RUTHFULLY YOURS

The administration thinks a nuclear Iran is inevitable—but lacks the courage to say it.

Does it matter what sort of deal—or further extension, or non-deal—ultimately emerges from the endless parleys over Iran’s nuclear program? Probably not. Iran came to the table cheating on its nuclear commitments. It continued to cheat on them throughout the interim agreement it agreed to last year. And it will cheat on any undertakings it signs.

We knew this, know it and will come to know it all over again. But what’s at stake in these negotiations isn’t their outcome, assuming there ever is an outcome. It’s the extent to which the outcome facilitates, or obstructs, our willingness to continue to fool ourselves about the consequences of an Iran with a nuclear weapon.

The latest confirmation of the obvious comes to us courtesy of a Nov. 17 report from David Albright and his team at the scrupulously nonpartisan Institute for Science and International Security. The ISIS study, based on findings from the International Atomic Energy Agency, concluded that Iran was stonewalling U.N. inspectors on the military dimensions of its program. It noted that Tehran had tested a model for an advanced centrifuge, in violation of the 2013 interim agreement. And it cited Iran for trying to conceal evidence of nuclear-weapons development at a military facility called Parchin.

“By failing to address the IAEA’s concerns, Iran is complicating, and even threatening, the achievement of a long term nuclear deal,” the report notes dryly.

These are only Iran’s most recent evasions, piled atop two decades of documented nuclear deception. Nothing new there. But what are we to make of an American administration that is intent on providing cover for Iran’s coverups? “The IAEA has verified that Iran has complied with its commitments,” Wendy Sherman, the top U.S. nuclear negotiator, testified in July to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It has done what it promised to do.” John Kerry went one better, telling reporters Monday that “Iran has lived up” to its commitments.

Homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, and 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks.

We now know that Michael Brown was much more of a menace than a martyr, but that won’t stop liberals from pushing an anti-police narrative that harms the black poor in the name of helping them.

The black teen in Ferguson, Mo., robbed a store, attacked a white police officer and was shot dead while resisting arrest. That was the conclusion of a St. Louis County grand jury that brought no charges against the officer after considering all the physical evidence, along with eyewitness accounts from blacks in the vicinity of the confrontation.

Not that any amount of evidence would have stopped the hooligans in Ferguson Monday night who were determined use Brown’s death as a pretext for more bad behavior. Nor will evidence thwart liberals who are bent on making excuses for black criminality and pretending that police shootings are responsible for America’s high black body count.

According to the FBI, homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, who are 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be murdered. And while you’d never know it watching MSNBC, the police are not to blame. Blacks are just 13% of the population but responsible for a majority of all murders in the U.S., and more than 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Liberals like to point out that most whites are killed by other whites, too. That’s true but beside the point given that the white crime rate is so much lower than the black rate.

Blacks commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of “over-policing” certain neighborhoods to juice black arrest rates. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the emergency calls originate, and they spend much of their time trying to stop residents of the same race from harming one another.

If Utopia last century was populated by Soviet Man, he has been superseded this century by Green Person with eerily similar yearnings – this time for a ‘sustainable’ world free of ‘inequity’. All the developed world needs to do is fill the pockets of the Third’s kleptocrats and sustainable joy will reign supreme .

To understand the impetus for last week’s ‘unique development in the U.S.-China relationship’ – and its implications for Australia – suspend disbelief, hold your nose, enter that rarefied repository of atmospheric alarmism, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and take a closer look at its most ambitious creation, the Green Climate Fund (GCF). In climate politics (and science), the devil is indeed in the detail – and dollars.

“The Green Climate Fund is to become the main instrument for multilateral climate finance in the future. It will channel a significant share of international climate finance needed to keep global temperature increases to below 2° Celsius.” – GCF statement, Bonn, September 9, 2014

Paragraph 19 of the G20 Brisbane Summit Communiqué reads:

“We support strong and effective action to address climate change. Consistent with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its agreed outcomes, our actions will support sustainable development, economic growth, and certainty for business and investment. We will work together to adopt successfully a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the UNFCCC that is applicable to all parties at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015. We encourage parties that are ready to communicate their intended nationally determined contributions well in advance of COP21 (by the first quarter of 2015 for those parties ready to do so). We reaffirm our support for mobilising finance for adaptation and mitigation, such as the Green Climate Fund.”

