RUTHFULLY YOURS

A new study published Monday explains why sea levels have not been rising as much as predicted — “thirsty continents” are absorbing extra water. Perhaps this discovery will encourage humility among climate scientists.

Tom Hartsfield, a scientist and writer with a PhD in physics from the University of Texas, explained that this isn’t a failing of science so much as a call for nuance in a politicized field.

Our global system of air currents, ocean currents, cloud patterns, resonant temperature cycles, energy storage and release mechanisms, and further processes is mind-bogglingly complex.

Presently, the best climate models fall many orders of magnitude short of the power and intricacy needed to effectively predict the long-term climate patterns that emerge from the interactions of all these planetary systems. And that’s not a failure of science; it’s just the reality of how tough the problem is.

But there is a failure of science occurring as well, Hartsfield notes.

The failure is the lack of transparency and honesty about how feeble these models are and how much we should stake on their all-too-fallible forecasts. Thus the same problem continues: climate science has once again botched a prediction that its models were underequipped to make.

We’re getting to the point where “the dog ate my homework” is going to look better than what the warmists are coming up with to explain why doomsday is a bit late in arriving. But trust them, it will arrive. Err, pretty soon…

You will remember that global warming isn’t absent; it is just in hiding, deep underneath the world’s oceans, just waiting to emerge. And now, to explain the downright embarrassing fact that that the sea level rise isn’t flooding poor island nations the way it was supposed to, we now have – ta-da! – “thirsty continents.” Why, those tricky continents, it turns out, actually absorb water in their soil. Who knew?

Sean Greene explains in the Los Angeles Times:

Despite the accelerated melting of glaciers and ice sheets, sea levels aren’t rising quite as quickly as scientists anticipated. The reason: Continents are absorbing more of the water before it flows into the seas, according to a new study.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory figured this out by measuring changes in Earth’s gravity with twin satellites orbiting the Earth in tandem. Over the past decade, thirsty continents have slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20%, or about 1 millimeter per year, according to the study published in Science.

Okay, it’s not “the dog ate my global warming,” but it is an attempt to explain away yet another failure of a doomsday scenario that was used to panic the public into uncritically accepting economy-killing measures that would, just coincidentally, vastly increase the power of governments over all economic activity.

It may be difficult for many to relate to the rarefied air of Oxford University’s student clubs, but nearly everyone will understand the gravity of the decision made by one leader of such a group who, in his resignation notice, called the club on its hideous anti-Semitism.

Perhaps more shocking, sadly, than that the anti-Semitism was so thinly veiled is that the student who resigned from the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, was willing to go public with his denunciation, which he delivered on Facebook on Monday, Feb. 15.

Chalmers, a second year student in Oriel College, Oxford, explained that the trigger for his resignation was the decision earlier the same evening by the OULC to endorse Israel Apartheid Week, which begins next week.

The Oxford student was horrified that the Club chose to endorse Israel Apartheid Week. IAW typically includes the harassment of Jewish students and provides a forum for bringing anti-Semitic speakers to campus. This decision, Chalmers explained, belied the claims some had made that the OULC was interested in improving an increasingly intolerant atmosphere.

Even prior to the vote to endorse the famously distorted annual attack week targeted against Israel were numerous incidents of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel expressions by members of the OULC, including members in leadership positions, cited by Chalmers.

Daniel Greenfield, in his Sultan Knish columns, writes about Islam from a perspective that is 100% objective and rational, a perspective I wish more people were capable of grasping. They don’t need to emulate his writing style or acquire as in-depth knowledge of Islam as his to appreciate the value he offers readers, indeed, offers the nation. Grasping the unchanging and unchangeable nature of Islam is a simple exercise in non-contradictory identification. A is A. Islam is Islam.

“Bad” Islam is just “Good” Islam in a bad mood, he writes. “Bad” Islam has nothing to do with Islam. It’s as though “Bad” Islam were not quoting from the Koran, but from the Peanuts cartoons and the translation always gets skewed in the process.

Greenfield is not an Islam-basher for the sake of bashing Islam. With his unbeatable gift for irony, he unleashes the same no-holds-barred passion as he bashes phony politicians (is there a difference?), and phony technologies (like solar and wind power), and phony humanitarians who profit from phony charities and leave chump change for the alleged beneficiaries (re Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, the Clintons, George Clooney, and two or three dozen more extraordinarily rich people who want to “do good”). The private organizations “resettling” Muslim “refugees” in American cities, and which are paid and subsidized by the U.S. government, are a case in point.

You remember Melissa Click, right? The University of Missouri unlovely who called for “muscle” to 86 a student journalist just trying to do his job. Turns out it’s not the first time the assistant professor of communication has, er, communicated on behalf of the radical Left:

The University of Missouri assistant professor who attracted nationwide attention and faced suspension from her teaching job for a November confrontation with a student journalist is in more hot water.

