The Current State of Climate Alarmism By Ari Halperin

America’s affliction with climate alarmism is shaped by two facts:

First, the main instigators have crossed the Rubicon and have no choice but to fight. How has this happened? Nature was one cause: the short-term natural warming in 1978-1998 was mistaken for anthropogenic warming through the confirmation bias. Natural cooling from 1999 onward has canceled the expected anthropogenic warming (which is small, beneficial, and caused by a variety of factors — not just carbon dioxide release).

But other causes were entirely manmade. In hindsight, it is clear that for almost two decades (approximately 1988 — 2004) multiple groups of climate “scientists” have been fabricating results in parallel, unaware that others were doing the same. Mann with his hockey stick got the most fame, but he was just one among many. Computer models, descriptions of the carbon cycle, and even instrumental temperature records were forged to exaggerate climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide, to hide past climate variations, to argue that carbon dioxide release is irreversible, etc. The environmental movement, encouraging and encouraged by this perversion of science, made global warming its central theme. And so did many mainstream politicians. Al Gore was the towering figure among them. He used his two terms as vice president to gut American science, replacing scientists with environmentalists and lawyers (see the book Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking, which contains essays by William Happer, Bernard Cohen, Patrick Michaels, Fred Singer and other scientists who experienced or witnessed this process). A vicious spiral developed: alarmist politicians handpicked scientists supporting the alarm, then they believed their claims, and so it went. A hardened core of climate alarmism was formed from such politicians and their quasi-scientists. This core attracted multiple layers of followers, ranging from ordinary profiteers and leftist extremists to totally innocent duped believers.

The Case for Marco Rubio By Ed Lasky

What would William F. Buckley do?

Conservative icon William Buckley promulgated what has become known as the Buckley rule: “Nominate the most conservative candidate who is electable.” Among the current candidates the only one who passes that test is Marco Rubio.

Donald Trump and some in the media have tried to characterize Marco Rubio as the “establishment” candidate. How does that square with reality?

Recall that the election of Rubio was hailed as a Tea Party hero when he knocked off the serial party-shifter and establishment candidate Charlie Crist. Has he retained his conservative credentials since being elected?

As Jim Geraghty wrote in late December, Marco Rubio is “plenty conservative” and has an indisputably conservative record as a senator :

This is a man who has a lifetime ACU rating of 98 out of 100. A man who has a perfect rating from the NRA in the U.S. Senate. A man who earned scores of 100 in 2014, 100 in 2013, 71 in 2012, and 100 in 2011 from the Family Research Council. A “Taxpayer Super Hero” with a lifetime rating of 95 from Citizens Against Government Waste. A man Club for Growth president David McIntosh called “a complete pro-growth, free-market, limited-government conservative.”

Across the board, Rubio’s stances, policy proposals, and rhetoric fall squarely within the bounds of traditional conservatism.

Rubio’s the guy who earned a 100 from National Right to Life in two straight cycles, and a zero rating from NARAL. He supports an abortion ban after 20 weeks, opposes exceptions for rape and incest (although he’s voted for legislation that includes those exceptions), and opposes embryonic stem-cell research. In the first Republican debate he declared, “Future generations will look back at this history of our country and call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies who we never gave them a chance to live.”

Rubio opposes gay marriage and has said that “we are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech. Today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage you are labeled a homophobe and a hater.” He recorded robo-calls for the National Organization for Marriage.

Since 2010, Rubio has proposed freezing government spending for everything but defense and veterans’ care at 2008 levels. He supports a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution and the line-item veto. He voted against funding for the Export-Import Bank, even though Florida receives the second-largest amount of money from the bank.

His initial tax-reform plan, co-authored with Utah senator Mike Lee, cuts the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and would reduce the current seven brackets to two: a 15 percent rate for individuals and a 35 percent rate for families. (Rubio later adjusted it to create a 25 percent tax bracket for couples making between $150,000 and $300,000.) It creates a new $2,500-per-child tax credit. Conservatives disagree about the best way to simplify the tax code and reduce the tax burden on Americans, but it’s hard to dispute that changes such as these would move the system in the right direction.

