RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Supreme Court’s stay of the EPA’s sweeping Clean Power Plan (CPP) is one of several developments undermining the efforts of President Obama and his fellow climate zealots. The Obama administration expected the CPP to seal the U.N.’s first universal climate agreement, but now that the president’s grand plan has been put on hold until final judicial review on the merits, its fate will likely not be known until late 2017 at the earliest. Furthermore, the prospects for upholding the power plan are not that strong. As a legal condition of imposing the stay, the Supreme Court had to conclude that the EPA’s plan would likely be overruled in the Court’s final review.

Last December in Paris the climate agreement was declared a fait accompli, with representatives of around 190 countries expected to sign it on Earth Day (April 22) at the U.N.’s headquarters in New York. The Paris deal does not “enter into force” until at least 55 countries that together account for 55 percent of man-made greenhouse gases ink the document. But if President Obama’s grand plan to reduce CO2 remains in legal limbo for two more years, why would other countries go ahead and submit their economic future to the terms of the U.N. agreement?

In response, the White House has apparently assigned Todd Stern, the State Department’s special envoy on climate, to get busy on damage control. Stern last week warned the presidential candidates that they would be well advised to stop sowing seeds of doubt about the CPP. In Brussels, Stern reassured EU officials that the Court’s freeze on the CPP would not weaken the EPA’s resolve on pledged carbon cuts or delay the signing of the agreement in April.

However, the European Union has good reason to worry about the viability of the Paris deal if the United States’ contribution is uncertain. After ambitious green efforts over the last ten years, many EU member countries have substantial economic concerns about expanded carbon dictates. As a result of the carbon policies they already have in place, Germany, Britain, and Spain have experienced soaring electricity rates, energy poverty, unsustainable subsidies, and industrial flight — all while failing to achieve meaningful carbon reductions.

The incoherence of the policies spawned by the U.N.’s earlier Kyoto climate accord is increasingly undeniable. Germany is subsidizing the construction of coal-fired power plants as necessary backups to renewables, and Britain is burning wood imported from the United States to generate electricity on a massive scale. Renamed “biomass” and declared “carbon neutral,” wood is no less polluting than coal. Headlines in the Daily Mail excoriate the retrofit of Britain’s largest coal plant to burn wood as a “forest-destroying symbol of the shameful absurdity of European energy policies.”

Some students wore sombreros to a tequila-themed birthday party at Bowdoin College — and others were so offended that the school had to provide them with safe spaces and counseling to deal with it.

According to the school’s newspaper, the Bowdoin Orient, the e-mail invitation to the event called it “a ‘tequila’ party” and then added, “we’re not saying it’s a fiesta, but we’re also not not saying that 🙂 (we’re not saying that).”

This phrasing was, presumably, aiming to poke fun at the way the PC police often lose their minds over pretty much any party where tequila is present — which wound up being exactly what happened with this one.

Yep. According to the Orient, one student (1) reported that some of the attendees had been wearing sombreros at the same time as they were drinking tequila at the party, and all hell broke loose.

In an e-mail to National Review Online, sophomore Richard Arms states that there have been “3 school-wide emails from deans and our president, and there have been several ‘safe-space’ opportunities on campus for students to discuss how they were hurt and offended” by the party.

What’s more, the General Assembly of Bowdoin Student Government issued a “Statement of Solidarity to stand by all students who were affected by the ‘tequila’ party that occurred on 20 February 2016.”

“The Assembly, representing the entire student body of Bowdoin, stands by all students who were injured and affected by the incident,” the statement reads.

(Yes — “injured.”)

According to the statement, even though the school offered offended students counseling (!) to help them deal with the fact that their classmates were drinking a kind of booze with a kind of hat on, the response just wasn’t enough for something so serious.

Rather than being a racial healer, Barack Obama has presided over and at times stoked more racial divisiveness than we have seen in a long while. Just in the last year we’ve had Black Lives Matter marches and verbal assaults of Democratic candidates, the Oscar protests over the absence of nominated black actors, Ivy League university students marching over “microagressions” no one else can see, and the still simmering protests and agitation over police shootings of black men. Driving it all is our duplicitous and malignant national racial discourse.

At the heart of it lies “racism,” a question-begging epithet and verbal aerosol sprayed over issues to avoid honestly confronting them. The idea of racism is peculiarly modern, and like most of progressive ideology it reflects the rise of pseudo-science in the wake of the scientific revolution. As such, racism was a consequence of the massive category error that tries to reduce human beings to mere material phenomena to be classified and understood and shaped with the methods of real science. In “scientific” racism, certain characteristics of physical appearance and behavior were stripped of historical and cultural context, and the “irreducible complexity” defining all humans reduced to this simplified, superficial description. Worse yet from the perspective of the West’s Judeo-Christian and Hellenic heritage, the unique individualism of people, with their God-given natural rights and spiritual freedom, was denied to fellow human beings.

