RUTHFULLY YOURS

A mother is arrested for giving her daughter a cell phone and letting her play in the park.
This week, a woman was arrested for letting her nine-year-old daughter (armed with a cell phone) go to a playground unsupervised. Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids explained this wacky story over at Reason:

Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead.

Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park — a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking — two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied.

The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl “abandoned” and proceeded to arrest the mother.

There are so many disturbing aspects to this story; it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s begin with the nitwit who called the police in the first place. I’m sure this snitch was puffed with pride when they called the police on this little girl’s working mother. A real citizen soldier, that one.

I spend a lot of time talking about the danger of big government and the nanny state and bureaucrats nosing around in people’s business, but this story brings into sharp relief an even more frightening phenomenon: 911-happy, hypersensitive, busybody do-gooders who take it upon themselves to decide what’s right and wrong for your child. And now, apparently, those “citizen informants” can cause real and lasting harm (not to mention a police record) to their neighbors.

Some might sympathize with the informant in this case — perhaps she was just concerned for this little girl’s safety. But let’s think about what was better for that little girl. Should Debra Harrell have made her daughter sit inside an air-conditioned fast-food restaurant with nothing to do all day but (to the horror of the first lady) eat fries and hamburgers? Or is her daughter better off spending the day outside in the fresh air getting exercise, meeting and playing with other kids, and learning a lesson or two about independence and decision making?

Israel’s Iron Dome system shows that the best defense is not always a good offense.

Between the fall of the Jewish Commonwealth to the Romans in the first century A.D. and the founding of Israel in 1948, Jews were remarkably easy to kill. Not anymore.

Today, thanks to an innovative missile-defense system called Iron Dome (in Hebrew Kipat Barzel), it’s harder than ever. Yet when it was first proposed, many Israeli defense experts (and one way or another most Israelis consider themselves defense experts) were reluctant to support the idea of a defensive response to rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon.

Throughout the history of warfare there has been conflict between those who believe in the strength of a defensive posture and those who put their faith in the attack. Aside from the proponents of the nuclear doctrine known as Mutual Assured Destruction, no one has ever seriously claimed that an exclusively offensive or defensive strategy is viable. Some military organizations have traditionally put more emphasis on defense and others on offense.

Israel, because of its small size, has always preferred to fight offensively. If there is going to be a war, let it happen on the other guy’s territory. This made sense in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1973, however, the IDF’s lightly fortified positions in the Golan Heights and on the east bank of the Suez Canal were overwhelmed in the initial Arab surprise attack.

This led to the delusion that the Bar Lev line in Sinai was somehow an Israeli version of France’s disastrous Maginot Line at the beginning of World War II. In fact, it was a set of positions built during the War of Attrition (1968–70) to protect Israeli soldiers from Egyptian artillery fire, and hadn’t been intended as a line of defense capable of repelling a full-blown attack. The costly success of the IDF’s offensive across the canal and the drive on Damascus in the north convinced Israel’s military leaders that their attack-centered doctrine was the correct one; it just needed better tanks.

In spite of this doctrine’s failure to work as planned during the Lebanon war that began in 1982, Israel’s leaders remained committed to an offensive-minded strategy. However, they knew that their enemies were beginning to equip themselves with long-range missiles. Indeed, Egypt had used a few early-model Scuds during the Yom Kippur War.

Thus, when the Reagan administration offered Israel the chance to take part in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) missile-defense program in 1983, a small faction inside the IDF leaped at the chance.

Rachel Carson, the muse of the anti-insecticide movement condemned hundreds of thousands of Africans to death from malaria with spurious non scientific facts against DDT which had successfully halted the dreaded disease….rsk

Next year, SA will probably meet its Millennium Development Goal of halting and reversing the incidence of malaria, thanks to the careful, targeted spraying of insecticides, including DDT, in houses. The insecticides protect residents for an entire malaria transmission season, saving countless lives. This method of malaria control is safe for residents and the environment, and is approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the world’s leading malaria scientists. Despite the overwhelming public health benefits of spraying with DDT, some, who should know better, campaign against it.

Last year, Prof Henk Bouwman of North-West University and co-authors published a paper in a respectable journal, Environmental Research, claiming that DDT spraying led to thinning of bird eggshells. Bouwman collected just 15 cattle egret eggs, five in an area of Limpopo where DDT is sprayed indoors for malaria control, and 10 where no malaria control is conducted. After measuring eggshell thickness and levels of DDT and its metabolite DDE, Bouwman performed a regression analysis and concluded that DDT thinned eggshells.

The idea that DDT thins eggshells is not new, but Bouwman used his research to advocate against DDT for malaria control. Let us accept for a moment that Bouwman’s evidence was solid — one would still have to weigh potential harm to bird populations with the enormous life-saving benefits of using DDT. But, in fact, we cannot even make that supposition, because Bouwman’s analysis was false.

In analysing his data, Bouwman, in what we assume was a blunder, transposed the data from the DDT-sprayed areas and unsprayed areas. An accurate analysis of his data actually reveals that the eggshells in the sprayed areas were marginally thicker than in the unsprayed areas. Yet based on his false analysis, Bouwman argued that “there is good cause for concern about the reproductive performance of the cattle egrets in the study area and also in other DDT-sprayed areas in Africa”.

We, with seven other malaria experts, published a response to Bouwman’s paper in Environmental Research, exposing his falsehoods and incorrect conclusions. Bouwman was alerted to his mistake when our response was accepted for publication in January. To date, no erratum or response from Bouwman or his co-authors has been published. This episode is of great concern to the malaria-control community in Southern Africa. Bouwman and a small clique of scientists have long campaigned against DDT using the flimsiest of data, and in the case of Bouwman’s latest efforts, falsehoods. In 2009, Bouwman went so far as to claim on TV that Caster Semenya’s intersex condition was somehow linked to DDT, causing alarm in malarial areas, to the detriment of disease-control efforts. Pressed to provide evidence for his scaremongering, he refused.

Mr. Tren is a director of Africa Fighting Malaria.http://www.fightingmalaria.org/
The Honeybees Are Just Fine

Is a relatively new class of insecticides, known as neonicotinoids or “neonics,” harming bees and other wildlife? That’s what the International Union for the Conservation of Nature claimed in a recent press release announcing the results of a meta-study the organization conducted earlier this year. One might have expected the press release to be accompanied by the underlying scientific studies. But that wasn’t the case.

The proper way to engage in scientific debate is to publish studies so peers can confirm or refute the findings. Frustratingly, IUCN has only released one of its seven studies, preferring to conduct science by press release. This lack of transparency—together with the well-known anti-pesticide position of many of the scientists involved—raises suspicions as environmental groups lobby regulators to ban neonics in Canada and the U.S. The pesticides are already banned for two years in the European Union, and IUCN is calling for even-tighter restrictions and a global phaseout.

IUCN’s claims rest on the idea that neonics can be harmful to bees, worms, and other fauna, and that long-term exposure can cause “impaired sense of smell or memory; reduced fecundity; altered feeding behaviour; and reduced food intake” in species that feed on plants.

First introduced in the 1990s as a replacement for older, more toxic organophosphates and pyrethroids, neonics are often used to coat seeds to obviate the need for widespread spraying, thus reducing exposure to farm workers. Although we can’t know exactly how IUCN arrived at its conclusions, we can examine the existing science and published data, particularly on bees. These data don’t support the anti-neonics case.

Pentagon Prepares to Transfer Six Guantanamo Detainees to Uruguay
Move Is Part of Stepped-Up Effort to Further Reduce the Prison’s Population

The Pentagon is preparing to transfer six detainees from Guantanamo Bay to Uruguay in the next 30 days, according to U.S. officials, part of an effort to further reduce the prison’s population.

Controversy over the decision to swap Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban detainees held in Guantanamo has raised questions about whether Congress will try to block further moves by the Obama administration to try and close the prison.

The Pentagon has notified Congress that it intends to transfer the detainees, which include four Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian. The notification of Congress was first reported Wednesday by the New York Times.

An official said the men being sent to Uruguay were low-level detainees, who all have been approved for transfer years ago.

“This is just another transfer,” said the official.

Since Mr. Obama announced a renewed effort to close Guantanamo more than a year ago, the Pentagon has stepped up the pace of transfers. Congress typically has 30 days to object to any transfer and move to block them.

While lawmakers haven’t moved to block routine transfers in the past, many in Congress are angry at the Obama administration for failing to notify them about plans to transfer the five senior Taliban detainees to Qatar.

There are 149 detainees in Guantanamo, including the six the Pentagon wants to send to Uruguay.

