RUTHFULLY YOURS

Big Green is big business. The global renewable energy market is estimated at over $600 billion. Obama’s stimulus boondoggle alone blew around $50 billion on green energy. Annual spending is somewhere around $39 billion a year and that’s just the tip of the Big Green iceberg.

California carbon auctions are climbing into the billions. And the endgame is a national and a global
carbon tax that will allow Big Green to take money out of the pockets of every single human being.

Environmentalism isn’t a hippie with a cardboard sign. It’s multinational corporations and big banks. It’s environmental consultants padding the bill for every government project. It’s subsidies that get carved up ten different ways into highly profitable investments at taxpayer expense. It’s brand greenwashing and useless recycling programs. It’s a dime, a dollar or a hundred dollars added to every bill.

Big Green is booming business. But it can’t succeed on its own. Without public policy based on the hoax that the planet is going to be destroyed unless Big Green gets more green cash, the scam collapses.

Even as the science behind the conspiracy theory that claims humans are warming the planet continues to fall apart, Big Green is escalating its crackdown on climate science. If you are going to falsely claim that 99.99% of scientists agree with you, the best way to ensure that is by criminalizing scientific dissent.

Racism is not a specific illness but a general sickness. Display one symptom and you display them all. If you show me an anti-Muslim bigot, I will be able to guess his or her views on the European Union, welfare state, crime and “political correctness”. Show me a leftwing or Islamist antisemite and, once again, he will carry a suitcase full of prejudices, which have nothing to do with Jews, but somehow have everything to do with Jews.

The Labour party does not have a “problem with antisemitism” it can isolate and treat, like a patient asking a doctor for a course of antibiotics. The party and much of the wider liberal-left have a chronic condition.

As I have written about the darkness on the left before, I am not going to crow now that it has turned darker than even I predicted. (There is not much to crow about, after all.) I have nothing but respect for the Labour MPs who are trying to stop their party becoming a playpen for fanatics and cranks. It just appears to me that they face interlocking difficulties that are close to insoluble.

They must first pay the political price of confronting supporters from immigrant communities, which Labour MPs from all wings of the party have failed to do for decades. It may be high. While Ken Livingstone was forcing startled historians to explain that Adolf Hitler was not a Zionist, I was in Naz Shah’s Bradford. A politician who wants to win there cannot afford to be reasonable, I discovered. He or she cannot deplore the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and say that the Israelis and Palestinians should have their own states. They have to engage in extremist rhetoric of the “sweep all the Jews out” variety or risk their opponents denouncing them as “Zionists”.

Be sure to see this movie Monday, May 2 – during its one-night nationwide engagement

Without presenting it to the US Senate, as required by the Constitution, President Obama has signed the Paris climate treaty. He is already using it to further obligate the United States to slash its fossil fuel use, carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth … control our lives, livelihoods, living standards and liberties … and redistribute our wealth. Poor, minority and working class families will suffer most.

China, India and other developing economies are under no such obligation, unless and until it is in their interest to do so. For them, compliance is voluntary – and they cannot afford to eliminate the fossil fuels that supply 85% of all global energy, generate some 90% of developing nations’ electricity, and will lift billions of people out of abject poverty. That’s why these countries have built over 1,000 coal-fired power plants and are planning to build 2,300 more – while unaccountable EPA bureaucrats are shutting down US coal-fired generators, and getting ready to block natural gas production and use.

What if the entire foundation for this energy and economic insanity were erroneous, groundless, fabricated … a climate con job – a Climate Hustle?

That is exactly what CFACT’s new movie demonstrates is actually going on.

Climate Hustle is the perfect antidote to the destructive, demoralizing climate alarmism that dominates political decisions and obsesses the Obama White House and EPA. You owe it to yourself to see it.

It’s coming to a theater near you on Monday, May 2, for a special one-night engagement.

I saw Climate Hustle April 14, at its U.S. premiere on Capitol Hill in Washington. The film is informative and entertaining, pointed and humorous. As meteorologist Anthony Watts says, it is wickedly effective in its using slapstick humor and the words and deeds of climate alarmists to make you laugh at them.

If you heard that a group of philanthropists came together to donate millions of dollars to schools, you would probably consider it good news. Indeed, thousands of underprivileged kids will be helped by the $35 million raised for Success Academy charter schools at a charity gala earlier this month. But teachers unions detect a nefarious purpose.

This $35 million donation was “part of a coordinated national effort to decimate public schooling,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote in an April 13 article at the Huffington Post. “Wealthy donors and their political allies,” she warned, are “pushing unaccountable charter growth in urban centers while stripping communities of a voice in their children’s education.”

Regardless of the political attacks, politicians and philanthropists must remain committed. Charter schools serve many underprivileged students: 56% are on free or reduced lunch and 65% are minorities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Because they are run independently of school districts and city bureaucracies, they have the flexibility to be innovative in the choices they offer to parents, providing services like extended-learning schedules and language immersion.

