ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Global warming: Science or dogma? By Michael Nadler

Posted By on April 15th, 2017

The Science & Environmental Policy Project is an outstanding resource for those unwilling to bury their heads in the sand and blindly accept the notion that human-caused catastrophic global warming is settled science and must be the highest priority in allocating the world’s limited economic resources.

Its April 1, 2017 issue of “The Week That Was” leads with the point that “government-funded Climate Studies have largely turned from empirical science to dogma — a belief system unsubstantiated by physical evidence.” Each week’s TWTW is chock full of commentary and links describing the latest science and other developments that challenge the climate change orthodoxy. This issue highlights the written testimony of John Christy, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Alabama’s State Climatologist and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, at the March 29th hearing titled “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method” held by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Professor Christy’s summary of his written testimony, supported by evidence in the full statement, gives rise to serious questions about those who think the subject of catastrophic global warming is no longer open to further scientific inquiry and debate.

“Science” is not a set of facts but a process or method that sets out a way for us to discover information and which attempts to determine the level of confidence we might have in that information. In the method, a “claim” or “hypothesis” is stated such that rigorous tests might be employed to test the claim to determine its credibility. If the claim fails a test, the claim is rejected or modified then tested again. When the “scientific method” is applied to the output from climate models of the IPCC AR5, specifically the bulk atmospheric temperature trends since 1979 (a key variable with a strong and obvious theoretical response to increasing GHGs in this period), I demonstrate that the consensus of the models fails the test to match the real-world observations by a significant margin…

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

EDWARD ROTHSTEIN REVIEWS “OSLO” THE STAGE PLAY

Posted By on April 15th, 2017

https://www.wsj.com/articles/oslo-review-getting-them-in-the-room-1492135200

EXCERPTS ONLY

The play is generally so smartly written, the characters and their realization so vivid, and the direction of Bartlett Sher so taut that you are drawn into a three-hour drama about something intrinsically undramatic, in which nuance and minutiae are generally more crucial than action: negotiations. It also helps quite a bit if you accept the play’s premises, which I think most people will.

I do not. But before explaining why, I should note that the play received its premiere last summer in Lincoln Center’s smaller Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and the production was slightly modified for its new “Broadway” run. The author’s research was considerable (he previously took on the Rwandan genocide in “The Overwhelming” and 1980s Afghanistan battles in “Blood and Gifts”). And the true-to-life aspect of “Oslo” is startling. Much of it takes place in a castle outside Oslo (abstractly suggested by Michael Yeargan’s spare sets) where a Norwegian sociologist, Terje Rød-Larsen —played by Jefferson Mays as a polished but obsessed ironist—is eager to apply theories of negotiation to the conflicts of the Middle East. Together with his wife, Mona Juul, an official in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry—played by Jennifer Ehle as a stern but gracious overseer who fills the audience in on details—they secretly assemble their subjects (neither side wanted to be publicly seen meeting the other) and set the wheels in motion. The surprise is that in September 1993 this resulted in the Oslo Accord, marked by a historic handshake on the White House lawn between Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s head, soon to lead the newly formed Palestinian Authority.

Since Mr. Rogers pulled off this success, it also seemed more plausible that the historical characters thought they could too. We are reminded of the play’s historical claims again and again, both by actors impersonating Israeli politicians ( Yossi Beilin, Shimon Peres ) and by the cast interjecting reminders of terrorist attacks and retaliations during the negotiations and, at play’s end, into the present. We are meant, ultimately, to side with Mr. Rød-Larsen, who declares that, despite it all, what was achieved should give us hope. The play is a plea for the value of negotiations.

The truth is, it depends. Most recently, negotiations removing chemical weapons from Syria proved to be a sham. The Vietnam peace talks led to a completely worthless agreement. And remember Munich?

It depends on who is negotiating and why. What we don’t learn from the play, for example, is that Israeli leaders had already had confidential meetings with a PLO-connected figure, Faisal Husseini, before the Norwegians took on this project and the talks led nowhere for multiple reasons. Oslo may have “succeeded” partly because it was so flawed: Israel had no security representative involved; the Palestinians had no legal representative. And the PLO, which had become impoverished and sidelined, was being brought back into power.

The play’s epilogue acknowledges that troubles did not end, but mentions just two terrorist attacks in the two years after the signing—both by Jews, one being the assassination of Rabin in November 1995. But that is a distortion. In May 1994, Arafat called for a “jihad” to liberate Jerusalem and referred to the agreement as part of a staged plan for dismantling Israel. And in the 21/2 years after the signing, 210 Israelis were murdered in terror attacks—three times the average toll of the previous 26 years. Before his 2001 death, Mr. Husseini boasted of the Oslo accord as a Palestinian Trojan Horse. …..