Australia Becomes First Developed Nation to Repeal Carbon Tax
Tony Abbott Pledged to Get Rid of the Tax Last Year

CANBERRA, Australia—After almost a decade of heated political debate, Australia has become the world’s first developed nation to repeal carbon laws that put a price on greenhouse gas emissions.

In a vote that could highlight the difficulty in implementing additional measures to reduce carbon emissions ahead of global climate talks next year in Paris, Australia’s Senate on Wednesday voted 39-32 to repeal a politically divisive carbon emissions price that contributed to the fall from power of three Australian leaders since it was first suggested in 2007.

Australia, the world’s 12th largest economy, is one of the world’s largest per capita greenhouse gas emitters due to its reliance on coal-burning power stations to power homes and industry. In 2011, daily emissions per head amounted to 49.3 kilograms (108 pounds), almost four times higher than the global average of 12.8 kilograms, and slightly ahead of the U.S. figure of 48.2 kilograms.

The former Labor government, while introducing a price on carbon, said the move would help slash emissions by 160 million metric tons by 2020. It offered voters billions of dollars in compensation through tax breaks and welfare payments for increased costs stemming from one of the most dramatic reforms ever attempted in the energy-reliant economy.

But after the global financial crisis took hold in 2008, followed by the end of a decadelong mining boom in 2012 that slowed growth and employment in the A$1.5 trillion (US$1.4 trillion) economy, Australian voters turned against climate laws—recognized by the International Energy Agency as model legislation for developed countries—blaming them for rising energy bills and living costs.

s Sen. Elizabeth Warren a Mere Hack or an Out-and-Out Sociopath? P By Bryan Preston

Sen. Elizabeth Warren now says that last year’s government shutdown was about birth control.

Warren did not make the remark in an off-the-cuff setting. She made it in a prepared speech.

Warren said it on the floor of the Senate while supporting a bill that she knows has absolutely zero chance of becoming law.

“Remember last year’s government shutdown that nearly tanked our economy?” Warren asked. “That fight started with a GOP effort to hold the whole operation of the federal government hostage in order to try to force Democrats and the president to let employers deny workers access to birth control.”

Warren is not lying about some distant event for which there is no extant living memory. The government shutdown was last year.

Spoiler alert: That shutdown was not over birth control. That shutdown was over the budget and the entirety of Obamacare. The whole law (which hardly any Democrat read before passing it into law). Not birth control.

There is, in fact, no national controversy over birth control as such. There is a controversy over how the Obama administration used regulatory powers written into the unpopular Obamacare law to impose even abortifacient drugs on Americans who object to the use of such drugs. The controversy is over whether Americans retain the right to live out our religious values once we own businesses.

Spoiler alert: The Supreme Court ruled that we do.

Warren is not merely delivering spin. Saying that the shutdown was about birth control is a Godzilla-sized lie, told intentionally, in order to be provocative. It won’t advance the bill she is supporting. That bill stands no chance of passing in the House, supposing that it even comes up for a vote in the Senate, which it probably won’t, because Democrats do not want to be taking pro-Obamacare votes leading up to the mid-terms. The bill and speaking out in favor of it is nothing more or less than base political theater. Warren is just lying to score points with the Democrat base, who also mostly know that Warren is lying, yet they will repeat the lie themselves until the end of time.

Oh for a thousand. That’s Hamas’s batting average on the eighth day of what Israel calls Operation Protective Edge and what could be called the Insane Hamas War. Hamas has now fired over a thousand rockets at Israel, each time with the hope of inflicting multiple Israeli fatalities, but it still—thanks mainly, of course, to Israel’s remarkable Iron Dome [1] missile-defense system—hasn’t inflicted a single one.

Hamas has also tried to kill Israelis with a maritime infiltration, a tunnel infiltration, and a drone launch [2]—all foiled.

Meanwhile, as the Israeli Foreign Ministry reported [3], Israel

has targeted over 1,576 terror targets, from the air and the sea. Among the sites targeted by the IDF are: long-range rocket launchers, Hamas leadership facilities, terror and smuggling tunnels, fuel-smuggling tunnels, compounds and training sites, communications facilities, air defense elements, concealed launchers, and additional sites used for terror activities targeting Israel, including command and control centers.

These are almost all, needless to say, accurate hits, inflicting great damage on Hamas. Israel has also reportedly inflicted about 200 fatalities—some of them, of course, very famously, unintentionally killed civilians—and a much higher number of wounded.

