RUTHFULLY YOURS

Glazov Gang’s 2014 Episode of The Year: Geert Wilders

A titan and courageous truth-teller crystallized the only way the West will be able to preserve itself.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/glazov-gangs-2014-episode-of-the-year-geert-wilders/

“You are always a student, never a master.

You have to keep moving forward.”

Conrad Hall (1926-2003)

Cinematographer

The end of the year is a good time to reflect on subjects we deem of particular importance. Education, along with stability at home, is perhaps the most critical requirement for future success. I want to offer my own experience and to provide some additional thoughts. In public schools, administrators too often put students and parents second to demands of unions. They are, for example, reluctant to approve options available to the well-off. Vouchers and charter schools are inimical to their interests. In colleges and universities, political correctness has driven out the concept of liberalness – the importance to confront differing opinions. Walter Lippman once wrote: “When genuine debate is lacking, freedom of speech does not work as it is meant to work.” With ten grandchildren in school, education, especially its promises, is close to my heart.

Too often, our high schools are considered successful if 80% of their students graduate on time and matriculate. The fact that many seniors may be illiterate and/or innumerate seems of little concern. Any number of colleges and universities – for profit as well as not-for-profit – have sprung up to accommodate the growing supply of students, most of whom must borrow the cost of tuition, and many of whom are unqualified. They have been told that a college degree – not education – is critical to success.

What has been lost in this mechanical process of sloppy manufacturing has been learning how to think. Too often, high school students graduate in need of remedial training. College seniors, in turn, graduate unprepared for the real world. I recognize that condemnation is broad; it ignores hundreds of good schools – public and private – and tens of thousands of even better teachers. But, as a generalization it stands; for learning should be pleasurable, solid and provocative.

I am sensitive to this issue because of my own experience. While I grew up in an educated household – my father, like his father and both his grandfathers, were alumni of Harvard – I never took advantage of the opportunities offered …or I did not until I was twenty-one, after I met the woman who became my wife. I blame only myself. I did have a few teachers in school and in college who tried to reach an unreachable boy. I remember those few fondly, and some of what they taught did stick, in spite of my best efforts to remain impervious to their attempts.

There has been essentially no global warming since 1998. Some would choose 1997, others would more conservatively use 2002 as the proper starting date, based on satellite data. Of course, this is quite unexpected, since CO2 — a leading GHG, which climate models presume to cause anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — has been increasing rapidly in the 21st century.

Even if we cannot readily find the cause for the “pause” — as it is sometimes called — we can be absolutely sure that it was not predicted by any of the dozens of the UN-IPCC’s General Circulation Models (GCMs). Therefore, logically, such non-validated GCMs cannot, and should not, be used to predict the future climate — or as a basis for policy decisions.

Here I would like to discuss some of the possible causes for the GW “hiatus.” Its existence is creating a scientific challenge for climate skeptics — and a real crisis for alarmists; it can no longer be ignored by any who consider themselves to be scientists — nor, indeed, by responsible politicians.

One possibility, of course, may be that the pause is simply a statistical fluctuation, like tossing a coin, with 15 to 18 heads in a row. Such an explanation cannot be dismissed out of hand, even though it has a very low probability — which becomes even smaller with each passing year of no GW. Obviously, climate alarmists like this possibility — although the number of such ‘true believers’ is shrinking. Most have started to look for a physical cause for the pause — an explanation of why current GCMs are failing to match observations.

In the last few days, the local Fresno community was outraged — or at least was reportedly to be so — at the vandalism of a local Islamic cultural center [1].

The police authorities almost immediately, and without waiting for the full evidence to be collected, declared the minor burglary and damage the apparent dividend of illiberal dark forces. The chief of police, without compelling evidence, and without explaining why a secular medical building was also trashed in the spree, rushed to hold a press conference. He declared the broken window and moderate trashing of the center’s interior, not just a “hate crime,” but in fact a “brazen hate crime.”

What next followed was Fresno’s comic version of what now is normal race and gender news. Almost immediately it was learned that there was a video of the suspected perpetrator in mediis rebus. Mr. Asif Mohammad Khan was a Muslim, with a record of mental disturbances, and had attended the center. He claimed that he had vandalized the buildings as part of payback to other center attendees who, he claimed, had bullied him — and reportedly was known to be an admirer of Osama bin Laden. The “brazen” hate crime and the atmosphere of intolerance vanished with the local morning fog. The FBI, of course, is still “investigating” a possible “hate crime.” But they too will quietly go away in short order.

But just a few days earlier, there was another Fresno crime captured on video, both violent and in theory fueled by racial animus, or at least more deserving of a FBI second look at such a possible catalyst. At a local municipal bus stop an elderly man with a walker bravely protested [2] that a large youth was bullying a smaller teen. The video captures the thug in response yelling at the defender, then striking the man to the pavement. The latter hit his head on his walker and momentarily lost consciousness.

State Department’s “vetted moderates” do Jabhat al-Nusra’s dirty work while Sen. John McCain pleads for more FSA support.

