Thousands of Israeli Arabs marched in Umm al-Fahm on Saturday in solidarity with the Islamic Movement’s Northern Branch. They rallied against the Diplomatic-Security Cabinet’s decision to ban its activities. This was also a show of support for the branch’s leader, Raed Salah, who was convicted of incitement to violence and is about to enter prison. The protesters observed a minute of silence at the start of the rally, in memory of the “shuhada” (martyrs) whose untimely deaths occurred as they were carrying out ramming and stabbing attacks. This moment of silence was their way of showing how ungrateful they are toward the state. It was also a means for undercutting the delicate coexistence between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens.
Even as Hillary Clinton is upping her anti-Wall Street rhetoric, here comes word that the Clinton Foundation is running a private-equity company down in Colombia.
The private-equity field is where Mitt Romney earned his fortune — and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads from the Obama campaign back in 2008.
The foundation’s Bogota-based firm, Fondo Acceso, was started in 2010 by Bill Clinton, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and mining magnate Frank Giustra, with seed funding of $20 million from the foundation’s Clinton-Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative and the SLIM Foundation, the Washington Free Beacon reports.
Anything to hide here? Well, Fondo Acceso took down its website once the Beacon broke the story. And the venture wasn’t even registered as a private-equity fund in Colombia, thereby skirting government oversight. A good move for an investment firm linked to the US secretary of state.
Ken Boehm, a watchdog with the National Legal and Policy Center, notes, “At the minimum, the Clinton Foundation should disclose every company that received investment funds from them, because the public is entitled to know whether those companies benefited from any State Department foreign-aid programs.”
To hear Hillary Clinton tell it, she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest — even though she was already 6 years old when he made his famous ascent.
On a visit to war-torn Bosnia in 1996, she claimed she and her entourage landed under sniper fire and had to run “with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base” — although videos of her arrival show her waltzing serenely across the tarmac, waving to the crowd.
She blamed the 2012 attack on American diplomatic and intelligence-gathering installations in Benghazi on “a disgusting video” when she knew almost from the first moment that it was a jihadist assault that took the lives of four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya.
No wonder the late William Safire, writing in The New York Times in 1996, at the height of the Whitewater investigation, called her a “congenital liar.” Said Safire: “She is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”
Photo: Reuters
Baron Munchausen has nothing on Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The burden of proof for Anthropogenic Climate Change falls on alarmists. Climate Change (CC) has been ongoing for millions of years – long before humans existed on this planet.
Obviously, the causes were all of natural origin, and not anthropogenic.
There is no reason to believe that these natural causes have suddenly stopped; for example, volcanic eruptions, various types of solar influences, and (internal) atmosphere-ocean oscillations all continue today. (Note that these natural factors cannot be modeled precisely.)
Let’s call this the “Null Hypothesis.” Logically therefore, the burden of proof is on alarmists to demonstrate that the Null Hypothesis is not adequate to account for empirical climate data; alarmists must provide convincing observational evidence for Anthropogenic CC (ACC)
– by detailed comparison of empirical data with GH models.
I am not aware of such proofs, only of anecdotal info – although I admit that ACC is plausible; after all, CO2 is a GH gas, and its level has been rising, mainly because of burning of fossil fuels.
However, ACC appears to be much smaller than predicted by GH models; there is even believed to be a period of no warming [“hiatus”] during the past 19 years – in spite of rapidly rising atmospheric CO2 levels [1].
More than a decade ago I wrote my first novel, Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Part of my motivation was to establish my bona fides at forecasting social, political and military trends. I didn’t like the direction America was heading, and I wanted to warn as many readers as possible about some of the dangers I saw coming. At the end of 2015, I hope that my past success at prognostication will encourage people to pay heed to this essay.
As we roll into the New Year, we are witnessing the prelude to the culmination of a titanic struggle between three great actors. Three great social forces are now set in motion for a 2016 showdown and collision that will, in historical terms, be on par with the First and Second World Wars.
Two of these great social forces are currently allied in a de facto coalition against the third. They have forged an unwritten agreement to jointly murder the weakest of the three forces while it is in their combined power to do so. One of these two social forces would be content to share totalitarian control over large swaths of the globe with the other remaining social force. One of these social forces will never be satisfied until it achieves complete domination of the entire planet. So what are these three great social forces? They are Islam, international socialism, and nationalism.
Allow me to explain the salient aspects of each, and how they relate to the coming 2016 cataclysm.
BERLIN—The Paris attacks have raised fears of terrorists slipping into Europe by posing as refugees. But in Germany, the top migrant destination, security officials have another worry: Local extremists will recruit the newcomers to join the Islamist cause once they arrive.
German authorities warn that migrants seeking out Arabic-language mosques in search of the familiar are increasingly ending up at those attended by Islamist radicals. In interviews, security officials from Berlin to the southwest German state of Saarland said they have registered a sharp rise in the number of asylum-seekers attending mosques they believed attracted extremists.
