RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3856/germany_foils_islamist_model_aeroplane_terror_plan

Germans launch dawn raids involving around 90 officers in bid to prevent high-tech terror attacks

German police have raided apartments across Germany in an operation aimed at foiling an alleged plot to perpetrate terror attacks using remote-controlled model aeroplanes, Germany’s Spiegel is reporting.

Spiegel, one of Germany’s leading media outlets, said that the dawn raids involving around 90 officers had been conducted in cooperation with Belgian law-enforcement agencies and that two Tunisian-born men were at the centre of their investigations.

“They are suspected of having sought to acquire information and equipment necessary to carry out ‘radical Islamist explosive attacks using remote controlled airplanes,’ according to a statement on the website of Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutors’ Office”, the report stated.

“According to the Stuttgart public broadcaster SWR, some of the suspects are students at the University of Stuttgart, where they are taking courses in aerospace engineering. As part of those courses, they learn how to use GPS to program model airplanes to fly specific routes,” it added.

The two men of Tunisian origin were described as having come under the sway of radical Islamist ideology, but they are not thought to be members of a known terrorist organisation.

This has been a busy week for anti-terrorism in Europe. On Monday, French police arrested six people on suspicion of planning terror attacks in France.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3848/anti_israel_rabbi_in_anti_semitic_attack_in_amsterdam

An anti-Zionist Rabbi has been attacked by a Muslim man in Amsterdam, in what is thought to be a racially motivated assault

A leading member of the anti-Israel Jewish sect Neturei Karta was assaulted in what seems to be an anti-Semitic attack by a Muslim man in Amsterdam.

Israel’s Channel 2 news reported that Yosef Antebi, a prominent member of the anti-Zionist group that frequently marches alongside anti-Israel protestors, was hospitalised after an attack on the streets of the Dutch capital.

A friend of Antebi reported, “As he was walking down the street, a car stopped next to him, and a man who appeared to be a Muslim immigrant came out. The immigrant started shouting anti-Jewish slurs at the rabbi. Rabbi Antebi is anti-Zionist, he does not advocate for war in the Middle East but he was identified as a Zionist. The Muslim started yelling at him and threatening him, and the rabbi noticed that the immigrant was going to attack him.”

At this point, the friend said, Rabbi Antebi asked passersby to help him, but was ignored.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/06/25/can-we-actually-even-tell-if-humans-are-affecting-the-climate/

We know, with great certainty, that the overall average temperature of the Earth has warmed by several degreees in the last 400 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age. Before that was a period called the Medieval Warm Period; before that was another cold period; and back at the time of the Romans there was a long period that was significantly warmer — Southern Britain was a wine-growing region. What we’re a lot less certain about is “why?”

Of course, the “why?” here has been, shall we say, pretty controversial. It’s worth wondering about the controversy and about the social mechanisms through which science is done — I wrote about them during the Climategate controversy as the “social contract of science” — but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Instead, let’s talk about how a scientist thinks about these sorts of questions and arrives at new answers. Back in grad school we called that “doing science,” and it was something everyone liked doing and wished they could be doing instead of whatever they actually were doing, like faculty meetings and refereeing papers.

The process of “doing science” is something you usually learn more or less by osmosis, but there are some good hints around. One of the best is a paper from the 16 October 1964 issue of Science, “Strong Inference” by John R Platt. Let’s say we have some phenomenon of interest, like global warming, or high blood sugar, or that damned yellow patch in my lawn. We want to know why it happens. Platt’s strong inference describes the process we should use when “doing science” as:

We generate a number of alternate explanations, hypotheses, that might explain the phenomenon.
For each hypothesis, we come up with an experiment which will prove the hypothesis wrong. That is, not one that “proves the hypothesis,” but one which, if successful, would disprove or falsify the hypothesis. (Sir Karl Popper argued in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery that this falsification was the core of scientific knowledge.)
We do the experiments. If an experiment falsifies a hypothesis, we discard it ruthlessly. Then we go back to (1) and try again.

A lot of times, the rub — and the really creative thinking — comes in from finding the right experiment. Richard Feynmann was known for an ability to see right through a problem to a simple and elegant experiment that would disprove a hypothesis. He demonstrated this during the review following the Challenger disaster. You may remember that the launch happened on a very cold morning in January; less than two minutes after launch the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up, killing all seven astronauts.

The question, as always, was “why?”

From films and debris, it appeared that the solid rocket motors had failed first, sending a blowtorch of hot gas into the external tank, which then exploded. The solid rocket motors were built of a stack of components containing the solid fuel, which were then joined to make the whole rocket motor; it appeared, in fact, that one of the joints had failed.