Double Games Of The UK Muslim Brotherhood by John Ware

The tone was plaintive, almost bewildered. “We work tirelessly for the good of British society on several fronts,” Anas Altikriti protested before calling a press conference to refute the government’s charge that he and other like-minded Muslim leaders are doing the opposite.

A classified government review by two of Britain’s leading civil servants, expert in the Arab world and Islamist ideology, has concluded that organisations like the one Altikriti heads are, in effect, fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood — a charge they categorically deny.

The Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, as it is known in Arabic, was established in 1928 in Egypt and its goal was — and remains — the step-by-step Islamisation of Muslim communities with the ultimate aim of creating a global Caliphate ruled by holy law. “Allah is our objective” is the Brotherhood’s motto, “The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

With Altikriti on the platform was Omer El-Hamdoon, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, and Mohammed Kozbar, chairman of the Finsbury Park Mosque, North London, where the press conference was held. “We are not enemies of the state,” said the gently-spoken Hamdoon. All three say they “totally reject the allegation” that they are “in any way linked to the Muslim Brotherhood”.

Altikriti, in particular, has emphasised that he has “absolutely no links” and on its face his denial would seem to be consistent with the values of “tolerance” and “positive co-existence” which he says he is devoted to promoting. It’s certainly a vision a world away from the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, who sought the moral purification of Muslims, because he regarded them as having been infected by Western decadence. That and his belief that Jews were a major source of the infection help explain why he was an admirer of Hitler and why he translated Mein Kampf into Arabic, calling it My Jihad.

Immigration or an iPhone by Daniel Greenfield

The public argument between Apple and the FBI over cracking the encryption on an iPhone used by the San Bernardino Muslim terrorists is one of those ongoing civil liberties debates that negotiate the terms on which we are asked to sacrifice our civil liberties for the sake of Muslim immigration.

We have already made a thousand accommodations and we will make a thousand more. There will be more databases, naked scanners, eavesdropping, vans that can see through walls, backdoors to every server, registrations, warrantless searches, interceptions and regulations. There will be heavily armed police on the streets. And then curfews and soldiers. These things exist in Europe. They’ll come here.

Some libertarians will argue that we should have none of this and no restrictions on immigration. That we should just shrug off each terror attack and move on with our lives.

Eventually though there will be a terror attack that we can’t shrug off and that can’t be minimized by using the cheap statistical trick of comparing Terror Attack X to the number of people who die every year from cancer. Or there will just be an endless parade of daily attacks, bombings, stabbings or shootings, as in Israel, which create a constant climate of terror that will preclude any hollow rhetoric about the number of people falling off ladders each year or getting struck by lightning. Some hawks will cheer every terror fighting measure short of closing the door on the root cause of the problem. They would rather see every American wiretapped, strip searched and monitored every hour of the day then just stop the flow of Muslim terrorists into this country.

The encryption methods of an iPhone, like the question of how many ounces there are in your tiny bottle of mouthwash, would not be much of an issue, if Muslim migration did not make it one.

Terrorists adapt to the terrain. They use the native population as protective coloration. They can find a way to transform a shoe, a tube of toothpaste or instant messaging on a game console into a terror tool. Just as the left can ‘politicize’ everything, Muslim terrorists can ‘terrorize’ everything. When everything is a potential terrorist tool, then there can be no such thing as privacy or civil rights.

Iran’s Growing Intervention in Syria and the Region By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Amidst rumors that Iran is withdrawing its forces from Syria, Debka File reported that “Under cover of the Syrian ceasefire that went into effect Saturday, Feb. 27, and the Russian air umbrella, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps finally managed to secretly install hundreds of armed Palestinian terrorists on the Syrian-Israeli border face-to-face with the IDF’s Golan positions.” Once again, events on the ground contradict Secretary John Kerry’s claim that Iran involvement in Syria is diminishing. “The IRGC has actually pulled its troops back from Syria. Ayatollah Khamenei pulled a significant number of troops out. Their presence is actually reduced in Syria,” Kerry told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations last week.