The Columbia Police Department released video from an October protest on campus in which assistant professor Melissa Click can be seen cursing at a cop who is trying to clear a roadway on campus after Click and a group of student demonstrators locked arms to block a road during the university’s homecoming parade in October.

In the police video footage, first published by the Columbia Missourian, Click can be seen screaming profanities at an officer who placed an arm on her as he told her to get back on the sidewalk. Less than two weeks later, the assistant communication professor was captured on video calling for “some muscle” to help her eject a student journalist at a protest site on the university’s quad.

Click is in the midst of applying for tenure at the university. Hank Foley, the university’s interim chancellor, previously resisted calls for her dismissal, saying her future with the university should play out through the tenure process. But after the release of the police video footage, Foley in a statement on Sunday said “he will address these new revelations with the Board of Curators as they work to complete their own review of the matter.”

In the topsy-turvy world as seen from the White House, Islamists such as Erdogan are regarded, incredibly, as the solution to extremist violence. Meanwhile, even as the US abets Shia militias in Iraq, those same fighters become US enemies if they venture into Syria
Last week, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan harangued Barack Obama in a very public tirade, warning that if America continued to support the Kurdish PYD-YPG in Syria it would be responsible for the creation of “a sea of blood”. Almost any president in the history of the United States could be guaranteed to recognise that Erdoğan’s millennialist ideology, not to mention megalomania, has transformed the fellow into a cross between Macbeth and King Lear. Almost any president apart from Obama, that is.

President Obama has, for years, consented to Turkey’s intervention in the Syrian civil war on the side of “moderate terrorists” — Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar ash-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and so on. Erdoğan obviously desires Bashar al-Assad’s regime overthrown and replaced by radical Islamist outfits, à la Libya. How that might serve the interests of America and the rest of the world is another matter altogether. President Obama’s “special friendship” with the Muslim Brotherhood-associated Erdoğan leads some to infer that the current incumbent in the White House might himself be an MB man.

There is certainly a case that Barack Obama pandered to MB bigotry in his 2009 Cairo Speech and praised with faint damns Morsi’s MB government (2012-13). But it’s complicated. Barack Obama might have lamented the dawn of the post-MB era in Egypt, but Saudi Arabia actively embraced it, the Saudi Royal Family’s favoured Islamic fundamentalism, being Wahhabism rather than the Haraki (activist) Salafism of the MB. Nevertheless, President Obama has acquiesced to a very unsavoury alliance with the Saudis in Yemen’s civil war, which mostly involves hitting al-Qaeda units with drone strikes and defending a corrupt government against the Iranian-backed Houthi insurgency.

Yesterday, February 14, was Valentine’s Day, the sacred day that intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and affection for one another. If you’re thinking about making a study of how couples celebrate this day, the Muslim world and the milieus of the radical Left are not the places you should be spending your time. Indeed, it’s pretty hard to outdo jihadists and “progressives” when it comes to the hatred of Valentine’s Day. And this hatred is precisely the territory on which the contemporary romance between the Left and Islamic fanaticism is formed.

The train is never late: every year that Valentine’s comes around, the Muslim world erupts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing everything in their power to suffocate the festivity that comes with the celebration of private romance. Imams around the world thunder against Valentine’s every year — and the celebration of the day itself is literally outlawed in Islamist states.

This year, for example, Pakistan banned Valentine’s Day as an “insult” to Islam and warned that “strict” action would be taken against anyone daring to celebrate the day in any part of Islamabad. While in the past, Valentine’s Day activities were disrupted by Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s main religious party, it was the first time this year that the state actually got involved to ban celebration of the day. In Iran, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia this year, and as always, Valentine’s Day was outlawed. Under the Islamic regime in Iran, for instance, any sale or promotion of Valentine’s Day related items, including the exchange of gifts, flowers and cards, was illegal. The Iranian police warned retailers, as they do every year, against the promotion of Valentine’s Day celebrations.

Very few Americans have ever heard of Avigdor “Yanush” Ben Gal, who died yesterday in Israel at age 79. But Ben Gal is an important figure in 20th-century history, who directly contributed to the end of the Cold War and fall of the Soviet Union, albeit in an indirect way.

Ben Gal was an officer in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) Armored Corps. Like many Israelis of his generation, he got to Israel in a roundabout way. As a boy, he fled Poland as a refugee with his parents into the Soviet Union at the start of World War II. His parents died along the way, but with his sister Ben Gal made it to the Palestine Mandate. He served in the IDF in the 1956 Suez Campaign, the Six-Day War of 1967 (in which he was badly wounded), and the War of Attrition that followed. He won his place in military history a few years later, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Then, as commander of the IDF’s crack 7th Armored Brigade, he arguably saved the Jewish state from destruction, and both established and proved the tactical and operational concepts for defending the West against mass Soviet-style tank assaults.

