The Great Russian Energy Scam Russian ‘Dark Money’ Funding ‘Green’ Groups in West by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18399/the-great-russian-energy-scam

Germany and several other European countries have largely banned fracking. This decision has transformed European leaders into the equivalent of 16th-century naval explorers, praying for favorable winds and weather as energy prices rise and fall depending on cloud cover and wind conditions.

In those days of autumn… the UN climate conference, was setting up its grotesque spectacle: a kind of ecological Versailles. The rich, powerful and virtuous of the planet gathered in Glasgow to pontificate to the rest of the West about how much we are harming the planet with our way of life. They arrived in their private jets to complain about the plague of air industry emissions. UK Chief Science Advisor Patrick Vallance said that everyone should eat less meat and fly less. Then came the news that 400 private jets would fly to the UN conference….

The British royal family has flown so long over the past five years that they have reached the moon and back.

While the Germans pontificated about the climate, the Washington Post informed us about their hypocrisy: “Germany presents itself as a climate leader. But it is razing villages for coal mines. The Garzweiler coal mine has already engulfed more than a dozen villages. Churches and family homes have been razed, agricultural land has disappeared and cemeteries have been emptied”. The Lützerath mine alone is twice the size of Manhattan. That is why Germany has been labelled as the most polluting country in Europe.

Thus, the progressive American pundits until October dreamed of an alliance between the West, Russia and China against global warming. Now that the West has isolated Russia, the largest energy supplier in Europe, no one is talking “green” anymore.

Russia, it turns out, has reportedly been promoting, often through “dark money” via Bermuda – which does not require countries to be named — “green” campaigns against nuclear power to ensure dependence by the West on Russia’s fossil fuel.

A German organization, The Climate and Environmental Protection Foundation, which received more than 17 million euros from Gazprom has also been accused of being a Moscow-funded “puppet.” — the Times revealed.

The Foundation for Climate and Environmental Protection was established last month in Mecklenburg-Pomerania by Manuela Schwesig… an ally of former German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, president of Nord Stream II Russian gas pipeline. He is still serving on the boards of state-backed Russian energy companies.

“Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas”. — Former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen – Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2022

“We discovered that Gazprom financed environmental NGOs who acted as consultants to ministers to various governments, such as Belgium, which then supported the abandonment of nuclear power.” — Dominique Reynié, professor of political science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, in an interview with CNews.

China (now allied with Russia) is also funding Western environmentalists. – Unherd investigation, December 15, 2021

“With winter fast approaching, Europe finds itself in an energy crisis—and reliant on the tender mercies of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. It’s a self-induced disaster years in the making”.

Ohio House Introduces Florida-Style Parental Rights Bill Landon Mion

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2022/04/05/ohio-house-introduces-floridastyle-parental-rights-bill-n2605518

Two Ohio state representatives introduced legislation that mirrors Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill and also prohibits Critical Race Theory-inspired instruction.

State GOP Reps. Mike Loychik and Jean Schmidt on Monday introduced House Bill 616, which would ban public educators teaching grades kindergarten through third grade from teaching, using or providing any instruction or material on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Educators for fourth through twelfth grades will not be allowed to teach age-inappropriate content in accordance with Ohio’s “state standards.”

This comes after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill into law last week that bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades kindergarten through third grade and would limit age-inappropriate discussions of sexuality in other grades.

Dubbed by critics as the “Don’t say gay” bill despite there being no mention of a ban on the word, Florida’s legislation also allows parents to access their children’s education and health records and requires schools to inform parents of changes to their child’s mental, physical or emotional well-being. The bill exempts schools from disclosing information to their parents if a “reasonably prudent person” would be concerned that doing so could result in abuse, abandonment or neglect.

Biden Sends Nearly $1 Billion to Afghanistan Since Taliban Takeover by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18400/biden-afghanistan-aid

After Biden’s retreat, the Taliban have consolidated control over Afghanistan. And over all the hungry children, the girls deprived of an education, and all the other sob stories that kept a river of private charity and taxpayer money flowing into a hellhole in which nothing ever got better.

That’s on top of the $782 million in “humanitarian aid” allocated to Afghanistan last year since the Taliban took over. This year, Biden signed an executive order allocating $3.5 billion of the Afghan assets held in the Federal Reserve for the same purpose. But even not counting those funds, Biden has dedicated $986 million to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over.

That’s nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money and nearly $4.5 billion in total funds.

The Biden administration keeps insisting that the money won’t go to the Taliban. That’s as plausible as its previous claims that the Afghan government wouldn’t collapse, that if it did we would be ready, and that all Americans would be evacuated before Kabul fell to the enemy.

There’s no one with less credibility on Afghanistan than a member of the Biden administration.

The Taliban have been hungry to get their hands on foreign aid, but, likely guided by their Qatari backers, they’ve also been clever about it. They proposed a joint body with the international community to dispense aid. When that didn’t work, they went back to their usual strategy of pressuring NGOs to hire Taliban members to determine where the aid should go and who should distribute it. But that’s just a matter of cutting out the middleman for more direct control.

Since the NGOs rely heavily on local labor, all the Taliban have to do is intimidate Afghan employees into following their orders. And for a terror group that practices mutilation and beheading, that’s not hard. Does anyone really believe that an Afghan with a wife and children living under Taliban rule is going to follow our aid guidelines rather than those of the gunmen

The Taliban, like the Houthis in Yemen and other Islamic terror groups who both cause and profit from famines, have already been distributing and taking credit for humanitarian aid.

Portions of the nearly $1 billion in foreign aid stolen from the paychecks of American workers and the mouths of their children will be used to finance a new Jihad against Western nations.

A generation after 9/11, Americans are once again funding the terrorists who are out to kill them.

Over two decades, the United States and its international partners poured billions in humanitarian aid into Afghanistan. Much of that aid went into the pockets of the Taliban.

Laptop Dancing Show intel, it’s the game they play. By Lloyd Billingsley

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/05/laptop-dancing/

Establishment media now acknowledge that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contains information about his dealings with China and connections to “the Big Guy,” has no existential problem. Before the 2020 election, some observers now recall, 51 former intelligence officials proclaimed the laptop was only “Russian disinformation,” and not a single one has now admitted that Biden’s laptop was, in fact, genuine. That refusal is the true bombshell revelation. 

The signatories to the October 19, 2020 statement suggesting it was disinformation include former CIA directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and Michael Hayden, as well as former acting CIA directors Mike Morell and John McLaughlin, a host of former CIA officers, National Security Agency officials, and former director of national intelligence James Clapper. The statement adds that “nine additional former IC officers who cannot be named publicly also support the arguments in this letter,” which closes out: “it is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.” 

For all but the willfully blind, this is a repetition of the Russia hoax, proclaimed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and found false by Robert Mueller’s investigation. As this repetition shows, the vaunted “intelligence community,” like the upper reaches of the FBI and Justice Department, is now a partisan force for the Democrats. True to form, the CIA has also revealed itself as another woke bureaucracy that stands more for “Cisgender Intersectional Agitprop” than proven service on the intelligence front.   

Clausewitz, Russia, and Ukraine The Russians may have learned again what history teaches: that those who plan to win a short war often end up losing a long one. By Mackubin Owens

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/05/clausewitz-russia-and-ukraine/

What can we learn about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine from a long-dead German who wrote during the time of the Napoleonic Wars? A great deal, it turns out. 

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian “philosopher of war,” had much to say about the timeless nature of war. He contended that although the character of various wars may differ, the fundamental nature of war remains constant: a violent clash of opposing wills, with each side seeking to prevail over the other. Despite the claims of Clausewitz’s detractors, technology has not negated his insights. For confirmation, we need look no further than the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

While Clausewitz’s most famous aphorism is that “war is the continuation of policy by other means,” perhaps the observation most applicable to Putin’s decision to “roll the iron dice” against Ukraine is this from On War: “the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.”

As the war drags on, it seems clear that Putin has failed on that count. He apparently envisioned a short war, characterized by a coup de main, the rapid seizure of Kyiv and the replacement of the Zelenskyy government with a Kremlin puppet. This was the model that the Soviets executed during the invasion of Afghanistan in 1978. For a number of reasons, also identified by Clausewitz, the current effort failed. 

As Clausewitz taught, war is not linear. It is not a predictable phenomenon occurring in a deterministic, mechanistic world. Rather, war is a highly complex interactive system characterized by chance, “friction,” unpredictability, disorder, and fluidity. As such, it cannot be subjected to precise, positive control or synchronized, centralized schemes.

Russian War Crimes Are Condemnable — but Not by the International Criminal Court By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/russian-war-crimes-are-condemnable-but-not-by-the-international-criminal-court/

The ICC is an enterprise antithetical to the Constitution and national defense, and our government should never facilitate its mission and operations.

In an editorial published Monday evening, the Wall Street Journal’s editors appear to echo President Biden’s call for war-crimes prosecutions over Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. Tellingly, though, the Journal omits the little detail of who, exactly, should do the prosecuting.

Presumably, that’s because the Journal well knows it shouldn’t be the International Criminal Court — not if the United States has anything to say about it.

The scenes of mass graves in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns are sickening, as are the well-documented reports of brutal Russian attacks targeting civilians, rape as a weapon of war, the kidnapping and murder of elected officials and their families, and Moscow’s troops conducting themselves as marauders rather than as armed forces beholden to the laws and customs of civilized warfare. Against this gory background, the Journal points out that an investigation “is already underway at the U.S. State Department and the International Criminal Court at the Hague.” In context, this observation appears to endorse an ICC probe of Russia, supported by the U.S. government. But the Journal stops short of proposing that, and for good reasons.

The U.S. State Department is a diplomatic arm of the United States government. It has no authority to prosecute anyone. Prosecution is the Justice Department’s job. DOJ, however, has been confined to enforcing statutorily based sanctions imposed against Russian oligarchs, officials, and entities. That is because the United States is not a combatant in the Ukraine war. Provocative rhetoric and military aid notwithstanding, the president’s top priority since Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion has been to prevent the United States from becoming a combatant.

America’s lawyer-Left has mobilized for the better part of two decades against military tribunals against combatants who mass-murdered Americans and against whom the United States has actually been at war. There are not going to be American prosecutions against Russia for war crimes against Ukraine. That is not to say the Justice Department may not apply Magnitsky Act provisions that enable our government to sanction Russian human-rights offenders: Seize any assets of theirs within our jurisdiction, bar them from entering our country — the sorts of things already being done under existing sanctions. But U.S.-initiated war-crimes tribunals? No.

Apart from God, Only Trump Can Stop Trump Salvatore Babones

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/04/apart-from-god-only-trump-can-stop-trump/

“As America’s record voter turnout proved in 2020, it’s unpopularity that drives the race. Electioneering is a blood sport, and it’s blood the voters are out for. No one watches Squid Game for the victories. Democracy, too, is all about the losers. Nothing beats the satisfaction of stepping into the voting booth, pulling a lever, and whispering to the losing candidate: “You’re fired”.

The defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 saved American democracy. Not from Donald Trump: he never shut down websites, imprisoned protesters, or sicked the security services on his opponents. No, if anything, the 2020 election saved American democracy for Donald Trump. The four-year Trump pause that began on January 20, 2021, put the grown-ups back in charge in Washington—and the world. Like grown-ups everywhere, they immediately maxed out their credit cards, mortgaged the family home, stabbed their friends in the back, picked fights with the neighbours, gave stern speeches in their coronavirus masks while posing for unmasked selfies at the Superbowl, and offered nuclear weapons to Iran in exchange for promises to stop supporting terrorism and shift to nuclear blackmail instead. Thanks to the 2020 election, we all know what adult democracy looks like.

It’s a lucky thing, too. Had there been no coronavirus; had the major media not conspired to suppress the Hunter Biden story; had the election been run under the pre-Covid rules, we would now be blaming Trump—for everything. The phase “imagine if Trump had done that” might never have entered the political lexicon. Ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan? Blame the rank amateurism of Trump’s bumbling foreign policy team. Renewed North Korean missile tests? Blame Trump’s personal courting of “little rocket man” Kim Jong-un. Russian invasion of Ukraine? Trump was only waiting for his second term to repay his true master in the Kremlin. Inflation a problem? Impeach Trump under the “emoluments clause” for raising the rack rate at the Trump International Hotel. We would never have known how much better things might have been.

HERE COMES ANOTHER CLIMATE DEADLINE THAT WILL PASS WITHOUT NOTICE

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/06/here-comes-another-climate-deadline-that-will-pass-without-notice/

We’ve heard so many declarations that our “last chance” to avoid global warming has arrived that we’ve lost count of the number of times the world has ended. But the sirens continue to wail, the latest from a United Nations grandee who says humanity has to act “now or never” to avoid overheating its host planet. Pardon us while we yawn.

