ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The U.S. Should Abandon the Paris Agreement and Learn from China The Clean Power Plan, too, risks America’s industrial future. By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on December 7th, 2016

One of the first items of business for the Trump administration will be to decide what to do with the Paris Agreement. In September, the Obama administration deposited with the United Nations general secretary an instrument accepting the Paris climate treaty without first asking the Senate for its advice and consent. As matters stand, the United States is now bound to the Obama administration’s target of reducing economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. The domestic counterpart of the Paris Agreement is the EPA’s Clean Power Plan — also crafted to avoid congressional approval — which is how the Obama administration intends for the U.S. to achieve its Paris obligations.

During the presidential election, Donald Trump denounced one-sided trade deals for destroying American jobs. The Paris Agreement is the mother and father of one-sided deals. It requires the United States to keep cutting its emissions in perpetuity irrespective of what anyone else does. Unlike the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (which the Senate would have rejected had Bill Clinton sent it to the Senate), there are no escape hatches. It forces the U.S. to play by its own rules while letting everyone else play by their own. Short of repudiating the whole treaty, once on the escalator, there’s no way off.

It is the latest product of U.N. climate conferences that kicked off with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Canadian Maurice Strong organized the Earth Summit. His genius was to see that government leaders and bureaucrats don’t like being left out. If you put negotiators from different countries in the same room, the pressure will be on them to find points of agreement. In that way, the U.N. created a climate-change process that acquired a momentum of its own. “The process is the policy,” Strong told an aide at the 1972 U.N. Stockholm conference on the environment, which Strong also organized. What appears important to delegates at the negotiating table are the detailed policy commitments, when what really matters is keeping the process going so that it sucks in more power, influence, and money.

Because the process develops a logic of its own, it ends up producing ridiculous positions that the nations of the world nonetheless sign on to. Article 2 of the Paris Agreement sets a new goal of limiting temperature increases to only 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. It had been cooked up by the Alliance of Small Island States. Along with polar bears, the small island states are featured as the prime victims in the climate-change morality tale: innocents on remote islands condemned to be swept away in a flood of biblical significance, to pay for the climate sins of the rich.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

U.S. Leaders Don’t Answer to Beijing by Fred Fleitz

Posted By on December 7th, 2016

According to the mainstream media, foreign policy experts and Democrats, President-elect Donald Trump made a serious error when he accepted a phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen congratulating him on winning the 2016 presidential election. Trump’s critics apparently believe Mr. Trump is not allowed to speak with the president of one of the world’s leading democracies and a close friend of the United Stats because the Chinese government forbids this.

Sorry, but China does not tell American officials who they can and cannot talk to. Despite the 1979 decision to open diplomatic relations with China and withdraw diplomatic relations with Taiwan, America and Taiwan remain close friends. We sell Taiwan billions of dollars in military hardware. America may have an unofficial relationship with Taiwan, but this does not mean our leaders should shun or insult Taiwan’s president.

Trump’s critics claim his decision to accept Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s congratulatory phone call indicates he does not understand foreign policy. I disagree. This was an act of leadership by a president-elect who plans to enact a new U.S. foreign policy that rejects President Obama’s failed foreign policy of retreat, appeasement and leading from behind.

The Donald Trump-Tsai Ing-wen phone call also could reflect an intention by the Trump administration to reevaluate America’s relationship with Taiwan and possibly upgrade relations. Such a move is long overdue. Taiwan is by any measure a thriving democracy and an independent state. Although the United States in 1979 recognized that China and Taiwan believe in a “one China” policy, the U.S. government has never officially endorsed this position. Instead of a U.S. embassy or consulate in Taipei, the United States maintains a nonprofit center known as the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), which operates as a barely unofficial embassy. Trump advisers are right in considering whether it is time to reevaluate U.S.-relations with Taiwan and the AIT. These advisers include China expert Peter Navarro, who contributed to the Center for Security Policy’s recent book on the growing threat from China, Warning Order: China Prepares for Conflict, and Why We Must Do the Same.

