RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.steynonline.com/5605/ukip-shakes-up-westminster

It’s all but impossible to launch a new political party under America’s electoral arrangements, and extremely easy to do so under Continental proportional representation. The Westminster first-past-the-post system puts the task somewhere in between: tough, but not entirely the realm of fantasy. The Labour party came into being at the dawn of the 20th century, and formed its first government in 1924. The United Kingdom Independence party was born in 1993 and now, a mere two decades later, is on the brink of . . . well, okay, not forming its first government, but it did do eerily well in May’s local elections. The Liberals were reduced to their all-time lowest share of the vote, the Tories to their lowest since 1982, and for the first time ever, none of the three “mainstream” parties cracked 30 percent: Labour had a good night with 29, the Conservatives came second at 25, and nipping at their heels was the United Kingdom Independence party with 23 percent.

They achieved this impressive result against not three opponents but also a fourth — a media that have almost universally derided the party as a sinkhole of nutters and cranks. UKIP’s leader, the boundlessly affable Nigel Farage, went to P. G. Wodehouse’s old high school, Dulwich College, and to a sneering metropolitan press, Farage’s party is a déclassé Wodehousean touring company mired in an elysian England that never was, populated only by golf-club duffers, halfwit toffs, rustic simpletons, and hail-fellow-well-met bores from the snug of the village pub. When I shared a platform with him in Toronto a few months back, Mr. Farage explained his party’s rise by citing not Wodehouse but another Dulwich old boy, the late British comic Bob Monkhouse: “They all laughed when I said I’d become a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.”

The British media spent 20 years laughing at UKIP. But they’re not laughing now — not when one in four electors takes them seriously enough to vote for them. So, having dismissed him as a joke, Fleet Street now warns that Farage uses his famous sense of humor as a sly cover for his dark totalitarian agenda — the same well-trod path to power used by other famous quipsters and gag-merchants such as Adolf Hitler, whose Nuremberg open-mike nights were legendary. “Nigel Farage is easy to laugh at . . . that means he’s dangerous,” declared the Independent. The Mirror warned of an “unfulfilled capacity for evil.” “Stop laughing,” ordered Jemma Wayne in the British edition of the Huffington Post. “Farage would lead us back to the dark ages.” The more the “mainstream” shriek about how mad, bad, and dangerous UKIP is, the more they sound like the ones who’ve come unhinged.

UKIP is pronounced “You-kip,” kip being Brit slang for “sleep.” When they write the book on how we came to this state of affairs, they’ll call it While England Kipped. A complacent elite assured itself that UKIP would remain an irritating protest vote, but that’s all. It was born in 1993 to protest the Maastricht treaty, the point at which a continent-wide “common market” finally cast off the pretense of being an economic arrangement and announced itself as a “European Union,” a pseudo-state complete with “European citizenship.” The United Kingdom Independence party was just that: a liberation movement. Its founder, a man who knew something about incoherent Euro-polities, was the Habsburg-history specialist Alan Sked, who now dismisses the party as a bunch of “fruitcakes.” As old-time Perotistas will understand, new movements are prone to internecine feuds. UKIP briefly fell under the spell of the oleaginous telly huckster Robert Kilroy-Silk, who subsequently quit to found a party called “Veritas,” which he has since also quit.

But Farage was there at the founding, as UKIP’s first-ever parliamentary candidate. In 1994, a rising star of the Tory party, Stephen Milligan, was found dead on his kitchen table, with a satsuma and an Ecstasy tab in his mouth, and naked except for three lady’s stockings, two on his legs and one on his arm. In his entertaining book, one of the few political memoirs one can read without forcing oneself to finish, Farage has a melancholy reflection on Milligan’s bizarrely memorable end: “It was the sad destiny . . . of this former President of the Oxford Union to contribute more to public awareness — albeit of a very arcane nature — by the manner of his death than by his work in life.” That’s to say, the late Mr. Milligan more or less singlehandedly planted the practice of “auto-erotic asphyxiation” in the public consciousness — since when (as John O’Sullivan suggested here a while back) the Tory party seems to have embraced it as a political philosophy.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3860/islamic_emergency_defence_group_lets_mask_slip

The newly launched Islamic Emergency Defence group has let its true colours show just days after its foundation. Read how…

Over the past few days, media outlets and tweeters alike have noted the existence of a new group, vocally backed by controversial cleric Anjem Choudary, called ‘Islamic Emergency Defence’ (IED).

