Putin should be put on the criminal blacklist in the West

"He is definitively not off the table"

Last year dictator Vladimir Putin was held on Finland's criminal blacklist (although he was later removed from it). Now it is time for both Finland and the rest of the Free World to put him back where he belongs - the sooner, the better:

“As the White House has made clear, we don’t usually start off by sanctioning heads of state, but imposing sanctions on Putin is an option,” the spokesperson said Thursday after the publication of Newsweek’s cover story on sanctions. “He is definitely not off the table.”--

If blacklisted, Putin would join a handful of other heads of state who have been sanctioned over the years, including former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych,  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, the former ruler of Iraq, and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Read the entire article here

A good sign: First U.S. Army paratroopers have arrived in Poland

This is a good sign:

U.S. Army paratroopers are arriving in Poland on Wednesday as part of a wave of U.S. troops heading to shore up America's Eastern European allies in the face of Russian meddling in Ukraine. 
Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said an initial contingent of about 600 troops will head to four countries across Eastern Europe for military exercises over the next month. 

First, about 150 soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team based in Vicenza, Italy, are arriving in Poland. 
Additional Army companies will head to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and are expected to arrive by Monday for similar land-based exercises in those countries. 
The show of strength comes as the United States, European allies and Ukraine try to ease tensions with Russia and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. All sides struck a diplomatic agreement last week, but it remains unclear whether pro-Russian demonstrators, who took over a series of government buildings in the wake of Russia's annexation of Crimea, will back down. 
Under the current plan, U.S. troops would rotate in and out of the four Eastern European countries for additional exercises on a recurring basis.

PS

Barack Obama should always remember what his great predecessor said:

Australian PM Tony Abbott's adviser: "climate change establishment is now starting to look rather shaky because mother nature is not complying"

Fortunately there are people like Maurice Newman, chairman of PM Tony Abbott's Business Advisory Council, who dare to oppose the warmists' 97 per cent mantra:

EMMA ALBERICI: It's no secret that you don't agree that man-made CO2 is causing global warming. Given there is now consensus among 97 per cent or so of climate scientists across the world that the view - around the view that human activity is responsible for climate change, what would it take to convince you?

MAURICE NEWMAN: We know first of all that the survey which came out with the 97 per cent number was flawed in the first place. So we don't pay any attention to that. What we do look at...

EMMA ALBERICI: There have been roughly three that have come up with that.

MAURICE NEWMAN: They all come up with flawed methodologies. So we don't pay any attention to that. We know that there are a whole host of scientists out there who have a different point of view, who are highly respected, reputable scientists. So the 97 per cent doesn't mean anything in any event because science is not a consensus issue. Science is whatever the science is and the fact remains there is no empirical evidence to show that man-made CO2, man-made emissions are adding to the temperature on earth. We haven't had any measurable increase in temperature on earth for the last 17.5 years. If you look back over history, there's no evidence that CO2 has driven the climate either. So I know that this is a view which is peddled consistently, but I think that the edifice which is the climate change establishment is now starting to look rather shaky because mother nature is not complying.

PS

What Newman wrote about wind turbines some time ago is also worth reading:

The harmful health effects, despite peer-reviewed and anecdotal evidence, are dismissed as being unconfirmed, psychosomatic or the politics of envy. It’s true. Not everyone who lives near wind turbines experiences adverse health effects. But then not everyone who smokes contracts lung cancer. Unaffected residents are bought off with bribes of better roads, community improvements or offers of employment. But these are token gestures and lead to bitterness and deep divisions in the community.
There is clearly an imbalance when cash-poor local residents are pitted against governments and powerful corporations. Rather than listen to their constituents, politicians are lending their support to oligopolistic insiders and, in so doing, are destroying the property rights of the very people they have pledged to protect.
But don’t expect help from academia, mainstream media or the public service. They are members of the same establishment and worship together at the altar of global warming. By ruthlessly perpetuating the illusion that wind farms can somehow save the planet, they keep the money flowing. All the while the poor become poorer, ever more dependent on welfare and colder in winter.

No wonder that Ukraine's leaders feel betrayed by the West

No wonder people in Ukraine feel betrayed by the West:

When Russia invaded Crimea and massed 40,000 or more troops in the east, Ukraine turned to an old friend, the United States, and asked for light arms, antitank weapons, intelligence help and nonlethal aid. The Obama administration agreed to deliver 300,000 meals-ready-to-eat. As this newspaper reported Friday, military transport planes were deemed too provocative for Russia, so the food was shipped by commercial trucks. The administration refused Kiev's requests for intelligence-sharing and other supplies, lethal or not.

Read the entire WSJ article here

UKIP and other EU-critical parties are on the march across Europe ahead of the EU elections

EU-critical parties are looking good ahead of the European elections in May. The latest UK opinion poll must be great news for UKIP leader Nigel Farage:

Voter support for Britain's anti-European Union UK Independence Party (UKIP) is at a record high according to one opinion poll on Sunday, reflecting a wider pattern of growing support for the party ahead of European elections next month.
The rising popularity of UKIP, which calls for an immediate withdrawal from the EU and tighter immigration laws, threatens to split the vote for Prime Minister David Cameron at European parliament elections in May and a national election in 2015.
UKIP's profile has been raised by the upcoming European elections on May 22, when polls suggest it could beat Cameron's party into third place.
A ComRes poll of voting intentions for next year's national election put UKIP on 20 percent - up four percentage points at their highest in the four-year history of the poll. Cameron's Conservatives fell three points to 29 percent.

No wonder that the traditional EU establishment and liberal MSM - like the Economist - are scared stiff:

Ms Le Pen’s rise should serve as a warning not just in Paris but also in Brussels and elsewhere. Populist parties, mostly but not solely on the far right, are on the march across Europe, from the UK Independence Party in Britain to the Finns Party in Finland, and from Geert Wilders’s PVV in the Netherlands to Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza in Greece.

The secret of Germany's "green" energy transition: Coal!

German politicians are often boasting about their Energiewende - energy transition policy - which includes huge subsidies for solar and wind energy. What they usually "forget" to mention, is that almost half of Germany's electricity comes from coal. And that's not going to change very soon.

The BBC has met the head of operations for one of the largest coal mines:

The mine is one of several operated by the Swedish state-owned company Vattenfall and its managers are bullish about the prospects.

In addition to the lignite already earmarked for extraction, they say there are another 1.6 billion tonnes approved for future mining in this area alone and demand remains high.

The head of operations, Uwe Grosser, is polite about the "energy transition" and the advent of renewables but dismisses the idea of a future without coal.

"We're the only ones who deliver constant power. Our power is always there.

"When solar, wind and the renewables are fed into the grid we're the only ones able to adjust our output, that's the only way it's possible to prioritise renewables.

"If they can't provide power. We can. 24 hours a day. 365 days a year."

Charles Moore: "The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more"

 

'This is a brilliant piece of work that every climate change negotiator should have in his front pocket' Jon Snow

Charles Moore reviews historian Rupert Darwall's excellent book "The Age of Global Warming":

The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, "global weirding") has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. --
Like most of those on both sides of the debate, Rupert Darwall is not a scientist. He is a wonderfully lucid historian of intellectual and political movements, which is just the job to explain what has been inflicted on us over the past 30 years or so in the name of saving the planet.
The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won't last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America's natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome's work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: "The world has cancer and the cancer is man."). --

The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. Before it, a desperate Gordon Brown warned of "50 days to avoid catastrophe", but the "catastrophe" came all the same. The warmists' idea was that the global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries refused. The Left-wing dream that what used to be called the Third World would finally be emancipated from Western power had come true. The developing countries were perfectly happy for the West to have "the green crap", but not to have it themselves. The Western goody-goodies were hoist by their own petard.
Since then, the international war against carbon totters on, because Western governments see their green policies, like zombie banks, as too big to fail. The EU continues to inflict expensive pain upon itself. Last week, the latest IPCC report made the usual warnings about climate change, but behind its rhetoric was a huge concession. The answer to the problems of climate change lay in adaptation, not in mitigation, it admitted. So the game is up.

Read the entire review here