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

North Korea Parades New Long-Range ‘Frankenmissile’ Pyongyang displays military hardware, including apparently new intercontinental ballistic missile By Jonathan Cheng

Posted By on April 15th, 2017

SEOUL—North Korea showed off what appeared to be at least one new long-range missile at a military parade Saturday, as tensions simmer over the possibility of a military confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea.

The weaponry on show, which appeared to include a newly-modified intercontinental ballistic missile and two types of large launchers with never-before-seen missile canisters, is likely to trigger fresh concerns about the speed with which Pyongyang’s missile program has advanced in recent years.

A spokesman for South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense declined to comment on the possible new military hardware, saying more time was needed to analyze the missiles.

But an expert on North Korean weapons said the new hardware appeared to be far more advanced than expected.

“We’re totally floored right now,” said Dave Schmerler, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif. “I was not expecting to see this many new missile designs.”

Mr. Schmerler called the new ICBM, which appeared to have elements of two other ICBMS, the KN-08 and KN-14 missiles, a “frankenmissile.”

Missile experts said the new capabilities, if confirmed, may increase Pyongyang’s options as it seeks to test-launch a ICBM able to deliver a nuclear warhead to the continental U.S., as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un indicated in a speech in January. U.S. President Donald Trump responded after that new-year speech, posting on Twitter: “It won’t happen!”

Meanwhile, recent satellite imagery suggests North Korea may be preparing a sixth nuclear test at Punggye-ri, where the recorded blasts have escalated in strength since the first one in 2006.

CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why France Is Revolting Against The Ancien Regime Michel Gurfinkiel

Posted By on April 15th, 2017

No political observer in his right mind would have expected at the beginning of 2016 a Brexit vote in Britain in June, the resignation of David Cameron, a dogfight between the two main Brexit supporters and propagandists within the Tory party, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and eventually the rise of Theresa May. Nor would he have foreseen, for that matter, the election of Donald Trump in the United States on November 8.

Something similar is happening in France now — on a much larger and trickier scale. A few months ago, it was taken for granted that François Hollande’s ineffectual socialist administration would be succeeded after the 2017 election — on April 23 and May 7 — by a conservative government led either by former president Nicolas Sarkozy or former prime minister Alain Juppé: a simple matter of the swing of the pendulum, as is the rule among democracies. What the French are facing now, however, is an unprecedented upsurge of the National Front, the elimination of a generation of political leaders on almost all sides, and the collapse or near collapse of classic Left and Right parties. While many voters welcome the change, others are just in a state of shock. On March 18 — one month or so ahead of the first ballot — 34 per cent of the electorate and 43 per cent of voters under 35 had still not decided whether to vote or not.

On March 20, the five most prominent candidates debated for three and a half hours on TV. About 10 million people watched intently. It was indeed a great show — and probably a defining moment in the campaign.

All five candidates are rebels. Marine Le Pen, 48, the National Front leader, is a rebel by definition. She has managed to upgrade in many ways the party she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011, to purge it of many unsavoury elements, to trim its formerly racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric (including Holocaust denial) and to switch from Vichy nostalgia to a near-Gaullist statism. In fact, she has even been increasingly reluctant to use the name National Front, and has floated alternative labels, such as Rassemblement Bleu Marine (“Navy Blue Rally”, a play on words with her first name which means “Navy” in French).

For all that, she is still sticking to a binary, undemocratic and utterly revolutionary view of the world, positing a bitter fight between what she calls “the System” (the political and cultural elite, of both Right and Left, the “lobbies”, globalisation, multiculturalism, immigration, the European Union, the euro) and “the people” (the ordinary Frenchmen) whom she claims to represent exclusively. The implication is that either you side with the people and her against the System, and opt for a fully sovereign and autarkic France under her guidance, or you are, willingly or not, an enemy of the people. Interestingly enough, she used this logic against her own father, as he resisted the revamping and defascisation of the National Front, and did not flinch from expelling him from the party at the age of 86.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 65, a former minister of vocational education, rebelled against the Socialist party in 2008 to found the more hardline Parti de Gauche (Left Party) and then the Front de Gauche (Left Front) in association with a diminutive Communist Party. He eventually started a new movement in 2016, France Insoumise (Indomitable France).

