Obama can't defeat ISIS with soft power, though ISIS could beat him with soft power assuming its Caliph ever decided to agree to sit down at a table with John Kerry without beheading him. Iran has picked up billions in sanctions relief and the right to take over Yemen and raid ships in international waters in the Persian Gulf just for agreeing to listen to Kerry talk for an hour. And that might be a fair exchange. As bad as having your capital or ship seized by Iran is, listening to John Kerry talk is even worse. So far ISIS has preferred the classical approach of killing everything in its path. The approach, deemed insufficiently nuanced by masters of subtlety like Obama and Kerry, has worked surprisingly well. For it's hard to destroy something if you don't know what it is. And it's hard to know what a thing is if you won't even call it by its name or name its ideology. The left loves root causes, but the root cause of ISIS isn't poverty, unemployment or a lack of democracy.  It's...

A ranking Iranian political figure, Issa Kalantari, recently warned that past mistakes leave Iran with water supplies so insufficient that up to 70 percent, or 55 million out of 78 million Iranians, would be forced to abandon their native country for parts unknown. Many facts buttress Kalantari's apocalyptic prediction: *Once lauded in poetry, Lake Urmia, the Middle East's largest lake, has lost 95 percent of its water since 1996, going from 31 billion cubic meters to 1.5 billion. *What the Seine is to Paris, the Zayanderud was to Isfahan - except the latter went bone-dry in 2010. *Over two-thirds of Iran's cities and towns are "on the verge of a water crisis" that could result in drinking water shortages; already, thousands of villages depend on water tankers. Nor are Iranians alone in peril; many others in the arid Middle East may also be forced into unwanted, penurious, desperate exile. With one unique, magnificent exception, much of the Middle East is running out of water due to such maladies as population growth, short-sighted dictators, distorted economic incentives, and infrastructure-destroying warfare. Some specifics:

Chanceries, political elites and business federations across Europe, regardless of whether they are on the Left or the Right, are hoping the Conservative Party loses today's (5/07) general election. All the better if a motley Labor government is strapped to a bloc of triumphant Scottish Nationalists, guaranteeing a double-lock against any further flirtations with Brexit (Britain's exit from the European Union). Or so goes the argument. They should be careful what they wish for. A Labor-SNP arrangement would be inherently weak and unstable, like the string of Gladstone governments dependent on the swing vote of the Irish Home Rule movement in the late 19th century. A Tory defeat would flush out the last EU dreamers and leave a post-Cameron party with even less tolerance for the posturing of Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker, who this week accused the Anglo-Saxon world of trying to destroy the euro and vowed to stop Britain imposing its "exclusive agenda on all the other member states of Europe." In other words, Brexit and the doom of the EU is either on the horizon or just beyond it.

[This is the text of Robert Spencer's address at the Mohammed Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland Texas on Sunday, May 3rd, just hours before two Moslem terrorists were gunned down trying to murder the attendees.] A very good friend of mine told me right before I left for this event that - you're just poking them in the eye, you're trying to provoke them.  You know, why are you doing that?  You're the one that's being offensive.  And this was a friend, you know, and I was kind of taken aback.  And I had to stop and think - well, what exactly is wrong with that? And what's wrong with that is that this is only offensive because Moslems have made it offensive.  Okay, so we have to not draw Mohammed, because that'll poke them in the eye and offend them.  And then we have to not be Jewish, because that will poke them in the eye and offend them.  And then what?  Okay, I guess pork and alcohol are out.  Okay, and then what? The Islamic State - the Islamic State is beheading people and taking sex slaves, and subjugating the Christians under the hegemony of the Islamic law.  And they're doing it all on the basis of Koranic directives.  And so that's all Islamic.  So I guess we can't say a word about that.  Because that would poke them in the eye and offend Moslems. You see, step by step by step, we're ending up going in the direction of accepting Islamic law.  Let's put it this way: Every Western media outlet that refuses to publish the Mohammed cartoons is accepting Islamic blasphemy law. I say it's time for a little cultural self-assertiveness.

Amazing scenes from Baltimore: rioters throwing bricks at police, looting and burning down a CVS pharmacy and other stores, stomping on police cars and setting them on fire. The rioting followed the funeral of Freddie Gray on Monday (4/27), a black man who died in police custody in uncertain circumstances. The next day (4/28), National Guard in camouflage patrolled the streets, and a curfew was imposed. The rioters also burned down a housing project for seniors and a community centre, a $16million investment by the Southern Baptist Church that was due to open in six months. It was meant to be a sign of hope in a blighted area. And yet, despite the evident self-destructiveness, some were claiming that the rioters were "uprisers" that represented a "rebellion". Morehouse College professor Mark Hill Lamont told CNN that the turmoil in Baltimore was "resistance to oppression" rather than rioting.  Salon commentator Benji Hart called the rioting a "legitimate political strategy" But there was nothing "political" in the rioting and looting. In fact, in political terms, destroying one's neighborhood is a big setback for those who want to have legitimate concerns about policing addressed and effect other changes.  Liberals seem to not care less.