Apparently, Kerry missed or ignored the statement made Mohammad Pakpour, the commander of the IRGC ground forces earlier this month, confirming that units from its Saberin special forces brigade had been deployed in Syria and Iraq.

Al-Sabirin, is a new terrorist organization that the IRGC and Hizballah “are building in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.” Debka describes how their agents clandestinely recruited new terrorists from among young Palestinians who fled the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus and sought refuge in Lebanon. Hizballah organized their return to Syria through south Lebanon – but not before training and arming them for penetration deep inside Israel to carry out mass-casualty assaults on IDF positions, highways and civilians.”

The recruitment of Palestinians to fight along the IRGC and Hizballah forces together with the announcement that Teheran will reward of “$7000 to the family of every Palestinian shaheed killed in the Jerusalem intifada, and $30,000 to every family whose house had been razed by Israel, helps to increase Iran’s influence among Palestinians everywhere.

According to ITIC Spotlight on Iran, on February 23, Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Qods Force, met with the families of IRGC fighters who had been killed in Syria. He talked about his presence in Lebanon with senior Hezbollah officials during Second Lebanon War (2006). He said he had returned to Tehran after the first week of the war and met with Ali Larijani, at the time the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (today chairman of the Majlis, the Iranian parliament), and that they had gone together to the city of Mashad and met with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. During the meeting, said Soleimani, they received instructions from Khamenei that changed the outcome of the war. He did not reveal what the instructions were (ISNA, February 23, 2016).”

Sweden’s Migration Industry by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

That Sweden is a “humanitarian superpower” is a myth that needs exposing once and for all. The recent migration wave to Sweden has made some people poor and and others very, very rich. It is all about money, and it is about winners and losers.

If liberal journalists outside Sweden believe that rape is humanitarian, then Sweden has a humanitarian migration policy.

Meanwhile, thousands of “unaccompanied refugee children” are disappearing. and no one knows where they are.

There is nothing “noble” in Sweden’s migration policy — far from being a good example of how a migration policy should function, it is a disaster, and its final result is chaos, conflict, and corruption.

When you talk to journalists from the U.S. or the UK, they often seem to think that Sweden is a humanitarian superpower that has received refugees because the Swedish government is following some ideology based on doing good deeds.

That Sweden is a humanitarian superpower, eager to lead by example, is a myth that needs exposing once and for all. The recent migration wave to Sweden has made some people poor and and others very, very rich.

North Korea’s Nuclear Missile Threat Very Bad News by Peter Pry and Peter Huessy

A careful technical reading of the DoD report clearly confirms that North Korea can strike the U.S. mainland with nuclear missiles right now. But the casual or non-expert reader can get the false impression that President Obama was right to assert that there is no nuclear missile threat from North Korea.

Given this overwhelming evidence of North Korea’s ability to strike the U.S. mainland, how strange that most major news outlets have never reported that North Korea already has nuclear-armed missiles that can strike the U.S.

The DoD report was inexplicably silent about North Korea’s current nuclear and missile capability, which could kill millions of Americans in an EMP attack — as warned by both the 2004 and 2008 Congressional EMP Commission reports.

The EMP Commission and the authors of this article believe that North Korea tested what the Russians call a Super-EMP weapon.

It is time to face reality — to stop wishful thinking that everything is fine, that diplomacy will work.

Space-based missile defenses will offer a realistic prospect of rendering nuclear missile threats obsolete, thus neutralizing the growing nuclear missile threats to the U.S. from North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia.

