RUTHFULLY YOURS

What is the origin of the false belief—constantly repeated—that almost all scientists agree about global warming?

Last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the “crippling consequences” of climate change. “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists,” he added, “tell us this is urgent.”

Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on May 16 that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured language) on its website, “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.”

Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.

One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.

Ms. Oreskes’s definition of consensus covered “man-made” but left out “dangerous”—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.

Another widely cited source for the consensus view is a 2009 article in “Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union” by Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a student at the University of Illinois, and her master’s thesis adviser Peter Doran. It reported the results of a two-question online survey of selected scientists. Mr. Doran and Ms. Zimmerman claimed “97 percent of climate scientists agree” that global temperatures have risen and that humans are a significant contributing factor.

At the United Nations, it’s a pretty reliable rule that when something looks bad on the surface, there’s worse rot beneath. That’s no accident. It’s a natural product of UN secrecy, bureaucracy and membership freighted with unfree states. Mix those elements together, and they yield a moral compost heap in which bad policy and bigotry flourish. By the time something troubling sprouts into plain view, it has already set down a massive root structure within the UN hothouse.

For the past six years, one product of this mulch was the UN Human Rights Council’s sponsorship of Richard Falk as a special rapporteur for what the UN Human Rights Council is pleased to call “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” This has been a lopsided anti-Israel mandate since its conception, and Falk with great zeal translated it into a platform for attacking Israel and the U.S. That made waves in the U.S. last year when Falk blamed America for the Islamist terrorist bombings of the Boston Marathon. More than two dozen members of Congress called for the UN to fire Falk. As it turned out, the UN Human Rights Council (reborn in a 2006 flurry of “reform” from the irredeemably corrupt UN Commission on Human Rights) has no procedure for firing a special rapporteur, [1] nor does the UN require its rapporteurs to divulge such niceties as other sources of funding and support. Falk carried on until his term expired this month, only to be replaced by a candidate with a similar anti-Israel record, Indonesia’s Makarim Wibisono [2]. So far, so bad.

But neither is the Falk connection entirely gone. The UN Human Rights Council has now appointed, as another of its special rapporteurs, none other than Richard Falk’s wife — Hilal Elver [3]. She shares her husband’s work, agenda and predilection for 9/11 conspiracy theories, Israel trashing and so forth. You can read more about her on the web site of Geneva-based UN Watch, which called her UN appointment “bizarre, nepotistic, and politically driven.” UN Watch in its online briefing [4]includes a link to Elver’s application for the post, complete with “self-disqualifying answers, non-sequiturs, and more than 20 spelling mistakes.” Her specific post is special rapporteur “on the right to food,” a post which UN Watch notes was initiated by Cuba and “first held by Jan Ziegler, founder and recipient of the Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize.”

To this I’d add, if the UN’s aim is to ensure that people around the globe have enough to eat, the real project should be the right to freedom — the point being that free people have a far better record of ensuring all can eat well than do oppressed people whose “right to food” is overseen by state planners and UN rapporteurs. But campaigning for freedom to choose is not an agenda that would generate much business for the UN or its deep bench of cronies.

Instead, the UN has now empowered Elver to jet around the globe, traveling under the UN flag, reporting back to the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly in New York, spreading her agenda on anything she might deem relevant to ” food.” Her position as rapporteur is unpaid, but her expenses are picked up by the UN (which means almost one-quarter of her tab will be bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers).

If we were living in normal times, the following scandals and failures — without going into foreign policy — would have ruined a presidency to the point of reducing it to Nixon, Bush, or Truman poll ratings.

Think of the following: the Fast and Furious scandal, the VA mess, the tapping of the communications of the Associated Press reporters, the NSA monitoring, Benghazi in all of its manifestations, the serial lies about Obamacare, the failed stimuli, the chronic zero interest/print money policies, the serial high unemployment, the borrowing of $7 trillion to no stimulatory effect, the spiraling national debt, the customary violations of the Hatch Act by Obama cabinet officials, the alter ego/fake identity of EPA head Lisa Jackson, the sudden departure of Hilda Solis after receiving union freebies, the mendacity of Kathleen Sebelius, the strange atmospherics surrounding the Petraeus resignation, the customary presidential neglect of enforcing the laws from immigration statutes to his own health care rules, the presidential divisiveness (“punish our enemies,” “you didn’t build that,” Trayvon as the son that Obama never had, etc.), and on and on.