Charter schools are also closing achievement gaps. At Success Academy schools in New York, three-quarters of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and nearly all are minorities. In 2015, 68% of students scored proficient in reading and 93% ranked proficient in math. For contrast, only 35% of New York City students overall scored proficient in math. Their reading abilities were even worse.

This success translates to broad-based support. About two-thirds of public-school parents favor charter schools, according to a 2015 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll. Support is especially high among low-income parents, according to a March survey commissioned by the organization I lead. Some 88% of parents who earn less than $50,000 a year would like to see more charter schools in their communities. CONTINUE AT SITE

As senior party members said to mull resignation over handling of anti-Semitism row, leader says he will continue to engage Palestinian groups, declares Labour ‘absolutely against anti-Semitism’

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn rebuffed calls Sunday to denounce contacts with terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah, while declaring that his party is against anti-Semitism, amid a roiling scandal over accusations of widespread anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments among Labourites.

Corbyn used a May Day rally to say the party “is absolutely against anti-Semitism in any form” after a tumultuous week that focused attention on the party’s attitude toward Jews instead of its campaigning efforts ahead of London’s mayoral race.

But as Labour attempted to push back against efforts to label it anti-Semitic, it also came under fire for Corbyn’s past contacts with Hamas and Hezbollah, both sworn to Israel’s destruction.

A statement from Corbyn’s spokesperson said he would continue to engage such groups, while denying that doing so was tantamount to an endorsement.

“Jeremy Corbyn has been a longstanding supporter of Palestinian rights and the pursuit of peace and justice in the Middle East through dialogue and negotiation,” the statement read, according to the Telegraph newspaper. “He has met many people with whom he profoundly disagrees in order to promote peace and reconciliation processes, including in South Africa, Latin American, Ireland and the Middle East. He believes it is essential to speak to people with whom there is disagreement, particularly when they have large-scale support or democratic mandates.”

Seventy years ago this month, a committee of 12 scholars and statesmen completed an 80-page report that is all but forgotten today. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, consisting of six British and six American members, was a British idea.

Under pressure from President Harry Truman to allow 100,000 Jewish survivors in Europe’s DP camps to emigrate to the British Mandate, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin proposed the joint committee as a way to outflank the White House. Between January and March 1946, the Committee heard testimony in Washington, London, numerous sites in Europe, the Arab capitals, and Jerusalem. Bevin was sure that a sense of Britain’s strategic realities in the Middle East — its dependence on bases and oil for instance — would bring the US members to shy away from antagonizing the Arab world. To ensure the desired outcome, however, the British helped to establish a global anti-Zionist narrative that bled into anti-Semitism, all in the shadow of the Jewish world’s greatest catastrophe.

Jewish witnesses in Washington, London, Europe, and Jerusalem were aggressively cross-examined by British committee members. It was pointless, the British argued, for the Jews to rehash the recent history of pogroms or the Shoah. These were irrelevant. Rather, Jewish speakers had to show how more Jews could be put in Palestine without causing an uproar, and why most could not simply return to Poland, Romania, and so on. Thus in Washington, when Joseph Schwartz of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee discussed the recent Krakow pogrom to demonstrate that the Jewish place in Poland was over, British committee chairman Sir John Singleton laconically countered, “History shows, doesn’t it, that in every country where there has been persecution, the people have come back.” Even in Poland, after speaking with Adolf Berman, a former Warsaw Ghetto leader, British committee members asked “whether friction was being caused by returning Jews asking for restitution of their property.”

Similarly, British committee members lost patience with Jews who insisted that Palestine had the space and economic potential such that Arabs and Jews could live at peace. Economist Robert Nathan argued that a properly developed economy in Palestine could accommodate up to a million Jews, thus raising the living standard of everyone. “Is it your view,” Singleton asked, “that the acquisition of more land by the Jews would increase the friendship between Arabs and Jews? . . . [It] doesn’t seem that it would tend toward a solution.”

Author David Kilcullen “Blood Year” is scathing of Barack Obama’s deer-in-the-headlights response to the rise of ISIS. The last thing Vladimir Putin had to fear on the eve of his bold intervention in the Syrian civil war, was the reaction of a supine US president

Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror
by David Kilcullen
Black Inc, 2016, 304 pages, $29.99

The United States will remain in a kind of purgatory until it unlocks the full meaning of 9/11. Without the right understanding of what that terrorist attack signified, there cannot be an effective response to it. David Kilcullen’s Blood Year makes the case that the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have badly misjudged the nature of the challenge to America and the wider world in general. As a direct consequence of this, asserts Kilcullen, the power and reach of militant jihadism appear much stronger now than when President Bush first launched the Global War On Terrorism (GWOT) in 2001.

