RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Get out!!” bellowed Quamisi, jumping up and overturning the coffee service, which tumbled off the desk and clattered to the rug, the pot’s contents spilling over the colors. .…”Get out, killer of my brother!!” Weakened with pent-up rage, Quamisi leaned with both arms on the desktop. “I will have you, and I will have that coin!!”

“Of course you will,” replied Fury. His expression had turned to mild contempt. “When the sun rises in the west.” Then he turned and left the room.

Excerpt from We Three Kings

My very first completed novel, finished sometime in the early 1970s on an Underwood manual typewriter, was a dystopian one, In the Land of the Pharaohs, set in the future in a New York City under the thumb of a fascist dictatorship. I don’t even recall the year I typed the last page of it. I managed to find representation for it by a literary agent, the late Oscar Collier, who was unable to interest a publisher in the novel. The story centered on the exploits of a homicide detective, Kenticott Coldiron, who eventually encounters a gang of patriots who raid the fortress-like Federal Reserve Bank in lower Manhattan and make off with its stash of gold bullion.

The gang’s headquarters were in an abandoned subway station. The story climaxed in a shootout between Coldiron and Treasury Agent Frank Vishonn in a disused subway car. Vishonn perishes, and the gang disappears, as does Coldiron. That gang was a predecessor of what would become the Skelly gang of patriotic but Crown-defying smugglers in Sparrowhawk. I remember few of the other characters’ names. I did, however, appropriate the name Vishonn for a Virginia planter in the Sparrowhawk series, and also Gramatan. The colonial Vishonn dies, too, and violently. I eventually disposed of the manuscript of Pharaohs, after I’d written my second detective novel, First Prize, as unworthy of further submission to publishers, although some fans claim to still have a copy.

Among the favorite claims of climate-change activists is that anyone who dares to disagree with their worldview is a “denier,” and that those who reject their orthodoxy about the workings of the Earth’s atmosphere are “anti-science.”

But when it comes to the technologies that can actually reduce the volume of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, it’s obvious that the climate-change jihadis are the ones who are anti-science. For proof of that, consider the energy plan put forward on Monday by Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont and presidential candidate, who has claimed that climate change is the greatest national-security threat facing the United States.

Sanders’s energy plan comes straight from the far-left playbook. It claims that the only thing needed to deal with climate change is renewable energy. On Sanders’s website, the plan carries endorsements from Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, who may be America’s most famous climate activist, as well as Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace USA.

The gist of Sanders’s plan, which is modestly titled “Combating Climate Change to Save the Planet,” is to create a “completely nuclear-free clean energy system for electricity, heating, and transportation.” It also declares that Sanders wants “a moratorium on nuclear power plant license renewals in the United States.”

For over 30 years on American television, and before that on radio, the premier game show was called “Truth or Consequences”. For about 20 years, it was hosted by the ever-popular Bob Barker.

On the show, contestants received roughly two seconds to answer a trivia question correctly (usually an off-the-wall question that no one would be able to answer correctly, or a bad joke) before “Beulah the Buzzer” sounded. If, as was almost always the case, the contestant could not complete the “Truth” portion, there would be “Consequences,” usually a zany and embarrassing stunt. From the start, most contestants preferred to answer the question wrong in order to perform the stunt. Said the show’s producer Ralph Edwards, “Most of the American people are darned good sports.”

In many broadcasts, the stunts on Truth or Consequences included a segment with a popular, but emotional, heart-rending surprise for a contestant, that being the reunion with a long-lost relative or with an enlisted son or daughter returning from military duty overseas, particularly Vietnam.

Bob Barker would sign off the show by saying “I hope all your consequences are happy ones.”

It is my contention that in this sad era of Islamist terrorism, jihadism and attempts to form a “world-wide Caliphate”, (starting with a desire to remove the Jews from Israel, followed by a gradual demographic/migratory take-over of Europe and a myriad of mini-wars in Africa, the Philippines and other Asian countries where Muslims seek the submission of their neighbors), that the idea of accepting hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants to Canada and the United States, has some consequences, and these should be discussed, frankly and honestly.

On Tuesday I appeared at the US Senate at a hearing called by Senator Ted Cruz’s sub-committee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. Senator Cruz introduced me as “an international bestselling author, a Top Five jazz recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist”. In fact, at that moment, I was America’s Number One jazz vocalist, but I thought it was a bit early in the proceedings to jump up and demand the record be corrected.

You can read various accounts of this event across the Internet from one perspective or another. Among the climate wallahs, there is a lively back-and-forth at Judith Curry’s pad, at Anthony Watts’, Bishop Hill’s, and Junk Science. On the politics of it – ie, Republicans and Democrats – I have a couple of thoughts, one of which has to do with the 2016 election. But that is a separate subject, so I’ll leave it for another day.

There was an altercation underway as I entered the room, when two Greenpeace activists attempted to get in the face of Professor William Happer about something or other. You can see it here. It is, to be legalistic about it, witness-tampering, and a sadly appropriate start to a hearing that at least partly addressed the climate of intimidation in global-warming science.

As for the hours that followed, I’ll let the reports from all sides speak for themselves, and just make a couple of points. On the morning of the event, Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat and Ranking Member, sent a message, warning me that I was obligated to “respect the decorum of the Senate”. I’ve been invited to Buckingham Palace, the White House and parliaments around the world, and nobody has ever felt it necessary to pre-issue such a warning. In the event, the US Senate has no “decorum” worthy of respect, as we’ll get to in a moment.

