Displaying posts published in

April 2016

BOOKS Comments turned off

Carbon delusions and defective models By Viv Forbes

By on April 6th, 2016

The relentless war on carbon is justified by the false assumption that global temperature is controlled by human production of two carbon-bearing “greenhouse gases.” The scary forecasts of runaway heating are based on complicated but narrowly focused carbon-centric computerized global circulation models built for the U.N. IPCC. These models omit many significant climate factors and rely heavily on dodgy temperature records and unproven assumptions about two trace natural gases in the atmosphere.

The models fail to explain Earth’s long history of changing climates and ignore the powerful role of interacting cycles in the solar system, which determine how much solar energy is absorbed and reflected by Earth’s atmosphere, clouds, and surface. Several ancient societies and some modern mavericks, without help from million-dollar computers, recognized that the Sun, Moon, and major planets produce cyclic changes in Earth’s climate.

The IPCC models also misread the positive and negative temperature feedback from water vapor (the main greenhouse gas), and their accounting for natural processes in the carbon cycle is based on very incomplete knowledge and numerous unproven assumptions.

See: Errors in the IPCC Global Circulation Models:
http://jo.nova.s3.amazonaws.com/guest/david-evans/media-release-evans-climate.pdf

http://sciencespeak.com/climate-basic.html

The dreaded “greenhouse gases” (carbon dioxide and methane) are natural gases. Man did not create them – they occur naturally in comets and planets and have been far more plentiful in previous atmospheres on Earth. They are abundant in the oceans and the atmosphere and are buried in deposits of gas, oil, coal, shale, methane clathrates, and vast beds of limestone. Land and sea plants absorb CO2, and micro-organisms absorb methane in deep oceans.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Students Can’t Remember A Past They Never Learned by Pete Hoekstra

By on April 6th, 2016

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana tells us.

The philosopher’s statement poses a unique problem for many top U.S. colleges, where students and faculty have pressed for some time to ensure that they never learn about their past in the first place.

The latest example is Stanford University, where an attempt is underway to suppress the recognition of Western civilization. Students at Stanford want to reinstate the subject as a core curriculum course. Some students are fighting it. The proposal is in the form of a ballot initiative that would require the faculty senate to debate whether the study of Western civilization should be reinstated.

The school eliminated the required class in 1988, a year after the Rev. Jesse Jackson led a march in which participants – undoubtedly inspired by the works of Yeats and Tennyson – chanted: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go.”

The undergraduate student body will have the ability to vote on the ballot initiative this week.

Despite its non-binding nature, efforts to smother it and smear its supporters began soon after the petition’s launch, which should surprise no one. Many college campuses have become “safe spaces” for bullying and intimidation to silence the free speech of conservatives, a tactic to which we are not immune.

Such efforts are unfortunate. Religious freedom is a cornerstone of Western civilization and has served as an overwhelming force for good in the world.

In other parts of the globe, ISIS is destroying pre-Islamic artifacts and committing genocide against religious minorities in the Middle East. Jamat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the hardcore Islamist Pakistani Taliban, murdered 74 people and injured 362 in an Easter Sunday assault on Christians in Lahore. The name of the murderous ISIS-affiliate Boko Haram in Nigeria loosely translates to “Western education is a sin.”

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Look Inside Britain’s Muslim Sex Grooming Gang Scandal By Janet Levy

By on April 6th, 2016

For the past few decades, British authorities have been caught up in the pervasive meme of multiculturalism — the falsehood that all cultures are equal and that to believe otherwise is to commit the worst modern day offense — to be “racist.”

Under this fallacy, the British government in 2001 introduced a series of restrictive speech codes that criminalized criticism of Islam, followed by a Racial and Religious Hatred Bill imposing fines and even imprisonment for speech that “incited hatred against a person for their religious or racial background.”

These laws have victimized a number of Britons. Hoteliers Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang were prosecuted for “insulting” a Muslim guest. Liberty Great Britain party chairman Paul Weston was arrested on suspicion of racial harassment after publicly reading a passage critical of Muslims from Winston Churchill’s The River War. Dr. Vladislav Rogozov, a Czech-born, UK cardiac anesthesiologist, is being investigated by Sheffield’s Royal Hallamshire Hospital for giving an online interview about his 2013 confrontation with a Muslim surgeon who refused to replace her blood-specked hijab with the proscribed, operating-theater headgear.

