RUTHFULLY YOURS

At last, we have a peer-reviewed paper that accurately surveys how much support there is for anthropogenic global warming among relevant scientists. And the news isn’t good for Al Gore, nor for Barack Obama, who sees climate change as our number one national security threat.

The widely cited figure of 97% of scientists supporting man made global warming theory has always been a fraud:

…a Canada-based group calling itself Friends of Science has just completed a review of the four main studies used to document the alleged consensus and found that only 1 – 3% of respondents “explicitly stated agreement with the IPCC declarations on global warming,” and that there was “no agreement with a catastrophic view.”

“These ‘consensus’ surveys appear to be used as a ‘social proof,'” says Ken Gregory, research director of Friends of Science. “Just because a science paper includes the words ‘global climate change’ this does not define the cause, impact or possible mitigation. The 97% claim is contrived in all cases.”

The Oreskes (2004) study claimed 75% consensus and a “remarkable lack of disagreement” by the other 25% of the abstracts she reviewed. Peiser (2005) re-ran her survey and found major discrepancies. Only 1.2% or 13 scientists out of 1,117 agreed with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) view that human activity is the main cause of global warming since 1950.

Last week’s mass executions in Saudi Arabia suggest panic at the highest level of the monarchy. The action is without precedent, even by the grim standards of Saudi repression. In 1980 Riyadh killed 63 jihadists who had attacked the Grand Mosque of Mecca, but that was fresh after the event. Most of the 47 prisoners shot and beheaded on Jan. 2 had sat in Saudi jails for a decade. The decision to kill the prominent Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, the most prominent spokesman for restive Saudi Shia Muslims in Eastern Province, betrays fear of subversion with Iranian sponsorship.

Why kill them all now? It is very hard to evaluate the scale of internal threats to the Saudi monarchy, but the broader context for its concern is clear: Saudi Arabia finds itself isolated, abandoned by its longstanding American ally, at odds with China, and pressured by Russia’s sudden preeminence in the region. The Saudi-backed Army of Conquest in Syria seems to be crumbling under Russian attack. The Saudi intervention in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi rebels has gone poorly. And its Turkish ally-of-convenience is consumed by a low-level civil war. Nothing has gone right for Riyadh.

Worst of all, the collapse of Saudi oil revenues threatens to exhaust the kingdom’s $700 billion in financial reserves within five years, according to an October estimate by the International Monetary Fund (as I discussed here). The House of Saud relies on subsidies to buy the loyalty of the vast majority of its subjects, and its reduced spending power is the biggest threat to its rule. Last week Riyadh cut subsidies for water, electricity and gasoline. The timing of the executions may be more than coincidence: the royal family’s capacity to buy popular support is eroding just as its regional security policy has fallen apart.

WALLSTROM IS ALL THE RAGE NOW WITH EURO FEMINISTS BECAUSE SHE CRITICIZED SAUDI ARABIA….BUT SHE IS A VICIOUS ROTTWEILER WHEN IT COMES TO ISRAEL…RSK

Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström linked Palestinian grievances with Israel to the Islamist terror attacks that killed 129 people in Paris.

“Obviously, we have reason to be worried, not just in Sweden but across the world—because there are so many that are being radicalized. Here, once again, we are brought back to situations like the one in the Middle East, where not least, the Palestinians see that there is not a future. We must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence,” Wallström said in a television interview.

In response to Wallström’s comments, Israel summoned Sweden’s ambassador to the Jewish state for an urgent meeting with Israeli Foreign Ministry Director-General Dore Gold, calling the Swedish minister’s remarks “brazen,” “shocking,” and “hostile.”

Pithy comment from a Belgian reader “Again this lack of common sense. Why on earth can’t you link terrorism and migration? Isnt it obvious that the more you import the Middle East and Africa having unrestricted flows the more terrorism and less freedom you will have? All terrorists in Europe in 2015 were Muslim immigrants or the children of Muslim immigrants. Showing that the problem is within Islam itself. Europe sticking its head in the sand on the Islamic migration issue is the last thing Europe needs. ”
Troubles crowded in on Europe in 2015. In 2016, they could shake the foundations of European economic and political integration.

The conflict in Syria has blown back devastatingly into Europe, spurring terror attacks and a refugee crisis over which policy makers appear to have little influence.

Border controls, viewed as a thing of the past across much of the continent, have been raised at many national frontiers, and leading politicians have acknowledged that the Schengen passport-free travel zone, one of the great successes of European integration, is under threat.

To the east, the Ukraine conflict remains unresolved and Russia’s foreign-policy posture more aggressive than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

Meanwhile, the recovery of the eurozone economy has been faltering and economic vulnerabilities remain in some countries in the form of high debts and weak banks, even with official interest rates close to zero.

Added to that, the U.K. could deliver a blow to the European Union in a referendum, likely to be held in 2016, over whether the country should become the first ever to leave the 28-nation bloc.

So you think carbonphobics fall into only two categories: useful idiots who fret loudly about a non-existent threat and careerists happy to whip up the scare stories that keep their grants coming. Well, there is a third set of snouts in the trough — bankers and ‘green fund’ managers. Hold on to your wallet
An international pension-fund coalition — co-founded by a UN agency last September — showed great enthusiasm for decarbonisation in Paris last month. It wants to shift at least USD600 billion of other people’s money into renewable energy projects. But only if governments establish ‘legal frameworks to protect long-term investors’ and to ensure ‘capital reallocation’ is risk-free – that is, underwritten by taxpayers – in perpetuity. Nice work if you can get it.

