Posts
http://tinyurl.com/yjsjbm9
Minister admits Islamic extremists who believe in jihad and sharia law have infiltrated the Labour Party By Daily Mail Reporter
...Members of the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) which believes in Britain should develop sharia law have placed sympathisers in elected office and local branches of parties, an investigation revealed...It also uncovered evidence that moderate Muslims were being targeted by group leaders who resent their 'un-Islamic' behaviour***So much for extremism being unIslamic.***
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
The root of the Israeli-Arab "problem."
SARAH HONIG; ARABS MAY KILL JEWS BUT JEWS MAY NOT RETALIATE
Another Tack: ‘Dam butlab dam’ only for some
By SARAH HONIG
Jerusalem Post
19/02/2010
jpost.com
As in yesteryear, so in the 21st century, it’s axiomatic that Arabs have the right to inflict incalculable harm on Jews, but the Jews’ attempts to deflect such blows are evil, outrageous and deserving of merciless punishment.
Terrorist arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s son, Abdel-Rauf, stood teary-eyed before TV interviewers and lavished praise on his deceased father. He bragged that the late lamented, who was discovered dead in Dubai, “fought the Jews, hit the Jews, kidnapped and killed Israelis. He outfitted and dispatched suicide bombers.” That evidently made him an object for admiration, a source of honor and a claim to fame. Killing Jews is a noble objective, one to take pride in, to revere.
So when we Israelis point to Mabhouh’s gory record, it isn’t just our biased say-so. It’s hardly an unsubstantiated allegation, a pretext to justify assassination. His own son concedes this, indeed he crows about it as the paramount tribute he can pay his father.
And it isn’t a mournful son’s subjective or self-serving aggrandizement either. Hamas issued an official statement celebrating its latest shahid (martyr). Prominent in the Hamas-compiled catalog of Mabhouh glories are the 1989 abduction-murders of IDF soldiers Avi Sasportas and Ilan Sa’adon.
By the boastful admission of both his kin and organization, Mabhouh’s hands were bloodstained. Hence, by the Arabs’ own rules of engagement, he was liable for reprisal. The principal code governing these rules is dam butlab dam (blood begets blood).
Because of this core premise Hamas now vows to wreak the most horrific vengeance on Israel, actual proof of Israeli culpability for Mabhouh’s demise being entirely immaterial. All Israelis are therefore fair game. This is the elementary protocol of the blood feud.
But here’s where we encounter our enemies’ cynical lopsided logic. By their own rules assuming for argument’s sake that we submit ourselves to them we should be perceived just as entitled as they to hunt down and kill whoever killed our own. Yet our retribution is condemned a priori as illegitimate. The right to avenge Mabhouh’s death is unchallenged, whereas the right to avenge Mabhouh’s victims is categorically denied. What is valid, in fact a sacred duty for one side, is intolerable and entirely villainous for the other.
The underlying assertion is that Mabhouh’s acts were virtuous and sanctioned by absolute supernal will. Unlike our own, Arab society is unbothered by the pluralistic niceties of postmodern moral relativism. Allah is exclusively on their side and they are the only interpreters of his wishes. This isn’t only Hamas ideology. The Palestinian Media Watch disseminated the text of the January 29 sermon on PATV, under the auspices of our supposed peace-partner Mahmoud Abbas.
It called on all Muslims to remember that “the Jews are the Jews! The Jews are the Jews! Even if donkeys would cease to bray, dogs cease to bark, wolves cease to howl and snakes to bite, the Jews would not cease to harbor hatred towards Muslims. The Prophet said that if two Jews would be alone with a Muslim, they would think only of killing him… The Prophet says: ‘You shall fight the Jews and kill them…’” There is a whole loathsome lot more, but the basis is clear: the murder of Jews is divinely decreed.
In other words, Mabhouh acted morally. Those who opposed him are immoral. By this precept Jews must die and have no right to resist. That is their lot. Not only do they possess no right to avenge, they possess no right to self-defense, to fight at all. Their very existence is a provocation, a casus belli.
THIS IS key to understanding today’s Mideast. As in yesteryear, so in the 21st century it’s axiomatic that Arabs have the right to inflict incalculable harm on Jews and to do so in the most sadistically inventive ways but the Jews’ attempts to deflect such blows are evil, outrageous and deserving of merciless punishment.
Failure to admit how selective Arab rules of warfare are precludes making sense of anything in our region and dooms to failure any so-called peace drives and mediation initiatives. The tragedy is that not only is the fundamental asymmetry between Jewish and Arab mind-sets not comprehended abroad, but there’s no inclination to even consider it.
