Tony Thomas: The Fishy ‘Science’ of Ocean Acidification

With an obstinate atmosphere failing to warm as predicted, another peril was needed to sustain the junk-science industry and keep lazy reporters supplied with bogus scoops. No problem! Conscript a Disney character, garnish with misrepresentations and there you have it: ocean acidification
How scary is “ocean acidification”? Very scary. The previously scary “global warming” stopped 19 years ago, but do stay scared because all that CO2 since 1997 has instead been “acidifying” the oceans. Please imagine baby oysters dissolving in the equivalent of battery acid, and hermit crabs raising a nervous feeler to discover that their protective shells have disappeared. Curse you, horrible human-caused CO2 emissions!

In one celebrated episode involving Climate Science™, a lone oyster farmer in Maine put his oysters into a bucket and then found that the bivalves at the bottom were crunched because their shells were weakened.[1] Can any reasonable person ask for better scientific proof of ocean “acidification”?

“Ocean Acidification”, the evil twin of global warming, is scary because the chemistry is so simple. For example, the Australian Academy of Science in its curriculum for secondary schools, organizes an experiment for 16-year-olds where crushed ocean shells go into a test tube of sea water. You add acid or vinegar or something, and then watch the shells fizz and dissolve!

Palestinians: Save Us from the Good-Hearted Westerners! by Bassam Tawil

Every Palestinian knows in his heart that we do not want a state of our own alongside Israel, but rather instead of Israel. This includes all the land of Palestine and Israel. It means that Jews have no right to exist on even one speck of it.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas claims he wants to reach a peace agreement with Israel. But at the same time he and his henchmen incite the Palestinians to stab, run over and shoot Israelis to death, while he idealizes, glorifies and finances — with the funds he receives from the West — the terrorists and their families.

The Palestinian people are already almost totally radicalized, even in the West Bank. They do not seem concerned about living under an Islamist regime run by Hamas or Islamic State.

Abbas’s goal is now, with the help of the international community, to impose a solution on Israel. The solution he seeks – a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines – would pose an existential threat to Israel. It would also just be a matter of time before the Palestinian state will be run by Hamas or Islamic State.

What can be done with these Americans and Europeans? They always seem pining for a dialogue between the Israelis and the Palestinians that would end in a peace agreement, yet oddly all of them seem aware that the Palestinians have not, in all honestly, met Israel’s most minimal demands: the cessation of incitement (agreed to even under the Oslo accords — and requiring no funding!) and the recognition of Israel as a Jewish State. Many throughout the world still view Israel as potentially the next — and 22nd — Arab state.

At Least 16 Dead in Islamic State Suicide Bombing in Syria Bombers targeted two crowded restaurants in central Qamishli, in the northeast Hasakah province By Dana Ballout and Mohammad Nour Alakraa

BEIRUT—Islamic State claimed responsibility on Thursday for a deadly double suicide bombing in a Kurdish Syrian city, part of the extremist group’s campaign against Kurdish-controlled areas of the country.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights both reported casualties of at least 16 and no more than 20, and about 30 wounded.

The Sunni Muslim militant group claimed the attacks in a statement distributed online, boasting that it had killed 30 people and wounded hundreds more.

Islamic State bombers targeted two crowded restaurants on Wednesday evening in central Qamishli, in the northeastern province of Hasakah, according to Syria’s state news agency and the Observatory, a U.K.-based opposition monitoring group.

They entered and detonated their explosives as people ate, the Observatory said. The majority of the victims were Christian, it added.

Iran Vows to Speed Up Ballistic-Missile Program, Casting Fresh Doubts on Nuclear Accord Obama administration preparing new sanctions By Asa Fitch and Jay Solomon

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani ordered his defense minister to expedite development of the country’s ballistic missile program in response to new U.S. sanctions set to be imposed on Iranian defense companies.

Mr. Rouhani’s comments, made on his official Twitter account Thursday, cast fresh doubts on the prospects for the U.S. and Iran to successfully implement the landmark nuclear agreement reached last July.

The Obama administration has said it could begin removing sanctions on Tehran as early as January since Iran has begun taking steps to roll back its nuclear program.

But the U.S. is concurrently preparing to impose new sanctions on Iranian defense firms and officials in the wake of two ballistic missile tests staged by Tehran over the past three months, according to senior U.S. officials.

Mr. Rouhani said Thursday such sanctions are illegal and that Tehran will take steps to retaliate, including accelerating the pace of its missile program.

White House Delays Imposing New Sanctions on Iran for Missile Program No timeline for when new penalties may be imposed on TehranBy Jay Solomon

WASHINGTON—The White House has delayed its plan to impose new financial sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile program, according to U.S. officials, amid growing tensions with Iran over the nuclear deal struck earlier this year.

The officials said the Obama administration remains committed to combating Iran’s missile program and that sanctions being developed by the U.S. Treasury Department remain on the table. They also said imposing such penalties was legal under the landmark nuclear agreement forged between global powers and Iran in July.
U.S. officials offered no definitive timeline for when the sanctions would be imposed after the decision was made Wednesday to delay them. At one point, they were scheduled to be announced Wednesday morning in Washington, according to a notification the White House sent to Congress.

Republican leaders on Thursday accused the Obama administration of losing its will to challenge Iran after Tehran countered on Thursday that it would accelerate the development of its arsenal.

“If the president’s announced sanctions ultimately aren’t executed, it would demonstrate a level of fecklessness that even the president hasn’t shown before,” said Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), a leading critic of the nuclear deal, in an interview.

