RUTHFULLY YOURS

Students at Plano Senior High School in Texas will not be allowed to wear National Honor Society stoles at their graduation because, apparently, that might make kids who were not in NHS feel left out.

In order to earn membership in the National Honors Society, students must not only maintain a high GPA, but also perform regular community service each semester. (Clearly, two accomplishments too controversial to deserve recognition.)

Now, according to local news source WFAA, students with a 3.6 GPA or higher will be allowed to wear stoles signifying that they earned a high GPA. But one NHS member, Garrett Frederick, said that that’s kind of missing the point.

“I’m not just an honor student — I’m an NHS student,” said Frederick, a graduating senior who has been a member of NHS since his sophomore year. “I worked hard.”

“I put in the hours,” he continued, referring to the 20 hours of community service he did to maintain his membership.

Frederick’s mom, KellyAnn, told WFAA that she contacted the school on behalf of her son and was told that graduates would not be wearing regalia associated with any club or organization — and that an NHS sponsor told her that school administrators wanted, as WFAA put it, “everyone to feel included in graduation and not single students out.”

But here’s the thing: Some students should be singled out, because they did accomplish more than other students.

Now, of course, the school did state that it would not allow regalia associated with any club or organization. Why should NHS be any different? Well first of all, if it were up to me, I’d say that stoles and cords should be allowed for all kinds of different involvement and achievements.

What about risks from anti-energy policies imposed in the name of stopping climate change?

President Obama continues to use “dangerous manmade climate change” to justify a massive regulatory onslaught that will “fundamentally transform” America’s energy, economic, business, industrial, social, legal and constitutional systems before he leaves office.

The more science batters alarmist claims, the more people realize that plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide makes life on Earth possible, the more China, India and other developing countries burn oil, gas and coal and increase their CO2 emissions to lift billions out of poverty, malnutrition, disease and brutally short lives – the more the administration issues draconian climate edicts.

Almost every department, agency and bureaucrat that didn’t eagerly volunteer has been dragooned to aid the campaign: from the EPA and Agriculture, Interior, Defense and State Departments, to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. The Securities and Exchange Commission is the latest agency to re-up.

Pressure from climate and environmental activist groups “persuaded” the SEC to release its initial “interpretive guidance” on climate change in January 2010. It purported to help companies decide when they must disclose how their business might be affected by actual physical climate change, by direct impacts from laws, regulations or international agreements, or indirectly by effects on business trends.

It turns out that Mars, with no help from CO2 or the Koch Brothers, has experienced massive climate change. The findings, based on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter radar data, help make the point that significant drivers of climate change have nothing to do with mankind’s puny influence. Scott K. Johnson reports at ArsTechnica:

Layers in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets record ice age histories on Earth, and the ice caps of Mars’ would tell us a great deal—except we can’t really go drill cores from the darn things. (snip) Working with images around the edges of the Martian ice caps, researchers have been able to catch glimpses of such layering. But without understanding how those glimpses connect together, the information they can reveal is limited.

A team of scientists led by Isaac Smith and Nathaniel Putzig of the Planetary Research Institute used radar data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to stitch together an X-ray-like look at the layering within the polar ice.

Most of the action was found at the northern pole, where the ice is up to 2km thick. The researchers were able to pick out layers of accumulation as well as several major breaks marking periods of disappearing ice. Since the last break about 370,000 years ago, ice has been moving back to the poles—meaning Mars is currently in an “interglacial” period.

The layer of new accumulation at the northern pole was as much as 320 meters thick. That number is much higher than early images had hinted at, but it is close to predictions made using models. This layer is thinner and a bit more complicated at the southern pole, equaling about eight percent of the volume of the northern layer. In total, there is about 87,000 cubic kilometers of newly accumulated ice—enough to cover the surface of Mars with about 60cm of it.

