RUTHFULLY YOURS

Much is made of the peer-review of scientific papers; it is frequently held up as the gold standard that assures the quality of scientific publishing. People often ask whether some work has undergone peer-review and are then ready to accept it — confident this makes it kosher. I wish this were really true.

Its proper functioning depends on the integrity of the editor, who chooses two or more anonymous reviewers, at his discretion, and supposedly bases acceptance for publication on their disinterested advice.

But this ideal system is easily misused. If the editor has a bias — as often happens in a controversial area like climate change — then all bets are off. The editor simply selects the reviewers who will give him the opinions he wants. Even if the author objects to particular points in the review, the editor always has the final word — and the paper is rejected.

Some Examples

I have had three recent experiences that have disillusioned me about peer-review — involving prestigious journals; International Journal of Climatology, published by the Royal Meteorological Society; Geophysical Research Letters and Eos, both published by the American Geophysical Union.

1. International Journal of Climatology – Royal Meteorological Society: My co-authors David Douglass (University of Rochester) and John Christy (University of Alabama-Huntsville) on an IJC [2007] paper (that notes the absence of the “Hotspot” in the tropical troposphere, claimed to exist there by B.D. Santer), have recounted in an essay in American Thinker (20Dec2009) their sad experience with IJC editor Glenn McGregor; D&C base their essay on leaked “Climategate” emails between Santer and “team members;” our scientific controversy is fully discussed in Appendix A of their essay: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2009/12/a_climatology_conspiracy.html

The great chronicler of Stalin’s empire and evil was a giant, not least for his honesty in re-evaluating and rejecting the revolutionary passions of his youth. He will be missed.

Robert Conquest, chronicler of Soviet evil and one of the great historians of our age, has died in California at 98. London’s Daily Telegraph reports:

“Conquest personified the truth that there was no anti-communist so dedicated as an ex-communist. His career illustrated also what the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, another former communist, meant when he said to the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti that “the final battle” of the 20th century would have to be fought between the two sides they represented.

An ardent Bolshevik as a young man, Conquest became a bitter foe of Soviet “Socialism”. He had first visited Russia in 1937 as a youthful devotee of the great experiment. It was a half century before he returned in 1989, having spent his life between chronicling the horrors the country had endured, and emerging, in the view of the Oxford historian Mark Almond, as “one of the few Western heroes of the collapse of Soviet Communism”. “He was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn,” said Timothy Garton Ash.”

The Iran nuclear deal is a chance for Moscow and China to consolidate their Middle East influence at America’s expense.
There’s considerable debate over whether the Obama administration’s recent accord with Iran will stop the regime from getting a nuclear weapon. But there can be no debate about the fact that the biggest beneficiaries of the accord and the impending lifting of sanctions will be—besides the rulers in Tehran—Russia and China. Beijing and Moscow are already seizing this moment to consolidate their steadily growing influence in the Middle East, through their client Iran, at the expense of the U.S. and its allies.

The emergence of a Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis is now virtually certain. It’s also the biggest power shift in the Middle East since the Suez crisis of 1956.

This emerging axis comes as no surprise. Russia and China have been important enablers in Iran’s search for a nuclear weapon almost from the start, including Russia’s construction of the nuclear complex at Bashher and China providing key components for Tehran’s centrifuge program. Yet neither regime has suffered any criticism or lasting opprobrium for doing so, not least in the United Nations. On the contrary, the Obama administration assiduously cultivated their cooperation in the U.N. for imposing economic sanctions on Iran, even as Russia and China were sharply criticizing the entire sanctions regime, and China was given an exemption from the sanctions for purchasing Iranian oil.

Dozens of states have passed laws forbidding state and local governments from doing business with companies invested in Iran, but one short paragraph in the nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama appears to shatter these efforts.

In 2006, as treasurer of Missouri, I decided to divest state funds—including in employee pensions—from any bank, company or financial institution doing business with a terrorist-sponsoring state. At that time the list included Iran, North Korea, Syria and Sudan.
I believed it was my constitutional and fiduciary responsibility to the people of Missouri to prevent their money from potentially helping support terrorist activities. At least 30 other states have undertaken similar initiatives.

Speech will frame lawmakers’ vote as their most consequential since 2002 Iraq war resolution

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama plans to make his sharpest sales pitch yet in favor of the Iran nuclear deal that the U.S. and other world powers reached three weeks ago, with a lengthy speech on Wednesday outlining his argument in detail for Americans.