In what is probably the silliest comment on climate since Harry Reid blamed global warming on the Koch brothers, a green journalist opined of the refugees currently dying in the Mediterranean: "This is what climate crisis looks like . . . We know there is evidence that the violence triggered by the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 were in part fuelled by protests over soaring food prices." The soaring prices were actually exacerbated (as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN confirmed) by the diversion of much of the world's farmland into making motor fuel, in the form of ethanol and biodiesel, for the rich to salve their green consciences. Greenie climate policies were a far greater contributor to the Arab Spring than climate change itself. Without abundant fuel and power, prosperity is impossible. Nearly 700 million Africans rely mainly on wood or dung to cook and heat with, and 600 million have no access to electric light. As the International Energy Agency recently put it in a recent report, "increasing access to modern forms of energy is crucial to unlocking faster economic and social development in sub-Saharan Africa". Africa is awash with fossil fuels - but not the capital to build plants to turn them into electricity. Greenie activists and politicians in the West -- what I call the Green Taliban -- are determined to deny them that capital.  Why?

I'd like to give all TTPers - both those who will be attending the Vegas Rendezvous this weekend and those unable to do so - an intro to what I'll be talking about. First, though, I need to get something off of my chest. I have become very, very tired of reading standard conservative media. Frankly, the gelded whining gets to me. Detailed arguments aplenty, explaining why the latest Leftist power-grab or exploitation is wrong. Or why their latest hate speech is unfair. So. What. Newsflash: the other side doesn't care. They've made it crystal clear that power is the only goal, that they enjoy using power to enrich themselves and hurt others, and that there are no limits of law or decency that restrain them. If you're looking to standard conservative media for hope or change, I recommend Prozac as a mandatory Plan B.   Economics? Once, this was their spearhead. Now? They'd need a high-power telescope to see even Zero Hedge ahead of them; meanwhile, the global economic order makes ticking sounds. Popular culture? Never a strength - and now it's the main front of the Left. External enemies? This, they still get. But not the internal ones, who are statistically much more likely to murder you (yes, Virginia, liberals are more lethal than terrorists). Like so much of the conservative movement, they keep trying to approach the 21st century with the worldview and infrastructure of 1980. Not. Working. The cold hard truth is that liberty's future is arising without them - and may not need them. What's needed are the bright spots of the new conservative counter-culture.  Here they are...

President Obama has made a not-so-subtle attempt to personalize his administration's war on "climate change" by linking it with his daughter Malia's asthma. Nice try, Mr. President. But the evidence just doesn't stack up.  It's one more farce for the Climate Fascists. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the EPA's Gina McCarthy and the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy have lent their ‘expert' support to the ‘global warming means more asthma' thesis  -- all a classic case of doing their masters' bidding. Problem is, despite this impressive show of concerted ‘expert' strength, the connection between climate change and asthma is flimsy on stilts. This becomes evident when you examine the claims made by the CDC website. It certainly sounds authoritative. (How could America's leading national public health institute possibly get it wrong where health issues are concerned?) But none of them bears close scrutiny. Let's examine them one by one.

China's approach to international energy and environmental policy can be summed up very simply: tell the idiot yang guizi whatever they want to hear - then carry on doing what China wants, regardless. Fortunately for the prospects of the US economy, it would appear that not every US politician has fallen for the risible line, heavily promoted by the Obama administration and its amen corner in the environmental movement, that China cares every bit as much as the West does about the allegedly urgent need to curb global CO2 emissions. Two who very much haven't are Republican senators Roy Blunt of Missouri and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma who have just launched a challenge to the bilateral climate change "agreement" reached by Mr. Obama with China last year, whereby both countries have supposedly made a commitment to reducing their "greenhouse gas" emissions. In addition, there is, as this ACCF policy research special report notes, a good deal of further legal trouble ahead for Obama and his eco-fascists at the EPA.  Mr. Obama may yet be prevented from being China's Useful Green Idiot - however much he wants to be.

The United States has handled its economic diplomacy with shocking myopia. The US Treasury's attempt to cripple the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) before it gets off the ground is clearly intended to head off China's ascendancy as a rival financial superpower, whatever the faux-pieties from Washington about standards of "governance". Such a policy is misguided at every level, evidence of what can go wrong when a lame-duck president defers to posturing amateurs in Congress on delicate matters of global geostrategy. Washington has enraged Britain by trying to browbeat Downing Street into boycotting the project. It has forced allies and friendly countries across the Far East to make a fatal choice between the US and China that none wished to make, and has ended up losing almost everybody. Germany, France, and Italy are joining. Australia and South Korea may follow soon. The AIIB is exactly what the world needs.  Here's why...

