RUTHFULLY YOURS

The nations of the world have issued their demands for this month’s Paris climate conference, and the Government of Bolivia has cut to the chase:

The capitalist system is a system of death. Hence, capitalism is leading humanity towards a horizon of destruction that sentences nature and life itself to death. In this regard, for a lasting solution to the climate crisis we must destroy capitalism.

Yeah, but, as the American media like to say about Trump, where are the specifics?

Oh, don’t worry. The Bolivians have a ten-point plan:

1. Adoption of a new model of civilization in the world without consumerism, war-mongering, and mercantilism, a world without capitalism; build and consolidate a world order of Living Well that defends and promotes the integral rights of our peoples, undertaking the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.

2. Construction of a climate system based on responsibility to Mother Earth, the culture of life and the full realization of humanity in their holistic development, humanizing the economy, surpassing the simplistic approach to decarbonization of the economy.

“Decarbonization” is just the beginning:

No — terror attacks are episodes in a continuance of the centuries
old battle that the civilised world has against the militarist, political
ambitions of the Muslim Ummaa — since its founding….

The warped Islamic
philosophy is inculcated in the madrassas — radical imams should be a prime
target for silencing…

Islam — not necessarily radical –seeks the
conversion or destruction of any but Muslim ( and indeed either Sunni or Shia
Islam — long may they battle each other, it is a partial salvation for the
non-Muslim world) adherents..

After being harangued by conservatives and mathematicians, liberal news outlets — the Washington Post, Time, Slate, The Daily Beast, a few others — began admitting that the claim that women earn 77 cents on the dollar is a lie. Let the haranguing resume: There is no basis in fact for saying that 97 percent of scientists believe that climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous.

Those were the words tweeted by President Obama: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: Climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” “Read more,” he added, with a link to a Reuters piece that announced the 97 percent finding by the University of Queensland’s John Cook, et al. But Cook’s result is deeply flawed.

For starters, though, Reuters and the president are wrong about what Cook’s study claims. It does not claim that 97 percent of scientists believe that climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous. What it claims is that 97.1 percent of the relevant scientific literature agrees with the much more conservative claim that humans are contributing to global warming in an unspecified amount.

But even in making that considerably more anodyne assertion, the “consensus” is on shaky footing. According to the abstract for Cook’s paper, 66.4 percent of the abstracts Cook and his team looked at neither supported nor opposed the position that man causes global warming. Which gives you not a 97.1 percent consensus, but 97.1 percent of the remainder, which is 32.6 percent. That is, 32.6 percent of peer-reviewed global-warming literature agrees that global warming is man-made. That’s not overwhelming.

In the unrelenting clamor about global cooling of the 1970s, global warming of recent times, and now the current renamed climate change, reasonable people would be well served to read the 1926 book entitled Microbe Hunters by Paul De Kruif. As a little girl, I was fascinated by the exploits of Antony Leeuwenhoek and his “wretched beasties.” As a grown woman, I am struck by the relevance of the world of science in the 17th century. Thus:

Leeuwenhoek was cautious about calling anything the cause of anything else. He had a sound instinct about the infinite complicatedness of everything – that told him the danger of trying to pick out one cause from the tangled maze of causes which control life.

Yet daily we are told by the prophets of climate change that humans are solely responsible for the natural changes of climate, and thus, we must accommodate and transform our way of living even if it results in lowering the quality of our lives.

By studying the largest glaciers on earth, scientists hope to determine whether we’ll have time to respond to climate change or whether it’s already too late.

At one point several hundred thousand years ago, snow began falling over the center of the earth’s largest island. The snow did not melt, and in the years that followed, storms brought even more. All around Greenland, the arctic temperatures remained low enough for the snow to last past spring and summer. It piled up, year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium. Eventually, the snow became the Greenland ice sheet, a blanket of ice so huge that it covered 650,000 square miles and reached a thickness of 10,000 feet in places. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, a similar process was well underway. There, as snow fell upon snow for years without end, the ice sheet spread out over a much vaster area: 5.4 million square miles, an expanse far larger than the lower 48 states. By the start of the modern era, when power plants and electric lights began illuminating the streets of Manhattan, about 75 percent of the world’s freshwater had been frozen into the ice sheets that lay over these lands at opposite ends of the earth.

The ice sheets covering Greenland and large areas of Antarctica are now losing more ice every year than they gain from snowfall. The loss is evident in the rushing meltwater rivers, blue gashes that crisscross the ice surface in warmer months and drain the sheets’ mass by billions of tons annually. Another sign of imbalance is the number of immense icebergs that, with increasing regularity, cleave from the sheets and drop into the seas. In late August, for instance, a highly active glacier in Greenland named Jakobshavn calved one of the largest icebergs in its history, a chunk of ice about 4,600 feet thick and about five square miles in area.

