Error Theory

Gates' patent claims pre-empted by my 2005 "Hurricane Stopper" post

2009-07-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

Bill gates just filed a patent on a scheme to unplug hurricanes by surrounding them with fleets of pump-boats bringing cold water to the surface:

Having posted this idea four years ago myself, I have to admit it's a bit wacky. On the other hand, Hurricane Katrina devastated a substantial chunk of my country, so anything that MIGHT be able to slow these monsters down ought to at least be talked about.

The Gates scheme is lumbering and passive. My Hurricane Stopper is agile and active, giving it a better chance of being practical. My idea was to have wind-turbine powered jet-boats suck their propellant water from the cold depths and spread it around in the hurricane's path. Think of barge-like wind-farms, big enough to ride out hurricane seas.

Downsides: Might not be possible to build a wind-farm barge capable of riding out hurricane winds and seas; would kill a lot of birds and fish; possible ill effects from changing the temperature gradient in the Gulf, if used on massive scale.

Gate's scheme is similar to mine in that it also uses the hurricane's own energy, but it does so passively. He would dot the Gulf with giant tubs, ballast-regulated to ride so that hurricane seas would lap over the edges of the tubs, raising the water level in the tub above the surrounding sea level. Gravity would then drive the water in the tub down through a drain in the bottom that extends down to the cold depths:

At whatever rate the waves lap over the top, the same amount of water should flow out the bottom. But is it really possible to in this way get the warm top-water off of the cold water below?

The patent claim is that when the top-water gets pushed down to the cold depths, it pushes the cold water up, but will it? How can cold rise through warm? It seems more likely that the warm water exiting the drain will float back up, but not all the way because it has been cooled by its exposure to deep water, with the warm top-water continuing to sit as a lid on the cold water below.

The only way any cold water would make it to the surface is by roiling of the waters from below, but this roiling would be originating 155 feet down, and only by passive means. If it brings any cold water to the surface, it won't be much.

Neither will these giant tubs be very mobile, meaning the Gulf would have to be pre-saturated with these lap-tubs. FAIL.

In sum, Gates claim to the general idea of stopping hurricanes by bringing cold water to the surface is pre-empted by my four year old scheme, and his "best embodiment" of this general idea is far inferior to my embodiment, leaving him with nothing. Sorry Bill. You should have been reading my blog. I'd have been glad to work with you on a patent claim before the one year post-publication deadline for filing.

Let that be a lesson to everyone. Read my blog!

Note to Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Searete LLC and Intellectual Ventures

If you all want to make a giant pile of cash (not as big as the computer operating system pile, but maybe only one order of magnitude below), I've got an invention I'd be glad to let you patent, for an appropriate share. It is a fundamentally improved version of a standard household appliance. Whole new functionality, with no loss of existing functionality. Not a household necessity like the basic functionality is, but something that a lot of people would want to have, at little additional cost. Ultimate market penetration could easily go over 50%. All patentable and not pre-empted. I've done the patent searches.

We just need to sign a disclosure agreement and a standard deal for inventor's share if we go forward. I've been sitting on this for over ten years because I don't want to start the clock on the patent expiration until I am teamed up with someone who has the bucks to actually put the invention into production. Forget potential profits. I want a share of the real thing. Gates has the resources to develop and produce the product, so it is a good match. Any other appliance companies, R and D companies, or investors who want to contact me, feel free (serious only please).

Another freebie for the public: mitigate global cooling with sooty coal

With the earth cooling rapidly (by historical standards) for 10 years now, and with our quiescent sun guaranteeing a significantly extended cooling phase going forward, we need to start figuring out how to mitigate the growing cold, because unlike global warming, global cooling is actually dangerous. Cold really does feed on itself in a way that can get away from us, and it directly constricts the space available for living things, both seasonally and absolutely. Nothing gobbles up the biosphere like glaciation.

It is the feedback mechanism that creates the danger. Spreading snow and ice increase the earth's "albedo," or reflectivity, bouncing sunlight away and cooling the earth, creating yet more snow and ice. Of course this feedback cycle also works in the warming direction, but with a big difference. In the warming direction, the albedo feedback effect gets smaller and smaller as warming progresses. Once snow and ice have shrunk back to arctic regions, they are that point only reflecting away a small amount of sunlight, so further melting cannot shrink the albedo much further.

In the cooling direction, the albedo feedback effect gets larger and larger as cooling progresses. When snow and ice come down to lower latitudes, they cover progressively larger swaths of land and they reflect away sunlight that is progressively more direct. This is why the earth regularly experiences runaway cooling, and spends most of its time in 100,000 year long glacial periods, but has never experienced run-away warming. Warming feedbacks diminish as they progress. Cooling feedbacks build.

The last two years are illustrative, as near record snow- cover in Asia and North America have spawned our present cool summer. We are seeing right now just how fast cooling feedbacks can ramp up, but there may be something we can do about it.

We just need to darken the snow. Where oh where can we get our hands on a massive steady supply of black sooty stuff that we can pump out onto the snow all winter long across the great white north?

Just build, build, build coal burning electric plants across North America, Scandinavia and Asia, and leave the scrubbers off the smokestacks. As a handy by-product, the resulting cheap energy will bring our "green"-around-the-gills economy rocketing back from its current death spiral.

If we would de-regulate energy development (real energy development, not the phony "green" garbage), our economy would start booming tomorrow, and there is absolutely no reason to regulate CO2.

The facts are in: the CO2 theory of late 20th century warming has been debunked

There are two competing theories of 20th century warming. One, backed by the known history of correlation between solar activity and global temperature, says it was caused by the extraordinarily high levels of solar activity between 1930 to 2000. The other, formulated by anti-capitalist ideologues who claimed in the 1970's that fossil fuels were causing global cooling, says that fossil fuels caused the warming from 1980-1998.

With both candidate causes galloping along at high levels until 2003, both theories claimed validation. Then the sun went quiet, as atmospheric CO2 continued to grow apace--the perfect experiment for finding which theory is correct--and the results are in. The planet is cooling, supporting the solar warming theory and debunking the CO2 warming theory.

The alarmist theory is not just wrong, but is actually an obvious case of omitted variable fraud. The only way the CO2 alarmists could pretend that the tiny CO2 greenhouse effect could cause runaway global warming was by completely omitting the known solar-magnetic warming influence from their models and misattributing this warming effect to CO2. As NASA climate-modeler Gavin Schmidt puts it:

[T]here is no obvious need for ‘new’ or unknown physics to explain what [is] going on.

Schmidt feels no "need" to account a known warming effect when he can make his model work just as well (even better, for his purposes) by misattributing this warming effect to CO2. Dirtbag.

Solar warmists never behave in this anti-scientific way. They never omit CO2 greenhouse effects from their calculations, but only do what scientists are supposed to do: use reason and evidence to gauge the magnitude of the different warming effects as best as they can. Their calculation that the dominant climate driver is solar activity has now been confirmed. That means CO2 cannot cause run-away warming, which means that whatever warming effect it has is all to the good. In general, warming is good for people and other living things, while cooling is bad. Mankind and the biosphere both thrived when Greenland was green.

Now that we are entering a cooling phase, people may start wishing that CO2 had a significant warming effect, but it doesn't. The one place where CO2 can be of significant help is as a fertilizer for plant growth. With the shorter growing seasons that go with global cooling, we need as much of that effect as we can get. Thus there is a non-negligible grounds for subsidizing CO2, and no reason to suppress it, as our demented Democrats are doing.

Dirty coal might actually require subsidization

When the eco-religionists talk about "clean coal," they are not talking about soot at all, but are talking about sequestering the colorless, odorless, harmless plant-food called CO2. What we need is not just "dirty coal" in the CO2 emitting sense, but real dirty coal, chock full of good old fashioned snow-darkening soot.

Getting genuinely dirty coal power probably will require subsidization, because old-time soot is the byproduct of an inefficient burning process. It will take some R & D to develop plants that can be switched back and forth between fully efficient summer-mode burning, sans soot and sulpher, and "inefficient" winter burning, with black soot intact (efficient once the external value of soot is counted as an output).

Massive expansion of dirty northern coal-fired electrical generation will kill several birds with one stone: it will rejuvenate the world economy; it will decrease wintertime albedo cooling feedbacks, significantly mitigating global cooling; the release of CO2 from coal-burning will give some relief from cold-driven crop shrinkage; and it will contribute very slightly to the earth's blanket of greenhouse gases, mitigating global cooling itself by a very slight amount.

So that's my freebie. Dig here. Back to the future. Return to dirty coal. Hard to patent the past, but I predict that at least a few hefty diamonds will be pulled from this ash heap.

Everyone involved with the Flight 93 Memorial knows that the Crescent of Embrace points to Mecca

2009-07-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

In 2007, Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird told me that everyone at the meetings he attended is fully aware that the giant crescent, originally named the Crescent of Embrace, really does point almost exactly at Mecca. Professor Baird says they all just assume (himself included) that the Mecca orientation must be an innocent coincidence.

Pretty crazy, when they have also been told the meaning of a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca. Every mosque is built around a Mecca-direction indicator called a mihrab, and the classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Geometrically, the Crescent of Embrace is the world’s largest mihrab.

However honestly Project Partners believe that the Mecca orientation of the crescent must be a coincidence, this is not what they tell the public. When reporters asked Memorial Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley about the Mecca orientation, she denied it:

"The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site," she said.

Thinking that the Mecca orientation of the crescent must be a coincidence in no way justifies lying to the public about this explosive information. If Baird’s account is accurate—that the dozens of Memorial Project Partners all know that the giant crescent actually does point to Mecca—then the Memorial Project has a lot of explaining to do. Now an overlooked article from 2007 corroborates Professor Baird’s information.

Dr. Glenn Kashurba

It turns out that a Pennsylvania psychiatrist who has been intimately involved with the memorialization of Flight 93 (writing two books on the subject) argued to a reporter before the July 2007 Memorial Project meeting that the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent (which he took as a given) should be seen as coincidental:

“When you calculate angles to Mecca - I'm going to be in Washington, D.C., this week, and I'm sure if I calculate angles of the monuments, at least one points to Mecca,” Kashurba said. “I don't know if it will be the White House or the Lincoln Memorial, but at least one will. People looking for a way to support their way of looking at things will look at this in this way for ever and ever.”

If Dr. Kashurba was getting his information from the Memorial Project’s public statements, he would have denied that the crescent points to Mecca. Here is what Memorial Project Partner Patrick White told the press 9 days before the Kashurba story:

Rawls, of Palo Alto, Calif., contends that the centerpiece of the design points toward Mecca.

Rawls’ claims are untrue and “preposterous,” according to Patrick White, Families of Flight 93 vice president. “We went through in detail all his original claims and came away with nothing.”

Kashurba knew better, as did Patrick White himself. The week after his public denial, a local woman asked White how he could be okay with the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. This time White did not deny the Mecca orientation, but argued that it cannot be seen as honoring Islam because the inexactness of the Mecca orientation would be "disrespectful" to Islam.

Mecca orientation takes literally 2 minutes to verify, starting from source documents

It is not surprising that these Memorial Project insiders would know that the giant crescent does in fact point almost exactly at Mecca (1.8° north of Mecca to be precise, ± 0.1°). After all, they had by the summer of 2007 been examining my report, and answering questions from the press about it, for over a year, and the near Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is trivially easy to verify.

Just use any of the online Islamic prayer-direction calculators to print out the direction to Mecca from Somerset PA. Place this graphic over the Crescent site-plan on your computer screen, and you will see that the Mecca-direction line (which Muslims call “qibla”) almost exactly bisects the crescent:

The green circle in this image is from the qibla calculator at Islam.com (down at the moment, but you can use the one at Qibla.com, or QiblaLocator.com). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca.

Patrick White knows this and deceives the press and the public about it. Dr. Kashurba knows it and stands by as White and others deceive the press and the public about it. These deceptions have been blatant.

Everything points to Mecca?

The Project even went to far as to dig up an academic fraud from Texas, willing to deny that there is any such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round.

Was the reporter embarrassed to ask Muslims if they can really face any direction to face Mecca? Hard to blame her. Just to ask such a stupid question is to answer it, but the obviousness of the fraud is no excuse for letting it stand.

According to Professor Baird, every Memorial Project member who saw these denials knew that they were fraudulent, yet not one of them has tried to tell the public about the Project’s dishonest cover-up. When the truth does get out to the broader public, Project members are going to have a lot to answer for, which is presumably why they are keeping their mouths shut now. They have done a very bad thing and they don’t want it exposed.

What proves Islamic intent is the architect’s elaborate repetition of the Mecca orientation

No one ever claimed that the almost exact Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace proves Islamic intent. Architect Paul Murdoch proves intent in a different way: by elaborate repetition of his Mecca orientations. His first confirmation of intent is to include an exact Mecca orientation.

In Murdoch’s explanation, the flight path breaks the circle, turning it into the giant crescent. To find this thematically defined crescent, remove those parts of the full Crescent of Embrace that extend out past the point where the flight path breaks the circle. The resulting true or thematic crescent points EXACTLY at Mecca:

At the upper tip of the crescent, the flight path comes down from the NNE and symbolically breaks the circle. What symbolically remains standing is the true or thematic Crescent of Embrace, pointing exactly at Mecca.

Murdoch’s next confirmation of intent is to exactly repeat this entire multi-Mecca oriented geometry in the vast array of crescents of trees that surround the Tower of Voices part of the memorial. Setting aside the chance that an architect could in the first place design a memorial to Flight 93 out of nothing but crescents just by innocent coincidence (which must be close to zero), the odds that these crescents would by random chance manifest Murdoch’s repeated Mecca orientations are 1 in 131 billion:

The only change was to include an explicitly broken off part of the circle

The original Crescent of Embrace design included the symbolically broken off parts at the upper crescent tip. When the bare naked Islamic-crescent shape caused a public uproar, the Memorial Project added another broken off part of the circle, floating out in front of the mouth of the original crescent.

They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, the symbolic result of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. That makes it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque.

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Chavez threatens to invade Honduras, Obama says Honduras is on its own

2009-07-02T20:59:00.001-07:00

Never a word from the Obama regime about Venezuela's threat to invade Honduras and restore Chavez crony and fellow usurper Zelaya to power, but there is no lack of volume in Obama’s actions. Instead of facing Venezuela with a palm turned “stop,” Obama is pointedly walking away. AP headline: “U.S. halts military operations with Honduras to protest coup.”

This is not just some planned military exercise that has been cancelled. Honduras is a close military ally and a base of operations for the United States in Central America. We will continue to use our bases, but as of now, the Hondurans are on their own.

Obama knows better than anyone that the arrest of Zelaya was completely legal and was not a coup

When AP calls the military arrest of Zelaya a “coup,” they are just following Obama, but the Obama regime was fully informed all along of the details of Zelaya's attempted usurpation and fought vigorously to forstall his arrest:

The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said the U.S. Embassy in Honduras was “consistently and almost constantly engaged in the last several weeks working with partners” and that U.S. officials were “in contact with all Honduran institutions, including the military.”

What were the Hondurans telling Obama? That the Honduran constitution REQUIRED the arrest of a president who tries to engineer a second term, and that it specifically empowers the Honduran Supreme Court to issue to the Honduran military an arrest warrant in such a case. Honduran Supreme Court justice Rosalinda Cruz describes how Zelaya had already started illegally shutting down checks and balances and how his arrest was immediately necessary to stop him from usurping the Honduran democracy:

“The only thing the armed forces did was carry out an arrest order,” said [Honduran Supreme Court Justice Rosalinda Cruz] in a telephone interview from the capital, Tegucigalpa. “There’s no doubt he was preparing his own coup by conspiring to shut down the congress and courts.”

Cruz said the court issued a sealed arrest order for Zelaya on June 26, charging him with treason and abuse of power, among other offenses. Zelaya had repeatedly breached the constitution by pushing ahead with a vote about rewriting the nation’s charter that the court ruled illegal, and which opponents contend would have paved the way for a prohibited second term.

She compared Zelaya’s tactics, including his dismissal of the armed forces chief for obeying a court order to impound ballots to be used in the vote, with those of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

“Some say it was not Zelaya but Chavez governing,” she said.

Having been “consistently and almost constantly engaged" for weeks "with all Honduran institutions," the Obamaistas knew that Zelaya was trying to end the rule of law, yet they fought furiously against his removal, and when he was removed, dishonestly called Zelaya's arrest "not legal"; declared Zelaya to still be the legal president of Honduras; and insisted on his immediate return to power.

OAS extended membership to communist Cuba last month

To ratchet up the pressure on Honduras, Obama is joining the call for Honduras to be ousted from the Organization of American States if it does not knuckle under to Zelaya. Exactly one month ago, the OAS voted to grant membership to the communist dictatorship in Cuba. Usurpers in. Rule of law out.

Check out AP’s picture of Hillary and Zeyala laughing over Cuba’s rehabilitation:

Here is Zelaya's actual commentary:

"The Cold War has ended this day in San Pedro Sula," said Honduran President Manuel Zelaya immediately following the announcement.

Yes, we are all communists now.

UPDATE: Chavez broadcasts his efforts to arrange a real coup in Honduras, Obama still silent

Hugo Chávez said that he supports the return of deposed President Zelaya to Honduras by means of "a set of actions," including contacts with military officers. Zelaya could return home "by land, air or water," said Chávez in an address on Thursday in a state-run TV station, AFP reported. ...

"We are supporting his return to Honduras and we are planning several actions. (We are) contacting social leaders that are heading the resistance movements. We have contacted military leaders who disagree with what is happening in their country," Chávez said.

If chavez succeeds in creating violent chaos and undermining the Honduran congress and supreme court, expect Obama to continue to support Zelaya's return to the presidency, regardless of popular opposition. Restoration of Zelaya is already Obama's declared objective, and as with Chavez’ initial threat of to invade, Obama is saying nothing to counter this latest Chavez threat.

