RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303945704579391611041331266?mod=Opinion_newsreel_1

Messrs. McNider and Christy are professors of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and fellows of the American Meteorological Society. Mr. Christy was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

In a Feb. 16 speech in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry assailed climate-change skeptics as members of the “Flat Earth Society” for doubting the reality of catastrophic climate change. He said, “We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists” and “extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts.”

But who are the Flat Earthers, and who is ignoring the scientific facts? In ancient times, the notion of a flat Earth was the scientific consensus, and it was only a minority who dared question this belief. We are among today’s scientists who are skeptical about the so-called consensus on climate change. Does that make us modern-day Flat Earthers, as Mr. Kerry suggests, or are we among those who defy the prevailing wisdom to declare that the world is round?

Most of us who are skeptical about the dangers of climate change actually embrace many of the facts that people like Bill Nye, the ubiquitous TV “science guy,” say we ignore. The two fundamental facts are that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased due to the burning of fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat before it can escape into space.

What is not a known fact is by how much the Earth’s atmosphere will warm in response to this added carbon dioxide. The warming numbers most commonly advanced are created by climate computer models built almost entirely by scientists who believe in catastrophic global warming. The rate of warming forecast by these models depends on many assumptions and engineering to replicate a complex world in tractable terms, such as how water vapor and clouds will react to the direct heat added by carbon dioxide or the rate of heat uptake, or absorption, by the oceans.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303775504579392821615729590?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Pull Out of Sochi to Protest the Kiev Massacre
It is absurd, if not obscene, to pretend that there are two Putins.

Two images from Wednesday compete for space in people’s minds.

The image of the immaculate snow of Sochi crisscrossed by the world’s top skiers to the cheers of the international crowd. And that of the bloodied snow around the barricades of Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, after special units of the Ukrainian government, with Vladimir Putin’s seal of approval, attacked the protesters there. At least 26 people were killed, and hundreds were injured—yet the international response has been indifference.

Telling ourselves that we’re used to this sort of thing doesn’t do any good.

It’s no use reminding ourselves of the abandonment of the 130,000 Syrians put to death through the murderous madness of Bashar Assad, backed by the very same Mr. Putin; of the innumerable Chechens “kicked into the crapper,” in the elegant phrase used by the same master of Russia and its borderlands. It’s no use knowing, as we have for some time now—since republican Spain was abandoned in the 1930s, since Central Europe was sacrificed in the 1940s, and since the Polish revolt in the early 1980s was kept at arm’s length—that democracy never defends its values.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/risking-lives-to-promote-climate-change-hype?f=puball

Yet another global warming expedition gets trapped in icebound ideology

Will global warming alarmists ever set aside their hypotheses, hyperbole, models and ideologies long enough to acknowledge what is actually happening in the real world outside their windows? Will they at least do so before setting off on another misguided adventure? Before persuading like-minded or naïve people to join them? Before forcing others to risk life and limb to transport – and rescue – them? If history is any guide, the answer is: Not likely.

The absurd misadventures of University of New South Wales climate professor Chris Turney is but the latest example. He and 51 co-believers set out on the (diesel-powered) Russian charter ship Akademik Shokalskiy to prove manmade global warming is destroying the East Antarctic ice sheet. Perhaps they’d been reading Dr. Turney’s website, which claims “an increasing body of evidence” shows “melting and collapse” across the area. (It is, after all, summer in Antarctica, albeit a rather cold, icy one thus far.)

Instead of finding open water, they wound up trapped in record volumes of unforgiving ice, from Christmas Eve until January 2 – ensnared by Mother Nature’s sense of humor and their own hubris. The 52 climate tourists were finally rescued by a helicopter sent from Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, which itself became locked in the ice. The misadventurers were transferred to Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis, but the Shokalskiy remains entombed, awaiting the arrival of US Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star. (Meanwhile, Tourney hopes to get more grants to study manmade global warming, to help him make more money from his Carbonscape company, which makes “green” products from CO2 recovered from the atmosphere.)

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamacare-the-terrifying-consequences-to-healthcare

As the ObamaCare debate rages, we hear much about insurance companies, costs, and people’s ability to pay. We hear the policy defended as proponents tell us it will provide healthcare to those who never had it. Of course, these proponents never seem to explain how those who couldn’t afford healthcare when it was a choice can now afford an even more expensive cost now that government mandates it.

However, these debates about the pros and cons of ObamaCare basically focus on money. What about the real issue – healthcare? What will ObamaCare do to our medical system? How will it affect the quality of our care? How will it affect doctor’s decisions as they attempt to take care of our health needs? And, ultimately, in a system controlled by government bureaucrats and government-written manuals – who will really be making the decisions that determine our quality of life? These are the real questions that need to be the center of the debate. And the answers are terrifying.