The Australian Academy of Science has just honoured a fresh draft of boffins, including a pair whose names will be instantly familiar to all who marvel at Big Climate’s high-volume alarmism. Professors Neville Nicholls and Ian Allison, step forward and take a bow.
At Quadrant we respect winners, so hats off to newly-elected Australian Academy of Science Fellows, Professors Neville Nicholls and Ian Allison. Both are climate catastrophists, each seemingly oblivious to the empirical research which has downgraded the CO2 climate-sensitivity guesstimate (i.e. positive feedback number) from the IPCC’s 1.5-4.5 times to barely more than unity.

These real-world observations suggest that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial levels would generate, all things being equal, a beneficial increase of about 1degC in warming, not the supposed life-frying 4-6deg rise by 2100 on which the whole multi-trillion-dollar climate scare is based.

The IPCC’s fantasy figure for sensitivity to CO2 is one of the reasons why 111 of its 114 climate model runs over-estimated the negligible warming in the 15 years to 2013. However, the main reason why the climate models are duds is that the very notion of complex and chaotic climate forces being controlled by a simple CO2-emissions dial is laughable.[1]

As for the new Academy Fellows[2], I’m not even sure I’d accept a Fellowship, if beseeched. Who would want to be a co-Fellow with Tim “Desal Plant” Flannery FAA, for example,[3] or the ABC’s Robyn Williams FAA, the latter supporting the writing of horror fiction about global warming killing off families’ beloved kittens and spaniels in 2023?

The Supreme Court is divided 4-4 on many issues, but the good news is that all eight Justices can still agree that Americans deserve their day in court to challenge intrusive government. That’s the essence of Tuesday’s unanimous ruling that the Obama Administration’s expansive interpretation of the Clean Water Act can be challenged in court.

In February 2012, the Army Corps of Engineers told the Hawkes peat-mining company that marshy land it owns in Minnesota had a “significant nexus” to the Red River 120 miles away and thus could be regulated under the Clean Water Act. Hawkes tried to challenge this determination in federal court. But the Corps said the company couldn’t do so until it had finished the Corps’s permitting process, which the Corps said would be very expensive and take years (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes).

This amounts to a pre-emptive veto of private land use. The Army Corps said the company must wait to challenge the Corps’ decision. But if Hawkes develops the land on the assumption it would win its challenge many years hence, the company runs the risk of major penalties if it loses in the end. Heads the Army Corps wins; tails Hawkes loses. CONTINUE AT SITE

When the Israeli Ministry of Exterior invited me to visit Israel as part of a delegation of European-based Arab journalists and media representatives, I accepted without hesitation. The goal of the invitation was to provide us with an opportunity to freely explore the different dimensions to life inside the state of Israel. Located in the heart of the Middle East and one of the region’s central and enduring conflicts, Israel receives a large amount of attention from neighboring peoples curious about the state itself and its management. Although major developments in international communication and accessibility of knowledge have transformed the world into a connected community that now sometimes resembles a small village, Arab media coverage of Israel continues to be characterized by a lack of clarity and misrepresentation, making it difficult for Arab citizens to truly understand the country. The persistent and recurring problems in the West Bank and Gaza are of major concern to many Arabs, but media sources often conflate the State’s controversial foreign policy with life inside the the country itself and produce dystopian visions of life inside its borders.

While not an article or analysis, the following is an honest testimony of what I saw during my visit, without influence by any person or institution. I hope to present an alternative perspective from other Arab media outlets that I have found to exaggerate and mischaracterize the realities of Israeli life.

On my flight from Rome to Tel Aviv on Israel’s El Al airlines, I thought about what awaited me and what I would see. Although I had an idea of what Israel was like and friends who have told me of their experiences working there, memories of the accumulated assumptions about the place that I had gained throughout my childhood in Egypt presented a conflicting counter narrative. I wondered which was the truth: what I now knew, or what had been instilled in us Egyptians as children. Do the “Jews” in Israel actually hate Arabs? If they found out I was Egyptian, would treat me poorly? Would I be verbally or physically abused if Israelis heard me speaking Arabic?

