Is the Climate Crusade Stalling? It’s past time to take a closer look at the climate zealots’ science. By Kathleen Hartnett White

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.”

School Reportedly Creates ‘Safe Space’ for Students Hurt by ‘Tequila Party’ Offended students also received counseling. By Katherine Timpf

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.

Ben Sasse Explains His #NeverTrump Stand By Elaina Plott

‘I don’t understand what motivates Chris Christie.”

That’s one of Senator Ben Sasse’s softer statements during our conversation Wednesday morning. We’re talking about the New Jersey governor’s recent endorsement of Donald Trump. After multiple media appearances this week following his declaration that he would not vote for Trump under any circumstance, Sasse can lambast the Republican front-runner on autopilot. But when reflecting on Trump’s latest string of high-profile surrogates, he struggles for the right words.

“I think — I mean — maybe you have to know Christie well to understand him, to speculate about it, and I don’t know him,” Sasse says. “But it’s pretty hard to read the transcripts of stuff he’s said in the past about Trump, put them up against what he says now, and say, ‘Oh, yeah. That is definitely a mature, adult consistency.’”

Beginning with a series of tweets in January questioning Trump for boasting about his marital infidelities, his support for single-payer healthcare, and his Second Amendment views, Sasse emerged early on as a vocal anti-Trump force. Now, through an open letter via Facebook, he’s pledging to oppose Trump no matter what, and is urging conservatives to unite around a third-party alternative should he clinch the nomination.

That Sasse — the wonky, conservative freshman from Nebraska — has joined the so-called #NeverTrump movement is not all that striking. What is striking is that he’s the only sitting senator to have done so, his voice echoing in a chamber empty of Republicans who will openly stand beside him. Sasse has grappled with that fact in recent days, especially as Christie and colleagues such as Alabama senator Jeff Sessions — Sasse says he still “like[s]” and “respect[s]” Sessions — join the Trump train. But in an arena where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House speaker Paul Ryan refuse to breathe the front-runner’s name, Sasse is launching his own offensive.

Christians Who Demonize Israel – Part III Sabeel: An Anti-Semitic Cult within the Church by Denis MacEoin

Sabeel’s theology distorts the Old Testament by denying Jews any ongoing connection with the land of their origin, and treating them as a people abandoned by God. There is also repeated disparagement of Judaism as “tribal,” “primitive,” and “exclusionary.”

Where most modern churches have left the anti-Semitism of the past behind and recognize that the Romans, not the Jews, crucified Jesus, this cult of what has been called “Christian Palestinianism” denies any historical or theological connection between the biblical Israel, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel.

Perhaps the gravest error made by Kairos, Sabeel, and other Christian groups who pursue a one-sided campaign is that they take away from the Palestinians any form of agency or self-reliance. If the Israelis are to blame for all that is wrong and the Palestinians are only victims, then Palestinians must be treated as children, without the will and power to act on their own behalf. Or who can act only through violence and hate.

Are these campaigns, replete with fraudulent charges, as in the Inquisition, really not about Palestinians at all, but just the latest incarnation of the old racist and religious hatred of Jews, and a clear expression of the “New Anti-Semitism”?

The Women-Hunt in Germany Muslim migrants openly follow, film and sexually harass teenaged girls in shopping mall. Stephen Brown

“If a woman gets raped walking in public alone, then she, herself, is at fault. She is only seducing men by her presence. She should have stayed home like a Muslim woman.”
– Dr. Abd Al-Aziz Fawzan Al-Fawzan, Professor of Islamic Law, Saudi Arabia.

Many Germans welcomed with open arms the million, mostly male and Muslim, migrants Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel invited into Germany last September. At train stations, they handed out water bottles to the newcomers, while holding signs stating: “Willkommen!” At first, everything was, as the Germans say, “Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen” (“peace, joy and happiness”).

But the good feeling these greeters created, especially among themselves, has somewhat dissipated, primarily due to the increasing number of reported sexual assaults by migrants against women and children. The best known incident was the sexual molestation of hundreds of women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve by about 1,000, mostly North African men that included migrants.

The latest such multicultural enriching incident to create similar outrage occurred last Thursday in Kiel, a northern German city in Schleswig-Holstein, a state bordering Denmark. Three teenage girls, aged 15, 16 and 17, were visiting a central shopping mall, the Sophienhof, in “broad daylight” when two young Afghan asylum seekers, aged 19 and 26, began to follow and film them with their cell phones.

