RUTHFULLY YOURS

For Obama, it isn’t the man in the arena who counts. It’s the speaker on the stage.

Barack Obama told the U.N.’s General Assembly on Monday he’s concerned that “dangerous currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.” It’s nice of the president to notice, just don’t expect him to do much about it.

Recall that it wasn’t long ago that Mr. Obama took a sunnier view of world affairs. The tide of war was receding. Al Qaeda was on a path to defeat. ISIS was “a jayvee team” in “Lakers uniforms.” Iraq was an Obama administration success story. Bashar Assad’s days were numbered. The Arab Spring was a rejoinder to, rather than an opportunity for, Islamist violence. The intervention in Libya was vindication for the “lead from behind” approach to intervention. The reset with Russia was a success, a position he maintained as late as September 2013. In Latin America, the “trend lines are good.”

“Overall,” as he told Tom Friedman in August 2014—shortly after ISIS had seized control of Mosul and as Vladimir Putin was muscling his way into eastern Ukraine—“I think there’s still cause for optimism.”

It’s a remarkable record of prediction. One hundred percent wrong. The professor president who loves to talk about teachable moments is himself unteachable. Why is that?

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2015/0928/ISIS-in-America-how-doomsday-Muslim-cult-is-turning-kids-against-parents?

So far, 58 Americans have been arrested in 2015 for plotting violence or attempting to join the so-called Islamic State in Syria. More than half are under 25, and experts say recruits are getting younger.

Washington — American families are under assault from an Islamic extremist group that is quietly turning young minds against their parents, against their religious faith, and against their country.

The group, the self-proclaimed Islamic State in occupied sections of Syria and Iraq, is using social media and the worldwide reach of the Internet in a sophisticated recruitment campaign that is making families feel helpless to stop a slow-motion kidnapping of their children.

So far this year, 58 Americans – more than half under 25 – have been arrested for attempting to travel to Syria or for plotting violence in the US. That is more than twice the number of similar arrests for the entire year in 2014, and more than twice the number for all of 2013, as well.
ISIS IN AMERICA:A seven-part series

Mohamed Rasul is homeless in New York City. But don’t feel too sorry for him, he’s “homeless by choice.” He’s got a free laptop and free Wi-Fi in Bryant Park.

According to Mohamed, he’s “never been as comfortable as under de Blasio” because no one forces him to leave the park where a miniature carousel spins children around on painted horses and a yoga lesson takes place on the main lawn. These things, the carousel, the yoga lesson and the free Wi-Fi, only exist because the park was restored from its old days as Needle Park.

Back then the stretch of park behind the New York Public Library had more crimes than some towns. Cleaning it up took a lot of hard work.

Now that hard work is being undone by a pro-crime mayor.

When you have enough Mohameds in the park then the kids, the coffee, the Wi-Fi, the yoga mats and the lunch break crowd goes away to be replaced by junkies, needles, drug dealers, muggers and rapists.

I’m in Sweden for a couple of days, threading my way between the “refugees” at the railway station. More on that anon. Nonetheless, a prudent man does not neglect book-plugging duties for long. So I see Lynne Cohen has a review of my new tome:

Michael Mann needs no introduction. He is the Yale-and-Berkley-educated physicist and mathematician, now a climatologist at Penn State University. He is also the inventor/creator/discoverer of the (in)famous hockey stick graph, what Steyn calls “the single most influential graph in climate science. It leapt from the pages of a scientific journal to the posters and slides of the transnational summits, to official government pamphlets selling the Kyoto Protocol, to a starring role on the big screen in an Oscar winning movie [An Inconvenient Truth], to the classrooms of every schoolhouse in the western world.” Also, a version of the hockey stick featured prominently in the influential United Nation’s 2001 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The hockey stick graph purports to demonstrate that, for about 900 years — represented by the long handle lying flat — the world experienced almost no climate variation. Then, the blade of the stick shoots straight up for about 120 years, from the start of the industrial revolution… The only problem is, the hockey stick has been almost completely discredited, which is the fundamental point of Steyn’s book.

To educate readers, Steyn quotes about 150 Ph.D. scientists from every corner of the earth. He even uses the statements of a few liberal scientists who actually believe in MMGW, but who have no trouble denouncing the hockey stick… Several of the hockey stick’s most obvious problems are easy to grasp. The 900-year long handle completely ignores two indisputable eras, the Medieval Warm Period, from about 950 to 1250 A.D. and the later Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. For proxy measures, Mann and his team used only a few trees, including one California bristlecone pine, which is certainly old, but whose rings cannot determine climate. As stated by Dr. Jeffrey Foss, author of the 2009 book Beyond Environmentalism: A philosophy of Nature: “tree rings are not a reliable proxy for temperature.” After more critical analysis, Foss concluded, succinctly: “wrong tree, wrong proxy, wrong location, wrong method.”

You will love the 12 chapter titles, written in Steyn’s proverbial acerbic inflection, among them: “Mann is an island,” “Mann of the hour,” “Mann o’war,” “Mann overboard,” and my personal favorite, “Mann boobs.”

The success of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate has to be getting under the skin of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“He led the largest city in the country as it prospered for a dozen years, and to see this guy who is all talk seize control of the apple cart is galling to him,” a Bloomberg friend told me this week. Maybe that explains why Ian Bremmer, a Time magazine columnist and president of the consulting firm Eurasia Group, issued the following tweet Saturday: “Word from those that know: Mike Bloomberg now seriously considering independent run.” His words have since ricocheted everywhere in retweets and made the Drudge Report.

But how serious is this boomlet? The climate for an independent in the race is favorable. For years, politicos have talked of Bloomberg as a potential White House contender who would resonate with an alienated electorate that wants to end government gridlock. More than 70 percent of voters think the country is on the wrong track, with both the Democratic president and the GOP Congress unpopular. The upcoming election could feature major-party candidates who have negatives of above 40 percent with voters. A dynastic race between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton would leave many voters aching for fresh faces.

Bloomberg has been officially silent about any possible interest in the White House, spending his time managing his media company and a foundation that promotes his mix of socially liberal and fiscally conservative ideas. But he has fans in both parties. Last month, Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who runs Fox News, called on Bloomberg to run, saying “it’s time” for him “to step in the ring.” New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin reported in June that New York Democrats disgruntled with Hillary Clinton were urging him to run.

With polls showing that a majority of Americans believe that she is lying, Hillary Clinton has been more aggressive in addressing questions about her private e-mail server. But with each new appearance, more questions are raised than answered. Her latest interview with Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd is no exception.

For months, Mrs. Clinton has insisted that she, and she alone, had the power to determine whether her e-mails were required to be preserved as federal records. In her initial press conference at the United Nations in March, she explained that “for any government employee, it is that government employee’s responsibility to determine what’s personal and what’s work-related.” Her campaign website reinforces that contention, arguing that the “Federal Records Act puts the obligation on the government official to determine what is and is not a federal record.” And the Department of Justice recently told a federal judge the same thing: “Under policies issued both by the National Archives and Records Administration and the State Department, individual officers and employees are permitted and expected to exercise judgment to determine what constitutes a federal record.”

American interfaith groups are being infiltrated and undermined by the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliate, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). In their eagerness to find Muslim faith partners whom they want to believe share their values of religious tolerance and mutual respect, Jewish interfaith leaders allow themselves to be exploited. Under the guise of interfaith dialogue, Islamist organizations like ISNA that have ties to extremism, insinuate themselves into faith organizations while advancing their hidden agendas. Faith leaders who disregard ISNA’s ulterior motives place their congregations at risk.

In its June 2015 ruling in favor of Samantha Elauf, a Muslim woman who was denied employment for wearing a headscarf, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the American judiciary’s prohibition on workplace discrimination based upon religious practice. In the American melting pot, there are benefits to all faiths that successfully negotiate societal challenges between the secular and the religious, but these benefits are only guaranteed by a legal system that upholds a universal human rights standard. Blind spots in the interfaith movement, however, undermine common cause when religious leaders pursue interfaith outreach at any cost.

One such example was described in an article in a Jewish community paper written by a participant in a Christian/Jewish interfaith partnership with the Muslim organization, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). The current head of ISNA’s interfaith relations, Dr. Sayyid M. Syeed, a sociolinguist by training, is a founder and former executive of ISNA. At the invitation of its rabbi, Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, Syeed met with faith leaders of various denominations, professors of religion, and “interested citizens” at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in suburban Philadelphia. The rabbi presented Syeed “to guide our thinking about these issues.” Rabbi Kreimer is founding director of the Multifaith Studies Department of the RRC, the seminary of a branch of Judaism on the left side of the political spectrum and self-described as liberal progressive.

Come on. What do you people want from Hillary anyway? She’s been as transparent as possible… for a Clinton.

Speaking with NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” Clinton said, “Look, I think I have done all that I can to take responsibility, to be as transparent as possible in turning over 55,000 pages in turning over my server.”

Hillary Clinton’s version of “as transparent as possible” involved

1. Setting up a private email server controlled by her and routing her government work through it

2. Claimed to have deleted all her emails and then turned over tens of thousands of print outs of emails while leaving out crucial emails. “Finally, in December, dozens of boxes filled with 50,000 pages of printed emails from Mrs. Clinton’s personal account were delivered to the State Department.”

3. Refused to answer if she wiped her server

4. Attempted to dodge FBI and State Department investigations

5. Lied about the time she began using the email

Today it’s Osama bin Laden’s aide; tomorrow it could very well be the Blind Sheikh.

​The Obama administration quietly shipped Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard back to the Wahhabist Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last week despite warnings that the Muslim terrorist remains a serious threat to the United States.

The newly released terrorist detainee is Abdul Shalabi, 39, who trained to be the 20th hijacker for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Shalabi was set free even though military officials deemed him too dangerous to be unleashed on the world and too valuable as an intelligence asset to be released from U.S. custody.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said last week that the liberation of Shalabi, whom he referred to as a “dangerous detainee,” is “another example of President Obama playing politics with national security and putting campaign promises ahead of U.S. national security interests.” Shuttering the terrorist detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has long been a goal of President Obama, going back at least to the campaign trail in 2008.

For an architect whose abstract ideas were, he assured us, very so important, he wasn’t much of a thinker. His notions were to real thought what doggerel is to genuine poetry — a catalogue of inaccuracy, looseness, laziness and mendacity, all covered in a thick sauce of arrogant self-confidence.
French fascism is alive and well, and its current headquarters (as I write this) are not in the offices of the Front National but, appropriately enough, in the ugliest building in the world in the most beautiful capital city in the world, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It is here that has been held the completely uncritical exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Le Corbusier, the fascist architect, under the title Le Corbusier, Mesures de l’homme.

Not a word about his fascism has been allowed to obtrude on the almost religiously respectful thoughts and impressions of the visitors who troop through the exhibition with solemn or pious expressions on their faces, as if regarding something holy, though what is exhibited is often so extremely bad and incompetent in execution that it should evoke derision and laughter rather than the abject mental genuflection that it does in fact evoke. People, especially in France, have long been cowed into veneration by decades of propaganda to the effect that Le Corbusier was a great, possibly the greatest, architect, and that any revulsion from, let along mockery of, his work would reveal their own lack of understanding. It is certainly true that Le Corbusier was a master: but a master of propaganda and self-promotion in a credulous age, not a master of architecture.