RUTHFULLY YOURS

How ironic that Science – a supposed neutral methodology — has taken on the status of an authoritative graven image, with all the dogmatic accoutrements that accompany a religious system. Nothing illustrates this more than its stance on Naturalistic Macro-Evolution and on Climate Change.

As for the former, the Neo-Darwinian model never had the intrinsic explanatory power to be so much as a working hypothesis, even before its detractors began making mincemeat of its assumptions by holding its manifold contradictions and threadbare evidence to the antiseptic light of day. Yet, it permeates modernity’s worldview and is as resistant to the call for reconsideration or reformation as any 16th-century cleric. If the edifice is now crumbling, it is due to the fact that all idols contrary to truth, like Dagon in the Philistine temple, come to fall on their faces.

As for the latter, it is no longer an article of contention that those who drive the global warming agenda have made common cause with political forces, and those entities are hell-bent on maximizing their own climate of fear as they aggregate power for their own ends. Having perfected the technique of using a thin veneer of altruism as a fig leaf to cover their nakedness, the Left have become what they once claimed to despise: a monolithic authority impervious to reason. And it is for this reason alone that they have wrangled science into a state of harlotry, using influence, money, and promotion as the methodology by which their new quasi-science will approach the remaking of the world. Those who have whored out a tool of inquiry, in the service of justifying their agenda, revealed their true hand when threats of prosecution, as well as the demolition of professional reputations of the heretical, were laid on the table. Apparently, little has changed from when Galileo was forced to mutter under his breath, “Yet, it moves.”

Bill Nye — “the Science Guy” — thinks that the recent deadly flooding in Louisiana is a result of climate change.

That’s not surprising. Bill Nye thinks everything is the result of climate change. Flooding in Missouri is climate change. Tornadoes in Kentucky is climate change. Fire in Alaska is climate change. A morning thunderstorm in Houston is climate change. One time, there was a blizzard in New York in January. That was climate change, too. The event doesn’t even have to be weather-related. The Islamic State’s massacre of 130 people in Paris last year? You guessed it.

When it comes to Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” it’s almost like “science” has nothing to do with it.

That would not be particularly surprising, either. After all, William Sanford Nye’s scientific bona fides consists of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell, and a stint at Boeing. But you can be anything you want on television, and in the late 1980s, hard at work pursuing a career in comedy, Nye landed a recurring bit as Bill Nye “the Science Guy” on Almost Live!, a Seattle-area sketch-comedy television show, and a role as Christopher Lloyd’s laboratory sidekick on Back to the Future: The Animated Series. Nye then leveraged that success into his namesake PBS Kids show, Bill Nye the Science Guy, which from 1993 to 1998 filmed 100 half-hour episodes, each focused on a particular topic (dinosaurs, buoyancy, germs, &c.) and accompanied by a parody soundtrack (e.g., Episode 75, on invertebrates: “Crawl Away,” by “S. Khar Go” — a parody of “Runaway” by Janet Jackson). Somehow, because of this, Nye is now the go-to authority on exoplanets and dark matter and whether we are living in a computer simulation — and, of course, environmental policy.

Oddly, being America’s foremost “edutainer” is a sweet gig. When Nye is not pronouncing on all matters scientific, he pals around with pop stars and “bonds over Jay Z” with SNL actors. He does q-&-a’s with the New York Times and Esquire. He sits with Arianna Huffington at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and take selfies with rapper DJ Khaled — who, it turns out, is “concerned about climate change.” (What a coincidence!) Nerddom would seem to have come a long way from passing-period swirlies.

Except that Bill Nye is not exactly a nerd. He just plays one on TV. Whatever Bill Nye was — to be fair, it’s no small accomplishment making science hip and interesting for millions of students — he is now primarily the foremost science-side participant in the cycle of personal validation and political-agenda-pushing that has come to characterize the relationship between leftwing politics and science. Stipulate that Bill Nye is a scientist. He then proclaims that climate change is not only real, but an apocalyptic threat. Rachel Maddow and Touré and all the other people who already believed that about climate change for political reasons get a fuzzy feeling, because they have been validated by a Scientist. They tousle Bill Nye’s zany hair. Rinse and repeat. Everybody wins.

Over the past decades Israel has been growing and developing at a phenomenal pace. Thanks to ongoing immigration and a high birthrate, its population has doubled over the past 30 years. Since 1990 its GDP per capita has tripled. And the start-up nation—still very small with a population of 8.5 million—has become a world leader in some of the most important fields.

After a recent visit to Israel as head of a delegation from his state, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush noted, among other things, that Israel’s water-desalination company, IDE Technologies, is considering a “program in Texas to help cities, communities and industrial partners meet their water needs.” Israeli firms are already helping California solve its water crisis.

It should come as no surprise in light of a recent Scientific American article detailing Israel’s pioneering innovations in this field. Just 15 years ago Israel, one of the world’s driest countries to begin with, was suffering from a drought and at the brink of a water catastrophe. Now, thanks to its revolutionary desalination technology, Israel not only fully supplies its own water needs but is at the forefront of solving the world’s water crisis.