A remarkable report by Anne Barnard of the New York Times this weekend confirms my multiple reports here at PJ Media about the increased alliance between the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.

As Barnard reports:

In northern and eastern Syria, where Mr. Assad’s opponents won early victories and once dreamed of building self-government, the nationalist rebel groups calling themselves the Free Syrian Army are forced to operate under the extremists’ umbrellas, to go underground or to flee, according to Syrian insurgents, activists and two top commanders of the American-financed F.S.A. groups.

Two weeks ago I reported that Jabhat al-Nusra had used U.S. TOW anti-tank missiles in the rebels’ seizure of the Syrian Army’s base in Wadi al-Deif. The terror group posted a video showing the use of the TOW missiles in the battle (at ~3:50):

Nusra fans on Twitter were also noting the U.S. missiles being used:

Now Barnard confirms that FSA elements were fighting at Wadi al-Deif under the direction and/or control of Jabhat al-Nusra:

The fall of the army base at Wadi al-Deif, which straddles an important supply route in Idlib Province, proved the Nusra Front’s dominance, they said. Other insurgents had long besieged the base without victory. Nusra succeeded after seizing much of the province from Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, two of several groups that until recently, American officials were calling the opposition’s new hope […]

An Israeli year is usually tumultuous. It has to do with the hostile Middle Eastern environment, with Israel’s problematic parliamentary system that often produces rickety, short-lived coalitions, and with the dynamism of a young society undergoing dramatic economic and demographic growth.

This wasn’t one of Israel’s most tumultuous years but also definitely not one of its quietest. The Gaza war and a wave of terrorism broke five years of relative calm since the 2008-2009 Gaza war. The Obama administration kept lambasting Israel publicly, while in Israel a governing coalition collapsed after less than two years in office. Outside the media limelight, though, Israel kept making diplomatic and economic gains, and the immigrants kept coming.
1. Gaza erupts.

On June 12 two Hamas terrorists kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenage boys. On July 2 three Israeli criminals kidnapped and murdered a Palestinian teenage boy. Although the standard line is that these events precipitated the summer’s seven-week Gaza war, that assumption is now challenged by Israeli intelligence reports saying Hamas had actually been planning the war, or something similar to it, going back months before those two incidents.

Israel won this Gaza war big. Four months after it ended, much of Gaza is still devastated and Hamas is still dazed. Blasted buildings and homeless civilians are nothing to celebrate. They are, though, the outcome of Hamas’s human-shields strategy coupled with firing 4500 rockets at Israeli territory.

The war took a high toll for Israel, too—66 soldiers and six civilians for the side that made every effort to avert the war even as the rockets were already falling. The revelation of Hamas’s tunnels from Gaza into Israel, and plans to use them to perpetrate mass-murder and kidnapping attacks on Israeli soil, chilled Israelis to the bone. On the plus side, the Iron Dome antimissile system turned in an amazing performance and kept the casualty toll from being much higher.

The Middle East is no picnic for a non-Arab, non-Muslim, Jewish state. The 2014 Gaza war showed a tough, resolved, realistic Israel.

Congress can resist Obama’s departures from the Constitution.

Despite the Democratic party’s losses in November’s elections, President Obama has audaciously begun ignoring constitutional restraints in order to impose his policy views. This is true not only on domestic issues, such as immigration and Obamacare, but now in foreign and defense policy, too. Checking Obama’s misuse of his foreign-affairs powers should be a top priority for the new Republican majorities in Congress.

Obama’s worldview demands major departures from traditional American foreign policy and threatens to use international agreements to transform domestic policy. For example, as part of his crusade against global warming, Obama signed an amorphous agreement with China last month, ostensibly committing the parties to limit carbon emissions. The president will surely invoke it as a legal basis for sweeping executive orders on climate change. Similarly, now that the president has signed the Arms Trade Treaty (which has no chance of Senate ratification), he may attempt to limit firearms sales through executive action.

Overseas, Obama desperately wants a face-saving deal with Iran that will give him a diplomatic success without legislative constraints and let him leave office without Iranian development of a nuclear weapon. “We wouldn’t seek congressional legislation in any comprehensive agreement for years,” one senior administration official leaked about the Iranian negotiations. Only Iran’s intransigence in pursuit of an even better deal has forced an extension of negotiations from November 24 to next summer.

These assertions of unilateral executive power raise constitutional conflicts of the first order. Congress must first ask whether any of Obama’s agreements include obligations sufficiently grave to amount to a treaty under the Constitution — or, alternatively, whether these potential deals flow from the president’s legitimate constitutional authority in foreign affairs, and thus need not be embodied in treaties.

If, as some reports indicate, the administration has pledged not to use military force against Iran in exchange for a halt to its nuclear-weapons program, such a commitment would almost certainly require Senate ratification. The West cannot rely on Iran’s promises to confine itself to a civilian nuclear program, but if such an agreement were adopted, Tehran would know that Obama would not resort to military force, and Iran’s nukes would dramatically reshape the regional balance of power in its favor.

There is a great deal of argument on the subject of capitalism that could be superseded by coming to some agreement about what we talk about when we talk about capitalism. If by “capitalism” we mean (a) what happens when a few million grocers and the mind-bendingly complex chains of production behind them compete for the custom of a few hundred million hungry Americans, that’s one thing; if by “capitalism” we mean (b) bank bailouts and General Electric’s defense-contracting division, that’s another thing. There are critics of capitalism who argue that (a) leads inevitably to (b); one need not necessarily take a position on the merits of that claim to understand that (a) and (b) are nonetheless different things, and that if we take “capitalism” to mean (b) then we need another term — “free enterprise,” “laissez-faire,” etc. — to denote (a).

Across a not-insubstantial spectrum of political debate, the common term for (a) is “economic liberalism,” but in the contemporary context — particularly the contemporary American context — that presents some difficulty, too, as evidenced by Katrina Forrester’s new essay in The Nation, “Liberalism Doesn’t Start With Liberty.” Forrester, a lecturer in the history of political thought at Queen Mary University, London, begins with a strange assertion: that the idea of liberalism as a consent-oriented view rooted in the work of John Locke and based on “toleration, private property, and individualism” is in effect a propaganda coup, “a recent invention. It is, in fact, largely a product of the Cold War. . . . Before the 1930s, histories of liberalism told a different story.” The claim is false on its face: We find that conception of historical liberalism fully developed as early as Ludwig von Mises’s Nation, State, and Economy, published in 1919, to say nothing of Adam Smith’s attention to “liberal” policy in a rather more well-known work in 1776. (If you would like a few charts illustrating the historical use of the word “liberal,” Daniel B. Klein obliges in The Atlantic here.) Mises was writing not in the context of the Cold War but in the context of the trauma of the First World War; the book’s original title was Imperialism, and that tendency, rather than socialism, is the evil to which Mises addresses his criticism. The French use of libéral to denote political ideas emphasizing individual liberties dates to the 18th century, its adoption by critics of the English proponents of those ideas at least to the first year of the 19th. That the common understanding of “liberalism” and its origins is a Cold War invention surely would come as a surprise to the ghosts of Peel and Gladstone.

DEVALLS BLUFF, Ark.—White, working-class voters in eastern Arkansas for years backed Democratic candidates, among them Bill Clinton and outgoing Gov. Mike Beebe, but have moved sharply toward Republicans in recent elections.

Now, as the 2016 election takes shape, some of Hillary Clinton ’s allies are trumpeting her potential as a presidential candidate to bring these voters back to the Democratic Party and to run competitively in a handful of states, including Arkansas, that have spurned President Barack Obama .

But even here, where Mrs. Clinton was the state’s first lady, many voters say they view her with the same leeriness they do Mr. Obama and other national Democrats. That points to a significant question should Mrs. Clinton run: whether enough such voters can separate her from the national party many have grown to dislike.
“I’m mad at the Democratic Party, and I don’t see Hillary changing that,” said Eddie Ciganek, a 61-year-old farmer who serves on Prairie County’s governing board and who has voted Democrat at times. “Her thinking isn’t going to be very far off from President Obama’s thinking, and I don’t think they’re moving the country in the right direction.”

Occasional Democratic voter Johnny Watkins, 64, wearing a light-blue work shirt after finishing his shift at the county landfill, said of Mrs. Clinton: “I don’t think she has any concerns about us.”

Working-class voters have long been a bedrock of Democratic support, and the party continues to do well with voters from lower-income households overall, according to exit polls.

But white, more rural voters in the South and elsewhere have been fleeing the party. Just five years ago, Arkansas Democrats held both Senate seats, three out of four House seats, the governor’s office and control of both chambers of the state legislature. The election in November of Republicans Tom Cotton to the U.S. Senate and Asa Hutchinson to the governor’s office will leave the Democratic Party without a single federal or statewide officeholder in Arkansas, a state that Bill Clinton carried twice by at least 17 percentage points.

Federal lawsuits against North Carolina claim that recent changes to the state’s election laws will “suppress” minority votes. For example, in N.C. State Conf. of NAACP v. McCrory, plaintiffs assert that the new laws “impose a disproportionate burden on the ability of African Americans to vote” and will “raise costs for voters and deter participation.” They highlight testimony by a former director of the State Board of Elections who asserted that the laws will “ultimately reduc[e] turnout in comparison to comparable elections.”

Turnout data for the 2014 election, posted Dec. 10 on the state’s Board of Elections website, tell a different story. Black turnout and registration for the November 2014 election increased by every relevant measure compared with November 2010, the last non-presidential general election.
Last July, North Carolina adopted electoral reforms that eliminated same-day registration, reduced the number of days of early voting to 10 from 17, and required ballots to be cast in a voter’s home precinct. It also instituted a voter-ID requirement that will take full effect in 2016.

Two sets of plaintiffs, led by the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, sued in federal court on Aug. 12, 2013. They were followed a few weeks later by the Justice Department. Attorney General Eric Holder asserted that the state’s new laws would restrict “access and ease of voter participation” and “would shrink, rather than expand, access to the franchise.”