The president will speak at American University in Washington as the battle heats up between the White House and opponents of the deal, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to win over lawmakers on Capitol Hill who are expected to vote on the agreement next month.

The deal negotiated between Iran and a six-nation negotiating bloc strictly limits Tehran’s nuclear activity for at least a decade in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.

A core component of Mr. Obama’s argument on Wednesday will be to frame lawmakers’ decision on the Iran deal as the most consequential congressional vote since the 2002 Iraq war authorization.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign staged another document dump on Friday, including more of her private emails from her time as Secretary of State, a health report and eight years of tax returns. We’ll have more to say about the emails, but the tax filings show how Bill and Hillary define charity.

The first couple of American liberalism reported income of $139 million in their hardship years from 2007-2014. That’s a tad more than most of the “everyday Americans” whom Mrs. Clinton claims to speak for, which may explain why an accompanying press release stressed that she and Bill had given $14,959,450 to charity.
That’s wonderful, save for the small detail that her charity of choice was her own family. The couple donated all but $200,000 of their gifts since 2007 to the Clinton Family Foundation, which isn’t exactly the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Anglo-American historian and poet who chronicled Stalin’s excesses dies in Palo Alto, Calif.

Robert Conquest, an Anglo-American historian whose works on the terror and privation under Joseph Stalin made him the pre-eminent Western chronicler of the horrors of Soviet rule, died Monday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 98 years old.

Mr. Conquest’s master work, “The Great Terror,” was the first detailed account of the Stalinist purges from 1937 to 1939. He estimated that under Stalin, 20 million people perished from famines, Soviet labor camps and executions—a toll that eclipsed that of the Holocaust. Writing at the height of the Cold War in 1968, when sources about the Soviet Union were scarce, Mr. Conquest was vilified by leftists who said he exaggerated the number of victims. When the Cold War ended and archives in Moscow were thrown open, his estimates proved high but more accurate than those of his critics.

Someone should tell the mullahs in Tehran that there’s no way Hitler could have lost that war, if only he had had the Jews on his side. There’s more than a modicum of truth in the joke. Killing six million Jews diverted resources from the German war effort. More importantly, Jewish physicists, including Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Robert Oppenheimer, David Bohm, Rudolf Peierls, Otto Frisch Felix Bloch, Niels Bohr, Otto Hahn, and Edward Teller, led the American effort to build an atom bomb. Enrico Fermi, whose wife was Jewish, left Italy for America after Mussolini imposed race laws in 1938. Albert Einstein had spent the First World War in Berlin; at the outbreak of the Second, he helped persuade Franklin Roosevelt to fund the Manhattan Project.

100,000 German Jews had served in World War I, 12,000 died on the battlefield, and 35,000 were decorated for bravery, a higher proportion than the general population. Jewish loyalty to Germany was not in question in 1933. The Jews of Eastern Europe, moreover, were in general more sympathetic to Germany than to Russia. Killing Jews served no rational German objective. Yet no-one can argue that Jew-hatred was merely incidental to the Nazi regime. On the contrary, it was the raison d’etre of National Socialism.

“I WONDERED HOW HE WOULD BE REMEMBERED IF HE DIED TRYING TO REACH THE SHORES OF ENGLAND TONIGHT”

If you hate the migrants in Calais, you hate yourself
Over the centuries, we offered succour and shelter to the persecuted. Now it’s Fortress Britain
By Nick Cohen
The Observer
August 2, 2015

I looked at Salah Mohammed Ali and wondered how he would be remembered if he died trying to reach the shores of England tonight. It was not a fanciful speculation.

Since 1 June, 10 refugees have died on the roads around Calais, at the port or inside the Channel tunnel. Their number included an Eritrean woman hit by a car last week on Calais’s urban motorway. A few days before, a Sudanese man had tried to jump on to the Eurostar. He misjudged the distance and the train smashed his head open. Worst of all was Samir, an Eritrean baby, who lived and died within the space of an hour. Her young mother fell from a truck heading to Dover. The fall triggered a premature birth and that was Samir’s life over before it had begun.

The pointless debate continues. As reliable as the arrival of the scorching heat and drenching humidity of August, comes the debate (mostly by academics) over whether the United States is guilty of moral outrage for having dropped the atomic bombs on Japan on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, to put an end to the carnage of World War II.

For some, the fact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “proves” the inherent savagery and evil of America. For others, America was not necessarily evil (though maybe it was), but merely impatient, arrogant and greedy, and could have accomplished the Japanese surrender a kinder, gentler way.