RUTHFULLY YOURS

On November 7th, 2013, the former Commander of the US Strategic Air Command and Chief of Staff of the USAF, General Larry Welch, (retired), spoke at a Kings Bay, Georgia symposium on the enduring requirements of the US Strategic Nuclear Triad, an event I planned and hosted and which is one of a continued series of such events which will continue in April 16-17 at Crane/NavSea, Indiana. Here is my introduction and the remarks of General Larry Welch.

MR. HUESSY: General Welch has been speaking at my breakfast seminar series since he was SAC commander, and that’s 29 years ago, I believe. I think he has spoken at my series more than any other individual. I once noted at my seminar a couple of years ago that he was a national treasure, to which he replied that he had not yet taken up residence in the U.S. National Archives.

(Laughter).

He is, nonetheless, a voice of extraordinary wisdom and common sense. Would you please welcome our former United States Air Force chief of staff, our former SAC commander, former president of IDA, General Larry Welch?

(Applause).

MR. LARRY WELCH: When Peter asked me to do this, I thought this is a really good idea. I’m going to give a keynote speech and find something really useful to say to one of the most experienced, knowledgeable, committed, dedicated groups that I could imagine. But since Peter asked me to do it, I did what I always do when Peter asks, I said yes.

But I said yes for another reason, because I do have a message for a knowledgeable, experienced, committed, dedicated group of people. And the fact is, my message is about the message. It’s specifically about staying on message – staying on message about the strategic nuclear deterrent, the triad that underwrites that deterrent, and all the capabilities it takes to keep that triad effective. And I’m talking about policy, people, platforms and weapons.

And I raise that issue tonight because I think we need a much more intense focus by a knowledgeable, committed, experienced group of people in order to get us back on message. The issue is that the nation, in some respects, has drifted off message and it has created confusion in places where we don’t need confusion. Most certainly confusion in places where I expect confusion: those who believe that somehow if we just ignore them, nuclear weapons will go away. But I’m not talking about those people.

George Bernard Shaw famously said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.” There couldn’t be a better description of our president, who proclaimed in Berlin in July 2008: “This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”

The vice president was not far behind, just as persuasive but less vivid. “I think it is manmade. I think it’s clearly manmade. If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar icecap is melting,” Joe Biden said, outlining the administration’s position on global warming; apparently, “Apocalypse Now” is threatening a host of calamities. Although the vice president sounds terminally confused, if he says “I think it is manmade,” then there should be no more debate. It is settled. We should take it as gospel and blow trillions of dollars in an effort to save the planet. And according to those two delusional alarmists, this is it. There will not be another moment. Must act now!!!

I am old enough to remember that not so long ago, in the mid-1970s, the world debated “global cooling” with the same intensity and urgency as we are debating global warming today. It was also very urgent and potentially catastrophic although, back then, we needed to save the planet from freezing. The cover of the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek proclaimed “The Coming Ice Age.” In the article “The Cooling World,” the magazine suggested that, among other disasters, cooling “may portend a drastic decline for food production.” In the June 24, 1974 issue of Time magazine, the article “Another Ice Age” painted a bleak picture for the future of our planet. These same publications now advocate global warming.

I recently raised this argument with a renowned defender of global warming. His response was that science is a lot better today than it was forty years ago. “Does that mean science was wrong in predicting a new ice age?” I asked him sarcastically. I got my answer when he did not respond: It really does not matter what science says; we simply must believe in global warming. This and other discussions with the supporters of global warming convinced me of the futility of citing scientific and historical records to initiate an intellectually honest dialogue. I also became aware that these people would never relinquish their convictions and will continue to find arguments to justify them-even if these new arguments are diametrically opposed to those they previously espoused.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/what-have-they-wrought-at-st-james-church?f=must_reads Those who have perpetrated a deplorable anti-Israel falsehood and outrage on the grounds of St. James Church in Piccadilly, London have done so fully knowing that their intention is to promote the ugliest PLO and Palestinian Authority propaganda. The church has installed a life size 8 meter tall/30 meter long replica of Israel’s security wall in […]

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A Chinese news agency is reporting that Secretary of State John Kerry has offered one of his many “bridging proposals” on the right of return of Palestinian refugees, in his effort to move the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks along. These talks appear to be going nowhere on their own when Palestinians and Israelis are left to deal with each other directly, but also nowhere with Kerry in the middle, as he seems to be regularly, now that his most recent diplomatic “breakthrough,” the Iranian nuclear deal, remains in limbo, near two months on from the much ballyhooed November signing in Geneva.

