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Ruth King

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GLOBAL WARMING? THINK AGAIN

By on May 26th, 2016

From Jan Poller
These scientists made their own clouds, and what they found could require us to rethink how fast the earth is warming.

A new experiment looking at clouds is about to change the way we think about climate change.

For decades, scientists have thought that the tiny particles that form clouds — and play a big role in keeping the planet cool — were produced as a counterintuitive side effect of pollution.

So, while it was understood that we were putting loads of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere and heating things up, it was also thought that at least some of those particles were getting trapped inside clouds and helping to keep that warming from being even more catastrophic.

But a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, which looked more closely at these tiny particles, found that they can be produced naturally. This will help us understand just how cloudy the world actually was before we started polluting it, which is key to figuring out the rate at which our planet is heating up.
A cloud conundrum

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes aerosols as the single biggest source of uncertainty in human-driven climate change. Part of the problem is that we have no way of measuring just how cloudy the planet was in the preindustrial era.

Thanks to this uncertainty, and despite our precise measurements of the effects of human-induced greenhouse warming on climate, the estimates for projected climate change have entertained a wide range of numbers for projected warming, and these numbers haven’t changed for the past 35 years.

The models predict that if carbon dioxide doubles over the next century, then the planet will warm anywhere from 2.7 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit — a critical difference that should inform the way we prepare for the future.

So, what’s the deal with aerosols? Turns out that there are two sources of the particles:

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It’s Not Disney World – The VA Scandal Two Years Later-By Adam Andrzejewski

By on May 26th, 2016

Today, nearly half a million veterans still wait to see a VA doctor.

So, we opened the books on the VA. Here’s just a sample of our findings:

The VA spent $1.7 million on ’employee engagement’ and other satisfaction surveys with Gallup (2010-2014). There is no indication these polls found, flagged or identified the most egregious scandal in VA history.

The VA paid $303 million in salaries to non-essential positions: Painters ($185 million), Interior Designers ($64 million), and Gardeners ($54 million). While veterans were dying, the VA managers were rewarding the efficiency of these positions with bonuses (2012-2015.)

$751.1 million spent on ‘household’ and ‘office’ furniture including furniture rental, draperies, curtains, carpeting, modification, repair and maintenance (2010-2015). Much of from luxury, upscale manufacturers.

While the veterans wait weeks to see a doctor, we found:

The VA lawyered up and added 175 attorneys.

Dramatically increased their spending on public relations (PR).

‘Reformed bonuses’ so millions of dollars continued to flow to many of the same employees who gamed-the-system during the scandal.

and much more…

Read our Forbes column, It’s Not Disney World – The VA Scandal Two Years Later.

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MY SAY: HILLARY CLINTON’S 1969 COMMENCEMENT SPEECH AT WELLESLEY

By on May 25th, 2016

From the candidate that a majority of Americans- including Democrats- do not consider trustworthy….her words:

‘Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said “Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust.” What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted?”

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Flemming Rose: A Portrait in Courage A Danish journalist stands up to attempts to suppress unpopular opinions. By Michael Tanner ****

By on May 25th, 2016

Both around the world and here at home, free speech is under assault. From the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris to the “unexplained” deaths of critics of Russian president Vladimir Putin, people who express unpopular opinions or report the truth are in danger. Worldwide, more than 110 journalists were killed in 2015, bringing the total to 787 since 2005, according to Reporters without Borders.

The threats to free speech in this country don’t rise to that level, of course. But Hillary Clinton wants to change the First Amendment to limit political speech, and Donald Trump wants to rewrite libel laws so that he can sue media critics. Meanwhile, colleges routinely punish those who take unpopular stands and reject speakers who might challenge student orthodoxy.

That’s one reason why it is significant that the Cato Institute will award the eighth biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to a true champion of free speech, the Danish journalist and author Flemming Rose.

Rose came to the world’s attention in 2005, when, as an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, he published a series of twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Rose did so, not because he sought to be offensive, he said, but to challenge the growing wave of “self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam.”

Rose’s decision to publish the cartoons sparked riots in Europe and across the Islamic world. A price was put on Rose’s head, and he has received numerous credible death threats. A plot to assassinate him was disrupted by the FBI in 2009. Still, he firmly rejects the idea, so prevalent these days, that “you have a right not to be insulted or offended.”

While he came to prominence as a result of the Muhammad cartoons, Rose is not a provocateur but a defender of free speech as a matter of principle. In fact, he has recently undertaken a new cause: standing up for Muslims targeted by some of Europe’s new anti-terror laws, and fighting restrictions on religious speech deemed “extreme” by authorities. He has condemned Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s call to ban the Quran.

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Thanks to Obama, the terrorist cancer is growing Mark Thiessen

By on May 25th, 2016

We still do not know who or what is responsible for the crash of EgyptAir Flight 804, but we know this much for certain: The terrorist danger is growing, and it won’t be contained to the Mediterranean.

Responding to criticism of President Obama’s handling of terrorism, White House press secretary Josh Earnest boasted Thursday of all the setbacks the Islamic State has experienced in recent months, noting that in Iraq “45 percent of the populated area that ISIL previously controlled has been retaken from them. In Syria, that figure is now 20 percent.”

That’s like a patient who ignored a cancer diagnosis bragging that he finally reduced the tumor in his lung — glossing over the fact that he let it spread and metastasize to his other organs. If he had attacked the Islamic State cancer early, Obama could have stopped it from spreading in the first place. But instead, he dismissed the terrorist group as the “JV team” that was “engaged in various local power struggles and disputes” and did not have “the capacity and reach of a bin Laden” and did not pose “a direct threat to us.” He did nothing, while the cancer grew in Syria and then spread in Iraq.

Now the cancer has spread and metastasized across the world.

According to a recent CNN analysis, since declaring its caliphate in 2014, the Islamic State has carried out 90 attacks in 21 countries outside of Iraq and Syria that have killed 1,390 people and injured more than 2,000 others. The Islamic State has a presence in more than a dozen countries and has declared “provinces” in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Post reported in 2015 that “since the withdrawal of most U.S. and international troops in December, the Islamic State has steadily made inroads in Afghanistan” where it has “poured pepper into the wounds of their enemies . . . seared their hands in vats of boiling oil . . . blindfolded, tortured and blown apart [villagers] with explosives buried underneath them.”

On the day an EgyptAir plane carrying 66 people disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that investigators will look into all “potential factors that may have contributed to this tragedy.” (White House)

And while the Islamic State spreads and grows, al-Qaeda is making a comeback. Obama is touting the killing of Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour as “an important milestone,” but the truth is that the Taliban has made major military gains in Afghanistan — and that has opened the door to al-Qaeda. The Post reported in October that “American airstrikes targeted what was ‘probably the largest’ al-Qaeda training camp found in the 14-year Afghan war.” Sounds good except for one small problem: There were no major al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan when Obama took office. Now it is once again training terrorists in the land where it trained operatives for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

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Oberlin Students: Replace Midterms with Conversations and Erase Grades Below Cs Very reasonable. By Katherine Timpf

By on May 25th, 2016

Student activists at Oberlin College are saying how frustrated they are that the school is making it so tough for them to be on campus — and that it’s so unfair that the school won’t heed their demands for how to make it easier on them.

Now, in case you forgot, Oberlin made headlines in December when student activists started demanding $8.20 per hour for protesting. That was pretty ridiculous in itself, but interviews with student activists in a New Yorker piece written by Nathan Heller suggest that that demand was really just the tip of the ridiculousness iceberg. For example, a self-identified “Afro-Latinx” student named Megan Bautista said she was upset that the school is refusing to erase any grades below Cs:

Oberlin had modified its grading standards to accommodate activism around the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings, and Bautista had hoped for something similar. More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail. “Students felt really unsupported in their endeavors to engage with the world outside Oberlin,” she told me.

Whoa. So, is she trying to say that under the current policy, if you earn a D then a D appears on your transcript? Yikes, that is insane! Totally unfair! How do kids even handle going there?

I’m being sarcastic, of course . . . but believe it or not, some students actually believe this to be unfair. A transgender student named Cyrus Eosphoros — an activist who had advocated putting trigger warnings on Antigone – told the New Yorker he had just dropped out because of what Heller said he’d described as a “want of institutional support.”

“There’s this persistent, low-grade dehumanization from everyone,” Eosphoros said.

This sentiment of feeling dehumanized and mistreated was echoed by many others — including a student from Chicago named Zakiya Acey, who thought it was like, totally an injustice that some of his professors made him actually take his midterms instead of allowing him to just chat with them about the subject material instead:

“There’s professors who have openly been, like, ‘Yeah, instead of, you know, writing out this midterm, come into my office hours, and you can just speak it,’ right? But that’s not institutionalized,” he said. “I have to find that professor.”

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Commencement Season The two most popular toxic themes being promoted to new graduates. Thomas Sowell

By on May 25th, 2016

This is the season of college Commencement speeches — an art form that has seldom been memorable, but has increasingly become toxic in recent times.

Two themes seem to dominate Commencement speeches. One is shameless self-advertising by people in government, or in related organizations supported by the taxpayers or donors, saying how nobler it is to be in “public service” than working in business or other “selfish” activities.

In other words, the message is that it is morally superior to be in organizations consuming output produced by others than to be in organizations which produce that output. Moreover, being morally one-up is where it’s at.

The second theme of many Commencement speakers, besides flattering themselves that they are in morally superior careers, is to flatter the graduates that they are now equipped to go out into the world as “leaders” who can prescribe how other people should live.

