ISIS

A week dedicated to topics that underscore impacts environmentalists don’t want to discuss.

Radical Islamic terrorism raised its ugly head again this weekend when 49 individuals were killed in Orlando, Florida, by a gunman’s rampage that represents the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. According to a Rasmussen Report, most Americans saw the horror in Orlando coming nearly three months ago.

I have been wrestling for some kind of explanation why the President of the United States, Barack Obama, would continue to talk about climate change and urge the global transition from fossil fuels to wind, solar and bio-energy. I have concluded that he thinks everyone, not just Americans, are idiots.

Many complicated factors contribute to the global price of a barrel of oil, but two of the leading components are supply and risk—and both have the potential to escalate in the days ahead. The current region-wide sectarian war could easily bump oil prices up dramatically. And, the expected nuclear deal with Iran could drop them—dramatically.

“If you don’t call it something, you can’t connect the dots,” said Rudy Giuliani talking about ISIS.

After years of rising gasoline prices, people are puzzled by the recent drop that has a gallon of gas at levels not seen in nearly four years. Typically in times of Middle East unrest, prices at the pump spike, yet, despite the violence in Iraq and Syria, gallon of gas is now at a national average of $3.

Thought experiment: Imagine a world in 2001 in which the Cold War was still raging. Imagine a world in which Soviet Communism was still on equal global footing with the United States. Would Osama bin Laden have directed his soldiers to fly planes into the Kremlin? The question answers itself.

President Obama insists that religion, let alone Islam, has nothing to do with the terrorist threat ISIS poses to Americans and all freedom-loving people. But his secretary of state says religion, and Islam, is wholly relevant in the fight against global warming. Top. Men.

Newt Gingrich’s recent article on CNN asks “What Would Reagan Do About ISIS?” Writing a “speech” from the perspective of Ronald Reagan as if he was still president, Gingrich seeks to show a more assertive, commanding response to the massive unrest in Iraq and Syria. The relative merits of Gingrich’s Reagan’s speech are not worth all that much consideration (In a nutshell, it calls for swift action against the militants, and generally damns the present policy). What is of interest is the strange phenomenon the article reveals about a large section of the American right wing today: dogmatic Ronald Reagan worship.

The idea from John Kerry is that CO2-induced warming is an imminent national security threat. So he is saying the increase of one molecule of CO2 per 10,000 molecules of air in the last 100 years is a threat on par with what is going on in the Middle East? How can that even be close. The real threat when it comes to CO2 is the agenda that paints it as a threat. One, it makes us more reliant on an unstable area of the world. Two, the policies limiting its use starve the lifeline of our economy. As I have opined before, it’s the global warming agenda that is the major threat, not global warming.

So much blood and treasure was wasted during the long occupation in Iraq that there was a sigh of relief across America when the troops finally left. Yet the end of the American presence has resulted in chaos. Islamist extremists in recent days have been making gains against the Iraqi military, seizing several towns, including the city of Mosul. The sheer rapidity of the collapse of law and order in Iraq led to a lot of hand-wringing in the White House. President Obama finally decided to send a few hundred troops to bolster the beleaguered regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This choice will only serve to further diminish the status of the United States in the region.