The six-month interim period established in the Geneva agreement, during which Iran agrees to freeze some of its nuclear activity, and Western nations relax some of their sanctions, has not yet commenced, and no one is quite sure at this point what has been agreed to. In any case, Iran continues to proclaim the things they intend to do during the interim phase, such as advanced centrifuge developmentinsuring that the new centrifuges can be quickly installed and begin spinning if the interim agreement is not extended and talks break down at some point short of a final agreement, as they seem likely to do.

The report on the refugee proposal is significant since this is not a minor issue for the Palestinians. Their narrative of the Palestinian Nakba argues that European imperialists established Israel due to guilt over the Holocaust and made the Palestinians pay the price with their expulsion in large numbers during the 1948 war, thereby creating the refugee situation. Of course, the Zionist movement preceded the Holocaust by decades, and first won European support after World War I. The Palestinian narrative places the Palestinians in their now established role of victims, ignoring the many opportunities they had and rejected over the last 75 years to create a state of their own.

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/congressional-letter-academic-boycott-of-israel-is-thinly-veiled-bigotry/2014/01/10/0/ A congressional letter slams the American Studies Association’s academic boycott of Israel as antithetical to academic freedom and as “thinly veiled bigotry.” UPDATED! PLEASE NOTE UPDATE AT THE END OF THIS ARTICLE Dozens of members of the U.S. House of Representatives are busily circulating a request to their colleagues, asking them to sign on […]

With the “Interim Agreement” finally scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 20, the administration is warning congress not to pass a sanctions bill which would be triggered only if Iran defaults on its commitments. Iran Interim Agreement to Start Two Months After Announcement In November the world was told that the P5+1 countries with […]

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This is looking like another bad year for global warming.
The year began with the news that an Australian “climate researcher” leading a tourist expedition to Antarctica got his ship trapped in the sea ice. Which is embarrassing, because the purpose of his expedition was to study the melting of sea ice supposedly caused by 20th-century global warming. The current expedition was meant to retrace the route Douglas Mawson took in 1912—but they were stopped 70 kilometers short of where Mawson landed. So they needed to have an icebreaker ship sent to rescue them. Then the icebreaker got caught in the ice, and someone had to rescue the rescuers. You can’t make this stuff up.
The award for best headline on this story goes to Andrew Bolt, “Warmists Trapped by Irony.”
(Second prize goes to Mark Steyn for this line: “On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters.”)
More widely, this is yet another embarrassment for the global warming theory as a whole. Melting ice at the poles, and particularly at the South Pole, is necessary to produce the rising sea levels which are supposed to be among the catastrophic consequences of global warming. So if the ice is still so thick they’re getting caught in it, it’s bad PR for their theory.
Even worse PR for global warming is the fact that North America just spent a week getting sucked into a “polar vortex” that brought temperatures down to record lows not seen in decades—precisely the kind of weather the warmthers told us we shouldn’t be having.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The hysterical responses to Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua’s book discussing why some cultures succeed and others fail are revealing. Even though Chua was talking about cultural elements, rather than genetic ones, the accusations of racism are entirely predictable.Chua’s thesis, like most similar arguments, is plausible in some areas and implausible in others. Any explanation […]

There is an orgy of reporting on Governor Christie’s scandal, and the ones enjoying it the most are the folks who fear him as a serious contender against the already anointed Hillary Clinton. Personally, I don’t think that Governor Christie will, or should be the next Republican candidate. But the notion that Hillary Clinton is unbeatable is silly.

After all in 2008 she debated an inexperienced and relatively obscure Illinois Senator. He became Senator after other contenders in the Democratic primaries were sullied by scandal. He had never governed anywhere; he had no legislative history; his biography excluded data and academic history that was critical to his eligibility ; and he proved to be an unqualified President. Nonetheless, he bested her in debates- and that was without a teleprompter.

Hillary Clinton has a serious history of prevarication : making false claims about a difficult corkscrew landing in Bosnia; “finding” missing documents in an ante-room in the white House; ordering the sanitizing of Vince Foster’s office after his suicide; lying and finger wagging that the Lewinsky story was a right wing conspiracy; and the whole sordid story of Benghazi and blaming it on a video critical of Islam. As Secretary of State she has accomplished nothing other than record setting flight hours and shaking hands with tyrants around the globe.

She is not worthy of the office and she is not “unbeatable.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/368137/print I don’t know how long this G-File will be as I am on a plane from Tampa with a low battery. Every percentage point it drops rings in my ears like the countdown from 24. The pressure is making me sweat like Chris Christie reading the Bergen County Record. The Christie scandal is an […]