RUTHFULLY YOURS

Green activists, some masquerading as attorneys general of New York and California, want to prosecute Exxon as a climate heretic. Its sin? Saying impeccably true things about climate science: The range of uncertainty is high. Climate models are not the climate, and show themselves to be unreliable guides to future warming. There is a cost-benefit test that policy must pass, and it doesn’t.

The AG case is a spinoff of “investigative” journalism by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News, which we now learn was directly underwritten by climate activists at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund.

“It’s about helping the larger public understand the urgencies of finding climate solutions. It’s not really about Exxon,” explained a Rockefeller official about a January meeting to coordinate the legal and journalistic attack.

The journalists involved in this travesty, we’re sorry to say, are of the dumber sort—confused about what science is. But their clottedness comes at a poignant moment.

Honest greens have always said nuclear power is indispensable for achieving big carbon reduction. James Hansen, the former NASA scientist who has been chaining himself to fences since the first Bush administration, was in Illinois last week lobbying against closure of a nuclear plant. Ditto activist Michael Shellenberger. We might also include Bill McKibben, the Bernie Sanders of the climate movement and shouter of Exxon accusations, who told journalist William Tucker four years ago, “If I came out in favor of nuclear, it would split this movement in half.”

Nuclear (unlike solar) is one low-carbon energy technology that has zero chance without strong government support, yet is left out of renewables mandates. It’s the one non-carbon energy source that has actually been shrinking, losing ground to coal and natural gas.

What keeps nuclear costs high? Why do so many opponents misread the Fukushima meltdown, where 18,000 deaths were due to the earthquake and tsunami, none to radiation exposure, and none are expected from radiation exposure? Why has the U.S. experience of spiraling nuclear construction costs not been matched in South Korea, where normal learning has reduced the cost of construction?

The answer increasingly appears to be a real scientific fraud. In a series of peer-reviewed articles, toxicologist Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows how a cabal of radiation geneticists in the 1940s doctored their results, and even a Nobel Prize acceptance speech, to exaggerate the health risk from low-level radiation exposure. At the time, Hermann Muller, their leader, was militating against above-ground atomic-bomb testing. “I think he got his beliefs and his science confused, and he couldn’t admit that the science was unresolved,” Mr. Calabrese told a UMass publication. CONTINUE AT SITE

The issue of the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States has understandably ignited a firestorm of protest by Americans concerned about their safety and the safety of their families. These Americans are not exhibiting “xenophobia,” the usual claim made by the open borders immigration anarchists. They have simply been paying attention to what James Comey, the Director of the FBI, and Michael Steinbach, the FBI’s Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division, have stated when they testified before congressional hearings about the Syrian refugee crisis. They made it clear that these refugees cannot be vetted. There are no reliable databases to check and no capacity to conduct field investigations inside Syria to verify the backgrounds of these aliens.

I focused on these issues in my October 7, 2015 article for FrontPage Magazine, “Syrian ‘Refugees’ and Immigration Roulette: How the government is recklessly playing with American lives.”

Further reports have provided disturbing information that ISIS operatives have seized blank Syrian passports and other identity documents, along with the printing devices used to prepare passports and other ID, and have sold these documents to reporters in false names. These identity documents are indistinguishable from bona fide documents because they are bona fide documents — except that the photos and biometrics do not relate to the original person but create credible false aliases for anyone willing to pay for them.

The challenges our officials face in attempting to vet refugees and others was the focus of my September 15, 2015 article for FrontPage Magazine, “The Refugee Crisis Must Not Undermine U.S. National Security: America’s enemies cannot be permitted to turn our compassion into a weapon against us.”

These multiple challenges, where failures may well cost American lives and undermine national security, are well known to the administration, yet the administration defiantly continues to press for the admission of thousands of Syrian refugees. Meanwhile, the administration ignores a commonsense solution to the refugee crisis that would be far more cost effective and not undermine U.S. national security or pose a threat to public safety: The simple establishment of safe zones in the Middle East for these refugees. This is a proposal made by a number of our true leaders, including Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

In an unsuccessful attempt to assuage the fears of Americans about the vetting process, the administration claimed that the screening process was thorough, noting that the vetting process for Syrian refugees was a lengthy process that took from 18 months to two years. (Of course without reliable databases or the ability to conduct field investigations in Syria, no length of time would be adequate.)

Long after it would have made any difference, President Obama finally turned over thousands of Fast and Furious documents to the House Oversight Committee, revealing a deliberate attempt by some in the Justice Department to keep secret details about the deadly gun-running operation. It’s an effort that continues to this day.