During his visit Commissioner Bush met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “discussed [with him] several economic areas where Israel and Texas can work together.” Bush noted that “Texas is home to the Silicon Prairie” while “Israel is the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.” We locals call it Silicon Wadi—the Tel Aviv-area beehive of Israeli high-tech companies that a Forbes article speculated could become “the dominant tech ecosystem in the world.”

At present, as Israeli commentator Yoram Ettinger notes, according to a recent study tiny Israel is “one of the top five world high-tech powers.” Only two countries—the U.S. and China—have more companies trading on the NASDAQ. Israel is one of only eight countries in the world to have launched space satellites, “a global co-leader with the US” in that field—and so on.

Of particular relevance to the Texas delegation’s visit was Israel’s offshore natural-gas exploration, which it is doing in partnership with Houston-based Noble Energy. It was Noble that, at the start of the millennium, first discovered the natural-gas deposits off Israel’s coast. Today the huge Tamar gas field is already online, and the even larger Leviathan field is on the way. Israel will be exporting natural gas to Jordan next year, and it is nearing a deal with Egypt. And although the politics are complex, Israel is also talking about possible gas deals with Turkey and with Greece and Cyprus.

“The worst example of international diplomacy in history, with none other than the world’s leading state sponsor of Islamic terrorism, at a time when the free Western world is being plagued by a scourge of Islamic terrorism.”

The media and much of the Republican establishment have caught on to only part of a story about a shady deal that the Obama administration made with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a deal that took a rather labyrinthine and bizarre form. What they are talking about is bad enough, which involves paying a ransom for hostages, opening up Americans to kidnappings and imprisonment whenever they travel abroad.

The part of the story that they are missing, however, is that what the administration did was highly illegal, according to statutes we still have on our books.

On August 3rd, a story broke that an unmarked cargo plane loaded with $400 million in foreign currency landed in Tehran as part of a United States payment to Iran. Coincidentally this happened the very same day that three American hostages were released.

The next day President Obama took to the airwaves, and emphatically stated, “We do not pay ransom for hostages. We didn’t here, and we won’t in the future.” He went on to describe how he has met with various American families whose loved ones are being held hostage around the globe, and that we simply do not pay ransom because that would encourage more hostage taking in the future. “Those families know we have a policy that we don’t pay ransom,” Obama said. “And the notion that we would somehow start now, in this high-profile way, and announce it to the world, even as we’re looking in the faces of other hostage families whose loved ones are being held hostage, and saying to them we don’t pay ransom, defies logic,” President Obama added.

However, Washington is abuzz with the news from the Thursday, August 18th Wall Street Journal that an Iranian cargo plane from Iran Air went on a trip to Geneva where pellets were loaded onto it, with foreign currencies including Swiss francs and euros. One of the hostages, Pastor Saeed Abedini, had said that he was kept waiting at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran on January 16th, until the morning of January 17th, and “was told by a senior Iranian intelligence official that their departure was contingent upon the movements of a second airplane,” according to reports.

Another aspect of the story is that Iran Air is the official airplane used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to transfer weapons and manpower to Syria to fight for President Bashar Assad’s brutal dictatorship and to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran Air had been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for ferrying weapons and supplies until January 16th of this year, the very same date these foreign currencies were being ferried to Tehran.

Interestingly, January 16th was also “Implementation Day” of the agreement.

Senior Palestinian Authority officials told the Hebrew news portal Walla on Sunday that the Israeli ‎leadership is rooting for a Hamas victory in the upcoming PA municipal elections. The reason cited for ‎Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s ostensible favoring ‎of a majority win for the terrorist organization that runs Gaza over its rival faction, Fatah, is that this ‎would legitimize Jerusalem’s claims that there is no partner for negotiations on the Palestinian side.‎

Everybody, other than delusional leftists, knows by now that the only difference between one jihadi ‎group and another is internal, involving power struggles and arguments over the best way to eliminate ‎the world’s infidels. For decades, Israel has acted on the hope — and prayer — that this is ‎surmountable. Like all Western countries, even the one situated in the Middle East, Israel operated ‎under the assumption that enemies could be moderated, with heaps of goodwill, territorial concessions ‎and help from the international community.‎

However, the cold, hard reality, which has been evident throughout history, is that this premise is ‎false. Europe, whose memory is so short that it has forgotten the lessons of World War II, is unable to ‎articulate this realization. But a glimmer of understanding occasionally rears its head among citizens ‎shaken awake by terrorist attacks, whose increasing frequency is beginning to cause insomnia. ‎

German Chancellor Angela Merkel — one European leader whose popularity is plummeting as a result ‎of a spate of gruesome attacks committed by radical Muslims against innocent people — last week ‎made a desperate attempt to defend herself against charges that her open-door policy to refugees was ‎responsible.