In this context and political climate, with racism conflated with religion – one specific religion – it is easy to see how government and public service employees would fear professional and legal repercussions (up to seven years in prison) merely for speaking up about criminal behavior by Muslims who justify their actions citing the Koran. In this way, teachers, police, child care workers, government officials and others have been silent about the growing menace of Muslim gangs who sexually groom and exploit children in the UK.

In his riveting book, Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal (World Encounter Institute/New English Review Press, 2016. 328 pp., $17.20) author Peter McLoughlin explains how multiculturalism-inspired political correctness along with its companion, willful blindness concerning Islamic doctrine, has jeopardized the safety and well-being of children. McLoughlin posits that, since 1988, this nationwide sexploitation has resulted in the shattering of lives of between 100,000 to 1 million girls. The author documents how the fear of being deemed racist and facing criminal charges, dismissal or even threats of violence, has led to suppression of information and a stunning lack of intervention on behalf of young victims. In essence, an extensive, insidious operation that targets children for sexual grooming and enslavement has been covered up because of political correctness and fear of Muslim retribution.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Blasphemy Convictions Intensify in Sisi’s Egypt by Raymond Ibrahim

By on April 6th, 2016

“There have been more blasphemy cases and convictions during the Sisi era than during the Morsi era.” — Ibrahim Eissa, Muslim television host in Egypt.

Their crime was to have made a 20-second video on a mobile phone mocking the Islamic State — an act interpreted as mocking Islam. In the video, the boys appear laughing and joking, as they pretend to be ISIS members praying and slitting throats. “The judge didn’t show any mercy. He handed down the maximum punishment [five years].”

Egypt is becoming more like Pakistan. Although that nation also prohibits the defamation of all religions, only Christians and moderate Muslims are targeted and imprisoned; some, such as Asia Bibi, a 50-year-old Christian woman and mother of five, are on death row. Conversely, Muslims who openly defame Christianity — and they are many — are regularly let off.

Despite Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s many pluralistic words and gestures, which have won him much praise from the nation’s Christians and moderates, he appeases the Islamist agenda in one very clear way: by allowing the controversial defamation of religions law, colloquially known as the “blasphemy law,” to target Christians and moderates in ways arguably worse than under the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi.

Last month three Christian teenagers were jailed for five years for breaking the defamation of religions law. A fourth defendant, 15, was given juvenile detention for an indefinite period. [1] Earlier, they were detained for 45 days and subjected to “ill-treatment,” according to a human rights group.

Their crime was to have made a 20-second video on a mobile phone mocking the Islamic State — an act interpreted as mocking Islam. In the video, the boys appear laughing and joking, as they pretend to be ISIS members praying and slitting throats. The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, an independent rights group, confirmed that the four teenagers were performing scenes “imitating slaughter carried out by terrorist groups.” Even so, according to their defense lawyer, Maher Naguib, the Christian youths “have been sentenced for contempt of Islam and inciting sectarian strife…. The judge didn’t show any mercy. He handed down the maximum punishment.”

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Tony Thomas Genuflecting Before Savagery

By on April 6th, 2016

The University of NSW demands a keen reverence for the ways and customs of “pre-invasion” Aborigines — an astonishing admonition in the light of current attention to domestic violence. Were those same standards embraced on campus, few female professors, lecturers or students would go unscarred
OK, the University of NSW wants its students to refer to Australia from 1788 as “invaded, occupied and colonized”. Moreover, students should be reverential towards the, er, invadees. For example, “the word ‘Elders’ should be written with a capital letter as a mark of respect.”

These Elders, say the guidelines, are “men and women in Aboriginal communities who are respected for their wisdom and knowledge of their culture, particularly the Law. Male and female Elders, who have higher levels of knowledge, maintain social order according to the Law.” The guidelines note that the “sophistication of Indigenous Australian social organization (is) starting to be more recognized.”

This is all terrific, but I don’t think it quite gets the flavor of pre-contact, and sometimes post-contact, Aboriginal social customs. Helpfully, the earliest white arrivals jotted down their impressions. Sensitive UNSW students and their lecturers, professors, administrators and campus thought-police, may find the rest of my piece upsetting. So I immediately issue them a ‘trigger warning’ and ‘need for safe space’ alert.