The organisation claims it exists to defend ordinary Muslims, which it says are “one of the most oppressed communities in Britain”. But soon after launching, the organisation was given the vocal support of the intolerant and controversial cleric Anjem Choudary, who has been the front man for the extremist, now banned Islam4UK and al-Muhajiroun groups.

These organisations promoted Shariah law, and activists routinely waved placards telling British soliders to burn in hell. Choudary’s group was recently implicated in violent scuffles on London’s Edgware Road.

But for those of us keen to give IED (awful choice of acronym, by the way) the benefit of the doubt, and see where the organisation went with its goals, the pretence of goodwill and decency soon dissolved, with the organisation tweeting out intolerant and offensive things, as well as ‘instructions’ on ‘how to deal with egotistic police’.

The organisation claims “vigilantism” is a legitimate method by which “Muslims can legally defend themselves” and stated yesterday, “We invite all non-Muslims to embrace Islam and save themselves from the hell-fire”.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3856/germany_foils_islamist_model_aeroplane_terror_plan

Germans launch dawn raids involving around 90 officers in bid to prevent high-tech terror attacks

German police have raided apartments across Germany in an operation aimed at foiling an alleged plot to perpetrate terror attacks using remote-controlled model aeroplanes, Germany’s Spiegel is reporting.

Spiegel, one of Germany’s leading media outlets, said that the dawn raids involving around 90 officers had been conducted in cooperation with Belgian law-enforcement agencies and that two Tunisian-born men were at the centre of their investigations.

“They are suspected of having sought to acquire information and equipment necessary to carry out ‘radical Islamist explosive attacks using remote controlled airplanes,’ according to a statement on the website of Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutors’ Office”, the report stated.

“According to the Stuttgart public broadcaster SWR, some of the suspects are students at the University of Stuttgart, where they are taking courses in aerospace engineering. As part of those courses, they learn how to use GPS to program model airplanes to fly specific routes,” it added.

The two men of Tunisian origin were described as having come under the sway of radical Islamist ideology, but they are not thought to be members of a known terrorist organisation.

This has been a busy week for anti-terrorism in Europe. On Monday, French police arrested six people on suspicion of planning terror attacks in France.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3848/anti_israel_rabbi_in_anti_semitic_attack_in_amsterdam

An anti-Zionist Rabbi has been attacked by a Muslim man in Amsterdam, in what is thought to be a racially motivated assault

A leading member of the anti-Israel Jewish sect Neturei Karta was assaulted in what seems to be an anti-Semitic attack by a Muslim man in Amsterdam.

Israel’s Channel 2 news reported that Yosef Antebi, a prominent member of the anti-Zionist group that frequently marches alongside anti-Israel protestors, was hospitalised after an attack on the streets of the Dutch capital.

A friend of Antebi reported, “As he was walking down the street, a car stopped next to him, and a man who appeared to be a Muslim immigrant came out. The immigrant started shouting anti-Jewish slurs at the rabbi. Rabbi Antebi is anti-Zionist, he does not advocate for war in the Middle East but he was identified as a Zionist. The Muslim started yelling at him and threatening him, and the rabbi noticed that the immigrant was going to attack him.”

