RUTHFULLY YOURS

In her December 28 CNN article, “How Germany Banishes Climate Myths [1],” German environment minister Barbara Hendricks argues that the climate policies enabled by her country and the EU as a whole have been an economic success.

This is nothing more than East German-style disinformation.

The reality is that Germany’s so-called “Solar Valley” has become a mothballed industrial rust belt. Nearly all solar energy manufacturers have closed their doors.

In support of her argument, Hendricks claims that while greenhouse gas emissions in the EU fell by 18% between 1990 and 2012, there was cumulative growth of 45% in the EU’s economy during this period. However, this represents a growth rate of only 2% annually, while typical investment portfolios grew by between 100% (4.5% annually) and 300% (13.6% annually) during this time.

Hendricks asserts:

Scientists have long agreed that climate action strengthens economic development and creates an opportunity for comprehensive modernization of our economies.

This makes no sense. Scientists aren’t experts on economics, and unbiased scientists never agree on such contentious matters. Hendricks continues:

The age of fossil fuel is coming to an end, just as the age of the horse and cart, the steam locomotive and the oil lamp eventually came to an end.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/to-undermine-sharia-on-the-glazov-gang/

How and why the West needs to spearhead the effort to undercut the Sharia narrative.

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Dr. Moorthy Muthuswamy, the author of Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War.

Dr. Muthuswamy came on the show to discuss To Undermine Sharia, analyzing how and why the West needs to spearhead the effort to undercut the Sharia narrative.

Founded in 1948, The World Council of Churches (WCC) is a fellowship of 345 Protestant and Orthodox Christian churches in 110 countries. Their aim is “to support the member churches and ecumenical partners to journey together, promoting justice and peace in our world as an expression of faith in the Triune God.”

To advance their “justice and peace” initiatives, they collude with Islamic and Palestinian friends in a covert scheme to sabotage Israel. Their web of anti-Zionism extends throughout Europe, the Americas and Africa. While this may seem a bold assertion, it is nonetheless worth examining some undeniable evidence.

WCC is among the many coalitions of Christians that embrace the extreme left and the jihad agenda as appeasers and collaborators. According to Melanie Phillips, a British journalist and commentator, Islamic tactics are emboldened largely due to the support of Christian leaders. These strong alliances help to propel the Islamic agenda. Respectable Christian institutions like the WCC have partnered and even befriended this dreadful Islamist fraternity under the guise of ecumenism.

BRIAN WILLIAMS FOR PRESIDENTTwo years ago NBC and MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell tried to invent a Romney gaffe by playing an edited tape of Romney. Mitchell wasn’t just another angry MSNBCite, but NBC’s Chief Foreign Affairs correspondent and a colleague of Brian Williams who often appeared on his newscast.

NBC was criticized, but Mitchell wasn’t fired. Neither was anyone else. She didn’t even apologize.

The network had even more outrageously edited George Zimmerman’s tape to make him sound racist. A local producer and correspondent were fired. The correspondent, Lilia Luciano, had reported for, among other NBC outlets, The Nightly News with Brian Williams.

Brian Williams is in trouble for lying, but he was part of a media culture of deceit where lies were acceptable for a good progressive cause. Williams isn’t really in trouble because he lied, but because he got caught. Worse still, the lies were self-serving. They served Brian Williams; they didn’t serve the left.

Williams had failed to draw the line between the “good lie” (ObamaCare is making life better) and the “bad lie” (I swam the flooded French Quarter with puppies on my back during Katrina while Al Qaeda shot RPGs at me). But the borders between the “good lie” and the “bad lie” have been vague when it comes to the titans of the left.

This past month the Center for Immigration Studies released a report authored by Jessica Vaughan, that organization’s director of policy studies.

The title of the report was, “Government Data Reveal 5.5 Million New Work Permits Issued Since 2009.”

Jessie is an old friend and colleague. I contacted her to discuss her astonishing report. I was more than a bit curious as to how she had come to focus on how millions of aliens were granted employment authorization when, under existing immigration laws, they would not qualify to be granted this important immigration benefit. I was especially interested to know if any official reports issued by the GAO, at the behest of an appropriate congressional oversight committee, had been behind the initial findings. She was crystal clear in her response: There were no such reports, she came to do the study on her own.

Here is how her report begins:

Government data reveal that about 5.5 million new work permits were issued to aliens from 2009 to 2014, above and beyond the number of new green card and temporary worker admissions in those years. This is a huge parallel immigrant work authorization system outside the limits set by Congress that inevitably impacts opportunities for U.S. workers, damages the integrity of the immigration system, and encourages illegal immigration.

Originally published by Defining Ideas.

In December, MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, had to explain to Congress several remarks he had made about the “stupidity of the American voter,” as he put it in one speech. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh frequently uses the more diplomatic phrase “low-information voter” to explain why bad policies or incompetent politicians succeed. And numerous polls of respondents’ knowledge of history and current events repeatedly imply the same conclusion––that the American people are not informed or smart enough for democracy.