I recently received a report from an oncologist, Dr. John Conroy, who is fighting the desperate battle to treat cancer. All of those concerned Americans who wear their pink ribbons and dash for miles in their stop-cancer marathons should take a long hard look at what Dr. Conroy reports to be the future of all American medicine. They may want to start running straight at Congress to save their own lives.

Obviously, Oncology is a very detailed science, difficult for the layman to understand. That’s why American healthcare has always promoted specialists. Let’s begin with a patient who has discovered a lump on her breast. She takes a mammogram, undergoes a biopsy, and is found to have adenocarcinoma. She is seen by an oncologist and certain questions need to be addressed.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/keeping-the-peace-amidst-chaos-and-crises#ixzz2trFo0Shv

In 2002, former top defense official Michelle Flournoy and Capitol Hill staffer and former USAF official Clark Murdock published a Center for Strategic and International Studies assessment of what further strategic nuclear weapons reductions the United States should pursue and what kind of deterrent force we should maintain to keep the peace and maintain stability.

They concluded a Triad of nuclear forces including submarines, land based missiles and bombers made the most sense, at levels of nuclear weapons from 1000-2200, the higher number then being under consideration by the Bush administration. Eventually, the United States and Russia concluded the Moscow Treaty that reduced deployed strategic nuclear weapons from 6000 to 2200 which was the single largest percent reduction of strategic nuclear weapons in history.

Under the New Start treaty of 2010 that further reduced our deployed nuclear weapons to 1550, we continued to maintain a Triad of forces including 450 Minuteman land based missiles.

However, some radical proposals continue to be put forward to eliminate the ICBM force from our nuclear deterrent largely under the assumption that the Cold War is over and there are no serious threats to the United States from any nuclear armed adversary.

While the Cold War did end in 1991 with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the totalitarian threats to America’s security remain although in changed form.

http://sarahhonig.com/2014/02/18/exposing-the-charade/

Odds are that convicted spy Jonathan Pollard is now in his 29th year in prison only because of thinly camouflaged anti-Semitism. That is the learned opinion of James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Woolsey has said so in interviews to Channel 10, as well as to The Jerusalem Post. He went on the record and without beating around the bush. He thus gave an authoritative voice to what many suspected and hinted at for years.

Woolsey may be the only higher-up in the US security establishment to head-on cite anti-Semitism, but he is not the only one to have called for Pollard’s release on the grounds that he had served an unreasonably and disproportionately long sentence in comparison to the time other spies for US allies spent behind bars.

In many cases the spies from friendly countries were sent up for less than four years, and they didn’t serve the full sentences either. Egyptian Abdelkader Helmy got a three-year-and-10-month sentence. Jean Baynes, who was caught spying on behalf of the Philippines, was sentenced to three-and-a-half years. Spies for Britain and South Africa were each given two years.

After the Woolsey statements, the specter of anti-Jewish prejudice, however denied, can no longer be covered up. The elephant in the room has materialized and come out in full view. Nobody – on either side of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic – can continue pretending the issue is not there.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4182/israel-europe-discrimination The fact remains that a Dutch soccer player was excluded from a training camp on the sole basis that he is Jew with an Israeli passport. Not only is the Dutch Foreign Ministry’s advice to “keep sports and politics separated as much as possible” bankrupt of any enforceable meaning; it conflicts with the Dutch […]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/144361#.UwXXLYWCUtX

Jack Engelhard, author of “The Bathsheba Deadline” and “Indecent Proposal”, as well as the award-winning memoir of his experiences as a Jewish refugee from Europe, has decided to make public a private exchange of letters he had with the world-famous and brilliant former New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal.

Rosenthal faced up to the mistake of New York Times’ minimization during WWII of the slaughter of the Jews of Europe in an editorial in 1996. He admitted that the daily wrote about what was happening to Jews on inner pages. He regretted that error deeply and worried about the state of israel.
Engelhard’s decision to release the letters to Israel National News for publication followed the recent op-ed by PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas published by the New York Times.

“So what else is new when, upon reading the paper Tuesday, May 17, here’s Mahmoud Abbas getting himself published as an op-ed contributor,” Engelhard wrote in an opinion published by INN. “This is like Al Capone getting to tell his side of the story, or Josef Mengele giving advice in the Journal of the American Medical Association.”

Abbas NYT piece effectively buried the Oslo Accords, upon whose ratification Roshenthal famously said, “The signing of these accords proves the anti-semites wrong – Jews aren’t smarter than other people.”