One proposed explanation was that the cold has made the O-ring seals at the joints stiff. During a public, televised hearing, management people from the solid rocket manufacturers discounted this idea. Feynmann, who was one of the members of the all-star panel doing the investigation, quietly got a salt shaker and a glass of ice. They had a sample of the O-ring material that had been provided as a prop for the hearing. Feynmann put the salt into the ice, making a concentrated salt solution with a temperature much lower than the normal freezing point of water. Feynmann, without making a fuss about it, dropped his sample of O-ring in the water and let it chill.

http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/the-edward-snowden-travel-agency/?print=1

The absurdities of the Where’s-Edward-Snowden guessing game have by now reached such heights that it would be no great surprise to see reports of the NSA leaker popping up in Tehran, or perhaps transiting the Pyongyang airport. Yes, I’m making that up. But a lot of the recent reports read like scenes from some latter-day version of Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 satire of the news trade, Scoop. Traveling on what is presumably a revoked U.S. passport, Snowden departs Hong Kong for Moscow. Speaking from Finland, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin says that Snowden arrived unexpectedly in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and is still hanging around the transit hall — though journalists hunting high and low in the transit area can’t find him. Maybe he’s enroute to Ecuador? Or points between? On a tip that he was booked aboard an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Cuba, some two dozen journalists board the plane — only to discover as it heads for Havana that he’s not there.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/blowing-smoke-obama-climate-speech-riddled-with-lies/?print=1

King Canute, attempting to teach his people a lesson regarding his abilities, supposedly went to the sea and commanded the tide to stop. Twelfth-century English historian Henry of Huntington wrote that Canute took his throne to the seashore, but the tide, “continuing to rise as usual dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person.”

President Barack Obama’s naïve and error-riddled speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday clearly demonstrated that he is serious about trying to stop global climate change. However, like the tide, climate change is a natural event of such proportions that it is largely unaffected by human activities. Obama ignores that the “official climate science” on which he bases America’s climate and energy policies has been washed away by 17 years without global warming, despite atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) — the gas Obama blames for rising temperatures — continuing to increase primarily due to the emissions of China and India.

Unlike America’s hopelessly misguided president, the reasons behind Canute’s action were sensible. He wanted to reduce unrealistically elevated expectations of him. Canute’s goal was to show fawning courtiers that there were things over which he had no control. He knew the facts about tides. Sadly for our American friends, and indeed for the whole free world — which depends on a strong America — Obama lacks Canute’s humility and knowledge about nature. The president’s misunderstanding and his apparent disinterest in real climate science is leading the United States into an economic black hole from which it may take generations to recover.

Obama also seems oblivious to real-world economic evidence that the policy path on which he is setting the U.S. has already been tried and has failed in other countries. It is not surprising that when he launched his most recent climate change initiative last week in Berlin, the German public response was less than enthusiastic — they are already suffering the economic and energy consequences of “going green” in a hopeless attempt to stop climate change. Many Germans are also aware of the implications of the Climategate scandal, through which the corrupted science of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was exposed through leaked emails.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/06/republican_party_wont_survive_amnesty_bill_and_neither_will_america.html The Republican Party won’t survive the passing of the Democrat’s illegal immigration amnesty bill.  This shouldn’t be too complex for the D.C. geniuses:  if you betray your party’s base to pander to the opposition’s base, they win, you lose.   If you screw the white working class to pander to the Hispanic vote, whites […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324328204578569270162405156.html?mod=trending_now_4

ByJOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA in Mexico City and JACK NICAS in Chicago

Questions swirled Wednesday over whether fugitive Edward Snowden, the admitted leaker of U.S. secrets, has a clear path to asylum in Ecuador.

As Russian officials reiterated that Mr. Snowden was in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, his ability to leave appeared to hinge on two points—whether there was a country that would allow him free transit on his way to Ecuador, which has said it would consider granting him asylum, and whether he had the temporary travel documents to get there.

Late Wednesday, Univision Networks posted images of what it said was a “safe pass” for temporary travel that had been issued to Mr. Snowden—a document he would need after U.S. officials said earlier this week they had canceled his passport. Word of such a pass echoed comments earlier this week by Julian Assange, the founder of antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, who said Ecuador had given Mr. Snowden a “refugee document of passage.”

But according to a senior official in Ecuador’s foreign ministry on Wednesday, Mr. Snowden had no such pass. “He does not have any documents issued by the government of Ecuador, such as a passport or a refugee identification,” said Galo Galarza, a senior ministry official. He didn’t provide additional details.

Also Wednesday, Ecuador’s foreign ministry said the country would consider whether to grant asylum to Mr. Snowden if he presents himself at one of the country’s diplomatic missions.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323873904578569373649278986.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

As the American people, the world and official Washington continue to unravel the mystery named Barack Obama, a key clue may be found in the booing of Nancy Pelosi—from the Left.

The former House Speaker was booed, shrieked at and vilified for remarks she made last weekend to Netroots Nation, the progressive activists’ convention.

Ms. Pelosi spoke to the convention about Edward Snowden, whose theft of NSA computer data has taken him to China and now Russia. To her credit, Nancy Pelosi told them what they didn’t want to hear:

“I know some of you attribute heroic status to that action, but you don’t have the responsibility for the security of the United States. Those of us who do have to strike a different balance.” She said Edward Snowden had clearly broken the law.

At this, the full-time American Left went ballistic with boos.

“Leave him alone,” they shouted. “Secrets and lies!” And the ultimate articulation of rejection: “You suck!”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323844804578529030063800200.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Psychiatry’s diagnostic bible has broadened the definition of mental illness to absurdity.

The American Psychiatric Association released a revision of its diagnostic bible in May, the first major rewrite in two decades. “The Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” or DSM-5, is the official guidebook for diagnosing every conceivable psychiatric ailment. This new edition loosens the rules in a disturbing way.

In previous editions, you the patient had to meet certain specified criteria in order to be diagnosed for any particular condition. For example, if I were going to diagnose you as having schizophrenia, then you had to have specific symptoms, such as delusions or hallucinations. If you didn’t have those symptoms, then I couldn’t make the diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Not anymore. Last month, DSM-5 introduced a new diagnosis, “Unspecified Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder.” The only required criterion is that you have some distress from unspecified symptoms, but you “do not meet the full criteria for any of the disorders in the schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders diagnostic class.” You don’t have to have delusions. You don’t have to have hallucinations. In fact if you do have delusions and hallucinations, then you probably don’t qualify for unspecified schizophrenia. (You will find the new diagnosis in one short paragraph at the bottom of page 122 of DSM-5.)

Likewise for every other diagnostic category, including, for example, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Let’s suppose that you occasionally don’t pay attention to your wife. You don’t meet the old-fashioned criteria for ADHD, which included impairment in multiple settings, like on the job or while driving. You are inattentive only when your wife is talking. You pay attention to everybody else. Hey, no problem. You now qualify for “Unspecified Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.”

http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=3033

A sort of follow-up to the related story of Syrian “rebels” learning from the “former” KLA that we put in charge of Kosovo — and put in touch with the Syrians. And so one supposes that to U.S. officialdom, the below developments are nothing alarming. Wonderful news, in fact. After all, we organized the Syrian-Albanian note-sharing on how to win an insurgency and have an unfree “liberated” country afterwards.

Comment from American Council for Kosovo director Jim Jatras, who circulated the item below:

“Albanian Islamists”?? What? There’s no such thing!

Shouldn’t that be, “Secular, Democratic, Pro-American Kosovo Albanians Paradoxically Join Jihadists in Syria”?

Funny how US support for political and military empowerment of secular, democratic, pro-American (etc., etc.) Muslims always seems to morph into more jihadists.

Albanian Islamists Join Syrian War

Ethnic Albanians are getting more and more involved in the Syrian war as they join Syrian Islamist groups, writes Mohammad al-Arnaout. (Al-Hayat, Apr. 29)

In recent months, the “Albanian world,” which consists of five contiguous states (Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro), has been increasingly interested in what is happening in Syria and the controversy over whether Albanians should go fight there.

This coincided with the growth of political Islam, which in the past few weeks expressed itself in an unprecedented way with the emergence of Kosovo’s first officially registered Islamist political party: the Islamic Movement to Unite (LISBA). [Didn’t see that coming!] It is headed by Arsim Krasniqi and supported by Sheikh Shaukat Krasniqi and a former Yugoslavian army officer, Fuad Ramiqi [who is al Qaeda-connected]. The latter made no secret of his goal to change Kosovo’s secular constitution in order to “defend the Islamic identity of Kosovo’s Albanians, who make up 95% of the population.”

[Digital Journal on March 6th reported that the party — Levizja Islamike Bashkohu — is actually “the first fundamentalist Islamist political party in the Balkans.” That is, the American-sponsored, “secular”, “nominally Muslim” Kosovo which we’re still feverishly trying to prop up as a fully-fledged state that is Muslim and pro-U.S., has the distinction — a decade-and-a-half after our “help” — of housing the region’s first official Islamist party. Digital Journal quoted a Weekly Standard article by Stephen “Suleyman” Schwartz — Muslim Kosovo’s biggest advocate and war proponent — now “warning” that “‘exponents of Saudi-financed Wahhabism and of the Muslim Brotherhood have penetrated the highest levels of the official Kosovo Islamic apparatus,’ though they are not readily welcomed by the secular population…Kosovans struggling in poverty have been paid (by Gulf-sponsored charities) to the wear the hijab or grow beards…” What was expected to happen after NATO handed Kosovo to ‘Kosovans’?]

There has long been behind-the-scenes talk that young Albanians, influenced by political Islam’s rise in Syria, are participating in the fighting there among the ranks of Islamist groups (Jabhat al-Nusra and others). [Hmm, young, Albanians. Surely they don’t see parallels in Syria to their own “no religious component” struggle in 1998-99 Kosovo?] When news emerged in November 2012 that the first Albanian martyr, Naaman Damoli, had fallen in Syria, the Kosovar newspaper Koha Ditore brought that issue to light in its Nov. 12, 2012, issue.