RUTHFULLY YOURS

How, in the midst of alarmists’ tireless headline-grabbing, can common folk form a considered view? The truth is that we can’t. We are all in the hands and at the mercy of the political elite. That should make us all feel safe in our beds
I find it taxing to discuss the climate with those who are unabashed global warmists (GWs). I don’t mind disagreements per se but, I am sorry, most GWs are muddled-headed wombats when the matter proceeds beyond the notion that the planet is warming to what should be done about it, the practicalities and the cost. I want to help.

Categorisation is a helpful tool to make sense of complicated situations. In this case it might help to set down a broad classification of beliefs. Now any broad classification involves a fair degree of fudging. Bear that in mind.

I will go in just six steps; from the extreme GWs to the sceptics. Attributions are indicated in brackets.

On my way back from David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in Charleston, I opened up the Post and Courier newspaper to Section D, entitled “Faith & Values.” What struck me was an article on the second page reporting that the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) had adopted a resolution supporting transgender rights. The resolution calls for congregations and camps to have gender-neutral bathrooms, use gender-neutral language, and train religious school staff on gender issues.

I have no idea what any of this gender identity noise really means, but I have concluded that this whole movement (together with the delegitimization of Israel, the legalization of marijuana, demonizing those who are offended by Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue trade, push for single-payer health care, and prosecution of those who question the scientific basis of man-caused global warming) is just one giant progressive wave to further supplant Judeo-Christian values and alter the moral fabric of our society.

Jews are being stabbed, run over, and shot on streets across Israel on a daily basis; they are fleeing Europe en masse as anti-Semitic attacks have become common place; and BDS (the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement) is flourishing across the globe as the number of hate groups continues to grow and their influence continues to be peddled. The streets of American cities are becoming unsafe, as Jews become victims of attacks with Molotov cocktails and knives, our college campuses have become anti-Semitic centers of pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas hate including violence and intimidation by members of Muslim hate groups, and liberal American Jews, including mainstream Jewish establishments, welcome anti-Israel groups into their open tents.

By all means, read Bill McKibben’s victory proclamation on Keystone XL posted by the New Yorker, first for its infantile analysis.

• He sees Keystone as a harbinger, which it surely is: President Obama waited seven years to kill the pipeline, then did so when he no longer had to face voters and when gasoline prices are near an all-time low in real terms. If abundant fossil fuels is what it takes to afford Mr. McKibben such victories, well, you can see the paradox.

• He celebrates the divestment movement as if it means anything. But buyers will always materialize for profitable businesses. Anyway, 80% of the world’s fossil-fuel reserves are not held by publicly traded businesses, but by state-run companies—run by states that have never shown interest in anything but revenue maximization.
• He thinks solar is somehow changing the energy picture, but for every additional unit of solar the world consumed in 2014, it consumed 325 additional units of fossil energy.

• He is fooled by warnings from the BlackRock investment house and Mark Carney of the Bank of England about fossil-fuel reserves becoming “stranded assets,” as if energy shares are priced in the expectation that 100% of hydrocarbon reserves will be produced.

Missouri, Yale, and America’s Cultural Revolution

The pathological narcissism of American college students has found a potentially devastating new source of power in the sports-industrial complex. University of Missouri president Timothy Wolfe resigned Monday morning in the face of a threatened boycott by black football players of an upcoming game. Wolfe’s alleged sin was an insufficient appreciation for the “systematic oppression” experienced by students of color at the university. Campus agitators also alleged that racial slurs had been directed at black students and feces had been smeared in the shape of a swastika in a dormitory.

The university’s board of overseers had convened in emergency session to discuss the football boycott;Wolfe resigned before meeting with them, issuing the standard mea culpa: “I take full responsibility for this frustration, and I take full responsibility for the inaction that has occurred.” According to the New York Times, the university could have lost more than $1 million had it forfeited its football game with Brigham Young University on Saturday. A group called “Concerned Faculty” had walked off the job in solidarity with the student activists and was calling on other faculty to join them.

“When our student societies decide they want to put on events, they ask ‘do you think there is any particular risk, or do you think that there is any reason to think that any student would feel threatened or unsafe at inviting a particular speaker’?” Those Orwellian words were spoken by the president of Students Union at Leeds University in England to David Aaronovitch of the London Times. They could, however, have been spoken by campus leaders, administrators or professors at any U.S. university or college.