This bipartisan disdain for the masses has been a constant theme of political philosophy for over 2,500 years. From the beginnings of popular rule in ancient Athens, the competence of the average person to manage the state has been called into question by critics of democracy. Lacking the innate intelligence or the acquired learning necessary for dispassionately judging policy, the masses instead are driven by their passions or private short-term interests.

The earliest critic of democracy, an Athenian known as the Old Oligarch, wrote that “among the common people are the greatest ignorance, ill-discipline, and depravity.” Aristotle argued that the need to make a living prevents most people from acquiring the education and developing the virtues necessary for running the state. He said the “best form of state will not admit them to citizenship.” And Socrates famously sneered at the notion that any “tinker, cobbler, sailor, passenger; rich and poor, high and low” could be consulted on “an affair of state.”

By the time of the Constitutional convention in 1787, this distrust of the masses had long been a staple of political philosophy. Roger Sherman, a lawyer and future Senator from Massachusetts, who opposed letting the people directly elect members of the House of Representatives, typified the antidemocratic sentiment of many delegates. He argued that the people “should have as little to do as may be about the government,” for “they want information and are constantly liable to be misled.”

Raúl Castro’s demands include reparations and no more U.S. asylum for doctors who defect.

Less than two months after his “historic” outreach to Havana with a promise to “normalize relations,” the U.S. commander in chief is getting the back of Raúl Castro ’s hand.

On Dec. 17, President Obama floated his plan to revise a half-century-old U.S.-Cuba policy by promising engagement. “We intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people,” he said. The trouble is that as his statements in recent weeks have shown, Raúl Castro has no interest in doing things differently.

The message from Havana is that if Mr. Obama wants a Cuba legacy it will have to be on Cuba’s terms. That means he will have to go down in history as the U.S. president who prolonged the longest-running military dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.
Days before Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs Roberta Jacobson arrived in Havana on Jan. 21 for talks, the Cuban state newspaper Granma published the government’s list of “demands” for normalizing relations. One of them was that the U.S. recognize Cuban state-run community groups as nongovernmental organizations. It did not name any, but the notorious “committees to defend the revolution,” which exist to enforce repression by spying on the neighbors, come to mind. Also on the list published in Granma was a demand that the U.S. end its asylum program for Cuban doctors who escape while serving in third-world countries where they have been sent to work for slave wages.

The Crusades — gruesome as they were — were not some early outbreak of “Islamophobia.” They were an effort, by Christian nations in Europe, to defend Christians in the Middle East who were being slaughtered by Muslim tribes, and specifically to take back the city of Jerusalem from the Muslim armies who had invaded it.

It is a very strange interpretation of history to put the blame for slavery on Christians, but to ignore William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln and other Christians who led the world in fighting to abolish it. Slavery is still practiced by Muslims in Mauritania and, as recently seen, by Boko Haram.

Barack Obama is the President of the United States, but to judge from his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast last Thursday morning, one might get the impression that he thinks himself far more than that.

He and his speech-writers presumably realised with the news in America, as in the rest of the world, dominated day in and day out with atrocious news stories from Muslim communities in the Middle East, the President would probably have to make a reference to Islamic violence.

It is Israel’s head on the block, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is weighing the political fallout of irritating a President who is generally irritated with Israel vs. nuclear fallout.

Thomas Friedman suggests again that Israel subordinate its national security concerns to American politics. Friedman remains a stalking horse for President Obama’s views.

If U.S. military action in Iran were to fail, the blame should accrue to U.S. strategy, planning and execution, and not to Israel’s justifiable concern that that it is #1 on the “hit list.”

Perhaps Friedman could please go protect somebody else?

Kenichi Hartman Grew up biracial (white/Asian) and tricultural (American/Japanese/Jewish), mostly in Tokyo and Palo Alto. Made Aliyah in October 2011 along with his loving wife and two adorable daughters.

Part one:http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-startup-samurai-in-the-startup-nation-an-interview-with-kentaro-sakakibara-part-i/

Kentaro Sakakibara interview part III – What do the Japanese know about Israel

KH: You mentioned before that you’ve been getting opposition on Twitter from your fellow Japanese about setting up Samurai House in Israel.

KS: People have been raising all sorts of doubts and questions through Twitter and personal communication. We’ve been getting it from everybody! It seems like there’s no one in Japan who hasn’t asked me what the heck I’m doing here! (laughs). It’s really tiring every time I go back to Japan now because I have to constantly answer the same questions about “Why Israel?” Really, I should record my answer and push “play” every time someone questions my decision to go to Israel.

KH: So what’s the nature of the push-back you’re getting about being in Israel? I can think to two basic reasons: (1) Israel is perceived to be very dangerous, so people in Japan might wonder why you’re going out of your way to risk the personal safely of you and your associates; or (2) You are being overly hasty in embracing cooperation with Israel, because the Arab-Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli conflict still has not been resolved.

KS: The opposition is usually much more simplistic than that. They think Israel = Middle East = just like Syria. It’s all just one big jumble in their heads. People ask, “What’s over there, just desert and wars, right?” Most Japanese still don’t get that what’s going on Israel is unique compared to the rest of the region. There are more than a few people who think that Israel is primarily a Muslim country because, after all, it’s in the Middle East! So they think I’m just wasting my time, and doing it in a very dangerous place!