Worse yet the Arabs’ skewed standards are commonly accepted overseas. Hence the outcry whenever Israel does anything in aid of its self-preservation. Large-scale campaigns like Defensive Shield, the Lebanon War or Cast Lead are decried for “lack or proportionality.” However, there was censure even for pinpointed targeting such as the recent Nablus killing (in an exchange of fire during an attempted arrest) of the three ambushers who had earlier slain Meir Avshalom Chai in a drive-by shooting. Abbas described them as “ruthlessly executed martyrs.” Even the trials and convictions of murderers like Marwan Barghouti are portrayed as illegitimate. There plainly is just nothing Israel may do to secure itself. Even the most legalistically scrupulous remedies are repudiated.
The Goldstone Report is part and parcel of ongoing efforts to paralyze and disallow Israeli self-defense. The mud now slung at Israel is intended to intimidate use of force in future.
It’s nothing new. This isn’t the product of what’s castigated as occupation and/or the shortage of suicidal concessions on Israel’s part to appease Arab/Muslim appetites. Jewish self-defense, in its most rudimentary and literal sense, was anathema way before the Jewish state’s birth and subsequent cheeky survival.
In his milestone, still ever-relevant 1943 book The Forgotten Ally, Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre Van Paassen quotes his own interview with the British Mandate’s acting high commissioner Harry Luke during the countrywide Arab rioting of 1929 (most notorious for the Hebron massacre). Van Paassen told Luke: “You arrested first and foremost, in every case I investigated, the Jews who successfully defended themselves. You arrested 50 Jews in Haifa at the moment they defended themselves heroically against the attack of a mob of some 2,000 runners-amok… yesterday I saw a man brought into Jerusalem by the mounted police and recognized in him an older settler from the neighborhood of Lifta, the owner of a small canning factory who had been in this country for more than 50 years a real pioneer. I visited this man in jail. His name is Isaac Brozen… He was arrested after he had barricaded himself in his factory… Arabs from Lifta raped and massacred his old wife and two daughters and set fire to his house across the roadway.”
Luke, like Goldstone eight decades later, argued that he was only looking out for Jews. Brozen, and the many others Van Paassen listed, were merely “placed in protective custody for their own good.” The interviewer countered: “but they were in chains and in solitary confinement… Mr. Brozen was loaded down under chains… chains on his hands and chains on his feet, old Turkish chains at that…”
Another Tack: ‘Dam butlab dam’ only for some
By SARAH HONIG
Jerusalem Post
19/02/2010
jpost.com
As in yesteryear, so in the 21st century, it’s axiomatic that Arabs have the right to inflict incalculable harm on Jews, but the Jews’ attempts to deflect such blows are evil, outrageous and deserving of merciless punishment.
Terrorist arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s son, Abdel-Rauf, stood teary-eyed before TV interviewers and lavished praise on his deceased father. He bragged that the late lamented, who was discovered dead in Dubai, “fought the Jews, hit the Jews, kidnapped and killed Israelis. He outfitted and dispatched suicide bombers.” That evidently made him an object for admiration, a source of honor and a claim to fame. Killing Jews is a noble objective, one to take pride in, to revere.
So when we Israelis point to Mabhouh’s gory record, it isn’t just our biased say-so. It’s hardly an unsubstantiated allegation, a pretext to justify assassination. His own son concedes this, indeed he crows about it as the paramount tribute he can pay his father.
And it isn’t a mournful son’s subjective or self-serving aggrandizement either. Hamas issued an official statement celebrating its latest shahid (martyr). Prominent in the Hamas-compiled catalog of Mabhouh glories are the 1989 abduction-murders of IDF soldiers Avi Sasportas and Ilan Sa’adon.
By the boastful admission of both his kin and organization, Mabhouh’s hands were bloodstained. Hence, by the Arabs’ own rules of engagement, he was liable for reprisal. The principal code governing these rules is dam butlab dam (blood begets blood).
Because of this core premise Hamas now vows to wreak the most horrific vengeance on Israel, actual proof of Israeli culpability for Mabhouh’s demise being entirely immaterial. All Israelis are therefore fair game. This is the elementary protocol of the blood feud.
But here’s where we encounter our enemies’ cynical lopsided logic. By their own rules assuming for argument’s sake that we submit ourselves to them we should be perceived just as entitled as they to hunt down and kill whoever killed our own. Yet our retribution is condemned a priori as illegitimate. The right to avenge Mabhouh’s death is unchallenged, whereas the right to avenge Mabhouh’s victims is categorically denied. What is valid, in fact a sacred duty for one side, is intolerable and entirely villainous for the other.
The underlying assertion is that Mabhouh’s acts were virtuous and sanctioned by absolute supernal will. Unlike our own, Arab society is unbothered by the pluralistic niceties of postmodern moral relativism. Allah is exclusively on their side and they are the only interpreters of his wishes. This isn’t only Hamas ideology. The Palestinian Media Watch disseminated the text of the January 29 sermon on PATV, under the auspices of our supposed peace-partner Mahmoud Abbas.