The docs were turned over late last week, hours before the court-ordered deadline, and only represented a fraction of the total number the oversight committee had requested. An Obama-appointed federal judge struck down the president’s 2012 executive privilege claim back in January, giving the DOJ 60 days to hand over all information about its role in the 2009-2011 Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal.

Operation Fast and Furious was an ATF and Department of Justice program that purposely allowed the sale and trafficking of thousands of weapons to violent Mexican drug cartels. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed by Mexican bandits in December 2010 and guns from the operation were found at the murder scene. When Sinaloa cartel leader El Chapo Guzman was captured last year, guns from the operation, including a .50 caliber rifle that was used to shoot at a police helicopter, were found in his hideout. Hundreds of Mexican citizens have been killed as a result of the program and thousands of guns are still missing and being used to carry out violent crimes in Mexico and potentially in the United States.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz complained during an interview with Special Report Wednesday that the department was not complying with the law.

“They are breaking the law by telling us they’re only going to provide a couple of the documents,” he said

“When you have a duly issued subpoena, you must comply with it,” Chaffetz continued. “There was a concerted effort here to make sure the Congress never saw the light of day on these documents. They still owe us more.” He added, “if you’re going to withhold documents … there needs to be a consequence to that and the new administration I hope will go back and prosecute these people, because they’re clearly breaking the law.” But in order for there to be any consequences, we “have to have an administration with integrity,” Chaffetz said. “That’s why it’s time for us to have another election and get another administration in there.

El Niño has doused northern California, but farmers in the state’s Central Valley won’t see much benefit. The Obama Administration is again indulging its progressive friends at the expense of low-income communities.

The Bureau of Reclamation recently announced that Central Valley Project agricultural water contractors south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta would receive a mere 5% of their contractual allocation this year despite brimming reservoirs in the North. Lake Shasta is at 90% capacity, and billions of gallons of water were released from Lake Folsom this winter to avert flooding.

Meantime, wildlife refuges and farmers north of the Delta—those in Democratic Reps. Jerry McNerney and John Garamendi’s districts—will get 100% of the water they’re owed. The liberal gentry in the Bay Area, which pipes its pristine water directly from Hetch Hetchy reservoir, also won’t be affected by this government water rationing. Federal biological opinions limit Delta water pumps to a third of capacity to protect endangered smelt and salmon, which can get sucked into the machines. Despite these restrictions, fish populations continue to decline.

The Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged last year that “existing regulatory mechanisms have not proven adequate” to halt the smelt’s decline and that “we are unable to determine with certainty which threats or combinations of threats are directly responsible.” The bigger culprits appear to be invasive species, Delta farm fertilizer, Sacramento effluence, the drought and, perhaps, natural selection.

The Obama Administration is nonetheless doubling down on a failed policy. Amid this winter’s storms, Delta water regulators reduced water pumping to protect putatively vulnerable larval and juvenile smelt. Three adult smelt—and no juveniles or larvae—have been killed by the pumps this year. CONTINUE AT SITE

We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty’s worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West. Vigorous civilizations are a rarer breed. They change the world. But don’t last.

America used to be vigorous when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. It is growing decadent. And decadent civilizations fall to barbarians.

The barbaric civilization is purely crude. It runs on kinship. It is pre-rational and its guiding ethos is self-esteem often misspelled as honor. It has no notion of enduring facts or objective reasoning. It is incapable of recognizing inconsistencies in its code because truth is whatever it feels at a given time.

The barbarian has no morals. He obeys tribal codes that he does not understand, but accepts. Fairness exists only relative to his own interests. Empathy is foreign to him. He holds life cheaply and kills casually. He loathes outsiders and obeys no universal laws. His tribe is ruled by hierarchies which gain their position through brutality and trickery. And he assumes the world works the same way.

He cannot and will not interact with a more advanced civilization on any terms other than these. Cunning barbarians may learn the languages of more advanced civilizations and even ape their values for their own purposes, but they never adopt them. When a barbarian speaks of democracy, he means power. When he talks of religion, he means the worship of his own power. When he prattles of morality, he does not mean universal laws, but anything that impinges on his own power.

To the barbarian, all values are reducible to power. They are his gods, his religions and his laws.