Mélenchon can be described as the far-Left counterpart to Marine Le Pen. He shares almost entirely her binary, anti-elite, anti-globalisation, anti-lobbies, anti-European philosophy, except on the issue of immigration and multiculturalism, which he accepts as a natural and positive development. Just like her, he supports a strong, autarkic government, and sees himself as a charismatic popular leader who is not supposed, ultimately, to be answerable to any other authority.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Is a Bigger Threat Than Syria and North Korea Combined Damascus and Pyongyang violated their agreements. Tehran can comply and still threaten millions. By Michael Oren

Posted By on April 15th, 2017

Michael Oren is an Israeli historian, author, politician, former ambassador to the United States, and current member of the Knesset for the Kulanu party and the Deputy Minister for Diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office. He is author of many books, most recently ” Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide .”

The U.S. has signed agreements with three rogue regimes strictly limiting their unconventional military capacities. Two of those regimes—Syria and North Korea—brazenly violated the agreements, provoking game-changing responses from President Trump. But the third agreement—with Iran—is so inherently flawed that Tehran doesn’t even have to break it. Honoring it will be enough to endanger millions of lives.

The framework agreements with North Korea and Syria, concluded respectively in 1994 and 2013, were similar in many ways. Both recognized that the regimes already possessed weapons of mass destruction or at least the means to produce them. Both assumed that the regimes would surrender their arsenals under an international treaty and open their facilities to inspectors. And both believed that these repressive states, if properly engaged, could be brought into the community of nations.

All those assumptions were wrong. After withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Pyongyang tested five atomic weapons and developed intercontinental missiles capable of carrying them. Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, less than a year after signing the framework, reverted to gassing his own people. Bolstered by the inaction of the U.S. and backed by other powers, North Korea and Syria broke their commitments with impunity.

Or so it seemed. By ordering a Tomahawk missile attack on a Syrian air base, and a U.S. Navy strike force to patrol near North Korea’s coast, the Trump administration has upheld the frameworks and placed their violators on notice. This reassertion of power is welcomed by all of America’s allies, Israel among them. But for us, the most dangerous agreement of all is the one that may never need military enforcement. For us, the existential threat looms in a decade, when the agreement with Iran expires.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Every Public-School Student in Arizona Will Get a Chance at Choice The state expands its program offering $5,000 to $14,000 in education savings accounts. By Jonathan Butcher

Posted By on April 15th, 2017

It’s hard to find Aiden Yellowhair’s school on a map. He and his sister, Erin, are members of the Navajo Nation and attend the private St. Michael Indian School outside Window Rock, Ariz. The Catholic school’s website provides a helpful tip to follow Interstate 40 east from Flagstaff, but warns that “if you pass into New Mexico, you’ve gone too far.”

The remote location makes it easy to overlook St. Michael’s 400 students, but the school is an oasis on the 27,500-square-mile reservation. Only 66% of Arizona’s Native American high schoolers graduate in four years, a full 12 percentage points below the state average and nearly 20 points below the national average. At St. Michael, the principal says, 99% of students graduate and 98% of those attend college.

What allows Aiden and Erin to cover tuition at St. Michael is Arizona’s program for education savings accounts. Parents who take children out of public schools can opt in and receive, in a private account, a portion of the funds that the state would have spent on their education. Most students receive $5,000, but the deposits for children with special needs are roughly $14,000, depending on the diagnosis. That money can be used to pay for private-school tuition, tutoring, extracurricular activities, school uniforms and more.

Arizona created the program in 2011 for special-needs students, but since then lawmakers have slowly expanded eligibility—to children in military families, foster care, and failing schools, as well as those on Native American reservations. Today more than 3,300 students use the accounts, about 1% of those eligible.

Now the state has opened the gates to everyone. Last week Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that will give every public-school student in Arizona—1.2 million in all—an opportunity to apply to the program. New enrollment will be capped at about 5,500 students per year, up to a maximum of 30,000 in 2022. To apply, students must be currently enrolled in public school, except for incoming kindergartners. Applicants will be taken first come, first served.

Education savings accounts are a way to give parents more options. Many families would like to send their children to private schools or home-school them, but they simply cannot afford to—especially since they are taxed to pay for public schools regardless. A program like Arizona’s allows these parents to make the best choice for their families, whether that means a religious school, a secular private school or home schooling.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Andrew Harrod Reviews Farahnaz Ispahani’s New Insightful Book on Religious Persecution in Her Native Pakistan

Posted By on April 15th, 2017

This was an interesting, important read. It is getting a fair amount of attention on Twitter.

