RUTHFULLY YOURS

An East Coast blizzard howling, global temperatures peaking, the desert Southwest flooding, drought-stricken California drying up—surely there’s a common thread tying together this “extreme” weather. There is. But it has little to do with what recent headlines have been saying about the hottest year ever. It is called business as usual.

Surface temperatures are indeed increasing slightly: They’ve been going up, in fits and starts, for more than 150 years, or since a miserably cold and pestilential period known as the Little Ice Age. Before carbon dioxide from economic activity could have warmed us up, temperatures rose three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit between 1910 and World War II. They then cooled down a bit, only to warm again from the mid-1970s to the late ’90s, about the same amount as earlier in the century.

Whether temperatures have warmed much since then depends on what you look at. Until last June, most scientists acknowledged that warming reached a peak in the late 1990s, and since then had plateaued in a “hiatus.” There are about 60 different explanations for this in the refereed literature.

The preposterous nonsense known as homoeopathy has long exasperated doctors: but at whom, exactly, is their exasperation directed? At the homoeopaths themselves, or at the credulous and foolish public that persists in its patronage of such quackery on quite a large scale? According to a recent commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, about 2 percent of Americans patronized homoeopaths last year.

The absurdity of homoeopathic theory – that diseases are cured by substances that produce similar symptoms to themselves, that those substances are more powerful the more dilute they became and so forth — was recognized by doctors very early on. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a famous polemic against it, as did Sir James Young Simpson, the discoverer of the anaesthetic properties of chloroform. But homoeopathy had one great advantage over its orthodox rival at the time of its development, the beginning of the nineteenth century, namely that at least it did no harm. This was an immense advantage, for the remedies used by orthodox medicine of the time were often worse than the diseases for whose cure they were employed.

The article in the Journal draws attention to the anomaly, as it sees it, of the lack of regulatory oversight of homoeopathic remedies sold over the counter. But one may ask why there should be such oversight of products that are sometimes so dilute that the chances are they do not contain a single molecule of the allegedly therapeutic substance. What harm can be done by such substances?

That a growing number of non-Caucasians are protesting the current crop of Oscar nominees for the coveted acting statuette has hit the broadcast and print media.

Two whole years without a black nom? Omigosh.

How many Hispanic nominees are there? How many Asians? How many Baha’i? How many disabled?

What is evident, dependably endorsed by the loud wailing of the captain of charlatanry, Al Sharpton, is that in the face of campus protests over “microaggressions” making students “feel unsafe,” and in view of efforts to remove iconic statuary or flags from various southern venues and universities owing to rediscovered historical factoids of inconvenient realities, actors are picking up on the victimhood cavalcade. Recalling their pampered childhoods, or not, these role-model icons, so beloved in the crybaby era, are joining the fray.

Spike Lee, a director of middling specialty films that do not break the bank in audience appeal, along with Will Smith’s spiky wife, Jada Pinkett, have now been amalgamated with other complaint-mongers to post a scary warning: They will boycott the Oscars.

Shudder, gasp.

First, who cares? If they did not perform up to standard, they did not merit inclusion in the Oscar-nom club, which is a fiercely fought battle annually.

At 11 a.m. on Dec. 2, some 60 miles east of Los Angeles, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, stormed into a Christmas party for employees of the San Bernardino county public-health department, where Farook worked. Wearing military-style clothing and black masks, the couple unleashed a barrage of bullets. They killed 14 people, and minutes after the attack, Malik pledged an oath of allegiance to Islamic State on her Facebook page. It was the most lethal terrorist attack in the U.S. since 9/11.
Farooq and Malik were married parents and college graduates. They were solidly middle-class, without criminal records or documented mental-health issues. He was a native-born American, she had recently emigrated from Pakistan, and there was nothing in the basic details of their backgrounds to suggest that they were any special threat.

They were, in short, very much in the social mainstream of American life—and that, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to be typical of homegrown jihadists, whose numbers have been increasing in recent years. In 2015, the FBI investigated supporters of Islamic State in all 50 states, and more than 80 Americans were charged with some kind of jihadist crime, ranging from planning travel to Syria to plotting an attack in the U.S. It was the peak year since 2001 for law-enforcement activity against Americans who had chosen to join a group or accept an ideology whose goal is to kill fellow Americans.

Working with a research team, I have assembled an exhaustive data set of the roughly 300 jihadists indicted or convicted in the U.S. for some kind of terrorist crime since 9/11. Those crimes ranged from the relatively minor—sending small sums to a terrorist group—to murder.

The Obama administration angered Republicans on Capitol Hill Thursday when it eased visa rules for some European travelers who have visited terror hot spots in the Middle East and Africa. In December, following the San Bernardino terrorist attack, lawmakers passed legislation designed to prevent Europeans who have joined terrorist groups like ISIS from entering the United States.

Under the newly passed Visa Waiver Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015, nationals of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Sudan as well as other travelers who have visited those countries since Mar. 1, 2011 now must apply for a visa in order to travel to the U.S.

The Obama administration implemented those changes with a few modifications.

Under the revised requirements, some Europeans who have traveled to those four countries in the last five years may still be allowed to travel to the United States without obtaining a visa if they meet certain criteria.

The administration announced it will use its waiver authority — granted to it in the legislation — to give waivers to travelers who traveled to the terror hot spots as journalists, for work with humanitarian agencies or on behalf of international organizations, regional organizations and sub-national governments on official duty.

Obama-administration scandals never resolve. They just vanish — usually, under a new scandal.

So it was with one of this president’s earliest embarrassments, “Operation Fast and Furious,” designed to help the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) dismantle drug cartels operating inside the United States and disrupt drug-trafficking routes. Instead, it put into the hands of criminals south of the border some 2,000 weapons, which have been used to kill hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

Now, Fast and Furious is back in the news. Earlier this month, a raid on the hidey-hole of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman recovered not only the notorious drug lord, but a (“massive”) .50-caliber rifle, capable of stopping a car or shooting down a helicopter, that originated with the ATF program. Rest easy, though: Only 34 such rifles were sold through the program.

The news comes just days after a federal judge rejected President Obama’s assertion of executive privilege to deny Congress access to Fast and Furious–related records it requested back in 2012 as part of an investigation into the gun-walking operation. Despite the IRS scandal, Benghazi, and a host of other accusations of malfeasance against this White House, it remains this president’s sole assertion of executive privilege.

Three-and-a-half years later, the question is still: Why?

In November 2009, the ATF’s Phoenix field office launched an operation in which guns bought by drug-cartel straw purchasers in the U.S. were allowed to “walk” across the border into Mexico. ATF agents would then track the guns as they made their way through the ranks of the cartel.

At least, that was the theory. In reality, once the guns walked across the border, they were gone. Whistleblowers reported, and investigators later confirmed, that the ATF made no effort to trace the guns.

A man whose bomb designs were responsible for killing many Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan was released from the Guantanamo prison camp and sent to Bosnia, the Pentagon announced today.

The government also acknowledged that Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed al-Sawah could possibly make his way back to terrorism, but that prospect isn’t likely because he cooperated.

Uh-huh.

The Hill:

The review board set up by President Obama to review remaining detainee transfers decided to release him last February.

The Pentagon also announced the transfer of Abd al-Aziz Abduh Abdallah Ali al-Suwaydi, a 41-year-old Yemeni, to Montenegro.

Al-Suwaydi admitted to being an explosives trainer, according to his files posted by the Times.

Thursday’s transfers mark the 15th and 16th of January. They are part of the president’s bid to release as many detainees as possible in order to bring the remaining detainees to the U.S. and close the prison.

The latest transfers bring the total number of detainees remaining at the prison to 91. One more detainee is scheduled to be transferred this month.

I suppose there’s an alternate universe somewhere where America has a president who isn’t concerned about his legacy and cares more about national security than his place in the history books.

But it isn’t this America. The blood and treasure expended to get these terrorists locked up in the first place should count for something. Sacrifices were made, lives lost so that some of the worst of the worst would be prevented from going about their business of threatening and killing Americans.