RUTHFULLY YOURS

At the July 3 Nobel laureates conference on Mainau Island, 30 of the 65 attendees signed a media-reported letter urging action against global warming. Not reported by the media: the attendees listened to Norway’s 1973 Nobel physics laureate, Ivar Giaever, give a truth-telling “Emperor’s New Clothes” speech. Also, the majority of the Nobel laureates refused to sign the alarmist global-warming letter.

Giaever gave a great speech. His explanations were clear. His graphs were persuasive. He took the part of the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes folktale. The boy saw the emperor parading around naked and cried out, “The emperor has no clothes on!” Giaever was saying that the fraction-of-a-degree differences in temperature upon which global warming theory is based are as invisible as the Emperor’s new clothes. He said (on this video at the 6:45 mark):

The president — Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces — does not have to be a military man. Or maybe should not be a military man; a civilian perspective on issues of war is essential. But that being so, the civilian CinC should be wary of inventing military doctrine.

President Obama had a brief — and unusual — visit to the Pentagon this week. Normally, he receives his national security briefings in the White House, but he had a message to deliver about America’s war against ISIS. “Ideologies,” he said, “are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas.”

“Climate change hysteria, having debilitated science and heavily infected the media, NGOs, politics and sundry interest groups, now appears to have morphed into a virulent strain of fundamentalist belief to which even the Pope seems to have no immunity.”

Theologians once devoted their energies to calculating the number of angels able to dance on the head of a pin. Today, in the thrall of dubious science and warmist pamphleteers, Pope Francis has put his seal on a document larded with ‘facts’ no less improbable than those cavorting cherubim of old.

While the infallibility of the Pope is a matter of debate and doctrinal subtlety, the fallibility of whoever wrote the Pontiff’s encyclical, On Care for Our Common Home, is irrefutable. In incorporating an undigested, evidence-free regurgitation of alarmist hype and misinformation, it does no service to the Church or humanity. While the document’s general concern for our planet’s environment is laudable, the focus on threats and problems, while largely ignoring the numerous successes and improvements, serves more to proclaim the authors’ conspicuous righteousness than to encourage further betterment.

Sensing weakness in the West, the absence of conviction and resolve, illegal migrants of all kinds pour into Europe. More drown. The problem gets bigger. And worse. Nations can only be generous if they feel secure. Australia has absorbed that lesson. The international community … not so much
In 1957 I took out my first subscription to a “small magazine”. I did so through my school, St Mary’s College in Crosby, Lancashire, which encouraged its boys to take the Times and magazines such as the Spectator and the New Statesman as first steps to becoming leaders of society. My English teacher, Mr Hughes, had never heard of the magazine I chose, however. It was called Crossbow, the house journal of the Bow Group, itself quite a new body of young Tory intellectuals who wanted to continue talking politics late at night despite having left university. Perhaps because so many Bow Groupers worked in the London media, Crossbow’s launch had been covered by the BBC news. It still exists, incidentally, though mainly on the internet, where a search for it may mis-direct you to a magazine for electric crossbow enthusiasts.

President Obama delivered on upbeat progress report Monday on the fight against Islamic State, and we can only hope that this time he’s right. A reason for skepticism is that Mr. Obama has offered similarly confident predictions of eventual victory before.

Speaking at the Pentagon, the President noted that Islamic State had been hit by more than 5,000 air strikes, “lost more than a quarter of the populated areas that it had seized in Iraq,” failed in key battles at Kobani, Mosul Dam and Tikrit, “alienated those under its rule” and united the world against it. He also promised an intensified air campaign against its leadership in Syria and its oil facilities in Iraq, along with an intensified effort to train and equip friendly local forces.

It started with a course boycott and ended with a Nazi cartoon.

In the spring of 2014, a series of ugly incidents rocked the campus of Vassar College, a small liberal arts college just north of New York City.

It started with a boycott protest against a course that involved travel to Israel and the West Bank, including forcing a professor and students to walk a gauntlet of people ululating (audio example here). It culminated in the posting on social media of a Nazi cartoon portraying Jewish control of the U.S.

The group mounting the protest and posting the plainly anti-Semitic cartoon was Vassar Students for Justice in Palestine.

The Obama Administration dismisses a bias complaint by Asian-Americans.

Harvard University is looking for legal cover to justify discriminating against Asian-Americans, and it has an ally in Washington. The Education Department on Tuesday said it had dismissed a complaint from 64 organizations alleging that Harvard uses de facto quotas to limit Asian-Americans on campus.

The percentage of Asian-American students at Harvard and other elite universities has held suspiciously steady for two decades at about 18%, while the number of college-age Asian-Americans has increased rapidly. In May the coalition asked the civil-rights arms of the Education and Justice Departments to investigate why Asian-Americans, who make up about 5% of the population but earn an estimated 30% of National Merit semifinalist honors, aren’t accepted to Harvard in numbers that reflect these qualifications.

White House expected to announce millions of Office of Personnel Management records stolen; intelligence chief suspects Chinese hackers
WASHINGTON—Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said Wednesday the White House soon will announce that “millions and millions” of government background investigation records—dating back 20 years—were stolen by hackers who broke into the Office of Personnel Management’s network.

Mr. Comey, describing the theft as an “enormous breach” during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his own personal information was stolen as part of the intrusion, which Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said likely was carried out by Chinese hackers. Chinese officials have said they weren’t involved.

Some native Swedes feel that Sweden’s immigration policy is a sociological version of creative destruction: “Out with the old, in with the new.” Various ethnic and religious identities have been formed, but Swedish national identity is being lost. If this trend continues, in a few years Malmö will become a city where ethnic Swedes are in the minority.

Sweden has become a shattered society. Optimists say that some day a new common historical and cultural context, based on Swedish multiculturalism, will grow. But immigrant riots in Husby, and the jihadist elements growing in major Swedish cities, tell a different story.

Officials in Sweden’s government say they want immigrants to integrate into the society, but in areas where the majority are immigrants, there is not much society for them to integrate into. There are buildings and traces of a society, but the people who built that society are not around. In many areas where the majority of residents are immigrants and their children, the only identity the community manages to forge is that the area has many social problems.

Most boycotters have no commitment to fairness and regard the idea with derision. Against them, one has to use tactics that fall under the rubric “this is going to hurt you more than us.” Anti-boycott operations have used this approach sporadically with remarkable success. But the approach needs to be conceived more systematically and implemented far more widely.

Such strategies can be summarized under at least four headings: lawfare, counter-boycotts, digging up dirt and self-harming. On the other hand, some Israeli ministerial decisions inadvertently facilitate boycotts; this area, too, needs to be considered.