That’s the amazing thing. Longshot as it would be for Chavez to pull off a coup in another country, he is openly talking about it, and Obama is saying nothing in response. He has already terminated cooperation with the Honduran military, clearing the way for Chavez to create a violent path to power for Zelaya.

EPA comment period closes Tues: tell ‘em no state-establishment of CO2-phobic religion

2009-06-19T18:02:00.000-07:00

Only a couple more days to let the EPA know what you think of its proposed war against CO2. Just click on the little yellow “add comments” balloon. The following is a comment that you can copy and paste. (If you choose to roll your own, feel free to leave it here too.)

Dear EPA:

There is overwhelming statistical evidence that the primary driver of natural temperature change is solar-magnetic activity, yet the solar flux is completely omitted as an influence on climate in all four IPCC assessments and in the Obama administration's new "Climate Change Impacts in the United Sates" report. This omission is rationalized on grounds that the existing theories of how solar activity affects climate are still formative. The scientific method rejects this rationalization. Observational evidence is supposed to trump theory, not vice versa, but the IPCC is using theory (its distrust of existing theories of the mechanism by which solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature), as an excuse for ignoring the overwhelming evidence that solar-magnetic DOES drive global temperature. Not all religions are anti-scientific, but the demonstrably anti-scientific nature of CO2 alarmism proves that it IS religion, not science.

EPA regulations are supposed to be science based. Imposing restrictions based on an anti-scientific religious doctrine would not just violate the EPA's mandate, but would violate the constitutional prohibition on state establishment of religion.

Solar-magnetic warming: theory and evidence

The sunspot-temperature theory is actually looking pretty solid. It is known that a strong solar-magnetic flux shields the earth from high energy cosmic rays which otherwise, according to the theory of Henrik Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, would ionize the atmosphere, seeding cloud formation. Thus the solar wind in effect blows the clouds away, giving the earth a sunburn.

Whatever the precise mechanism, researchers have found that solar-magnetic activity “explains” statistically about 60-80 percent of global temperature change on all time scales going back hundreds of millions of years. On the decadal time scale, see the seminal 1991 paper by Christensen and Lassen (“Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate”) and the 2003 isotope study by Usoskin et al (“Solar activity over the last 1150 yrs: does it correlate with climate?”), which found: “a correlation coefficient of about .7 - .8 at a 94% - 98% confidence level.”

For longer time scales, see the 2003 paper by Shaviv and Veiser (“Celestial driver of Phranerozoic climate?”), which found that found that the cosmic ray flux explains statistically about 75% of global temperature variation over the last 550 million years.

Omitted variable fraud

Solar activity was at “grand maximum” levels from 1940 and 2000 which, given the historical correlation between solar activity and temperature, could easily explain most or all late 20th century warming. When the IPCC and others omit the solar-magnetic variable from their models, any warming effect of solar activity gets misattributed to whatever correlated variables ARE included in their models.

By sheer coincidence, CO2 reached its own “grand maximum” levels (at least compared to the rest of the Holocene) in the second half of the 20th century. Thus in the alarmist models, whatever warming effect the omitted solar-magnetic variable is responsible for gets misattributed to CO2.

You can find rationalizations for this omitted-variable fraud in every IPCC report. For instance, section 6.11.2.2 of the Third Assessment Report does not question the correlation between solar activity and climate, but dismisses the cosmic-ray cloud THEORY as too speculative to include in their climate models:
At present there is insufficient evidence to confirm that cloud cover responds to solar variability.
But they don't just leave solar-magnetic activity out of their models. Because their forecasts are based entirely on their climate models, they also leave solar magnetic effects completely out of their climate forecasts, despite knowing that there is SOME mechanism (even if the cosmic-ray/cloud theory turns out to be wrong) by which solar-magnetic activity is the primary driver of global temperature.

The only solar variable they do include is solar output or Total Solar Insolation (from long to short-wave radiation), which does not include the solar-magnetic flux. The Fourth Assessment Report does the same thing, looking only at TSI, as do all of the analyses that follow from these reports. For instance, if you look at he “Natural Influences” subsection of the Obama administration’s new report, you will see on page 16 that the only natural influence listed is “solar output’ (or TSI), which is why it is shown graphically to be so tiny.

Solar output is close to constant over the solar cycle (less than 0.1% variation), which is why it is called “the solar constant." Because TSI is nearly constant, it cannot account for the many thousands of years of close correlation between solar activity and temperature. That must be coming from the one solar variable that DOES vary with solar activity: the solar magnetic flux. Every IPCC climate scientist knows this, yet they still omit the solar-magnetic variable.

Proof of omission: page 16 graphic from the June 2009 report by U.S. Global Change Research Program (in effect, the NOAA). The only natural warming effect listed is total solar output, which does not include the solar-magnetic flux. Similar graphics can be found in each of the IPCC's assessment reports, where this analysis originates.

Religion, not science

When the alarmists omit solar-magnetic effects on the grounds that they are not satisfied with with existing theories of HOW these effects work, they are not just committing statistical fraud, but they are contradicting the very definition of science. Observation (the overwhelming correlation between solar activity and global temperature) is supposed to trump theory, not vice versa.

Consider an analogy. Until Einstein developed his theory of general relativity there was no good theory of gravity. Newton had a description of the gravitational force (that it diminishes by the inverse of the square of the distance) but nobody had any sensible account for the mechanism by which massive objects were drawn to each other. Applying the standards of the IPCC, a pre-Einsteinian or pre-Newtonian scientist should have forecast that when a stone is released in the air, it would waft away on the breeze. After all, we understand the force that the breeze imparts on the stone, but we don't understand this thing called gravity, so we should not include it, even though we observe that heavy objects fall.

That is not science, and neither is CO2 alarmism. Data is supposed to trump Theory. By using theory (the proclaimed insufficiency of solar-magnetic theory) as an excuse to ignore the evidence (where solar activity is known to somehow warm the climate), warming alarmism perverts the scientific method.

That makes it religion in the constitutionally barred sense. Not only is this belief system embraced by millions of people WITHOUT EVIDENCE, but it is embraced in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. Alarmism about CO2 is not just a religion, it is a demonstrably irrational religion, equivalent to believing that rocks will waft away on the breeze.

EPA is supposed to make science-based rulings. If you regulate CO2 based on demonstrably anti-scientific ideology, it will be an unconstitutional state establishment of religion.

The current cooling trend fits the solar-magnetic theory, not the CO2 theory

All of the major temperature records show that the earth's average temperature has been falling for ten years now (with the 21 year smoothed temperature falling for five). In this period, CO2 has continued to increase, while the sun has descended into a prolonged solar minimum. This turn in the sun (breaking the coincidental correlation between solar activity and CO2 that existed for the previous 70 years), is rapidly unmasking the hoax of anthropogenic global warming.

It should not take a rare astrological event to unmask an obvious statistical and scientific fraud. Will the EPA now destroy its reputation by codifying the "green" religion at the very moment when the heavens themselves are exposing its dishonesty? If you choose this course, you will be destroying the nation's economy and the lives of your countrymen in the service of your own anti-scientific religious beliefs, in violation of your oath of office.

Sincerely,

False AP report: Obama did NOT say that Iran must respect voters' choice

2009-06-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

Obama's comments were mushy, yes, but at least he said the most important thing, according to AP:

He said it's up to Iran to determine its own leaders but that the country must respect voters' choice.

Why then have reputable people continued to pass harsh judgment? And why would AP paraphrase what would have been Obama’s key statement?

Turns out Obama said no such thing. What he actually said is that the VOICES of the Iranian people should be heard and respected, not their votes:

And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.

This is consistent with the rest of Obama's remarks. He never said a word about respecting votes. Obama did mention "the democratic process," but far from saying anything about this process having to meet any standards of integrity, he instead implied strongly that he will accept whatever result the "process" followed by the Mullahs produces:

I want to start off by being very clear that it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be; that we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes the United States can be a handy political football...

Democracy means that Iranian sovereignty lies with the Iranian people and that a regime that rigs an election is NOT sovereign. Yet Obama is explicit that he will continue to treat the mullahs as the Iranian sovereign no matter how they judge the election. He even goes so far as to suggest that the only reason he is bothering to comment on the competing claim to sovereignty at all is because it would be unseemly for him not to:

We will continue to pursue a tough, direct dialogue between our two countries, and we’ll see where it takes us. But even as we do so, I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we’ve seen on the television over the last few days.

The only operative concerns that he mentions are for: "free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent." When he talks about the "democratic process" going forward, all he urges is that the process be peaceful and that dissent be allowed. He says nothing about the process being honest:

...there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed. And I think it’s important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.

It is no accident that Obama ended with the statement that AP paraphrased so egregiously (equating his call for bloodless suppression with a demand for legitimate elections). This was his theme throughout. He views the honesty of Iran's democratic process as something to be judged by the mullahs, who he clearly accepts to be the sovereign power, regardless of the merits of competing claims.

AP covers its tracks, just like they did with the Flight 93 memorial

AP's fraudulent report about Obama demanding respect for voters' choice was the primary print report on Obama's comments. Now that it has already misled millions of people, AP has covered its tracks by filing an update that overwrites the errant statement. This is what AP does when it gets caught putting out misinformation. To avoid issuing a correction, they flush the misleading story down the memory hole by using the same url for a completely different story. (Google only finds AP's original article still posted at Fox News.)

AP did the same thing last year after it was taken to task for failing to check the most basic facts in a story about the controversy over possible Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial. Ramesh Santanam reported a number of conflicting factual assertions, like the 44 blocks:

Opponents also claim there is a plan to have 44 glass blocks, for the 40 victims and four hijackers, in the design.

"That's an absolute, unequivocal fabrication that is being portrayed as fact," said Edward Felt's brother, Gordon Felt, president of Families of Flight 93. "It's misleading and helps drive the conspiracy theory."

When it was pointed out that Santanam could have found the four extra blocks just by opening up the design drawings and counting, AP quickly filed a completely different story (about fundraising for the memorial), under the same url.

It's not that there is anything inherently wrong with AP using subject feeds that automatically update with their latest offering. It is that AP is systematically using this system to dodge corrections. This is actually their official policy:

For corrections on live, online stories, we overwrite the previous version. We send separate corrective stories online as warranted.

Except AP virtually never issue corrective stories, for the simple reason that AP has no established correction procedure. They just do the overwrite thing and say "too bad."

Well this time the overwrite thing is not good enough.

Demand a corrective story about AP's false paraphrase of Obama's words

Associated Press obviously understands the importance of Obama saying that Iran must respect voters' choice or they wouldn't have bothered to pretend that he said it when he didn't. They don't just fail to mention Obama's glaring omission on this crucial point, but actually tell the public via false paraphrase that he did say what he glaringly omitted. This cannot stand. Faced with our new president's key statement on a historic crisis, AP reports a photo negative of what Obama actually said.

There may be no established procedure for AP corrections, but anyone can still send a pre-written email to AP CEO Tom Curley, Chairman Burl Osborne, Editor Kathleen Carroll, the reporters who worked on the story (the egregious Jennifer Loven, along with Anne Gearan and Robert Burns), plus a smattering of other AP editors and bureaucrats. Who knows. There may even be a limit to how disingenuous some of these people are willing to be.

Error Theory extra: Obama implies that he will let the mullahs get nuclear weapons

Obama is king of the weasel words. At first blush, his statement about Iranian nukes seems to suggest that he will try to stop Ahmadinijad from getting nukes:

...tough, hard-headed diplomacy — diplomacy with no illusions about Iran and the nature of the differences between our two countries — is critical when it comes to pursuing a core set of our national security interests, specifically, making sure that we are not seeing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East triggered by Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon...

But wait a minute. If he meant to say that we need to make sure Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon, how come he said this other thing? How come he said we need to make sure that there is not an arms race triggered by Iran getting a nuclear weapon? Is he actually saying that what we need to insure is that when Iran does get nukes, it does not trigger and arms race?

Yes. Absolutely. With 100% certainty. Otherwise he would not have used weasel words. The only reason to use weasel words was to find a way NOT to commit to stopping Iran from getting nukes.

Seeing Obama use weasel words for the simple objective of stopping Iran from acquiring the most powerful weapons is like seeing AP use paraphrase for what would have been Obama's key remark. There has to be a reason for going the long way around, so you look at the actual words and you see the actual meaning.

Obama evades the simple goal of stopping Iran from acquiring the most powerful weapons because he does not share that goal. He either positively wants Iran to have nukes, or he is determined to accept it. Since these views shared by very few of his countrymen, Obama uses weasel words.

This nixes any possibility that Obama accomodation of Islamofascist election-stealing is because he thinks he can negotiate Ahmadinijad and the mullahs out of their nuclear ambitions. He has no intention of keeping the Islamofascists from acquiring nuclear weapons. If there is any interplay between Obama's tolerance for election-stealing and his tolerance for Islamofascist nukes it can only be that one reason he wants the mullahs in power is so that his plan to accommodate their nuclear ambitions will not go unfulfilled.

UPDATE: Robert Kagan on how Obama's already established "realist" policy is premised on accepting the legitimacy of Iran's Khomeini-ist regime

Excellent column on how Obama's "grand deal" with the Iranian Islamofascists seeks to trade recognition of their legitimacy as a way of getting them to come around on nuclear weapons. This, says Kagan, is how to understand his lack of encouragement for the uprising. It isn't that he really thinks that "meddling" from the U.S. would hurt their cause. It is that he wants them to go away, so that his negotiations with the "legitimate" Islamofascist dictatorship can proceed as planned.

"If you find all this disturbing," says Kagan, "you should":

The worst thing is that this approach will probably not prevent the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon. But this is what "realism" is all about.

The only thing he is missing is that Obama has no intention of stopping the Islamofascists from getting nukes and never did. His "grand deal" was always just a ruse to keep the Islamo-fascists in power and help them get the bomb.

Why? Because Obama is an Islamofascist himself. That is the obvious explanation, fitting everything we know about Obama with everything about his behavior. As I have documented before, every single one of Obama's long term mentors and confidants (with the possible exception of Michelle) is not just Muslim, but Islamofascist: William "Abu Zayd" Ayers, the so-called "ex-Muslim" Jeremiah Wright, Islamofascist "cousin" Raila Odinga, PLO terror supporter Rashid Khalidi, Saudi-NOI moneyman Khalid Al-Mansour, and perhaps the greatest influence of all, Obama's communist, racist. Islamofascist father.

UPDATE 2: Obama justifies his indifference to Iranian democracy on grounds that there is little difference between Ahmadinijad and Mousavi

CNBC asked how the uprising changes things for our relationship with Iran. Obama's answer? It doesn't change things at all:

Well, I think first of all, it's important to understand that although there is amazing ferment taking place in Iran, that the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised.

Shouldn't that be "last of all"? The nation is standing up for honest democracy, and Obama is looking at the lack of difference in the candidates.

Of course there is turning out to be a big difference between the candidates as well. Ahmadinijad is determined to "purify" Iran by mass murdering the brave Iranians are trying to overturn his election fraud. Mousavi is standing up for electoral honesty and the lives of the protestors.

Notice that Obama's original comment only expressed concern for peaceful dissent:

...whenever I see violence perpetrated on people who are peacefully dissenting, and whenever the American people see that, I think they’re, rightfully, troubled.

Yes, and we are also troubled when an unarmed population tries to physically resist an armed usurper and gets slaughtered, but what about Obama? His statement sidesteps this emerging reality, but the contortions that he is already going through to support Ahmadinijad suggest that "peacefully" will indeed turn out to be another Obama weasel word.

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Gay marriage is not a right

2009-06-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

Homosexuals have a right to be tolerated, but social recognition of relationships via the institution of marriage is not about tolerance. It is about approval, and nobody has a right to approval. By trying to force social approval for what most people disapprove, it is homosexuals who are being illiberal, violating the democratic right of the people to by majority rule establish what laws they see fit so long as those laws do not themselves violate natural liberty.

There was a time when marriage was about more than mere social approval, so that being barred from marriage could indeed violate a person's natural liberty. For instance, sex outside of marriage used to be a crime, often severely punished. This is no longer the case, not just as a practical matter, as society has become more tolerant, but as a matter of Constitutional law. Justice Kennedy’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas recognized for the first time (and long overdue) a general right to liberty, grounded in the 9th Amendment’s assertion that the sphere of protected liberty is not limited to the enumerated protections.

In the particular instance, Lawrence v. Texas specifically decriminalized homosexual relations, whether homosexuals are married or not. In one stroke, that stripped away the relevance of marriage to constitutionally required tolerance. The remaining legal concomitants of marriage contain only minor liberties (some of suspect propriety, like allowing spouses not to testify against spouses, regardless of the severity of the crime in question). At the same time, the economic arrangements of marriage can be secured by freedom of contract, without requiring society to do anything more than provide enforcement of contracts.

In terms of assistance, our laws don’t provide any significant advantages to married couples, and what advantages do exist are to support the bearing and raising of children. Supporting children indirectly by assisting parents is always hit or miss, and there is no possibility, never mind any constitutional requirement, that all parents or children be supported equally.

All that is left is the issue of social approval. Given that tolerance and approval are opposites of a sort, it may seem obvious that no one has a constitutional or moral right to approval, but it is still important to work through the moral machinery, beginning with the theoretical quesiton of how to achieve the greatest equal liberty.

The inalienable rights of the Declaration and John Stewart Mill’s principle of liberty

The 9th Amendment reads:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

To locate these unenumerated rights that are “retained by the people,” the obvious place to start is with rights that had already been enumerated in the Declaration of Independence:

that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

For this general protection of liberty to be taken seriously (as Lawrence v. Texas calls for), individual liberties would have to be extended until they interfere with other constitutionally protected values, or with each other.

