can lecture the world about “inconvenient truths,” but cynics note that one major effect of his proselytizing on behalf of climate extremism has been to line his own pockets with that other green stuff, US dollars, and plenty of them. In 2000, Gore had a net worth of about $1.7 million. By 2012, he had amassed a fortune of some $250 million. Nice work if you can get it.

Regular readers may recall my fondness for the philosopher Harvey Mansfield’s observation that “environmentalism is school prayer for liberals.” Professor Mansfield delivered that mot more than thirty years ago. It seemed almost quaint at the time. It was, I thought, a comparison that had the advantage of being both true (environmentalism really did seem like a religion for certain leftists) and amusing (how deliciously wicked to put a bunch of white, elite, college-educated leftists under the same rhetorical light as the Bible-thumpers they abominated). Ha, I mean to say, ha!

Well, I am not laughing now. In the intervening years, the eco-nuts went from being a lunatic fringe to being lunatics at the center of power. Forget about Al Gore (if only we could): sure, he was vice president, but that was in another country (or so it seems) and besides . . . I trust that many readers will catch the allusion to Marlowe via T. S. Eliot. Despite his former proximity to the seat of power, Al Gore is relevant these days partly as comic relief, partly as an object lesson in the cynical manipulation of public credulity for the sake of personal enrichment. The collections come early and often in the Church of Gore. Who knew that pseudoscience, wrapped in the mantle of anti-capitalist moral self-regard, could pay so well?

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Don’t Waste Your Time: Iran’s Mullahs Will Not Abandon Their Nuclear Program by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on April 12th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21546/iran-will-not-abandon-nuclear-program

Tehran has played this game before: Agree to talks. Make vague promises. Extract sanctions relief. Then quietly continue nuclear development under the radar. This formula has worked for more than two decades. Right now, the only reason Iran is talking is to stall, to promise just enough to prevent America from striking it — “We are almost there!” — to keep its regime and avoid seeing its uranium centrifuges and enrichment sites blasted to rubble. The regime does not want war — but it also cannot accept total nuclear disarmament.

The Islamic Republic has smoothly outmaneuvered every administration. It has accepted deals to avoid confrontation, then quietly violated them. With each round of negotiations, Iran gained what it needed — time, money, legitimacy — and gave away nothing it could not reverse.

Worse, Iranian officials have themselves confirmed what skeptics have long argued: that the regime’s nuclear program was always military in nature. Former parliamentary speaker Ali Motahhari openly admitted in an interview that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities were initially designed to build weapons, not generate electricity. That was not a slip of the tongue. It was a rare moment of honesty from a system built on lies.

[W]orse yet, [the regime] could announce one day that it already possesses several nuclear bombs — and that there is nothing anyone can do about it. Will the world then be forced to live with a nuclear-armed theocracy that sponsors terrorism, oppresses its people, and seeks to export its ideology across the region? That does not sound like a cheery future to accept.

The Islamic Republic has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith. It has lied, manipulated and deceived at every turn. Hoping for a different outcome, unfortunately, is self-deceptive make-believe.

Negotiations only serve to give Iran what it wants: time and space to complete its nuclear project. Axios reported on April 10 that “sources said the Iranians think reaching a complex and highly technical nuclear deal in two months is unrealistic and they want to get more time on the clock to avoid an escalation.”

After watching what happened to Libya after it gave up its nuclear weapons program, and to Ukraine when it gave up its warheads. Iran’s regime could hardly have any intention of abandoning their quest for the bomb. Diplomacy will not stop them. Appeasement will not deter them. The only solution, sadly, seems to be force. If the US and Israel fail to act now, we will soon be facing a world where the Islamic Republic of Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold and commands its bombs. Then what?

Negotiations for Iran’s mullahs are simply a sign of strategic necessity. The regime needs breathing room — and, most importantly, it needs to preserve what it sees as its ultimate insurance policy: a nuclear arsenal.

The Trump administration is once again engaging with the Iranian regime, this time in Oman, to encourage it to end its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs the way Libya’s late leader Muammar Ghaddafi did. As US President Donald J. Trump transparently put it: “I would love to make a deal with them without bombing them.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Next Year in Jerusalem Passover reminds us of whose land “Palestine” really is. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on April 12th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/next-year-in-jerusalem/

Passover 2025 begins on the evening of Saturday, April 12, and runs through Sunday, April 20. This is now the second Passover since Hamas brutally massacred 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and a massive propaganda campaign began to convince the world that Israel is a “settler colonialist” state that is illegally occupying land that belongs to the “Palestinians,” who are supposedly the indigenous people of the land.

