RUTHFULLY YOURS

Someone should tell Barack Obama and all the potential scavengers attempting to make a haul at COP-21 in Paris this week — global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is over.

Any runway model can tell you — Paris is for new fashions. Not last year’s retreads. Climate change is so 2009!

Only the neo-Leninist “useful idiots” on the New York Times editorial board still believe in it. The American public certainly doesn’t. Ninety-seven percent now disbelieve it — or, more accurately, put it far on the back burner. Yes, that’s the same number we used to have shoved down on our throats as the percentage of scientists who supposedly believed in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. That proved to be absurd. Yet still the UN persists with its annual fiesta for moral narcissists, almost always in a luxe venue best accessed by carbon-spewing corporate jets.

Well, where better than Paris? Just watch the cholesterol. And don’t worry about ISIS. They know what’s worth attacking and it’s not this utter balderdash. (At least people pay attention to a soccer game and a rock concert.)

Not even Stalin during the days of Trofim Lysenko tried to pull off something so scandalous (and anti-science!) as the global warming scam. And good old Joe made nowhere near as much money for his lies as Al Gore — the D student in geology — did by running around declaring “The ice is melting! The seas are rising! The storms are raging!” thereby netting himself one billion dollars and an Oscar. That the seas never rose and the ice never melted and the hurricanes didn’t even happen, in fact literally stopped, is beside the point. (Well, maybe that last fact is some sort of climate change.) People felt good about themselves. They believed in Mother Earth, even if they didn’t have anything else to believe in — more likely because they didn’t have anything else to believe in.

Ten thousand Syrian refugees should be brought to the U.S., President Obama says, because that’s “who we are.” Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, have used similar language to explain America’s obligation. More than half of the nation’s state governors have objected. On Nov. 20, a bipartisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives voted, in effect, to block the administration’s resettlement plan on security grounds.

While the debate rages in the U.S., and as Europe struggles to cope with refugees streaming north, too little attention has been directed to the region where the refugees could best start life anew: the Arabian Peninsula and its Arabic-speaking oil-rich countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Approximately 4.3 million Syrian civil-war refugees are now in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt, and registered with the United Nations. Vast camps attest to the refuge these countries have provided even though they struggle without the oil wealth of their neighbors.

Our French feminine newscasters are attractive, charming, refined, and fashionably dressed. (Though a few have disfigured themselves with silicone lips that interfere with their ability to speak). Compared to their American and British counterparts, they are stunningly beautiful. And it just might have something to do with French culture, because women on the French channel of Israel’s i24 news are in general better looking than their colleagues on the English channel.

I’m not sure of the appropriate vocabulary for their profession. Some are simple newsreaders, others are full-fledged journalists. They don’t go into the grimy field like the American and British big names that stood up, rain or shine, at Place de la République for hours on end last week. Decades ago they were called “speakerines,” a word that has been dumped, along with “concierge” for custodian and “garcon” for waiter. For some reason that escapes me, our indoor journalists have taken to baring their arms to the shoulder when temperatures drop and normal people are bundled up in sweaters and jackets. In my experience, TV studios are more likely to be cool than overheated. But I was surprised to see a sweet young thing on the 14th of November dressed in a summery pastel sleeveless top reciting press releases filled with shock and gore. By the end of the day the word had apparently gone out. Since then, it’s jackets or long sleeves, all black for the first week, now varied but still appropriate to a grieving nation.

Since Paris was attacked, these anchors have been asking invited guests, “What do they want?” Well, if they’re terrorists it follows that they want to terrorize us and résistance consists of not being afraid. We’ll go to concerts, restaurants, cafés, and shopping centers. The terrorists will not prevail. Then, since they are all Muslim, it means they want to divide our society, turn us against all Muslims, so we will resist by holding hands, forming human chains, and proclaiming friendship with our Muslim fellow citizens. TV cameras focused on a blindfolded man at Place de la République carrying a sign that said “I’m Muslim, give me a hug.” Of course he got lots of hugs. No one seemed to notice that the blindfold was a keffieh… like the ones worn by the caliphators that brought the jihad flag to the statue of Marianne in the summer of 2014.