Islamic State Launches Attacks in Baghdad Militant group fights Iraqi forces at Abu Ghraib, conducts suicide bombing: By Tamer El-Ghobashy and Ghassan Adnan See note please

LOVE THE HEADLINE? NOW ISIS IS A “MILITANT GROUP”…..RSK

BAGHDAD—Islamic State launched separate attacks on Iraq’s capital Sunday, including the largest in two years on the city’s outskirts and a bombing that killed at least 54 people, officials said.

The attacks show how Islamic State continues to pose a formidable threat to Iraq’s political and security center even after recent losses in other regions.

The assault on the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib marked the largest-scale attack there since the militancy swept through Iraq in 2014. Meanwhile, the marketplace bombing, in the heart of Baghdad, resulted in one of the highest death and injury tolls from a single bombing in the past couple of years.

The Abu Ghraib attack began at dawn when some 30 militants breached a military barrier in Khan Thari on the western edge of town. By late afternoon, the military had repelled the assault and trapped 20 Islamic State fighters around a grain silo about 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) from the town center, the officials said.

Hours later, Islamic State claimed a twin suicide bombing in Mraidi, a large outdoor market in Baghdad’s Sadr City, that security officials said killed at least 54 people and injured 85 more. Officials said the toll was likely to rise as many of the wounded were in critical condition. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Clinton Coronation Resumes Democrats begin to unite as they get serious about keeping power.

Mr. Sanders could muster a mere 26% of South Carolina Democrats. The exit polls say Mrs. Clinton won an almost unbelievable 86% of the black vote, suggesting that she will also sweep the other southern states with heavy African-American populations on Tuesday. Mr. Sanders will presumably win in Vermont, and maybe another state or two, but that won’t be nearly enough to stop Mrs. Clinton from cruising to the nomination.

The Democratic contest thus returns to the normalcy of recent decades, which is that a progressive insurgency invariably fails against the establishment favorite. Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, Howard Dean and Mr. Sanders were all favorites of the white gentry left. They lost because they couldn’t defeat the government unions or persuade enough African-Americans. Barack Obama was the exception because he could compete for the black vote.

Mrs. Clinton continued to underperform among younger voters, and underlying economic anxiety should concern Democrats going into November. Some 84% of Democrats in South Carolina said they are either very or somewhat worried about the U.S. economy. But the Clinton juggernaut shows that, unlike the GOP, there really is a Democratic establishment composed of powerful interest groups that determine the nominee. Those forces are rallying to defeat Mr. Sanders, whom they view as unelectable. READ MORE AT SITE

An Airwaves Strategy to Beat Trump The Club for Growth says what worked in Iowa can work elsewhere: ads that link his business record to a lack of character.By Kimberley A. Strassel

David McIntosh has been fighting for economic freedom for 30 years, and he is convinced the battle has reached a hinge moment. “The stakes really are that high,” says the president of the Club for Growth. “If we don’t do this, it’s all at risk. This is the moment.”

By “this” he means denying Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination. The club is one of America’s most effective free-enterprise advocacy groups, and for months it has tried to alert voters, often without much other support, to the risks of a Trump nomination.

With the primary race now at a decisive moment, Mr. McIntosh is trying to rally support for a sustained anti-Trump push leading up to the winner-take-all primaries on March 15. With Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz finally confronting the front-runner, Mr. McIntosh is convinced that the billionaire can still be defeated with the help of a sustained TV and social-media assault.

“We’ve got people on our side still saying, ‘Let’s wait and see.’ Or ‘maybe we can fix this in a brokered convention,’ ” says Mr. McIntosh. “My message is that’s too late. It’s got to be now.”

When Mr. McIntosh took over the Club for Growth presidency more than a year ago, the former Indiana congressman had no idea his first real fight would be trying to stop a TV celebrity from hijacking the Republican Party. The club usually plays in House and Senate campaigns, and it is backing no presidential candidate. “We’re neutral on the other candidates. We’ve said that both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are gold standards—either would be great on economic issues. This is about stopping Trump.” READ MORE AT SITE