Before modern racism, there were prejudice and bigotry, the leftover tribal instinct to distrust the stranger or those who look and live differently. Humans are naturally clannish and exclusionary, as a visit to any playground or school, or a perusal of multiculturalist dogma and curricula, will reveal. The idea of a universal human nature and the subsequent tolerance for difference was and still is a strange one, a learned behavior that culture has to teach and reinforce.

Politicians insisting that the latest Islamic jihad attack has nothing to do with Islam have become a familiar feature of the mainstream media landscape, but last Saturday, Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans went them all one better.

Speaking at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, Evans declared:
We’re all Muslims deep down. We all yearn for peace.

Evans thus went farther than Barack Obama, John Kerry, David Cameron, and all the other Western politicians who insist that Islam is a religion of peace. For Evans, Islam is not just a religion of peace, but the religion of peace: to be a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or an atheist would not make one yearn for peace.

This is taking pandering to dizzying new heights, and that wasn’t all: this wasn’t the police commissioner’s first visit to the Islamic Society of Boston. He went there last December — right after two Muslims murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino. He made that visit in order to make sure that the local Muslims weren’t jittery after that attack:

I don’t think we can tolerate bigotry toward the Muslim population. They’re an important part of our city. I just want to reassure them that we’re here for them.

Muslims acting avowedly in the name of Islam and jihad committed mass murder of non-Muslims, and in the wake of that attack, the Boston police commissioner took it upon himself to reassure … Muslims. However he went about doing this reassuring, it is certain that he never asked members of the Islamic Society of Boston why so many Muslims don’t yearn for peace at all, but seem instead to relish war.

Remember the university professor who wanted the government to use the RICO law created to prosecute mobsters as a tool against global-warming dissenters? Well, taxpayers may be the ones calling for an investigation after examining the nonprofit venture that George Mason University Professor Jagadish Shukla has been running with generous government funding.

On Tuesday evening House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith wrote to the inspector general at the National Science Foundation. Chairman Smith reported that Mr. Shukla has recently been audited by the university in connection with his outside position running the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES).

According to Chairman Smith’s letter, the audit “appears to reveal that Dr. Shukla engaged in what is referred to as ‘double dipping.’ In other words, he received his full salary at GMU, while working full time at IGES and receiving a full salary there.”

Mr. Smith cites a memo from the school’s internal auditor in claiming that Mr. Shukla appeared to violate the university’s policy on outside employment and paid consulting. The professor received $511,410 in combined compensation from the school and IGES in 2014, according to Mr. Smith, “without ever receiving the appropriate permission from GMU officials.” CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-is-right-on-encryption-1456877827

The Apple encryption conflict has turned nasty, as the Obama Administration, most Republicans and public opinion turn against the tech company. But, lo, Apple won its first court test on Monday, and its legal briefs against the court order to unlock an iPhone used by the San Bernardino jihadists show it has a better argument than the government.

The FBI is attempting to extract information on Syed Rizwan Farook’s device but has been frustrated by Apple’s encryption. So a California magistrate ordered the company to design a custom version of its operating software that will disable certain security features and permit the FBI to break the password. Apple has cooperated with the probe but argues that forcing it to write new code is illegal.

One confusion promoted by the FBI is that its order is merely a run-of-the-mill search warrant. This is false. The FBI is invoking the 1789 All Writs Act, an otherwise unremarkable law that grants judges the authority to enforce their orders as “necessary or appropriate.” The problem is that the All Writs Act is not a catch-all license for anything judges want to do. They can only exercise powers that Congress has granted them.

Congress knows how to require private companies to serve public needs. The law obligates telecoms, for example, to assist with surveillance collection. But Congress has never said the courts can commandeer companies to provide digital forensics or devise programs it would be theoretically useful for the FBI to have—even if they are “necessary” for a search.

Congress could instruct tech makers from now on to build “back doors” into their devices for law-enforcement use, for better or more likely worse. But this back-door debate has raged for two years. In the absence of congressional action, the courts can’t now appoint themselves as a super legislature to commandeer innocent third parties ex post facto. CONTINUE AT SITE

Actors are a peculiar breed. Ask them to play characters of intellectual depth and the more accomplished deliver convincing performances, no problems. As global-warming worrywart Leonardo DiCaprio demonstrated at this week’s Academy Awards, the trouble starts when they write their own lines

Red-carpet aficionados struggling to figure out how a ‘visceral cinematic experience’ – filmed almost entirely in the snowy landscapes of North America – could prompt a frothy take-home serve of climate alarmism from a leading actor should reflect on Mark Twain’s advice: “Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, unless you can’t think of anything better”.

