Displaying posts published in

October 2015

The Climate Is Indeed Changing: Cooling Ahead By Brian C Joondeph

Global warming became climate change in response to the inconvenient truth that there has been no warming over the past 17 years. This is called a “pause,” with the expectation and anticipation that any day now temperatures will begin climbing again. And when temperatures do rise, it could be called a “pause” in global cooling – or, in other words, another turn in the endless cycle of the Earth warming and cooling.

Pope Francis and President Obama continue to preach the perils of global warming, not concerning themselves with any pause or faulty climate models. One of the world’s leading climate change experts disagrees about those perils noting some “mathematical anomalies which effectively ‘disprove’ global warming.”

Dr. David Evans was a climate modeler for the Australian government. He has six degrees in applied mathematics. In analyzing “complex mathematical assumptions widely used to predict climate change,” he predicts stable temperatures until 2017, after which the Earth will cool for the next decade, ushering in a mini-ice age by 2030.

UAE: “A Huge Leap from Medieval Ways” by Sara Al Nuaimi

The remarkable crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, donated land for the Hindu temple, to foster cultural and religious tolerance, and bring diversity to Abu Dhabi. The temple also fit newly passed UAE legislation establishing religious freedom.

As the prince explained, a “civilized, advanced” Abu Dhabi with sustainable development requires “concerted efforts from all sectors of the community” — Hindus included.

“This is a huge leap from medieval ways of thinking. Humanity is against aggression and stopping others from practicing their faith.” — Saleh Al Turigee of Saudi Arabia, who has 143,000 Twitter followers.

Positive voices from the UAE and elsewhere in the Middle East, especially Egypt, supported the temple. It shows that the non-extremist segment not only exists, but is ready to take on the extremists.

“Religion is for Allah only. All Imams agree that building temples for idol worshipping is a blasphemy.” — Waseem Yousef, imam of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi. He quickly found his television show canceled.

Truth Isn’t True Selling a big lie. Bruce Bawer

The movie Truth isn’t yet officially out, but it’s been the subject of enough early reviews to establish that it strongly communicates one great and important truth: that if you want to sell a Big Lie that’s been definitely and very publicly exposed as a lie, just wait a decade or so and then make an all-star Hollywood movie presenting that lie as the unvarnished truth. Promote the hell out of it. Then sit back and watch history get rewritten in the mind of a whole new generation.

In 2004, only weeks before the presidential election, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather and 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes served up a report about President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. The claims they made were conceivably explosive enough to lose the election for Bush. But the documents they presented as proof of those claims were obvious forgeries – correspondence supposedly dating from the 1970s but obviously typed on a modern-day computer.

Berkeley Prof: Race in America Is Like ‘Occupation’ in Israel A glimpse inside the twisted world of “Ethnic Studies” assistant professor Keith Feldman. Cinnamon Stillwell

Can an accurate analogy be drawn between American race relations and the Arab-Israeli conflict? UC Berkeley ethnic studies assistant professor Keith Feldman advocates this particular “special relationship” in his 2015 book, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, the subject of a recent lecture sponsored by the University’s Center for Race & Gender (CRG).

CRG is home to the notoriously politicized Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP) whose 2012 annual conference featured a jargon-riddled talk from Feldman. He was in similar form for CRG’s September 24 Thursday Forum Series, which included “commentary” by Judith Butler, a UC Berkeley comparative literature professor best known for her virulent anti-Israel activism. Feldman, a fellow endorser of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, stood at the podium, while Butler was seated at a front table. An audience of approximately sixty comprised mostly of students filled the large classroom in Dwinelle Hall.

Feldman, whose manner was humble and, at times, apologetic, began by thanking Butler for being his “interlocutor” and CRG for its “Islamophobia project,” which he described as “unique globally” and a “community” that he had “been able to engage . . . in the construction of this book.”

Thieves, Liars and Idiots: The Two Hour Democratic Debate A night the Democratic Party should be ashamed of By Daniel Greenfield ****

“A little bit of this town goes a very long way,” Hunter S. Thompson said. “After five days in Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years.”

That went triple for the miserable parade of hypocrisies that was the Democratic debate where a gaggle of establishment political hacks claimed to be the voice of political change and where men and women whose combined net worth could break banks ranted about the rich in a debate hosted in a $2.7 billion dollar luxury resort and casino with its own Ferrari dealership so that the candidates can take a break from their income inequality spiels to test drive a 2015 Maserati GranTurismo.

The Democratic debate only ran hours, but it seemed to last for years as the Democratic Party’s crazy Socialist grandpa Bernie Sanders nervously waved his hands, struggled to follow the answers of the other candidates and talked about himself in the third person.

There Is No God but Hephaestus And fire is his messenger. By Kevin D. Williamson

A news photograph from Hazem Bader, who chronicles newsworthy doings in Israel for Agence France Presse, inspired a good deal of guilty giggles on Tuesday: A Palestinian thug mishandled his Molotov cocktail and managed to set fire to his T-shirt and then to his keffiyeh, which had his compatriots scrambling to put out the flames dancing on his head. That was not the sort of halo that the holy warrior had in mind at all — martyrdom, yes, inshallah, but not right now. Like all decent people of good will, my first reaction was: Serves you right, ass. And then a smidgen of guilt: If you’ve ever seen a human being burned, you don’t wish it on anybody. Not even these Jew-hating jihadi bums.