It called on all Muslims to remember that “the Jews are the Jews! The Jews are the Jews! Even if donkeys would cease to bray, dogs cease to bark, wolves cease to howl and snakes to bite, the Jews would not cease to harbor hatred towards Muslims. The Prophet said that if two Jews would be alone with a Muslim, they would think only of killing him… The Prophet says: ‘You shall fight the Jews and kill them…’” There is a whole loathsome lot more, but the basis is clear: the murder of Jews is divinely decreed.
In other words, Mabhouh acted morally. Those who opposed him are immoral. By this precept Jews must die and have no right to resist. That is their lot. Not only do they possess no right to avenge, they possess no right to self-defense, to fight at all. Their very existence is a provocation, a casus belli.
THIS IS key to understanding today’s Mideast. As in yesteryear, so in the 21st century it’s axiomatic that Arabs have the right to inflict incalculable harm on Jews and to do so in the most sadistically inventive ways but the Jews’ attempts to deflect such blows are evil, outrageous and deserving of merciless punishment.
Failure to admit how selective Arab rules of warfare are precludes making sense of anything in our region and dooms to failure any so-called peace drives and mediation initiatives. The tragedy is that not only is the fundamental asymmetry between Jewish and Arab mind-sets not comprehended abroad, but there’s no inclination to even consider it.
Worse yet the Arabs’ skewed standards are commonly accepted overseas. Hence the outcry whenever Israel does anything in aid of its self-preservation. Large-scale campaigns like Defensive Shield, the Lebanon War or Cast Lead are decried for “lack or proportionality.” However, there was censure even for pinpointed targeting such as the recent Nablus killing (in an exchange of fire during an attempted arrest) of the three ambushers who had earlier slain Meir Avshalom Chai in a drive-by shooting. Abbas described them as “ruthlessly executed martyrs.” Even the trials and convictions of murderers like Marwan Barghouti are portrayed as illegitimate. There plainly is just nothing Israel may do to secure itself. Even the most legalistically scrupulous remedies are repudiated.
The Goldstone Report is part and parcel of ongoing efforts to paralyze and disallow Israeli self-defense. The mud now slung at Israel is intended to intimidate use of force in future.
It’s nothing new. This isn’t the product of what’s castigated as occupation and/or the shortage of suicidal concessions on Israel’s part to appease Arab/Muslim appetites. Jewish self-defense, in its most rudimentary and literal sense, was anathema way before the Jewish state’s birth and subsequent cheeky survival.
In his milestone, still ever-relevant 1943 book The Forgotten Ally, Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre Van Paassen quotes his own interview with the British Mandate’s acting high commissioner Harry Luke during the countrywide Arab rioting of 1929 (most notorious for the Hebron massacre). Van Paassen told Luke: “You arrested first and foremost, in every case I investigated, the Jews who successfully defended themselves. You arrested 50 Jews in Haifa at the moment they defended themselves heroically against the attack of a mob of some 2,000 runners-amok… yesterday I saw a man brought into Jerusalem by the mounted police and recognized in him an older settler from the neighborhood of Lifta, the owner of a small canning factory who had been in this country for more than 50 years a real pioneer. I visited this man in jail. His name is Isaac Brozen… He was arrested after he had barricaded himself in his factory… Arabs from Lifta raped and massacred his old wife and two daughters and set fire to his house across the roadway.”
Luke, like Goldstone eight decades later, argued that he was only looking out for Jews. Brozen, and the many others Van Paassen listed, were merely “placed in protective custody for their own good.” The interviewer countered: “but they were in chains and in solitary confinement… Mr. Brozen was loaded down under chains… chains on his hands and chains on his feet, old Turkish chains at that…”
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Some judges really "get it." Words to remember.
http://tinyurl.com/ygg8t4b
Ruling of Judge William Young in the case of the shoe bomber.
