Stonewalled in his efforts to grasp how US scientists turned an 18-year pause into a temperature increase, a powerful congressman is on the warpath. Even as the climate-change establishment heads to Paris, its scam is much closer to surfacing than the heat they now insist is hiding in the deep ocean
A grandiose United Nations Climate Change conference is to be held in Paris at the end of the month. It has been extensively billed as the last chance for world leaders to sign up to the massive expenditure supposedly necessary to save the world from the global warming disaster. A previous effort of this sort in Copenhagen six years ago went horribly wrong, so it is not surprising that the propaganda associated with the lead-up to the Paris conference has been vastly more intrusive and hysterical. As a consequence, the apparently coherent scientific story behind the politics is beginning to fall apart.
Senior U.S. intelligence officials now say they’re almost sure—one of them calls it “99.9% certain”—that a Russian plane that crashed into the northern Sinai Peninsula on October 31 was brought down by a bomb. (Update: Russia now confirms it.)Although the attacks in Paris on Saturday, November 14, which killed about 130, have gotten far more media attention, the Russian crash exacted a considerably higher toll with 224 people killed, mostly Russian holidaymakers returning from the Sharm al-Sheikh resort in Sinai.
One of the reasons the Paris attacks had a greater impact is that ISIS was clearly behind them. But U.S., British, and Israeli intelligence officials are now saying it was apparently behind the Sinai crash, too.
That assessment is based on chatter that was picked up after the crash between Sinai Province—an ISIS affiliate in Sinai that claims credit for the atrocity—and ISIS Central.
Investigators also say the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder indicate that the crash was no accident and an explosion was involved.
The president vowed to “destroy” ISIS: “a bunch of killers with good social media.”
President Obama stressed at a press conference today in Malaysia that “the United States could never be at war with any religion because America is made up of multiple religions.”
He also hit at critics — namely, the Politico headline “Obama’s Asian Distraction?” — who have suggested that his focus on the Asia pivot came at a bad time with new ISIS and al-Qaeda attacks.
“This region is not a distraction from the world’s central challenges, like terrorism. The Asia Pacific is absolutely critical to promoting security, prosperity and human dignity around the world,” he said. “That’s why I’ve devoted so much of my foreign policy to deepening America’s engagement with this region.”
Obama said the American victims over the past several days — Nohemi Gonzalez in Paris and Anita Datar in Mali — “remind me of my daughters, or my mother, who, on the one hand, had their whole life ahead of them, and on the other hand, had devoted their lives to helping other people.”
Here is a list of a few trendy words, overused, politicized, and empty of meaning, that now plague popular communications.
“Intersection” How many times have we read a writer, columnist, pundit, or job applicant self-describe himself with this strange word? Here’s an example: “Joe Blow is a social theorist working at the intersection of class oppression, racial stereotyping, and transgendered emergence.”? Or: “Amanda Lopez writes at the intersection of Latina identity, Foucauldian otherness, and social media.” Most of the time “intersection” exists only in the grandiose mind of the writer. It is a patent though feeble attempt to become a threefer or fourfer on the race/gender/generic victim/revolutionary activist scale. The intersected topics are individually irrelevant — and all the more so when cobbled together. The use of “intersection” is a postmodern way of plastering bumper-sticker narcissisms without writing, “I am an identity-studies person without much knowledge of literature, history, or languages, but am desperately trying to convey expertise of some sort by piling up a bunch of pseudo-disciplines that credential my victimhood activism.”
“Diversity” The noun was rebranded in the 1980s, and does not mean what it by nature should — “a range” or “multiplicity.” No one furthers the goals of “diversity” by ensuring plenty of conservatives, liberals, radicals and reactionaries on campus, or welcoming lots of Christian fundamentalists as well as atheists and Muslims. The word instead is a euphemism for non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-Christian, and non-liberal. It is a relative and entirely political noun. The University of Missouri football team can both be 52% African-American and proof of diversity, even if African-Americans make up less than 12% of the population — in a way that all white and elderly Democratic primary candidates are honorifically diverse by virtue of their homogeneous left-wing politics.
Three other observations: First, racial and ethnic diversity, without assimilation and integration into one culture, and when identity becomes essential rather than incidental to a nation (i.e. a salad bowl society rather than the melting pot), leads to Armageddon, whether in Austria-Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Iraq.
Brown University is finally coming out and admitting that despite its delightfully multicultural name, it is a deeply racist institution.
Expressing gratitude to students of color for calling attention “to actions needed to address racism and injustice on our campus,” Brown President Christina H. Paxson has developed a plan and asked students, faculty and staff to comment on it.
Brown’s own president is admitting there is racism on campus. What is it about liberal universities that make them hotbeds of racism? Why do liberals hate blacks and other minorities so much?
But at least they are offering reparations:
The university plans to invest $100 million over the next 10 years on achieving the goals outlined in the plan, Paxson said in her introduction.
Called “Pathways to Diversity and Inclusion: An Action Plan for Brown University,” the 19-page plan outlines steps for “creating a just and inclusive campus community,” increasing the university’s racial and ethnic diversity and adding issues of race, ethnicity and identity to teaching and research on such topics as environment, health, technology and global affairs.
So you have a school that claims to be one of the top in the country, Brown University, and yet it teaches environment, health, and technology, all from a white perspective. Can you imagine being forced to learn only the white version of physics? The white version of anatomy? The white version of oceanography? It’s like we’re still stuck in racist Woodrow Wilson’s early 20th century worldview!