“Evidently, the criminals then posted these films on their social networks with the result that more and more men came to a restaurant area of the Sophienhof in order to persecute, sneer at them and to frighten them,” reported the newspaper, Die Welt.

Like the women in Cologne and those participating in the anti-Morsi demonstrations on Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2013, the three Kiel teenagers were at first probably unaware they were being hunted, and that a pack of hyenas was slowly surrounding them.

IN THE UK HOUSE OF LORDS: STRONG SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL

House of Lords has been debating the Middle East, and some of the speeches have been notable for their resounding support for Israel.

Look, for example, at this offering, from Labour life peer Lord Livermore, a former party strategist and quite obviously not a Corbynista:

‘My Lords, I wish to use the short time available to argue for a better understanding of Israel. This task is urgent because we see now a disturbing resurgence of anti-Zionism that is bordering on the antisemitic, particularly, I regret to say, in sections of the left in British politics.

Israel is not of course above criticism. It is right that where necessary we should be critical of Israeli policy, conduct and behaviour. \

But too often this legitimate criticism of specific actions taken by Israel obscures the reality of Israel. When this reality is not heard, it creates a space for those with uglier motivations to build support for grotesque analogies between Israel and apartheid South Africa or even Nazi Germany.

I fear that on the left today what is in jeopardy is support not just for the conduct of Israel but for the concept of Israel. We see senior figures praising as friends those who are committed to the violent destruction of the Jewish homeland.

Indeed, we now have the perverse situation where people who consider themselves to be progressive oppose Israel in the belief that they are standing up for liberal values and human rights, but in doing so side with totalitarian Islamist regimes that abuse human rights and prohibit basic liberties.

I believe that it is the duty of progressives to stop the slide from opposition to specific policies of Israel towards opposition to the very existence of Israel. I want us to make the progressive case for a country where women have the right to vote, dress as they wish and say what they wish in a region where, too often, they are segregated and subjugated; for a country that is committed to the free practice of religion for all in a region where religious minorities are frequently suppressed and persecuted; for a country where gay people are not discriminated against, tortured, detained or executed, as they are almost everywhere else in the region; and for a country with a free press, freedom of expression, an independent judiciary and strong trade unions, all lacking in almost all neighbouring countries.

DAVID COLLIER: ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK….THE SHAME OF THE UK STUDENTS ****

During these weeks across the UK, universities are holding ‘Israeli apartheid week’. I have sat and viewed with revulsion as images have emerged of students on campus being fed raw radical Islamic propaganda. It has turned into a show, with each of the universities trying to outdo each other. This year Cambridge received praise for placing a military checkpoint in the centre of the Sidgwick lecture site at the University. Did I just call it raw Islamic propaganda? Yes, I did, but more on that later.

Just last night (24th Feb) I was at SOAS to hear yet another incessant and libellous attack against Israel. The usual tales were told, replete with examples of how Israel is randomly shooting at people in the street. The evening started with the host boasting about being able to recognise Zionists in the crowd and deliberately not letting them have the microphone when questions are tabled. They actually took photos at one event on Monday of a person they identified as ‘Zionist’ who had his hand up constantly. What they did is take pictures of him and Photoshopped different things into his hand and shared it amongst themselves. What type of university believes this is acceptable? SOAS does, we know Kings does too. In Oxford we have seen claims of rabid antisemitism. In Cambridge they simply want to intimidate the Jewish presence into submission first. In Westminster and others across the land, I’ve spoken to Jews, Zionists and Israelis who hide their identity whilst in University. This is the ‘safe space’ that has been created on UK campuses in 2016; safe to intimidate, safe to scare, safe to shout down, safe to silence, safe to lie and safe to hate.

Israeli Apartheid week is a recruiting tool for BDS on campus. It aims to flatten the complex situation in the Middle East into the binary black/white issue of Apartheid. If Israel can successfully be labelled an apartheid state, then the reservoir of the anti-Apartheid sentiment across the globe can be reawakened and directed towards Israel. Ironically, it is in universities, the very places that simple issues are meant to be opened up and investigated, one of the most complex and multi-faceted conflicts on the planet is reduced to propaganda rhetoric and blatantly false, one sided accusations of absolute guilt.
Apartheid

Let me firstly deal with this ridiculous and slanderous notion.