The decadents are obsessed with filtering hierarchies of ideas and people. Their societies have grown too complex, too full of ideas, cultures and interest groups. The management of this unmanageable plenitude occupies all the energies of their fading civilization. They are the miser with the fading memory still struggling to count his gold. Decadents have too much of everything and no idea what to do with it except to squander it in fits of misguided and destructive impulses.

The decadent civilization has a million laws which it applies selectively. Its universal laws, inherited from a vigorous civilization, are buried between equivocation. Decadents don’t believe in objective truths and so they cannot have universal laws. Instead they mire them in so many legalisms as to be meaningless. The laws must be interpreted by a specialized caste. Everyone is always in violation of some obscure law. Life depends on a lawless dispensation from the law. Justice is impossible. Corruption is mandatory. The only way for the decadent civilization to function is to bypass its own safeguards through corruption, black markets and lobbying. This is true in all things.

The crucial task of the law is interpretation that keeps everyone from constantly being punished. This task is accomplished by lawyers, lobbyists and the politicians who are constantly adding more laws to fix the interpretations in the old laws creating a complex mass of contradictory information.

This holds true in every other area of decadent life.

Interpretation is what the decadent civilization does best. While vigorous civilizations discover new things, decadent civilizations endlessly categorize and re-categorize them to accommodate intellectual fads. Decadents compulsively seek new systems of organization. The computer age is the glorious final era of the decadents who finally have infinite ways to manage infinite information.

What they lack is any way of distinguishing what is worthwhile in both information and systems.

The presentation “Islam: Fear over Knowledge” provides the “knowledge you need to combat Islamophobia,” stated Geneva Pope from the localInterfaith Communities for Dialogue on April 3 in an Annandale, Virginia, Presbyterian church. This biased introduction set the tone for a whitewashing of Islam before over 100 listeners by Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brownand Imam Zia Makhdoom in an event promoted by the Fairfax, Virginia, county government.

Makhdoom, whose Alexandria, Virginia, mosquehas featured various extremist affiliations, began the event proclaiming Islam a “message of peace, of brotherhood, and of equality for the entire humanity.” Christians in places like Egypt and Iraq “have lived there for centuries peaceably, as brothers and sisters,” although “conditions may have not have been perfect.” Numerous Middle Eastern Christians who have endured centuries as persecuted dhimmis under Muslim-majority rule refute his contentions (see here, here, here, and here).

“Taking one life is the equivalent of taking the life of the entire humanity” is a teaching “verbatim in the Quran,” Makhdoom stated with an oft-invoked reference to Quran 5:32. Yet, as is almost universal among Muslim apologists like him, his not so verbatim scriptural quotation ignored this verse’s exception forfitna, an Arabic word translated by the Muslim reformer Irshad Manji as “villainy in the land.” Sanctioned by the subsequent verse 5:33’s brutal death penalty, fitna invocations have justified violence against all kinds of Islam’s perceived opponents such as American troops in Afghanistan.

Our dysfunctional federal government’s bungling is killing people.

Example: Every year, more than half a million patients undergoing a common medical procedure risk getting a superbug infection because their doctor is using a contaminated instrument. A doctor inserts a thin, tubular scope down your throat and into your digestive system to treat cancer and other problems. You assume the tube is clean. Think again.

The scope’s defective design allows bacteria to grow even after it’s rigorously cleaned between patients. The Food and Drug Administration, whose job is to ensure the safety of medical devices, has known about this problem since 2012 but dawdled while patients died. Three months ago, Olympus, the manufacturer of most of these specialized scopes (duodenoscopes), began recalling them.

Yet numerous hospitals are still using them, and patients are still getting infected and dying – eight more infections and two more deaths according to last month’s FDA data.

Even at prestigious institutions such as UCLA Medical Center, New York-Presbyterian, Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, Massachusetts General in Boston and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, patients have been infected with superbugs from contaminated duodenoscopes.

When hospitals fail to warn patients about the risk, it makes a mockery of the idea that patients are giving “informed consent” before the procedure, says medical-safety expert Lawrence Muscarella.

Worse, the FDA and another federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, go along with the hush-up about which hospitals are having a problem. These agencies are supposed to work for us – the public – but clearly they’re siding with the hospitals. The FDA is stonewalling about where the two most recent deaths occurred.

In the wake of the terror attacks in Belgium, news reports once again focused on how so-called “No Go Zones” in Europe create neighborhoods where communities develop that, although are geographically located within major cities, insulate themselves from their surroundings, fostering the mindset that cooperating with law enforcement is dangerous and even traitorous.