Ruling of Judge William Young in the case of the shoe bomber.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Obama team credits itself, and blames Bush, more than reality
http://tinyurl.com/y8ctyt9
Obama report: 95,000 jobs to come each month
****The Obama economic team claims the stimulus package saved 2M jobs and blamed Bush for losing 700K jobs each month and bequeathing a mess to Obama.**** ...Recognizing voters were likely to hold Obama to account for the economy, the White House team cast blame on their predecessors and unpopular Wall Street bankers... — we certainly inherited an economy with a number of economic problems."...Indeed, even adding an average of 95,000 jobs each month, unemployment is likely to remain around 10 percent through this year and not fall below 6 percent until 2015....It will be even tougher if Americans continue to save at high rates — somewhere in the 4 percent to 7 percent range —...***A strange judgment: where are the banks going to get funds to lend w/o people saving their money and lending it to banks? The more deposits banks have the greater the pressure to lend. Unfortunately, it's been safer to lend this money to the government since there's a big difference between the short-term rates paid to depositors and the higher rates of Federal non-risk debt. If Obama knew his ass from a hole in the ground about jobs, he would concentrate on making business less chancy and more profitable for businesses to expand. When a government is hostile to capital, capital goes on strike. Unemployment benefits are NOT stimulus ( they encourage workers NOT to look for jobs.)Anything that lowers the bar for an employee to be able to create more value than he costs IS stimulative of jobs: business tax cuts, regulatory certainty, personal tax cuts to make take-home pay greater for the same productivity.****
Obama report: 95,000 jobs to come each month
****The Obama economic team claims the stimulus package saved 2M jobs and blamed Bush for losing 700K jobs each month and bequeathing a mess to Obama.**** ...Recognizing voters were likely to hold Obama to account for the economy, the White House team cast blame on their predecessors and unpopular Wall Street bankers... — we certainly inherited an economy with a number of economic problems."...Indeed, even adding an average of 95,000 jobs each month, unemployment is likely to remain around 10 percent through this year and not fall below 6 percent until 2015....It will be even tougher if Americans continue to save at high rates — somewhere in the 4 percent to 7 percent range —...***A strange judgment: where are the banks going to get funds to lend w/o people saving their money and lending it to banks? The more deposits banks have the greater the pressure to lend. Unfortunately, it's been safer to lend this money to the government since there's a big difference between the short-term rates paid to depositors and the higher rates of Federal non-risk debt. If Obama knew his ass from a hole in the ground about jobs, he would concentrate on making business less chancy and more profitable for businesses to expand. When a government is hostile to capital, capital goes on strike. Unemployment benefits are NOT stimulus ( they encourage workers NOT to look for jobs.)Anything that lowers the bar for an employee to be able to create more value than he costs IS stimulative of jobs: business tax cuts, regulatory certainty, personal tax cuts to make take-home pay greater for the same productivity.****
Greece government hospitals owe $9.5B and docs strike
We are currently reminded of the worst aspect of Obamacare: disincentives to join the medical profession and the possibility of doctors' strikes if they are treated as government workers. (The other aspect of Obamania being so union-oriented, including government unions such as SEIU, that there is rejection of the once-believed principle: there is no allowable strike against the public interest.)
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Debunkum- the outing of various false but common beliefs.
The anthropic global warming issue has been widely debunked through the fraud revealed by the emails from the U of East Anglia and the recent revelations about the fraudulent claims of the UN's IPCC. Even India has disavowed the IPCC, led by an "outstanding" Indian scientist. Only Obama and his EPA still claim to believe in AGW.
Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute reported on the demise of a favorite social science and liberal trope. The Officer Krupke syndrome has been debunked. This is the theory, popularized in the '60s, that crime results from disadvantages visited upon the criminal class ( "Officer Krupke, we're depraved because we're deprived.")Redistribution of incomes was justified on the grounds of societal good and crime was regarded as a form of social protest.Even police chiefs regarded homicide as a societal problem. Criminologists subscribing to this "root causes" theory predicted that crime rates would go up during the recession. In fact, they went down. This is not to say that there is an anti-correlation; in fact, there is zero effect. Even the prosperous times showed an increase in crime except since the '90s when it crime started declining because of better policing ( shown to greatest effect by Wm Bratton, NYC Police Commissioner under Rudy Giuliani, now being replicated in LA ). Also, there is now clear evidence that increased incarceration has decreased crime for the simple reason that predators have been removed from the streets. This goes against recent budget-driven measures releasing prisoners early.The also-common belief that many inmates are currently only perpetrators of victim-less crimes is belied by the fact that the demographics of prison populations hasn't changed since the '60s.
The panic visited on parents about the supposed correlation between thimerosol in vaccines and autism has been finally put to rest when The Lancet recently retracted its finding of a dozen years ago claiming such an effect ( and causing parents to avoid vaccinating their children!)
Recent years have revealed the utter failure and counter-productive nature of the various New Deal initiatives that were claimed to have ended the Great Depression. We now know that these measures, which the various Obama programs are replicating, were hindrances to the natural recovery of the economy. When Democrat flacks claim that "Obama is the best economic President since FDR" they are only partly correct: he is perhaps the "worst economic President since FDR." The simple explanation is that when the government is anti-business and anti-capitalism, capital goes on strike and business hunkers down. It required WWII to force capital to be deployed and business to expand. Stimulus measures ( "what else does stimulus mean but spending?", said Obama ) don't work when conjoined with hostility to profits and business.
Economists used to talk about "rational economic man" who would calmly optimize his situation. This is also the argument in favor of thinking that the Iranian mullahs would be rational in their use of nuclear weapons since they would be dissuaded, as the more rational Russians and Americans were, by Mutual Assured Destruction. We now know that people are not purely rational in their decisions even when considering only "normal, sane" players. More to the point is the need to consider the decision-making of religious fanatics obsessed with the next world and easily capable of suicide murder and terrorism in this one in order to achieve non-rational goals such as a world-wide caliphate.
