Earth day 2016 TURN LIGHTS OFF
Earth Hour 2016 will be held on Saturday 19 March between 8.30PM and … The first thing anyone can do to get involved is to turn off their lights on Saturday. … the lights are turned off at the end of the business day the Friday before Earth Hour …
My Earth Day Message:
Keep the home lights burning…..RSK
Last December, President Obama and his environmental-activist political appointees traveled to Paris to persuade other nations to sign up for his radical climate-change agenda. This administration doesn’t care that many Americans believe climate change is exaggerated, that the scientific justification used for his regulations are flimsy, or that the models he uses to predict climate-change impacts are often biased. Instead, the administration recently launched investigations to intimidate anyone who disagrees with them.
If climate change is the real threat the Obama administration says it is, and the science is as “settled” as we are told by the liberal national media, why does the administration need to use tactics often reserved for the mafia to try to protect its own interests? What is the administration afraid of?
A few days ago, the president signed the United Nation’s Paris climate-change agreement, knowingly entering America into a contract that puts us at an economic disadvantage. Hardworking American taxpayers don’t want their government to work against their economic interests. And the president’s promises will do little to impact climate change.
The former head of the Department of Energy’s Fossil Energy Office, Charles McConnell, testified before the House Science Committee that the Clean Power Plan, the cornerstone of the president’s climate agenda, will reduce sea-level rise by the thickness of three sheets of paper. The same regulation would also reduce global temperatures by a measly 0.03 degrees Celsius, yet the plan, if implemented, would cost billions of dollars annually. That is all pain and no gain.
Today, Earth Day, President Obama will attach America’s name to the Paris Climate Agreement. Greatly affected, according to gushing accounts in the press, will be the president’s “legacy.” Unaffected, according to math, will be the threat of climate change. And left holding the bill, as seems to happen with each new acquisition for the Obama presidential library, will be the American people.
The agreement’s uselessness stems from its negotiating structure. Each country submitted a pledge of climate action, each pledge was accepted without question, and the sum of those pledges became the deal. Doe-eyed diplomats at the United Nations envisioned this process creating an “upward spiral of ambition,” as they phrased it during the 2014 Bonn Climate Conference. But the major developing countries, whose rapidly rising greenhouse-gas emissions are the driving force behind fears of climate change, care more about economic growth for their impoverished populations. So, as I wrote at National Review Online in December, they submitted pledges to continue with business as usual.
China pledged that its emissions would peak “around 2030,” precisely when the U.S. government’s national laboratory had already estimated the peak would occur. India’s pledge amounted to a slowdown from its current rate of progress. Pakistan said simply that it would “reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible,” which offers nothing beyond a definition of the word “peak.”
Unsurprisingly, the sum of many pledges to do nothing is: nothing. When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compiled the pledges and compared them with its own preexisting projection, it found a temperature reduction by 2100 of only 0.2°C. When the analysts compared the pledges with the projection created by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2000, they found no improvement at all.
What are political conventions for?
If you’ve ever been to one, you might think the purpose is for attendees to schmooze, drink, and drink some more. That holds true both for the delegates and for the journalists, who usually outnumber them by at least three to one.
But that’s not actually why political conventions exist. They’re sort of like volunteer fire departments that almost never get a call. It’s not that the firefighters don’t want to put out fires, but until they’re needed, they’re pretty happy to play cards, watch movies, and eat chili. They understand that when the call actually comes, the game ends, the TV goes off, and the boots go on.
Originally, conventions were partly a technological solution to a real problem. Phones didn’t exist and mail was too slow to coordinate the desires of the party faithful across a whole nation. (Also, few negotiators want to put all of their bargaining positions in writing.) You needed lots of face-to-face meetings.
By the 1960s, the telephone started to erode this function of conventions, as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Michael Barone has written.
Barone also notes that the media took one of the key jobs away from party bosses: counting delegates. The first media delegate count wasn’t until 1968, by CBS News.
Not long thereafter, conventions started to resemble infomercials. A political party throws a surprise party for the nominee that isn’t a surprise, because the nominee was determined well before the convention. In fact, the nominee is actually the party-planner-in-chief, choosing who sings his praises and when. The ending is no more in doubt than the question of whether the Ginsu knife in the TV ad will really be able to cut through the can.
But the core purpose of conventions never disappeared. It just got buried under all of the bunting and balloons. Even the communication function of the convention was a means to an end, not the end itself.