The residents eye law enforcement officers with great suspicion if not outright animosity. The situation is exacerbated because while they fear law enforcement, they may well also fear their neighbors who may take revenge against them for cooperating with law enforcement.

These neighborhoods become “cultural islands” that eschew the cultures and values of the cities and countries in which they grow — a virtual malignancy that ultimately comes to threaten its host city and country because within this cocoon radical Islamists are shielded from law enforcement, find shelter and support and an ample supply of potential terror recruits.

These communities are inhabited by many Muslim refugees who cannot be effectively screened.

This makes assimilation by the residents of these isolated communities unlikely if not impossible and creates breeding grounds for crime and, in this era and under these circumstances- breeding grounds for terrorism.

While there are no actual “No Go Zones” in the United States, there are neighborhoods scattered around the United States, where the concentration of ethnic immigrant minorities is so great that police find themselves unable to make the sort of inroads that they should be able to make in order to effectively police these communities. Adding to the high density of these aliens in these communities is the issue of foreign languages often being the prevalent language in such “ghettos.” This gives new meaning to the term “Language Barrier.”

Another attempt by the Obama administration to run out the clock on a scandal.

For more than three years, the Treasury Department has been looking into fraud committed by solar companies who received taxpayer loans from the Obama administration. But they have yet to release their findings, and Congress wants to know what the hell is going on.

Daily Caller:

Republicans senators sent a letter Monday to Treasury Inspectors General Eric Thorson and J. Russell George, asking the officials for updates regarding the agency’s investigation into solar companies that inflated the market value of their products to get more taxpayer cash.

“As you are aware, the Department recently indicated that applicants included ineligible costs or otherwise overstated the value of their solar energy investments by claiming approximately $1.3 billion in unwarranted cash grants,” Republican senators, led by Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, wrote in a letter to Treasury officials obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Treasury Department said it would publish its findings by June 2015, but that never happened. Republicans are once again hammering the agency for not releasing the results of a probe into whether taxpayers were fleeced for billions of dollars.

Republicans noted the amount of potential solar energy fraud was “more than two-and-a-half times the amount of the Solyndra default.”

Republicans wrote to the department in November asking for the status of their investigation into solar companies, and lawmakers are again asking for Treasury officials to handover the “final results of your investigations.”

“Based on the information available, we remain concerned that the 1603 cash grant program and the administration of the investment tax credits lack sufficient transparency, oversight and enforcement to protect taxpayers,” Murkowski and her colleagues wrote to the Treasury in November.

Despite warnings that Muslim terrorists remain a grave threat to the United States, President Obama gave two dangerous veteran jihadists at Guantanamo Bay get-out-of-jail-free cards earlier this month.

Emptying out Guantanamo is a longtime goal of Obama. Shuttering the terrorist detention facility located on U.S.-held territory in Cuba has been a goal of President Obama, going back at least to the campaign trail in 2008. He wants to close the prison camp and unleash the worst of the worst among Islamic terrorists, allowing them to wreak havoc and kill more Americans. Violent Muslim militants are merely misunderstood people from a foreign culture, in Obama’s view, and setting them free is just the right thing to do as he sees it.

Obama doesn’t give a farthing’s cuss about the prospect of these hardened terrorists returning to the glories of jihad-fighting after leaving Gitmo. Terrorists, freedom fighters — why quibble? They’re all more or less the same to the president.

The first newly freed detainee, Salem Abdul Salem Ghereby (also known as Rafdat Muhammad Faqi Aljj Saqqaf, Falen Gherebi, and Salim Gherebi), a 55-year-old Libyan national, was transferred to Senegal on April 3.

Senegal, a French-speaking country on Africa’s western coast, also accepted Ghereby’s comrade-in-jihad, Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr (also known as Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjoub, Omar Mohammed Khalifh, and Omar Mohamad Khalifah), another Libyan national who is thought to be 43 or 44 years old.

Why Senegal? Perhaps because about 95 percent of Senegal’s up to 14 million inhabitants are Muslims.

Although Senegal “has shown no signs of jihadist terrorism” and its government has cracked down on terrorist financing and money laundering in the region, it is bordered by Islamist violence-plagued Mali and Mauritania. According to the American Foreign Policy Council, there are concerns that Senegal “presents a potential ‘backdoor’ for radical, jihadist Islam, which already exhibits a major presence in rapidly-changing North Africa.”

According to a 2008 Department of Defense report, Ghereby was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) also known as Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya, which is reportedly tied to al-Qaeda.