Very often debunking is periodic and cyclical, where wrong-headed ideas are shown to be false but then the demonstrations are forgotten and the fallacies repeated.
Go back to the repeated belief that there will be too many people for the planet to be supported. This goes back to Malthus and repeated every generation or so including The Population Bomb of Paul Ehrlich ( one of whose co-authors is now a major adviser to the Obama administration ), debunked most recently by the Green Revolution of Norman Borlaug. Now, of course, it seems that we NEED more population to sustain the Ponzi scheme of American and other social security systems.
Pollution, while it has real aspects, is employed by the "Environmental" movement ( who often elevate the planet above people) to include things which are, rationally, not pollutants at all. That is, acid rain, PCBs and mercury are pollutants. When certain chemicals were demonstrated to deplete the ozone layer, they can legitimately be considered pollutants to be reduced, if not eliminated. When, however, "thermal pollution" of Lake Michigan was adduced as a reason to oppose nuclear plants near the Lake, that was nonsense. Likewise, the EPA's recent categorizing CO2 as a pollutant is nonsense.
Environmentalists seem to need some cause to be angry about ( and often to justify actual terrorist acts against people -- e.g. spiking trees, arson and colliding with whale boats ): the putative endangerment of the polar bear does seem to be debunked by the simple observation that there are, despite ostensible global warming and melting of ice floes, more polar bears than ever. Even when something like DDT was demonstrated to thin out the shells of eagles and similar birds, endangering their survival in certain areas, the countervailing good, such as fighting malarial mosquitoes, was ignored. We now have more eagles but also more people succumbing to malaria than heretofore. It is laughable that millions are being devoted to mosquito netting when pesticide spraying would be much more effective.
Whole philosophies, like Communism and Socialism, have been debunked, only to reappear again and again, most recently in the U.S. The idea of income redistribution is somehow taken as a desideratum without considering that it has never worked and has an enormous downside. It is amusing to note that David Hume referred to "income equalization" as being detrimental to "thrift and industry." Aristotle noted 2500 years ago that, when the hoi polloi in a democracy realize that they can off-load the entire tax burden onto a (voting) minority, the destruction of the polis follows inevitably.
Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute reported on the demise of a favorite social science and liberal trope. The Officer Krupke syndrome has been debunked. This is the theory, popularized in the '60s, that crime results from disadvantages visited upon the criminal class ( "Officer Krupke, we're depraved because we're deprived.")Redistribution of incomes was justified on the grounds of societal good and crime was regarded as a form of social protest.Even police chiefs regarded homicide as a societal problem. Criminologists subscribing to this "root causes" theory predicted that crime rates would go up during the recession. In fact, they went down. This is not to say that there is an anti-correlation; in fact, there is zero effect. Even the prosperous times showed an increase in crime except since the '90s when it crime started declining because of better policing ( shown to greatest effect by Wm Bratton, NYC Police Commissioner under Rudy Giuliani, now being replicated in LA ). Also, there is now clear evidence that increased incarceration has decreased crime for the simple reason that predators have been removed from the streets. This goes against recent budget-driven measures releasing prisoners early.The also-common belief that many inmates are currently only perpetrators of victim-less crimes is belied by the fact that the demographics of prison populations hasn't changed since the '60s.
The panic visited on parents about the supposed correlation between thimerosol in vaccines and autism has been finally put to rest when The Lancet recently retracted its finding of a dozen years ago claiming such an effect ( and causing parents to avoid vaccinating their children!)
Recent years have revealed the utter failure and counter-productive nature of the various New Deal initiatives that were claimed to have ended the Great Depression. We now know that these measures, which the various Obama programs are replicating, were hindrances to the natural recovery of the economy. When Democrat flacks claim that "Obama is the best economic President since FDR" they are only partly correct: he is perhaps the "worst economic President since FDR." The simple explanation is that when the government is anti-business and anti-capitalism, capital goes on strike and business hunkers down. It required WWII to force capital to be deployed and business to expand. Stimulus measures ( "what else does stimulus mean but spending?", said Obama ) don't work when conjoined with hostility to profits and business.
Economists used to talk about "rational economic man" who would calmly optimize his situation. This is also the argument in favor of thinking that the Iranian mullahs would be rational in their use of nuclear weapons since they would be dissuaded, as the more rational Russians and Americans were, by Mutual Assured Destruction. We now know that people are not purely rational in their decisions even when considering only "normal, sane" players. More to the point is the need to consider the decision-making of religious fanatics obsessed with the next world and easily capable of suicide murder and terrorism in this one in order to achieve non-rational goals such as a world-wide caliphate.
Very often debunking is periodic and cyclical, where wrong-headed ideas are shown to be false but then the demonstrations are forgotten and the fallacies repeated.
