RUTHFULLY YOURS

EPA officials gave $542 million to colleges and universities in grants to study everything from pollution caused by backyard grilling to hotel shower use, but those funds have never been audited by a government watchdog.

EPA awarded the funds to 341 schools in more than 3,100 grants from 2009 to 2014, according a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of more than 100,000 agency awards compiled by Open The Books.

The last audit by EPA’s inspector general of any of those grants, however, was 10 years ago, and then was only conducted in response to a specific complaint.

“The last time that the OIG did a review … was in December 2005 on a hotline complaint for the University of Nevada,” EPA IG spokesman Jeffrey Lagda told TheDCNF. “In the past 10 years, the OIG has not conducted any reviews of grants awarded to colleges and universities.”

Instead, the IG relies on single audits – audits of the each university as a whole – though Lagda did not say who conducts those inspections.

Officials with Open The Books – a non-profit government accountability group that is digitizing billions of dollars of spending at all levels of government – think change is needed.

“How is the EPA supposed to protect the environment when it can’t even protect its own grant-making system from mis-allocation of resources and taxpayer abuse,” Open The Books Founder Adam Andrzejewski told TheDCNF. “It’s time for a deep, line-by-line forensic audit of EPA disbursements.”

States and businesses are suing to stop the Obama Administration’s anticarbon Clean Power Plan, and now they have new evidence to seek a preliminary injunction.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute has obtained government emails that show the EPA secretly worked with environmental lobbyists to craft its Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gases. The emails show this secret alliance designed a standard that would be impossible or economically ruinous for existing coal plants to meet—in order to force their closure.

The New York Times first reported that in 2014 environmentalists Dan Lashof, David Doniger and David Hawkins—all with roots at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)—drafted a “blueprint” that “influenced” the greenhouse gas rules. That wasn’t the half of it.

The emails, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, show that this trio and other environmentalists essentially wrote the rule. Their inside man was Michael Goo, who worked at the NRDC before becoming the EPA’s Associate Administrator for the Office of Policy. The emails show intense 2011 communications between Mr. Goo and high-level officials at the NRDC, the Sierra Club and the Clean Air Task Force. Mr. Goo used a private Yahoo email account to send multiple drafts of his options memo to these outside groups, which returned them with draft instructions.

The Oberlin College Black Student Union has released a list of 50 “Institutional Demands” for the school, including one that orders it to pay black students who organize protests $8.20 per hour for doing so.

The 14-page (!) document opens with this nice buzzword salad:

Oberlin College and Conservatory is an unethical institution From capitalizing on massive labor exploitation across campus, to the Conservatory of Music treating Black and other students of color as less than through its everyday running, Oberlin College unapologetically acts as [sic] unethical institution, antithetical to its historical vision.

“This institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy,” it continues.

The Earth will do exactly as it pleases.
“Shakespeare made a reckless ruler pull down his kingdom on his head, [and we are adding] a hundred and twenty excess parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.”

But it is generally acknowledged that it’s horrifyingly ignorant to think that we can dial in a nice climate by turning the CO2 adjustment knob. Indeed, the current and projected CO2 levels are at the very low end of the range for the last 600 million years. Global temperature is also at the low end of that range. More recently, we are at the low end of the temperature decline since the Holocene Optimum 8,000 years ago. Backing up, the Eemian age 120,000 years ago was much warmer, and sea levels were 6 meters higher, and CO2 was around 280 ppm.

What is obvious is that the Earth will do exactly as it pleases, and we have no ability to predict that or, consequently, to control it. We can influence it, usually but not always for the worse. Furthermore, we have no idea if the current 15°C is the optimum climate. Higher temperatures over the last 200,000 years have been associated with improvements in human welfare. There has been no tipping point, not even at the P-T Extinction Event 250 million years ago, when the temperature briefly blipped past the previous 22°C lid (in effect for hundreds of millions of years) to at least 28°C. More interestingly, there has been no tipping point on the downside, when Snowball Earth increased the albedo so drastically.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ignited a firestorm last week at oral arguments for Fisher v. University of Texas, a case concerning that school’s affirmative-action policies. The media pounced after Justice Scalia suggested that it might be not be a bad thing if fewer African-Americans were admitted to the University of Texas. Many rushed to call the comments racist.

Subsequent reports clarified that Mr. Scalia had been invoking the “mismatch” hypothesis, which posits that students who receive large admissions preferences—and who therefore attend a school that they wouldn’t have gotten into otherwise—often end up hurt by the academic gap between them and their college peers. But on the whole even this coverage has spread confusion.
The mismatch theory is not about race. It is about admissions preferences, full stop. Mismatch can affect students who receive preferential admission based on athletic prowess, low socioeconomic status, or alumni parents. An important finding of mismatch research is that when one controls for the effect of admissions preferences, racial differences in college performance largely disappear. Far from stigmatizing minorities, mismatch places the responsibility for otherwise hard-to-explain racial gaps not on the students, but on the administrators who put them in classrooms above their qualifications.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, and a host of others believe that Islam can and should be reformed. But how?

