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The Certainty of Uncertainty “A Disgrace to the Profession”: The World’s Scientists on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science by Mark Steyn

Posted By on October 28th, 2015

Nine years ago self-proclaimed “climate hawk” David Roberts was contemplating Nuremberg trials for deniers:

When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.

But in his latest piece, at Vox.com, he’s singing a rather different tune:

Basically, it’s difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There’s no fixed point of reference.

Now he tells us.

Grappling with this kind of uncertainty turns out to be absolutely core to climate policymaking. Climate nerds have attempted to create models that include, at least in rudimentary form, all of these interacting economic and atmospheric systems. They call these integrated assessment models, or IAMs, and they are the primary tool used by governments and international bodies to gauge the threat of climate change. IAMs are how policies are compared and costs are estimated.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Murphy’s Law by Mark Steyn

Posted By on October 28th, 2015

As we come to an end of another grim week in politics, two views of how Campaign 2016 is going from Team Bush:

First, the dean of the consultant-industrial complex, the man who gave us Presidents McCain and Romney** and is now seeking to make it a hat-trick as head of Bush’s SuperPac; Mike Murphy explains why Donald Trump doesn’t matter:

He’s dead politically, he’ll never be president of the United States, ever. By definition I don’t think you can be a front-runner if you’re totally un-electable. I think there’s there an a-priori logic problem in that.

So that’s great news for Jeb. Because if you discount the front-runner, and the runner-up to the front-runner, and Cruz and Rubio and whatnot, then the real front-runner is Jeb, who’s totally electable even if no actual electors want to elect him. Why is that?

We see Feb. 1 to March 15, 45 days, as our period to seize the nomination and get in front—and there are a lot of states and a lot of congressional districts and a lot of targeting to that. One of the reasons we’ve worked so hard and Jeb, frankly, has inspired so many people to donate to us is so we have the resources to pursue that campaign. Most of these other guys are all running on spec. We’re at a point now where we’re significantly funded for those 45 days, cash in the bank today. Nobody else is in that situation in this race. Nobody’s close…

For most of these guys, it’s: Well, lightning’s going to strike, Jindal-mania is going to hit the New Hampshire primary, I’m going to win and I’m suddenly going to turn around a ton of money and then I’m going to run the momentum all the way through March. Here’s the problem with that: let’s say it’s the 10th of February, you have won the New Hampshire primary two days ago. You’re only 20 days out so you should be on the air already…

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Simon P. Kennedy The Destruction of the Family

Posted By on October 28th, 2015

Family is no mere sociological construct, so we must stop treating it like one. It is how people live and thrive. It is natural. It carries with it certain obligations and duties. It is not malleable, no matter how hard those bent on re-defining the institution try to make it so.
The past couple of months have witnessed two extraordinary events in the history of Western moral culture. First, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a five-four decision that the right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples under the United States Constitution. The states are now required by judicial fiat to license marriages between two people of the same sex. The second is really a series of events, namely the exposure of Planned Parenthood. The practice of abortion, and the most (in)famous company practising it, have been laid bare on YouTube. These two events represent major moral flashpoints for Western society. It may seem coincidental that these crisis points have been reached almost simultaneously. However, it is hardly surprising that these two events are unfolding at the same point in history, as they share a common root.

At the root of the Obergefell v Hodges decision and the very existence of Planned Parenthood is a neglect of, and reversal in, the Western understanding of the concept of family. While there are, undoubtedly, other factors at play in these crises, the neglect of the idea of family is an important one that must be brought into the discussion. The family is here taken to be the organic community developed through and around a marriage. It usually, though not always, involves a man and a woman in marital union and their offspring. Therefore, it includes not only a married couple, but also their children. This does not exclude infertile or childless marriages from using the label of “family”; it merely requires the natural possibility of children as an outworking of a marriage. It also does not exclude single-parent households. These are families, but they are incomplete in the natural and organic sense. Just as in the childless marriage, in a single-parent family there is a component missing in the structure family.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK Commander Slams World’s Weak Response to ‘Human Shields’ for Causing Terrorists to Use Them More “The international community has blood on its hands.”By Michel Gurfinkiel

Posted By on October 28th, 2015

French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian recently made an essential statement about the war against terror and the difficulties it involves for Western countries.

In an interview with Europe 1 [1] focusing on the French air strikes against the Islamic State [1], he remarked:

Daesh [ISIS] is organized in such a way that children, women, civilians are being put on front lines. Its leadership is hiding in schools, mosques, hospitals, making the action of the coalition in Iraq and the action of France and other partners in Syria difficult, because we don’t want civilian casualties. We pay as much attention to the targets we select as to the need to combat Daesh.

This is a frank admission of the “human shield” tactic practiced by Islamists, and their crippling effect on Western fighting.

Undoubtedly, Le Drian is aware that the United States and other Western partners in the coalition against ISIS are facing the same challenge, and that Israel faces similar difficulties when counter-attacking organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Fatah-affiliated terror groups.

What remains to be seen is whether he and the French government, now having this experience with human shields, will reconsider their foreign policy regarding Israel.

We asked Colonel Richard Kemp, the former British commander in Afghanistan and an expert about war ethics, to comment on Le Drian’s no-nonsense statement.

———————-

PJM: Do LeDrian’s remarks come as a surprise to you?

Kemp: Not in the least. The Islamic State (ISIS) are adept at using human shields and locations protected under the Geneva Conventions. They are war criminals. The comments by Jean-Yves Le Drian are understandable and it is right that so-called collateral casualties are avoided as far as possible; but his comments also indicate the danger of the Western response to Islamist terrorist use of human shields, which often serves to encourage greater use of this tactic and leads to more and more civilian deaths.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DEBRA HEINE: HOUSE COMMITTEE MOVES TO IMPEACH IRS COMMISIONER

Posted By on October 28th, 2015

The House Oversight & Government Reform Committee led by Chairman Jason Chaffetz introduced on Tuesday a resolution to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, accusing him of making “false statements” under oath, failing to comply with a lawful subpoena, and overseeing the destruction of documents that were being sought under a congressional subpoena.

The move comes less than a week after the Justice Department issued a report finding no criminal behavior in the IRS’s decision to target conservative groups for improper scrutiny. The DOJ investigation was led by a career Justice Department lawyer in the Civil Rights Division who happened to be a “maxed-out” Obama campaign donor.

Via Fox News:

“Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust,” Chaffetz said in a statement Tuesday. “He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled.

“Impeachment is the appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and to protect the institutional interests of Congress.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Budget Betrayal: GOP’s Path to Victory … for Hillary Posted By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on October 28th, 2015

At close to midnight Monday, Republican leadership in Congress – outgoing House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – dropped a bomb on members of their respective chambers: a budget bill secretly negotiated with the Obama White House. Without consulting GOP representatives elected on a promise of stopping the Obama agenda, the deal provides yet another huge increase in the debt ceiling – i.e., the bill to be presented to our children and grandchildren for our refusal to live within our unprecedented means today – and further busting the caps from the 2011 budget deal.

CNN reports that GOP leaders will attempt to ram the deal through as early as tomorrow (Wednesday).

Of course, by giving the president the spending and borrowing authority he wants, Republicans forfeit the leverage to demand concessions from him in policy battles over the final 15 months of his term. Obama gets a green light and a blank check.

Republican voters get yet another demonstration that electing Republicans yields Washington As Usual.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Pivotal Role of Jordan in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict By Barry Shaw

Posted By on October 28th, 2015

When all strands of Palestinian political society came together in a deadly incitement based on religion radiating out from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, it left many dead on both sides of the religious divide – including the Jewish Israelis who were the prime target of Islam-motivated Palestinians.

Although the Islamic Movement and Hamas were two of the leading Palestinian instigators of the violence, it was the statements of a presumed secular Mahmoud Abbas that inflamed the Palestinian street. He, like Yasser Arafat before him, presumed to speak for the Muslim world when he exhorted his people in a televised address to his people on September 16,

“We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”

He was referring to his incitement to prevent Jews from visiting the Temple Mount plateau, which is the holiest place in Judaism. About them he said,

“The Al-Aqsa Mosque is ours. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is ours as well. They have no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet; we won’t allow them to do that.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Karen Wilkin: A Review of ‘Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War’ Exhibit

Posted By on October 28th, 2015

Review In the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Soldier, Spectre, Shaman,’ some works gain in meaning because of their new context.

Every large museum has a repository of paintings, sculptures and works on paper, acquired over the years, that are seldom on view. They range from minor efforts by major artists (and vice versa) to ambitious works by once well-regarded practitioners that no longer correspond to current taste, and a lot in between. Smart curators often mine these holdings for forgotten treasures—taste changes—or for what these works can tell us about the desiderata of the period in which they were made. Case in point: “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War,” the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of responses to the emotional climate of the fraught years before, during and after World War II.

Organized by MoMA’s Lucy Gallun, assistant curator, Department of Photography, and Sarah Suzuki, associate curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, and drawn entirely from the museum’s collections, the show assembles paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs, many rarely—if ever—exhibited, by more than 30 artists. Some celebrated, some obscure, they come from North and South America, Europe and Asia. Each of them experienced the horrors of the war, its preamble and its aftermath differently: as combatant or victim, refugee or exile, direct witness or distant observer. Despite these variables, the mood of all the works in the exhibition is one of anxiety and pessimism, whether expressed through representation, abstraction, symbol, or metaphor. Cynics can put this down to curatorial choice or to the finiteness of the human imagination. Or we can assume that the pervasive sense of threat and bleakness conveyed by “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman” accurately reflects the devastating world-wide events of the decades under review.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Battling Iran-Backed Extremists in Yemen With al Qaeda and ISIS also exploiting the power vacuum in some areas, much more than the future of my country is at stake. By Khaled Bahah….see note please

Posted By on October 28th, 2015

Please remember that in October 2000, the USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers, while in port in Aden, Yemen, for refueling. The attack was attributed to al Qaeda. The explosion ripped a hole in the hull of the ship, killing 17 U.S. sailors. Thirty-nine others were injured. Yemen has been the haven and locus of terrorists. rsk
Mr. Bahah is the prime minister and vice president of the Republic of Yemen.

In a region racked by strife, Yemen stands out. It is the poorest country in the Middle East and since March the plight of my people has been worsened by an inhumane war.

The people of Yemen elected President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi in February 2012 to preserve the country’s unity, independence and territorial integrity, while leading all Yemenis toward a brighter future. But that future has been stolen by Iranian-backed Houthi militia, who drove our legitimate government from office and have committed countless human-rights abuses, documented by the U.N. In response, a broad, international coalition led by Saudi Arabia, and with Yemen’s national army, is working to liberate our country from illegal, foreign-sponsored control.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Gabriel Schoenfeld: A Review of Garry Kasparov’s New Book “Winter is Coming-Why Vladimir Putin and Enemies of the Free World Must be Stopped”

Posted By on October 28th, 2015

The Chess Master vs. Putin-The author could easily have opted to live out life like an oligarch, yachting from port to port. Instead, he plunged into politics.
When Garry Kasparov, in 2005, suddenly announced his retirement from competition after two decades dominating the chess world, there was widespread puzzlement. He explains in “Winter Is Coming” that he left the pawns and pieces behind to join Russia’s pro-democracy movement. Having “achieved everything I could want to achieve at the chessboard,” he writes, he believed it was time for a different kind of accomplishment. “I wanted my children to be able to grow up in a free Russia. . . . I hoped to use my energy and my fame to push back against the rising tide of repression coming from the Kremlin.”

Now Mr. Kasparov reprises his participation in Russia’s fight for democracy. It is a compelling story of courage and civic-mindedness. With his wealth and status, he could easily have opted to live out life like a Russian oligarch, buying baubles and yachting from port to port. Instead, he plunged into politics, organizing coalitions to challenge the autocratic rule of Vladimir Putin, taking a leading role in public demonstrations and marches, and in 2007 running for president himself. The result was, among other things, beatings at the hands of secret-police thugs, confinement (briefly) in a Moscow prison cell and, finally, self-imposed exile in the West.