Instead of piling on Donald Trump for taking a phone call from the leader of a U.S. ally, Trump critics should be focusing on how the lack of global leadership by Barack Obama created a power vacuum in the Asia-Pacific region that emboldened China to engage in belligerent actions to seize control of almost the entire South China Sea. This action is endangering the economies and security of America’s friend and allies in the region and also threatens freedom of navigation in a crucial sea area.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Near Miracle Called America By Dr. Robin McFee

Posted By on December 7th, 2016

For those of us who love our country – it is refreshing to hear someone of stature describe the US as a near miracle of great global good; such sentiments are not often spoken in the modern era of globalism and anti-American rhetoric. Thankfully there seems to be an emergence, a renewal perhaps, of interest in our nation’s birth, as evidenced by the best seller lists of non-fiction. Thank God……

Because…. this tempestuous election year I found myself withdrawing into a sort of intellectual womb – trying to satisfy a need for political inspiration or at least connecting with folks who forged the greatest nation in the modern world – our nation. Perhaps you, too, found the need to go back in time to when it all started. And then trying to make sense of how we could get so far from the Framers’ intentions for the republic. So like Ben and Jerry’s for the brain, I’ve been binging on the writings of our founding fathers. Books like The Quartet, The Fever of 1721, Washington’s Secret Six, The Jefferson Bible, Hamilton, Faiths of our Fathers, The Federalist Papers, and similar.

Speaking of which….have you ever read the Silence Dogood letters? If not, may I suggest going online and reading those insightful missives that appeared in James Franklin’s New England Courant? Beyond being good literature, they take political satire and moral commentary to a level not readily viewed in early 18th Century America. That a largely self taught adolescent wrote them, all the while quoting some of the great philosophers (such as Cato) in their native language ought to impress, even if that young man happened to be Benjamin Franklin. Consider our nation was forged by adolescents of intellect and courage – Benjamin Tallmadge, Nathan Hale, Alexander Hamilton, and so many others – all of whom not only would be familiar with, they would be conversant about Cato, Voltaire, Cicero, Plato, Virgil, Epictetus, and similar. On the other hand, if I asked the average adolescent who Cato was, if I didn’t get a blank stare, the answer would likely be the Green Hornet’s side kick. And as for quoting, let alone reading Latin or Greek – unless the child is a prodigy or fortunate to attend a private school or exceptional public school – good luck with that. Yet nearly 300 years ago one might argue the average person was far more literate, even if not as well educated, as our average citizen.

More is the pity, because the Framers designed our nation around the notion of the citizen statesmen, and that the foundation of our country would be an engaged citizenry. I think if they listened to the average citizen today, most of the founding fathers and mothers might want to rise from the grave just so they could die all over again.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Report: Nearly Half of American Jihadists are Not Fighting for ISIS By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on December 7th, 2016

A new study out of George Washington University underscores that nearly half of all terrorism charges brought since March 2011 are connected to terrorist groups other than the Islamic State.

“The jihadist threat to America goes far beyond the Islamic State (IS),” writes Sarah Gilkes from GWU’s Project on Extremism. “While there has been a relative surge in the number of U.S. persons radicalized and recruited by the group in the last five years, other jihadist organizations, primarily al-Qaeda, remain popular and active.”

She noted that “many American recruits are driven by a broad counter-cultural idealism, and are less tangled up in the minutiae of the power plays that divide such groups abroad.”

From March 2011 to July 31, 2016, 178 people were charged with terrorism-related offenses in this country; 79 of those had no relation to ISIS.

Thirty-eight percent of those accused of working on behalf of a terrorist group other than ISIS attempted or successfully traveled abroad to locations such as Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Forty-six percent of ISIS recruits attempted or completed travel during the same period.

Only four of the people accused of working for terror groups other than ISIS were refugees. Fifty-two of the 79 were U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, reflecting a trend of truly homegrown jihad. Two were in the country illegally at the time of their arrest, and one was here on a student visa, states the report.

The non-ISIS jihadists were charged in 22 states, with New York having the largest share of cases at 11. Twenty-eight percent of those charged were converts to Islam.

The terror-related arrests involved not just those planning or conducting attacks but fundraisers and recruiters. The tally includes only Salafi jihadist groups and does not include arrests linked to groups like Hezbollah or Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama’s Final National Security Speech: ‘Stigmatize Good, Patriotic Muslims,’ and You Fuel Terrorism By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on December 7th, 2016

President Obama emphasized the absence of another 9/11-scale attack on the homeland during his two terms in office and argued that acting “like this is a war between the United States and Islam” would result in more American deaths and “the loss of the very principles we claim to defend.”

Speaking to service members at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa today, Obama highlighted policy moments during his tenure including the Iraq pullout and Afghanistan surge. He claimed that “by any measure, core al-Qaeda, the organization that hit us on 9/11, is a shadow of its former self.”