Extension of individual rights until they interfere with each other is just another way of saying that there is to be the greatest possible equal liberty, and thanks to John Stewart Mill, we already have an effective rule for identifying this greatest equal liberty. If you are not harming other people, says Mill’s famous “principle of liberty,” you are not to be harmed by the state.

Mill’s stroke of genius was in how he defined “harm,” distinguishing between what he called direct and indirect interests (On Liberty, Ch.1, PP12). Direct interests are life and liberty. If someone physically accosts you, or takes your money, then your direct interests are affected. In contrast, Mill distinguished indirect interests as vicarious interests: either a person’s thought’s about the behavior of others, or his concern for other people’s opinion of his own behavior.

In its full articulation, Mill’s principle of liberty says that in terms of the law, all direct interests are to take absolute priority over any amount of indirect interests. Unless you can think of additional distinctions that would allow us to further separate greater from lesser liberty interests, this is as far as we can go in determining the scope of greatest equal liberty and protecting it. It is hard enough to come up with ANY general scheme for distinguishing greater from lesser interests, so that conflicts between interests can be adjudicated in favor of the greater equal liberty, but Mill did it. As far as it goes, his scheme WORKS.

When direct interests are in conflict with direct interests, Mill’s principle of liberty turns the issue over to majority rule. When a person’s behavior does not harm the direct interests of others, but only offends their indirect interests, then law is to leave him alone. This leaves just one more case. What should be done when the only conflict is between different peoples' indirect interests, with no direct interests on either side?

Mill’s principle of liberty and the right to privacy

Sometimes a person’s interest in engaging in a particular behavior is indirect. He might be specifically interested in other people’s reaction to his behavior, as when San Francisco homosexuals take to the streets for their pornographic parades. On the other side, residents who don’t like these displays have only an indirect interest in having these exhibitionists put their pants back on. The result is a conflict of indirect interests only.

Mill never addressed this case, but logically it should be treated the same as a conflict of direct interests. Since none of the liberty interests that are at stake can be identified as greater or lesser than the others, the greatest-equal-liberty criterion has nothing to say about what should happen. The natural liberty of individuals is not at stake, which means the question must be turned over to majority rule.

Ours is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. The natural liberty of individuals comes first, then come the rights of the majority. So long as the majority does not infringe natural liberty then the democratic ideal holds sway, and the boundary of natural liberty, as far as reason can discern it, is the priority of direct over indirect interests.

In San Francisco majority rule means porno-marches yes. In Fresno, porno-marchers no. The upshot is a right to privacy, created not as a way of protecting a class of inherently private behavior, but as a way of allowing some behaviors to be banned in public.

People DO have a direct interest in being allowed to participate in pornographic acts. It is only engaging in such acts in public that no one has a direct interest in. So long as people have scope to engage in pornographic acts in private, then their direct interests are protected, and only their indirect interests are affected by being barred from this behavior in public, which is not a liberty concern.

Gay marriage is an indirect interest

Since marriage no longer regulates matters of natural liberty, all that is left of the institution of marriage under American law is society's stamp of approval for married couples. A desire for approval is an indirect interest: an interest in what other people think. To impose it over the indirect interests of the majority is to treat it as a direct interest, and ultimately to impose it over the direct interests of others.

Of course majority rule is imperfect. What it approves will never be what everyone approves, and some people will always be forced to go along with public approval for what they do not approve. Still, one of our individual rights is to have a republican form of government, which means that matters that are properly subject to majority rule ARE subject to majority rule, and that minorities do not get to impose their demands for approval on the rest of us. When that is violated, the harms to direct interests that result are wrongs.

Ted Olson's suit in favor of gay marriage

In their interview with Larry King, Ted Olson and David Boise outlined the equal protection argument they are going to make in federal court against Proposition 8 (which amended the California State Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman).

They appeal to the precedent established in the aptly named case of Loving v. Virginia, where 42 years ago SCOTUS struck down a Virginia law barring interracial marriage. Loving v. Virginia recognized marriage as a fundamental right. Olson and Boise argue that under the equal protection clause, that right must be recognized equally for all Americans, regardless of sexual orientation, allowing anyone to marry anyone.

This argument begs the exact question that Prop. 8 raises, and answers so succinctly: what is marriage? If it is by definition between a man and a woman, then yes, homosexuals have a right to marry, but they can only marry people of the opposite sex. Otherwise it is not marriage.

Olson and Boise are in-effect trying to use the equal protection clause to change the definition of marriage, but changing the definition of marriage is beyond the purview of the equal protection clause. The definition of marriage as between a man and a woman is established by history and religious tradition, things that the equal protection clause cannot affect. The 14th Amendment can only determine that homosexuals have a right to marry people of the opposite sex, just like everyone else.

Kmiec’s proposal to get government out of the marriage business entirely

Douglas Kmiec thinks the thorny problem of gay marriage can be resolved (or at least swept under the rug) by getting government out of the marriage business altogether. But when government participation in marriage is viewed as a vehicle both for conferring social approval and for directing social assistance mothers and fathers who bear and raise children, abandoning this enterprise is no solution. Kmiec is just dodging the question of what society should approve and disapprove by deciding not to approve or disapprove of anything.

The moral weakness of this approach is well captured by Ed Morrissey's reason for approving of it:

Kmiec has the better argument, mostly because the “state” gave up protecting marriage and children decades ago.

We already fail to give proper due to heterosexual marriage, so instead of fixing that failing, lets just dump the whole thing.

From the viewpoint of moral science, getting government out of the business of approving or disapproving anything is a violation of the rights of the majority. So long as natural liberty is protected, majority rule properly holds sway. To say that the majority cannot exercise its properly allocated powers is a tyranny of the minority, overthrowing the largest part of republicanism, which is democracy.

The American meaning of republicanism is the system of liberty under law. Democracy has two roles in this system. It allows us to throw off a tyrant who tramples on the natural liberty of the people (a capacity that looks like it is going to be tested in the next two elections); and it allows the people to decide for themselves how they want to be governed consistent with natural liberty. Thomas Jefferson stated the latter in an 1817 letter to Alexander von Humboldt:

The first principle of republicanism is that the lex majoris parties is the fundamental law of every society of individuals of equal rights; to consider the will of the society enounced by the majority of a single vote as sacred as if unanimous is the first of all lessons in importance, yet the last which is thoroughly learnt.

Tyrannies of majority and minority in California

In the name of anti-discrimination, California has for many years been engaging in both tyranny of the majority and tyranny of the minority. The state government (tyranny of the majority) has passed numerous laws that violate freedom of association and other natural liberties, forcing not just toleration, but actual association with homosexual behavior.

Consider California’s 2003 Fair Employment and Housing Act, which expanded the state’s anti-discrimination laws to include trans-gendered people in employment and housing. What? You didn’t promote that grizzled and graying 250 pound bald man wearing a pink dress and a push-up bra? Yes, I’ve actually seen it, at a local Sear Robuck no less.

Bet he wasn’t dressed like that when he applied, but if they fire him for it, they’ll lose in court. And what sane jury would ever believe that this person's grotesque behavior did not hold back his career? To avoid losing in court, Sears will actually have to promote him. In California, it is now in effect the employer's job, not the employee's job, to keep the employee's career on track, so long as the employee dresses shamefully.

California's Democrat dominated legislature has been larding the state up with this garbage for decades. Homosexuals were added to the anti-discrimination laws several years before the trans-gendered. All of these laws are violations of natural liberty. People are allowed to discriminate on the basis of every behavior except homosexual behavior. Again, the upshot is forced approval on the pretense of individual rights, when there is no right to approval.

These bogus rights claims become tyranny of the minority when they are used to keep the majority from enacting restrictions that withhold public approval for homosexuality. The California Supreme Court did this when it struck down the first anti-gay-marriage proposition on grounds that it violated the state constitution. No it didn’t. California has approximately the same equal protection clause as the 14th Amendment. This clause can’t change the definition of marriage any more than the federal clause can. Homosexuals have the same right to marry people of the opposite sex that everyone else does. They do not have a right, legal or moral, to marry each other.

Californians are fighting back against the tyrannies of majority and minority that are being imposed upon them. I have no problem with conservatives who think that gay marriage SHOULD be approved by society, but to force this approval under the guise of individual rights is perverse.

Gay marriage nothing like interracial marriage

The contrast between interracial marriage and gay marriage goes far beyond the simple fact that marriage has traditionally referred to a man and a woman. Even if there was no pre-existing right to heterosexual marriage, bans on interracial marriage would still not stand up to constitutional scrutiny.

In the absence of a constitutionally recognized fundamental interest, the test for constitutionality is the rational relation test: is a ban on interracial marriage “rationally related” to “a legitimate state interest”?

The answer is “no.” There is a legitimate state interest in maintaining the genetic quality of the next generation, but miscegenation laws are an irrational way to pursue that state interest. (The "rational relation" test is not in general a rationality test. Only the relation has to be rational, not the law itself. But if a law is positively irrational, that can call the rational relationship into question.)

Regarding the genetics of the next generation, individuals are motivated on their own to find the best partner with which to have a family. Since desirable qualities are spread throughout all races, and since the qualities of any individual can only be judged by those who encounter them as individuals, the expected best outcome for the next generation results when individuals are free to pick their own mates as best as they can. Any interference with this free choice will only block some people from accepting their best available choices, which will harm the genetics of the next generation.

Similarly for parenting quality and for every other legitimate state interest relating to mate-choosing. Thus rationality calls for free choice, and any discrimination against free choice is positively irrational. Interracial couples still have no right to approval. It is just that disapproval in this case fails to meet the most basic test that ANY law must meet (or should have to meet) to pass constitutional muster: that it cannot be positively irrational.

No such affirmative argument can be made in the case of gay marriage. On the contrary, limiting marriage to a man and a woman is perfectly rational for an institution designed to foster the bearing and raising of children. The specific accommodations that society makes here and there for married as opposed to unmarried couples are generally aimed at the accommodation of children.

Homosexual couples CAN have children, but do so at a much lower rate than heterosexual couples, and it is perfectly rational for society to focus its approval and its various accommodations for children towards those who for the most part are bearing and raising the children. The object of such laws is to promote the welfare of children, not to assuage the feelings of adults.

Bans on gay marriage are not just rational, but compelling

If homosexual couples are allowed marry, they will have to be given equal access to babies for adoption. After all, if society has determined not just that homosexual marriages should be approved, but that homosexual couples have a RIGHT to approval, then how can that approval be denied by any part of society? But in fact there is plenty of evidence that children need to be raised by a mother and a father. Children don’t always get what they need, but it is certainly rational for society to try to improve their odds.

Indeed, society’s interest in protecting children is compelling, and to protect children from homosexual adoption, it would be necessary to ban homosexual marriage. This is the test that the Court applies when a constitutionally recognized “fundamental interest” is at stake. A law that infringes fundamental interests must be "necessary" to "a compelling state interest." Thus even if the courts were to pretend that equal protection can change the definition of marriage, there would still be a strong case to make for the constitutionality of a ban on homosexual marriage.

In sum, the question is whether we are going to take our fundamental institution for supporting the bearing and raising of children and turn it into something very different, something for everybody, based on the fraudulent idea that homosexuals somehow have a RIGHT to approval.

No. They have a right to be tolerated, which they have been granted in full. Now they answer that liberal generosity with this illiberal demand for approval. I would like to see society move in the opposite direction and use the legitimate powers of the majority to suppress public homosexual displays. That is what the right to privacy is really about. It is the public’s right to put behind closed doors that which society is only required to tolerate.

Make the gang trash pull their pants up in public. Give tickets to the parents of foul mouth teenagers. Keep the porno-parades in San Francisco, and ban gay marriage entirely.

ADDENDUM: Privacy and abortion

The Supreme Court has proclaimed a right to abortion, pursuant to a proclaimed right to privacy that is held to be implicit in the Constitution. Suppose privacy rights were to be understood as I suggest in this essay: as a way to allow some protected activities (activities that do not harm the direct interests of others) to nevertheless be banned in public (when only indirect interests are harmed by such a ban). Would such a right to privacy still imply a right to abortion?

Absolutely not. Abortion involves the most extreme harm to the direct interests of the unborn. That means it is not a protected activity in the first place, which means it cannot be protected by a right to privacy.

The ordinary language meaning of privacy says the same thing. Something is a private matter if it does not harm third parties. A child, born or unborn, is obviously a third party.

This does not mean that there is no natural right to abortion. I think there is such a right, stemming from the fact that in many cases, not terminating a pregnancy will mean that another child who would otherwise have been conceived at a later date will no longer be conceived. This is just an extension of the recognition by anti-abortion advocates that an abortion means a child who would have lived does not live. Carrying the same logic one step further, there are also actual children who some years down the road will not be born if their parents do not have abortions today. In fact, we can name millions of these children. Every child born to a parent who earlier had an abortion is a child who would not have been born otherwise.

These lives can no more be discounted than the lives of the unborn in the womb, and in my probably not humble enough opinion, the only people who can choose between these lives are the parents. That makes it a private decision in the private-sphere vs. government-sphere sense, but not in the common language sense of there being no third party interests that need to be accounted. It is just that the best people to account those third party interests (whether to have children now or later) are the parents.

Abortion is about the last thing that can be fit under the unenumerated rights of the Ninth Amendment. Because the direct interests of the unborn are at stake, it does' not fit under Mill's principle of liberty (and hence not under the rights of the Declaration, which Mill's principle logically articulates), and it was not a historically recognized right, available for the people to "retain." Thus until a constitutional amendment is passed that protects a right to abortion (an amendment I would gladly work for), it ought to be for the states to decide.

The advocates of the "living Constitution" are wrong. The constitution does not say whatever progressive opinion wants it to say. It says what it says, and if we don't like what it says, it is incumbent on us to amend it, not re-interpret it to suit our will.

Obama’s filing against 9/11 families: so bad it's good

2009-06-05T15:08:00.000-07:00

Bizarre amicus brief totally demolishes the Second Circuit's dismissal of the families' suit, then replaces it with the most mendacious stupidity imaginable. Now the Supreme Court will HAVE to hear the case, just to avoid the implication that it accepted this garbage.

9/11 families were stunned this week to learn that President Obama is asking the Supreme Court NOT to review their effort to recover damages from the government of Saudia Arabia and from several Saudi princes for funding al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on America. That the defendants did funnel vast sums of money to al Qaeda was accepted as a given by the appellate court, as was the fact that al Qaeda was known to be dedicated to and engaged in violent attacks against America. So what was the Obama administration’s reason for siding with the Saudis?

Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s amicus brief to the Supreme Court had to admit that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals erred in its grounds for denying the suit against the Saudi princes. No, the fact that the princes did not actually direct the al Qaeda attack on the United States does not relieve them of liability for attacks that they funded. The precedent on this is clear. As long as the defendant knew “that the brunt of the injury” from his tortious act would be felt in America, then:

... he must ‘reasonably anticipate being haled into court there’ to answer for his actions. [Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783, 790. Cited on Kagan’s p. 18.]

Nevertheless, said Kagan, she could think of a way around the appellate court’s utter failure to get the heart of the case right. The families’ suit falls under the 1976 FSIA law that establishes exceptions to the principle of sovereign immunity. This law does not allow jury trials. Thus while the appellate court was clearly wrong to say that the suit should not be heard, Kagan suggests that there are snippets in the ruling that can be read as the appellate court acting in its role of trier of fact, and thus ruling against the families for providing insufficient evidence.

In other words, instead of seeing the Second Circuit as rejecting the basis of the suit, we should see them as accepting the suit, and ruling against it on the substance. To make her argument that the appellate court actually did try the facts, she quotes the Second Circuit’s statement that:

Conclusory allegations that [Prince Turki] donated money to charities, without specific factual allegations that he knew they were funneling money to terrorists, do not suffice.

But of course the families DID marshal reasons why Turki could be expected to know that his donations were going to al Qaeda, as indicated by the appellate court’s further statements that there was no personal jurisdiction even if the defendants did “know that their money would be diverted to al Qaeda,” or were “aware of Osama bin Laden’s public announcements of jihad against the United States.” (Cited in the families' reply brief, p.8, and in Kagan’s brief, p. 19, respectively.)

For Kagan to pretend that the Second Circuit acted as a sufficient trier of fact, when it explicitly asserted that the facts don’t matter, is just an attempt to mislead the Court. The evidence that the Saudi Princes knew they were funding al Qaeda has yet to be considered by U.S. courts, even though Kagan herself admits that if they did know, they should be held liable.

The families respond

Of course the families are angry that Obama is blocking their access to the courts, despite their legitimate claims under U.S. law:

The Administration's filing mocks our system of justice and strikes a blow against the public's right to know the facts about who financed and supported the murder of 3,000 innocent people. It undermines our fight against terrorism and suggests a green light to terrorist sympathizers the world over that they can send money to al Qaeda without having to worry that they will be held accountable in the U.S. Courts for the atrocities that result. …

The Administration's filing is all the more troubling in that it expressly acknowledges that the courts below applied incorrect legal standards in dismissing the Saudi defendants, but nonetheless argues that the case -- one that seeks to account for the terrorist attacks against America and the murder of our family members -- does not warrant the Supreme Court's time.

This at the same time as Obama insists that al Qaeda operatives held at Guantanamo Bay must be granted access to U.S. courts. Concocted rights for terrorists, yes. Following the law for the victims of terrorism, no.

On Saudi state liability, Kagan again misleads to the point of outright dishonesty

Here too, Kagan is forced to start out by noting that the grounds on which the Second Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the families’ claims is not valid. The circuit court held that damages for terrorist acts have to be brought under the FSIA law’s special exception for terrorist acts, which requires that the state defendant be designated by the State Department as a terror supporting state. Since Saudi Arabia has not been so designated, suit cannot be brought under this provision, end of case.