Climate-caliphate: 1. Entity led by a climate-caliph, generally an eco-zealot, ex-politician or career bureaucrat turned climate propagandist; elected by a shadowy process. 2. Global climate-caliphate: theocratic one-world government or de facto government; an ideology or aspiration of this kind promoted by a militant fossil-free sect, or radical group intending to behead, disembowel, or otherwise degrade Western economies with the two-edged sword of wealth redistribution and ‘decarbonisation’, while reciting mantras about ‘saving the planet’. Also known as Agenda 21.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was not the only agency excited by the 21st annual Conference of the Parties (COP). Another group ecstatic about the prospect of a ‘low-carbon’ world was the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the 43-year-old brainchild of the late Maurice Strong.

Russian President Vladimir Putin calls the United States a threat to Russia’s national security in a New Year’s Eve official document.

Russia’s expanded role internationally has caused “counteraction from the USA and its allies, which are striving to retain their dominance in global affairs,” the document reads, according to Reuters.

The updated assessment, called “About the Strategy of National Security of Russian Federation,” is the latest sign of the tension between Moscow and the West.
The previous version, from 2009, mentions neither the United States nor its NATO allies, according to Reuters.

Relations between Moscow and the West soured after the Russian forces annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014. The West also accuses Russia of backing separatists in eastern Ukraine, which Russia denies.

Saudi Arabia said Saturday it has executed 47 prisoners, including reformist Shiite cleric and activist Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.
Al-Nimr was a central figure in Shiite protests that erupted in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring, and carrying out his execution may spark new unrest among the OPEC powerhouse’s Shiite minority.

The cleric’s name was among a list of the 47 carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency. It cited the Interior Ministry for the information. Saudi state television also reported the executions.
Related: Crucifixion Sentence in Saudi Arabia Sparks Outcry
Saudi Arabia carried out at least 157 executions in 2015, with beheadings reaching their highest level in the kingdom in two decades, according to several advocacy groups that monitor the death penalty worldwide.

His 17-year-old nephew was sentenced to crucifixion earlier this year but was not among those put to death this time.
Maya Foa, a spokeswoman for rights group Reprieve, said 4 of the 47 executed were political prisoners.
“Last year saw Saudi Arabia execute over 150 people, many of them for non-violent offences,” she said. “This appalling news suggests 2016 could be even worse. Alarmingly, the Saudi Government is continuing to target those who have called for domestic reform in the kingdom.

Razeen Sally is Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

China’s “market Leninism” graphically illustrates the tension between a static political system and a fast-changing, globally integrated market economy. Will China’s party-state adapt, or will it stagnate and get stuck in the middle-income trap? The auguries are not good.
Without innovations, no entrepreneurs; without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist returns and no capitalist propulsion. The atmosphere of industrial revolutions—of “progress”—is the only one in which capitalism can survive. —Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles, 1939

My last Quadrant essay (November 2015) was on economic liberalism in Asia. Here I switch focus to capitalism in Asia. I say “capitalism” deliberately. What does it mean?

A capitalist economy is, of course, a market economy: the exchange of goods and services at freely forming prices in a system that unites production and consumption. This was what Adam Smith meant by a market economy; he also emphasised property rights and “natural liberty”, or what we now call economic freedom—the individual’s freedom to produce and consume, and to use his property rights, as he sees fit. But capitalism suggests more than “market economy”. I use it in the Schumpeterian sense. For hovering above this essay is Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great twentieth-century economists; he was also perhaps the greatest historian of economic thought of all time, and surely one of social science’s most colourful and dazzling performing artists.

Karl Marx wrote about “capital”—the stock of wealth around which production and class relations are structured. Werner Sombart, from the last generation of Germany’s Historical School of economics, was the first to refer to “capitalism”. But Schumpeter had a different vision of capitalism. Vision was one of his favourite words. Today the word is debased, for everyone has a “vision”, just as everyone has a “philosophy”. But Schumpeter meant something precise: a vision is a personal conception of how a whole system works, before filling in its compartments and its nuts and bolts. He laid out his vision of capitalism first in The Theory of Economic Development, and later, encompassingly, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

Sweden is a country where using the word “mass immigration” usually gets criticized just for sounding racist. Only anti-Semitism does not get criticized. In Sweden, all other forms of racism — even things that some say could be classified as racism — are criticized, and ruthlessly.

TV4, one of the most important Swedish media outlets, in 2015 described anti-Semitism as simply a “different opinion.”

“What is history for us is not the history of others. … When we have other students who have studied other history books, there is no point in discussing facts against facts.” — The administration of an adult-education school, in a reprimand to a teacher who said the Holocaust actually took place.

“The Jews are campaigning against me.” — Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström.

There are fewer than 20,000 Jews in Sweden; more than 20,000 Syrians received asylum in 2014 alone. That is why so few politicians — who are eager to win the votes of immigrants — talk about Arab anti-Semitism.

President Obama imagined he could end his second term with an arms-control detente with Iran the way Ronald Reagan did with the Soviet Union. It looks instead that his nuclear deal has inspired Iran toward new military aggression and greater anti-American hostility.

The U.S. and United Nations both say Iran is already violating U.N. resolutions that bar Iran from testing ballistic missiles. Iran has conducted two ballistic-missile tests since the nuclear deal was signed in July, most recently in November. The missiles seem capable of delivering nuclear weapons with relatively small design changes.

The White House initially downplayed the missile tests, but this week it did an odd flip-flop on whether to impose new sanctions in response. On Wednesday it informed Congress that it would target a handful of Iranian companies and individuals responsible for the ballistic-missile program. Then it later said it would delay announcing the sanctions, which are barely a diplomatic rebuke in any case, much less a serious response to an arms-control violation.