Take two brothers, both Arabs living in the British mandate in 1946. How they got there, how long their families were there is not relevant. According to the UN definition of the Palestinian refugee, even if the family had come looking for work in 1945 from Syria, they count as Palestinian. So do their children and grandchildren, even if they themselves were all born and lived all their days back on Syria or Lebanese soil. So be it. These are just elements that contribute to the absurdity of the conflict, and have to be accepted as factual without adhering to any ethical, moral or logical position.

During 1948, the two brother’s lives took different paths. One, having moved to a village near Haifa that worked in friendship with the local Jewish towns, remained a passive bystander as civil war erupted in the region. The civil war erupted because the Arab population, egged on by regional Arab dictatorships, had refused to accept the UN decision on Jewish independence over any part of the land. Some people do argue that the Jewish acceptance of the deal was a ploy, and the Jewish national aspirations dictated that the area should turn violent regardless. This too is irrelevant. Factually we know the Arabs rejected the deal and turned violent, the Jews accepted the deal and responded to the violence by defending against those that openly sought to destroy them.

David Singer: End the West Bank Refugee Gravy Train

With more than three million Syrians fleeing war-torn Syria seeking safe havens in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Europe – scarce United Nations resources continue to be used supporting and maintaining about 760,000 Palestinian Arabs currently living in the West Bank and registered as “refugees” with the United Nations Relief And Works Agency (UNRWA).

Their refugee categorization and status was changed on 3 January 2013 when PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas replaced the “Palestinian Authority” with the “State of Palestine” by this decree:

“Official documents, seals, signs and letterheads of the Palestinian National Authority official and national institutions shall be amended by replacing the name ‘Palestinian National Authority’ whenever it appears by the name ‘State of Palestine’ and by adopting the emblem of the State of Palestine.”

John Whitbeck – a legal advisor to the Palestinian team in negotiations with Israel – has written on the significance of this name change:

“In his correspondence, Yasser Arafat used to list all three of his titles under his signature — President of the State of Palestine, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and President of the Palestinian Authority (in that order of precedence). It is both legally and politically noteworthy that, in signing this decree, Mahmoud Abbas has listed only the first two titles. The Trojan horse called the “Palestinian Authority” in accordance with the Oslo interim agreements and the “Palestinian National Authority” by Palestinians has served its purpose by introducing the institutions of the State of Palestine on the soil of Palestine and has now ceased to exist.”

Abbas’s semantic ploy had left Israel without its designated negotiating partner under the Oslo Accords and had effectively ended negotiations for the creation a Palestinian State under the Bush Roadmap.

When To Whip A Virgin: Danish Imam tells (video)

No, it’s not one of those kinky sex videos.

It’s an imam, and a prominent one at that (apparently), in one of those former Viking lands that seem set on committing cultural suicide and taking the rest of Europe down with them.

He’s explaining to the female of the species the mandatory punishments the Religion of Peace metes out to married women on the one hand and virgins on the other if they should have the temerity to leave said creed.

Remember, this is not a lecture in some Middle Eastern hellhole.

It is a lecture in one of the nation states of northern Europe.

This is Danelaw, but not as King Knut knew it.

Osama bin Laden, Lefty Friend of the Planet By Michael Walsh

As if we needed another reason to despise the Saudi Arabian terrorist, Osama bin Laden:

Osama bin Laden wrote a letter calling on the American people to help President Barack Obama fight “catastrophic” climate change and “save humanity,” in the latest evidence of his worries about environmental issues, newly released documents show.

The letter was among materials that were seized in the May 2, 2011, US raid on bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan that killed the al Qaeda chief and which were released on Tuesday by the Obama administration. The undated, unsigned letter “to the American people,” which US intelligence officials attributed to bin Laden, appeared to have been written shortly after Obama began his first term in 2009, based on the letter’s references to events.

Bin Laden’s preoccupation with climate change also emerged as a theme in the first tranche of documents from the raid that was declassified in May 2015, as well as in an audio recording released via the al Jazeera network in January 2010.

You can’t make this stuff up. But wait — there’s more!

In the rambling letter made public Tuesday, bin Laden blamed the 2007-8 US financial crisis on corporate control of capital and corporate lobbyists, and the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He called on Americans to launch “a great revolution for freedom” to liberate the US president from those influences. That would enable Obama to make “a rational decision to save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny,” bin Laden continued.