We should all subscribe to the concept of diversity. Typically, we think of it in terms of race, religion, place of national origin, sexual preference, socio-economic backgrounds and/or the physically and mentally challenged. We ignore, however, diversity of opinion. The word implies tolerance for those different from ourselves. There is no question that diversity strengthens us as individuals and as a nation. Arthur Brooks wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Scholarly studies have piled up showing that race and gender diversity in the workplace can increase creative thinking and improve performance.”

Right before Monday’s meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, the two leaders gave perfunctory opening statements to the press.Due to their famously strained relations, which hit rock bottom when Netanyahu addressed Congress in March, the much-touted tete-a-tete has been leading the news in Israel for reasons beyond the aid package and Palestinians.

To sweeten the pot for Netanyahu detractors gleefully awaiting another Obama hissy fit, a pre-trip scandal erupted over the appointment of Ran Baratz as public diplomacy czar. Netanyahu’s selection of Baratz to fill this role caused an international stir when it emerged that the person about to make Israel’s case to the world had spent years posting very undiplomatic diatribes on Facebook against both U.S. and Israeli officials.

So, when Obama and Netanyahu exchanged pleasantries and spoke a few scripted lines prior to meeting privately, everyone — myself included — was hanging on their every nuance for clues. And leave it to Obama to provide a whopper of a glimpse into the workings of his mind.

Jerusalem – I want to explain why I am in Israel.

I am here with 450 American (and a German and a Canadian) listeners to my radio show. About 400 are non-Jews.

We are here on a “Stand with Israel” tour organized by the syndicator of my radio show, the Salem Radio Network. I am accompanied by my wife, my producer Allen Estrin and his wife, and my radio colleague Mike Gallagher.

#ad#​People frustrated with the direction of America and the direction of the world regularly ask: “What can I do to make any difference?”

Here is one of the best answers I know: visit Israel. And do so especially when there are terror attacks.

If every time there were a spate of attacks on Israel, few people canceled their trips to Israel in response or — if I may imagine a much better world than the one we live in — tourism to Israel actually increased, three huge things would be achieved.

It was doubtful that the University of Missouri would stand up to a left-wing pressure campaign targeting its president, but when the football team joined the campaign, it was all over.

Missouri is an SEC school, where even a mediocre football program — Mizzou is 1-5 against the rest of the conference — has formidable financial and cultural power.

If anyone running the university had any guts, the school would have told the team, “Come back and talk to us when you can beat sad-sack Vanderbilt, or at least score more than three points against them.” Given the team’s performance, the proper rejoinder to its threatened boycott should have been, “How would anyone notice?”

Instead, Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri system, is out in one of the most parodic PC meltdowns on a college campus to date. The Missouri episode shows how the political climate on campus falls somewhere between a Tom Wolfe novel, a Monty Python skit, and the French Terror.

Hysterical Yalies protest a free-speech panel.
New Haven, Conn. — Really, Yale — you shouldn’t have! All this for little ol’ me?

It wasn’t really for little ol’ me, in fact. On Friday, I was honored to be a guest of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale, where I participated in a panel on freedom of speech with the wonderful writer Harry Stein and Professor Bradley A. Smith, a noted law scholar. The Yale kids did their screaming best to prevent us from having a conversation about free speech — the Yale kids are utterly immune to irony — but the event went much as planned. Coming and going, we were chanted at by idiot children screaming, “Genocide is not a joke!”

Of course it isn’t. Yale kids, on the other hand . . .

For the first several years of my life, I thought that “Yale man” was a synonym for “caveman,” because the only references to Yale I’d ever heard were from Thurston Howell III, who greeted displays of barbarism with “Heavens! A Yale man!” I thought of that when the police officer was obliged to carry the shrieking protester out of the venue where he’d come to put a stop to our free-speech discussion.

What senior Hamas figure Musa Abu Marzouk and other Hamas leaders are saying is very clear: Even if a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, Hamas and other Palestinians will continue to fight until Israel is completely destroyed.

Hamas is openly stating that it will use any future Palestinian state as a launching pad to attack and eliminate Israel.

Hamas is not a small opposition party in the Palestinian territories that can be dismissed as a minor player. Hamas is a large Islamist movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that controls the entire Gaza Strip with its population of 1.8 million Palestinians. Hamas, not much different than Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, has its own security forces, militias, weapons and government institutions.

The Obama Administration and Western governments can talk as much as they like about the two-state solution. Even if President Abbas agrees to a Palestinian state, he will never be able to persuade Hamas, Islamic Jihad and many other Palestinians to recognize Israel’s right to exist.