MY SAY: DECEMBER 31 CAME VERY EARLY THIS YEAR

As August ends, from time immemorial, Jews begin to discuss the advent of the Jewish high holidays, which vary because they are always observed on the Jewish calendar. They are either early in September or they go into October.

On the Gregorian calendar holidays are on fixed dates every year, but somehow it increasingly feels as if December 31 comes earlier with every passing year. I wish you all a happy, healthy, successful and safe new year. rsk

Suicidal liberalism will never end Illegal Immigration Heather MacDonald exposes how leftist “justice” will turn us into a banana republic

Heather MacDonald: Today, I’m going to talk about the mass illegal immigration and its effect on American society. This summer the nation experienced a horrible murder in San Francisco. A young woman, Kate Steinle, was fatally shot by an illegal alien who had been deported five times already for various felonies. I wanted to deport him a sixth time, but was foiled in doing so by the San Francisco Sheriff, who alleged that this murderer should be let out.

As the country was trying to digest this information and what it meant for our immigration policies residents of Los Angeles, if they relied exclusively for their information from The Los Angeles Times, would have been largely clueless. Because The Los Angeles Times barely covered it. Only several days after Donald Trump had brought this to the national attention did the LA Times get around reporting what had happened and the underlying policy of sanctuary cities that led to it.

The unwillingness of The Los Angeles Times to report on this murder honestly is emblematic of how mass illegal immigration is distorting our cultural discourse and resulting in a whole series of taboos about what can be said in polite discourse.

Islamophobic Houston Mosque Fire was Set by Muslim Islamophobia is everywhere Daniel Greenfield

Islamophobia is everywhere. Literally everywhere.

Like the mosque vandalized in Fresno on Christmas.

Fresno police say a lone suspect vandalized the Islamic Cultural Center in Northeast Fresno on Christmas morning. Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer says it is clear the incident is a hate crime which is why the FBI is also investigating this case.

Except the Islamophobic incident turned out to be the work of… Asif Mohammad Khan, who had “posted on social media that Osama bin Laden was the “most inspirational person in his life.”

But surely the Islamophobic Houston mosque Christmas fire had to be real. It just had to be.

Mustafaa Carroll, who is the executive director for the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on law enforcement to investigate, citing a recent spike in vandalism to mosques that have prompted hate crime investigations.

“We urge law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for this fire,” he said in a statement.

What Muslims Really Believe An illuminating look at the key research on this subject. John Perazzo

Eric Holder once called the United States “a nation of cowards,” when he claimed that Americans are largely afraid to have an honest discussion about race. He was partially correct: Leftists like Holder are fearful of discussing race in any manner that depicts African Americans as something other than the perpetual, pathetic victims of white bloodlust and simpleminded bigotry. The meek responses that Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, and Hillary Clinton recently bleated out when confronted by some of the aggressive racists in the Black Lives Matter movement, were classic illustrations of this cowardice.

Equally pitiful has been the Left’s propensity for turning two blind eyes to the very obvious problems posed by Islam and the value system inherent in its scriptures. For the most part, leftists are content to simply depict anyone who’s willing to have a substantive conversation about those problems, as a dimwit, a Nazi, or both. Thus, when Donald Trump recently suggested that it would be advisable to temporarily stop Muslim immigration into the U.S. until the government is able to get its woefully deficient vetting process in order, he was instantly ridiculed and excoriated by a conga line of glib, self-congratulating know-nothings. Hillary Clinton, for instance, called Trump’s remarks “reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive.” Dawud Walid of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations characterized Trump’s proposal as “fascist.” Martin O’Malley called Trump “a fascist demagogue.” CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen saw, in Trump, “the traits of a proto-fascist.” And White House spokesman Josh Earnest informed us that Trump’s remarks “disqualif[y] him from serving as president.”

Meet Jeremy Corbyn’s German doppelganger: Benjamin Weinthal

“While the Hizballah-loving Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership of Britain’s Labor party, Sahra Wagenknecht, one of two leaders of Germany’s hard-left die Linke party, recently made headlines by equating the aerial bombing campaign against Islamic State with the group’s own barbaric deeds. Her opinions are shared by her fellow party members, as Benjamin Weinthal reports:

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has a socialist doppelganger in Germany. Her name is Sahra Wagenknecht and she serves as co-chairperson of the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag—The Left Party.

Her remarks blanketed the German media on Tuesday because she equated Islamic State terrorism in Paris with Britain’s aerial campaign designed to help destroy the terrorist organisation in the Syrian and Iraqi theatres of war.

‘Of course it is no less a crime to murder innocent civilians in Syria with bombs than it is to shoot them in Parisian restaurants and concert halls. One is individual terrorism, the other state-sponsored,’ Sahra Wagenknecht, an admirer of the now-defunct East German communist state and Stalinism, told the Bundestag on Monday.

The attitudes of Wagenknecht’s Left Party mirror in many respects the enthusiasm of Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn for Hamas, Iran’s clerical regime and Hezbollah. Moral conflation and a bottomless level of cultural relativity dominate the thinking of both hardcore left-wing leaderships. For Wagenknecht, Corbyn brought ‘movement into the sleeping social democracy of Europe’.

The Left Party is a formidable force in German politics. Germany’s Parliament has 630 members, of which the Left Party has 64 seats. This amalgam of West German leftists, trade unionists and East German communists (including many former Stasi officers) catapulted itself into the largest opposition bloc in the 2013 national election.