And so as Jews around the world once again read the Passover Haggadah, which tells the foundational story of their liberation from slavery in Egypt, they will once again repeat the concluding statement of the Passover Seder, just as they have repeated it throughout the ages: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

This indelible phrase is a reminder to the world, if the world were interested in paying attention, of the fact that Zionism did not begin in 1948, with the founding of the modern state of Israel, or in the nineteenth century with the work of pioneering Zionist Theodor Herzl. No, Zionism, the aspiration of the Jews to return to their homeland, is many centuries older than either one, and older also than the “Palestinian people,” a KGB propaganda invention of the 1960s.

Zionism is older than the Ottoman Empire, the now-dead Islamic caliphate that did all it could to prevent the nineteenth-century Zionist movement from attaining its goals. It is older than the United States of America, on which today’s haters of Jews and Israel insist that the Jewish state now depends for its existence. It is older than the religion of Islam, on which, with its deeply rooted hatred of Jews, the “resistance” of the “Palestinian” people is actually based, although Western policymakers steadfastly ignore this fact.

Whose land is it? Well, which people has longed to return there for twenty centuries and more?

Yet as Passover begins once again, the voices insisting that Israel has no right to the land it inhabits, and that the Jews there are white supremacist, colonialist occupiers, are more insistent than ever. As Antisemitism: History and Myth shows, the October 7 jihad massacre was the occasion for a clearly carefully planned recrudescence of Jew-hatred, including the reappearance of ancient lies that most people thought had died in the ashes of Berlin in April 1945. But this antisemitism is, as always, based on lies.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Dos and Don’s of Negotiating with Iran By Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on April 12th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/the_do_s_and_don_ts_of_negotiating_with_iran.html

Shortly after then-Secretary of State John Kerry concluded talks with his Iranian counterpart that led to the 2015 nuclear agreement, the wizards at Google had already delivered judgment. When I typed in the phrase, “how not to buy a carpet” at Google images, the first result was a photo of the two foreign ministers and their aides, facing each other across the negotiating table in Lausanne.

The ever-smiling Mohammad Javad Zarif told Kerry three times they had a deal, but that he needed to go back to Tehran to run it by the “Supreme Leader.” And three times he came back, demanding more.

Donald Trump called the deal the United States finally signed, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), “the worst deal ever” and withdrew the United States from it in 2018. He was right.

The President’s Middle East special envoy, Steve Witcoff, recently admitted that he got “duped” by Hamas during negotiations in Qatar with Hamas-appointed Arab mediators.

Having worked in the Middle East as a war correspondent and investigative reporter for forty years, let me say it straight: if the Arabs managed to dupe Mr. Witcoff, the Iranians are going to take him to the cleaners.

So here are a few “do’s and dont’s” for Witcoff when he travels to Oman this weekend.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Climate Crisis Con Game The climate crisis isn’t just a narrative—it’s the Left’s longest-running confidence game, leveraging fear for our children to loot wallets, liberties, and the public trust. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

Posted By on April 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/12/the-climate-crisis-con-game/

The technical term is “confidence game.” A crook gains the confidence of a victim (the “mark”) and preys upon their naivety, greed, and/or fear. Ultimately, the duped mark gives their money and/or property to the crook willingly.

Consider this real-world example provided in Connie Fletcher’s 1991 book, What Cops Know: Today’s Police Tell the Inside Story of Their Work on America’s Streets, wherein an anonymous Chicago Police Department (CPD) detective reminisces about a con game he redressed:

“One of the superintendents of the Chicago Police Department—his aunt was taken for $15,000… She was a recent widow, Italian. And during this con, they sent her back to Italy to dig up her husband’s body and take a button off his vest. International phone calls were made between Chicago and Palermo, Italy, continuing the con on this woman, warning her that she must do these things in order to keep her three grandchildren safe. It was five thousand dollars for each grandchild.”

“When I went to the [lead con artist, Louis]… I said, ‘Louis, you cost these people [fifteen thousand] dollars.’ He said, ‘I was taking a curse off their children.’ ‘Louis, come on.’ ‘Listen, are those children safe today?’ ‘Yeah, they’re safe.’ ‘Then it’s off. The curse has been taken off them.’ I said, ‘Why did you charge them [fifteen thousand] dollars?’ He said, ‘It was to take the curse off.’”

While this seems a rather involved scam, boiled down to its essence, it aligns with the experience of another CPD detective: “The best con is the simplest con.” At its stony heart, the con preys upon a grandmother’s love and fears for her grandchildren to extort money from her.