Despite the media excitement, there was little new. UNFCCC’s search for ‘another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force’ for ‘mobilising’ developed world finance has been going on – with increasing urgency – since the 2009 Copenhagen debacle. How did we get to this point? The latest saga in the UN climate-protection racket began four years ago in Mexico, where we must revisit the Moon Palace Golf and Spa Resort, Cancun, and the 15,000+ delegates dancing to the COP-16 theme song, “Let’s put the CAN in Cancun!”

It was here that UNFCCC’s new Costa Rican executive secretary, Christian Figueres, first warned that “the environmental stakes are high, because we are quickly running out of time to safeguard our future.”

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele reckons global warming will kill Prince William, and that is only one of his many unhinged prophecies. A man who strikes many as an all-round cad and thoroughly deplorable fellow, he trades in schemes and slurs to silence sceptics. Oh, and one other thing: He aims to head the IPCC

Brussels BS-erPlease don’t tell Kate Middleton! We don’t want to upset her, but a leading IPCC scientist has predicted that in 2039, her bloke, King William V, will die at 57 from the West Nile virus as a result of the planet’s IPCC-predicted global warming.

The scientist is Belgium’s Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, and he made the forecast in a tract written for Greenpeace in 2004. At the time, he was Vice-Chair of the IPCC’s Working Group 11 for the 2007 Fourth Report. He has since risen to Vice-Chair of the IPCC itself, one of three Vice-Chairs directly below IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri. (The other two are from South Korea and that powerhouse of climate-change science, Sudan).

But wait, there’s more! Ypersele is the first to put up his hand to be elected the next IPCC chair when that position is up for grabs late next year. He has the full and proud backing of the Belgian government. In a year he could be the most influential scientist on the planet!

Find it odd for a supposedly impartial IPCC boffin to be writing reports for Greenpeace? (And did he get paid, by the way?). No, it’s not at all odd. Chair Pachauri himself wrote doom-laden intros for Greenpeace tracts in 2007 and 2008. The IPCC’s writing team for the Fifth Report included various Greenpeace alumni[i], and IPCC reports cheerfully cite Greenpeace among their sources.[ii]

Apart from killing off our future king in 2039, Ypersele’s 40-year forecast for 2044 is a catalogue of horrors extreme even by the standards of his catastropharian peers. Even Tim “No More Rain” Flannery, who fancied Perth as a drought-denuded ghost town, seems almost sane by comparison. According to the ambitious alarmist from Brussels, here are the high-temperature torments the world has coming:
•Belgian irrigation drying up with the river Meuse
•Farmers suiciding outside the Prime Minister’s office
•The Paris-Berlin high-speed train departing its buckled rail tracks and killing 52 passengers
•Heat-death corpses stacked in the improvised morgue of Antwerp’s cold stores
•Desperate Egyptians flooding Belgium as they flee the rising Mediterranean
•Belgian workers inundate Norway in quest of somewhere to cool down, then refuse to return
•Turkey and Syria are at war over water access
•The female US President — Hilary Clinton, perhaps, finally fulfilling her ambition at the age of 96? – dispatches a dozen submarines to seed the Southern Ocean with iron powder in a desperate bid to increase its CO2 absorption capacity.

“The “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” meme was launched by James Hansen in his address to the US Senate in June 1988. Despite the predictions of the IPCC modelling and the mewling of the catastrophists, there has been no warming trend for the last 18 of those 26 years and the world is presently cooler than it was in 1998.
How does this blatant fraud survive?”

Put the ABC business editor, John Hewson, Ross Garnaut and a couple of other coal-phobic gabblers on the same stage and what do you get? Why, that fabled “elephant in the room” — and a jumbo-size load of alarmist droppings to mark its effect on otherwise intelligent souls

On Monday, November 17, the school of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne convened a panel devoted to the proposition that fossil fuel-infected “stranded assets” might cause the next global financial crisis. If you’re not up to speed with the latest enviro-disaster greenspeak lingo, know that a stranded asset is an investment in some or other carbon-spewing industry or portfolio, and that the true believers consider it likely that it will be rendered near-worthless when the world switches abruptly to those “sustainable” sources we keep hearing are just around the corner.

You might think that the business faculty at one of Australia’s most august tertiary institutions would begin by considering just how likely such a sudden transition might be, then progress to a reasoned and logical examination of all the associated risks and rewards associated with what participants kept calling the “carbon bubble”. You would, alas, be hopelessly wrong.

