RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Earth will do exactly as it pleases.
“Shakespeare made a reckless ruler pull down his kingdom on his head, [and we are adding] a hundred and twenty excess parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.”

But it is generally acknowledged that it’s horrifyingly ignorant to think that we can dial in a nice climate by turning the CO2 adjustment knob. Indeed, the current and projected CO2 levels are at the very low end of the range for the last 600 million years. Global temperature is also at the low end of that range. More recently, we are at the low end of the temperature decline since the Holocene Optimum 8,000 years ago. Backing up, the Eemian age 120,000 years ago was much warmer, and sea levels were 6 meters higher, and CO2 was around 280 ppm.

What is obvious is that the Earth will do exactly as it pleases, and we have no ability to predict that or, consequently, to control it. We can influence it, usually but not always for the worse. Furthermore, we have no idea if the current 15°C is the optimum climate. Higher temperatures over the last 200,000 years have been associated with improvements in human welfare. There has been no tipping point, not even at the P-T Extinction Event 250 million years ago, when the temperature briefly blipped past the previous 22°C lid (in effect for hundreds of millions of years) to at least 28°C. More interestingly, there has been no tipping point on the downside, when Snowball Earth increased the albedo so drastically.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ignited a firestorm last week at oral arguments for Fisher v. University of Texas, a case concerning that school’s affirmative-action policies. The media pounced after Justice Scalia suggested that it might be not be a bad thing if fewer African-Americans were admitted to the University of Texas. Many rushed to call the comments racist.

Subsequent reports clarified that Mr. Scalia had been invoking the “mismatch” hypothesis, which posits that students who receive large admissions preferences—and who therefore attend a school that they wouldn’t have gotten into otherwise—often end up hurt by the academic gap between them and their college peers. But on the whole even this coverage has spread confusion.
The mismatch theory is not about race. It is about admissions preferences, full stop. Mismatch can affect students who receive preferential admission based on athletic prowess, low socioeconomic status, or alumni parents. An important finding of mismatch research is that when one controls for the effect of admissions preferences, racial differences in college performance largely disappear. Far from stigmatizing minorities, mismatch places the responsibility for otherwise hard-to-explain racial gaps not on the students, but on the administrators who put them in classrooms above their qualifications.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, and a host of others believe that Islam can and should be reformed. But how?

The idea of reforming Islam is not entirely new. But Islam cannot be reformed the way Christianity was. For one, Islam claims that it is the perfect eternal faith for mankind. Divisions have happened and will continue to occur in Islam. Yet reformation has not happened in nearly 1,400 years and is not going to happen. In the mind of millions of Muslims, Islam is carved in granite, just the way it is. No change. Allah’s book is sealed.

About the only universal agreement that exists among Islamic scholars is that every word of the Qur’an is the word of Allah and is not subject to human modification, ever. The Hadith enjoys a similar sacrosanct standing. And of course, the faithful Muhammad’s conduct as recorded in the Sunna is the model to be emulated. Hence, one can pick and choose, but one cannot discard or revise any part of the Islamic scripture. For this reason, a Martin Luther-type reformation has not happened and will not likely ever happen within Islam.

Numerous people have tried it in every imaginable way. The Mu’tazelis tried it, the Sufis tried it, and hundreds of old and new schools tried it, and they all failed. Many open-minded Muslim intellectuals have tried reforming Islam, including Muhammad Ali of Egypt, Sayyid al-Qimni, Nasr Abu Zayd, Khalil Abdel-Karim, Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohammed Arkoun, Mohammed Shahrour, and Ahmed Subhy Mansour. Sheikh Mansour was fired from Al-Azhar University after expressing his Hadith rejector views. Edip Yuksel, Gamal al-Banna, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, Ahmed Al-Gubbanchi, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, and Faraj Foda, Taha were hanged in 1985 under the sharia regime of Jaafar al-Nimeiri, and Foda was assassinated in 1992 by al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. Persian scholar and historian Ahmad Kasravi was also assassinated by Fada’iyan-e Islam (the devotees of Islam).

There is a certain class of academic for whom historical references to oil become a clarion call to rise up, denounce, and publish. A recent book talk proved the point. Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, pronounced himself “lucky” to have previewed the work of the speaker, Irene Gendzier, professor emerita in the department of political science at Boston University:

She has . . . discovered things that those of us who thought we knew something about Palestine often found a revelation.

High praise from the former PLO spokesman for Gendzier’s new book, Dying to Forget, Oil, Power, Palestine and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East. A mix of students, colleagues, friends of the author, and the public totaling about forty-five squeezed into a tight space on the second floor of a bookstore near Columbia.

Gendzier began by lamenting the recent ISIS attack on Paris, only to pivot to the upheaval currently overwhelming the Middle East:

[W]hat about all the other events taking place? What about Beirut? What about Yemen? What about Iraq? What about Syria? Why are we selective? The selectivity of the mourning comes with something more. . . . A kind of indifference about . . . “the deaths of others.”. . . [T]he terrible despair that comes from those that are permanently uprooted and displaced, and exist nowhere as a result of wars. We seem not to think about them.