Go back to the repeated belief that there will be too many people for the planet to be supported. This goes back to Malthus and repeated every generation or so including The Population Bomb of Paul Ehrlich ( one of whose co-authors is now a major adviser to the Obama administration ), debunked most recently by the Green Revolution of Norman Borlaug. Now, of course, it seems that we NEED more population to sustain the Ponzi scheme of American and other social security systems.
Pollution, while it has real aspects, is employed by the "Environmental" movement ( who often elevate the planet above people) to include things which are, rationally, not pollutants at all. That is, acid rain, PCBs and mercury are pollutants. When certain chemicals were demonstrated to deplete the ozone layer, they can legitimately be considered pollutants to be reduced, if not eliminated. When, however, "thermal pollution" of Lake Michigan was adduced as a reason to oppose nuclear plants near the Lake, that was nonsense. Likewise, the EPA's recent categorizing CO2 as a pollutant is nonsense.
Environmentalists seem to need some cause to be angry about ( and often to justify actual terrorist acts against people -- e.g. spiking trees, arson and colliding with whale boats ): the putative endangerment of the polar bear does seem to be debunked by the simple observation that there are, despite ostensible global warming and melting of ice floes, more polar bears than ever. Even when something like DDT was demonstrated to thin out the shells of eagles and similar birds, endangering their survival in certain areas, the countervailing good, such as fighting malarial mosquitoes, was ignored. We now have more eagles but also more people succumbing to malaria than heretofore. It is laughable that millions are being devoted to mosquito netting when pesticide spraying would be much more effective.
Whole philosophies, like Communism and Socialism, have been debunked, only to reappear again and again, most recently in the U.S. The idea of income redistribution is somehow taken as a desideratum without considering that it has never worked and has an enormous downside. It is amusing to note that David Hume referred to "income equalization" as being detrimental to "thrift and industry." Aristotle noted 2500 years ago that, when the hoi polloi in a democracy realize that they can off-load the entire tax burden onto a (voting) minority, the destruction of the polis follows inevitably.
Friday, February 5, 2010
UN Climate Panel loses even more credibility
The government of India has set up its own panel on climate change, having lost all faith in the UN IPCC (albeit headed by an Indian scientist.)
Barrasso Calls for U.N. Climate Chief’s ResignationWASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senator John Barrasso, R-Wyo., called on Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to resign after revelations of ongoing scientific fraud under Dr. Pachauri’s watch. Senator Barrasso delivered the following statement on the Senate Floor:
“Every day, new scandals emerge about the so called ‘facts’ in the UN reports. The integrity of the data and the integrity of the science have been compromised.
“Concrete action by world leaders is needed. Government delegations of the UN’s general assembly and UN Secretary Moon must pressure Dr. Rajendra Pachauri to step down as head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“It is time to conduct an independent investigation into the conduct of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientific data behind these policies must be independently verified.
“Administration policies relating to climate change will cost millions of Americans their jobs. We need to get this right. To continue to rely on these corrupted U.N. Reports is an endorsement of fraudulent behavior. It is a signal to the American people that ideology is more important than their jobs.”
Background: Recent news reports have highlighted Dr. Rajendra Pachauri’s and the United Nation’s involvement in covering up flawed science:
* February 2, 2010, Investor’s Business Daily article, Walter Russell Read, Project Director for Religion and Foreign Policy at the Pew Forum, said “After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding..
Barrasso Calls for U.N. Climate Chief’s ResignationWASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senator John Barrasso, R-Wyo., called on Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to resign after revelations of ongoing scientific fraud under Dr. Pachauri’s watch. Senator Barrasso delivered the following statement on the Senate Floor:
“Every day, new scandals emerge about the so called ‘facts’ in the UN reports. The integrity of the data and the integrity of the science have been compromised.
“Concrete action by world leaders is needed. Government delegations of the UN’s general assembly and UN Secretary Moon must pressure Dr. Rajendra Pachauri to step down as head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“It is time to conduct an independent investigation into the conduct of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientific data behind these policies must be independently verified.
“Administration policies relating to climate change will cost millions of Americans their jobs. We need to get this right. To continue to rely on these corrupted U.N. Reports is an endorsement of fraudulent behavior. It is a signal to the American people that ideology is more important than their jobs.”
Background: Recent news reports have highlighted Dr. Rajendra Pachauri’s and the United Nation’s involvement in covering up flawed science:
* February 2, 2010, Investor’s Business Daily article, Walter Russell Read, Project Director for Religion and Foreign Policy at the Pew Forum, said “After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding..