The introduction on the university’s website:

“If coal, oil and gas companies are permitted to exploit all the resources they have currently discovered, the world’s climate will warm well beyond the 2C limit governments have agreed is necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

An HSBC study found that removing the ‘stranded assets’ from the balance sheets of fossil fuel companies would halve their sharemarket value. Aggregating these losses is in the realm of $2 trillion: a greater impact on global sharemarkets than the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Reports by Citibank, Standard & Poors, Bloomberg, the Bank of England, Oxford University, London School of Economics and others support the seriousness of the carbon bubble threat.

Meanwhile, the scientific evidence of climate change continues to pile up, the likelihood of a post-Kyoto global political agreement is increasing, and the divestment movement gathers momentum.

Campus Anti-Semitism: Where Are The Christians?

The Brownshirts are back on campus, speaking Arabic. But where are the Christians who grew up in the land of the free?

First, a confession. I hated school. Teachers frightened me and I still get nightmares thinking of our principal, Mr. Webster.

I got a case of the willies from the moment I got up in the morning. I’d walk to school with one black eye from yesterday and get back home with another black eye from today. Win or lose, you had to fight back. The schoolyard itself was just as tough. Montreal was a tough town.

But these were skirmishes and scuffles, a rite of passages from boyhood to manhood.

You were being taught that life in and around the schoolyard was a sample of what it’s going to be like later on – and you had friends.

Doodie and Moishe and Tevee…we were always there for one another. We could count on the Cohens and the Goldbergs.

We could also count on the Smiths and the Pattersons. Jews, Christians, we were in it together.

So where are the Christians today? From campus to campus, Jewish students are hurting. Waiting for them are armies of trained specialists, Arabs who are ready to pounce on them by use of Beer Hall tactics and Brownshirt thuggery. They have been sent over here, and funded, by their sheiks and imams to intimidate and to radicalize and they appear to be succeeding.

Of course a respectable number of Arab students are just that, students and legitimate, but that makes the burden on Jewish kids no easier.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/needed-accurate-climate-forecasts?f=must_reads

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.

David R. Legates is a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware, USA. He is a Christian and a senior fellow of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/needed-accurate-climate-forecasts?f=must_reads#ixzz3K5AMfDBy
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

President Obama’s agreement with China is about as credible as his “affordable care” pronouncements.

Pleistocene glaciers repeatedly buried almost half of the Northern Hemisphere under a mile of ice. The Medieval Warm Period (~950-1250 AD) enriched agriculture and civilizations across Asia and Europe, while the Little Ice Age that followed (~1350-1850) brought widespread famines and disasters. The Dust Bowl upended lives and livelihoods for millions of Americans, while decades-long droughts vanquished once-thriving Anasazi and Mayan cultures, and flood and drought cycles repeatedly pounded African, Asian and Australian communities. Hurricanes and tornadoes have alsobattered states and countries throughout history, in numbers and intensities that have been impossible to pattern or predict.

But today we are supposed to believe climate variability is due to humans – and computer models can now forecast climate changes with amazing accuracy. These models and the alarmist scientists behind them say greenhouse gases will increasingly trigger more “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people, species and ecosystems,” a recent UN report insists.

In reality, carbon dioxide’s effect on devastating weather patterns is greatly overstated. We are near a 30-year low in hurricane energy (measured by the ACE index of “accumulated cyclone energy”), and tropical cyclone and storm activity has not increased globally over that period. In fact, as of November 18, it’s been 3,310 days since a Category 3-5 hurricane hit the US mainland – by far the longest stretch since records began in 1900. This Atlantic hurricane season was the least active in 30 years.

In Vienna on Monday, after the deadline for reaching a deal on Iran’s nuclear program ‎expired, and yet another extension was agreed upon, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry ‎gave a joint press conference with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.‎

‎”Today we are closer to a deal that will make our partners like Israel and the Gulf states ‎safer,” he said. “We now see a path for solving issues that until now were intractable.”‎

Responding to this turn of events at a forum in Tehran on the same day, Iran’s Islamic ‎Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari ‎expressed satisfaction.‎

‎”The Americans have very clearly surrendered to Iran’s might,” he said. “[Which] is ‎obvious in their behavior in the region and in the negotiations.”‎

Indeed.‎

He then pointed to the fact that Iran is arming Hezbollah and Hamas with heavy ‎weaponry for the purpose of defeating Israel and attaining a “final victory” over the ‎West.‎

Jafari was referring to hundreds of Fateh missiles — with 160- to 220-mile ranges and the ‎ability to carry 1,100-pound warheads — whose transfer was announced over the weekend ‎by Revolutionary Guard Aerospace Force Brig. Gen. Seyed Majid Moussavi.‎