Viewed in its proper light, then, what to make of the Left’s “climate crisis?”

Despite the lack of any remote consensus regarding the alarmists’ proclamations of an impending climate apocalypse, what to make of the leftist “experts” and politicians who implore a concerned public to trust the science—i.e., the selectively chosen science that purports to support their alarmist position and deepens the “mark’s” fears for their offspring and/or planet?

What to make of the left’s incessant warnings of impending environmental doom despite the failure of past dire prognostications to materialize?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump, Trade, and the Tragedy of the Working Class Moynihan’s warnings on family breakdown echo louder than ever, as cultural decay—not just trade policy—lies at the heart of America’s working-class collapse. By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on April 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/12/trump-trade-and-the-tragedy-of-the-working-class/

Last month marked the 60th anniversary of the first serious attempt on the part of social scientists to analyze and evaluate the collapse of the traditional family in American society. On March 1, 1965, the U.S. Department of Labor released a report written by then-Assistant Secretary (and future Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D, NY) on the dissolution of black families in America. That report, “The Negro Family:  The Case for National Action,” was both groundbreaking and enormously controversial. Sixty years later, the study remains groundbreaking. However, its conclusions are, sadly, no longer especially controversial, having been corroborated by endless data spanning decades and extending to every race, culture, and creed in the country. At some point, the rescue of the American family will either become a serious and urgent focus of societal action, or it will prove the undoing of the great American experiment.

Among other things, Moynihan noted in his report the existence and the pervasiveness of black poverty and the correlation between that poverty and the breakdown of the black nuclear family. In an attempt to explain why black economic advancement lagged behind both political advancement and the economic fortunes of other ethnic groups, Moynihan examined reams of data and endless studies on black family life. And what he found—a paradox which came to be known as “Moynihan’s Scissors”—was” that welfare and male unemployment in the black community no longer appeared to be nearly perfectly correlated, as they were in the past and in other populations.

As it turned out, male unemployment was diverging from welfare outlays because the family was breaking down. In other words, welfare made it possible for women—black women, in this case—to survive and raise their children without the children’s father present in the home. In turn, the absence of the father from the home became necessary for the collection of welfare. A vicious circle had been created, and it was exacerbating black poverty tremendously.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Sahel: Emerging Center of Global Islamism The West Is Nowhere to Be Seen by Nils A. Haug

Posted By on April 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21522/sahel-islamism

Global Terrorism Index 2025, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace, reveals that the primary instigator of global terrorism during 2024 was the Islamic State (ISIS) and associated groups — such as al Qaeda, Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal Muslimeen, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and al- Shabaab — together responsible for more than 7,500 deaths.

Although the West is experiencing escalating terrorism in countries such as Sweden, Australia, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, the Sahel region evidently remains the “global epicentre of terrorism, accounting for over half of all terrorism-related deaths in 2024.” Here, conflict deaths exceeded 25,000 for the first time, of which nearly 4,000 were directly connected to terrorism.

A perturbing factor is that in Europe, “one in five persons arrested for terrorism is legally classified as a child.”

The consequence is, of course, that with the West’s retreat, ISIS has free rein to action their visions of global influence. They are present in 22 countries at present….

Russia’s Wagner mercenary militia, although rebranded as an “Expeditionary Corps,” continues its predatory activities in the area, offering “governments in Africa a ‘regime survival package’ in exchange for access to strategically important natural resources.”

Covertly obtained Russian documents reveal how the group strives to “change mining laws in West Africa, with the ambition of dislodging Western companies from an area of strategic importance.” The upshot is accelerating anti-Western sentiment, resulting in the local states seeking to expel hitherto entrenched foreign interests.

“This is the Russian state coming out of the shadows in its Africa policy.” Russia’s patent objective is therefore to “seize control of critical resources,” and “aggressively pursue the expansion of its partnerships in Africa, with the explicit intent to supplant Western partnerships.” — Jack Watling, Royal United Services Institute, February 20, 2024.

Currently, the significant strategic, political, and economic benefits in the region are reaped by Russia, China and Turkey. The West is nowhere to be seen.

The center of world terrorist activity and violent death is no longer the Middle East. The “Sahel region of Africa is now the ‘epicentre of global terrorism,'” responsible for “over half of all terrorism-related deaths” worldwide, according to the respected Global Terrorism Index.

The sub-Saharan Sahel is largely unknown to much of the world. It can be described as the large, mostly flat, strip, nearly 600 miles wide, located between the savannahs of Sudan to the south and the Sahara desert to the north.

ELECTIONS, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Dems fight bill to stop illegal immigrant voting despite polls showing voter support 208 Democrats on Thursday voted against the Trump-backed measure that would crack down on noncitizen voting y Deirdre Heavey , Elizabeth Elkind

Posted By on April 11th, 2025

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dems-fight-bill-stop-illegal-immigrant-voting-despite-polls-showing-voter-support

The House passed the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act on Thursday, with 208 Democrats voting against the President Donald Trump-backed measure that would crack down on noncitizen voting.

The SAVE Act, which passed 220-208, now heads to the Senate, where it will need the support of some Democrats to meet the 60-vote threshold for advancement. Democrats have rejected the bill, despite polling indicating bipartisan support for voter ID requirements. 

A Gallup Poll released ahead of the 2024 election found that 84% of respondents favor requiring a photo ID to vote, and 83% support requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote for the first time. 

If passed in the Senate and signed into law by Trump, the SAVE Act by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, would require voters to obtain proof of citizenship in person before they register for a federal election, and it would remove noncitizens from voter rolls. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Paying a Heavy Cost for Going After a Tax Cheat Named Hunter Biden IRS agents blew the whistle on Hunter Biden’s tax case, endured retaliation, and are now back in government to fix the system that tried to silence them. By Nancy Rommelmann

Posted By on April 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/11/paying-a-heavy-cost-for-going-after-a-tax-cheat-named-hunter-biden/

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

Joe Ziegler is not a beaten man – not for his antagonists’ lack of trying. Across his seven-year pursuit of Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes, Ziegler, a special agent in the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigative division, and his colleague Gary Shapley were shunned, threatened, and lied to. Ziegler was doxed. Shapley was told to accept a demotion or resign. Convinced the IRS and Department of Justice were stonewalling their efforts to bring charges against a sitting president’s son, the agents went public as whistleblowers in 2023.

The result, during the hyper-polarized years spanning the Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump administrations, was predictable: The two men were accused of partisanship, lambasted by Democratic members of Congress and the press, and had their reputations impugned by high-powered lawyers paid for by those sympathetic to the Bidens.

The fortunes of these political victims have now turned. In mid-March, incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Ziegler and Shapley would start work as senior advisers, helping to guide tax reform.

Which is all the agents had ever wanted and tried to do. “At the end of the day, this is truly about doing the right thing and standing up for what is right,” Ziegler would testify before the House Ways & Means Committee in December 2023. “I will say this again and again, this is much bigger than the Hunter Biden investigation. This was not a personal attack on Hunter Biden, but a call for change.”

While the reprisals they say they endured for their acts of conscience appear to have ended, Ziegler and Shapely do not want their experience to be memory-holed – especially because other whistleblowers who spoke out during the Biden administration have received less attention for their tribulations. Speaking with RealClearInvestigations recently, the two men gave their first in-depth interviews on the years-long case that upended their lives and careers.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Will Iran Seize Its Only Chance with President Trump? Not agreeing to serious talks with the US to end its nuclear weapons program could prove disastrous for Iran. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on April 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/11/will-iran-seize-its-only-chance-with-president-trump/

President Trump stunned the world this week when he announced that the U.S. would hold direct talks with Iran on its nuclear weapons program this weekend. The president has given Iran two months to negotiate a new agreement to end its nuclear program and said at the press conference, “I think if the talks aren’t successful with Iran… Iran is going to be in great danger, and I hate to say it.”

The talks are scheduled to take place on Saturday in Oman. The U.S. will reportedly be represented by Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Iran’s chief negotiator reportedly will be Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

Trump said in response to a reporter’s question about whether he would use military force if Iran refused to agree to a nuclear deal, “If it requires military, we’re going to have military.” The President later added that Israel would “be the leader” of a military strike on Iran if nuclear talks fail.

After Trump’s announcement, however, Iranian officials indicated their nation might not engage in serious negotiations when they said Iran would only agree to indirect talks with the U.S. mediated by Oman. Foreign Minister Araghchi added that his government primarily wanted the talks to rule out the use of U.S. military force against Iran.

An administration source told me Iran’s resistance to direct and meaningful talks to end its nuclear weapons program might mean the talks will not take place, at least this weekend. This could lead to Iran suffering severe repercussions from the U.S. and possibly Israel by mid-year.

Why Trump Believes Addressing Threats from Iran Is Urgent

President Trump has moved fast to address threats from Iran because they surged to a dangerous level—especially concerning its nuclear weapons program—due to the Biden administration’s inept Iran policies that amounted to appeasement.