Wrong, as Kagan herself explains:

Congress’s concern was not to impose new limits on the domestic tort exception, but instead to expand jurisdiction to cover a narrow class of claims based on conduct abroad. See, e.g., H.R. Rep. No. 702, 103d Cong., 2d Sess. 3, 5 (1994) (explaining that the bill would “expand” jurisdiction to include claims by an American who is grievously mistreated abroad by a foreign government”).

This was necessary because the domestic tort exception only applies to injuries that occur on U.S. territory. Specifically, the domestic exception allows suit when:

1605(a)(5) - money damages are sought against a foreign state for personal injury or death, or damage to or loss of property, occurring in the United States and caused by the tortious act or omission of that foreign state.

In the wake of the Iranian hostage taking in Tehran, Congress wanted designated terror-supporting states to be liable for harms that they inflict on Americans even on their own territory, but this in no way was supposed to limit suit over harms that occur within the United States, such as the 9/11 murders.

Confronted with this obviously wrong ruling by the Second Circuit, Kagan again tries to cobble together an alternative grounds for granting Saudi immunity. To fullfill this improbable command from above, she decides to flat-out lie about precedent, big bald astounding lies.

Torturing "tortious"

Notice that the language of the domestic tort exception is perfectly clear that what has to occur inside the United States is the personal injury or death, not the decision that leads to the personal injury or death. Suppose that the home office of a state owned shipping company decides to scrimp on safety equipment for its cargo vessels, leading to loss of American lives when cargo is offloaded in an American port. This is exactly the kind of thing that FSIA was intended to cover, but Kagan pretends otherwise, arguing that not only the tort (the harm), but also the “tortious act or omission” that creates the harm, have to take place inside the United States.

In many cases there is no separation between the harm and the act that creates it. They both occupy the same time and place. Neither does the language of torts typically distinguish between the tort and the tortious act. Instead, the tortious act is seen as being realized when the tort (the harm) actually occurs. Kagan's ploy is to try to make a distinction between the tort and the "tortious act" that leads to it, and she is able to come up with some out-of-context references to make it sound as if precedent demands that both the harm and the decision-making that leads to the harm have to occur here in America.

She claims, for instance, that:

In Amerada Hess, the Court considered and rejected the argument that domestic effects of a foreign state’s conduct abroad satisfy the exception. 488 U.S. at 441.

Applied to the current case, she is clearly suggesting that the “domestic effect” corresponds to the 9/11 attacks, and that the “conduct abroad” corresponds to the statutorily required “tortuous act or omission” that in both cases took place outside of U.S. territory. A look at the actual Supreme Court ruling, however, shows this to be a gross misrepresentation of Ameranda Hess.

Looking up Argentine Republic v. Amerada Hess Shipping Corp. and turning to p. 441 we find what the case was actually about:

In this case, the injury to respondents' ship occurred on the high seas some 5,000 miles off the nearest shores of the United States. Despite these telling facts, respondents nonetheless claim that the tortious attack on the Hercules occurred "in the United States."

In other words, it was the harm itself that in this case did not occur within U.S. territory. Contrary to Kagan’s representation, the Court was NOT making a distinction between the harm and decision that led to it and claiming that both had to occur within the United States.

This kind of blatant misrepresentation of precedent is lawlessness! Is this how the Obama administration treats precedent? As fodder for utterly dishonest word games? YES.

To preserve its own reputation, SCOTUS will have to hear the families’ case

The Supreme Court asked the Obama administration to submit this brief. It cannot be ignored. If SCOTUS accepts guidance from this contemptuous document, then it is implicated in the Obama administration’s contempt for the law.

If the sheer perversity of Kagan’s filing does force the Court to hear the families’ case, that would be a great outcome, but the downside risk is equally amplified. If the Court DOES accept Kagan’s guidance, it is a black black day for America.

Meretricious cites and arguments dominate every paragraph of Kagan’s brief, except in two place: where she shoots down the Second Circuit’s patently errant grounds for dismissal. It almost seems like she started with a brief in support of the families’ suit before getting the order from Obama to side with the Saudis. Apparently she decided that it was fruitless to try to support the Second Circuit’s reasoning, so she let the demolition of the Second Circuit’s ruling stand, then supplied her own just as bad case for Saudi immunity.

However it came about, Kagan’s destruction of the Second Circuit ruling is so competent, and her substitute arguments for immunity so incompetent, that the whole almost seems designed to force a Supreme Court hearing. Could she have intentionally sabotaged her own brief? Doubtful, given that the Obama DOJ just overruled its own career lawyers in order to drop an already won case against three New Black Panthers who were caught on tape using weapons to intimidate voters. Apparently the Obama administration just really is this stupid and malicious.

In any case, it seems unlikely that Kagan’s shenanigans will get past the justices. Antonin Scalia is unlikely to forget the FISA case opinion he wrote in 1992, addressing the very question of harms resulting in the United States from decisions made by foreign entities in their home countries. His conclusion? In a breach of contract case where the only tie to the United States was the option of receiving payment in dollars in New York City, the Court denied immunity. Only the harm itself had to take place on U.S. territory, not the decisions that led to the harm, and the opinion was unanimous.

Obama’s imperial presidency: he does not want to be bound by the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, and says so

The family group states directly that:

The filing was political in nature and stands as a betrayal of everyone who lost a loved one or was injured on September 11, 2001.

Indeed, the entire first section of Kagan’s brief is replete with claims that exceptions to sovereign immunity should be determined politically.

That is the way it used to be, before Congress passed the FSIA act specifically in order to take these determinations out of the political realm. The United States only started granting any exceptions to the legal tradition of sovereign immunity in the 1950's, after some nation-states started getting heavily involved in commerce. If state enterprises could not be held liable in U.S. courts, they would have a competitive advantage over private industry. Not smart policy during the cold-war contest between capitalism and communism.

Exceptions were at first made on a case by case basis by the executive, but such arbitrariness does not suit the needs of commerce, so Congress made an explicit decision to take this power away from the executive. Even so, Kagan’s brief hints over and over (p. 4-10) that executive prerogative should still hold sway, but without ever making an explicit case that FSIA intrudes on the inherent powers of the presidency, and without ever stating what the president would want to do with those powers in the present case if the court were to recognize them as pre-eminent.

The reason Kagan doesn’t make these things explicit is because they are damning. Obama knows that the Saudi’s are liable under U.S. law, but for his own political reasons he does not want them to be held liable, but neither does want the nation to understand that he considers currying favor with the people who attacked us on 9/11 to be more important than justice for his own murdered countrymen.

The president does indeed have some inherent power here, just as President Bush had inherent power to wiretap conversations with al Qaeda operatives both at home and abroad, regardless of what Congress put in the FISA wiretapping law. Bush did abide by FISA, but he didn’t have to.*

Obama is going further. He does not want to abide by FSIA, but is unwilling to make the case that the particular exemption from FSIA that he is asking for is a legitimate exercise of his inherent powers, or even assert what he would do with that power. He just wants the courts to do his dirty work for him, asking them to grant immunity to the Saudis based on bogus claims about FSIA law and precedent.

Conservative justices might be tempted to recognize the president’s inherent powers in the area of foreign policy, but they should not let him exercise this power on false pretenses. If he wants to claim that he has the inherent power to grant immunity to the Saudis and that this is how he wants to exercise that power, he can do it publicly, but he should not be allowed to overrule Congress on the pretense that he is doing the will of Congress.

To allow this subterfuge would destroy fundamental FSIA precedents while failing to attain the virtue of the pre-FSIA regime, where the president had to stand or fall by his explicitly political decision-making. If Obama wants to invoke the inherent power of the presidency here, he at the very least has to be willing to admit it.

* FISA court precedent on inherent powers

The powers of Congress to regulate in an area where the president has his own inherent authority was addressed by the FISA court in September 2002:

The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. It was incumbent upon the court, therefore, to determine the boundaries of that constitutional authority in the case before it. We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.

The contrast to the present case is instructive. Bush’s Solicitor General Ted Olson did not hide the fact that President Bush wanted the court to recognize his inherent authority to conduct signals intelligence. With that power duly recognized, Bush still went the last mile to conform to the law as enacted by Congress. That is what it means to “uphold our fundamental principles and values,” while Obama, who keeps accusing President Bush of failing to uphold our values, engages in legal subterfuge, showing as much contempt for the law as for our 9/11 families.

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NASA still hiding correlation between solar activity and temperature

2009-06-01T15:26:00.000-07:00

NASA finally mentions the Maunder Minimum in its discussion of the current prolonged solar minimum, but it STILL does not mention that the Maunder Minimum coincided with the onset of the Little Ice Age, or that the Dalton Minimum in the early 1800's was also cold, as was the unnamed fin-de-the-1800's minimum.

Thar she blows, the Maunder Minimum of sunspot activity:

As it has done for two years now, NASA is predicting that solar cycle 24 will ramp up tomorrow. Should that broken-clock prediction hits its hour, then NASA is also predicting that solar cycle 24 will have the modest amplitude of the 1928 cycle, indicated by the red arrow.

A look at the temperature record shows the correspondence between solar activity and temperature:

Maunder Minimum cold; Dalton minimum (just before the red thermometer-based line starts) cold; unnamed end-of-1800's minimum (first dip in red line) cold; "grand maximum" solar activity between 1920 and 2000 warm.

NASA is acutely aware of this correspondence, but is keeping John Q Public in the dark. Now that the sun has gone quiet again, the climate is cooling again, but you will never hear it from James Hansen’s underlings at NASA:

CO2 keeps going up, but temperatures are going down. NASA frowns and scratches.

Gee you tax-payer supported SOLAR SCIENTISTS, busy gaping at "the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," if temperature is not being driven by CO2, what possibly COULD have created warming since 1910 and cooling since 2000?

Deluded people all over the world actually think the planet is still warming

This week's sky-falling headline, courtesy of the UK Times:

Climate change is already killing 300,000 people a year in a “silent crisis” that is seriously affecting hundreds of millions more, an influential humanitarian group warned today. ... The report claims that 90 per cent of the deaths are related to gradual environmental degradation caused by a warming climate.

Whatever those supposed deaths might be attributable to, they cannot be attributed to a warming climate, because THE CLIMATE IS NOT WARMING. It is cooling. Just look at any of the major temperature records:

You'd think that the Times could bother to check with England's own climate office for something as basic as the temperature record, but the problem isn't JUST the press. Like NASA, the Hadley Centre tries to keep the most basic climate-science facts from the public. When temperatures were rising, Hadley cried the global warming threat from the rooftops. Now that the planet is cooling, they are doing their best to cover it up. Here is Hadley's current statement:

The year 2008 was tenth warmest on record, exceeded by 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2001, 2007 and 1997

They are actually describing a jaggedly descending temperature, but with no mention of the cooling that is occurring. All they say is how warm it still is.

Even those who see themselves as trying to take the reasoned middle ground are misled about the most basic facts. A recent Popular Science editorial claimed that:

...few if any doubt any longer that the warming itself is occurring, given the worldwide rise in surface temperature...

HADcrut3 is a surface temperature record. Can PopSci name a single warming skeptic who is ignorant enough think that this record shows that "warming itself is occurring" when it very clearly shows the opposite?

Presumably they mean to refer to the fact that pretty much everybody now acknowledges that there does seem to have been a small amount of warming between the late 70's and 2000, topped off by the El Nino spike of 1998. It did indeed take a while for many skeptics to acknowledge this small amount of warming, for the simple reason that it was not evident in satellite readings (as can be seen in the above graphic with the gray background), while the surface temperature records were known to be tainted with an upward temperature bias, thanks to growing "urban heat island" effects.

No clear warming signal until very late 90’s, then cooling

Pre-98, the alarmists themselves were not yet sure that temperatures were actually rising. Their theory was that CO2 should cause temperatures to rise, and they were watching like hawks for a clear warming signal that they could take as evidence that this theory was right, but it took them a while to get it. In the mid 90's, even the most radical alarmists, like NASA's James Hansen, were only talking about whether or not this predicted signal had been seen yet or not.

They even worked it out so they could claim to see CO2-caused warming in the absence of rising temperatures. Aerosols from coal burning are seen as having a cooling effect, so in the absence of CO2 warming effects, cooling would be expected. Thus so long as temperature readings were not actually showing global cooling, Hansen et. al. could claim that human release of CO2 was having a measurable warming effect. (See for instance, the 1995 IPCC report, summary of the science, p. 22, subhead 4: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate.)

With the El Nino spike, it became clear that some warming had occurred. But that was the temperature peak. Since then the surface records and the satellite records all show cooling. Thus the alarmists got essentially one data point that can be taken as supportive of their theory: the very late 90’s did show a clear warming signal. Unfortunately for them, the CO2 theory has no explanation for the rest of the temperature record.

There was no significant human production of CO2 before WWII, so the CO2 theory has no explanation for planetary warming from the Little Ice Age to the 1930s (covering about .8° of the 1°C temperature rise between the Little Ice Age and today). In contrast, the theory that solar-magnetic activity drives climate fits this emergence from Little Ice Age very well: goodbye Maunder Minimum, with hiccups at the Dalton Minimum and the fin-de-1800's minimum.

Ditto for the post-2000 cooling: it does not fit the CO2 theory at all, but fits perfectly with the theory that climate is driven by solar activity.

Two Memorial Project commissioners quit over the Project’s bad behavior

2009-05-21T20:20:00.000-07:00

Two Pennsylvanian’s quit the Flight 93 Memorial Commission last week, protesting Park Service plans to condemn five crash-site properties that it never negotiated for in good faith. Consider the case of the Lambert family, who have been on their land for three generations:

"It's absolutely a surprise. I'm shocked by it. I'm disappointed by it," said Tim Lambert, who owns nearly 164 acres that his grandfather bought in the 1930s. The park service plans to condemn two parcels totaling about five acres — land, he said, he had always intended to donate for the memorial.

"To the best of my knowledge and my lawyer, absolutely no negotiations have taken place with the park service where we've sat down and discussed this," Lambert said.

Lambert said he had mainly dealt with the Families of Flight 93 and said he's provided the group all the information it's asked for, including an appraisal.

They are condemning land that he was trying to GIVE to them, just because he had the gall to expect the Park Service to actually do its part.

Project members have embraced the “absolute moral authority” conceit

How dare anyone not rush to give these grieving 9/11 family members whatever they want? Didn’t they hear Maureen Dowd’s proclamation that “the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq [or on 9/11] is absolute”?

When crash-site owner Mike Svonavec put up a donation box to try to cover some of the cost of hiring security guards for the hugely popular Temporary Memorial, Patrick White, cousin of Flight 93 hero Louis Nacke, told the press:

That land has been paid for with 40 lives ... the donation box is an insult to that cost.

When Svonavec insisted that the Park Service follow its own legally required procedures for assessing property values (procedures that, as it happens, take into account current property values, not just pre-crash property values), White accused Svonavec of trying to profit from the blood of his cousin:

"I think Svonavec believes his land, because it has the blood of my cousin and 39 other people, it's worth more," he said.

Using the flag of victim-hood to defend Paul Murdoch’s terrorist memorial mosque

Project members use the same trick to deflect criticism of the giant Islamic-shaped crescent that is now being built on the crash-site. When people point out the hidden terrorist memorializing features—things that no one knew about when the Crescent of Embrace design was chosen—like the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, or the 44 glass blocks emplaced along the flight path, Project members not only deny these easy to verify facts, but they pretend that they are being accused of intending to honor the terrorists:

“That’s an absolute, unequivocal fabrication that is being portrayed as fact,” said Edward Felt’s brother, Gordon Felt [about the 44 blocks claim].

He says he is insulted people would believe he would participate in anything that honored his brother's killers.

In The Church of Liberalism, Ann Coulter slammed the media for granting the Jersey Girls an “absolute moral authority” card, not questioning the Girls’ practice of blaming the Bush administration instead of al Qaeda for their husband's deaths on 9/11. The Jersey Girls were bad enough, but nowhere is the flag of victim-hood being used to cover up more bad behavior than at the Memorial Project.

Active cover-up of an ongoing Islamic supremacist plot

Like the Jersey Girls, the Memorial Project gives Islam a pass for 9/11. Project members might not have known about the Mecca-orientation of the Crescent of Embrace, but they DID know that it was a giant Islamic-shaped crescent. Now they are doing far worse. Now they DO know that the giant crescent points almost exactly at Mecca, and are consistently misleading the press about it.

Their own Muslim consultant told them not to worry about the Mecca-oriented crescent, claiming that it can’t be seen as a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built) unless it points EXACTLY at Mecca (a claim that was contradicted earlier this month by Saudi religious authorities).

So what does Project Supervisor Joanne Hanley say when asked about the Mecca-orientation claim?

The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site.

They are actively and knowingly covering up clear evidence of an ongoing al Qaeda sympathizing plot. Bad behavior indeed.

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Obama equates the Muslim law of hate with the Christian law of love

2009-05-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

From Obama's Notre Dame speech:

For if there is one law that we can be most certain of, it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together. It is no coincidence that it exists in Christianity and Judaism; in Islam and Hinduism; in Buddhism and humanism. It is, of course, the golden rule - the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated. The call to love. To serve. To do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this earth.

So many of you at Notre Dame - by the last count, upwards of 80 percent - have lived this law of love through the service you've performed at schools and hospitals; international relief agencies and local charities.

