RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/eu-light-bulb-ban-illuminates-power-struggle-in-brussels-a-852931.html

Beginning Saturday, it will be illegal to import or produce traditional incandescent light bulbs in EU member states. The move has upset consumers and many environmentalists, but it serves to highlight the EU’s democratic deficiencies.

From the front, the item the defendants dragged into the courtroom looked like an ordinary mobile heater: a vertical, slightly ribbed metal plate with a power cable. Only when seen from the back did the device reveal itself to be a battery of interconnected 100-watt light bulbs. Packed closely together, the bulbs heat the metal plate, which in turn radiates heat into a room.

This was the way the “Electric Resistance Society” was trying to circumvent European Union bans and bring traditional incandescent light bulbs back to Europe. It argued that there could be no legal objection to selling them as miniature heating units for homes.

But the judges at the administrative court in the western German city of Aachen were not impressed by Siegfried Rotthäuser and Rudolf Hannot’s attempt to outsmart the system. The judges prohibited the sale of 40,000 “Heatballs” seized by customs authorities that the two engineers had had made in China. In fact, the “Heatballs” were nothing but ordinary tungsten light bulbs. And that makes them hot goods since the European Commission issued Regulation No. 244/2009. The regulation calls for a gradual ban on sales of all traditional incandescent light bulbs. The first to go were 100-watt bulbs, on Sept. 1, 2009, and it will cover all remaining bulbs as of Sept. 1, 2012.

The reason is that incandescent light bulbs waste 95 percent of the energy they consume. If the EU’s climate objectives are to be met, the reasoning goes, Europeans can no longer afford to use such energy-gobbling devices. As a result, the classic — and popular — light bulbs have been gradually disappearing from store shelves in the EU.

Gabriel’s Eco-Offensive

Now that 100-, 75- and 60-watt bulbs have already been eliminated, as of Sept. 1 the smaller 25- and 40-watt bulbs will also slowly disappear from the lives of 500 million Europeans — without any of those citizens having ever been asked about the ban. Nowhere is the bureaucratic influence of European government agencies as powerful as in the delirium of energy efficiency.

“The EU has made a decision without consulting citizens and, in doing so, it has massively intervened in our quality of life,” says Hannot, the light-bulb activist. This paternalism and lack of transparency almost aggravates him more than doing without the stronger, warmer light of incandescent light bulbs. The makers of the documentary film “Bulb Fiction” even speculate that the European light-bulb lobby, including major companies like Philips and Osram, are behind the demise of the cheaper incandescent light bulb given the much larger profit margins associated with more expensive energy-saving light bulbs.

But there is also someone else behind the phase-out of incandescent bulbs: Sigmar Gabriel, the current chairman of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), Germany’s largest opposition party.

The 53-year-old — who is undoubtedly a shining light for the Social Democrats today — wanted to make a name for himself in 2007, when he was the federal environment minister. At the time, Germany was ruled by a grand coalition made up of the SPD, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and Germany had just assumed the six-month rotating presidency of the European Council presidency in Brussels. Gabriel was seeking the international spotlight.

In February, after Australia announced a ban on incandescent light bulbs, Gabriel wrote to the EU environment commissioner, saying: “Europe can no longer afford products with a degree of efficiency of only 5 percent, such as conventional light bulbs.”

http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2012/08/31/rnc-convention-speech-you-may-have-missed/?print=1 If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are to win the White House, they have to succeed in getting the votes of the still-undecided swing voters. With the Democrats in an all-out war based on painting the Republican nominees as the devil incarnate who hope to destroy the well-being of the poor, the dispossessed, women, […]

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2012/08/arise-sir-ludwig.html

As one of my regular readers has emailed me this morning, prompting this short post, it’s gratifying to see neurosurgeon Sir Ludwig Guttmann (1899-1980), “Father of the Paralympics,” arise from relative obscurity to all but the cognescenti and be given his due place in the media spotlight this year. To its credit, the BBC has made a fascinating documentary about this Jewish refugee from Nazism who, like so many of his type, contributed so appreciably to their host societies. (The video is below; hat tip Ian)

Thanks in large part to the dedication and expertise of Dr Michael Jolles, a London physician and an historian of Anglo-Jewry, the Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History contains potted biographies of numerous highly distinguished medicos and scientists from Nazi persecution who fled to Britain, much to Britain’s enrichment.

Here’s the in-a-nutshell entry for Sir Ludwig:

“Born in Tost, Upper Silesia, the son of an innkeeper and distiller, he took refuge in Britain in 1939. In 1944 he became foundation Director of the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Convinced that paraplegics would gain physical, therapeutic, and psychological benefits from sport, an idea that was revolutionary at the time, he organised, in 1948 on the hospital lawn, competitive games for the disabled to coincide with the Olympic Games that were being held in London. In 1952 the so-called Stoke Mandeville Games involved over 130 competitors, and were awarded the Fearnley Cup in 1956 for their promotion of the Olympic spirit. They developed into the Paralympic Games, first held in Rome in 1960 and held ever since immediately after the Olympics. In 1960 Guttmann founded the Association of the Disabled. He retired from Stoke Mandeville in 1966 and in 1976 published his Textbook of Sport for the Disabled. Appointed OBE (1950) and CBE (1960) he was knighted in 1966.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/introducing_the_ujr_the_united_jihadi_republic.html

Cairo and Damascus — always at the heart of Arab politics — are again starring in the real-life drama of Arab turmoil that the media’s idiot-savants called the “Arab Spring.” Somehow, the “Arab Spring” does not look so rosy.

