RUTHFULLY YOURS

Foreign observers are somewhat puzzled by the latest twist in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. They are used to seeing angry young Palestinian men lashing out in violence. But they are surprised by the fact that young women appear to be the backbone of the “stabling intifada” in which, in addition to shootings, gasoline bomb and rock throwing attacks, individual Palestinian terrorists are going out every day and seeking out Jews on the street to murder with knives.

What drives young girls and women to do murder and to usually sacrifice their own lives when, as has often happened, Israelis defend themselves against attempted butchery with armed force? In its feature on the subject published today, the New York Times attempts to answer the question with the usual explanations about Israel being to blame: “anger over decades of Israeli military occupation, fading hopes of statehood and a rebellion against Palestinian leaders.” But, the piece, written by the paper’s Palestinian stringers, also alludes to the drumbeat of incitement from those same leaders as well as the popular culture of hate that is part of the daily fare of the media controlled by them. When you strip away the usual cant about the conflict, it’s clear that it takes more than political grievances to make young people abandon their own lives in order to shed the blood of strangers. Tired talking points about statehood or borders aren’t a sufficient explanation. Only religious fervor and pure hatred can motivate a person to behave in such an inhuman fashion.

http://www.hoover.org/research/does-woodrow-wilson-belong-princeton

Back in 2008, the Princeton Alumni Weekly published the results of a panel deliberation ranking the university’s most influential alumni. At the top of the list was James Madison (class of 1771) and close behind him, in third place, was Woodrow Wilson (class of 1879), who was Princeton’s president from 1902 to 1910. He left the university to enter politics first as governor of New Jersey between 1911 and 1913 and then as President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. By all accounts, his presidency at Princeton transformed the school from a college for playboys into the serious academic institution that it has become today. He openly urged African Americans to apply and also hired the first Jewish and Roman Catholic faculty members.

It is a sign of the times that there is an active movement at Princeton, led by the students of the Black Justice League, to remove his name from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and from the Wilson House at Princeton. The main charge against Wilson was that he was a racist for overseeing, as President of the United States, the systematic removal of black employees from the federal civil service long after it had been desegregated. He was also a sympathizer of the Klu Klux Klan. His resegregation policy provoked a huge backlash from the NAACP, which had previously endorsed his 1912 presidential campaign given his promises to be “President of the whole nation” and to supply black citizens an “absolute fair dealing.”

Until world leaders can explain their way past two specific graphs, their gathering in Paris this week to combat so-called global warming might as well launch a War on Leprechauns.

It would be bad enough if President Obama and some 150 other heads of state were pursuing destructive solutions to a legitimate problem. Far worse, they are poised to adopt policies that will slow economic growth, spread poverty, and stymie human progress, all in slavish service to an utterly bogus “problem” of their own imagination. They are like madmen frantically swatting brooms at “bats” that flap their brittle wings solely inside these politicians’ febrile skulls.

Those who push this agenda once hollered about pending doom, thanks to “global warming.” A few years ago, they quietly retired that rhetoric and, instead, began shouting about “climate change.”

Why the jumped-up new slogan? “Global warming” stopped happening, and complaining about it increasingly made them look deranged.

As this graph clearly indicates, scientific observations from weather satellites have reported zero warming in global mean temperatures since February 1997, when readings from recent decades peaked. Simply put, despite the warmists’ high-decibel bluster, there has been no global warming for 18 years and nine months.

While world leaders in Paris this month push for sacrifice and austerity to save the planet, one American environmental group is boldly pushing back. A new breed of environmentalists — including many former hard-core greens — is promoting “ecomodernism,” a fresh approach that challenges the dogma of the traditional environmental movement.

Ecomodernists have a more optimistic, capitalistic, and sensible world view than their old-guard counterparts. And if the Paris conference fails to produce results, ecomodernists could represent a new path forward on both environmental and global-growth issues. “Instead of viewing environmental problems as a sign of the coming apocalypse, we instead view them as unintended consequences of development,” says one of the movement’s founders, Michael Shellenberger. “We are not going to solve global warming with all of us trying to live with less.”

Shellenberger is a lifelong liberal activist who once worked for groups such as the Sierra Club and Earthjustice. His environmental cred is stellar: Even as a kid, Shellenberger would cast off paper boats lit with small candles every August to commemorate the Hiroshima bombings. During the anti-nuke 1980s, he was swayed by the documentary The Day After and other films that showed doomsday scenarios about nuclear proliferation. “I was anti-nuclear my whole life.”