Federal officials said they have counted more than 100 cases in which Islamists known to them have tried to establish contact with refugees. According to state and local agencies across the country, Islamists have offered migrants rides, food, shelter and translation help. In some cases, they have invited them to soccer games and grill parties, or brought them copies of the Quran and conservative Muslim clothing.
The single most important benchmark underpinning this week’s talks in Paris on climate change—two degrees Celsius—has guided climate-treaty discussions for decades, but scientists are at odds on the relevance of that target.
Many researchers have argued that a rise in the planet’s average global air temperature of two degrees or more above preindustrial levels would usher in catastrophic climate change. But many others, while convinced the planet is warming, say two degrees is a somewhat arbitrary threshold based on tenuous research, and therefore an impractical spur to policy action.
“It emerged from a political agenda, not a scientific analysis,” said Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College London. “It’s not a sensible, rational target because the models give you a range of possibilities, not a single answer.”
Policy makers tend to assume the two-degree target expresses a solid scientific view, but it doesn’t. The exhaustive reports published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are considered to be the most comprehensive analysis of the science of global warming. Yet the two-degree limit isn’t mentioned in a single IPCC report.
With Congress stuck among the contradictory demands of labor, business and talk-radio restrictionists, neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama has been able to move the needle on immigration reform. Meanwhile, as the economy gathers steam, states face a tight labor market at all skill levels.
There might be a way forward, if Congress enacts legislation to give states standing waivers or permission to craft their own guest-worker programs. It sounds radical, but several states, red and blue, have already been trying to do this.
California, New Mexico and Kansas have passed resolutions or drafted legislation to issue guest-worker visas to undocumented aliens. Three pending bills in Texas would let state employers hire foreign workers from abroad on temporary work visas. Utah’s conservative legislature overwhelmingly approved legislation in 2011 to let undocumented workers obtain a two-year visa. But Utah’s program has been postponed, because immigration is a federal function and states would need federal waivers. President Obama has stonewalled Utah’s waiver request.
One way to release states from the partisan whims of administrations would be for Congress to erect a statutory architecture under which states could implement their own guest-worker programs. Canada has done this through its highly successful Provincial Nominee Program.
A new Brandeis University study shows that over half of all Birthright candidates do not know how to answer even the most basic questions about the Jewish state, making them functionally illiterate concerning Israel. The study seeks to understand and assess Israel literacy and is a continuing project with participation of researchers from the university’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies.
The study found that regardless of the students’ background — for example, whether they had attended Jewish day school or not — and the ranking of their university, relatively few Jewish students were Israel literate. This is among students who are interested enough in Israel to apply to go on a Birthright trip; results would most likely be even more depressing among those who were not Birthright candidates.
The results are truly disconcerting at a time when anti-Israel motions and boycott, divestment, and sanctions activity are rampant on U.S. college campuses and Jewish students are met by an unprecedented wave of anti-Semitism. As the authors of the study say, Israel literacy is “the requisite knowledge to participate in productive conversations about Israel.” Without knowledge, it is going to be near impossible to participate in any kind of meaningful conversation about Israel. The authors go on to say that “we were surprised that Jewish graduate students, including some who were training to become Jewish professional leaders, lacked some of the foundational knowledge that would equip them to engage in Israel-related activity and education.”
David Goldman Reviews: If You Really Want to Change the World, by Henry Kressel and Norman Winarsky.
Henry Kressel for thirty years was the senior partner in the technology practice of Warburg Pincus, one of the most successful private equity and venture capital firms, after a distinguished scientific career at RCA Labs. Norman Winarsky runs the venture capital division of SRI International (originally founded as Stanford Research Institute), one of Silicon Valley’s great idea factories. In this compact volume they offer a step-by-step guide to creating world-shaking new companies with billion-dollar market valuations. Why reveal their secrets? In fact, there are no secrets, only a set of filters that eliminate the vast majority of contenders from the running.
This is a cautionary tale more than an inspirational one, and many of the book’s deepest insights are found in its diagnosis of what went wrong with seemingly bulletproof ventures. Great new companies require the right technology for the right market niche, the right management for the right customers, the right investors for the right executives, the right financial controls for the right take-off trajectory. It sounds simple, and it is. It requires vision, experience, contacts and common sense to bring all these elements together in one venture. There are very few venture firms with the brains and bandwidth to do it all, but the ones who do produce a remarkably high number of hits.
Kressel and Winarsky have no use for the popular notion that start-ups should fail until they succeed, “pivoting” to things that work by trial and error. They write:
Failure has become de rigeur, particularly in software start-ups that initially require little capital and small teams. The idea seems simple enough: you start with an initial venture concept, put together a team, and launch the venture. You develop minimally viable products, keep testing different market and product hypotheses, and pivot based on the market feedback you get. You expect to fail repeatedly and hope to eventually get to product-market fit.