So why is there not much public reaction or media investigatory outrage?

In one sense there is: an iconic, landmark president was ushered into office with a supermajority in the Senate and a solidly Democratic House, at a time the public felt angry over the Iraq war and the 2008 financial meltdown. Six years later, Obama’s poll ratings bottomed out at about 43%. He lost the House in 2010, and he probably will see the Senate gone in 2014. But that said, amid such failure Obama will never descend to 30% approval ratings, and that again bring to mind the question: why?

Obvious answers:

1) His record support among minorities will not change since 70-90% of various hyphenated groups see the Obama tenure as long-overdue representation of their own interests — economic, ethnic, and symbolic. It does no good to cite rising unemployment rates among African-Americans or a deterioration in household income among Latinos. The point is that Obama feels their pain, even if his policies helped cause it. In this view, expecting blacks, to take one example, to defect from Obama would be as if right-wing rural Texans would have abandoned Bush in 2006, or the Malibu set would have given up on Clinton during Monicagate. In short — unlikely.

2) The media is not just overwhelmingly hard left, but hard left with a chip [1] on its shoulder [2] that its own views are neither accepted by the majority nor usually implemented by government.

All the above scandals and embarrassments would have ruined a Bush, given that such mishaps would have been headlined daily in the New York Times (e.g., “VA, Benghazi, AP, NSA, IRS overwhelm sinking Bush administration”) or Washington Post (“Bush Cabinet Paralyzed by Scandal”).

For the media, Obama is not Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton whom they overwhelmingly supported [3]. He is quite different — the first gold-plated liberal president since FDR [4], and probably the last for a while, intent on fundamentally transforming the United States, by redistributing income [5] and accumulated wealth, and recalibrating the American profile [6] abroad.

The media believes that both are socially just and long overdue. Why then nitpick a president on details, when his intentions are noble? Extraordinary ends sometimes require tawdry means. Note here: when Obama leaves office, and should he be replaced by a Republican president, then we will see a press playing catch-up, intent on restoring its shattered image by exposing cabinet members who violate the Hatch Act and the insidious revolving door [7] between Wall Street/ banking and White House billets. But for now, the media is invested in seeing Obama as a once-in-a-lifetime emissary of its own politics [8].

On the view that there’s a silver lining to most things, consider the European election results. Yes, fascism is back, officially, ugly as ever. But at least Americans might be spared lectures from the bien-pensant about the crudeness of U.S. politics vis-à-vis Europe’s.

Now, whenever I hear about the National Front, I’ll reach for my Second Amendment.

Many are the blameworthy in this disgrace to a continent, but let’s start with the most blameworthy: the French electorate. Last week, Jean-Marie Le Pen, National Front founder and the party’s hyena in winter, suggested a method for how Europe could solve its “immigration problem”: “Monseigneur Ebola,” he said, “could sort that out in three months.”

One in four French voters cast their ballots for the National Front, edging out the center-right UMP and trouncing the governing Socialists. On election night Sunday, Mr. Le Pen’s daughter and current party leader, Marine Le Pen, declared: “Our people demand just one politics. The politics of the French, for the French.” What’s French for Ein Volk ?

Ms. Le Pen is supposed to be softer and smoother face of her father’s party, but the evidence of that is hard to see. Last month she paid a visit to Moscow, lambasted the European Union for declaring a “Cold War” on Russia and embraced separatism in Ukraine. As for Vladimir Putin, she praised him in a recent interview as a “patriot” who “upholds the sovereignty of his people” and defends “the values of European civilization.”

Values, presumably, such as invading and intimidating neighbors, stuffing ballot boxes, jailing dissidents and attempting to restore the reputation of the Soviet Union.

The Kremlin has also made overtures to Hungary’s Jobbik party, which took nearly 15% of the vote in last week’s election, as well as to Greece’s Golden Dawn, which got 9.4%. These parties aren’t neo-fascist, in the early Benito Mussolini mold. They’re neo-Nazi, in the late Ernst Röhm mold. Golden Dawn marches under a swastika-like banner. As for Jobbik, when the World Jewish Congress held a meeting in Budapest last year, the party organized a rally to denounce “the Israeli conquerors, these investors, [who] should look for another country in the world for themselves because Hungary is not for sale.”