In fact the Christian "law of love" (the Commandment of Jesus to "love your neighbor") is explicitly universal. Asked "who is my neighbor," Jesus answered with the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). The Koran, in contrast, is explicit that its call to treat others in a loving way is NOT universal:

Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves. [Koran verse 48.29]

O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the Hypocrites, and be firm against them. Their abode is Hell,- an evil refuge indeed. [9.73]

The Koran is replete with instructions for carrying out this "law of hatred" as one might call it:

I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. [8.12]

Fight them, and Allah will punish them by your hands, cover them with shame.... [9.14]

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. [9.29]

Obama knows the Koran

Obama is fully aware that the Islamic version of the golden rule applies only to other Muslims. Not only did he study the Koran as a boy, but he even studied "menjaji," which is the Indonesian term for recitation of the Koran in Arabic. Menjaji is the gold-standard of fundamentalist Islamic education. This is how Obama was able to recite the Shahada for NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof "with a first rate [Arabic] accent." He was drilled on it.

The Shahada is the Islamic profession of faith: "I witness that there is no god but Allah; I witness that Muhammad is his prophet." According to Sharia law, a single sincere utterance of this profession of faith constitutes conversion to Islam. The Shahada comes at the beginning of the Islamic call to prayer, which Obama recited for Kristof. Judge for yourself whether his utterance was sincere:

Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

Having drilled the Shahada as a boy, Obama certainly knew what it meant to recite these words to Kristof. Obama IS a Muslim.

If he were a moral Muslim, he would speak about the need for Islamic reform, instead of covering up the unpleasant truths of orthodox Islam. By hiding his own Islam, Obama is following another unpleasant truth about orthodox Islam: that it is a religion of deceit.

Tabari's History recounts the story of Nuaym, a recent convert to Islam, who set Muhammad's enemies against eachother at the Battle of the Trench:

‘I ‘ve become a Muslim, but my tribe does not know of my Islam; so command me whatever you will.' Muhammad said, ‘Make them abandon each other if you can so that they will leave us; for war is deception.' [Tabari volume 8, p. 23. This incident is also recorded in Ishaq's Life of Muhammad, p. 458.]

Like Nuaym, Obama's tribe does not know of his Islam either. (Well, his African tribe does, but his American tribe does not.) That is the price we pay for America's Ignorance about Islam. With just a little knowledge about Islam, we can even tell what kind of Muslim Obama is. His deceptions about Islam demonstrate that he is orthodox. He tells the same "religion of peace" lies that CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood organizations tell.

When ignorant multi-culturalists call Islam a religion of peace, they are just following their own injunction to respect every culture but western liberty (which they call oppressive). But Obama is not an ignorant multi-culturalist. He knows his Islam. When he calls Islam a religion of peace, the meaning is very clear: "war is deceit."

Saudi authorities contradict U.S. Park Service: mihrabs do NOT have to point exactly at Mecca

2009-05-08T16:35:00.000-07:00

A Muslim consultant told the Park Service in 2006 that the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 cannot be seen as a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), because the giant Islamic-shaped crescent does not point exactly at Mecca:

Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.

Saudi religious authorities recently had to address this question when observers noted that some 200 mosques in Mecca itself do not point directly at the Kaaba (the “Sacred Mosque” that all Muslims are supposed to face for prayer). Meccans who worried that their prayers might not count were assured by the Islamic Affairs Ministry that “it does not affect the prayers.”

The necessity for such a rule is obvious. Throughout most of Islam’s 1400 year history, Muslims who were any significant distance from Mecca had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. Thus it became established religious principle that what matters is intent. It is the mind of the believer that needs to face directly towards the Kaaba, and directly towards God. This principle applies in Mecca the same as anywhere else.

All the great mosques of the ancient world point well away from Mecca

Older mosques often point 10, 20, 30 or more degrees away from Mecca. The most famous mihrab in the world, the mihrab of the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain, points more than 45° off of Mecca:

The Cordoba mihrab points south, while Mecca is east-southeast of Spain.

In contrast, the Crescent of Embrace points a mere 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°, which is highly accurate by Islamic standards.

The Muslim consultant who lied to the Park Service was a classmate of architect Paul Murdoch

Who told the Park Service that a mihrab has to point exactly at Mecca to be legitimate? It was Nasser Rabbat, a professor of Islamic architecture at MIT and an expert in the history of mosque design. No one knows better than Professor Rabbat that mihrab orientation does NOT have to be exact.

There is only one reason why Rabbat would lie to the Park Service about such a basic fact. He recognizes that the giant Mecca-oriented crescent at the heart of the Flight 93 memorial IS a legitimate mihrab, and he wants this al Qaeda sympathizing plot to succeed.

A look at Rabbat's background shows that he was a classmate of Crescent of Embrace architect Paul Murdoch, both getting masters degrees in architecture from UCLA in 1984 and both doing their masters work on Middle Easter subjects. (Murdoch wrote a “masters project” titled: “A museum for Haifa, Israel.” Rabbat wrote a master thesis on house design in Cairo and Damascus.)

This prior connection between Murdoch and Rabbat raises the possibility that Murdoch himself was able to orchestrate the Park Service investigation into warnings about his own design. By the same token, having the two classmates both show up in the Flight 93 memorial raises the possibility that Rabbat was Murdoch's source of expertise on how to incorporate the full complement of typical mosque features into his Crescent design. (For the dozen typical mosque features, see Crescent of Embrace, chapter 5.)

The Crescent of Embrace also includes an exact Mecca-orientation

While exact orientation on Mecca is not a traditional requirement, modern mosque designers do generally employ now-available techniques for orienting their mihrabs more precisely on Mecca than was previously possible. Murdoch satisfies this modern norm (and provides hidden proof of intent) by including a true thematically-defined crescent that does point exactly at Mecca.

Murdoch's thematic explanation for his crescent design is that the circle was broken on 9/11 by the path of Flight 93. The terrorist-piloted airplane smashes our peaceful circle, turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent (that just happens to point to Mecca). The terrorist-memorializing implications of this theme are hardly less overt than the Islamic symbol shapes themselves. Nothing particularly subtle here folks.

The symbolic breaking of the circle occurs at the upper crescent tip, where the fifty-foot tall, thousand-foot long Entry Portal Wall is parted by the Entry Portal Walkway, which follows the flight path through the wall:

The section of wall to the right of the walkway in this image is symbolically "broken off" by the flight path. Remove this symbolically broken off part, and the remaining crescent structure points EXACTLY at Mecca, ± 0.1°:

What symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11: a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca.

Rabbat knew about this too, since the original report that Rabbat was commenting on detailed both the slightly inexact Mecca-orientation of the full Crescent of Embrace, and the exact-Mecca-orientation that results when the symbolically broken-off parts are removed. Same for the Park Service. As the original recipient of Alec Rawls' report, the Park Service knew about both orientations. They also knew, because it was also in the original report, that a mihrab does NOT have to point exactly at Mecca. Yet they still publicly touted Rabbat’s claim that the crescent can’t be seen as a mihrab because it doesn’t point exactly at Mecca. A veritable web of self-conscious lies by Rabbat AND the Park Service.

The design is called a broken circle now, but the circle is still broken in the same place as before (where the flight path crosses the upper crescent tip). The unbroken part of the circle, what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11, remains completely unchanged. It is still a giant-Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing exactly at Mecca.

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Gertz says his Pentagon sources didn’t lie, he just didn’t report all of what they told him (PLUS some information from Larry Johnson)

2009-05-05T17:17:00.000-07:00

Background

Joe Miller at Annenberg FactCheck says he was told by the Pentagon that the USS Bainbridge arrived at the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama on Friday February 10th and that authorization to send in the first SEAL team came at 8:00PM that night, rebutting a purported word-of-sailor report of a 36 hour delay. But news reports on the 9th said that the Bainbridge actually arrived before dawn local time on THURSDAY. Since 8:00 P.M. Friday was 4:00AM Saturday in Somalia, that would make the actual delay, local time to local time, about 48 hours.

Bill Gertz at the Washington Times also talked to the Pentagon, but his report uses slightly different language than Miller's, relating that the Bainbridge “took charge” of the hijack scene on April 10th without being specific about when it arrived on the scene. Could the Pentagon have been making a distinction between arriving on the scene and taking control?

I thought that unlikely, given that a spokesman for the Maersk Alabama said on the 9th that the Navy took immediate control. As I quoted in my “Pentagon lied” post:

"When the Navy comes in, they're in charge," Speers told CNN.

Gertz says that the Pentagon WAS making a distinction between arriving on scene and taking control

Via email, from Bill Gertz:

April 10 was when the Pentagon was put in charge of the operation, which is different than arriving on the scene. Prior to that point, the owner of the ship was in charge and was advocating a money-for-hostage deal.

If this is what Gertz was told, why wasn’t it in his article? And why didn’t he question it, given that Maertz itself denied staying in control after the Navy arrived?

If Gertz let his readers know that the USS Bainbridge arrived on scene early on the 9th, then the Pentagon claim that the Captain of the Bainbridge waited a full day to ask for additional resources that he obviously might need becomes implausible. That grounds for skepticism should have been exposed, but Gertz covered it up.

Larry Johnson’s intel

Larry Johnson has some important information about the timeline, and an interesting take. First the intel (via email):

The Spec Ops folks received the first notice of the pirate attack around 8am edt on 8 April. They went forward with a recommendation to SOCOM [Special Operations Command]. SOCOM in turned made a recommendation to SecDef and it hung there in limbo until Friday at around 11 am edt.

At 8:00 AM edt on the 8th, the Bainbridge would have en route to the Maersk Alabama, but Johnson says that SOCOM was not responding to any request for resources from Bainbridge Captain Frank Castellano, since Castellano did not yet have any more information about the hostage situation than CENTCOM did. Rather, SOCOM was just reacting to the information then available (that the crew had regained control of the Maersk Alabama, and that the pirates had Captain Philips on a lifeboat).

Thus as far as Captain Castellano initiating his own request for special resources (a key point in both the Pentagon timeline and the SEAL-pals timeline), it seems the critical point would be the Bainbridge’s arrival at the Maersk Alabama, allowing Castellano to verify the situation for himself. Even if the Navy DID wait until the next day to officially “take control,” there was no reason for Castellano to delay in requesting resources that he obviously might need.

In the larger picture, Johnson’s intel makes Castellano’s role seem a bit of a red herring. The recommendation to send the SEAL teams was already put forward by SOCOM on Wednesday, and Johnson says that Castellano would not have been included in the discussions about whether to act on that recommendation, which would be undertaken at the Joint Chiefs/SecDef level. Once Castellano had verified what the Joint Chiefs had heard from the crew of the Maersk Alabama on Wednesday, they didn’t need Castellano to tell them what resources were called for. Castellano may well have made requests, but this seems almost irrelevant. The actual decision-makers already knew what he knew and they already had SOCOM’s recommendations.

From this point of view, the SEAL-pals account seems to have been a bit of good-luck for the Obama-defenders at the Pentagon. It put the focus on when Castellano made his request, which whenever it actually occurred would have been well after the Joint Chiefs' deliberations about sending in the SEALs actually began (back on Wednesday morning).

At the other end, Johnson says that the authorization to deploy the Kenya-based SEAL team came at 11:00 AM edt Friday, not 8:00 PM, as Joe Miller’s Pentagon source claimed. That again makes the real delay about 2 days: from Wednesday morning to Friday morning. (Add another 12 hours for the authorization of the SEAL sniper team, which was likely part of the original SOCOM recommendation.)

Does this mean that somebody did not want the Special Operations option to be available on scene?

I put that question directly to Johnson, because that is how it looks from the outside. Absent a pressing need for SEAL teams elsewhere, why in the world would there be ANY delay in deploying these teams to where they MIGHT be critical for a successful mission?

Deploying the teams and using them are two different things. If they turn out not to be needed, don’t use them. They don’t do any harm. Wouldn’t the only reason to keep the teams off-site be if somebody did not want the Special Operations option to even be available?

Johnson says no, that turf-battles ALWAYS happen, and that it is wrong to read so much into them:

The delay is quite normal. During the heat of the moment things are not always crystal clear. Then you get the turf battle of who is in charge and which agency is best positioned to help. Please recall that during the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 there was a huge fight at the scene between FBI, ATF, Port Authority Police and NYPD over who was in charge. It is just human nature.

This explanation for the delay sounds plausible, especially given that this was the first hijacking of an American-flagged vessel since forever, so the jurisdictional issues it raised had yet to be confronted. Johnson cites a host of agencies with a jurisdictional dog in the Maersk Alabama fight: “DOD, Homeland Security (because they are in charge of Coast Guard), State, CIA, DOJ and FBI.”

The outcome is bad: a resource that obviously might be needed should not be kept off-scene by turf battles, yet it happens. To attribute this to a particular agenda, we would have to have details about the positions the different parties were taking.

One bit of evidence that the delay WAS driven by Obama’s policy preferences is that claim from the second word-of-soldier account that:

He [Obama] reportedly question his staff, “Will ‘my’ FBI people get there before the Navy does?

Obama has been upfront about favoring a law-enforcement over a military approach to the Global War on Terror (now officially renamed “Overseas Contingency operations”). It was also circulated by the seemingly credible Captain Raymond Wellborn USN. Johnson is skeptical, however, because his own sources give a different account of the rescue than Wellborn’s do.

Three conflicting accounts of the rescue

From Wellborn’s source:

Pirates in a life boat at 30-meters could be compared to fish in a barrel. All that was necessary was to take out the plexiglass window so that it would not deflect the trajectory of the high velocity .308 round. So, a sniper (one of four) with a wad-cutter round (a flaxen sabot) would take out the window a split second before the kill-shot-- no change in sight-picture, just the window blowing out, clean.

… The pirate holding Captain Philips raised the gun to his head, and IMMINENT DANGER was so observed and noted in the Log as CO BAINBRIDGE gave the classic order: WEAPONS RELEASED! I can hear the echo in my earpiece now, "On my count (from 8.5 seconds), 3, 2, 1, !" POP, BANG! Out went the window, followed by three simultaneous shots. The scoreboard flashed: "GAME OVER, GAME OVER-- NAVY 3, PIRATES 0!"

Johnson’s paraphrase of his source’s account:

Phillips was at the doorway taking a piss. This was the first time after the lifeboat was hooked up to the tow line that the SEALs got all four people on board the lifeboat in sight at the same time. That's why they took the shot.

Neither of these accounts squares very easily with what McClatchy was told by the Navy:

Two of the captors had poked their heads out of a rear hatch of the lifeboat and the third could be seen through a window in the bow, pointing the rifle at the captain, who was tied up inside the 18-foot lifeboat, senior Navy officials told The New York Times. It took only three shots — one each by snipers firing from a distance at dusk, using night-vision scopes, the officials said.

Did the Navy not want to admit that Philips was relieving himself at the time of the rescue? Could be. Was there an extra wadcutter round that the Navy did not mention? Could be. Why didn’t Wellborn’s source mention that only one of the pirates was behind the plexiglass window? Because he didn’t know? And why is the busted window in the lifeboat near the stern (here and/or here), not the bow, as the Navy said? WTF????

Perhaps the sources for these different accounts will be willing to step up with clarifications. More information would be good, especially some credible details on why it took two days for CENTCOM to act on SOCOMS SEAL-team recommendations, when it must have been obvious to everyone that these resources MIGHT be needed. All else is to get to the bottom of the delay and the crazy ROE. Both are at this point well established facts, but were they agenda driven, or were they just bumbled onto?

What about that bogus claim that SEALs had the pirates sighted in when Philips jumped in the ocean on Friday morning?

At least part of this SEAL-pals claim is bogus. There were no SEALs on site Friday morning. This is apparently the explanation for Gertz’ one-sided report. Being convinced by this SEAL-pals error that the report is “obviously false,” he thinks there is something wrong with me for pointing out the holes in the Pentagon’s story:

Gen. Jones put his reputation out there for an internet rumor by agreeing to go on the record. He is the guy who was in the middle of it and he said he didn't recognize the rumors as being close to accurate. So you believe something which is obviously false versus the national security adviser to the president who spoke on the record? What's wrong with the picture.

The issue isn’t belief. It is getting to the bottom of what actually happened. Suppose the SEAL-pals report does turn out to be phony. Maybe it does not really come from any discussions with SEALs at all, never mind accurate ones. Then it provides no evidence for or against the claims that it puts forward.

If the report is bogus, does that mean that the Navy was NOT following the crazy “imminent danger” ROE that the SEAL-pals report claims? Of course not. Gertz own article confirms that Philips had to be in “imminent danger” for our military to take action. Opportunities where the hostage was out of danger were off limits. If the pirates ever left Philips unattended, our sailors were not allowed to rescue him by taking out the pirates, just as the SEAL-pals report said.

The question is how much the errant claim about SEALs having the pirates sighted-in on Friday morning vitiates the SEAL-pals report as a source of evidence.

The SEAL-pals report also described the pirates as being sighted in by “Navy shooters”

If you read past the bullet points at the top of the SEAL-pals account, the fuller account below does not say that it was SEALs who had the pirates in their sights, but “Navy shooters.”

Is it possible that regular sailors aboard the Bainbridge did have the pirates in their sights when Philips leapt in the water? If so, then the SEAL-pals report could still be genuinely sourced, but couldn’t be too carefully vetted. It would be more like a compilation of things that were getting passed around (which is about how it presents itself, at least in the bullet points).

A key to whether the Bainbridge’s own sailors could have had the pirates in their sights is the distance to the lifeboat. The third reporter involved in the Pentagon’s SEAL-pals rebuttal effort (after Gertz and Miller) is NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski. Mik’s Pentagon sources claim that the Bainbridge was a mile away:

Friday, April 10
Captain Phillips jumped into the sea in an attempt to escape his pirate captors, but the Bainbridge was a mile away from the lifeboat at the time and had no special operations forces in the water or the air that could have helped Phillips escape.

Again, contemporaneous accounts contradict the Pentagon’s claims. The New York Daily News reported that Phillips: “had hoped to swim the few hundred yards to the warship Bainbridge.”

CBS reported that the Bainbridge was staying:

a minimum of 200 yards away — too far to send its own lifeboat to pick up the captain in just a few seconds, and it has no helicopter on board, they said.

If the Bainbridge was within a few hundred yards then the lifeboat was almost certainly kept under armed surveillance. Here is drone surveillance from the previous AM (Thursday), showing the lifeboat illuminated by the Bainbridge:

There was a full moon on April 9th, which at 3:59 AM would have been to the west. Since the illumination in this image is from the east, it has to be from the Bainbridge (either searchlights or infrared).

We also know that the Bainbridge has a pair of twin-.50 caliber machine guns:

And a pair of 25mm chain guns:

A couple hundred yards is the length of the Bainbridge. When Philips jumped in the ocean, wouldn’t Bainbridge gunners have been crying for an order to take out the lifeboat?

LJ says no:

You do not shoot at a lifeboat on heaving seas, particularly if the guy you want to rescue is anywhere near the field of fire. Moreover, a .50 cal or a chain gun are not, repeat not, accurate fire systems. You can blow the shit out of the lifeboat but you are just as likely to kill the captain.

But were the seas heaving? And even if LJ is right, would this stop the gunners from thinking they could have pulled off the shot, and venting frustration to their buddies at not being given the chance? Such an incident might well trigger a round of woulda-coulda-shouldas and end up in a word-of-sailor compilation, fair or unfair.

From someone who certainly WAS there

The officer of the deck did an interview with his hometown newspaper. He says that Bainbridge gunners never got a clear shot, but for LJ’s reason--because Philips did not get far enough away from the pirates--not because the Bainbridge was too far away:

As Sieg acted as officer of the deck again, Phillips dived from the lifeboat into the water.

"We threw on our engines," Sieg said in a phone interview Sunday from the ship. "We were firing flares. We were doing everything we could to distract the pirates, but we couldn't afford to shoot at the pirates because the captain never got away."

Sieg said it was his worst moment because despite Phillips' nerve and will to escape, the Navy couldn't help him at the time.

"It was maybe a one-minute escape attempt," he said. "It was over too quickly, and we never had an opportunity to intervene and help him out. It was a pretty terrible moment to be (the officer of the deck) and to know there was nothing to do to help him out."

The pirates jumped in immediately after their prisoner, and Phillips could not get away.

The local reporter forwarded my email to Ensign Sieg, asking for detail on the distance. Will update if he replies, but at this point the Pentagon claim of the Bainbridge being a mile away looks pretty wobbly.

Conclusion

If all the information is this bollixed up, it may be impossible to sort anything more out, but we do know two things. We do know that there was a two day delay in getting the SEAL teams deployed, notwithstanding the Pentagon’s attempt to focus on the lack of delay in getting authorization from Obama once they asked him for it, to the exclusion of the two day delay in asking for authorization. Second, we know that the ROE precluded any rescue of Philips if there was actually an opportune moment to do so. Instead, our sailors were ordered to wait until they thought the pirates were about to shoot Captain Philips, which by the official account is exactly what happened.

If the Pentagon wants to engage in public relations efforts, it should acknowledge these issues and what there is to learn from them. That ROE needs to be changed. Hostage holders need to be taken out when the risk to their hostages is at a minimum, not a maximum. According to Captain Wellborn’s sources, the ROE that was in force was actually the most restrictive possible:

It's the law in Article 19 of Appendix L in the "Convention of the High Seas" that the Commanding Officer of a US Ship on the high seas is obligated to respond to distress signals from any flagged ship (US or otherwise), and protect the life and property thereof when deemed to be in IMMINENT DANGER.

If that is correct (anybody know where to find a copy of the Convention?), it is pretty bad. The maximum restriction allowed by international law is not the proper ROE for our military to be operating under.

The Pentagon should also be straight about the 2-day delay. If it came in asking for presidential authorization, don’t deflect the issue by saying that authorization came quickly once asked for. Misdirection just compounds the grounds for criticism, and probably makes it harder to learn a constructive lesson. Just say that a two day delay is not that bad, given the number of agencies weighing in, and the time it takes to get a clear picture. Denying a multi-day delay that the whole country just witnessed breeds distrust, even if the press is willing to look the other way.

People say good things about Gertz, but he managed to cover up both the real delay, and the perversity of the ROE. Maybe he is right about the SEAL-pals account. Maybe it IS counterfeit. That doesn’t mean there is no need to get to the truth, and he was certainly wrong to smooth over the contra-indications.

Thanks to Larry Johnson for his input. Mr. Johnson forwarded quite a bit more information than what I excerpted here. For instance, he says that POTUS did not nix any plan to take out the pirates with swimmers (claimed by Captain Wellborn’s sources), because no such plan was ever put forward. If anyone wants to see the rest of Johnson’s remarks, I have posted our whole exchange (with Larry’s okay) at my Crescent of Betrayal website.

Obama's "Christian" grandmother to perform pilgrimage to Mecca

2009-05-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Sarah Hussein Obama, 2008
From USA Today:

Sarah Hussein Obama, grandmother of U.S. senator Barack Obama, when asked on Wednesday about recent attacks on her grandson that include the spreading of rumors that he is secretly a Muslim:

"Untruths are told that don't have anything to do with what Barack is about," she said in the local Luo language ... "In the world of today, children have different religions from their parents," she said. She, too, is a Christian.

Sarah Hussein Obama, 2009
From Pakistani Daily Times today:

US President Barack Obama’s paternal grandmother, Sara Obama, will perform haj this year along with her son Syed Obama ... performing haj is one of the most desired wishes of the US president’s grandmother.

Sarah Hussein Obama 2008
From USA Today:

Matt Drudge said that he was e-mailed a widely circulated picture of Obama in a turban and robe by the Clinton campaign.

"Bringing such pictures that are trying to imply that not only is he a foreigner, he is a Muslim is wrong, because that is not what he is," scolded Sarah Obama.

"Christian" Barack Hussein Obama, 2009:

Obama's head-down bow to Saudi King Abdullah, and no, this is NOT a two handed handshake, as an Obama aide tried to claim:

Obama's left hand is draped across his left leg, which is braced forward to support his deep bow. Notice how high Abdullah's and Obama's hands are (both pictures). Obama is practically kissing Abdullah's hand.

Figure it out people. Islam does not just permit lying about religion (Koran verse 16:106), but actively calls for it when such deception can advance the cause of Islamic conquest. See the hadiths of Tabari 8:23 (scroll to bottom), and Sahih Muslim, book 19, 4436.

BUSTED: The Obama Pentagon flat-out lied about the SEAL team timeline (ACTUAL DELAY, 52 HOURS)

2009-04-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

With all the back-and-forth between Somali time and D.C. time, a lot of people let this slip through the cracks (including me).

The "SEAL pals" email circulated by Rear Admiral Lou Sarosdy (USN ret.) claimed that Obama did not authorize SEAL teams to assist in the rescue of Captain Philips until 36 hours after these resources were requested by the captain on the scene. In their rebuttal campaign last week, anonymous Pentagon sources claimed that the USS Bainbridge did not arrive at the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama until Friday April 10th.

It actually arrived on scene at 4:00 AM on the 9th, local time, which in Washington was 8:00 PM on the 8th. It seems that reporters and editors let the date claim slide on the assumption that the time difference would shift the times the way it would have to shift the times to fit the Pentagon's claim, when it actually shifts them the other way. In fact, the Pentagon just flat-out lied about the Bainbridge's arrival time.

On the other end, the Pentagon used Washington time to make it sound as if Obama's authorization came on Friday, when it actually came at 4:00 AM Saturday morning local time. Thus the actual delay, local time to local time, was 4:00 AM Thursday to 4:00 AM Saturday: 48 hours!

Our "fact checkers" are not checking the facts

Obama's Pentagon rebuttal crew talked to three reporters: Bill Gertz at the Washington Times, Jim Miklaszewski at NBC and Joe Miller at Annenberg's FactCheck.org. Here is Miller's statement of the Obama Pentagon's rebuttal:

Although Phillips was taken hostage on April 8, the Pentagon didn’t actually take charge of the situation until the U.S.S. Bainbridge arrived on the scene on April 10. At that point, Pentagon officials told us, the captain of the Bainbridge requested the resources to resolve the situation. By 8:00 p.m. (Washington time) on April 10, President Obama had authorized the redeployment of a SEAL team from Kenya to the Bainbridge. Pentagon officials told us that the request worked its way up and back down the chain of command in a few hours, not a day-and-a-half, as the e-mail states.

Thanks are due to Mr. Miller for pinning down the time of the first SEAL-team authorization. Other sources offer redundant documentation of the Bainbridge's arrival on-scene in the early AM local time on the 9th, not on the 10th, as the Pentagon claimed. According to CNN, the USS Bainbridge arrived on the scene of the hijacking "before dawn Thursday." AP's timeline is more specific:

ON THURSDAY
4:00 a.m.: U.S. Navy destroyer U.S.S. Bainbridge reaches the Maersk Alabama.

After opening with the statement that the Bainbridge arrived before dawn, the CNN report goes on to say that the Bainbridge arrived at 8PM, but this seeming discrepancy is easily resolved. 4:00 AM Wednesday morning in Somalia was 8:00 PM Tuesday evening in Washington. (There is a 9 time-zone difference between Washington and Somalia, but the "spring forward" during daylight savings chops it to 8. This is why some televisions stations continued to refer to "Tuesday's hijacking." They first reported it here in the States on Tuesday the 7th.)

CNN was specific about the Navy taking over the scene the moment they arrived:

"When the Navy comes in, they're in charge," Speers [a spokesman for the Maersk Alabama] told CNN.

And according to Joe Miller:

At that point [when the Bainbridge arrived], Pentagon officials told us, the captain of the Bainbridge requested the resources to resolve the situation.

So the request for the SEAL teams went up the chain of command not long after 4:00 AM local time on the 9th. If authorization to send the nearby Kenya-based SEAL team over did not come until 4:00 AM Saturday, as Miller's Pentagon sources told him, then no, the request did not "work its way up and back down the chain of command in a few hours," as they also claimed. It took TWO FULL DAYS!

At least I have an excuse for missing this the first time round

I didn't follow the hijacking story until I read the "SEAL pals" version of what really happened of the coast of Somalia. When I then read the Pentagon's "SEAL pals" rebuttal in the Washington Times, I saw that it actually confirmed most of the "SEAL pals" claims. In particular, it expressly confirmed the perverse Rules of Engagement, where if the pirates ever left Captain Philips unguarded, our sailors were not allowed to rescue him by taking them out. "Obama's order not to rescue hostage confirmed by National Security Advisor and Pentagon," as I titled my response to Gertz' Pentagon exclusive.

That response did not address the claimed 36 hour delay, but Gertz, Miller and Miklaszewski all made the Pentagon's rebuttal of the 36 hour delay the centerpiece of their articles. So how did these supposed fact checkers all fail to check the most easily checkable facts at the heart of their own story? Faced with conflicting claims about the timeline, they simply reported what the two sides said, without making any attempt to see check and report on who was right.

Gertz got played the worst. His Obamagon sources denied that there was ANY delay in sending the Kenya-based SEAL team:

As soon as the Pentagon took charge on April 10 with its warship the USS Bainbridge on the scene, Mr. Obama first authorized a few Navy SEALs from a base in Africa to deploy to the Bainbridge and take necessary action. The team was flown by transport aircraft and parachuted to waters near the warship, officials said.

48 hours becomes zero hours, and Gertz reportorial curiosity is not raised enough to check the very first fact: when the Bainbridge actually arrived on-scene.

Miklaszewski's malfeasance

If Gertz was the least curious reporter, Miklaszewski was the most dishonest, because he KNEW when the Bainbridge arrived. Miklaszewski is NBC's designated "Pentagon correspondent." As such, he narrated most of NBC's updates on the hijacking. In his April 8th report, about the crew regaining control of the Maersk Alabama but losing Captain Philips, he noted that the USS Bainbridge was "a half day away," so he knew when it would get there, and the Nightly News' April 9th edition (without Miklaszewski) reported that: "The USS Bainbridge arrived in the early hours of this morning."

Despite knowing that the USS Bainbridge arrived before dawn on Thursday, Miklaszewski's report on the Pentagon's rebuttal effort (helpfully titled "SEAL EMAIL CRITICIZING OBAMA IS BOGUS") only said that the Bainbridge arrived on Thursday, leaving open the possibility that it arrived late Thursday. Similarly with Obama's authorization of the first SEAL team, which "Mik" only relates as having been issued on Friday, leaving open the possibility that it was issued early Friday.

Even if the Pentagon did not give Miklaszewski a specific time for the first SEAL-team authorization as was given to Joe Miller (8:00PM Washington time), Miklaszewski knows full well that if the authorization came early Friday, he would have been told. Thus he had to know that the 36 hour delay was at least in the ballpark: from early AM Thursday to at least mid-day Friday. Still he simply related the Pentagon assertion that the "SEAL pals" claims were false, with every line of his report written in an Obama-defending style (along with that BOGUS headline).

Neither did Miklaszewski speak up when the Pentagon told Gertz and Miller that the Bainbridge did not arrive until the 10th. Miklaszewski knew that was mis-information, as did numerous other reporters who covered the hijacking, yet they have all covered it up by omission.

Corrections are not enough: the media needs to tell the public about the Obama Pentagon's disinformation campaign

Like NBC, Joe Miller was also affirmative in declaring Admiral Sarodsy's "SEAL pals" report to be false:

Q: Did Obama delay the rescue of Captain Phillips?
A: No. Military officials say that the claims being made in a widely circulated chain e-mail are false.

So much for FactCheck.org. All of these outfits not only need to issue corrections, they need to trumpet the true story here: that the new Obama Pentagon put out completely wrong information in an express attempt to counter correct information from our own soldiers about the Obama administration's untenable decision-making.

By engaging in such a concerted rebuttal effort, Obama's Pentagon is acknowledging that if the claimed delay is true, it is devastating. As Gertz described their mission:

They sought to dispel Internet reports that the military was delayed from taking action by indecision inside the White House.

That they made such a focused effort to distribute false information is BIG NEWS, and it needs to be reported.

The second word-of-sailor account adds to the devastation

The 36 hour delay that was correctly reported in the "SEAL pals" account is damning enough, but a second word-of-sailor report, circulated by Captain Raymond "Buddy" Wellborn USN, is even more damning if true, giving the reason for the two day delay:

He [Obama] reportedly questioned his staff, "Will 'my' FBI people get there before the Navy does?"

This is consistent with the crazy don't-shoot-if-Philips-is-unguarded ROE. Obama WANTED to preserve the hostage situation so that he could negotiate with the pirates, give them the status of a place at the table, and make some kind of concessions to them, probably some rules of engagement that we would promise to abide by in future. The engagements that these promises encouraged would then, of course, be settled by yet further negotiation.

This is the fundamental fact that all the REAL information points to: Obama WANTED to negotiate with the pirates, and he wanted to establish this as a modus operandi going forward. Vice Admiral Gortney, who commands the Naval forces in the Middle East, was perfectly clear about the Obamagon's plan (and his own devotion to it):

Authorities went through "a deliberate, slow deliberate process to let the negotiation process work itself out to a nonviolent end," he said. "And unfortunately, that did not occur."

Imagine thinking it "unfortunate" that instead of having to negotiate with the pirates, we were able to take them out? As Obama always means by "change," the world is turned upside down.

The second authorization (delay time 50+ hours)

In addition to specifying 8:00 PM EDT Friday for Obama's authorization to send in the Kenya-based SEAL teams, Joe Miller's Pentagon sources specified a slightly later time for Obama's authorization for bringing in the SEAL sniper team from Norfolk VA:

Later Friday night, the Pentagon requested that SEAL Team 6 – the Navy’s counter-terrorism unit, which is also known as United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DEVGRU – also be deployed to the Bainbridge. Obama approved that request, as well.

Jim Miklaszewski's sources dated this second authorization to Saturday morning, but that discrepancy with Miller's late-Friday account can be reconciled by the time zones. Miller was explicitly talking Washington time, and late Friday in Washington is Saturday morning in Somalia.

It is only in regards to the second authorization that Gertz' Pentagon sources were willing to admit ANY Obama delay, claiming that Obama issued the second authorization "in a matter of hours" after CENTCOM passed on the request. That would probably be close to midnight, which would bring the delay on this INITIAL request to 52 hours (4:00 AM Thursday to 8:00 AM Saturday, local time).

Remember, the original request from Bainbridge Captain frank Castellano was for the Norfolk specialty teams, at least according to the "SEAL pals" report (which was correct, if a bit conservative, on the 36 hour delay):

1. BHO wouldn't authorize the DEVGRU/NSWC SEAL teams to the scene for 36 hours going against OSC (on scene commander) recommendation.

And why wouldn't Castellano request the Norfolk specialists from the outset, when they turned out to be just what was needed (at least under the hyper-restrictive ROE that Obama's people at CENTCOM insisted on)?

Obama and Obama's people at CENTCOM are the same thing

The Pentagon tried to slip their deception through by pretending that the only delays that can be attributed to Obama are the time it took for him to authorize the SEAL teams once the Obama people at CENTCOM finally decided to pass these request on to him from below. As Gertz' sources put it, Obama approved CENTCOM's request for authorization "in a matter of hours." Yes, but only after talking with them for almost two days about to WHETHER to make a request for authorization.

The only way Gertz and Miklaszewski could fall for such an obvious diversion is if they wanted to. Like Eason Jordon in Baghdad, they know that the key to future access is to play ball with current access (plus whatever Chris Matthews-like "thrill going up my leg" favoritism they may have for Obama themselves).

Well they really shamed themselves this time, but they and their employers can still redeem themselves if they will not just issuing corrections for the false information they helped the Pentagon put before the public, but actually do their jobs and report the truth about the Pentagon's disinformation campaign against its own soldiers.

Under the Bush Doctrine, we would have to invade ourselves

2009-04-25T09:52:00.000-07:00

"U.S. plans to accept several Chinese Muslims from Guantanamo" reports the L.A. Times. Not just any Muslims, mind you, but Islamofascist terrorists whose schtick is plotting acts of war against China, for which they are wanted by the Chinese government.

It is stupid enough for Obama to abandon the Bush Doctrine of regime change for nations that harbor terrorists. It is beyond stupid to become a nation that harbors terrorists. One Big Ass Mistake America.

Obama's order not to rescue hostage confirmed by National Security Advisor and Pentagon

2009-04-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

Stung by the widely circulated “SEAL pals” account of what really happened in Somalia (discussed here last Friday), the Obama administration had National Security Advisor James L. Jones and a number of anonymous Pentagon sources give their side two days ago in a Washington Times exclusive. Their mission, according to reporter Bill Gertz, was:

... to dispel Internet reports that the military was delayed from taking action by indecision inside the White House.

Clintonesque parsing of words is evident throughout the Jones-Pentagon account, amounting on more than one occasion to outright dishonesty. Yet the actual information they provide (as opposed to the lawyerly spin they try to put on it) actually confirms the most damning details in BooBooFan’s purported SEAL report.

Exhibit 1: The Rules Of Engagement.

BooBooFan states the ROE this way:

Once [SEAL teams] arrived, BHO imposed restrictions on their ROE that they couldn't do anything unless the hostage's life was in "imminent" danger.

The Pentagon’s rebuttal states the ROE without any requirement that the danger be "imminent":

"It took awhile to get facts and then to get the military on scene," said one senior military official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing special forces operations. "As the picture got more clear and commanders' requests went back down the chain, the guidance was: 'We would like a peaceful resolution. However, if Captain Phillips' life is in danger you can take appropriate action.'

But we know from Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, speaking at the time of the incident, that the ROE did specify "imminent danger," and that this was interpreted literally:

Navy officers aboard the USS Bainbridge were in the midst of a drawn-out hostage negotiation when Navy snipers saw one of the pirates aim his AK-47 machine gun at Capt. Richard Phillips's back and concluded the American was in "imminent danger," said Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, commander of naval forces in the Middle East.

Gertz’ report includes Gortney’s earlier statement, but without any comment on its inconsistency with the current rebuttals. Intead, Gertz just relays the interpretation that is presented to him, where the Pentagon dismisses the “imminent danger” claim by denying that the ROE was in any way restrictive:

The posting also stated that rules of engagement imposed by the president prevented action unless the hostage's life was in imminent danger.

The military official said the commander had authority to take action at all times because Mr. Phillips was being held at gunpoint.

Yes, but as soon as the pirates took their weapons OFF of Philips, our sailors were barred from taking action. This is exactly the opportunity they would have been waiting for in order TO take action. So the ROE was, you are free to take action, UNTIL you have an opportunity, then you can't, as actually occurred when Philips briefly escaped his captors.

Jones and the Pentagon spokesman try to cover this up, Jones by mis-stating the ROE, the Pentagon spokesman by pretending that the ROE did not really restrict anyone, but Vice Admiral Gortney's statement makes perfectly clear that the crazy ROE was followed to the letter. Instead of taking out the pirates at a moment of minimum risk to Captain Philips, they actually waited until Philips was in maximum peril. With all due credit to our soldiers for following orders, that is absolutely insane.

Exhibit 2: The passed-up rescue attempts

Here our anonymous Pentagon spokesman takes the lawyerly parsing of language to new heights, pulling off an amazing bait-and-switch.

BooBooFan’s claim is devastating if true:

The first time the hostage jumped, the SEALS had the raggies all sighted in, but could not fire due to ROE restriction.

The Pentagon's reply seems to be equally devastating:

However, military officials at the Pentagon involved in the operation said Navy SEAL snipers had not arrived on board the Bainbridge at that time and therefore could not have fired on the pirates.

Except BooBooFan never said it was the SEAL sniper team that had the Islamofascist pirates sighted in, and the Pentagon’s own account verifies that regular SEAL teams were already on site. In Gertz' paraphrase:

Mr. Obama first authorized a few Navy SEALs from a base in Africa to deploy to the Bainbridge and take necessary action. The team was flown by transport aircraft and parachuted to waters near the warship, officials said.
…
The arrival of the first SEAL team gave the military an emergency capability if the pirates holding the ship’s captain became violent. Mr. Jones said the Pentagon requested a second, more complete SEAL team to be dispatched from the United States and Mr. Obama approved that request as well.

Once Captain Phillips leapt in the water, it did not require snipers to take out the pirates. As I put it in my own initial remarks on the subject:

WTF? No one was ready at the machine gun to waste the pirates when this guy got clear?

According to BooBoo, a SEAL team WAS ready, and Jones' account confirms this detail. It is only some slippery use of language on the part of the Obama-defending military spokesmen that make this sound like a debunking, when it is actually a confirmation.

Exhibit 3: It was either Obama himself, or his immediate underlings, who devised the ROE

The administration’s rebuttal effort takes pains to paint the controversial Rules of Engagement as coming from CENTCOM, not the president:

At the Pentagon, military officials said the rules of engagement were set by military commanders at Central Command and were more limited than combat rules because the Navy regarded the operation as countering criminal activity, namely piracy.

But this is a distinction without a difference. As Commander In Chief, Obama has his own men at CENTCOM, and being the president’s men, they would have gotten their way.

Thus BooBoo’s claim that the prohibition on taking any propitious opportunity to rescue the hostage came from BHO is borne out. Thanks to Jones et. al., we now know that this crazy ROE did come the top, if not from BHO himself then from his immediate underlings.

The distinction that does make a difference is the clear Obama stamp. The Obamatons declare outright that their preferred outcome was to negotiate with the pirates!

Authorities went through "a deliberate, slow deliberate process to let the negotiation process work itself out to a nonviolent end," he said. "And unfortunately, that did not occur."

BooBoo never leveled that accusation, but I did. I was trying to tear the cover off when I titled my first commentary, “Obama WANTED to negotiate with the pirates.” Now, thanks to Jones et. al., we have confirmation of that too.

This is what the crazy ROE was really all about. The order was: if you see that the pirates have left Captain Philips unguarded, giving you an opportunity to rescue him by killing them, DON’T TAKE IT. They (the Obama people at CENTCOM) preferred to have the pirates alive and in possession of Captain Philips. They even have the gall to call it “unfortunate” that the Islamofascist hijackers ended up getting taken out!

For two years now I have been working with Tom Burnett Sr. (father of murdered Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Jr.) to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent atop his son’s grave. Unlike the new Obama CENTCOM, we do not find the violent termination of an Islamofascist hijacking (with no loss of life to the hostages this time) to be “unfortunate.” Good grief.

Exhibit 4: No more War On Terror

A second Obama stamp is that decision to treat the Islamofascist pirates as engaged in criminal activity instead of acts of war. Technically, they are engaged in both. Some of the Somali pirates are linked to al Qaeda. ALL of them are practicing their religion of Islamic supremacy, which encourages the taking of booty. From Muhammad’s biographer Ibn Ishaq (at 326):

Allah said, ‘No Prophet before Muhammad took booty from his enemy nor prisoners for ransom.' Muhammad said, ‘I was made victorious with terror. The earth was made a place for me to clean. I was given the most powerful words. Booty was made lawful for me. I was given the power to intercede. These five privileges were awarded to no prophet before me.'

The Koran grants similar allowance to Muhammad’s followers:

So enjoy what you have gotten of booty in war, lawful and good. [Koran verse 8.69]

To al Qaeda, piracy is a core part of their religion, just like that “made victorious with terror” part. Fighting piracy is part and parcel of fighting al Qaeda and fighting terror. That makes it clearly covered by our 2001 declaration of war against those who attacked us on 9/11. But while they are still waging war on us, Obama has unilaterally decided to put the War on Terror into retirement. The official term now is “Overseas Contingency Operations,” and along with the language change, the tools of war are also being abandoned in favor of treating Muslim acts of war as criminal activity only.

As the Pentagon admits, the don’t-rescue-if-you-can-possibly-help-it ROE derived directly from this signature Obama policy choice. Here it is again:

At the Pentagon, military officials said the rules of engagement were set by military commanders at Central Command and were more limited than combat rules because the Navy regarded the operation as countering criminal activity, namely piracy.

The pretense that this somehow came from our military rather than from the White House, when it obviously got into the military through the White House, is completely disingenuous.

Exhibit 5: the delay

With all the misleading language employed by Jones and his Obama-defense crew, it is hard to put much stock in their claim that Obama and/or his CENTCOM dopplegangers were not behind the two days or so that it took before the order was even given to get SEAL teams moving to the site. Gertz’ Pentagon sources talk about the time it took to actually move the SEALS from the East Coast to the Middle East, but that isn’t the issue. The issue is why it took so long to authorize the move.

BooBooFan said that the commander on the site wanted the SEALS en route ASAP:

BHO wouldn't authorize the DEVGRU/NSWC SEAL teams to the scene for 36 hours going against OSC (on scene commander) recommendation.

The rebuttal consists of insisting that once CENTCOM asked Obama to authorize the SEAL teams to go in, “the request to use the forces was approved in a matter of hours.”

Yes, but how long did it take Obama's CENTCOM underlings to get around to asking for authorization? Again, the Pentagon rebuttal relies on the distinction between CENTCOM and Obama, but there is no difference between the two. Obama has his dopplegangers at CENTCOM. After all, he IS the president.

The actual information provided by Jones et. al. supports BooBooFan’s time-line. The SEAL teams were apparently not authorized to get moving until sometime after the Bainbridge arrived on the scene (more than a day after the American flagged Maersk was commandeered).

Does that sound like our military? Steaming into a crisis situation without getting all necessary men and material en route? What would be hard to believe is that the commander on the scene did try to insure that SEAL teams were en route as soon as he got underway, yet according to the new information, SEALs were not authorized for something like a day and a half, just as BooBooFan claims.

Why the delay? Why did there need to be special presidential authorization at all? Do we treat SEAL teams like nukes now? They can’t be moved without orders from the highest level? The more likely scenario is that when Obama’s men at CENTCOM got the request to send over the SEAL teams, they held it up, giving Obama a chance to mull it over, then after much insistence from commanders on the scene, they decided to ask Obama for formal permission to send over the SEAL teams, which Obama authorized after the unspecified “few” additional hours.

In sum, Jones et. al. manage to corroborate in detail almost all of BooBooFan’s information, indicating that his purported SEAL sourcing is accurate. So thanks very much to the Obamagangers, and a big thumbs down to Bill Gertz for helping them to elide the numerous inconsistencies between their information and their spin.

At first blush, the Gertz article reads like an effective rebuttal, until you start paying attention to the actual information content instead of how it is characterized. Under scrutiny, not one point of the supposed rebuttal stands.

Epilogue: Obama’s numerous unreported Islamofascist ties

It might be unfair to insist on the logical implications of the Obama administration’s ROE (that they WANTED to negotiate with the pirates), because we all know that Democrats are not logical. To a “violence only begets violence” sloganeer like Obama, it might seem axiomatic that we should not take action unless at the final instant it becomes absolutely necessary.

Of course that too is a form of wanting to negotiate with the pirates. It is a world view in which negotiating is always seen as the better or higher course. But Obama might not be this kind of well-meaning Democrat. The more worrisome possibility is that what looks like a kumbaya-type penchant for negotiation with everybody may only be a ruse. After all, Obama is certainly not interested in negotiating with his real enemies: the Republicans, yet he is interested in negotiating with Syria and Iran, with Hamas, with the mythical “moderate Taliban,” and every other Islamic supremacist entity he can find, including a dingy-full of Islamofascist pirates.

Is it just coincidence that, except for his racial-separatist wife and the communist pedophile who mentored him as a child, every single one of Obama’s long-time mentors and confidants is not just Muslim, but is actually Islamofascist? Count ‘em up. If the media had properly reported ANY of these Islamofascist connections, Obama would never have been elected.

1. William Ayers, the proud domestic terrorist who gave Obama a resume by picking him for the board of the Annenberg Challenge (where the two of them funneled education funds to Afro-centric racists like Obama's pastor/mentor Jeremiah Wright). In addition to being a communist, Ayers apparently converted at some point to Islam, giving his children Nation of Islam names and adopting for himself the Muslim honorific "Abu Zayd,” meaning “father of Zayd.” Thus Ayers named both his son and himself after Black Panther/Nation of Islam thug Zayd Malik Shakur, who murdered NJ policeman Werner Forrester in 1973.

Obama told documented lies about his relationship with Ayers, at first denying any significant relationship, before it came out that they worked together for many years, and that Obama’s “coming out party” in Chicago electoral politics was hosted at Ayers’ home.

2. Raila Odinga, Kenyan Prime Minister and a Obama's fellow Luo tribesman. (Odinga says he is Obama's cousin. Obama says not quite.) Like Obama, Odinga calls himself a Christian, but in late 2007 he was outed by Kenya's Muslim leaders nya for signing a secret Memorandum of Understanding with them where he begins by declaring Islam to be the only true religion and ends by promising to impose Sharia law on Kenya. (Odinga recently removed his rationalizations for the MoU from his “Odinga for President” website, but I saved a copy.)

During a 2006 trip to Kenya, Obama campaigned extensively for Odinga. The interference in Kenyan politics becoming so grating to Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki that he ended up calling Obama a “stooge" of Odinga.

3. Jeremiah Wright, the racist, America-hating, "ex-Muslim" pastor at Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Wright earned a masters degree in the study of Islam, where he presumably learned Muhammad’s teaching that Muslims who reside in Infidel territory are supposed to pretend to be infidels, if by doing so they can advance the cause of Islamic conquest. (See Koran verse 16:106, and the hadiths of Tabari 8:23 and Sahih Muslim, book 19, 4436.)

Wright’s “Christian” church celebrates Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and teaches the Islamic version of the law of love: to love members of your own group while hating outsiders. In particular, Wright teaches hatred of white people, as NOI leader Louis Farrakhan does.

4. Khalid Al-Mansour, who managed Obama's admission to Harvard Law, is another radical Nation of Islam racist, who once declared that God wanted blacks to go around cutting white people's noses off.

5. Rashid Khalidi, Obama's best dinner buddy, is a PLO terror supporter.

6. Frank Marshall Davis The only identifiable mentor/confidante of Obama who is not a known Islamofascist is Frank Marshall Davis, the communist pedophile who shepherded Obama as a boy in Hawaii. (Davis wrote in his memoirs that he didn't want to "disappoint" a 13 year old girl by not having sex with her.)

7. Obama's father Then there is Obama's Muslim/Communist/racist father, who Obama never met, but does dream about. Barrack Sr. was a member of a Kenyan opposition party when he slammed the sitting regime for not being socialist enough or Afro-centric enough, calling instead for "Europeans" and "Asians" to be stripped of their property.

8. Obama's wife Last and probably least is Michelle, whose Princeton thesis favored a black-separatist viewpoint, and is lauded as a "fellow traveler" by her communist-conversant husband.

Tangential other Islamofascist connections abound. Obama had Nation of Islam personnel on his senate staff. The primary financial backer of Obama “cousin” and confidant Raila Odinga is Moammar Ghadaffi. (Ghadaffi calls Obama a Muslim, and if anyone should know, it is this confidant of Obama’s own secret-Muslim confidant). Hugo Chavez, who has a long relationship with Obama mentor William Ayers, also has ties to al Qaeda, and uses the Islamic salutation “inshallah.”

Obama himself seems to have told some very bold lies about his own Muslim upbringing, denying that he was raised Muslim at all, and that he ever prayed in a mosque, while childhood friends recall praying in the mosque with him, and say that he was “previously quite religious in Islam.”

Obama’s grandmother was also caught lying about her religion, telling USA Today that she is a Christian, just a year after telling the New York Times that she is “a strong believer in the Islamic faith.”

Thus we have Obama, his cousin and his grandmother, all caught lying about their religion. What accounts for it? Well, the Islamic religion does not just permit lying about religion. It actively calls for deception, wherever it can help the goal of Islamic conquest. “War is deception,” was one of Muhammad’s guiding principles, and infidel territory is called in Islam “dar al harb,” or “the world of war.”

Obama is turning out to be a liar about many things. He denied, for instance, that he ever worked for the ACORN vote-fraud group, despite documentary proof to the contrary, but the only ones who exposed it are bloggers.

The Obamatons are so confident that our dishonest media will cover up for them that they don’t even seem to care if their lies are plausible, like the lunatic claim that Obama’s deep bow to Saudi King Abdullah was just a two handed handshake, when the video clearly shows his left hand draped across his knee. Immediately after signing the trillion dollar porkulus spending bill, Obama declared himself to be a crusader for fiscal responsibility, out to slash the deficit, and the media switched to the newspeak without a ripple.

Thanks the malfeasance of the press, refusing to report on ANY of Obama’s extensive Islamofascist ties, we are now stuck with a president of suspect loyalties. He presents himself as pursuing the pacifistic, appeasement minded policies of his Democratic Party cohorts, and that may well be the real explanation for his fecklessness and dishonesty. But bad as that would be, it is not the most likely explanation.

Not surprisingly, Obama is able to find yes-men in the Pentagon who are willing to cover up for him too, while those who are skeptical will have to be wary of getting purged. If Obama IS a secret Islamic supremacist, will our military be able to preserve itself, and the nation? There are some mistakes that are not recoverable, and handing the presidency to a man with extensive Islamofascist ties may well be one of them.