At this point, the friend said, Rabbi Antebi asked passersby to help him, but was ignored.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/06/25/can-we-actually-even-tell-if-humans-are-affecting-the-climate/

We know, with great certainty, that the overall average temperature of the Earth has warmed by several degreees in the last 400 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age. Before that was a period called the Medieval Warm Period; before that was another cold period; and back at the time of the Romans there was a long period that was significantly warmer — Southern Britain was a wine-growing region. What we’re a lot less certain about is “why?”

Of course, the “why?” here has been, shall we say, pretty controversial. It’s worth wondering about the controversy and about the social mechanisms through which science is done — I wrote about them during the Climategate controversy as the “social contract of science” — but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Instead, let’s talk about how a scientist thinks about these sorts of questions and arrives at new answers. Back in grad school we called that “doing science,” and it was something everyone liked doing and wished they could be doing instead of whatever they actually were doing, like faculty meetings and refereeing papers.

The process of “doing science” is something you usually learn more or less by osmosis, but there are some good hints around. One of the best is a paper from the 16 October 1964 issue of Science, “Strong Inference” by John R Platt. Let’s say we have some phenomenon of interest, like global warming, or high blood sugar, or that damned yellow patch in my lawn. We want to know why it happens. Platt’s strong inference describes the process we should use when “doing science” as:

We generate a number of alternate explanations, hypotheses, that might explain the phenomenon.
For each hypothesis, we come up with an experiment which will prove the hypothesis wrong. That is, not one that “proves the hypothesis,” but one which, if successful, would disprove or falsify the hypothesis. (Sir Karl Popper argued in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery that this falsification was the core of scientific knowledge.)
We do the experiments. If an experiment falsifies a hypothesis, we discard it ruthlessly. Then we go back to (1) and try again.

A lot of times, the rub — and the really creative thinking — comes in from finding the right experiment. Richard Feynmann was known for an ability to see right through a problem to a simple and elegant experiment that would disprove a hypothesis. He demonstrated this during the review following the Challenger disaster. You may remember that the launch happened on a very cold morning in January; less than two minutes after launch the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up, killing all seven astronauts.

The question, as always, was “why?”

From films and debris, it appeared that the solid rocket motors had failed first, sending a blowtorch of hot gas into the external tank, which then exploded. The solid rocket motors were built of a stack of components containing the solid fuel, which were then joined to make the whole rocket motor; it appeared, in fact, that one of the joints had failed.

One proposed explanation was that the cold has made the O-ring seals at the joints stiff. During a public, televised hearing, management people from the solid rocket manufacturers discounted this idea. Feynmann, who was one of the members of the all-star panel doing the investigation, quietly got a salt shaker and a glass of ice. They had a sample of the O-ring material that had been provided as a prop for the hearing. Feynmann put the salt into the ice, making a concentrated salt solution with a temperature much lower than the normal freezing point of water. Feynmann, without making a fuss about it, dropped his sample of O-ring in the water and let it chill.

http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/the-edward-snowden-travel-agency/?print=1

The absurdities of the Where’s-Edward-Snowden guessing game have by now reached such heights that it would be no great surprise to see reports of the NSA leaker popping up in Tehran, or perhaps transiting the Pyongyang airport. Yes, I’m making that up. But a lot of the recent reports read like scenes from some latter-day version of Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 satire of the news trade, Scoop. Traveling on what is presumably a revoked U.S. passport, Snowden departs Hong Kong for Moscow. Speaking from Finland, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin says that Snowden arrived unexpectedly in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and is still hanging around the transit hall — though journalists hunting high and low in the transit area can’t find him. Maybe he’s enroute to Ecuador? Or points between? On a tip that he was booked aboard an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Cuba, some two dozen journalists board the plane — only to discover as it heads for Havana that he’s not there.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/blowing-smoke-obama-climate-speech-riddled-with-lies/?print=1

King Canute, attempting to teach his people a lesson regarding his abilities, supposedly went to the sea and commanded the tide to stop. Twelfth-century English historian Henry of Huntington wrote that Canute took his throne to the seashore, but the tide, “continuing to rise as usual dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person.”