‎”Islamist terror in Germany wasn’t imported with [them],” she said, though more than 2 million ‎unvetted migrants have flooded her country since 2015. The phenomenon of homegrown radicals ‎going to Syria to train with Islamic State terrorists, she explained, “has been concerning us for years.” ‎

How comforting.‎

http://spectator.org/west-bank-story/ Does a Good Samaritan have a chance these days? Over a month ago, a terror attack in the West Bank killed Rabbi Miki Mark, seriously injured his wife (now recuperating in hospital), and lightly injured his teenage son and daughter. The attack, in which Palestinians terrorists fired over 20 bullets into the Marks’ car […]

On the eve of Tisha B’Av, which marks the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians and the Second Temple by the Romans, most restaurants in Israel close early and no comedies are broadcast on TV. As a result, when invited to a dinner at a trendy eatery in Herzliya on Saturday night, I questioned whether it would be open.

Not only was the answer yes, but the place was packed, to boot.

Seated near a large window watching the orange sun slowly sink into the Mediterranean, I felt a mixture of great fortune and guilt. The meal I was about to enjoy, the price of which could cover my rent, would be as delicious as the company was interesting. But it was the start of a somber Jewish fast day, when we should have been at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, not partying along the beach.

Years ago, an Orthodox friend contended that Tisha B’Av should have become a feast day when the State of Israel was established, because it signified that we had returned to our homeland from exile. When I asked why he did not put this theory into practice, he said his neighbors would take it the wrong way.

Indeed, Judaism is big on “marit ayin,” meaning the way things appear, which is why I’ve never been good at observing it. I am nevertheless a sucker for its spiritual tenets, moral lessons and endless wisdom. So I decided that if we were all feasting while our neighbors were fasting, I could at least make a meaningful toast befitting of the occasion.

“Let us hope that next year on Tisha B’Av, Jews will be allowed to pray on the Temple Mount,” I said, referring to the fact that today only Muslims are permitted to do so, and if any Jew is caught even mouthing words suggesting he is communing with God, Muslims and police descend upon him like the plague.

And boom, before our glasses even had a chance to clink, it was clear I had sparked a political fight. In my defense, it was one of few times I actually hadn’t intended to be provocative. I knew that the people at the table shared my views, and believed I was saying something non-controversial.

An Israeli movement known as Im Tirtzu (IMTI) has been instrumental in publicizing the infiltration of Israeli organizations perceived as human rights organizations, but, which, in reality, are actually Foreign Agent organizations bent on destroying Israel.

Im Tirtzu (Hebrew אם תרצו, lit. ‘If you will it’) is a phrase coined by Theodor Herzl — “אם תרצו, אין זו אגדה” or “If you will it, it is no dream.” Founded in 2006 by Ronen Shoval, Im Tirtzu is an Israeli “extra-parliamentary movement that works to strengthen and advance the values of Zionism in Israel.” A major component of Im Tirtzu’s efforts is devoted to “combating the campaign of de-legitimization against the State of Israel and to provide responses to anti-Zionist” declarations. With thirteen branches at universities and colleges throughout Israel, its mission is based on recognizing that it is critical “to strengthen the Zionist and Jewish identity of Israeli students and encourage them to participate in Zionist activities in the Israeli academic sphere.”

Like many American universities, Israeli institutions of higher learning are filled with left-leaning professors who display a fierce anti-Zionist bias. In 2010, American-born Israeli journalist, newspaper editor, and writer, Caroline Glick noted that

One of Im Tirtzu’s central goals is to engender an atmosphere of academic freedom and intellectual pluralism on university campuses. Over the past generation or so, those campuses, and particularly the humanities and social sciences faculties, have become hotbeds of anti-Zionist activism and intellectual terror. Stories of professorial intimidation of and discrimination against Zionist students are widespread, as are instances of outright indoctrination in the classrooms.

Responding to complaints from students, Im Tirtzu examined the Politics and Government Department faculty at Ben-Gurion University and discovered adjunct lecturers openly promoting calls for international boycotts of Israel. Better known as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, its primary purpose is the elimination of Israel.

In one of their publications, Im Tirtzu explains the concept of “political terrorism” which is defined as “actions that are not actually physically violent, but which are intended to spread terror and fear in certain countries for the achievement of political aims.” Consequently, “various political entities in Israel and abroad… carry out political actions with the aim of paralyzing Israel’s ability to defend itself.” For example, the Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Secretariat, a Palestinian Foundation located in Ramallah, “supports not only foreign agent organizations, but also Palestinian organizations who work together with the terrorist organization ‘The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.'”

Dr. Sebastian Gorka on “Defeating Jihad” — on The Glazov Gang.
Dr. Gorka unveils the winning strategy against Jihad, unmasks the Radical-in-Chief, describes the horrific scenario of a Hillary victory, and much, much more.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2016/08/14/dr-sebastian-gor…-the-glazov-gang/

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/08/12/islams-hatred-of-dogs-and-cruelty-to-animals-on-the-glazov-gang-2/