The other day at a party, a young man, earnestly secular and ultra-liberal on every single social issue, called Pope Francis a “really cool pope.” I guess as my e-pal Dan Friedman points out, there are many “really cool Reform rabbis” whose views on capitalism and climate change are completely consonant with those of Pope Francis. How hilarious that the coercive anti religion, anything goes, liberal groupies, who cringe at skull caps and phylacteries or celibate priests, suddenly find common ground with a religious leader who abhors gay marriage and any form of abortion, whether surgical or medically induced.
Mark Steyn found this pithy quote from Richard Tol
http://www.steynonline.com/7013/encyclical-variations
http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-pope-on-climate.html
“I am not impressed by normally a- or anti-religious intellectuals who suddenly discovered their inner papist. ”
That sums it up….rsk
-“Kennedy and Bradford Condemn U.S. Policy on Palestine Question,” Christian Science Monitor, April 5, 1948.
Condemnation of United States policy regarding Palestine was expressed by Representative John F. Kennedy (D) of Massachusetts… at the state dinner of the Massachusetts Department of the Jewish War Veterans… Mr. Kennedy demanded the lifting of the arms embargo “to give the Jewish people in Palestine an opportunity to defend themselves and carve out their partition.” He termed the reversal of our stand in the United Nations on Palestine as “one of the most unfortunate reversals in American policy.”
The trouble began when, just after the United States voted in the United Nations for the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, the State Department’s “striped pants boys,” as Truman liked to call them, convinced him to halt all military shipments to the Middle East – despite the fact that Britain was arming the Arabs and no one the Jews. Then, the day after Truman privately assured Chaim Weizmann of his commitment to partition, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. announced that, as peaceful partition seemed impossible, the U.S. recommended abandoning the partition plan and called, instead, for U.N. rule in Palestine. “This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy,” Truman wrote in his diary. “The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I’m now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I’ve never felt so […] in my life.” Three weeks later, on March 25, 1948, Truman seemingly tried to have it both ways – his and the State Department’s. He told reporters that it might be a good idea to have a U.N. “trusteeship” for Palestine after the British left in May, but he was still for partition. It was into this fray that a first-term Catholic Congressman from Boston stepped on April 4, 1948: speaking to Massachusetts Jewish War Veterans, John Fitzgerald Kennedy denounced the “unfortunate reversal… of our policy towards Palestine” as “one of the most discouraging aspects of recent American foreign policy.” He reminded his audience that “since the end of the first World War successive Presidents and Congress have ‘reaffirmed’ the solemn promise of the Balfour declaration” and demanded “explanation from the Administration” as to the “sudden reversal of our position in relation to the partition of Palestine.” Perhaps, he added, there may be sufficient cause for the reversal in Palestine. “If there is,” he emphasized, “we are entitled to know what it is.” Present here, then, are the notes for that speech.
“Either our leaders will protect us from our sworn enemies or we’ll have to get some that will.”
The West is enmeshed in a struggle for civilisation against an extremely well-resourced enemy that regards us, our society and its values as decadent and contemptible. An agent of barbarism with few parallels in history, if our leaders won’t protect us from Islamism we’ll have to get some who will
As the federal government struggles to formulate legislation that will strip Australian citizenship from terrorists with dual nationality it becomes necessary fully to confront the enormity of the jihadist threat. While it appears that some critics of the legislation think it impinges upon the human rights of terrorists they seem oblivious to the long history of the terrorist campaign against Western liberal democracies.
The question is not whether the rights of terrorists are respected. The issue is whether civilisation will survive without taking firm and rigorous action against those external and internal enemies who seek desperately to destroy it. Politicians need to recognise what we are up against, and if they lack the stomach for the struggle they should get out of the way.
There is no doubt that the rise of militant Islamism and its systematic use of jihadist terror represent a profound threat to civilisation. Not since the emergence of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism has the assault on the liberal democracies of the West been so explicit, so comprehensive, so ruthless, and so bloodthirsty. The Islamist challenge was once characterised as a ‘clash of civilizations’, but the behaviour of ISIS confirms that it is best seen as a barbarian war on civilization, per se, developing on a scale not seen since the invasions of the Mongol hordes 800 years ago or the collapse of the Roman Empire under the impact of barbarian invaders 1500 years ago.
Climate science — the comfortably settled careerist variety — would have us believe it has identified causes and trends that place its projections beyond challenge and dispute. Well, one thing is certain: when reality fails to match warmist expectations, the denials are pathological.
It is normal in science for important hypotheses to be met with scepticism at first and then to be accepted or disproven over time by testing predictions against empirical evidence. The absolute pre-eminence of empirical evidence over any and all authority or consensus is the essential core of science and what sets it apart from other areas of understanding and belief.