Former Pakistani parliamentarian Farahnaz Ispahani analyzes “Pakistan’s foundational dilemma—Muslim homeland or Islamic state” in her new book, Purifying the Land of the Pure: A History of Pakistan’s Religious Minorities. Therein she provides an observant overview of how recurring drives for Islamic theocracy dashed any founding vision of Pakistan as a secular state, to the detriment alike of Pakistan’s Muslim-majority and non-Muslim minorities.

Ispahani begins her historical review with the 1947 partition of Britain’s Indian colony into the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. “Pakistan was carved out of British India as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims—a majority enclave designed to protect against minority status in an undivided India” with its Hindu-majority. Given disparate ethnicities and new borders drawn along Hindu/Muslim sectarian lines, “Pakistan was not a territorial nation in the traditional sense. Its leaders had to explain its raison d’être, and most found it convenient to do so in religious terms.”

This faith-based identity appears in Pakistan’s name, the source of Ispahani’s book title. Pakistan arose amidst the 1930s Muslim India independence movement from an acronym encompassing the future country’s regions. Yet Pakistan also means “Land of the Pure” in Urdu, a “meaning embraced by Islamist activists since the country’s founding.”

While Pakistan’s population today is only three percent non-Muslim, Ispahani notes that in 1947 Pakistan (then including modern Bangladesh) was almost 23 percent non-Muslim. This previously more pluralistic Pakistani population drew hope from Pakistan’s founding Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader), Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Days before Pakistan’s August 14 independence, his famous August 11, 1947, “speech advanced the case for a secular, albeit Muslim-majority, Pakistan.”

Several of Jinnah’s fellow Muslim League leaders tried to suppress his speech’s publication, indicating for Ispahani the controversy surrounding Westernized, secular Pakistani leaders like him. “As time went on, Pakistan’s religious parties ferociously attacked Pakistan’s elites for their un-Islamic lifestyle while demanding greater Islamization,” demands often receiving appeasement. “Each round of Islamization was followed by demands for an even greater role for religion in public life.”

Already in 1949, notes Ispahani, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, offered a “vision for Pakistan diametrically-opposed to the secular one Jinnah had offered” in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly. “Liaquat, an Oxford-educated and thoroughly westernized landowner not known for personal religiosity,” supported the Objectives Resolution declaring an Islamic state as the objective in the drafting of Pakistan’s constitution. Many believe that he thereby “intended to placate clerics and Islamists only in the most cosmetic sense.” Nonetheless, Pakistan’s 1956 constitution, with the Objectives Resolution as preamble and numerous Islamic references, proclaimed the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Ispahani examines a similar duality in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in Pakistan’s 1970 elections. He “spoke of Islam as the personal religion of the majority” on the campaign trail but under his leadership Pakistan’s new “1973 constitution not only retained the Islamic provisions from earlier versions but also added new ones.” A 1974 constitutional amendment then began the ongoing persecution of the Ahmadi sect by declaring them non-Muslim. “Rejecting Bhutto’s hard-cultivated Islamic credentials,” his Islamist opposition in the 1977 elections emphasized his alcohol consumption.

Following the elections, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto in a coup and had him executed on trumped-up charges. Many associate Pakistan’s Islamization with Zia, Ispahani notes, who “used the phrase ‘soldier of Islam’ to describe himself in his very first speech” in power. Until his death in a mysterious 1988 plane crash, this dictator’s “Islamization of the nation was global in its scope and almost obsessive in its thoroughness,” as she documents in detail.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Putting ‘America first’ in the Mideast Ruthie Blum

Posted By on April 15th, 2017

America’s surgical strike on Syrian regime targets last Thursday night — and this Thursday’s “mother of all non-nuclear bomb” attack on Sunni terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — garnered surprisingly widespread bipartisan support, but put some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s critics in a bit of a rhetorical quandary. How could they word their defense of Trump’s bold yet not extreme warning shots without putting a dent in their distrust of the new occupant of the Oval Office?

Coming up with a solution to this problem turned out not to be so difficult for those pundits and politicians who have been paying close attention both to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his own people — most recently with chemical weapons — and to every syllable of Trump’s Twitter feed.

Their argument now goes that Trump’s latest military moves — and shift in attitude toward NATO — are examples of policy “flip-flopping” from the “isolationism” expressed in his inaugural address to a newfound global interventionism. They contend that a president who so drastically and swiftly shifts gears is perfectly capable of performing yet another about-face when the mood arises.

The trouble is that this assertion is both overly simplistic and inaccurate.

