RUTHFULLY YOURS

Very Little to Debate at ‘Human Rights in Islam’ Discussion Posted By Hege Storhaug

http://pjmedia.com/blog/very-little-to-debate-at-human-rights-in-islam-discussion/?print=1

It is impossible for me to provide a complete account of the debate on “Human Rights in Islam: Just or Unjust?” that was held under the auspices of IslamNet, Norway’s largest Islamic organization, on November 7, 2011. The “ideas” that were presented were utterly lacking in logic or intelligence, and the whole thing raced by very fast. It was almost impossible to keep up with it all: claims were made at a tempo out of another world, and were absolutely without substance. It was far more a revival meeting than a debate.

They delightedly applauded the chopping off of hands and feet. And they didn’t raise an eyebrow when executions committed by family agreement were defended as a reasonable ”human right in Islam.”

You would be forgiven for thinking that we were in deepest Saudi Arabia, or in a long-ago century. Far from it. We were in an auditorium at Oslo University College, where our future was being hatched onstage. The place was packed, and the great majority of the young students were wearing clothes that identifed themselves as followers of the Prophet.

The website Fritanke.no reported prior to the “debate” that the participants were sharia expert Fadel Soliman, Lars Gule, and myself, and that Gule would withdraw from the event if IslamNet separated the audience members by sex. But they did. The young women used one entrance to the auditorium, the young men another. The auditorium consisted of four sitting areas. The areas in the back were entirely separated by sex, while one of the areas in the middle contained members of both sexes — though not in the same rows. The sexual separation “just happened — entirely naturally.”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-new-hope-for-beating-back-the-regressive-green-movement/?print=1

If at any given time in our nation’s history the American people had embraced a philosophy as retarding as that espoused by the green movement, our progress would have halted. Indeed, that’s what’s happening now. The cheapest, most efficient means of production is no longer our national standard. Those hardest hit are the poorest of the poor who depend upon cheap, bountiful energy to both sustain their lives and facilitate their upward mobility.For this reason, the green movement is not just wrong [9], but evil. It is anti-life, inherently regressive, and worth opposing with all our political might. Gird yourself with the intellectual ammo available from Epstein’s Center for Industrial Progress [3].

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The sign at her feet read “For a nuclear free, carbon free future.” The one in her hands an equally predictable “Excessive wealth and consumption are dying paradigms. Renew American with a Green Revolution.”

Before her stood Alex Epstein, energy expert and frequent PJTV guest commentator [2]. Noting the sign on the sidewalk, Epstein asked, “You’re opposed to nuclear power and [carbon dioxide] generating power?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Do you know what percentage of power in the world those generate right now?”

“That’s not my concern. My concern is the people that are profiting off of power that is unsustainable….”

Calm among the hubbub of Zuccotti Park, Epstein endured a lengthy non-response, then answered the question for her.

“We’re talking about something that’s producing 95% of the power in the world,” he stated flatly. “This is the power that’s keeping people’s lights on. It’s keeping the food going. And you’re saying we ought to dismantle that somehow. And I’m saying, if that happens, the entire world as we know it will collapse.”

This is how Epstein and his cohort at the Center for Industrial Progress [3] confront the menace of radical environmentalism [4]. There is a difference between caring about the world we live in and elevating wilderness above human life. The former motivates industrious action, shaping the environment to promote a thriving human existence. The latter retards industry and reduces both the quality of life and the capacity to sustain it.

Junk Science War: Fracking Quakes and ‘Dirty Faces’ Posted By Steve Milloy URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/junk-science-war-fracking-quakes-and-%e2%80%98dirty-faces%e2%80%99/ Though I write to defend the natural gas industry from the junk science hurled at it and the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), I do so with mixed emotions. Two recent government reports, one from the United […]

Egypt, Syria and Turkey: The Lepers with the Fewest Fingers http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/11/17/egypt-syria-and-turkey-the-lepers-with-the-fewest-fingers/?print=1With the financial news focused on the unraveling of Europe’s state finances, the mounting economic catastrophe in the Muslim world has barely merited a mention. Egypt and Syria are about to go over a cliff, while Turkey, supposedly the poster boy for Islamic success, faces […]

http://townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/2011/11/18/shine_a_light_on_americas_afghan-iraqi_rathole/print

When the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan closed shop on Sept. 30, it reported its “sobering but conservative” estimate that U.S. taxpayers had lost between $31 billion and $60 billion in waste and fraud of the $206 billion Uncle Sam has spent on contracts and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, that’s not all. According to the commission’s final report, “a similar amount could be lost due to unsustainable projects and programs.”

These staggering, if “conservative,” figures are the result of three years of the commission’s work, including 25 hearings and eight reports to Congress. What the commission neglected to mention in its final press release, however, was that it was trucking all of its records to the National Archives where, as The Wall Street Journal reported, also on Sept. 30, they would be sealed for 20 years.

