RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sometime in the near future the EU is expected to publish guidelines on consumer labeling of all Israeli products produced over the so-called “Green Line,” the armistice line created when the war against the nascent Jewish State ended.

The EU considers all Jewish cities and towns over the pre-1967 lines to be illegal. As such, anything produced, grown or packaged in either eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria or the Golan Heights will be labeled so that consumers can more easily boycott those products.

The guidelines will be published by the office of Federica Mogherini, the EU foreign policy chief. No vote is required for this measure to be taken.

There is pushback to that labeling plan coming not only from Israel, but also from many members of the U.S. Senate.

A federal appeals court Monday upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking the Obama administration’s plans to defer deportations for more than four million undocumented immigrants.

The 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds an injunction by a Texas federal judge that has blocked President Barack Obama’s 2014 immigration initiative, after leaders from 26 states challenged its legality.

The appeals-court ruling was widely anticipated, after a three-judge panel of the same court rejected the Obama administration arguments to quickly lift the injunction in May. But it paves the way for a potential appeal of the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court—and all but ensures that the immigration initiative will remained mired in a legal dispute through most, if not all, of Mr. Obama’s term in office.

In an article at the Washington Post, Janell Ross tackles the question of global attitudes toward immigration using data from Gallup polling and a report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Unfortunately, there are some problems with Ross’ conclusions, starting with the following claim:

Adults with a college degree are more likely than those with lower levels of education to want to see immigration kept at its present level or increased.

The devil is in the details on this generalization. According to data from the IOM report itself, at a global level, those with a college degree (defined as “High education” by the report) are more likely to favor a decrease (36 percent) in immigration than those with “Low education” (31 percent), and there is no clear statistical difference (i.e., within the likely sampling error) between immigration views for those with “Medium” and those with “High” levels of education. There is also no difference in the proportion saying they want immigration levels increased (down at only 20 to 23 percent across all categories) with education.

Obama and Netanyahu Pledge to Strengthen Ties Prime minister says he is committed to a two-state peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians Carol E. Lee and Rory Jones :

President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to publicly minimize their longtime discord as they met Monday for the first time in more than a year.

Mr. Netanyahu, in a notably conciliatory remark, told Mr. Obama he is committed to a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians that includes a two-state solution. The Israeli leader’s statement was a sharp reversal from his rejection of a two-state solution earlier this year, which had angered the White House.

“I want to make clear we have not given up our hope for peace,” Mr. Netanyahu said, seated alongside Mr. Obama in the Oval Office.
The White House has given up on reaching a peace agreement before Mr. Obama leaves office in 14 months, a point the president’s top aides publicly underscored in advance of Mr. Netanyahu’s visit.

Headlines blaring that processed and red meat causes cancer have made this steak-and-bacon-loving nation collectively reach for the Rolaids. Vegans are in full party mode, and the media is in a feeding frenzy. But there is more to this story than meets the (rib)eye.

With United Nations climate talks beginning in a few weeks in Paris, the cancer warning seems particularly well timed. Environmental activists have long sought to tie food to the fight against global warming. Now the doomsayers who want to take on modern agriculture, a considerable source of greenhouse-gas emissions, can employ an additional scare tactic: Meat production sickens the planet; meat consumption sickens people.

Someone at Yale University should have dressed up as Robespierre for Halloween, as its students seem to have lost their minds over what constitutes a culturally appropriate costume. Identity and grievance politics keeps hitting new lows on campus, and now even liberal professors are being consumed by the revolution.

On Oct. 28 Yale Dean Burgwell Howard and Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee blasted out an email advising students against “culturally unaware” Halloween costumes, with self-help questions such as: “If this costume is meant to be historical, does it further misinformation or historical and cultural inaccuracies?” Watch out for insensitivity toward “religious beliefs, Native American/Indigenous people, Socio-economic strata, Asians, Hispanic/Latino, Women, Muslims, etc.” In short, everyone.

Who knew Yale still employed anyone willing to doubt the costume wardens? But in response to the dean’s email, lecturer in early childhood education Erika Christakis mused to the student residential community she oversees with her husband, Nicholas, a Yale sociologist and physician: “I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns,” but she wondered if colleges had morphed into “places of censure and prohibition.”

How much of the money is spent on drivel….check out: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/2/golden-hammer-college-hid-95m-in-administrator-boo/?page=all Open the Books.org exposed:

“How a college hid $95 million in expense like booze, shooting clubs”

And: Is There Really a Lack of Funding in Education? The Books are Open.

http://forthegoodofillinois.org/blog/2011/10/is-there-really-a-lack-of-funding-in-education-open-the-books-and-find-out/

Earlier this fall, I published a story questioning the wisdom of Millennials’ above average desire to foot the cost of college for their kids. A reader named Morgan Ownbey commented to accuse me of using “shady stat tactics” by working from the median income and the projected cost of attending an elite private school to calculate the necessary savings rate. Ownbey’s point: “You do not have to save half a million dollar to send your kid to a good state school.”

I stand by my initial response — that my intentions were good and where to go to college is a personal and complicated decision between parent and child — I also stand by my concerns that young Americans’ will be able to save enough to cover the costs of both college and retirement. However, two recent reports suggest Ownbey and I both had a point.

According to a report out this week from the Urban Institute, across the country 81% of college-bound high school graduates enroll at home state schools or private institutions in state. (The latter arrangement can be a money saver if students live with their parents and commute to school.) Authors Sandy Baum, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, and research assistant Martha Johnson, however, make the larger argument that a true sense of the status of public higher education in America requires a state-by-state look.

Baum and Johnson write: “Because most students remain in-state to take advantage of lower tuition, a clear view of cross-state variation is vital for understanding the nature and extent of barriers to college affordability and for developing policies to address those barriers.”

Mississippi has the highest percentage of students remaining in state at 93%. According to new College Board data, Mississippi in state tuition and fees come to $7,147 this school year, while the 19% of Mississippi’s first-time college students coming from another state paid $19,480, making Mississippi among the ten least expensive states to attend public college in state and the 12 least expensive for out-of-state.

Last month, a majority of the states sued the federal government over the so-called Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate agenda. As the states explained, the president’s carbon regulation “unlawfully expands the federal government’s regulatory power over electricity production and consumption in nearly every State.” The suit will wind its way through the courts, with legal resolution years away.

Although legal challenges are necessary, they are not enough. If states have any chance of defeating the EPA’s attempt to take control over our energy choices, they must mobilize all three branches of government.

The EPA’s carbon regulation forces states to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent, on average, by 2030. The limits are so strict that many states will be forced to shut down affordable energy sources, mandate more-expensive sources, and join regional cap-and-trade schemes — all of which will drive up energy prices, to the detriment of the poor and middle class.

States have responded by suing the Obama administration and requesting a stay of the rule. And while legal scholars across the political spectrum agree that the EPA has a weak case, pinning our hopes on a legal victory is a mistake. In fact, it is a mistake the EPA is counting on states to make.

Much ink has been spilled blaming the state of U.S.–Israel relations on the poor personal rapport between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. The fact is that huggable Barney the Purple Dinosaur could have been Israel’s elected leader, and the relations would have been equally hostile.

For seven decades from the moment of Israel’s birth — through five wars, one campaign, eight operations, two “uprisings,” and years of terrorism — Palestinian Arabs have done everything possible to avoid living peacefully side by side with a Jewish state.

This isn’t ancient history. It’s today.

While St Peter’s heir no doubt means well, his encyclical is a master class in the treachery of good intentions. As Ian Plimer writes in ‘Heaven and Hell’, the green crackpottery Pope Francis embraces and endorses can only hobble the creation of wealth and mire the Third World in perpetual poverty

HEAVEN AND HELL: The Pope condemns the poor to eternal poverty
Professor Ian Plimer
Connor Court, 2015, 348pages, $29.95
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One hopes this new book by Professor Ian Plimer will shake the media from its gullible complacency and set it to confronting the gigantic fraud that the IPCC and hack scientists, avaricious governments, corrupted universities, and all the other self-interested parties riding the climate-change gravy train persist in preaching and promoting. While Plimer’s international best-seller, Heaven and Earth, did much to encourage scepticism and independent thought, the treatment it was meted by the liberal media, most notably at the shamelessly partisan ABC, won’t see me holding my breath.

Launched this month, Heaven and Hell is a frontal attack on the absurd, science-free claims peddled by, of all people, Pope Francis in his recent encyclical, Laudate ‘Si. As Plimer puts it, the documemnt is “science-free, an anti-development, anti-market enthusiastic embrace of global green left environmental ideology.”

Plimer goes straight for the jugular in demolishing the misrepresentations, false claims, erroneous predictions, fraudulent science and falsification of raw data –“a cardinal sin” — that represent the dubious basis for the papal pronouncement. The complete lack of any verified theory to explain, adequately and demonstrably, why and how carbon dioxide is heating the world is, of course, key to his critique.