Race-related protests on American college campuses are spreading faster than head lice at a daycare center (for an update, see here). Though each disturbance has its own idiosyncrasies, all include demands that the university recruit more black faculty and students, forcefully “re-educate” all students and faculty to expel lingering anti-black racism and then do whatever is necessary to make the campus a warm, caring and, most of all, a safe space for communities of color.
Far more is involved here than howling for school president’s head or cancelling a mid-term exam to permit traumatized students time to heal. The ruckus is entirely about pushing the university leftward, and these immature campus social justice warriors are what Lenin called useful idiots. All the nattering about diversity and dialogue is a subterfuge; these hypersensitive snowflakes and fellow traveler thugs are just the ground troops in a much larger ideological war.
DUBAI (Reuters) – An Iranian court has sentenced Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian to a prison term, the state news agency said on Sunday quoting the judiciary spokesman, a case that is a sensitive issue in contentious U.S.-Iranian relations.
The length of the prison term was not specified. “Serving a jail term is in Jason Rezaian’s sentence but I cannot give details,” judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei told a weekly news conference in Tehran, according to IRNA.
In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters he was aware of the IRNA report but could not independently confirm it. It was not immediately clear why Iran has not given details of the ruling against the 39-year-old Rezaian, who Iranian prosecutors accused of espionage.
On Oct. 11, Ejei said Rezaian, the paper’s Tehran bureau chief who has both U.S. and Iranian citizenship, had been convicted, without elaborating. He said then that Rezaian had 20 days to appeal against the verdict.
The Washington Post said last month that the verdict, issued soon after Iran raised hopes of a thaw in its relations with the West by striking a nuclear deal with world powers including Washington, was “vague and puzzling”.
At a time when the liberal left is consumed with placating the sensibilities of minorities and creating “safe places” on campus to insure that words will never harm them, I wonder if our president and other pundits are considering the sensibilities of 9/11 and Boston Marathon survivors and the grieving families of those who were murdered. How devastating it must be to have lived through those domestic Jihadist attacks, suffered permanent physical and mental impairment and then have to listen to our president proclaim that there is no need to fear the influx of 10,000 Muslim immigrants, or to read the Times’ daily vilification of people with the opposite point of view.
At the same time that the newspaper reports the bombing of the Mali hotel due to security lapses, its columnists excoriate those who question the efficacy of our national security to safeguard us from terrorist interlopers. Fear is the appropriate reaction for people who have experienced firsthand or suffered the consequences second-hand of the stated aims of Islamic Jihad. Too many of us have felt sick just seeing the images of executioners lopping off the heads of innocent people, raping and kidnapping scores of women and militarizing African children – forcing them to do unspeakable things including cannibalism. It’s impossible to pretend after this year’s double catastrophe in Paris that we can walk the streets of NYC, a prime stated target for repeat attack, completely confident that our excellent police and anti-terror squads can be omniscient and omnipotent. It just isn’t feasible in an open society where we don’t have security screening in our public museums, city transportation hubs, multiplex theaters or most of the myriad places where people congregate. A day after the Paris attack, I saw a New Yorker with a backpack large enough for a weeklong camping trip enter a movie theater, sit down and casually place that baggage on the floor beside her.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. –Abraham Lincoln
Last evening, we shared a table with a young group of marines en route to SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training in Maine. I woke up this morning feeling especially thankful to those who put themselves in harm’s way to protect our nation and yet I kept thinking about the Gettysburg Address. This is because I worry whether our soldiers (and their families) deployed after 9/11, many injured or in coffins, sacrificed in vain. Did the soldiers who liberated our country from England, as well die in vain? Did the 620,000 casualties of the Civil War die in vain?
At 10 years of age, I became aware of terrorism. I watched it play out during the television broadcast of the 1972 Olympics when a terrorist group, identifying itself as “Black September”, killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. Why were these athletes arbitrarily murdered on a world stage? I truly didn’t understand the catalyst until I was much older. Black September was a movement to avenge Palestinians’ losses in Jordan. This was one battle in a continuum of battles and part of a larger war.
This week, in response to calls for the United States government to stop taking in Syrian refugees following last week’s horrific terrorist attack in Paris, Senator Elizabeth Warren uttered words that must now seem terribly ironic to her constituents.
“These events test us. It is easy to proclaim that we are tough and brave and good-hearted when threats feel far away — but when those threats loom large and close by, our actions will strip away our tough talk and reveal who we really are.
Not two days after Ms. Warren made those impassioned remarks on the Senate floor, one of Ms. Warren’s own constituents, eighteen-year-old Ezra Schwartz from Sharon, Massachusetts, was gunned down by a Palestinian terrorist in Israel, together with two other innocent civilians. In response, the sanctimonious senator said nothing.
And that is not because Ms. Warren has a difficult time speaking. On November 18th, the day before Ezra Schwartz was murdered, Ms. Warren’s official Twitter account sent out more tweets than a sparrow in mating season — 11– about lobbyists, tax reform and the Economic Policy’s Women’s Economic Agenda. The day before that, Ms. Warren went to the Senate floor to deliver her remarks about Syrian refugees. And, lest anyone doubt Ms. Warren’s ability to multitask, she sent out tweets both before her speech (“Heading to the Senate floor now…”) and after her speech (“…Today I spoke about what I saw”). Yet she could not spare even a character for the beautiful young boy with the sweet smile from her home state.
