RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bill Nye, most notably of children’s television fame, is now taking his personal insight to the millions populating the social media world. Take this recent pearl of disciplined scientific speculation on Twitter:

“@BillNye: [Tropical storm] Bill floods Texas. Alaska is on fire. Just a little global warming and climate change. Nothing to worry about…”

Honestly, the anthropogenic global warming peddler’s ease in promoting his doctrine would make Egyptian priests, Native American shamans, and voodoo witch doctors sick with jealousy. Nearly everything can easily be blamed on the “global warming” gods’ wrath, it seems — and the devoted flock will buy the narrative, and assume a position of shame and guilt with little or no genuine thought. The devoted just require blind faith that the smart guys comprising the supposed scientific “consensus” have done the heavy lifting of analysis for them, and are telling them what they ought to be doing to save themselves and the world.

He could hear from inside his room where he was hiding the gunmen opening doors and inquiring if the people inside were Muslims or Christians.

“The motorbike riders got down from their bike and started beating [Christian journalist] Shamim Masih and… warned him that if he did not stop reporting on Christian issues, they knew his family and home and would teach him and his family a lesson.” — Nazir S. Batti, Pakistan Christian Congress Party.

“The city of Mosul alone had 45 churches. Now there is not a single one. The buildings have been destroyed. Four hundred churches have been destroyed in Syria. … The same is happening in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Northern Africa.” — Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia

“What happened to Christians in Iraq and Syria… does not receive Arabic media coverage that befits human beings, whatever their religion.” — Hani Naqshabandi, Saudi writer.

The British don’t need your advice any more than they needed your DVDs.
In the course of his recent European tour, President Obama decided to intervene in the domestic politics of the United Kingdom — and not on a minor matter. A referendum on whether the British should remain in the European Union is scheduled to be held by the end of 2017 under legislation now being debated in the British Parliament. This question goes to the heart of the U.K.’s democratic sovereignty, and opinion polls suggest that the electorate leans towards staying in, but by a modest margin. For the British it is a massive constitutional battle& on the order of the Glorious Revolution or, well, 1776.

Killing off military commissions has been an obsession of the Lawyer Left for over a dozen years. It may, at long last, be “Mission Accomplished” thanks to last week’s ruling by a deeply divided federal appeals court.

In al-Bahlul v. United States, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit threw out the terrorism conspiracy conviction of Osama bin Laden’s personal aide and propaganda director, an al-Qaeda jihadist who bragged about his Goebbels-like role in the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

The court, nearly a year ago, had already thrown out Suliman al-Bahlul’s other convictions for providing material support to terrorism and soliciting terrorism against the United States. Sitting en banc on that occasion, the Circuit’s seven judges ruled that al-Bahlul had an American constitutional right against prosecution on ex post facto crimes. These findings, consistent with recent Circuit precedent, were a remarkable measure of the Lawyer Left’s progress in expanding judicial protections for America’s enemies given that (a) the jihadist is a Yemeni whose only connection to our nation and its Constitution is to make war against them, and (b) congressional statutes criminalizing material support and solicitation of violence long predated al-Bahlul’s commission of those offenses.

Has the United States ever had a weirder president than Richard Nixon? The fact that his only close competitors in this regard are his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, and his indirect successor, Jimmy Carter, could help to explain why the ’60s and ’70s were such troubled times for this country. But even LBJ (who loved to lecture aides while sitting on the toilet) and Mr. Carter (who claimed to have been attacked by a “killer rabbit” and to have experienced “lust in his heart”) could not match Nixon for sheer bizarreness. Evan Thomas’s terrifically engaging biography contains many choice examples.

The story of IRS targeting of conservative groups that disagreed with Obama Administration policy isn’t over. On Friday the IRS lost another big battle, as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a viewpoint discrimination lawsuit against the agency can proceed. Next stop, discovery.

The lawsuit began when the Pennsylvania-based pro-Israel group Z Street applied for tax-exempt status in 2009. When Z Street called to inquire about its application, it says an IRS agent said the agency had a policy that required Israel-related applications to get extra scrutiny in a special unit in Washington. Z Street sued in federal court but the IRS claimed the Anti-Injunction Act prevents suits meant to evade the collection of taxes and because the IRS was protected by the doctrine of sovereign immunity. The IRS lost in district court but appealed.

Professors reacted to the budget move as if lawmakers had tried to ban tweed jackets with elbow patches.

On a sunny, early summer day, Memorial Union Terrace on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is idyllic. The high, cloudless skies and cool blue water of Lake Mendota serve as a backdrop to coeds drinking beer, sunning themselves and studying for exams.

Yet for weeks now this utopian campus has been awash in dyspepsia, ever since the state legislature’s Joint Finance Committee passed a budget motion concerning faculty tenure. Wisconsin is the only state where the university tenure framework is codified in statute. Under the new plan, tenure would be instead administered by the University of Wisconsin system’s governor-appointed Board of Regents.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-state-of-the-kurds-1434712156

With a political win in Turkey, victories over Islamic State and autonomy in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds are enjoying a triumphant moment—and thinking of a country of their own.

It is a time of good news for the Kurds, a people more accustomed to tragedy than to triumph.

Just last week in Turkey, a political party rooted in the struggle for Kurdish rights vaulted over the 10% threshold for parliamentary representation, giving the Kurds their biggest say ever in Turkish politics. Days later, allied Kurdish fighters in Syria seized a crucial border crossing from Islamic State, thus uniting Kurdish areas that now stretch from Iraq halfway to the Mediterranean Sea.

Establishing de-radicalization centers to fight the jihadist plague, either in Muslim countries or in the West is a futile endeavor. They cannot erase centuries of indoctrination by religious authorities in Arab and Muslim countries.

The preaching of hatred of all others (Kuffār), for not following in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad, include instructions to dehumanize and subjugate those who cave-in and preferred methods to kill the rest, especially the Jews.

This has been re-enforced by local mosques and madrassas in Muslim dominated territories over centuries, and more recently in non-Muslim countries. Since the mid 1960s the Saudi royal family and the Saudi Kingdom have funded Islamic radicalization.

Even before MK Michael Oren’s book “Ally” is officially released, it is already causing the kind of buzz that best-sellers are made of. And with good reason.

The memoir of Oren’s term as Israeli ambassador to the United States — a position he held from 2009-2013 — provides a detailed account of the U.S. administration’s treatment of Israel. Though the tension that has existed between Washington and Jerusalem since Barack Obama became president is both an open secret and the focus of endless commentary on both sides of the political divide, its true extent is often obfuscated by insistence that the rift is greatly exaggerated. Or that it is merely due to the fact that Obama has a personal aversion to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Oren is now asserting that none of us even knows the half of it.