In the Middle East, he noted, “most dangerously, we saw the emergence of ISIL, the successor to al-Qaeda in Iraq, which fights as both a terrorist network and an insurgency.” He added that keeping U.S. forces in Iraq to help prevent the creation of the Islamic State “was not an option” since “Iraqis wanted our military presence to end.”

The president blamed factors including “the government in Baghdad that pursued a sectarian agenda, a brutal dictator in Syria who lost control of large parts of the country, social media that reached a global pool of recruits and a hollowing out of Iraq security forces, which were ultimately overrun in Mosul in 2014.”

Washington’s response to the fall of Mosul refused, Obama said, “to repeat some of the mistakes of the 2003 invasion that have helped to give rise to the organization that became ISIL in the first place.”

“The campaign against ISIL has been relentless, it has been sustainable, it has been multilateral, and it demonstrates a shift in how we’ve taken the fight to terrorists everywhere, from south Asia to the Sahel,” he said. “Instead of pushing all of the burden onto American ground troops, instead of trying to mount invasions wherever terrorists appear, we’ve built a network of partners.”

“No foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland,” Obama declared. “And it’s not because they didn’t try. Plots have been disrupted, terrorists have been taken off the battlefield.”

The president acknowledged attacks on the homeland “carried out by homegrown and largely isolated individuals who were radicalized online.””These deranged killers can’t inflict the sort of mass casualties that we saw on 9/11,” he said. “But the pain of those who lost loved ones in Boston and San Bernardino and Fort Hood and Orlando, that pain continues to this day. And in some cases, it has stirred fear in our populations and threatens to change how we think about ourselves and our lives.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

BRUCE WALKER: THE LESSONS OF PEARL HARBOR

Posted By on December 7th, 2016

Seventy-five years ago, on December 7, 1941, the American Navy suffered the worst defeat in its history when a force led by six Japanese fleet carriers launched a surprise attack at the battleships at Pearl Harbor. Two of the eight battleships, Arizona and Oklahoma, were destroyed, and the other six were knocked out of action for many months. The Army Air Corps fields were attacked with great loss, and other smaller naval vessels were attacked as well.

The American carriers were at sea. Had those carriers been at Pearl Harbor, the whole course of the Pacific War would have been very different. During the first year of that conflict, only the carriers were able to slow down the Japanese advance. Battleships proved too vulnerable to air attack to fight major fleet actions alone. American submarines, which eventually would prove an incredibly potent force in the Pacific, were plagued by multiple problems with torpedoes which made them almost useless for many months.

The Japanese still might have inflicted crippling damage even with the carriers gone. The fuel depots for the American Fleet were at Pearl Harbor and so were major repair and maintenance facilities. Without these, the American Fleet could have had to operate out of San Diego, thousands of miles east.

The Japanese could also have utterly destroyed all the battleships, instead of just Arizona and Oklahoma, and these other battleships in two years were refitted and fighting the Japanese Navy. There were a number of other, smaller naval vessels at Pearl Harbor, which would be desperately needed in the first six months of 1942 and which follow-up attacks by the Japanese would have damaged or sunk.

Admiral Nagumo might have also done what Newt Gingrich played out in one of his brilliant counterfactual novels and ordered the two Japanese battleships with their 14-inch guns to pound every target those guns could reach while coyly holding the six Japanese fleet carriers back to pound on returning American carriers.

As America enters an increasingly dangerous world with our European allies threatened from within and our Pacific allies doubting our resolve, our incoming President Trump ought to grasp the dangers we face. (The superb team of capable military commanders he is surrounding himself with will surely help him with this task.)

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama Goes Out Lying About Islamic Terror Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 7th, 2016

Obama began his misspent time in office lying about Islamic terrorism and he ends it in the same shameful way. From Afghanistan to Iraq and right back to Islamic terror at home, he has never stopped lying about the threat that we face.

The speech was bizarre. After two terms of insisting that we weren’t at war with the terrorists, he grandly boasts that, “I will become the first President of the United States to serve two full terms during a time of war.”

Considering that the war was largely caused by his refusal to fight it, it’s an odd form of self-glorification. It’s like a fire chief boasting that the building next door has been on fire for two weeks because he refuses to put out the flames.

Having crippled the military, he claims that he believes it “must remain, the strongest fighting force the world has ever known”.Then there’s the bizarre revisionism of his disastrous Afghan surge and Iraq withdrawal, which considering the rise of ISIS now seems more insane than ever, being replayed one more time.