When appeasement is abroad, can apocalypse be far off?
http://tinyurl.com/ybgyfaj
Enlightened nations of the world are on a coffee-break from enlightenment By Caroline B. Glick
"Never again!"...Netanyahu used his speech at the notorious death camp to nudge what he referred to as "the enlightened nations of the world," to recognize that "murderous evil" has to be stopped as early as possible to prevent it from achieving its aims....Iran's leaders were declaring loudly that they intend to finish what the Nazis started. They will destroy the Jewish people. Iran's dictator supremo Ali Khamenei...put it, "Surely, the day will come when the nations of the region will witness the destruction of the Zionist regime… When the destruction happens will depend on how the Islamic nations approach the issue."... On Monday Germany's Der Speigel reported that evidence...proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Iran's nuclear program is not a peaceful one...Iran will have the wherewithal to build nuclear warheads by 2012.****One can only wonder if evidence of success might not appear much sooner.Iran is already building bigger rockets.****...as they did 70 years ago, the "enlightened nations" of Europe are siding with evil against its would-be victims....more anti-Semitic attacks in Europe in 2009 than there had been in any single year since the Holocaust. The report stated that the attacks were carried out by Jew haters on both the Left and the Right...Polish Catholic Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek...Ilmar Reepalu, the mayor of Malmo, Sweden...the EU's new foreign policy chief, Britain's Catherine Ashton...it makes sense that Europe will not raise a finger to prevent another Holocaust....like the Europeans, the Americans don't feel like being responsible. President Barack Obama, his administration and many of his fellow Democrats would rather take on Israel....the administration apparently believes that there is no reason to seek the overthrow of Hamas simply because the US is required by US law and binding UN Security Council resolutions to do so. The US Treasury Department has reportedly just removed all but one Hamas official from its list of known terrorists and so paved the way for Hamas to receive funding from Europe....Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell came up with a revolutionary new idea. In the face of Palestinian intransigence, Mitchell introduced the earthshaking concept of pressuring Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians....the Obama administration behaves as though the jury is still out on whether the mullahs are even seeking nuclear weapons...As far as Obama is concerned, the nuclear arsenal in most urgent need of evisceration is the US's nuclear arsenal....there is only one "enlightened" nation in the world that may actually do something to prevent the advance of murderous evil. And Israel unfortunately is of two minds on the issue.
...on the other hand, we have Defense Minister Ehud Barak,...As he put it, "The lack of defined boundaries within Israel, and not an Iranian bomb, is the greatest threat to our future."...If he could only be right, then Israel would be able to singlehandedly solve all the problems of the region and be immediately adored by the likes of the EU and the Obama administration just by making itself smaller...
Enlightened nations of the world are on a coffee-break from enlightenment By Caroline B. Glick
"Never again!"...Netanyahu used his speech at the notorious death camp to nudge what he referred to as "the enlightened nations of the world," to recognize that "murderous evil" has to be stopped as early as possible to prevent it from achieving its aims....Iran's leaders were declaring loudly that they intend to finish what the Nazis started. They will destroy the Jewish people. Iran's dictator supremo Ali Khamenei...put it, "Surely, the day will come when the nations of the region will witness the destruction of the Zionist regime… When the destruction happens will depend on how the Islamic nations approach the issue."... On Monday Germany's Der Speigel reported that evidence...proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Iran's nuclear program is not a peaceful one...Iran will have the wherewithal to build nuclear warheads by 2012.****One can only wonder if evidence of success might not appear much sooner.Iran is already building bigger rockets.****...as they did 70 years ago, the "enlightened nations" of Europe are siding with evil against its would-be victims....more anti-Semitic attacks in Europe in 2009 than there had been in any single year since the Holocaust. The report stated that the attacks were carried out by Jew haters on both the Left and the Right...Polish Catholic Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek...Ilmar Reepalu, the mayor of Malmo, Sweden...the EU's new foreign policy chief, Britain's Catherine Ashton...it makes sense that Europe will not raise a finger to prevent another Holocaust....like the Europeans, the Americans don't feel like being responsible. President Barack Obama, his administration and many of his fellow Democrats would rather take on Israel....the administration apparently believes that there is no reason to seek the overthrow of Hamas simply because the US is required by US law and binding UN Security Council resolutions to do so. The US Treasury Department has reportedly just removed all but one Hamas official from its list of known terrorists and so paved the way for Hamas to receive funding from Europe....Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell came up with a revolutionary new idea. In the face of Palestinian intransigence, Mitchell introduced the earthshaking concept of pressuring Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians....the Obama administration behaves as though the jury is still out on whether the mullahs are even seeking nuclear weapons...As far as Obama is concerned, the nuclear arsenal in most urgent need of evisceration is the US's nuclear arsenal....there is only one "enlightened" nation in the world that may actually do something to prevent the advance of murderous evil. And Israel unfortunately is of two minds on the issue.
...on the other hand, we have Defense Minister Ehud Barak,...As he put it, "The lack of defined boundaries within Israel, and not an Iranian bomb, is the greatest threat to our future."...If he could only be right, then Israel would be able to singlehandedly solve all the problems of the region and be immediately adored by the likes of the EU and the Obama administration just by making itself smaller...