The BDS leadership is telling the Israel-bashing and trashing organizations which have long been feeding at the Soros waterhole, to engage in a reverse boycott, an “aidcott.”

Ask anyone deeply involved in the current social wars against Israel to name the biggest funders of the hate, and one of the first names they’ll offer is George Soros.

But recent reports revealed that Soros invested in the popular carbonated drink maker Soda Stream, one of whose factories is located in Maale Adumim, a suburb of Jerusalem one the haters’ wrong side of the Green Line. It was also revealed that the aging billionaire increased his holdings in Teva Pharmaceuticals, an Israel company which manufactures generic drugs.

Now Soros is in the doghouse along with everyone else who dares to invest their money in Israeli companies.

As reported in The Tower, The Palestinian BDS National Committee posted an official statement on its website, BDSMovement.Net, calling for

a boycott of the Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Foundations due to the recently announced investment by Soros in SodaStream stock and increased investment in Teva Pharmaceuticals, both Israeli companies

which, the BNC says, violate international law.

The BDS movement teaches that Israeli communities and businesses located beyond the 1949 Armistice Line (often referred to as the Green Line) constitute war crimes.

Teva Pharmaceuticals is despised because, although its offices are located in Petach Tikva, within the 1949 Armistice Line, “Teva enjoys the benefits generated by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, allowing the company to exploit the Palestinian market,” according to a local human rights group.

In grateful memory of brothers George “Gersh” King, 24 and Harold “Heshy” King 20, who were killed in the Normandy Invasion in 1944.
“In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire”

“So to the indifferent inquirer who asks why Memorial Day is still kept up we may answer, it celebrates and solemnly reaffirms from year to year a national act of enthusiasm and faith. It embodies in the most impressive form our belief that to act with enthusiam and faith is the condition of acting greatly. To fight out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might. So must you do to carry anything else to an end worth reaching. More than that, you must be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhpas a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out. All that is required of you is that you should go somewhither as hard as ever you can. The rest belongs to fate. One may fall-at the beginning of the charge or at the top of the earthworks; but in no other way can he reach the rewards of victory.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.- Memorial Day, May 30, 1884

“Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake”

Hannah Senesh- May 1944

“And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong.

That, of course, is the lesson of this century, a lesson learned in the Sudetenland, in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Cambodia. If we really care about peace, we must stay strong. If we really care about peace, we must, through our strength, demonstrate our unwillingness to accept an ending of the peace. We must be strong enough to create peace where it does not exist and strong enough to protect it where it does.”

Ronald Reagan Memorial Day 1986

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-Earth-to-Bennett-Earth-to-Bennett-353126

Full disclosure: I voted for Bennett’s party in the last elections, not because I really believed in the man or his political program, but because I saw them as the “least of all evils” on offer at the January 2013 polls.

Since then, however, I have had occasion for second thoughts and am approaching the conclusion that I may have been mistaken.

Getting it all wrong

My gathering buyer’s remorse was greatly heightened by the op-ed in the Journal, in which he presented an “enhanced” version of his ill-conceived policy proposal, perversely dubbed the “Stability Plan.” In it he recommends doing virtually everything that should be avoided, and avoiding everything that should be done.

What is truly astounding is that anyone could get so much so wrong in such a short article of under 800 words.

As one whose vote contributed to getting Bennett into a senior post in the governing coalition, it is deeply disturbing to see him bandy about such reckless policy prescriptions, totally detached from reality, with such cavalier abandon.

It is difficult to know what is more troubling: Whether Bennett believes the delusional drivel he wrote in his op-ed, or whether he doesn’t but wrote it anyway.

Thus, while I agree with his repudiation of the two-state paradigm, and his rejection of negotiations with Hamas, Bennett’s proposal, if implemented, is likely to be even more disastrous for the Zionist ideal of a historically durable nation-state for the Jewish people in their ancient homeland.

I have pointed out in previous critiques of his plan, it will solve none of the major problems facing Israel today on the Palestinian issue.

