RUTHFULLY YOURS

During Obama’s sales pitch for the Iran deal, he lost his place, lost his temper and lost an opportunity to convince those who were not with him.

After the thunderstorm of criticism launched almost immediately after the Iran deal was announced on Tuesday, July 14, President Barack Obama held a press conference the next day, in an effort to quell the storm and sell the deal.

It did not really work.

For one thing, after a brief, assertive pitch in which Obama relayed “yesterday’s historic, comprehensive” deal, accomplished with “our allies…and partners” – more on that word* below – the deal “cuts off all pathways to Iran’s nuclear weapons program.” The president reiterated the same points he made at the press conference announcing the deal, and then he opened it up to selected media representatives for questions.

If you’ve been reading the NY Times for the past month, you’d be forgiven for believing that transgender people have been living in North Korea instead of in America. There has been little or no mention of the numerous transgender people who are doctors, teachers or professors living solid upper middle-class lives with little distinction from the lives they lived prior to their sex change.

The poster girl the Times picked for their nearly full-page editorial – “The Struggle of Transgender Workers,” (july 9th) is a masculine Puerto Rican man dressed as a woman in what looks like a Halloween fright wig and a dreadful dress. The Times mentions that Elaine Mendus, as she calls herself, studied at Indiana University in Pennsylvania but not that she has a degree, so the fact that she has difficulty in finding a job is understandable on many levels. If a hetero man without a college degree chose to wear a tee shirt and jeans when he went for job interviews, we wouldn’t classify his failure to get hired as discrimination. Similarly, a man who has not begun any medical transitioning, dressed as weird-looking woman might not be hired even by a transgender employer who took pride in her own appearance and that of her employees. An employment coach gave Ms. Mendus good advice to go on interviews as a man using the name that corresponded with her other papers; somehow this is reported as if it showed a lack of insight instead of a constructive attempt to be helpful.

The Obama administration has just reached an agreement with a jihadist, aspiring nuclear nation that is in an unofficial state of war with the United States, granting that nation massive, nearly immediate economic benefits without ending either its jihad or its nuclear program. This is what President Obama calls victory. History will likely view it as a catastrophe.

Make no mistake, the current Iranian regime has been waging a nearly continual, low-intensity military conflict with the United States since 1979, when it seized the American embassy in Tehran and held more than 50 Americans hostage for 444 days. Since then it has engineered terror attacks in Beirut and Saudi Arabia that killed hundreds of Americans, engaged in open hostilities against American warships in the Persian Gulf, and planned and directed deadly attacks on American troops in Iraq. Its unstinting support for the Afghan Taliban continues unabated to this very day.

“This is more than a bad deal. President Obama has betrayed the American people by agreeing to the kind of agreement with an enemy of the United States that he said he would not agree to. It is vital that Congress hold the president to his original promises by rejecting this agreement on a strong bipartisan basis and send a signal to the world that if a Republican is elected president in 2016, this deal will be declared null and void on his or her first day in office.”

There’s a confusing debate underway on the merits of the new nuclear agreement with Iran announced today. The Obama administration and its supporters are praising the accord as a historic achievement for world peace. The president’s critics claim it is a terrible agreement that will bolster the nuclear program of a state sponsor of terror. Both sides are throwing around nuclear terminology, timelines, and minutiae about the agreement.

How to make sense of this? I believe best way is to judge this agreement against President Obama’s own statements.

In 2007, when he was beginning his run for president, Senator Obama told a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that “the world must work to stop Iran’s uranium-enrichment program.”

America’s new partners in “peace.”

Every year, on the last Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, millions of Iranians take to the streets to engage in a bizarre ritual. As if on cue, they incessantly and rhythmically chant “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” while burning effigies of the leaders and flags of those respective countries. Occasionally, they’ll burn the Union Jack as well. Rounding off the spectacle are fiery speeches issued by various military, political and religious leaders regurgitating the same banalities about how the “Great Satan” and the “Zionist Entity” will ultimately be destroyed and replaced by the banner of Islam.

The event is called Al-Quds Day and was sanctioned by the Islamic Republic’s now deceased and criminally insane Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 as a way of underscoring the Muslim obligation to “liberate” Jerusalem and unshackle “Palestine” from those pesky Jewish infidels. While most normal countries maintain national holidays that celebrate freedom, independence and sacrifice, the mullahs invented a holiday that revels in an orgy of death, violence and depravity.

The United States and its five negotiating partners (Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom and Germany) reached an agreement July 14th on the final terms of a deal with Iran, under which Iran would curb its nuclear program for a period of time in return for sanctions relief.

The agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (or JCPOA for short), will go into effect on what is called “Adoption Day” – the date 90 days after the endorsement of the JCPOA by the UN Security Council, or such earlier date as may be determined by mutual consent of the JCPOA participants. The Security Council is expected to act within days to endorse the deal.

During his victory lap announcing that a final deal had been reached with Iran, President Obama warned that he would veto any congressional legislation blocking his legacy foreign policy achievement. The president declared that the agreement was “built on verification,” not trust. In this regard, Obama claimed that international inspectors will have 24/7 access to Iran’s key nuclear facilities to ensure Iran is fulfilling its commitments. “[Inspectors] will have access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain – its uranium mines and mills, its conversion facility, and its centrifuge manufacturing and storage facilities,” he said. “This ensures that Iran will not be able to divert materials from known facilities to covert ones.”

Physicist and blogger John Jay on the debasement of science:

It works like this: activists use science to push for international action on a science-related issue in an area such as health or environment. Then, an international agreement is established, and the science on which it is has been based becomes institutionalized and funded by government. Time and again, when this happens, “the science” stops being science. This is because the scientists working on the relevant topic start being advocates and stop being researchers. After all, they are now being paid by the bureaucracy to support a particular doctrine, not to discover new stuff.

Real science, which requires a sceptical and innovative frame of mind, then withers on the vine.

The Enlightenment
The development of modern science in the late 18th century went hand in hand with the rise of modern industrial capitalism. Its potteries, mines, steam engines, mechanization, and science itself, were all done by private enterprise. The role of government was to enforce patents and maintain a healthy legal and commercial environment.

Nowadays most scientists are paid by the government. What passes for science has largely become taxpayer-funded Environmentalism. Environmentalism has taken over much of science.

Scientists discover, understand and inform.

Environmentalists preach.

Economically, Pope Francis’ encyclical is an uninspired re-hash of the Marxist-Leninist diatribes against Western imperialism that have been the lingua franca of the international Left for 150 years. Worse than that, this shallow, cliche-ridden document is a betrayal of the Christian faith
Pope Francis is playing with fire. It seems that the converging crises engulfing the Catholic Church and the need to cultivate a supportive global constituency based on the Third World may have pushed the Pope to both ignore the free-market basis of functioning economic systems and desert the fundamental principles of Christianity.

Caught in a perfect storm of scandal and relevance, Francis appears prepared to capitulate to the neo-Marxist paganism that underlies the Deep Green ideology of the global environmental movement and assume a vanguard role in constructing a global welfare state, established to mitigate the alleged effects of climate change. This capitulation has two dimensions: economic and theological, as will be discussed below.

Hillary Clinton issued a lengthy statement tonight not only giving props to the Iran nuclear deal but also basically taking credit for it.

“I am still studying the details, but based on the briefings I received and a review of the documents, I support the agreement because it can help us prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. With vigorous enforcement, unyielding verification, and swift consequences for any violations, this agreement can make the United States, Israel, and our Arab partners safer,” Clinton said.

“…Today’s agreement is the culmination of a sustained strategy of pressure and engagement executed over many years. As secretary of State, I logged tens of thousands of miles and twisted a lot of arms to build a global coalition to impose the most crippling sanctions in history. That unprecedented pressure delivered a blow to Iran’s economy and gave us leverage at the negotiating table, starting in Oman in 2012. I know from experience what it took to build a global effort to get this done; I know what it will take to rally our partners to enforce it.”