Newly-arrived British and French were shocked at the local misogyny they encountered. First Fleeter Watkin Tench noticed a young woman’s head “covered by contusions, and mangled by scars”. She also had a spear wound above the left knee caused by a man who dragged her from her home to rape her. Tench wrote,

They (Aboriginal women) are in all respects treated with savage barbarity; condemned not only to carry the children, but all other burthens, they meet in return for submission only with blows, kicks and every other mark of brutality.[1]

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

OBITUARY PORN; MARILYN PENN

By on April 6th, 2016

The crowning indignity to Kitty Genovese’s memory is the half-page obituary and celebrity photograph afforded to her killer, Winston Moseley.( NYT 4/516) A close runner-up is the leniency shown to him by our justice system which did not execute this multiple rapist/murderer, but instead allowed him the privilege of a college education while in prison. To read the details of this man’s heinous and barbaric deeds and then chew on that last fact is perhaps an approximation of the angry frustration many American voters feel about how our government orders its priorities.

Moseley, who lived a long life, dying at 81, confessed to killing three women, raping eight and committing up to 40 burglaries. He stabbed Kitty Genovese 14 times, raping her after he had stabbed her, while she bled profusely, near death. Though he was sentenced to death, that penalty was reversed on appeal, a decision that enabled him to subsequently escape from Attica while our state, concerned about this vermin’s health, was transporting him to the hospital. Another innocent young woman was raped, innocent people were held at gunpoint and a dazed public was incredulous at the lapses in security and judgment that would allow this brutal animal to be uncaged.

For hard-working middle-America, college represents the second biggest financial burden after being a homeowner. Transferring that to their children via student loans, simply shifts the burden to the next generation which is increasingly in debt for decades after graduation. The argument for making a college education available to prisoners is that it reduces recidivism, ultimately saving the taxpayers’ money and it improves prison safety. Though this might make sense for prisoners who have reasonable expectations of leaving jail after completing their sentences, it makes no sense at all for a serial killer who is unlikely to ever be granted parole.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

What price NATO? If member states aren’t willing to spend on their own defense, why should we? By Jed Babbin

By on April 6th, 2016

Donald Trump panicked the foreign policy establishment when he said NATO is obsolete and ill-suited to fight terrorism. By saying that, and adding, “We can’t afford to do this anymore,” Mr. Trump drew gleefully harsh responses from Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Cruz said, “Donald Trump is wrong that American should retreat from Europe, retreat from NATO, hand Putin a major victory and while he’s at it, hand ISIS a major victory.”

Mrs. Clinton’s claim to the presidency rests on her experience as secretary of state. If you read her memoir, “Hard Choices,” you’ll inevitably conclude that although she went nearly everywhere and conferred with almost everyone in power, by her own recitation she never persuaded anyone to support any American position or undertaking. On the basis of that non-expertise, Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Trump’s position on NATO “would reverse decades of bipartisan American leadership and send a dangerous signal to friend and foe alike.” She would, of course, leave NATO undisturbed on its current course.

At the risk of injecting facts into politics, we need to understand what NATO has become and why, before we can try to fix it or consign it to the ash heap of history.

Mr. Trump’s assertion that NATO isn’t constituted properly to deal with terrorism is correct but irrelevant. NATO was designed in the 1940s to deal with the postwar threats of Soviet aggression, not with the then-unforeseen terrorist threat. We cannot forget that after Sept. 11, 2001, NATO — for the first time — invoked Article 5 of its charter, the collective defense provision that states an attack against one member is an attack against all. Many NATO members, including Poland, Britain and others, sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, joining our wars against terrorism.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

RUTHIE BLUM: PRIMARY DISTRACTIONS FROM IRAN

By on April 6th, 2016

Ahead of Tuesday’s Wisconsin presidential primaries, U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was in Israel, the destination he chose for his first foreign trip since assuming his post at the end of October.

In meetings with Israeli leaders — and in an interview with Times of Israel editor David Horovitz — Ryan reaffirmed his commitment to the Jewish state and his opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran. He also stated, in no uncertain terms, that — contrary to increasing rumor and pressure — he is not going to end up becoming the Republican nominee at what threatens to be a contested GOP convention. Nobody really believes he means it, however, because he had been equally adamant about not wanting the position he is currently occupying.