Quite the opposite. In all likelihood it will exacerbate many.

Untenable geographically

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2839/Report-from-the-Future-The-Umma-States-of-America.aspx

Imagine a curious soul or two in the not-too-distant future furtively peeling back the layers and learning the cruel truth: that their forbears willingly exchanged all of their precious liberties for tyranny rather than assess and educate and protect themselves against Islamic conquest — violent, pre-violent, smooth, explosive, financial, political, kafiyya-wrapped or Armani-suited. I think they will marvel because, as they will so very tragically know first-hand, Islam is so simple: its culture of death, its oppression of women and non-Muslims, its defilement of children, its suppression of conscience, religion and speech. They will be astonished, also very angry, over the way free men and women in 20th-21st centuries saw fit, not to embark on emergency measures to ensure energy independence from Islamic oil, block Islamic immigration, and shield financial markets and academia from sharia-compliance, but rather to erect a massive and invasive security state that robbed all citizens of their liberties as they fiddled away the Islamic threat. Mustn’t offend? Mustn’t offend? That was more important than saving the blessed beauty of our lost civlization…?! Incredulously, they will learn how “public intellectuals” invented all manner of “division” within Islam, detected endless “signs” of “evolution” to come, supported disastrous “democracy” movements, diagnosed “moderation” ever-aborning, projecting all in a static of isms and ists that confounded and dumbfounded and confused. To be sure, it kept “public intellectuals” gainfully occupied, but it did nothing to stem the waves of conquest that made life in the West a sharia-compliant and, of course, post-Communist hell on earth. Obamacare Allahu Akbar.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

First-ever bone graft, using bone grown in lab. (Thanks to Atid-EDI) A human patient with deficient jawbone has received a successful bone transplant using bone grown by Israel’s Bonus BioGroup using the patient’s own fat cells. The company expects the graft to be fully tolerated, without immunological rejection.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/07/bonus-biogroup-ltd-idUSnBw075977a+100+BSW20140507

Protein could reverse Alzheimer’s damage. A protein discovered by a Tel Aviv University research team may reverse the damage caused by Alzheimer’s. Laboratory tests showed that TAU (tubulin-associated unit) restored levels of the dementia-protecting protein NAP. It also restored disease-shrunken brains to normal size.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-discovery-could-reverse-alzheimers-damage/

Protecting the brain during heart operations. Israeli biotech Keystone Heart’s TriGuard is a cerebral protection device specifically designed to minimize the risk of brain damage during heart valve replacements and other cardiovascular procedures. Keystone has just raised $14 million of investment funding.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-cerebral-protection-co-keystone-heart-raises-14m-1000939820

Israeli ALS treatment to be presented at Turkish conference. Professor Dimitrios Karussis, Principal Investigator of BrainStorm’s clinical trials of its ALS stem cell treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center, will present at the Joint Congress of European Neurology, May 31-June 3 in Istanbul, Turkey.
http://www.brainstorm-cell.com/index.php/news-a-events/299-may-19-2014

Israelis live longer. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that men in Israel live until the average age of 80.2 and are ranked fourth in the world. Only men in Iceland (81.2), Switzerland and Australia live longer. Israeli women (84) are tenth in the world, compared to Europe (76) and the rest of the Middle East (68).
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4520549,00.html

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Israeli glasses can see in the dark. “Lumus” and “Opgal“, two cutting-edge Israeli optics companies, have collaborated to develop a Google Glass-style night-vision display system. The Therm-App mobile device, mounted on headgear, transmits high-resolution images to the Lumus wearable display.
http://itrade.gov.il/singapore/2014/05/15/google-watch-google-glass-face-competition-2-israeli-rivals/

Unsurprisingly, even though these latest anti-Semitic murders happened many
hours ago, they are not mentioned anywhere on the home page of the New York
Times at the present time, which instead is carrying anti-Israel stories.
Business as usual at the NY Times and elsewhere in the Western media – an
international media that has done its fair share to whip up anti-Semitic
incitement (often through its total fabrications about Israel) that leads to
attacks such as the one today in Brussels. On The Guardian home page at the
present time, there is a mention of a shooting in Brussels without mentioning it
happened at a Jewish institution.