According to Jim Skea, a European academic who co-chairs the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III, “it’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming” to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Keeping Earth’s temperatures in check “will be impossible,” he said, “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors.”

Skea’s comment arrived wrapped up in Working Group III’s just-released report on global warming mitigation, part of the IPCC’s sixth climate assessment. The media, which loves to breathlessly report the demise of the world caused by human carbon dioxide emissions, says the 1.5-degree limit “is recognized as a crucial global target because beyond this level, so-called tipping points become more likely. These are thresholds at which small changes can lead to dramatic shifts in Earth’s entire life support system.”

OK, then. But let’s back up a moment. Or maybe 13 years. That’s when Prince Charles said, with a deep, trust-me earnestness, that our world had only “100 months to act” before we had done so much damage that the effects of global warming would become irreversible.

Then last year, about 150 months after his previous doomsday prediction, the prince said that the upcoming climate summit in Glasgow was “quite literally … the last chance saloon” to stop the scourge of warming.

Yes, one man is a university researcher, the other an effete figurehead. But they have a common thread. They’re both wrong. And are unlikely to be right in their lifetimes.

MIT Leads the Way in Reinstating the SAT Expect others to follow. Selective institutions that don’t use standardized tests will fall behind.Jason Riley

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mit-leads-the-way-in-reinstating-the-sat-admissions-policies-standardized-testing-college-students-11649185773?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

During oral arguments in a 2003 Supreme Court case about affirmative action at the University of Michigan law school, Justice Antonin Scalia told lawyers who were defending the school’s racially discriminatory admissions policies that they couldn’t have their cake and eat it too.

“I find it hard to take seriously the state of Michigan’s contention that racial diversity is a compelling state interest—compelling enough to warrant ignoring the Constitution’s prohibition of distribution on the basis of race,” Scalia began. “The problem is a problem of Michigan’s own creation. That is to say, it has decided to create an elite law school . . . [and] it’s done this by taking only the best students with the best grades and the best SATs or LSATs, knowing that the result of this will be to exclude to a large degree minorities.”

Scalia said that if Michigan wants to be an elite law school, that’s fine. But there are trade-offs involved if the school also wants to prioritize enrolling some predetermined percentage of underrepresented minorities for aesthetic reasons. “If [racial diversity] is indeed a significant compelling state interest, why don’t you lower your standards?” he asked. “You don’t have to be the great college you are. You can be a lesser college if that value is important enough to you.”

Last week, the highly selective Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faced with a similar dilemma, apparently chose to maintain its high standards. It became the first prominent school to reinstate the requirement that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores, a practice that MIT and many other colleges had abandoned during the pandemic.

White House Alters Transcript to Clean Up After Yet Another Biden Gaffe Trying to make a president look competent is backfiring. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/white-house-alters-transcript-clean-after-yet-robert-spencer/

On Saturday in Wilmington, Del., Old Joe Biden’s dementia came full circle: he has previously mistaken the vice president for the first lady, and now, at the Commissioning Commemoration Ceremony of the USS Delaware, he recalled the days when the First Lady was vice president. But as always, White House.gov was ready to do everything necessary to make it appear as if we have a competent and coherent chief executive: in the official transcript of Biden’s rambling remarks, his misidentification of his wife as the vice president is quietly corrected without explanation. But the correction actually creates more problems than it solves.

Biden said of First Lady Jill Biden: “And I’m deeply proud of the work she’s doing as first lady with Joining Forces initiative she started with Michelle Obama when she was vice president, and now carries on.” In the WhiteHouse.gov version, we get “And I’m deeply proud of the work she is doing as First Lady with Joining Forces initiative she started with Michelle Obama when she [I] was Vice President and now carries on.”

That’s helpful in case anyone actually thought that Jill Biden was once vice president of the United States, but it’s not what Joe Biden said, and the correction blandly obscures a fact that ought to be of keen interest to contemporary observers as well as to future historians: Joe Biden is not entirely in control of what he says. His misstatement here is not just some innocuous slip of the tongue to be matter-of-factly corrected as if it were an insignificant typographical error; it is just the latest in a long string of weird statements that should arouse genuine concern about the mental state of the president of the United States, if such concern weren’t immediately dismissed as tendentious partisan mudslinging.