President Barack Obama’s naïve and error-riddled speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday clearly demonstrated that he is serious about trying to stop global climate change. However, like the tide, climate change is a natural event of such proportions that it is largely unaffected by human activities. Obama ignores that the “official climate science” on which he bases America’s climate and energy policies has been washed away by 17 years without global warming, despite atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) — the gas Obama blames for rising temperatures — continuing to increase primarily due to the emissions of China and India.

Unlike America’s hopelessly misguided president, the reasons behind Canute’s action were sensible. He wanted to reduce unrealistically elevated expectations of him. Canute’s goal was to show fawning courtiers that there were things over which he had no control. He knew the facts about tides. Sadly for our American friends, and indeed for the whole free world — which depends on a strong America — Obama lacks Canute’s humility and knowledge about nature. The president’s misunderstanding and his apparent disinterest in real climate science is leading the United States into an economic black hole from which it may take generations to recover.

Obama also seems oblivious to real-world economic evidence that the policy path on which he is setting the U.S. has already been tried and has failed in other countries. It is not surprising that when he launched his most recent climate change initiative last week in Berlin, the German public response was less than enthusiastic — they are already suffering the economic and energy consequences of “going green” in a hopeless attempt to stop climate change. Many Germans are also aware of the implications of the Climategate scandal, through which the corrupted science of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was exposed through leaked emails.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/06/republican_party_wont_survive_amnesty_bill_and_neither_will_america.html The Republican Party won’t survive the passing of the Democrat’s illegal immigration amnesty bill.  This shouldn’t be too complex for the D.C. geniuses:  if you betray your party’s base to pander to the opposition’s base, they win, you lose.   If you screw the white working class to pander to the Hispanic vote, whites […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324328204578569270162405156.html?mod=trending_now_4

ByJOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA in Mexico City and JACK NICAS in Chicago

Questions swirled Wednesday over whether fugitive Edward Snowden, the admitted leaker of U.S. secrets, has a clear path to asylum in Ecuador.

As Russian officials reiterated that Mr. Snowden was in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, his ability to leave appeared to hinge on two points—whether there was a country that would allow him free transit on his way to Ecuador, which has said it would consider granting him asylum, and whether he had the temporary travel documents to get there.

Late Wednesday, Univision Networks posted images of what it said was a “safe pass” for temporary travel that had been issued to Mr. Snowden—a document he would need after U.S. officials said earlier this week they had canceled his passport. Word of such a pass echoed comments earlier this week by Julian Assange, the founder of antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, who said Ecuador had given Mr. Snowden a “refugee document of passage.”

But according to a senior official in Ecuador’s foreign ministry on Wednesday, Mr. Snowden had no such pass. “He does not have any documents issued by the government of Ecuador, such as a passport or a refugee identification,” said Galo Galarza, a senior ministry official. He didn’t provide additional details.

Also Wednesday, Ecuador’s foreign ministry said the country would consider whether to grant asylum to Mr. Snowden if he presents himself at one of the country’s diplomatic missions.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323873904578569373649278986.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

As the American people, the world and official Washington continue to unravel the mystery named Barack Obama, a key clue may be found in the booing of Nancy Pelosi—from the Left.

The former House Speaker was booed, shrieked at and vilified for remarks she made last weekend to Netroots Nation, the progressive activists’ convention.

Ms. Pelosi spoke to the convention about Edward Snowden, whose theft of NSA computer data has taken him to China and now Russia. To her credit, Nancy Pelosi told them what they didn’t want to hear:

“I know some of you attribute heroic status to that action, but you don’t have the responsibility for the security of the United States. Those of us who do have to strike a different balance.” She said Edward Snowden had clearly broken the law.

At this, the full-time American Left went ballistic with boos.

“Leave him alone,” they shouted. “Secrets and lies!” And the ultimate articulation of rejection: “You suck!”