Hamas was offered a way out of this seemingly losing situation on Tuesday morning when the Israeli cabinet voted 6-2 to accept an Egyptian ceasefire proposal. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel would stop all hostilities if Hamas did, and then work for a diplomatically achieved disarmament of Hamas. Hamas’s military wing—which now appears to be running things in Gaza—responded by turning the offer down flat [4] and firing dozens more rockets. Even then, it took Israel a few hours to start pummeling Hamas again.

What does Hamas want? Apart from the obvious, “glorious” one of murdering men, women, and children, various analysts mention these possible motives: inspiring a new intifada on the West Bank; getting Egypt to reopen the border crossings it has closed; getting Fatah to pay the salaries of 40,000 Hamas civil servants in Gaza; and shoring up its political status vis-à-vis Fatah among the Palestinians. Except—possibly—the last of those, Hamas has achieved none of those goals in these eight days.

Katie Pavlich’s new book, Assault and Flattery (Threshold 2014), flips the script on the creaky old War on Women narrative of the left. Her book would be a welcome addition in campus gender studies programs, where it would do the most good in rebutting the industrial-size narrative about the oppressed role of women and how Democrats bring deliverance.

Naturally, nobody in any gender studies program will be adding Assault and Flattery to the lists of required reading for “Gender, Sexual Violence and Empire” or the “Harlots, Dandies and Bluestockings” classes this fall at Harvard. (Yes, weep aloud, as they really exist.) That’s too bad, because Pavlich’s book lays waste to the false narrative that the modern feminist movement, working hand in hand with the Democrat Party, does any good for women. Quite the opposite is true.

Pavlich provides example after example where the Obama administration has mistreated female federal employees, most obviously, choosing to pay them far less than male counterparts.

Not many books start with a warning. Assault and Flattery does:

Due to the vulgarity of many Democratic Leaders as well as the so-called women’s rights groups that defend them, this book contains language suitable for mature audiences only, or at least those with strong stomachs.

Pavlich doesn’t disappoint, taking on David Letterman’s jokes about statutory rape and Bill Maher’s demeaning characterizations of women — narratives surely absent from gender studies gripe sessions on campus. Pavlich particularly roughs up a left-wing Hollywood culture that will take a back seat to no one in treating women like objects.

But a chapter entitled “Barack Obama: the Most Anti-Woman President Ever” makes the book worth the read. She details the inside story of women enduring employment in the Obama administration. Not only are they paid less, they are treated badly. “I felt like a piece of meat,” Obama’s former communications director said in describing the atmosphere inside the White House. The book goes on to describe the harassment of women employees by Obama political appointees.

This narrative usually remains bottled up and ignored. Gender studies programs, ABC’s White House reporter Ann Compton and any outlet on the left ignore these inconvenient and messy narratives.

WASHINGTON — The White House wouldn’t definitively say that it would extend the July 20 deadline for a nuclear agreement with Iran, but seemed to be laying a groundwork of justification by highlighting what it says was good behavior by the Islamic Republic during the six-month interim agreement.

In a brief statement to reporters early this evening, President Obama did a rapid-fire hit on four foreign policy areas: Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and Russia, the last of which is now eligible for new sanctions over the Ukraine crisis.

Reports emerged today that the P5+1 negotiators in Vienna were focusing on an agreement for an extension of the talks.

After admitting that “very real gaps” remain in nuclear negotiations, Secretary of State John Kerry traveled back to Washington from Vienna “to consult with the president and to begin consulting with members of Congress about the way forward,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said today.

Obama said he received Kerry’s update, after which “it’s clear to me that we’ve made real progress in several areas, and that we have a credible way forward.”

“Over the last six months Iran has met its commitments under the interim deal we reached last year, halting the progress of its nuclear program, allowing more inspections and rolling back its most dangerous stockpile of nuclear material,” Obama said. “Meanwhile, we are working with our P5+1 partners and Iran to reach a comprehensive agreement that assures us that Iran’s program will, in fact, be peaceful and that they won’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”

He said as the July 20 deadline approaches, “there are still significant gaps between the international community and Iran and we have more work to do.”

“So over the next few days we’ll continue consulting with Congress and our team will continue discussions with Iran and our partners as we determine whether additional time is necessary to extend our negotiations,” Obama said.

It’s been Congress’ complaint throughout the six-month process, though, that they’ve not received [1] the promised close consultations from the administration.

Earnest painted the talks in a positive light.