RUTHFULLY YOURS

Gustavus Swift once said about his meat-packing operations that they used “everything but the squeal.”

We have just seen the world’s politicians meet in Paris to sign a worthless piece of paper aimed at reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide in a questionable belief that man-made global warming threatens our existence. There was endless promotion of wind and solar renewable power, and there were promises to end the use of fossil fuels.

What if the global nemesis, carbon dioxide, can play a role in providing clean, reliable, efficient electric power? A consortium of companies is currently building a 50-MWt (megawatt thermal) demonstration power plant in Texas to find out.

The plant is due to begin operations in 2016. Here is the gist from Power Engineering:

CB&I (NYSE: CBI), Exelon Generation (NYSE: EXC) and 8 Rivers Capital have teamed to build a $140 million demonstration power plant that produces zero emissions from natural gas.

The plant will be built in Texas using a supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) turbine from Toshiba. The plant will demonstrate NET Power’s Allam Cycle technology, which uses CO2 as a working fluid to drive a combustion turbine and produces pipeline-quality CO2 that can be sequestered or used in various industrial processes such as enhanced oil recovery.

The project includes technology development, plant design and construction, and a full testing and operations program. CB&I will provide engineering, procurement and construction services, 8 Rivers, which invented the Allam Cycle, will provide the technology development and intellectual property for the cycle, and Exelon will operate and maintain the plant. Design activities have been ongoing since 2010, and commissioning is expected by 2016.

A Lebanese militant who led one of the most infamous attacks in Israel’s history was killed in a strike on a Damascus suburb that the Lebanese group Hezbollah blamed on Israel.

The attack on Saturday night, which Hezbollah said was an airstrike, killed Samir Kantar who led fighters from Lebanon into Israel in a 1979 attack that resulted in the deaths of two young children, their father and two policemen. After almost three decades in an Israeli prison, he was freed in 2008 as part of an exchange with Hezbollah and went on to lead an offshoot of the Shiite militant and political group.

The strike raised tensions along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon on Sunday. Unifil, the United Nations peacekeeping force along the border, said three rockets from southern Lebanon were fired at northern Israel on Sunday night. Two struck land while a third fell in the sea and Israel responded with mortar fire at Lebanon.

Shortly after that, Lebanon’s state-controlled news agency reported that Israeli warplanes had entered the country’s airspace and could be heard in Beirut. But there were no reports of further airstrikes. Israel said it held the Lebanese Army responsible for attacks from its territory.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/20/daniel-greenfield-moment-muslims-are-not-the-new-jews/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Daniel Greenfield Moment with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed Muslims Are Not the New Jews, pointing out how Chanukah is not about Islamophobia.

Don’t miss it!

West Lafayette, Ind. — Although he is just 22, Andrew Zeller is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at Purdue University. He is one reason the school is a rare exception to the rule of unreason on American campuses, where freedom of speech is under siege. He and Purdue are evidence that freedom of speech, by which truth is winnowed from error, is most reliably defended by those in whose intellectual pursuits the truth is most rigorously tested by reality.

While in high school in Bowling Green, Ohio, Zeller completed three years of college undergraduate courses. He arrived at Purdue when its incoming president, Indiana’s former governor Mitch Daniels, wanted the university to receive the top “green light” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which combats campus restrictions on speech and rates institutions on their adherence to constitutional principles.

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).