News traveled slowly up Capitol Hill. “We learned of this development after the fact,” the two original Senate co-sponsors of the commission, Claire McCaskill and Jim Webb, wrote in a Nov. 7 letter to the archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero. Noting that the commission hadn’t thought to ask or even inform Congress about deep-freezing the documents for the next two decades, the senators asked “that the National Archives make a full disclosure of the commission’s files and records as quickly as possible, consistent with protections for privacy, proprietary information and other applicable laws.”

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/index.php/pruden/full_column/when_a_tantrum_gets_a_little_old When you’re bored, broke and mad at everybody, including Mom, throwing a tantrum is fun. Three-year-olds entertain their mommies with such noisy fits all the time. When regiments of tantrum-throwers get loose on Wall Street, they make the front page. The Occupy Wall Street movement spilled a little blood yesterday in New York City—nearly […]

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/11/17/main-feature/1/israeli-intransigence-try-palestinian-rejectionism/e

OH PULEEZ!!!WHO IN BLAZES NEEDS RECOGNITION FROM BARBARIANS WHOSE KORANIC FAITH DRIVEN LUST WANTS TO DESTROY ISRAEL AND ALL INFIDELS? THIS HAS BECOME STANDARD “IS-REAL POLITIK”….AND IT IS FRANKLY NAUSEATING AND STUPID…..RSK

The conventional wisdom in diplomatic and media circles concerning the Israeli-Arab conflict is that Israeli intransigence—especially on the building of West Bank settlements—is the dead weight that prevents the achievement of a two-state solution in the Middle East. The Netanyahu government has been trying to convince anyone willing to listen that the real cause of the conflict’s persistence isn’t Israeli intransigence but Palestinian unwillingness to accept a Palestinian state so long as that means accepting a Jewish state alongside it. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, these efforts haven’t met with much success.

The Real Obstacle Yossi Kuperwasser, Shalom Lipner, Foreign Affairs. Nearly two decades of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians have failed miserably because the Palestinians have refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. SAVE

No Higher Honor Condoleezza Rice, Random House. The former Secretary of State gives her version of conflicts in the world and in the White House. SAVE

A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism Fred Siegel, RealClearPolitics. Current Palestinian rejectionism has roots in an obsession with Jews and a refusal of political compromise, inspired by Islamic teachings—and European fascism. SAVE

But Israelis are nothing if not persistent; and two high-ranking officials in the Netanyahu government, Shalom Lipner and Yossi Kuperwasser, have just given it another try. Their article in the current issue of the influential journal Foreign Affairsfaithfully reflects the reasoning behind the government’s position and does so with careful documentation and lucid argument.

Lipner is a long-time civil servant in the Prime Minister’s Office; Kuperwasser is Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The head of the Ministry, former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, is a soft-spoken, independent-minded kibbutznik who has been taking on conventional pieties ever since he was forced out of the IDF by Ariel Sharon for opposing, on strategic grounds, the “disengagement” from Gaza. True to form, Ya’alon recently argued that a construction freeze in the West Bank would amount to an “ethnic cleansing” of the region’s Jews.

http://www.jewishledger.com/2011/11/jewish-book-month-is-every-month/ Jewish Book Month begins Nov. 21 and runs through Dec. 21.  Not long ago, book fairs all took place during this month. In fact, Hartford had one of the ten most important Book Festivals in the country and other Jewish Community Centers around the state held many of their book events during this month, […]

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/11/13/3090237/argentine-jewish-boxer-to-defend-title-in-buenos-aires BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — In many ways, Carolina Raquel Duer is a typical middle-class Jewish kid from Buenos Aires. She attended a Jewish day school, spent time working and traveling in Israel and celebrated her bat mitzvah at a Conservative synagogue. But when she stepped into the ring Nov. 12 at Club Atletico […]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/16/part-time-congress/
Proposal would end career politics and crony capitalism

ANOTHER GOOD AND ORIGINAL IDEA THAT PERRY PROPOSED….RSK

Anti-Washington fervor has reached a new high. According to Gallup, 82 percent of A Americans now disapprove of what they see on Capitol Hill. No wonder, considering crony capitalism has enabled the two parties to rack up $15 trillion in debt. The political establishment needs to change.

On Tuesday, Rick Perry proposed creating a part-time Congress by cutting in half the legislative calendar, member pay and office budgets. If the House and Senate fail to balance the budget by 2020, lawmaker salaries would be cut in half once more. “The status quo is good to the Washington insiders,” the Texas governor said. “It’s good to the overpaid bureaucrats. It’s good for the power-players, who can trade favors to build fiefdoms of influence. Those who got us into this mess will not get us out.”

Mr. Perry also wants to criminalize insider trading by lawmakers, referring to revelations in the explosive new book “Throw Them All Out” by Peter Schweizer about politicians who have hit the jackpot with stock trades or real-estate investments that coincide with their special knowledge of earmarks and other legislation. The book gives details of Republican and Democratic leaders from the permanent political class profiting from their inside information. Meanwhile, a study this week by the Center for Responsive Politics showed a whopping 47 percent of congressmen are millionaires. The median net worth of a senator in 2010 was $2.63 million and is 11 percent higher than 2009 – despite the bad economy shrinking the take-home pay of ordinary Americans.