Egypt may be the most important Islamic country, centrally located and equipped with thousands of advanced U.S. tanks and fighter jets. It is run by the extremist Muslim Brotherhood — an organization that essentially fathered al-Qaeda.

Egypt’s new leader, Muhammad Morsi, has decapitated the pro-U.S. heads of his army. He put large forces on his border with Israel, violating the treaty with Israel. Meanwhile, Egypt now flirts with Iran, catching Western intelligence flat-footed.

Syria, armed to the teeth with chemical and biological weapons, is splitting apart, and its weapons may fall into the hands Syria’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and rogue elements tied to al-Qaeda.

For decades, Egypt and Syria led the Arab world to militant nationalism and war. Briefly, Egypt and Syria came under the pan-Arab umbrella of Egypt’s Gamal Abdul-Nasser to produce “The UAR — The United Arab Republic.” Today, militant Islam unites them, and they might call themselves “The UJR — The United Jihadi Republic.”

Mass protest in Egypt and bloodshed in Syria did not bring the moderate democracy foreseen by Tom Friedman of The New York Times, Fareed Zakaria of CNN, or Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of the USA.

Today, our “experts” and leaders have no answers, only pretense. President Obama and Secretary Clinton plan to meet Egypt’s Morsi in New York, after he meets again with Iranian leaders. They have not condemned Egyptian treaty violations.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/russia_unfortunately_being_russia.html Before the pundits start telling you the Romney campaign stepped into a time-warp on the subject of Russia, it’s worth considering what adviser Rich Williamson said and what it means. “They’re trampling civil rights,” and “they’re our foe,” and “they’ve chosen a path of confrontations, not cooperation.” Pierre-Richard Prosper, another campaign adviser, added that […]

http://times247.com/

Why all the bowing hasn’t helped
FrontPage mag
Friday, August 31, 2012
Commentary
Why all the bowing hasn’t helped
It’s a good thing that President Obama isn’t running on his foreign policy record, because it’s every bit as bad as his economic record. The Obama 2012 website only lists National Security as an issue. That is already a backhanded admission that the only thing he can run on is Osama bin Laden. Read more…
U.S. reduces role in joint drill with Israel
Israel National News
Saturday, September 1, 2012
News
Washington has greatly reduced the scale of U.S. participation in a massive joint military exercise with Israel, sources told TIME Magazine on Friday. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz25DbPKZFz

Navy SEAL soldiers on despite Pentagon threat
Former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette is…
Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz25Db4wyXB
Follow the leader: Obama hurries after Romney
The Daily Caller
Friday, August 31, 2012
News
President Barack Obama announced Friday that he’s heading to Louisiana, but he’ll arrive after Mitt Romney has toured the storm-damage state in company with the state’s popular Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz25DbvxeOX

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ THAT SHOULD GO WELL WITH HIS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE The White House Press Office announced today that President Obama will soon be inducted into the Special Forces Association and receive an honorary Green Beret. Come on. That tank photo op has to come any day now. Maybe he’ll drive up in it to the […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

THE MACHINE

The most impressive thing about RNC 2012 was the smoothness of the entire thing. If the 2008 RNC stumbled, but ran on enthusiasm, the 2012 edition was a polished frictionless machine, except for one awkward moment with Eastwood, and even that seemed geared to give the critics something petty to pick apart that would not reflect badly on Mitt Romney and the Republican Party.

Mitt Romney is a machine politician, but not a politician of the political machine. He appears to excel at building a smoothly running machine around him. It’s not high praise and yet it’s not counter to the impression that he gives. It reflects his message that he takes charge and builds things that work.

Behind all the speeches and showpieces, RNC 2012 is a reflection of Romney’s whole campaign, it is the precisely calculated work of people who know what they are doing, who don’t always get it right, but have ability, ambition and even some guts.

Romney’s people went into this understanding that Obama and his allies would run on destroying him as a man, on making him into an ugly caricature, a running joke, a bad human being. And they worked to make that pitch as hard as possible to sell. They knew that the Democrats would focus on the white female vote, so they beat them to it. It’s not a new game, Reagan played it too, but it’s gone up to a new level.

Some wanted this event to hit Obama much harder. But it hit him hard enough. What it really did was make Romney much harder to hit. Romney’s people understand that common sense is on their side and that their mission is to defang the negative attacks from the media that will make people feel bad or guilty about following their common sense. And they did a pretty good job of that tonight.