Halting my train of thought, a man sitting next to me with his wife asked me something in Hebrew. In English, I explained that I didn’t understand the language. The man then apologized and asked in English, “Where are you from?” When I answered that I was from Egypt, he and his wife smiled genuinely and welcomingly. These were not the fake smiles our schools, society, television, and film had attributed to Israelis and Jews.

When I arrived in Israel’s financial capital, Tel Aviv, the airport’s clean atmosphere and facilities left me wondering whether I had left Europe. Its modernity left little doubt that I had entered a developed country.

On May 31, Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes joined an estimated 2,000 diplomats, public officials, journalists, and other opinion makers from around the world at a special conference on the delegitimization of the State of Israel at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

The unprecedented nature and size of the conference, entitled “Building Bridges, Not Boycotts,” befits the scope of this growing problem. Founded nearly 11 years ago, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) seeks to lobby governments, companies, universities, artists, and others to sever ties with Israel. Supporters say that Israel alone should be singled out among the nations of the world for its alleged human rights abuses and violations of international law.

Opponents say BDS has nothing to do with actual Israeli transgressions and is “not about helping the Palestinians or bringing peace,” as Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon remarked in his address to the conference. Its “only goal is to bring an end to the Jewish state … BDS is the true face of modern anti-Semitism.” As MEF fellows Alexander H. Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky explain, the BDS movement in the West is propelled by “an unholy alliance of far-left organizations and Muslim Brotherhood-backed Islamists,” centered primarily in universities and unions.

According to a new poll, a third of Americans now think boycotting Israel is ‘justified.’

Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour boasted that conference is an “admission” that Israel is “losing ground at American universities and colleges to BDS,” and he’s right. In fact, the BDS movement has continued to make advances on U.S. campuses, winning 12 of 26 BDS referendums last year, as well as a Middle East Studies Association (MESA) resolution lauding “calls for [anti-Israel] institutional boycott, divestment, and/or sanctions” as “legitimate forms of non-violent political action.”

The success of America’s institutions of higher learning is thanks in no small part to the largesse of America’s most generous citizens — persons with names such as Rockefeller and Carnegie. That tradition continues today. But one of the names has left-wing groups in a fit.

According to UnKoch My Campus (UKMC), a group of “students and activists” dedicated to exposing “the Kochs and their vast network of front groups,” the brothers have donated to more than 300 colleges since 2005. Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times estimated the total amount at $68 million as of 2013. UKMC alleges that these donations are intended “to undermine the issues many students today care about: environmental protection, worker’s rights, healthcare expansion, and quality public education, to name just a few.”

Supposedly in the interest of “accountability,” UKMC has been using open-records laws to intimidate professors and administrators involved in any academic work associated with Koch donations.

Last year, Ross Emmett, co-director of Michigan State University’s Center for Innovation & Economic Prosperity, who used Koch money to found a seminar — the Koch Scholars — that studies political economists such as F. A. Hayek and Karl Marx, was forced to release documents to student activists. In 2014, the head of the University of Kansas’s Students for a Sustainable Future filed a state records request demanding a decade’s worth of private correspondence from Professor Art Hall, director of the Center for Applied Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business. Hall, who had received a seed grant from the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation and testified against green-energy quotas before the state legislature, sued, alleging a “fishing expedition.” A year later, he reached a settlement with the university.

And as we see, the Israel-haters from the “Australia Palestine Advocacy Network”are on the campaign trail:AIJAC, meanwhile, has posed thirteen questions a-piece to current prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his main rival, ALP leader Bill Shorten, regarding their respective policies regarding Israel.

As will be seen by clicking this link, both parties are broadly similar on most issues. There is nothing that can be considered over-the-top hostile or alarming from either of them. Nevertheless, there seems to be little doubt that the ALP is worse from a Jewish communal perspective, especially if we read between the lines.

For unlike the Coalition the ALP is increasingly dependent on the Muslim vote, especially in western Sydney and in north Melbourne. It also is dependent on the Greens, who are openly hostile to Israel. The ALP also has various left-wing anti-Israel activists.

Reading the answers to the questions, there are several areas of concern:

– Counter-terrorism”: The ALP emphasises “early intervention and community engagement” and quotes that “we can’t arrest our way to success”. These are cop-outs, and suggest that terrorists won’t be monitored and stopped as effectively under an ALP government as under the Coalition.

-Schools: There is little between the two parties, but the ALP purely needs-based policy should be looked at closely for its possible impact on Jewish day school funding.

– The ABC (Australia’s equivalent of the BBC): The Coalition hasn’t been great, not with Turnbull as Communications Minister, but it seems clear that an ALP government would adopt a hands-off policy towards the ABC, even if (as it is) it is blatantly controlled by the Left and is hostile to Israel.

– 18C: This legislation can be used, and has been used, by leftists to silence conservative columnist Andrew Bolt and others, and should be repealed or modified. It is an open invitation, under an ALP government, to silence anti-Muslim blogs. It should have been repealed by Tony Abbott, who chickened out, but at least it is not being used as a left-wing weapon.

– UN Votes: An ALP government would obviously be more critical of Israel at the UN than a Coalition government.

So, leaving aside other policy issues, it seems clear that the ALP is at least marginally worse across the board.

Meanwhile, from the BDSers in Adelaide, who are a persistent bunch indeed, a singularly amateurish piece of work kicks of a new campaign of theirs:

Americans have difficulty in grasping the random nature of the stabbings, stoning and car-ramming attacks against Israelis. This is, in large part, is due to a basic assumption that everyone aspires to the same goals of a productive life and a positive future for their family and children asserts Elan Journo, a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and its Director of Policy Research. The inability of Americans to accept that a majority of Palestinian Arabs do not share this vision undermines our ability to understand the underlying causes of the conflict. [19]

American leaders foster this common misconception. “Throughout the Middle East, there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life,” declared President Bill Clinton during his remarks at the Signing Ceremony for the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principle on the South Lawn at the White House on September 13, 1993. [20]

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright quoted Clinton’s erroneous assessment of the desire for “the quiet miracle of a normal life” at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 8, 1997. [21] After visiting a school in Ramallah, Albright thought “The young Palestinians aren’t responsible for the unfair hand history has dealt them; they’ll never achieve what is fully fair in their eyes, but the peace process is the best path to the best deal they can get.” [22]

“Throughout the Middle East, there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life,” declared President Bill Clinton.
At Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat 94 percent of Judea and Samaria; ten years later, Ehud Olmert offered Abbas 93.6 percent with a one-to-one land swap. In other words, expansion has not significantly reduced the land available for establishing a Palestinian Arab state. [23] Abrams said that there “has been no deliberate policy or government push to expand settlements; on the contrary, there have been official constraints. The government has officially approved only 9,197 residential construction permits in the entirety of Judea and Samaria (i.e., the entire West Bank including the major blocs, excluding Jerusalem) in the six years since Netanyahu took office in 2009. Approximately two-thirds of those units approved were built inside the major blocs. That means only 500 or so units were approved each year for construction outside the settlement blocs.” [24]

At the Annapolis Conference, held on November 27, 2007 at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, President George W. Bush insisted that “The Palestinian people are blessed with many gifts and talents. They want the opportunity to use those gifts to better their own lives and build a future for their children. They want the dignity that comes with sovereignty and independence. They want justice and equality under the rule of law. They want freedom from violence and fear. [25]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice revealed her own confusion about the conflict during what she thought was an off the record meeting of leading international leaders, including former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Rice indicated she had no intention of drawing historical parallels or being too introspective, but as a young girl she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama “at a time of separation and tension.”