For more than a week now, the country has been mesmerized, and appalled, by the news emanating from academia. At Yale the insanity began over Halloween costumes. Erika Christakis, associate master of a residential college at Yale, courted outrage by announcing that “free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society” and it was not her business to police Halloween costumes.

To people unindoctrinated by the sensitivity training that is de rigueur on most campuses today, these sentiments might seem unobjectionable. But to the delicate creatures at Yale’s Silliman College they were an intolerable provocation. What if students dressed as American Indians or Mexican mariachi musicians? Angry, hysterical students confronted Nicholas Christakis, Erika’s husband and the master of Silliman, screaming obscenities and demanding that he step down because he had failed to create “a place of comfort, a home” for students. The episode was captured on video and went viral.

The Cretans both by land and sea are irresistible in ambuscades, forays, tricks played on the enemy, night attacks, and all petty operations which require fraud, but they are cowardly and down-hearted in the massed face-to-face charge of an open battle. – Polybius, Histories, Book IV, Volume II of the Loeb Classical Library (1922), p. 319. Translated by W.R. Paton.

The other evening, when I came upon that specific description of the military strengths and weaknesses of the various ancient Greek states in the events leading up to the Social War of 220-217 BC, I was too strongly reminded of how Muslims act when operating in gangs. Polybius’s description of the Cretan method of fighting and not fighting is also a description of guerrilla warfare – often called rape jihad. That is what Muslim gangs wage wherever they roam – in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Sweden, in virtually every country where they reside in large numbers, including in the United States.

A settlement between the University of Illinois (UI) and former Virginia Tech University professor Steven Salaita was approved by UI’s Board of Trustees Thursday. He will receive a lump sum payment of $600,000 and $275,000 in legal costs. In return, he will not seek or accept future employment by the university.

Thus concludes a saga that began in the summer of 2014 when the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) withdrew an offered position in its American Indian Studies Program due to Salaita’s vulgar, Israel-bashing, anti-Semitic tweets. He sued the university and unnamed donors, alleging breach of contract and violation of free speech.

Over 8,000 migrants entered Serbia on November 11 on their way from the Middle East to Western Europe. The item went unreported by the major media because it was not newsworthy. Daily totals may vary, not much, as the Great Invasion of 2015 continues unabated.

Millions are on the move, with unknown further multitudes tempted to follow suit. They will do so because Europe, rich and decadent, irresistibly tempts them. In all creation disease and frailty invite predators, as witnessed in the scene of Madame Hortense’s death in Zorba the Greek. Both the loss of the will to define and defend one’s native land and culture, and the loss of the desire to procreate, send an alluring signal to the teeming kazbahs and sukhs: Come, ye all, there’s money for nothin’ and chicks for free. Come, for no Western nation has the guts to shed blood—alien or its own—to keep you out in the name of its own survival. According to the leading German daily Die Welt (October 14), “Merkel’s call of welcome echoes even in West-Africa. The German welcome-culture appeals in Mali even to those who did not want to leave until now. TV pictures of nice people with welcome presents lure migrants. German visas can be bought.”

Spengler famously heralded The Decline of the West ninety years ago, but the English title of his magnum opus did not convey the dark, tragic implications of the word Untergang, “going under.” Spengler himself did not anticipate a cataclysmic event but rather an extended decline, a twilight. (Abendland, the West, literally means the “evening land.”) It now appears that the protracted fall is over, and the stage is set for a series of quick, brutal catastrophes.

Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
THIS week the European Commission announced guidelines suggesting that Israeli products from areas that came under its control in 1967 be labeled “Israeli Settlement” products and not “Made in Israel” as they have been until now. The policy carves out a special legal rule for Israel, not only contradicting the European Union’s own official positions on these issues, but also going against rulings of European national courts, and violating basic tenets of the World Trade Organization.

Faced with criticism from both the right and the left in Israel and the United States, the European Union claims its action is merely “technical,” rather than politically motivated or punitive. Yet this is belied by the fact that the measure comes in response to explicitly political demands for labeling by some member states’ foreign ministers, as well as anti-Israel NGOs.

In fact, the labeling controversy must be viewed as just one step in a broader, purposeful and gradual escalation of anti-Israel measures by the European Union. Two years ago, the commission promulgated a regulation that barred spending money on Israeli academic, scientific or cultural projects in the West Bank or Golan Heights. Then the union began refusing to allow imports of certain Israeli agricultural products. Last year, 15 European states issued warnings, alerting people to unspecified legal dangers of interacting with Israeli settlements. These steps, while supposedly motivated by what the European Union sees as Israel’s occupation of territory, have been applied only to Israel, and not to other countries regarded as occupiers in international law, such as Morocco or Turkey.