You can find my written testimony here. A few excerpts. First, the general overview:

Senator Sasse , formerly a college professor ran and won in 2014 on tough policy and principles…this is a man with a future in the Senate and in the country….rsk

Tonight, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) spoke on the Senate floor, criticizing Washington’s lack of urgency and seriousness in confronting the growing threat of militant Islam.
Remarks as prepared for delivery:

I rise today to speak about San Bernardino; about the decades-long fight that our free society now faces; and about our dangerous unwillingness to tell the truth about the nature of this battle – about who our enemy is.

We are at war.

The American people already know this. Our enemies obviously know this. It is only this town – where our so-called leaders dawdle and bicker, pander and misprioritize – it is only this town that seems confused. Washington ignores what it cannot escape.

And that is both a tragedy and a crisis. Because no war is winnable when you pretend that you are not even in one.

As Islamic terrorist attacks increase in the West, so, too, does the obfuscation of Middle East studies academia. By employing the predictable tropes of poverty, alienation, workplace violence, the need for gun control, bullying, “Islamophobia,” and other alleged Western ills, academics avoid assigning responsibility to the actual perpetrators or their Islamist ideology.

Such has been the reaction to the December 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which authorities were slow to describe as a terrorist attack, despite early evidence that married shooters Syed Rizwan Farooq and Tashfeen Malik had radical sympathies, including with ISIS. This led to speculation that, not coincidentally, omitted the actual culprit.

Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, immediately jumped on the gun control bandwagon and – echoing President Obama’s recent gaffe following the latest Paris attacks – claimed that mass shootings occur only in the U.S.: “This is everyday [sic], everywhere in America – and no where [sic] else in the world.” He decried America’s “deadly fetish” and “gun obsession,” urging readers to “Stand up to #NRA,” as if the National Rifle Association’s adherence to 2nd Amendment rights were the cause of Islamic terrorism.

Fantasy Islam: A game in which an audience of non-Muslims wish with all their hearts that Islam was a “Religion of Peace,” and a Muslim strives to fulfill that wish by presenting a personal version of Islam that has little foundation in Islamic Doctrine.

In December 2015, a small group of “Muslim reformers” met in Washington DC to discuss the reform of Islam. They stated they were “Muslims who live in the 21st century” who were “in a battle for the soul of Islam.” They proclaimed that they stood for “a respectful, merciful and inclusive interpretation of Islam.” They called their meeting the Summit of Western Muslim Voices of Reform and named themselves the Muslim Reform Movement. On December 4, 2015, fourteen “founding authors” from this movement signed the Declaration for Muslim Reform, laying out their beliefs.

At the conclusion of the event, two participants posted a signed copy of this Declaration on the door of the Islamic Center of Washington DC (a la Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle church in 1517). The document was quickly removed, and so far there has been little, if any, support for this reform movement from the greater Muslim-American community.

Here is the reason for that lack of support: the Preamble and Declaration are only two pages in length. But in those two pages these “founding authors” fundamentally rejected the commands of Allah in the Koran and the teachings of Muhammad in an effort to create their own Fantasy Islam that is more compatible with Western, Judeo-Christian values. Let’s examine some parts of that Declaration for Muslim Reform.

Israel’s relations with Sweden, problematic for some time, took a downward turn last week when something Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, said was interpreted by the Israeli government to mean that Israel was carrying out extrajudicial executions on Palestinians in the latest “Knife Intifada” by Palestinians against random Israelis.

The Swedish prime minister said that Wallstrom’s comments had been misunderstood. “The Minister for Foreign Affairs did not, as alleged, say that extrajudicial executions occur in Israel,” Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven and Wallstrom said in a statement.

Let’s look back and see what Foreign Minister Wallstrom actually said. Addressing Swedish lawmakers on Friday, Wallstrom denounced the almost daily Palestinian knife, gun, or car-ramming attacks, but urged Israel to avoid excessive force. According to the official English translation of her statement provided by the Swedish Foreign Ministry,

And likewise, the response must not be of the kind — and this is what I say in other situations where the response is such that it results in extrajudicial executions or is disproportionate in that the number of people killed on that side exceeds the original number of deaths many times over.

The student censors at Yale claimed a scalp—pardon the micro-aggression—this week when lecturer Erika Christakis resigned her teaching position on childhood education. She had been pilloried for asking in an email if students weren’t too sensitive if they are offended by politically incorrect Halloween costumes.

Yale’s powers-that-be ducked and covered in response, but the news on campus isn’t all bad, according to a forthcoming report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire). The foundation’s annual survey of 440 colleges—comprising 336 four-year public and 104 private institutions—finds that the share of schools maintaining “severely restrictive” speech codes has dropped to below 50% (49.3%) for the first time in the organization’s history. As many as three-quarters of colleges boasted restrictive speech codes in 2007 and 55% did as of last year.

Another positive sign: The number of schools receiving Fire’s highest “green light” rating has nearly tripled since 2006 to 22, up from 18 last year. These beacons include Purdue University, the University of Virginia and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. More than twice as many colleges have received ratings upgrades as downgrades this year.

Two news items over the past two weeks provide timely reminders of why Israel’s willingness to take military action in its own neighborhood makes it an unparalleled strategic asset for the West – including those Westerners who deplore military action and prefer to rely exclusively on diplomacy. At first glance, neither report has anything to do with Israel. Yet both underscore its vital role in Western security.

The first was a New York Times report on the Islamic State’s efforts to obtain red mercury – a material that, “when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives,” is rumored to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” Proliferation experts all say red mercury is a hoax, but it’s a hoax widely believed in many corners of the globe. The terrorist group was therefore willing to pay ‘‘whatever was asked’’ to procure it, as one Islamic State official told the arms dealer he tasked with the mission. Nor was this a passing fancy: The official “kept inquiring about red mercury for more than a year … pressing for results” until he disappeared (presumably because he was killed).