Today Twain surely would add: “nor in the way of anthropogenic atmospheric angst or a saving-the-planet pitch, no matter how silly”; especially if you have just won an Oscar for the best bear-ravaged frontiersman this side of Fortress Mountain and are doubling as a UN Messenger of Peace with a special focus on climate change.

On the celebrity frontier the mood this week seemed almost as tense – but not as chilly – as it was on location. Plenty of haute-couture and alarming epidermis on display – from Alicia’s ‘fun and flirty’ Louis Vuitton to Kate’s Ralph Lauren ‘garbage bag’. But fewer animal pelts and bear-hugs than last year.

Leonardo DiCaprio was in the front row, just a short walk from his first Oscar after five nominations. In a dignified acceptance speech, the star heaped praise on best director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and his USD165 million ‘transcendental’ film, The Revenant.

Mad Max: Fury Road’s sound editor turned up the contrast with an F-bomb. True, not the end of the world. But if Mark Mangini did not hear a pin drop, it was probably because it was drowned out by the voice of his spouse, mother or both. “It’s pretty intense up there,” confided co-winner, David White, in Mangini’s defence. “It’s typically Australians who do the swearing. So the fact that I didn’t swear, I deserve the Oscar just for that.”

But DiCaprio’s speech was scarier than any snarling thing roaring down Fury Road. One bear-hunting man’s ‘epic adventure of survival’ somehow morphed post-production into an eco-allegory about

“man’s relationship to the natural world. A world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people out there who would be most affected by this. For our children’s children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed. I thank you all for this amazing award tonight. Let us not take this planet for granted..” (transcript , Kadeen Griffiths, 29 February 2016; author’s bolding).

In a ruling that could have ramifications for Apple’s battle with the FBI over the iPhone of the San Bernardino terrorist, a federal magistrate-judge in Brooklyn yesterday denied the government’s request in a similar case to compel Apple to assist the government in searching the iPhone of a suspected narcotics trafficker. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein rejected the Justice Department’s claim that the All Writs Act authorizes the court to coerce Apple’s cooperation.

An unsettling aspect of the cases on both coasts is the Justice Department’s urging of the All Writs Act on the courts as a capacious source of power to coerce assistance from third parties. Interestingly, while Apple has vigorously contested the AWA order in California, the tech giant itself suggested that the Justice Department seek one in Brooklyn. Apple was willing to help in the Brooklyn case (as it has done in approximately 70 other cases), but only if there was an order, which the company even helped the Justice Department draft. It was Magistrate Judge Orenstein who was troubled about whether he had the authority to issue the order. Only when the court hesitated and asked for more briefing on the AWA did Apple do an about-face and oppose the issuance.

The AWA, which is now codified at section 1651 of Title 28, U.S. Code, was originally enacted by the first Congress in 1789 — a time when federal courts played a much more modest role in American life. The idea was that, in the few areas where the courts were empowered to act by the Constitution or a statute, they had some residual authority to issue orders necessary to exercise these grants of jurisdiction. It was never the purpose of the AWA to grant courts a limitless reservoir of power to, in effect, legislate in areas where Congress had not enacted controlling law — or, worse, to assume powers Congress had considered giving to judges but decided not to.

As Lady Gaga’s voice soared with emotion while performing “Til It Happens to You,” her song from “The Hunting Ground” (co-written with Diane Warren), masses of young women along with some men strode out on-stage with their forearms extended to reveal words of victimhood imprinted on them. Most disturbing was the word “survivor” recalling the term commonly associated with victims of the holocaust. Possibly lost on under-educated people below the age of 60 was the symbolism of that forearm, the site of numbered tattoos forcefully stamped on prisoners of Auschwitz and other concentration camps by Nazi exterminators. Tears could be seen in the eyes of the sensitive audience and defiance in Gaga and her gang as they represented the latest p.c. special interest group – Victims of Campus Rape. But there is zero similarity between that experience and the horrific plight of holocaust survivors subjected to starvation, torture, sadistic experiments and the most brutal modes of murder.

Current estimates are that one in five college students will experience campus rape. If you’re thinking of an assault in a dark alley by an unknown male brandishing a weapon or threatening violence, think again. According to statistics compiled by Campus Safety Magazine, 43% of victims have consumed excessive alcohol while a scorching 90% of “acquaintance rape” involves that substance. 84 % of women victims are freshmen or sophomores – under age for any alcohol consumption, much less binge drinking. And 38% of college victims are women who claim to have been victimized before, making this the best predictor for any campus rape. Male aggressors who have consumed alcohol are held legally responsible for their actions; females who report that they were too drunk to give consent are foolishly exempt from responsibility for that condition. While no one disputes that in the trendy, free-wheeling lifestyle of many campuses some violent rapes occur, a more common scenario is a young girl who knows and may like her partner but has drunk too much to be in control of herself and later regrets being taken advantage of.