At about 2 p.m. on October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt launched a coordinated surprise assault on Israel. IDF forces faced overwhelming odds on both fronts, but Israel had some breathing room in Sinai against Egypt. Not so on the Golan Heights, where Ben Gal deployed with his brigade. There only a few scant kilometers separated the front line from Israel proper. The Syrians threw 30,000 troops and 1,500 tanks (supported by as many artillery pieces) at the Israeli line. That line was thinly held by the under-strength 188th Barak Armored Brigade in the southern Golan and by Ben Gal’s brigade to the north. Between the two units, the Israelis deployed 177 tanks, about 50 artillery pieces, and fewer than 3,000 infantrymen.

In three days of bloody fighting (in which the Barak Brigade was effectively wiped out, with both its commander and deputy commander killed in action), Ben Gal held the front together with surviving elements of the 188th and his own brigade. In this action, Ben Gal’s tanks savaged the Syrian assault, destroying 600-800 tanks (plus hundreds of other armored vehicles). Ultimately, the 7th Armored stopped the Syrian attack cold, though at the conclusion of the fight, fewer than a dozen IDF tanks were still runners, the rest destroyed, damaged, or broken down. A day after the defensive fight concluded, the surviving tanks of the 7th Armored, along with reserves, counter-attacked into Syria.

This review appeared in the Chicago Jewish Star

Nothing Abides: Perspectives on the Middle East and Islam, by Daniel Pipes. Transaction Publishers, 2015.
More doggedly than any other expert on Middle East affairs Daniel Pipes has riveted his attention upon the threat that radical Islam poses to civilized life in nearly every corner of the globe. The Boston Globe was not indulging in hyperbole when it stated that “If Pipes’ admonitions had been heeded, there might never have been a 9/11.” He is the polar opposite to the willfully blind politicians who, as if to prove that the greatest deceivers are the self-deceivers, refuse even to identify the enemy by name and even (in Europe) impugn any criticism of the world’s most intolerant religion as a violation of human rights. Faced by the naked aggression of a militant and aggressive form of Islam, our own president, secretary of state, and those who now aspire to perpetuate their policies in Washington keep insisting that “climate change” is our main national-security concern. (“Bernie” Sanders would go one step further and , according to the Wall Street Journal of January 20, 2016, open “criminal investigation of climate dissenters.”)

Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum, and has taught at several universities as well as the US Naval War College. He is a public speaker of prodigious energy and singular courage in the face of Islamist intimidation. He has also made a major contribution to the debate over American foreign policy about how to put an end to the 68-year old Arab war against Israel, which has forced its citizens to carry on their lives under a constant burden of peril such as no other nation has had to endure (unless we count the pre-Holocaust Jews of Eastern Europe as a nation without nationhood).

Nothing Abides is a compendium of essays published by Pipes between 1994 and 2014. The title alludes to the “instability, volatility, and perpetual motion [that] continue to characterize Muslim communities.” It also takes for granted Samuel Huntington’s definition of the borders of “the religion of peace” as the “ceaseless wars waged by Muslims against non-Muslims, from the Christians of Iberia to the Hindus of Bali.” The essays are grouped in five sections: The Arab-Israeli Conflict; Middle Eastern Politics; Islam in Modern Life; Islam in the West; Individuals and American Islam. (Lest there be any confusion about Pipes’ position with respect to Muslims, he has encapsulated it thus: “My slogan is that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution.”)
Section 1, “The Arab-Israeli Conflict,” is likely to be of most immediate interest to readers of the Chicago Jewish Star. One of its topics is the (interminable) “peace process,” the peace processors and promoters, whose careers, in journalism and politics, demonstrate that in this realm nothing succeeds like failure, and (so Pipes argues) that “what is called the ‘peace process’ should actually be called the ‘war process.’”

President Obama and Secretary Kerry intend to advance recognition of an independent Palestinian state by January 20, 2017, the end of Obama’s second term, irrespective of its adverse impact upon the national security and homeland security of the US. Therefore, the President turned down a request by the Senate Democratic Leader, Harry Reid, to make a commitment to veto any UN Security Council resolution, which calls for an independent Palestinian state. According to the President, and the US foreign policy establishment, a Palestinian state would enhance stability, moderation, peace, and democracy.

How credible and reality- based is this assessment/expectation?

In 1993, Senator John Kerry and the US foreign policy establishment were convinced that Arafat – a role model for international terrorism – would respond to Israel’s unprecedented Oslo Accords concessions by ”transforming himself from lawlessness to statesmanship.” However, their assessment was discredited by an unprecedented wave of Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas-engineered hate-education, incitement and (the resulting) terrorism, which still persists today.

In 2011, President Obama, Secretary Clinton and Senator Kerry believed that the eruption of turbulence on the Arab Street was an Arab Spring, youth revolution, Facebook revolution, transitioning the Arab World to democracy: “Through the moral force of nonviolence, the people of the [Middle East] have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades….” However, their assessment has been disproved by the reality of an anti-US, anti-human rights, terror-driven and Islamic supremacy-inspired Arab Tsunami, led by ruthless minority regimes, followed/cheered by obedient and politically insignificant Muslim majority.