The real goal was to pick a nominee who could unify the party. That’s it. It wasn’t to pick a nominee who could win in November. That’s a huge consideration, but it was only one (very important) factor in deliberations over who should get the nomination.
After President Obama moved on his own to normalize relations with Cuba, White House officials told reporters they were confident that the thaw between the countries would result in positive change in Cuba. How’s that working out?
Not well. Political dissidents were rounded up before and after Obama’s visit last month. The Columbia Journalism Review noted that last week’s Communist Party Congress was “a particularly opaque affair, even by Cuban standards. Raúl Castro emphatically rejected new reforms during the opening speech.” “Julie Martinez,” a Havana secretary who asked that her real name not be used, told the Financial Times: “The same [80-year old] leaders and the same [lack of] reforms. . . . Am I supposed to wait till I’m their age to see some real change?”
Castro supporters are crowing that the Cuban regime has gained new credibility and legitimacy without having to make more than surface concessions to openness. Indeed, the evidence is that the U.S. policy on Cuban dissidents has, if anything, gotten worse since Obama’s opening. “Obama said his policies would help change Cuba, but instead the evidence is that Cuba is changing America more,” concludes Thor Halvorssen, founder of the Human Rights Foundation, an internationally respected organization fighting authoritarian and totalitarian rule of both the Right and the Left.
Consider the following three examples of U.S. interests’ kowtowing to the Cuban regime, and discriminating against Cuban Americans, in just the last month.
Paquito D’Rivera, a Cuban-American jazz musician who has won 14 Grammys, had already played at White House events. He was invited to perform there again, on April 29, by the renowned Thelonious Monk Institute — but was then told by the White House that he wouldn’t be attending, because he was “not passing the vetting process.”
D’Rivera quickly smelled a Castro rat, and expressed his belief that Cuban officials had intervened and tried to have him banned. In February, he had told the Miami New Times that Obama’s openness to Cuba would result only in “cosmetic” changes, mostly improvements in the Cuban elite’s access to the West: “Maybe now, some people, some elites, have the chance to go play with American musicians, like Wynton Marsalis going and playing there . . . but that doesn’t change much.”
Last year, a faction of the feminist Left discovered that it was being oppressed by the absence of a woman on at least one piece of America’s paper currency. After much baying from activists, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has struck upon a reasonable compromise. Lew announced on Wednesday that the place of Alexander Hamilton, currently experiencing a historical renascence, on the $10 bill is safe. Instead, Harriet Tubman, the great abolitionist, will replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill, and the seventh president will be moved to the back.
Tubman is an admirable choice. Not only was she a courageous chaperone along the Underground Railroad, responsible for escorting more than 300 slaves to freedom; she was also a scout and spy for the Union Army, the first woman in American history to lead a military raid (against Combahee Ferry, in South Carolina, where she helped liberate more than 700 slaves), a Republican, a devout Christian, and a staunch defender of the right to bear arms.
Andrew Jackson, for his part, was a giant of American history, and the animating spirit of the Democratic party. But moods change, and in the current public consciousness, Jackson’s considerable flaws have come to outweigh his also considerable merits. If there is a reason to remove Jackson from the currency, perhaps it should simply be that he hated paper money.
President Obama came into office in 2009 promising “transformation” and he has delivered on that promise. Over the past 7 1/2 years we’ve witnessed billion dollar deficits and the establishment of a highly politicized and inexorably failing health care system (“Obamacare”); the “weaponization” of government agencies (think, IRS, EPA, DOJ) to intimidate and attack his political opponents; the calculated and feckless decline of American power and influence throughout the world; relentless redistributionist policies; and the president’s support (often with a wink and a nod) of thuggish (and sometimes violent) radical groups like “Occupy Wall Street” and “Black Lives Matter.” As a result, America is “on edge” — socially, racially, economically — as it hasn’t been for decades. Indeed, many have reached the sobering insight that America’s best days may now be behind her.
Overlooked by most in Obama’s relentless efforts to “remake” America has been his ongoing and dangerous transformation of our military. Here I am not going address the dozens of weapon systems cut, or the tens of thousands of troops given their “pink slips.” What I want to speak to is his administration’s systematic destruction of the 200+ year-old culture of the U.S. military. This “multicultural makeover,” happening right before our eyes, threatens to undermine the very fabric of our armed forces. The forced acceptance of open homosexuality and the burgeoning hostility toward Christianity; the gratuitous degradation of our troops (e.g., forcing ROTC cadets to march in red high heels to experience what it’s like to be a woman; making male soldiers wear simulated lactation devices, or lecturing them on “white privilege,” dare I go on?); the “full-court press” to make our forces more diverse, most alarmingly by opening up combat positions (even special forces) to female soldiers; and the relentless purging from the ranks of dozens of fine general officers whose only “offense” was their failure to “get with the program” — all of this, like some nightmarish “progressive” Blitzkrieg, is now wreaking havoc with our reluctant service members, the objective being that of a complete and irreversible cultural transformation. What’s next, I wonder — weaponized hair and nail salons on wheels?
This is what happens when the inmates are running the asylum. And the refugee policy.
Some child brides are living with older husbands in asylum centers in Scandinavia, triggering a furor about lapses in protection for girls in nations that ban child marriage.
That ban child marriage currently. How long will that hold up? It’s all about the numbers. As it is there are layers upon layers of special exceptions for Muslims. Case in point…
Authorities have in some cases let girls stay with their partners, believing it is less traumatic for them than forced separation after fleeing wars in nations such as Afghanistan or Syria.
Would child rape victims from Denmark or Norway be allowed to stay with their rapist because it was deemed less traumatic for them? That seems to be a special rule for Muslim refugees. And how did the authorities determine this? Were they able to talk to the girls directly, without an interpreter or their “husband” in the room? Did they even bother to try?
Both these issues have caused unease in Scandinavia, where critics say that the authorities risk complicity in child abuse.
Risk complicity? They are complicit. If you house a girl together with her abuser, you are complicit.
“Minors seeking asylum are in a difficult situation where they have left their homeland, family and friends, and the partner they have traveled with can be the only person they know and trust in Norway,” said Heidi Vibeke Pedersen, a senior UDI official.
The 28 pages of a Congressional report detailing where the 9/11 hijackers got their financing have been classified for years, but what they contain is an open secret. Former Senator Bob Graham explained: “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier.” So why keep this information secret? Because the Saudis wield undue influence in Washington, among both parties – an influence that has deformed our response to the global jihad threat, and continues to do so.
Responding to a bill that would allow 9/11 victims’ families to sue governments linked to terror attacks inside the U.S., the Saudis have acted like neither an ally nor an innocent party: they’ve threatened to sell $750 billion in U.S. asserts, vividly demonstrating why their influence in Washington is so detrimental.
Nonetheless, they still have a friend in Barack Obama, a man who has never hesitated to reach out in friendship to those who threaten the United States. Obama is trying to get Congress to reject the bill, and his solicitude for the Saudis is drawing criticism even from members of his own party. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) called on him to release the 28 pages: “If the president is going to meet with the Saudi Arabian leadership and the royal family, they think it would be appropriate that this document be released before the president makes that trip, so that they can talk about whatever issues are in that document.”
The New York Daily News, normally a reliable Democratic Party organ, fumed: “If the President allows himself to get pushed around this way in front of the world, then he earns every bit of the anger being directed at him by the extended family of September 11.”
Of course, all too many Republicans are just as much in the tank for the Saudis as the Democrats. CBS News reported on September 30, 2001, on George W. Bush’s watch, that “two dozen members of Osama bin Laden’s family were urgently evacuated from the United States in the first days following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, according to the Saudi ambassador to Washington.” If Hitler had had twenty-four relatives on U.S. soil on December 8, 1941, would FDR have urgently evacuated them to Berlin?
The announcement by French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault that France will host a meeting of ministers from 20 countries in Paris on May 30 to try and relaunch the Israel-Palestinian peace process seems to be yet another flight of fancy that is destined to end up where the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap presently find themselves after decades of fruitless negotiations.
Who those 20 countries are that will attend such a meeting will make fascinating reading.
The other 173 member States of the United Nations should be miffed at not being invited to enjoy the sights, sounds, food and wine of Paris as it seeks to put behind it:
1. The devastating Islamic terrorist attack on 13 November last that claimed the lives of 130 people and wounded 352 others.
2. The assault on a police station on 7 January last by a jihadist wearing a fake explosive belt attacking police officers with a meat cleaver while shouting “Allahu Akbar”. He was shot dead and one policeman was injured. The ISIS flag and a clearly written claim in Arabic, were found on the attacker.
Ayrault said the conference aimed to prepare an international summit in the second half of 2016 which would include the Israeli and Palestinian leaders – acknowledging that:
“The two sides are further apart than ever”