For the fourth time this year, the Environmental Protection Agency has been accused of breaking laws governing its operations.

Last July, the agency was accused of colluding with left wing environmental groups to push its new carbon regulations. In October, a federal appeals court said the EPA broke the law when it illegally approved a pesticide.

In August, the EPA was responsible for a toxic spill at an abandoned mine that polluted rivers in three states.

Now the Government Accountability Office reports that the agency’s social media blitz to approve the new rules governing the protection of just about every acre of water in the country violated strictures against lobbying.

Fox News:

The EPA’s campaign violated restrictions against lobbying and propaganda by federal agencies, the Government Accountability Office said in a 26-page report. The agency blitzed social media in a campaign that urged the public to submit comments on the draft water rule. The effort reached at least 1.8 million people.

Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma said the GAO finding confirms what he has long suspected: “that EPA will go to extreme lengths and even violate the law to promote its activist environmental agenda.”

The Islamic State continues to perpetrate its barbaric terror right before our eyes, referencing Islamic texts and teachings as it commits its evil acts. The Obama administration and the U.S. media, meanwhile, continue their leftist mantra after each Islamic terror attack: “This is not Islam.”

In response to this mass denial in our government and culture, we are running The Glazov Gang’s feature interview with Dr. Ari Babaknia, an Iranian-born doctor who wrote and published a 4-volume book in Farsi “The Holocaust” (which in English is “Humanity, NOT”).

He discusses “Humanity, NOT,” which takes an in-depth look, in words and images, at the captured emotions of the victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and survivors of the Holocaust, told in their own words.

Dr. Babaknia focuses on the evil of genocide, the indifference of man in the face of evil, and when silence is not an option. The point is emphasized in the discussion that these are phenomena directly interlinked with our civilization’s silence and impotence today in the face of Islamic Jihad:

Defending his decision to address the HaaretzQ-New Israel Fund conference in New York on ‎Monday, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin called the left-wing newspaper, which he said he has ‎been reading for the last 70 years, a “beacon of freedom.” ‎

He got that wrong. Israel is the “beacon of freedom” that enables such a publication to grace its ‎pages with content that, when not crossing the line into treason, is merely shameful in its blatant ‎delegitimization of the Jewish state.‎

That its conference was engaged in doing the same came as no surprise. Nor was the fact that ‎organizers removed the Israeli flag from the podium area at the behest of Palestinian Authority ‎chief “peace” negotiator Saeb Erekat.‎

The contemptible reaction of Middle East studies professors to the Charlie Hebdo and kosher market massacres in Paris earlier this year was repeated with the brutal ISIS attacks on Paris in November. The deaths of 130 people resulted not in unequivocal condemnation, but in apologias for Islam, dire warnings of “Islamophobia,” and anti-Western equivocation.

Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, complained about Western media coverage, given numerous ISIS attacks throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and asked inanely, “What about my pain?” While it’s hardly unusual for the Western media to focus on the West, it is Safi and his academic cohorts who routinely omit or downplay ISIS’s misdeeds so as to avoid addressing its theological underpinnings. Indeed, his hackneyed comments on that front were true to form:

Yes, the members of ISIS come from Muslim backgrounds. No, their actions cannot be justified on the basis of the 1400 years of Islamic tradition. Every serious scholar of Islam has confirmed this clearly, and unambiguously. ISIS is about as Muslim as the KKK is Christian.

This week’s Supreme Court arguments cast a harsh light on the confused jurisprudence of using race as a factor in college admissions. Forty years of compromises have created a gigantic mess.

Everything you think you know about affirmative action is wrong.

But don’t worry, no one else is clear about it either. The fact is, affirmative action is a mess, and the case the Supreme Court heard this week, Fisher v. University of Texas, put the whole hot mess on vivid display. In fact, the oral argument—which ran overlong and featured numerous outrageous statements, mostly from Justice Scalia—turned out to be the perfect mirror for the court’s jurisprudence on the subject: long, sloppy, and unlikely to get better soon.

Affirmative action, as most of us know it, seems pretty straightforward. The best illustration of it is a cartoon that’s been making the rounds lately of three people—one short, one tall, and one in-between—trying to watch a baseball game from behind the outfield fence. In one frame, labeled “equality,” each stands on a crate. That means the tall person can see clearly, the medium-height one not as well, and the short one is blocked.

In the second frame, labeled “justice,” the tall person’s crate has been given to the short person, who now stands on two. Now everyone can see.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama declared with almost classical hubris that his ascent to higher office marked the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” So naturally he went into the Paris global-warming talks with appropriate fanfare and theatricality. In reality, President Obama’s approach to global warming is like his approach to health-care reform: He is willing to put his name to any agreement that lets him declare victory without bothering too much about the details.

The accord reached in Paris fails in three key ways: It cannot satisfy an elementary cost-benefit analysis; it does not serve the national interests of the United States; and the Obama administration is seeking to bind the United States to a treaty while insisting that it is not a treaty and thereby shutting Congress out of its proper role in ratifying such accords. For these reasons, the Paris agreement should be considered dead on arrival, and Congress should make it clear that the United States will not consider itself legally bound by it for the simple reason that it has not been legally adopted.