“When I took office, the United States was focused overwhelmingly on Iraq, where nearly 150,000 American troops had spent years fighting an insurgency and helping to build a democratic government. Meanwhile, al Qaeda had regrouped in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was actively planning attacks against our homeland. So we brought nearly 150,000 troops home from Iraq, consistent with the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the previous administration, and we surged our efforts along with our allies in Afghanistan, which allowed us to focus on dismantling al Qaeda and give the Afghan government the opportunity to succeed.”

Except the CIA had pointed out that there 50 to 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.

As he justified sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year, President Barack Obama’s description Tuesday of the al Qaeda “cancer” in that country left out one key fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Not All the News That’s Fit to Print College newspapers display anti-Israel bias on behalf of Palestinianism. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on December 7th, 2016

When Elmer Davis, director of FDR’s Office of War Information, observed that “. . . you cannot do much with people who are convinced that they are the sole authorized custodians of Truth and that whoever differs from them is ipso facto wrong” he may well have been speaking about editors of college newspapers who have purposely violated the central purpose of journalism and have allowed one ideology, not facts and alternate opinions, to hijack the editorial composition of their publications and purge their respective newspapers of any content—news or opinion—that contradicts a pro-Palestinian narrative and would provide a defense of Israel.

The latest example is a controversy involving The McGill Daily and its recent astonishing admission that it is the paper’s policy to not publish “pieces which promote a Zionist worldview, or any other ideology which we consider oppressive.”

“While we recognize that, for some, Zionism represents an important freedom project,” the editors wrote in a defense of their odious policy, “we also recognize that it functions as a settler-colonial ideology that perpetuates the displacement and the oppression of the Palestinian people.”

A McGill student, Molly Harris, had filed a complaint with the Students’ Society of McGill University’s (SSMU) equity committee. In that complaint, Harris contended that, based on the paper’s obvious anti-Israel bias, and “a set of virulently anti-Semitic tweets from a McGill Daily writer,” a “culture of anti-Semitism” defined the Daily—a belief seemingly confirmed by the fact that several of the paper’s editors themselves are BDS supporters and none of the staffers are Jewish.

Of course, in addition to the existence of a fundamental anti-Semitism permeating the editorial environment of The Daily, there is also the core issue of what responsibility a newspaper has to not insert personal biases and ideology into its stories, and to provide space for alternate views on many issues—including the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—in the opinion sections of the paper.

At Connecticut College, Professor Andrew Pessin also found himself vilified on campus, not only by a cadre of ethnic hustlers and activists, but by fellow faculty and an administration that were slow to defend Pessin’s right to express himself—even when, as in this case, his ideas were certainly within the realm of reasonable conversation about a difficult topic: the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Central to the campaign of libels waged against Pessin was the part played by the College’s student newspaper, The College Voice.

In August of 2014, during Israel’s incursions into Gaza to suppress deadly rocket fire aimed at Jewish citizens, Pessin, a teacher of religion and philosophy, wrote on his Facebook page a description of how he perceived Hamas, the ruling political entity in Gaza: “One image which essentializes the current situation in Gaza might be this. You’ve got a rabid pit bull chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left’s Panic Attack Over Dr. Ben Carson Progressive prejudices unleashed. December 7, 2016 Joseph Klein

Posted By on December 7th, 2016

The progressive Left’s opposition to President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Ben Carson to be the next Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is predictably condescending, biased and hypocritical. For example, out-of-touch Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called Carson a “disconcerting and disturbingly unqualified choice.” Democratic Senate Minority Leader-in-waiting Chuck Schumer said he had “serious concerns about Dr. Carson’s lack of expertise and experience in dealing with housing issues. Someone who is as anti-government as him is a strange fit for housing secretary, to say the least.”

It is incredible how progressives such as Pelosi and Schumer, neither of whom experienced real poverty first hand, are ready to demean Ben Carson, who grew up in abject poverty. They cannot deal with the fact that an incredibly accomplished African-American, who does not buy into the failed progressive ideology of big government social engineering, is poised to take over the leadership of a failing government bureaucracy that would rather dabble in social engineering than get its own house in order. Ben Carson simply does not fit the progressive image of how an African-American should think and act.

“I think the way that I’m treated, you know, by the left is racism,” Ben Carson has said. “Because they assume because you’re black, you have to think a certain way. And if you don’t think that way, you’re ‘Uncle Tom,’ you’re worthy of every horrible epithet they can come up with,” he added.

Ben Carson’s credentials for reforming the bloated, mismanaged Department of Housing and Urban Development come from his real life experience. “I grew up in Detroit, and I grew up in Boston. In Boston, we lived in the ghetto. There were a lot of violent episodes there. There were rats, there were roaches. It was dire poverty,” Carson said.

Carson’s opposition to government-imposed dependency is not based on some abstract conservative theory. He is not anti-government per se, but rejects the vicious circle of the dependency culture that progressive big government policies have fostered. “I’m interested in getting rid of dependency, and I want us to find a way to allow people to excel in our society, and as more and more people hear that message, they will recognize who is truly on their side and who is trying to keep them suppressed and cultivate their votes,” Carson said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2015.

Carson’s views are informed by what he saw first-hand growing up, including his own mother’s willingness to work at multiple jobs while raising her children as a single mother. She refused to simply rely on government handouts and instilled her work ethic in Ben Carson himself, which helped him escape the black hole of dependency. As a friend of Carson’s tweeted on Monday, “Dr. Carson’s mother worked 3 jobs at a time to keep them out of public housing, but he grew up around many who utilized housing programs.”

HUD is a failing government bureaucracy, which needs the kind of thorough overhaul that Ben Carson has the analytical skills to deliver, and the life experience to draw upon. He will not be trapped inside the bubble of conventional bureaucratic thinking that has led to gross financial mismanagement of HUD’s $50 billion annual budget during President Obama’s time in office, as well as poor performance. The fact that this renowned neurosurgeon, now retired, is willing to enter public service and bring a fresh outsider’s perspective to an entrenched government bureaucracy is to be lauded, not ridiculed.

During the tenure of the current HUD Secretary, Julián Castro, HUD’s own Office of Inspector General identified in its audit for fiscal years 2016 and 2015 eleven “material weaknesses,” seven “significant deficiencies” in internal controls, and five instances of “noncompliance” with applicable laws and regulations. “Overall, we determined that HUD’s financial management governance remained ineffective,” the Inspector General’s audit report concluded.

HUD’s management ignored over 60 prior recommendations on financial management presented by the Inspector General since 2012. Julián Castro became HUD Secretary in mid-2014, doing nothing since that time to fix the systemic problems at HUD. As Curtis Kalin, spokesman for Citizens Against Government Waste said to the Daily Caller News Foundation, “HUD’s failure to properly maintain basic financial documents calls into question the department’s commitment to safeguarding taxpayer dollars.”

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Anti-Breitbart Blacklist The angry Left looks to punish conservative media for Trump’s victory. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on December 7th, 2016

Someone behind an anonymous Twitter account is trying to destroy the influential conservative Breitbart News website by smearing it as “racist” – and he’s already scared at least 47 advertisers away from Breitbart.

In the current atmosphere of left-wing hysteria over the surprise election of Donald Trump as president, this blacklisting project has already earned an impressive return on investment. Breitbart is a target of the wrath of social justice warriors because it reports the truth about the Left and it used to be run by Stephen Bannon, now slated to become chief strategist in the Trump White House. Hurting Breitbart hurts Trump and Republicans in general, the thinking goes.

The campaign takes screenshots of advertisements on Breitbart and then harasses the advertisers, demanding that they stop advertising there. It also encourages people who hate Breitbart or Trump to take screenshots of a target company’s ads placed beside content deemed objectionable and tweet the images at advertisers along with a threat to stop patronizing that company.

The cowardly crusader hiding behind this effort to frighten advertisers away from Breitbart by lying about and mischaracterizing the provocative news website’s content goes by the user name Sleeping Giants.

The user’s identity seems safe for the moment but if Breitbart files a defamation lawsuit, Twitter could be forced to disclose the user’s identity.

So far the identity of the individual or individuals behind Sleeping Giants is not known, except to Shareen Pathak, managing editor at the DigiDay blog.

Pathak reports, “The creator of the account said he would prefer to remain anonymous to avoid being harassed by Trump supporters on the internet. He said he started the account because fake news and disinformation, are, in his opinion, two of the reasons why the election turned out in favor of Trump.”

The creator of Sleeping Giants reportedly told DigiDay, “The biggest way that this disinformation will continue is ad revenue, just like any news source. Beyond really wanting to stop this nonsense, this effort was really born out of the need to inform advertisers about the kind of material that they’re sponsoring. This isn’t supposed to be a boycotting effort as much as an information effort.”

The Sleeping Giants (Twitter handle: @slpng_giants) account was created last month. At time of writing the account had 3,144 tweets and 11,200 followers. Sleeping Giants says “We are trying to stop racist websites by stopping their ad dollars. Many companies don’t even know it’s happening. It’s time to tell them.”