The Gray Lady’s decison to give Abbas a bully-pulpit, and its skewed reporting of Itamar massacre, Nakba, and Obama’s Cairo speeches, makes one wonder what Rosenthal, a 56 year veteran of the New York times (1943-1999) and 1960 Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting, would say about her were he alive today.

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/11481

I was pleased to hear from Shannon Smith, executive director of Wyoming Humanities Council, but disappointed to learn that she disagreed. When people disagree with facts, it means they cannot abide information that conflicts with their belief system. Did she not grasp that our world is afire? That our World Trade Center was bombed and 3,000 citizens killed? That Christians are being slaughtered in Africa and Asia? That Jews are fleeing Europe again? That Sweden and Norway have been called the rape capitals of the world? That the violence occurring around the globe is caused by one group and one group only?

The books gifted by the Muslim Journeymen were described as containing “history, faith, and Muslim culture around the world.” Islamic history, antithetical to all we believe and trust, is severely misrepresented in their accounts. They do not divulge their 1400-year history of violence, slavery, destruction of 270 million people and their cultures, the permanent land grabs, and the forced imposition of Islamic ideology to 1.3 billion people. They do not disclose their cruel Islamic law, Shari’a, and its incompatibility with our heritage and Constitution. Our God is not their God; our Torah and Bible are not their Qur’an, of which eighty percent deals with killing the infidels. The adherents will not live harmoniously with other nations and ideologies and they are a danger to all humanity. Their literature warrants inspection.

Of the five novels the libraries received, Smith and her staff read Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, and admitted it was disturbing. So was In the Country of Men, by Hisham Matar. Both are stories of a desolate future and inappropriate, vulgar material. In the former, Marjane lives in Iran, a country in transition from secular to Islamic religious extremism; in the latter, nine-year-old Suleiman lives a frightening life in despotic Libya. Both books deal with issues of repression; abandonment and neglect; explicit sexuality and drugs; both have unsavory characters, and deal with issues of unhappiness, anxiety, martyrdom and death, and “life is pain.” These are very different from the decent, moral literature that produced the people who created our great nation.

The immersion in degradation is intentional. The books were chosen to discourage the innocent from reading and creative thinking, to produce “common” and “standard” (Common Core Standards) workers who are compliant and easily controlled, like the masses who lost their will to rise up against the Islamic and socialist regimes. In the words of Montesquieu, “As virtue is necessary in a republic…so fear is necessary in a despotic government.”

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/02/fearless-speech-vs-hate-speech.html

I usually do not pay attention to news about biblical movies. The Bible has been a subject of film for well over a century, logging in literally hundreds of titles. Although filmmakers know there is a wealth of stories to lift from the Bible, the ones that make it to the big screen are relatively few. The only difference between them lies in the progress of special effects, winding up today with computer generated images to create miracles and swell the sizes of the crowds and to add other technological icing. If you’ve seen one Ten Commandments or Ben Hur or The Robe, you’ve seen them all.
When Hollywood runs out of new takes on zombie plagues, alien invasions, capitalist conspiracies to take over the world, and catastrophic “climate changes” that dehydrate or drown the globe, there are always Red Seas to part, waters to walk on, and loaves and fishes to multiply. Jesus himself has undergone a number of make-overs during the film industry’s century-plus history, from handsome hunks preaching love on the hill to crowds of extras to a rockin’ Super Star.”
Anyone for Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson as Moses? Or as Mohammad? After all, we have Russell Crowe gallomping around as a pious but Ark-ready Noah.
A character in “House of Cards,” Secretary of State Catherine Durant, played by Jayne Atkinson, too strongly resembles former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I think that was intentional. Durant is a frumpy and dumpy white-haired Southern gal, as well, and is Frank Underwood’s policy poodle, ready to tailor her diplomatic spiel to Underwood’s. Will Hillary’s publicity agent protest the characterization? Likely not; it’s advisable not to call attention to the similarities between Hillary and Durant when a real life, alleged candidate is already having image and truth problems.
But suppose handsome George Clooney was picked to portray former president Bill Clinton in some improbable “docudrama”? Would his publicist crank out a protest? Absolutely not, not even if Bill Clinton as president were depicted espousing free market principles, siding with the Serbs, nailing bin Laden on the first try, and keeping his roaming hands off of his interns’ tushes.
But all it takes is someone’s whisper to get the ball rolling to a politically correctness-governed scandal, and the media, for lack of anything else to do, will lap it up and grow it to tabloid headline size.
For example, I chanced upon this February 17th story by Jeff Sneider from MSN: