RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ms. Hotovely is the deputy foreign minister of Israel.

One often-cited key to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is economic development. To that end, there seems to be broad agreement about the importance of extending development aid to help the Palestinians build the physical and social infrastructure that will enable the emergence of a sustainable, prosperous society. But few have seriously questioned how much money is sent and how it is used.

Such assistance will only promote peace if it is spent to foster tolerance and coexistence. If it is used to strengthen intransigence it does more harm than good—and the more aid that comes in, the worse the outcome. This is exactly what has been transpiring over the past few decades. Large amounts of foreign aid to the Palestinians are spent to support terrorists and deepen hostility.

For years the most senior figures in the Palestinian Authority have supported, condoned and glorified terror. “Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem,” President Mahmoud Abbas said last September on Palestinian television, “is holy blood as long as it was for Allah.” Countless Palestinian officials and state-run television have repeatedly hailed the murder of Jews.

Mr. Gersen is a professor at Harvard Law School.

In the past several years politicians have lined up to condemn an epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses. But there is a genuine question of whether the Education Department has exceeded its legal authority in the way it has used Title IX to dictate colleges’ response to the serious problem of sexual assault.

When an administrative agency makes rules and regulations—which are a form of law every bit as binding as those passed by Congress—it must follow the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act, the bible of the bureaucracy. The process most often used involves “notice and comment”: The agency must publish the proposed regulation and respond to comments before issuing the final rule. This can take months or years, and at the end of the process parties affected by the new rule can challenge it in court.

There’s a point to making the government jump through these hoops: By demanding transparency and facilitating public participation and judicial review, we can be more confident that the bureaucracy is up to good rather than ill.

More than a man of science, the man whose testimony helped persuade a British court that Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is a fusion of error, lies and propaganda was that genuinely rare specimen, a good-natured crusader with the gift for leading the benighted into the light
Bob Carter’s passing is a great loss to those on the side of the angels — and to the noble cause pure, non-politicised science — in the debate on climate change. In contrast to the rent-seekers and opportunists aboard the global warming gravy train, he was a real scientist dedicated to truth. In his tribute, former radio host and one-time global warming believer Michael Smith highlighted his approach:

I’d made the error of asking Bob for his opinion after my perfect opening monologue. Bob said, “I don’t have an opinion. I am a scientist. I don’t deal in opinion. I deal in facts. Observable, proven facts. I deal with the scientific method, making observations, doing experiments and arriving at conclusions. Your starting point seems to be an unproven hypothesis based on computer projections. Do you have any facts to back up your claims about global warming?

Carter’s book, Climate: the Counter Consensus, which came out in 2011, demonstrated this approach, as did his many presentations on climate issues over the years. Days before the mainstream media got around to reporting his passing, the internet was alive with tributes from around the world.
Bob Carter: Lysenkoism and Climate Science

Here are just a few that I found most striking. The first is from the great slayer of Michael Mann’s fabricated hockey stick graph, Steve McIntyre, who wrote:

He was one of the few people in this field that I regarded as a friend. He was only a few years older than me and we got along well personally.

I will not attempt to comment on his work as that is covered elsewhere, but do wish to mention something personal. In 2003, when I was unknown to anyone other than my friends and family, I had been posting comments on climate reconstructions at a chatline. Bob emailed me out of the blue with encouragement, saying that I was looking at the data differently than anyone else and that I should definitely follow it through. Without his specific encouragement, it is not for sure that I ever would have bothered trying to write up what became McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) or anything else.