But, while distraught Americans from both parties are obsessing over whether Donald Trump can win the nomination — and if he does, whether he can beat likely Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — the Obama administration is being given a free pass to get away with murder, figuratively. More literally, it is enjoying the benefit of the doubt caused by the distraction of the public away from the havoc the White House and State Department are continuing to wreak, which is enabling the actual death of a lot of people in the present, and a whole lot more in the future.

The terrorism of the Islamic State group is only a tiny part of this, though it seems to be the only jihadist organization that gets a rise out of Westerners, whom it makes no bones about targeting for mass murder. Indeed, as the suicide bombings in Brussels on March 22 indicated, Europeans and Americans only wake up when a lot of people with whom they can identify get slaughtered senselessly. That this kind of thing is going on routinely everywhere else in the world barely elicits a yawn.

But as evil as ISIS is, it is still small fry compared to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism, with tentacles reaching far and wide. And now, thanks to the Obama administration, it also has multibillions of dollars at its disposal with which to build its nuclear arsenal. Nor does it hide its ambitions to wipe Israel off the map and its loathing for America, the “great Satan.”

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

These Five Are the Best We Can Do? Presidential politics are so degrading, thanks to the press and the Internet, that superior people stay out. By Joseph Epstein

By on April 6th, 2016

Midway through historian G.P. Baker’s biography of the Roman general and master politician Sulla (139-78 B.C.), I came across the following two sentences: “There are some systems which naturally take control out of the hands of good men. There are even some which necessarily put it in the hands of bad ones.” Baker’s observation took my mind away from Rome and back, where it was not eager to go, to the current presidential campaign. How did it come about that we have five such unimpressive contenders for the presidency of the United States? Is there something in our system of electing candidates that makes inevitable the rise of the mediocre and even the exaltation of the vulgar?

Difficult to find anyone who talks about the presidential primaries with any enthusiasm. Even yellow-dog Democrats and academic feminists can’t get much worked up for Hillary Clinton. The young are apparently taken with the socialist fantast Bernie Sanders—but then, being young, they don’t realize he is nothing more than a digitally remastered 1930s replay.
On the Republican side, John Kasich talks endlessly about his own accomplishments—he balanced the national budget, he worked splendidly with those across the aisle when in Congress, in Ohio he has done everything but wipe out ISIS—in a manner that, though he seems unaware of it, is off-putting even to voters who want to like him. Ted Cruz is the very model of the contrast gainer: He looks good, that is, only in contrast to Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump’s vulgarity is nonpareil—and by his vulgarity I don’t mean his profanity merely, but the vulgar quality of his speech, his thought, his very sentiments. So low have things fallen owing to Donald Trump that lifelong Republicans have told me that, in a Trump-versus-Clinton election, they are likely to hold their nose and vote for Mrs. Clinton. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Lessons From the Ranch: Schooling a Teen in Hard Work Sen. Ben Sasse’s daughter got a month-long education in caring for cattle and driving a tractor. Kyle Paterson

By on April 6th, 2016

For the past month, Ben Sasse, the junior U.S. senator from Nebraska, has been tweeting out his “lessons from the ranch”—or, rather, his daughter’s lessons. While her peers across the country might have spent much of the past few weeks lolling about their bedrooms, staring at smartphones instead of doing homework, 14-year-old Corrie Sasse was hours from home, laboring as a farmhand in exchange for room and board.

“We just believe in work,” Mr. Sasse tells me. “In our family we try to figure out ways that our kids can work.” The freedom to do so is one benefit of home schooling, since Mr. Sasse and his wife, Melissa, clearly consider working hard an education in itself.

Corrie seems to have taken the ranch assignment in stride, texting updates to her father, who then shared them on Twitter. Production agriculture, she learned, can be a dusty, dirty, smelly business, not least during calving season, when this particular ranch expects 300 new arrivals.

Text #FromTheRanch: “Today we checked to confirm some cows were pregnant—which Megan did by jamming her hand up their rectum. Eww.”

We should confirm, for the uninitiated, that the pregnancy-check generally involves a shoulder-length disposable glove . . . but still. Mr. Sasse says that surprise, more than anything, helped his daughter overcome the ick factor: “It was just all of a sudden, the moment they were at, and she was told to do it, and that was the work that needed to be done that day.” Corrie donned the long glove too.

Text #FromTheRanch: “Am not going to call now. I need to get some sleep before checking cows—and feed the fats—at midnight. . . By the way, Dad, the ‘fats’ are cows soon to be slaughtered.”CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →