The United Nations has officially confirmed what many of us, including President Trump, knew already: the Paris climate accord was a complete waste of space.

As UN Environment admits in its latest Emissions Gap Report (10/31), even when you add up all the CO2 reduction pledges made by all the signatory nations at Paris, it still comes to only a third of what is supposedly necessary to stop the world warming by more than 2 degrees C by the end of this century.

According to UN Environment’s head Eric Solheim, the world is heading for disaster:

“One year after the Paris Agreement entered into force, we still find ourselves in a situation where we are not doing nearly enough to save hundreds of millions of people from a miserable future. Governments, the private sector and civil society must bridge this catastrophic climate gap.”

Despite having both an expansive budget and a large legal team, Special Investigator Robert Mueller likely will not find President Trump culpable for any Russian collusion—or at least no court or congressional vote would, even if Mueller recommends an indictment.

That likelihood becomes clearer as the Trump investigators—in Congress, in the Justice Department, and the legions in the media—begin to grow strangely silent about the entire collusion charge, as other scandals mount and crowd out the old empty story.

This news boomerang poses the obvious question—was the zeal of the original accusers of felony behavior with the Russian collusion merely an attempt at deflection? Was it designed to protect themselves from being accused of serious crimes?

The entire fiasco has boomeranged upon the Clintons, James Comey, Obama Admin officials Susan Rice and Samantha Power, Obama himself, and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.  Increasingly, it is turning out that they are the ones in need of being investigated.

The new film Only the Brave recounts the story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, an elite unit of firefighters.  Nineteen of this unit died fighting the Yarnell Hill fire in Arizona in 2013.

The men who sign up to be Hotshots train hard for the job of wildfire suppression.  It is a grueling job, and the training for it is punishing.  It is also a science; these men have to be both tough and smart.  They choose to do it; they want to do it, and they take enormous pride in their work, especially their successes – saving homes or a thousand-year-old tree.  They travel the country if needed.

When not working, the men are everything the American left abhors.  But when there is a wildfire to be fought, they show up ready to risk their lives to save homes and forests.  Their experience and their expertise are unique and probably grossly underappreciated, because most of us have never been aware of such teams of extraordinarily brave and well trained men.

Watching the film, it was hard not to think of Gen. John Kelly's remarks about the ridiculous media storm over President Trump's call to the widow of one of the soldiers killed in Niger.

Western Europe and Washington are reluctant to fess up to this unfortunate fact:

Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long ago given up even the pretence of being a democratic polity and is openly pursuing policies detrimental to democracy, the rule of law and Western security considerations.

In short, Turkey has become an Islamist dictatorship every bit as inimical to Western interests as Iran, except for being allowed by the West to maintain the charade that it is still a member of NATO and the western community of nations.

The key to spreading Erdogan’s Islamist message is an organization called Diyanet, the Turkish directorate for religious affairs that is directly subordinated to him.  Few if any western leaders have ever heard of it despite its importance.  Here’s what you need to know.  For the bottom line is that Turkey is now the key actor funding the radicalization of European Muslims.

China’s central bank has warned in the clearest language to date that extreme credit creation and trouble in the shadow banking system could lead to a full-blown financial crisis.

Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People’s Bank (PBOC), spoke of “fierce market reactions” and a possible Minsky Moment, the tipping point when credit cycles break and euphoric booms collapse under their own weight.

It had long been assumed that this particular form of crisis cannot happen a state-run financial system where the banks are under Communist Party control.

Mr. Zhou told China Daily that asset speculation and property bubbles could pose a “systemic financial risk”, made worse by the plethora of wealth management products, trusts, and off-books lending.  He warned:

“If there is too much pro-cyclical stimulus in an economy, fluctuations will be hugely amplified. Too much exuberance when things are going well cause tensions to build up. That could lead to a sharp correction, and eventually lead to a so-called Minsky Moment. That’s what we must really guard against.”

At the end of their lengthy editorial Tuesday (10/17) regarding the new Uranium One revelations --  "Team Obama's stunning coverup of Russian crimes" -- the New York Post editorial board writes:

“Until September 2013, the FBI director was Robert Mueller — who’s now the special counsel probing Russian meddling in the 2016 election. It’s hard to see how he can be trusted in that job unless he explains what he knew about this Obama-era cover-up.”

Frankly, it's outrageous that he, Ron Rosenstein, or anyone who even touched the Uranium One investigation now be involved with the current probe -- unless the real name of the FBI is actually the NKVD (Stalin’s Secret Police).  This is not how a democracy is supposed to work, even remotely.  Forget transparency -- this was deliberate occlusion.

Contrary to the Left's favorite narrative, any Russia scandal has always been worse for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump. Recent revelations confirmed this Tuesday (10/17), and even implicated the special prosecutor at the center of the Trump-Russia investigation, former FBI director Robert Mueller.

In 2010, the Obama administration approved a controversial deal giving Russian company Rosatom partial control of Canadian mining company Uranium One (and with it 20 percent of U.S. uranium), just as Russians paid former president Bill Clinton for speeches and Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

To make matters worse, the FBI had already gathered evidence of Russian corruption in the U.S. but kept it secret just when it would have mattered most, The Hill reported Tuesday.

A confidential U.S. witness working in the Russian nuclear industry helped federal agents gather financial records, make secret recordings, and intercept email starting in 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised U.S. trucking company Transport Logistics International, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Officials also acquired documents and an eyewitness account corroborating earlier reports that Russian officials had routed million of dollars into the U.S. to benefit the Clinton Foundation just as Hillary Clinton served on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which endorsed the Uranium One deal.

FBI Director Mueller sat on all the damning information and did nothing.  And the information is damning in the extreme.

Of all the sordid details to emerge thus far from the burgeoning Harvey Weinstein scandal, there’s one that creeps me out above all else.

Not all the revolting scenes of sexual abuse.  I mean the one right near the beginning of the scandal, where he announced how he was going to make everything better:

“I am going to need a place to channel my anger so I’ve decided I’m going to give the NRA my full attention.”

Let us pause awhile to relish that moment, because I don’t think history will ever provide us with a better example of what’s wrong not just with Hollywood in particular, but with liberalism in general.

I’m not in any way wishing to play down the awfulness of the suffering experienced by those young women.  But what I am saying that their individual stories of hardship are a drop in the ocean when set against the damage that powerful figures like Weinstein and the “liberal” agenda they represent have done to our broader culture.

 On race, on gender, on sexual politics, on the Constitution, on the environment, on welfare, on immigration, on the economy, there’s not a corner of human existence in the U.S and beyond that hasn’t been meddled with and changed for the worse by the liberal “values” so aggressively championed by people like Weinstein.

The decision of United States President Donald Trump not to certify the fact that Iran is duly implementing the provisions of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has brought to light the Byzantine games Putin is playing regarding Iran, Saudi Arabia, the EU, Ukraine, North Korea and of course with America.

He thinks he can leverage Trump’s decision to his great benefit.  He sees himself as a master geostrategist.  But it may all backfire.  Here’s why.