And the guts kicked in when they picked their battles. It would have made sense for Romney to dodge Bain and for Ryan to avoid Medicare, instead they turned around, picked up both issues and ran on them, and rammed them back into Obama’s teeth. It’s gutsy, but there’s also a common sense element to it. If you’re going to get attacked remorselessly on an issue, then you might as well own the issue and use it to send a message to your opponent that the attacks will hurt him as much as you.

That’s what RNC 2012 did.

Romney ran in the primaries as the most electable candidate, not by virtue of any special ability, but on determination and competence. RNC 2012 reflected that. It’s the work of people who are determined to win and who play hard. That may not be enough, but it’s a harder run for his money than Obama got last time around.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/315661/dog-whistling-past-graveyard-mark-steyn
Are there any words left that aren’t racist?

American racism is starting to remind me of American alcoholism. At the founding of the republic, in the days when beer was thought of as “liquid bread” and a healthy nutritional breakfast, Americans drank about three to four times as much as they do now. Today the United States has a lower per capita rate of alcohol consumption than almost any other developed nation, but it has more alcoholism support groups than any other developed nation — around 164 groups per million people. France, which drinks about 50 percent more per capita than America, has one-twentieth the number of support groups. The French and Italians enjoy drinking, the English and Irish enjoy getting drunk, and Americans enjoy getting drunk on ever more absurd stigmatizatory excess. At Walmart they card you if you “appear to be under” — what is it up to now? 43? 57? And the citizenry take this as a compliment: Well-preserved grandmothers return from failed attempts to purchase a bottle of wine with gay cries of, “I was carded at Costco! They’ve made my weekend!”

And so it goes with American racism: The less there is, the more extravagantly the racism-awareness lobby patrols its beat. The Walmart carding clerks of the media are ever more alert to those who “appear to be” racist. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared this week that Republicans use “Chicago” as a racist code word. Not to be outdone, his colleague Lawrence O’Donnell pronounced “golf” a racist code word. When Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell observed that Obama was “working to earn a spot on the PGA tour,” O’Donnell brilliantly perceived that subliminally associating Obama with golf is racist, because the word “golf” is subliminally associated with “Tiger Woods,” and the word “Tiger” is not so subliminally associated with cocktail waitress Jamie Grubbs, nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, lingerie model Jamie Jungers, former porn star Holly Sampson, etc., etc. So by using the word “golf” you’re sending a racist dog-whistle that Obama is a sex addict who reverses over fire hydrants.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/315493/cair-censor-or-free-speech-champion-andrew-c-mccarthy

Breaking news: CAIR, perennial agitator for language purges and “hate speech” regulation, is suddenly the champion of First Amendment free expression. It proves, once again, that Islamists and leftists are just like defense lawyers.

A defense lawyer who has a good case can be very persuasive. If the defendant really is innocent, or if the prosecution’s case really is flawed, defense counsel can take one main line of defense and pound away at it relentlessly. That is how doubt is sown, which is the defense lawyer’s objective. A credible story that the prosecutor cannot completely refute is the roadmap to acquittal.

This, however, is not the lot of most defense lawyers. In the vast majority of cases, the client really is guilty, and the state really does have ironclad proof. So defense counsel becomes the charlatan for whom every trial day is a new day. On Monday, he tries a false-identification theory, suggesting that the defendant was not even at the scene of the crime. When that doesn’t fly, on Tuesday he runs with, “Well, maybe he was there, but he didn’t know the three guys he was with.” Once that blows up, Wednesday’s gambit is: “Well, sure, he knew them, but he didn’t know they were going to rob the bank.” By Thursday, it’s: “Well, maybe he said he’d help them, but one was a government informant, so he must have been entrapped.”

Our defense lawyer is put in this untenable position because his true objective is fundamentally different from his lofty pretense. He purports to be on a quest for justice, but the only thing he really cares about is getting the defendant off, by any means that might work. Thus, he tries all means he can think of, even if they are contradictory — even if positing the first defense undermines the next, ultimately destroying his overall credibility as an advocate.

Although it does more than its share of litigating, the Council on American-Islamic Relations operates mainly in the court of public opinion. CAIR is the Muslim Brotherhood bullhorn created to cheerlead for sharia, for Hamas, and for sundry other jihadists — all under the guise of “civil rights.” In unison with its “social justice” collaborators on the left, CAIR is most often found campaigning against “Islamophobia.” This is a term strategically created by the Brotherhood to slur as “defamation” or “incitement” (collectively, “hate speech”) any criticism of Islamic supremacism. That includes the ideology’s undeniable roots in Muslim scripture; its vow to destroy the West from within; and its promotion of terrorism against legitimate sovereign authority, spun as “resistance” against “occupation.”

It is farce. CAIR has no real interest in hate speech per se. Indeed, it has no real interest in civil rights — no proponent of sharia could. Its sole actual imperative is Islamic supremacism: promoting any cause that increases Islamic influence and protesting any effort either to reduce Islamic influence or to subject Islamic-supremacist doctrine to scrutiny. Consequently, CAIR’s precious fretting over hate speech extends only so far as Islam is advanced or imperiled.