In other words, young people, who in most cases have never had either the sobering responsibility and experience of being self-supporting adults, are to tell other people — who have had that responsibility and that experience for years — how they should live their lives.

In so far as the graduates go into “public service” in government, whether as bureaucrats or as aides to politicians or judges, they are to help order other people around.

It might never occur to many Commencement speakers, or to their audiences, that what the speakers are suggesting is that inexperienced young graduates are to prescribe, or help to dictate, to vast numbers of other people who have the real world experience that the graduates themselves lack.

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The Muslim World is a Permanent Refugee Crisis It’s never going to stop unless we shut the door. Daniel Greenfield

By on May 25th, 2016

Forget the Syrian Civil War for a moment. Even without the Sunnis and Shiites competing to give each other machete haircuts every sunny morning, there would still be a permanent Muslim refugee crisis.

The vast majority of civil wars over the last ten years have taken place in Muslim countries. Muslim countries are also some of the poorest in the world. And Muslim countries also have high birth rates.

Combine violence and poverty with a population boom and you get a permanent migration crisis.

No matter what happens in Syria or Libya next year, that permanent migration crisis isn’t going away.

The Muslim world is expanding unsustainably. In the Middle East and Asia, Muslims tend to underperform their non-Muslim neighbors both educationally and economically. Oil is the only asset that gave Muslims any advantage and in the age of fracking, its value is a lot shakier than it used to be.

The Muslim world had lost its old role as the intermediary between Asia and the West. And it has no economic function in the new world except to blackmail it by spreading violence and instability.

Muslim countries with lower literacy rates, especially for women, are never going to be economic winners at any trade that doesn’t come gushing out of the ground. Nor will unstable dictatorships ever be able to provide social mobility or access to the good life. At best they’ll hand out subsidies for bread.

The Muslim world has no prospects for getting any better. The Arab Spring was a Western delusion.

Growing populations divided along tribal and religious lines are competing for a limited amount of land, power and wealth. Countries without a future are set to double in size.

There are only two solutions; war or migration.

Either you fight and take what you want at home. Or you go abroad and take what you want there.

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“I Love Israel … Free People Need to Unify against Islam as a Belief System”: Son of Hamas leader (video)

By on May 25th, 2016

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

At the Jerusalem Post Annual Conference Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a prominent Hamas commander, pays warm tribute to Israel as “the only light in the Middle East”, condemns BDS, the “apartheid” slur, and the political correctness that muzzles expressions of fear regarding Islam (“the Muslim people have a problem”), and issues a stark warning that the danger from Islam endangers the whole world, not just Israel.

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Freddie Gray and Jihad: Narrative v. Fact By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on May 25th, 2016

I’ve been fortunate to have had two professional careers, the first one in the courtroom as a trial lawyer and the second in journalism. I did not need the latter experience, though, to notice the stark difference between these two worlds.

When I prosecuted the “Blind Sheikh” (Omar Abdel Rahman) and the jihadist cell that bombed the World Trade Center and then plotted a simultaneous attack on several New York City landmarks, the organs of government that speak to the public through the media were making like irresponsible journalists. That is, they were eschewing facts and evidence, obsessively peddling a counterfactual narrative, to wit:

There is only one “true” Islam, and it is resolutely peaceful (indeed, being a “religion of peace” is apparently its only identifiable attribute). Therefore, the terrorist acts plotted and committed by a cabal of men who just happened to be Muslim had utterly nothing to do with Islam, notwithstanding the jihadists’ proclamations to the contrary.

By contrast, in the courtroom, criminal allegations cannot be proved absent convincing factual evidence — beyond a reasonable doubt — that unanimously persuades jurors of the suspects’ guilt.

Thus, though we prosecutors were formally part of the government, it was as if we were inhabiting a cocoon insulated from the fictional government narrative. Indeed, the judge repeatedly reminded the jurors of their oath to decide the case solely based on the facts proved and the controlling law, not bias, fear or favor — which was a 1990s way of saying “not narrative.”

The upshot of all this? No matter what “religion of peace” blather was coming out of Main Justice in Washington or the White House press apparatus, in our New York City federal courtroom a short distance from the Twin Towers, we were not only permitted but obliged as government attorneys to prove the truth:

(a) There are mainstream interpretations of Islam that endorse war against non-Muslims to establish Allah’s law (sharia);

(b) these are literalist interpretations that draw directly on Islamic scripture;

(c) the interpretations (Salafism, Wahhabism, Islamic supremacism — collectively, what we hopefully refer to as “radical” Islam) are urged on young Muslims (mostly men) by influential sharia scholars like the Blind Sheikh, whose powerful influence owes solely and only to their mastery of the doctrine;

(d) based on those incitements, these young men are radicalized into jihadism, plotting and committing acts of terrorism.

Those were the facts. Our evidence proved them incontestably. That is the only way we were able to convict jihadists — not only in my prosecution, but in case after terrorism case.

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