In the first place, Trump himself openly acknowledged that though he had said he was not going to intervene in Syria, he “changed his mind” when it was established that Assad was killing babies with sarin gas — after lying about having rid his country of chemical weapons. He has also openly declared war on the Islamic State group. This hardly constitutes a flip-flop. Instead, it indicates flexibility of thought and action on the part of a leader faced with a set of circumstances that warrants both.

The same goes for his statements on NATO, which he originally called “obsolete” and has since deemed necessary. His initial attack on the organization was that its members were not pulling their weight. This spurred them to make at least symbolic gestures, such as slightly increasing their budgets, to persuade him to reconsider. This is no small thing.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Said No to Troops in Syria. His Aides Aren’t So Sure. Eli Lake

Posted By on April 15th, 2017

Listening to his campaign rhetoric, the last thing you would expect Donald Trump to do as president would be to escalate a ground war in the Middle East. He won the Republican nomination last year by campaigning against both George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and Barack Obama’s war in Libya.

But as Trump’s young presidency has shown, many of the candidate’s foreign policy positions are not as firmly held as his supporters had hoped. It’s not just that Trump struck the Syrian regime after last week’s chemical weapons attack on rebels. It’s not just his recent reversals on Chinese currency manipulation and the NATO alliance. The president’s biggest foreign policy surprise may be yet to come.

Senior White House and administration officials tell me Trump’s national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, has been quietly pressing his colleagues to question the underlying assumptions of a draft war plan against the Islamic State that would maintain only a light U.S. ground troop presence in Syria. McMaster’s critics inside the administration say he wants to send tens of thousands of ground troops to the Euphrates River Valley. His supporters insist he is only trying to facilitate a better interagency process to develop Trump’s new strategy to defeat the self-described caliphate that controls territory in Iraq and Syria.

U.S. special operations forces and some conventional forces have been in Iraq and Syria since 2014, when Obama reversed course and ordered a new air campaign against the Islamic State. But so far, the U.S. presence on the ground has been much smaller and quieter than more traditional military campaigns, particularly for Syria. It’s the difference between boots on the ground and slippers on the ground.

Trump himself has been on different sides of this issue. He promised during his campaign that he would develop a plan to destroy the Islamic State. At times during the campaign he said he favored sending ground troops to Syria to accomplish this task. More recently, Trump told Fox Business this week that that would not be his approach to fighting the Syrian regime: “We’re not going into Syria,” he said.

IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Failure of Open Borders in Germany and Sweden Chancellor Merkel finally admits the obvious connection between refugee flows and increased security concerns. April 14, 2017 Joseph Klein

Posted By on April 14th, 2017

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has just woken up to the fact that terrorists have been entering her country under the guise of would-be asylum seekers. “There is no doubt that among the so many people who have sought shelter in our country were also persons who have become the focus of the security authorities,” Chancellor Merkel acknowledged. However, as if to exculpate herself from any responsibility, she added, “we should not forget that our country was already in the sights of Islamic terrorism before the many refugees came to us.” Her latter observation begs the question as to why she was so reckless in opening up Germany’s borders to a veritable flood of refugees, without any careful screening, in the first place.

With the upcoming election in mind as she seeks a fourth term, Chancellor Merkel was most likely trying to appear strong in reacting to the latest in a string of radical Islamic terrorist attacks in her country. Terrorists linked to ISIS are suspected of having detonated three bombs on Tuesday, next to a German soccer team bus in the town of Dortmund, which the chancellor called a “repugnant act.”

In September 2015, Chancellor Merkel boasted of how welcoming Germany was to the self-proclaimed refugees pouring in from the Middle East, Afghanistan and North Africa. “The right to political asylum has no limits on the number of asylum seekers,” she said. “As a strong, economically healthy country we have the strength to do what is necessary.” She opened Germany’s borders to nearly a million migrants and refugees from the world’s most terrorist ridden regions.

In 2016, Germany began to reap the horrors of the seeds of radical Islam and jihad that Chancellor Merkel had so enthusiastically planted. For example, ISIS claimed responsibility for the deadly December 19th truck assault on an outdoor Christmas market near a landmark church in Berlin, which killed 12 people and injured nearly 50 other victims. The individual who had allegedly carried out the attack was a 24-year-old Tunisian man whom had traveled to Italy from Tunisia in 2011 and spent time in an Italian jail before arriving in Germany in 2015. Last summer, there were four violent attacks in Germany within just a week’s time, which resulted in deaths and serious injuries. Two of them were committed by Syrian migrants. A third was committed by an Afghan asylum seeker. The fourth, a mass shooting in Munich, was committed by the German-born son of Iranian asylum-seekers.