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Obama finally gets something right ( Even a blind squirrel...)
http://tinyurl.com/yatvgnr
Obama Gets Space Funding Right We could send hundreds of robots to Mars for the cost of one manned mission. By STEVEN WEINBERG
In the federal budget released this week, President Barack Obama calls for increasing NASA's funding by 2% while cutting its manned space flight program. If enacted by Congress, the cuts will likely end plans to return astronauts to the moon. Some claim these cuts will damage America's capabilities in science and technology, but the president's spending plan will likely boost both.
The manned space flight program masquerades as science, but it actually crowds out real science at NASA, which is all done on unmanned missions...
Obama Gets Space Funding Right We could send hundreds of robots to Mars for the cost of one manned mission. By STEVEN WEINBERG
In the federal budget released this week, President Barack Obama calls for increasing NASA's funding by 2% while cutting its manned space flight program. If enacted by Congress, the cuts will likely end plans to return astronauts to the moon. Some claim these cuts will damage America's capabilities in science and technology, but the president's spending plan will likely boost both.
The manned space flight program masquerades as science, but it actually crowds out real science at NASA, which is all done on unmanned missions...
Directory: Darlings of the Left
One has to wonder where Obama finds the nominees he puts to the Senate. It's either political expediency ( appointing Hillary and Bob Gates )or it's pandering to the extreme Left of the Democratic Party, who have compiled their own list of "darling" candidates that satisfy The Daily Kos, The Nation, George Soros, etc. To get on the list, all that is needed is a history (however shot) of stridency in either domestic or foreign affairs. Compromising National Security was dodgy enough in quiet times but Al Qaeda, Maj. Hasan et al have made this toxic, even to the often-tone-deaf Obama and his pollsters.
http://tinyurl.com/ycx9aho
Justice at Dawn An Obama nominee falls victim to the realities of fighting terrorism.
It will be back to the future today on Capitol Hill, when President Obama's nominee to run the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel is scheduled for a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee. A year into the Obama Administration, Dawn Johnsen and her views on national security look more than ever like a relic of campaign nostalgia.
Back in the day, Ms. Johnsen's efflorescent critiques of the Bush Administration's antiterror policies while a professor at Indiana University made her a darling of the left. ...Ms. Johnsen claimed that U.S. detainee policies were "creating fertile conditions for the recruitment of terrorists." In March 2008 on Slate.com, she advised that the next Administration "must condemn our nation's past transgressions and reject Bush's corruption of American ideals."
That was all before the realities of fighting a relentless global terror network imposed themselves on the Obama Administration...
http://tinyurl.com/ycx9aho
Justice at Dawn An Obama nominee falls victim to the realities of fighting terrorism.
It will be back to the future today on Capitol Hill, when President Obama's nominee to run the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel is scheduled for a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee. A year into the Obama Administration, Dawn Johnsen and her views on national security look more than ever like a relic of campaign nostalgia.
Back in the day, Ms. Johnsen's efflorescent critiques of the Bush Administration's antiterror policies while a professor at Indiana University made her a darling of the left. ...Ms. Johnsen claimed that U.S. detainee policies were "creating fertile conditions for the recruitment of terrorists." In March 2008 on Slate.com, she advised that the next Administration "must condemn our nation's past transgressions and reject Bush's corruption of American ideals."
That was all before the realities of fighting a relentless global terror network imposed themselves on the Obama Administration...
The Emperor is Wearing No Clothes and now half the people see it.
http://tinyurl.com/y8vhr2j
The Obama Spell Is Broken Unlike this president, John Kennedy was an ironist who never fell for his own mystique. By FOUAD AJAMI
The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.
The nation's faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies...
The Obama Spell Is Broken Unlike this president, John Kennedy was an ironist who never fell for his own mystique. By FOUAD AJAMI
The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.
The nation's faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies...
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The danger to America
"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of
> entrusting a man like him with the presidency. It will be easier to limit
> and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary
> common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such
> a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious
> than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails us. Blaming the prince of
> the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made
> him their prince. The republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after
> all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such
> as those who made him their president." -- Author Unknown
> entrusting a man like him with the presidency. It will be easier to limit
> and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary
> common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such
> a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious
> than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails us. Blaming the prince of
> the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made
> him their prince. The republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after
> all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such
> as those who made him their president." -- Author Unknown
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Journalists grudgingly admit Hamas fired from media building during Gaza War.
http://tinyurl.com/ya7q5dw
Journalists in Gaza during the War either were biased in favor of Hamas ( so much for journalistic ethics ) or were afraid to speak the truth because of Hamas retaliation against them. Here's an inadvertent on-air admission, in Arabic in real-time.
Journalists in Gaza during the War either were biased in favor of Hamas ( so much for journalistic ethics ) or were afraid to speak the truth because of Hamas retaliation against them. Here's an inadvertent on-air admission, in Arabic in real-time.
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