‎”Our strategic guiding principle is … to allow the resistance groups to deal with the ‎bloodthirsty Zionist regime,” Moussavi told Iran’s Fars news agency.‎

This is in keeping with the nine-point plan for Israel’s destruction tweeted ‎earlier this month by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It also jibes with Khamenei’s anti-‎Israel and anti-American speeches surrounding the celebration of the Nov. 4, 1979, ‎takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by Islamic revolutionaries who had ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and ushered in the reign of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. ‎

It was spelled out, as well, in a communique issued by the Revolutionary Guard in honor of the 35th ‎anniversary of the taking of dozens of American diplomats hostage for 444 days (and the ‎coinciding Ashura day of mourning for the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, ‎Hussein ibn Ali).‎

The 28 States that make up the European Union (EU) would like to see the Israeli-Palestinian peace process resume. They seek an ultimate solution that will establish a Palestinian State with Jerusalem as its capital alongside the Jewish state. Both the Swedish and British parliaments (also Spain) have already voted to recognize a Palestinian state and others are sure to follow.

The Associated Press (AP) reported on Tuesday, (November 18, 2014) that “An internal European Union document proposes unspecified “actions” against Israel for its settlement activities in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, reflecting unhappiness with the lack of progress in Mideast peace efforts.”

According to the AP report, “The document calls for unspecified moves against European companies operating in Israeli settlements. It also proposes actions against settlers themselves, including a “no contact” policy toward settler organizations, and a refusal “to engage with settlers,” including public figures who oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The Europeans, burdened by a radicalized Muslim constituency, which in some of the EU states account for 10% of the population (France, Belgium), are pandering to their Muslim constituents with domestic and foreign policy concessions. One such concession is to push for a Palestinian state and punish Israel. The Muslim minorities have been co-opted by the socialist and leftist parties as a permanent voting bloc.

European colonial powers, including Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and others are laden with colonial guilt in a time when alleged “victimhood” is celebrated and pandered to, and “Human Rights” has become the Continent’s new religion, replacing Christianity. In today’s EU world, “Better red than dead” has been replaced by “Better green than dead.”

In order to preserve their “Dolce vita” or good life, the Europeans were willing to submit to Communism if they could keep their month-long paid vacations and generous welfare perks. Today, they are willing to submit to Islam in order to preserve their lives and property. After two world wars, the Europeans are tired and unwilling to fight. They resent America even though the U.S. has protected them from the Soviet Union, and is continuing to protect them from Russian, Iranian, and Islamic jihadist threats. They also resent Israel for resisting the jihadists, and for its chosen particularism as a Jewish state. Anti-Semitism of the pre-war years is in decline on the Continent, but Israel has become the “collective Jew,” a subject of derision and hatred.

Chuck Hagel is out at the Department of Defense, and one administration official explained that it was because “the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus” – apparently one that doesn’t shed such a bright light upon the smoking ruin that is Barack Obama’s foreign policy.

Hagel may have sealed his fate last week, when Charlie Rose asked him in an interview about the decline of the U.S. military. “I am worried about it,” Hagel responded with unexpected candor, “I am concerned about it, Chairman Dempsey is, the chiefs are, every leader of this institution” – as Bryan Preston of PJ Media has noted, he perhaps pointedly left Obama and Joe Biden off this list of concerned officials.

Yet who is the single individual most responsible for the decline of the military? Hagel must have known the answer to that question when he added: “The main responsibility of any leader is to prepare your institution for the future. If you don’t do that, you’ve failed. I don’t care how good you are, how smart you are, any part of your job. If you don’t prepare your institution, you’ve failed.”

Did Obama take that as a reference to his steep defense cuts at a time when the world is on fire? Or did he object to Hagel’s surprisingly cordial relations with Israeli officials?

We may never know what the true story is. It may be that Obama chose Hagel, the sole Republican on his national security team, to be the one to take the blame for his spectacular misjudgment of the Islamic State, which he famously dismissed in January 2014 as a “JV team.”

Did Chuck Hagel whisper that notorious analogy in Obama’s ear?

Or maybe Hagel is walking the plank for Obama’s insistence upon referring to jihad terrorists in Syria as “vetted moderates.” “We have a Free Syrian Army and a moderate opposition that we have steadily been working with that we have vetted,” said Obama in September 2014. What was he working with them for? To get them to fight the Islamic State. Yet long before that, in July 2013, Free Syrian Army fighters entered the Christian village of Oum Sharshouh and began burning down houses and terrorizing the population, forcing 250 Christian families to flee the area.