I myself have been closer than you’d generally like to be to that sort of fire on a few occasions: the automobile accidents and house fires that are part of the daily newspaper fare; the fiery climax of the Branch Davidian siege at Waco; a terrorist bombing of a train near New Delhi. Burning, it seems, is a very bad way to go.

But, as everybody from the Joker to Heraclitus to Father Gerard Manley Hopkins has observed: Everything burns.

I cannot help but seeing in the image of that hapless would-be Palestinian murderer a metaphor for the entirety of the Palestinian experience, and for the broader jihadist worldview.

Palestinian Reasoning: Yield to Our Crazy Religious Intolerance or We’ll Kill You By David French

Israel is on the brink of a third intifada. In the last several days, Palestinians have shot, stabbed, and rammed Israeli civilians to death, prompting fears that suicide bombings are next. But even without explosives, the attacks have been gruesome enough. In the the last 24 hours, two terrorists boarded a bus, locked the doors, and started shooting and stabbing passengers until one terrorist was shot to death and the other wounded. That same day, a Palestinian man rammed his car into a crowded bus stop, emerged from his vehicle “swinging an axe,” and killed a rabbi before he was stopped. In two other incidents, Palestinians seriously wounded Israelis in stabbing attacks.

What’s prompting the violence? The typical, tired media explanation for Palestinian attacks is “frustration with the lack of progress towards peace” (as if “peace” were ever the terrorists’ goal). But this time the consensus is that the immediate reason for violence is Palestinian rage over rumored policy changes at Jerusalem’s most holy sites. The New Yorker’s Ruth Margalit explains:

The stated cause of the recent surge in attacks is Palestinians’ belief that the Israeli government is trying to change the status quo at the holy compound in Jerusalem, a place revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. According to security arrangements dating back to 1967, the site, while open to Jewish visitors at specific times, is sealed off to non-Muslim prayer.

Israelis: ‘We Don’t Run’ Carrying on with their daily lives amid the terrorist attacks. By Michael M. Rosen

HOORAY FOR JON BON JOVI….RSK
Ra’anana, Israel — “We don’t run. / I’m standing my ground. / We don’t run, / And we don’t back down. / There’s fire in the sky, / There’s thunder on the mountains. / Bless each tear and this dirt I was born in. / We don’t run. / We don’t run.”

Jon Bon Jovi sang these words ten days ago to a raucous crowd of 50,000 Israelis during his first-ever performance in the Jewish state. “This should be the fight song for all you Tel Aviv-ers,” Bon Jovi told us that night, as my wife, my son, and tens of thousands of our closest friends wildly applauded.

Little did the rocker know how apt his words would prove to be. Minutes before his performance, two Israelis were stabbed to death in Jerusalem’s Old City by a Palestinian attacker, in part of what has become a surge in terror attacks against Israeli civilians.

Already this month, the Jewish state has absorbed dozens of murderous assaults with guns, bombs, fists, screwdrivers, cars, axes, vegetable peelers, and, most commonly, knives. Most of the attacks have been carried out in broad daylight in public places for maximum effect.

The terrorism hit very close to home for my family Tuesday morning with two separate attacks in our town north of Tel Aviv, just blocks from our kids’ school.

In the Age of Obama, Our Enemies Gather Round By Jerry Hendrix — O

In the third century a.d., external pressures from competing powers along the periphery of the empire, along with growing weakness and incoherence within the imperial government, began to undermine the power of Rome. Externally, the Goths, Franks, and Vandals rose and began to roll back the Roman system of governance and trade. Internally, the Senate became impotent and a series of weak emperors led first to the geographic division of the empire and ultimately its demise. The period of history that followed came to be known as the “Dark Ages” and lasted nearly a thousand years, during which human progress was truncated until the emergence of the Enlightenment.

Today, all along the perimeter of the current global system of governance, the combination of external pressures from authoritarian regimes and a series of questionable internal strategic choices have weakened the defenses of the rule of law, individual liberty, and free trade. These actions have allowed Russia to carve out territorial gains in the Crimea and Ukraine, China to assert sovereignty over a vast area of the ocean through the uncontested creation of artificial islands, Iran to inflate an expanding sphere of influence through acts of terrorism in the Middle East, North Korea to gain nuclear weapons, and Cuba to reemerge as a normal nation within the Western hemisphere despite its long and unapologetic support of Communism and terrorist activities.

Hillary Gets a Debate Pass Her opponents lack the nerve to point out her biggest vulnerability.

The first Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday evening was an opportunity for the unknown challengers to Hillary Clinton to make an impression, and it’s fair to say they did. The four men on stage showed they lack the ability and will to take her on.

The most important moment of the debate came when CNN’s Anderson Cooper gingerly raised the issue of her private emails as Secretary of State. Bernie Sanders, who is leading in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, replied by giving her a whitewash. Americans “are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” he declared. The Democratic crowd loved it, and so did Mrs. Clinton, who shook Mr. Sanders’s hand in gratitude after having ducked Mr. Cooper’s question by dismissing the whole issue as a Republican attack.

Only Lincoln Chafee dared to suggest that her “credibility” might be an issue for voters, but he apologized for doing even that. If Democrats aren’t willing to raise the main reason that Mrs. Clinton is losing in head-to-head polls against most Republicans—her penchant for ethical corner-cutting and deceit—then they are essentially putting their nomination into a Clinton blind trust.