The power to make laws rests wholly in Congress - at least that is what the Constitution says.  Yet who makes the "laws" in our federal system today?  Vast amounts of legislative power have been "delegated" to independent federal regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission or to the president or his cabinet secretaries.  The sheer volume of these rules is mind-numbing.  Consider that in 2014, the year that just ended, 75,000 pages of new regulations were adopted by the Executive Branch, either by the Obama administration directly or through independent regulatory agencies.  This is in addition to the myriad executive orders the president gives to his various departments regarding how to administrate federal laws. The imagined need for these rules is that congressional legislation cannot anticipate every situation or change that requires new regulations.  That is true, of course, only if we accept the underlying premise that the federal government ought to be directly involved in almost everything we do.  Abolishing the completely illegal and unconsitutional scam of legislative delegation to unelected bureaucracies should be a major GOP campaign theme in 2016.

If something drops out of the news, it usually means it is going well.  Mad cow disease killed nobody last year. Mozambique and Angola are growing their economies at a furious lick. There were only two localized famines last year - in South Sudan and the Central African Republic - both caused by conflict, rather than drought or population pressure. That's because the feeding of the world is going so well it's not news. New figures from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization show that the world's cereal harvest, which provides more than half of the calories that humans eat, broke a new record last year at 2.54 billion tons - an astonishing 20 per cent higher than ten years ago. Thanks to better techniques and seeds, the world's farmers (of which I declare I am one, in a mostly hands-off way) have provided a growing population with more food per head, year after year, largely without cultivating extra land or using extra water or chemicals. Corn, rice and wheat - the big three cereals - each broke records in 2014. So why do we hear frequent cries that the world soon will be or is already struggling to feed itself?

The latest Warmist campaign is that scientists and journalists who mislead the public about ‘global warming' should be banned from television. So says the producer of a highly tendentious and misleading new eco-propaganda movie about global warming, apparently blissfully unaware of the irony of his position. Robert Kenner is the producer of Merchants of Doubt, a documentary which seeks to claim that climate skepticism is nothing but a fossil-fuel-funded conspiracy coordinated by the same kind of cackling evil-doers who tried to persuade you that smoking doesn't cause cancer. Like the Obama administration, the movie takes for granted the notion that catastrophic man-made climate change is real, that all the scientists promoting the theory are reliable, honest and principled, and that the only possible reason anyone might have for claiming otherwise is that they are "merchants of doubt" - i.e., corrupt disinformers who deliberately and cynically seek to hide the truth about global warming from the public because they have been paid to do so by sinister corporate interests. Now Kenner has written a public letter to one of his fellow celebrity alarmists, scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson, to help promote his crappy film raise awareness in the media of the very serious issue of Big Oil funded denialism. The letter says:

South Korea lives under a US security umbrella. Both on a conventional and nuclear level, South Koreans are dependent on the US to deter North Korea from attacking them and overrunning their country.  Last Friday 3/06), US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman scolded South Koreans for being too nationalist. In her words, "Nationalist feelings can still be exploited, and it's not hard for a political leader anywhere to earn cheap applause by vilifying a former enemy." The South Koreans interpreted her remarks as criticism of their President Park Geun-hye for her refusal to reinstate reunification talks with North Korea due to Pyongyang's refusal to discuss the dismantlement of its nuclear program. Sherman negotiated the US's nuclear pact with North Korea in the 1990s. The North Koreans used the deal as a smokescreen behind which they developed nuclear weapons while receiving financial assistance from the US which paid off the regime for signing the deal. Once Pyongyang was ready to come out as a nuclear power, it threw out the nuclear inspectors, opened the sealed nuclear sites, vacated its signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began testing nuclear bombs. Sherman is now the US's chief negotiator in the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran. She;s having hissy fits because Bibi Netanyahu has ruined her plans.

In a valedictory speech last weekend of characteristically Latin American duration - a mind-numbing three hours - the Argentine president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, claimed that her country was the only one in the world to have reduced its national debt over recent years. Only Kirchner could think this a matter of national pride - for reduction in the national debt via the mechanism of default is anything to boast of.   Nonetheless, where Argentina treads, others will surely soon be following. The world is sinking under a sea of debt, private as well as public, and it is increasingly hard to see how this might end, except in some form of mass default. This most certainly includes China, by the way.  China's total indebtedness has quadrupled since 2007 to $28 trillion, according to estimates by McKinsey. At 282% of GDP, China's debt burden is now bigger, relative to output, than the US.