The Australian David Kilcullen has been, amongst other things, senior adviser to General David Petraeus during the Surge (2007-08) and chief strategist in the Counter-Terrorism Bureau of the US State Department. He currently runs a private agency that has advised everyone from the UK and Australian governments to Nato. Blood Year is that rare thing, an insider’s knowledge of Western policy-making in the twenty-first century combined with the frankness of an independent-minded questioner. Yet even Kilcullen—a veritable expert on counter-terrorism—appears, at times, not to grasp in its entirety the genesis of Islamic militancy and the comprehensive nature of its war against modernity.

Kilcullen contrasts George W. Bush’s second term in office (2005 to 2009) with his first (2001 to 2005). Stung into action by the destruction of the Twin Towers and the strike on the Pentagon, the forty-third President launched “Operation Enduring Freedom—Afghanistan”. On the hundredth day of his GWOT—some time after the initial success in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda and more than a year before the commencement of the Iraq War—President Bush could not unreasonably make the claim: “We are supported by the collective will of the world.”

There were two big pieces of news out of NASA this week. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and scientists at the Southwest Research Institute discovered a new moon, orbiting a dwarf planet named Makemake (one of the many Pluto-esque bodies that live in the far reaches of the solar system). And NASA announced that the Earth is getting greener. Literally greener. Plant growth is way up.

Why is plant growth way up? Because of all the extra carbon dioxide in the air. According to the study, which was published this week in the scientific journal Nature, the total area of the planet that’s covered by plants has increased by more than 11 million square miles in the last 33 years. For perspective: North America, including Greenland, is a little less than nine and a half million square miles. Of course, not all of this increase is due to CO2 and global warming. But 78 percent of it is. (Says the study.)

This is very good news. Plants feed the world. It is not, however, unexpected news. Wall Street Journal readers may recall a piece published in May of 2013 called “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide,” by William Happer, one of Princeton’s top-flight physicists, and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, a former Republican senator from New Mexico, and an Apollo astronaut who walked on the moon.

“In Defense of Carbon Dioxide” criticized the “conventional wisdom” about CO2 and the “single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas.” “Contrary to what some would have us believe,” wrote Schmitt and Happer, “increased carbon dioxide will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.”

Needless to say, they were right on the money.

Here are some questions for the man-made or Anthropogenic Global Warmers. Since I have taken up the cudgels on various Facebook pages I am screamed at by numerous sycophants who declare that I am a simpleton and totally ignorant. I confess! But here are some questions for the man-made Global Warmers:

Do you deny that the Sun’s radiation causes the surfaces of the Earth to warm?

Do you deny that we are travelling round the Sun at over 66,000 miles per hour in an ellipse?

Do you deny that the Sun is one million three hundred thousand times as big as Planet Earth by volume?

Do you deny that the Sun on it corona is approximately 6,500C?

Do you deny that the Sun is between 91 to 95 million miles away?

Do you deny that the whole Solar system is within an arm of the Milky Way?

Do you deny that Outer Space is a vacuum?

Do you deny the 1st Law of Thermodynamics? That all heat has to be generated by work done?

Do you deny the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, that all heat by itself flows from hot to cold and never versa?

Do you deny that evaporation causes cooling?

Do you deny that Conduction demonstrates heat flowing from hot to cold?

Do you deny that Convection carries heat upwards and away towards Outer Space?

Do you deny that only Radiation can pass heat into or through a vacuum?

Do you deny that the Atmosphere is warmed at the bottom by conduction from the Earth’s surfaces?

Do you deny that the atmosphere cools by 2 degrees centigrade for every 1,000 feet of altitude?

Do you deny that 99% of the Atmosphere is composed of Nitrogen and Oxygen?

Do you deny that the Greenhouse Gases only occupy 1% and that Carbon Dioxide a mere 0.04%?

Do you deny that the gases of the Atmosphere do not generate heat?

Do you deny that at 10,000 feet the gases are cold, including CO2?

Sometimes we wonder if we’re still living in the land of the free. Witness the subpoena from Claude Walker, attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands, demanding that the Competitive Enterprise Institute cough up a decade of emails and policy work, as well as a list of private donors.

Mr. Walker is frustrated that the free-market think tank won’t join the modern church of climatology, so he has joined the rapidly expanding club of Democratic politicians and prosecutors harassing dissenters.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman started the assault last autumn with a subpoena barrage on Exxon Mobil. His demand for documents followed reports by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times that claimed Exxon scientists had known for years that greenhouse gases cause global warming but hid the truth from the public and shareholders.

Those reports selectively quoted from Exxon documents, which in any case were publicly available and often peer-reviewed in academic journals. Some Exxon scientists changed their views over the years, and several years ago the company even endorsed a carbon tax. CONTINUE AT SITE