The hypothesis of dangerous global warming caused by CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels has repeatedly failed numerous empirical tests, while ongoing appeals to authority and consensus have served only to render it an un-scientific farce.
Among the failed predictions:
The great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses tested — or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I see bad ideas can persist for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they become intolerant dogmas
For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff.
Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudoscience—homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.
Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.
This should have been obvious to me. Lysenkoism, a pseudo-biological theory that plants (and people) could be trained to change their heritable natures, helped starve millions and yet persisted for decades in the Soviet Union, reaching its zenith under Nikita Khrushchev. The theory that dietary fat causes obesity and heart disease, based on a couple of terrible studies in the 1950s, became unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now fading slowly.
The University of California published a guide to microaggressions. If you don’t know what that is, microaggressions are ordinary, unoffensive comments and actions that offend feminists and minority “activists” with chips on their shoulders.
Because this is such a big problem in the minds of liberals, UC has published an unintentionally hysterical guide to microaggressive behavior. What follows is a list of microaggresive behaviors, exactly as written, and then my own interpretation of what would not be microaggressive alternatives:
Microaggressive: Saying you’re not a racist because you have Black friends.
Not Microaggressive: Saying you’re a not a racist because you have black friends who are also racist.
Microaggressive: To compliment an Asian person on his math abilities.
So I read in the paper today that humans are causing a sixth mass extinction on the planet.
Then, I see that one of the authors is Paul Ehrlich–author of the hysterically wrong The Population Bomb.
But the article doesn’t mention that (in)famous book or Ehrlich’s history of hyperbolic ecological fear mongering. It simply identifies Ehrlich as a Stanford University professor and president of the Center for Conservation Biology. That’s misleading by omission.
I checked other news reports, and they similarly merely refer to him as a professor, such as this one in the Telegraph:
Scientists at Stanford University in the US claim it is the biggest loss of species since the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. “Without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event,” said Professor Paul Ehrlich, at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Even if his remark was meant seriously, did it matter more than his work?
Tim Hunt, as you’ve probably heard by now, is a Nobel Prize–winning chemist who was forced to resign his position at University College London after he said, at a lunch for female journalists and scientists, “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. . . . Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry.”
Common sense says he was joking. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that what he said was sincere and offensive. Is a sexist remark worth ending Tim Hunt’s career? Dr. Hunt won his Nobel Prize for the discovery of cyclins, a group of proteins that control a cell’s progression through its life cycle. Because some cancers stem from errors in cells’ cyclical march toward mitosis, Dr. Hunt’s work has contributed a great deal to cancer research.
Conservatives love a faction. Among my friends here at National Review, we have conservatarians (Charles C. W. Cooke), reform conservatives (Ramesh Ponnuru), the secular Right (Andrew Stuttaford), etc. The distinctive features of those camps are, respectively, being comfortable with gay marriage, favoring tax credits for children, and favoring tax credits for the children of gay marriages so long as the money doesn’t end up in the offering plate.
The reaction to Donald Trump’s announcement of his presidential campaign suggests that there is room for one more: Grow the Hell Up Conservatism.
Trump brings out two of the Right’s worst tendencies: the inability to distinguish between entertainers and political leaders, and the habit of treating politics as an exercise in emotional vindication.
Whatever Trump’s appeal is to the Right’s populist elements, it isn’t policy. He is a tax-happy crony capitalist who is hostile to free trade but very enthusiastic about using state violence to homejack private citizens — he backed the Kelo decision “100 percent” and has tried to use eminent domain in the service of his own empire of vulgarity — and generally has about as much command of the issues as the average sophomore at a not especially good college, which is what he was (sorry, Fordham) until his family connections got him into Penn.
The final version of the law introduces so many hurdles to obtaining Spanish citizenship that most prospective hopefuls are likely to be deterred from even initiating the application process. Indeed, the law in its current form ensures that very few of the estimated 3.5 million Sephardic Jews in the world today will ever become Spanish citizens.
Spanish authorities — presumably fearful that the list of Sephardic surnames could provoke an avalanche of citizenship applications — issued an urgent notice that the government has no intention of ever publishing an official list of Sephardic names.
“All these facts lead us to conclude that the government has the clear intention that the fewer the number of applicants, the better. And the economic filter ensures that only people with high purchasing power can apply. … Considering all of these factors, we believe that this law does not right a wrong. This law is more of a symbol, a first step, but not a law that will serve to satisfy the majority of Sephardim who would like obtain Spanish nationality.” — Jon Iñarritu García, a congressman from the Basque Country.