The idea of reforming Islam is not entirely new. But Islam cannot be reformed the way Christianity was. For one, Islam claims that it is the perfect eternal faith for mankind. Divisions have happened and will continue to occur in Islam. Yet reformation has not happened in nearly 1,400 years and is not going to happen. In the mind of millions of Muslims, Islam is carved in granite, just the way it is. No change. Allah’s book is sealed.

About the only universal agreement that exists among Islamic scholars is that every word of the Qur’an is the word of Allah and is not subject to human modification, ever. The Hadith enjoys a similar sacrosanct standing. And of course, the faithful Muhammad’s conduct as recorded in the Sunna is the model to be emulated. Hence, one can pick and choose, but one cannot discard or revise any part of the Islamic scripture. For this reason, a Martin Luther-type reformation has not happened and will not likely ever happen within Islam.

Numerous people have tried it in every imaginable way. The Mu’tazelis tried it, the Sufis tried it, and hundreds of old and new schools tried it, and they all failed. Many open-minded Muslim intellectuals have tried reforming Islam, including Muhammad Ali of Egypt, Sayyid al-Qimni, Nasr Abu Zayd, Khalil Abdel-Karim, Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohammed Arkoun, Mohammed Shahrour, and Ahmed Subhy Mansour. Sheikh Mansour was fired from Al-Azhar University after expressing his Hadith rejector views. Edip Yuksel, Gamal al-Banna, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, Ahmed Al-Gubbanchi, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, and Faraj Foda, Taha were hanged in 1985 under the sharia regime of Jaafar al-Nimeiri, and Foda was assassinated in 1992 by al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. Persian scholar and historian Ahmad Kasravi was also assassinated by Fada’iyan-e Islam (the devotees of Islam).

There is a certain class of academic for whom historical references to oil become a clarion call to rise up, denounce, and publish. A recent book talk proved the point. Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, pronounced himself “lucky” to have previewed the work of the speaker, Irene Gendzier, professor emerita in the department of political science at Boston University:

She has . . . discovered things that those of us who thought we knew something about Palestine often found a revelation.

High praise from the former PLO spokesman for Gendzier’s new book, Dying to Forget, Oil, Power, Palestine and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East. A mix of students, colleagues, friends of the author, and the public totaling about forty-five squeezed into a tight space on the second floor of a bookstore near Columbia.

Gendzier began by lamenting the recent ISIS attack on Paris, only to pivot to the upheaval currently overwhelming the Middle East:

[W]hat about all the other events taking place? What about Beirut? What about Yemen? What about Iraq? What about Syria? Why are we selective? The selectivity of the mourning comes with something more. . . . A kind of indifference about . . . “the deaths of others.”. . . [T]he terrible despair that comes from those that are permanently uprooted and displaced, and exist nowhere as a result of wars. We seem not to think about them.

For the fourth time this year, the Environmental Protection Agency has been accused of breaking laws governing its operations.

Last July, the agency was accused of colluding with left wing environmental groups to push its new carbon regulations. In October, a federal appeals court said the EPA broke the law when it illegally approved a pesticide.

In August, the EPA was responsible for a toxic spill at an abandoned mine that polluted rivers in three states.

Now the Government Accountability Office reports that the agency’s social media blitz to approve the new rules governing the protection of just about every acre of water in the country violated strictures against lobbying.

Fox News:

The EPA’s campaign violated restrictions against lobbying and propaganda by federal agencies, the Government Accountability Office said in a 26-page report. The agency blitzed social media in a campaign that urged the public to submit comments on the draft water rule. The effort reached at least 1.8 million people.

Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma said the GAO finding confirms what he has long suspected: “that EPA will go to extreme lengths and even violate the law to promote its activist environmental agenda.”

The Islamic State continues to perpetrate its barbaric terror right before our eyes, referencing Islamic texts and teachings as it commits its evil acts. The Obama administration and the U.S. media, meanwhile, continue their leftist mantra after each Islamic terror attack: “This is not Islam.”

In response to this mass denial in our government and culture, we are running The Glazov Gang’s feature interview with Dr. Ari Babaknia, an Iranian-born doctor who wrote and published a 4-volume book in Farsi “The Holocaust” (which in English is “Humanity, NOT”).

He discusses “Humanity, NOT,” which takes an in-depth look, in words and images, at the captured emotions of the victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and survivors of the Holocaust, told in their own words.

Dr. Babaknia focuses on the evil of genocide, the indifference of man in the face of evil, and when silence is not an option. The point is emphasized in the discussion that these are phenomena directly interlinked with our civilization’s silence and impotence today in the face of Islamic Jihad:

Defending his decision to address the HaaretzQ-New Israel Fund conference in New York on ‎Monday, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin called the left-wing newspaper, which he said he has ‎been reading for the last 70 years, a “beacon of freedom.” ‎

He got that wrong. Israel is the “beacon of freedom” that enables such a publication to grace its ‎pages with content that, when not crossing the line into treason, is merely shameful in its blatant ‎delegitimization of the Jewish state.‎

That its conference was engaged in doing the same came as no surprise. Nor was the fact that ‎organizers removed the Israeli flag from the podium area at the behest of Palestinian Authority ‎chief “peace” negotiator Saeb Erekat.‎