Moral Muslims don't want a memorial to the terrorists on the Flight 93 crash site

2009-04-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims against Sharia--Islamic Reform Movement, for his press release in support of Tom Burnett Sr.'s efforts to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent atop his son's grave.

Islamic Reform Movement is clear eyed on the problem:

We all know who the enemy is. It’s Islamic radicals who are guided by the ideology of Islamic supremacy. Just as Nazis were guided by the ideology of Aryan supremacy. The only difference is that Gihadis consider it their religious duty to impose Islam all over the world and many of them yearn to die (and kill) for Allah. They use lines from the Koran such as “kill them [infidels] wherever you find them” or “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” as their guiding principles.

Islam needs to be reformed so that it rejects supremacism and violent conquest, but trying reform Islam is a difficult and dangerous business:

Islamic radicals murder more Muslims than Christians, Jews, Hindus and everybody else combined. Gihadis may hate you for being infidels. But they really hate us for not following their demented dogma.

In this struggle for the soul of Islam, the last thing that moral Muslims want is any kind of victory for the supremacists, never mind a mind-boggling symbolic victory over the heroes of Flight 93:

What possible reason could be there for including anything Islamic or anything even resembling an Islamic symbol into Flight 93 Memorial? Inclusion of Islamic symbols memorializes murderers who brought down the plane and is tantamount to spitting in the faces of victims and their families. United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked in 2001. Let's not allow hijacking of Flight 93 Memorial in 2008.

Muslims know all about facing Mecca for prayer

One of the difficulties in getting people to understand the significance of the Mecca-orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is that it all seems so esoteric, and if it is esoteric, how important can it be?

Witness Allahpundit, who as Michelle Malkin's pointman on this issue ought to be one of our strongest allies. Instead, he dismisses all concern about Islamic symbolism (effectively dismissing Michelle's original concern about the giant crescent, which remains completely intact in the "broken circle" redesign), on the grounds that: "if you need a protractor to properly express your outrage, you’ve probably gone too far."

We don't need a protractor to express our outrage. We need a protractor to explain what architect Paul Murdoch did. He built the world's largest mihrab: the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial will be the world's largest mosque by a factor of a hundred. The gigantic Sacred Mosque in Mecca would fit four times over inside Murdoch's 3000 foot wide crescent, which is just the centerpiece of Murdoch's mosque.

Orientation on Mecca is THE central symbol of Islam, together with the crescent shape. Unlike Allahpundit, Khalim knows these things:

The shape of the “broken circle” resembles a crescent moon. So does the shape of the tower. Crescent moon is the most recognizable Islamic symbol. When we pray, we face Mecca and Mosques are traditionally built to face Mecca. The case could be made that the proposed design is aligned in North-Easterly direction, which corresponds with Qiblah, a direction to Mecca. Conventional wisdom would dictate that since Mecca is located to the South-East of Somerset, Qiblah cannot possibly have a North-Easterly direction. This assumption would be correct if you’re using a flat map. However, if you take a globe, place pins on locations of Somerset and Mecca, and connect those pins with a string, you’ll see that the string at the base of the Somerset pin points North-East. This symbolism may not be noticeable to a non-Muslim, and it is also possible, but likely improbable that the designer is ignorant of its significance. The proposed design would be perfect for EgyptAir 990 memorial. But for United 93 memorial, it is simply unacceptable.

Allahpundit is just being careless, but the willful blindness of the Park Service is foundational

The Memorial Project is committed to the idea that Islam was also hijacked on 9/11. To them, blaming Islam would be as bad as blaming the hijacked passengers and crew. Thus the possibility of hostile Islamic intent cannot be contemplated, no matter how high the "coincidences" pile.

According to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird, the Memorial Project participants all know that the Crescent of Embrace does in fact point almost exactly at Mecca (despite the Memorial Project's many public denials). They just assume it has to be a coincidence, just as they assume it is a coincidence that the Sacred Ground Plaza sits almost exactly in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent-and-star flag.

(Both of these almost-exact Islamic symbol shapes also contain exact Islamic symbol shapes. Remove the symbolically broken-off parts of the giant crescent and what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11 is a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. In the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag is a separate upper section of Memorial Wall, centered on the centerline of the giant crescent, that will be inscribed with the 9/11 date.)

Backers of the crescent design chose it specifically as a symbol of healing and outreach, implicitly to the Islamic world. Having been so generous to Islam, they just can't believe that a hidden al Qaeda sympathizer could be so ungenerous as to take advantage of their outreach by sneaking a memorial to the terrorists past their noses. They just can't believe that anyone could actually want to hijack Flight 93!

This refusal to acknowledge evidence of hostile Islamic intent stabs at the heart of what Islamic reformers like Khalim are trying to accomplish.

How to distinguish a moral Muslim from an Islamic supremacist

Being knowledgeable about Islam, moral Muslims recognize (as bin Laden's followers do) that Osama bin Laden is a perfectly orthodox Wahabbist, using traditional means of violence and deception to pursue the traditional Islamic objective of world domination. The difference is that moral Muslims reject the totalitarian methods and objectives of established Islam. Moral Muslims recognize that traditional Islamic orthodoxy needs to be reformed.

Textually, the opportunities for reform are very propitious. The Koran contains both sweeping calls to violence (9.05, 9.29) , and sweeping calls for tolerance (2.256, 109). To turn these diverse commands into a religion of violent conquest, every major school of Islamic interpretation, both Sunni and Shiite, considers the peaceful verses of the Koran to be expunged via the doctrine of "abrogation." Where different verses can be seen to contradict each other, the doctrine of abrogation holds the earlier verses to be abrogated and replaced by the later verses.

The peaceful verses are all early verses, so as far as traditional Islam is concerned, they don't even exist, except as a device for deceiving infidels into believing that Islam is a "religion of peace."

This doctrine of abrogation flies in the face of the Koran's own insistence that it contains no contradictions (4.82), and that nothing is abrogated (2.106). Textually, traditional Islam does not have a leg to stand on, but anyone who points it out is subject to the traditional Sharia death penalty for blasphemy. Alternatively, in a Wahabbist specialty called "taking takfir," such heretical interpretations constitute apostasy, another death penalty crime in every major school of Islamic interpretation.

The Koran repeats dozens of times over that those who forget the words of Moses will burn in Hell forever (e.g. 2.75, 3.187, 5.13, 13.25, 15.90, 16.63). This is repeated so many times because it is Muhammad's accusation against the Jews: that they twist the "allegorical parts" of the Torah (3.07). But the LEAST allegorical part of the Torah is the Ten Commandments. Thus according to the Koran, the 6th Commandment--Thou shalt not murder--is binding on Muslims.

Murder is any killing that is not in defense against either a violent attack or a conspiracy to violent attack, and there is no clearer case of murder than the traditional Islamic death penalty for apostates, who only want to go their own way. The same goes for blasphemy. To kill someone for challenging doctrine is MURDER. If the Koran really is the word of God, then every traditional Muslim in the entire world who supports established Sharia law is "wood for the fire."

Whether Islamic reformers are out to save the lives of those who would be murdered, or out to save the souls of the murderers, they are engaged in a great contest with perhaps the greatest evil the world has ever known: a RELIGION of evil. All they need to do to win is expose the truth: that traditional Islam is in systematic violation of the Koran's own most fundamental commandments, yet to expose this truth they must break through the teeth of traditional Islam's strength: its totalitarian repression of dissent. In short, all they have to do is bring truth to the most psychologically brutalized people in the history of the planet.

What could be worse, in a battle like this, than to see the land of liberty--the great haven from which truth can be spoken--build a gigantic terrorist-memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site?

No helping hand from the land of the free

If this willful blindness prevails, it will be a clear signal that in the battle to wrest Islam from the grasp of evil, America will not help. By following the morally blind idea that goodwill to Islam means having a see-no-evil attitude toward Islam, America is refusing to witness what moral Muslims are trying to expose: that the worst evils--condemned to the fire many times over by the Koran itself--thrive at the heart of Islamic institutions.

That evil heart is what throbs, a half-mile across, in the crescent memorial to Flight 93, and the refusal of our own Park Service, fully alert to all the facts, to witness this evil is the worst possible betrayal, not just of America, but of the good people in the Islamic world as well. A see-no-evil attitude towards Islam is NOT goodwill. It emboldens the worst in Islam at the expense of the best. To help the good against the bad, we have to distinguish the good from the bad.

The good are those who are trying to reform Islam. The bad are those who pretend that traditional Islam orthodoxy is already peaceful, and deny that reform is necessary.

Muslims against Sharia has a facebook group, if anyone wants to join. Check out the Islamic Reform Movement website here.

To join our blogbursts, just send your blog's url.

Keep the change

2009-04-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

San Mateo Tea Party. I was there for the last hour (6-7 PM) and counted 150:

Message for the president:

Youth movement:

Protest babe (bundled up against the global warming):

My signs:

Obama WANTED to negotiate with the pirates

2009-04-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

Flopping Aces relays what purports to be word from Navy SEALS about what actually happened off the coast of Somalia.

The claim is that, in order to comply with Rules of Engagement handed down by Barack Obama, the Navy passed up several opportunities to take out the pirates and free Captain Philips (the American hostage).

The key element of this report -- the ROE -- has been corroborated by mainstream reports: Obama DID order that no action be taken unless the hostage's life was in "imminent danger." Navy officers were finally able to meet this requirement when one of the pirates pointed his AK at Philips' back, but without this excuse, chances to free Philips had to be passed up.

We saw this rule in action when the captain jumped in the water and the pirates were allowed to retrieve him. Not knowing the ROE, we at home could only think there was a very unfortunate lapse: "WTF? No one was ready at the machine gun to waste the pirates when this guy got clear?" Then the ROE came out and provided an alternative explanation.

The "imminent danger" rule cannot be justified as a way to minimize risk to the hostage. If we don't try free a hostage until he is in "imminent danger," we are obviously putting him at greater risk than if we free him at a point of minimum danger.

The clear implication is that Obama wanted to negotiate with the Islamofascist pirates. He is eager to CHANGE the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" norm. This guy actually wants to give them a seat at the table and make concessions to them.

NASA’s acknowledgement of “deep solar minimum” is still deeply dishonest

2009-04-10T19:41:00.000-07:00

I speculated last year that NASA solar scientists were avoiding notice of the prolonged solar minimum because they want to avoid talking about what happened the last few times there was a deep solar minimum: that the earth cooled dramatically.

By refusing to even consider the possibility of an extended solar lull, Hathaway himself can avoid having to address the impact that such a lull would have on global temperature. If he did address that question, he would obviously have to note that the last really long such lull seems to have caused the Little Ice Age, which would place him on the side of the "deniers" in the debate about human-caused global warming. If low solar activity caused the Little Ice Age, then the "grand maximum" levels of solar activity during the 20th century would be the cause of 20th century warming, and the hoax of human-caused warming would be exposed.

It looks like I overestimated the integrity of Hathaway et. al. Apparently they are fully capable of acknowledging that we are in the midst of a deep solar minimum while still not mentioning the well established correlation between solar-magnetic activity and climate.

Dr. Tony Phillips issued a NASA solar-science update last week titled Deep Solar Minimum. NASA has stopped denying the obvious:

In a way, the calm is exciting, says [solar physicist Dean Pesnell]. "For the first time in history, we're getting to see what a deep solar minimum is really like."

"This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway.

How long will the quiet last? Phillips notes that “The solar minima of 1901 and 1913, for instance, were even longer than the one we're experiencing now.” Indeed, and the PEAKS of 1900-era solar cycles were also low:

Solar activity, as measured by sunspot counts (from Cap'n Bob)

While Phillips, Hathaway and Pesnell tell their audience about the the early 20th century period of lowish solar activity, they fail to mention how it coincided with a prominent dip in global temperature:

HadCRUT 3, with 21 year smoothing. The Dalton and Maunder minima were also famously cold.

Phillips even quotes NASA solar scientist David Hathaway’s acknowledgment that, "five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years,” yet they STILL fail to acknowledge the elephant in the room: that this period of high solar activity coincides with the period of global warming that the IPCC attributes to CO2.

These are supposed to be our experts, the one’s who make sure that what is known about solar science is properly taken into account by the IPCC and by our domestic policy-makers. Instead, they are providing as much cover as they can for the IPCC’s outright refusal to account the most well known facts about the correspondence between solar activity and global temperature.

What Pesnell and Hathaway know

Even a non-specialist like Dr. Phillips would be well aware of the un-missable coincidence between deep solar minima and global cold spells. Don’t kids still learn in high school that the sun went blank for 50 years at the onset of the Little Ice Age (right after they learn that Galileo’s improvements to the telescope allowed people to start counting sunspots)?

But Pesnell and Hathaway know much more. EVERY solar physicist is well aware that numerous studies have found correlations of 0.6 to 0.8 between solar activity and climate on every time scale, from the decadal to the millennial, going back 500 million years. For the longer time scales, see Shaviv and Veizer 2003:

We find that at least 66% of the variance in the paleotemperature trend could be attributed to CRF variations.

(Cosmic Ray Flux serves as a proxy for solar activity because higher solar activity, with its attendant higher solar-magnetic flux, blocks more cosmic rays from reaching the earth.) For the shorter time scales see the 1150 yr study by Usoskin et. al. 2005:

The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 — .8 at a 94% — 98% confidence level.

Even global warming alarmists Lockwood and Frohlich begin a recent paper by acknowledging that, “[t]here is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth’s pre-industrial climate,” citing 17 papers to this effect (without mentioning the two above, or dozens of others).

Such a strong correlation over such long time periods implies a causal relationship, and it can only go one way: earthly temperatures are not causing sunspots.

One avenue by which an active sun warms the earth is easily understood. Increased solar activity brings with it a slight increase in Total Solar Irradiance (primarily in the form of a not-so-slight increase in UV). But this known increase in TSI is far too small to account for the observed high degree of correlation between solar activity and global temperature. Either the UV effects are somehow being magnified (perhaps by affecting atmospheric chemistry in some way), or that OTHER manifestation of solar activity—the solar wind—is somehow affecting global temperature.

The front running candidate for a solar-magnetic warming effect is Henrik Svensmark’s GCR-cloud theory: that the solar wind blows away the Galactic Cosmic Radiation that would otherwise ionize the atmosphere and seed cloud formation, in effect blowing away the clouds, causing the earth to warm. Many are highly skeptical of Svensmark’s theory, but whatever theory one prefers, the physical evidence is clear. There is some powerful mechanism other than direct TSI forcing by which solar activity is driving global temperature, and EVERYBODY knows it.

Inverting scientific method

The IPCC’s fraud is to use doubts about the mechanism by which indirect solar effects drive temperature as an excuse for completely omitting indirect solar effects from their models. The only solar effects that are included in the IPCC models are direct TSI forcings. Indirect solar effect, known from the data to be much more powerful (capable of turning solar activity into the dominant driver of global climate across the entire geological record) are completely excluded from the IPCC prediction scheme, simply because we are not certain how they work.

This is an exact perversion of the scientific method, which is defined by the priority of data over theory. The IPCC throws out the data because it is uncomfortable with the state of the theory.

Using the IPCC’s method, a pre-Einsteinian scientist would have to predict that a rock released into the air would waft away on the breeze because we understand how the breeze pushes the rock, but we don’t understand this invisible force that some people call "gravity." Thus by the standards of the IPCC, the tendency of dropped rocks to fall should not be accounted in our predictions, even though we are well aware of the overwhelming empirical evidence that heavy objects do fall. Sorry, but that is just not science, and neither are the IPCC’s predictions of dangerous CO2-driven global warming.

Solar magnetic warming has been mis-attributed to CO2

When the solar-magnetic variable is omitted from the IPCC models, the warming effects of the solar-magnetic flux get misattributed to any correlated variables that ARE included. Since CO2 and solar activity both reached historical highs over the second half of the 20th century, the warming effects of the high solar wind get misattributed to CO2. That is how the IPCC arrives at its claim that the climate is highly sensitive to CO2: by pure anti-scientific fraud.

Pesnell, Hathaway both know it, and are desperately spinning to cover it up. Despite being our solar experts, they toe the fraudulent IPCC line to the letter. In Phillips’s article, NASA acknowledges the slight increase in Total Solar Irradiation that accompanies high solar activity, but assures the American people that: “The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming.”

Nobody knows better than Pesnell and Hathaway that direct TSI effects are insufficient to account for the magnitude of the causal relationship between solar activity and temperature that is implied by the data. Nobody knows better than these two that the IPCC completely omits indirect solar effects from its models. Nobody knows better than these two that this causes late-20th-century warming to be misattributed to CO2. Yet they still pretend that the warming effects of CO2, which they know to be a fraud, will dominate the solar effects, which they know have been grossly understated.

This as the fraudsters now in charge of our energy policies are charging at manic speed to unplug our fossil fueled economy before the global cooling caused by our inactive sun pulls the rug out from under their global warming hoax.

Can Dr. Phillips please take a look at the right side of that temperature graph?

Really? “The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming”? In fact, "the changes so far" HAVE been "enough to reverse the course of global warming":

HadCRUT3 raw, peaked in 1998 (blue is 21 yr. smoothed).

Global warming stopped a decade ago, and global temperature has dipped substantially in the last couple of years. What can one call this NASA assertion that "the changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming" but a flat out lie about the readily available temperature record?

David Hathaway's Solar Cycle 24 predictions are just as counterfactual. He is STILL using his long since invalidated prediction scheme to predict that Solar Cycle 24 will ramp up TOMORROW:

Even Hathaway's colleagues have stopped paying attention to his meaningless "predictions":

Pesnell believes sunspot counts will pick up again soon, "possibly by the end of the year," to be followed by a solar maximum of below-average intensity in 2012 or 2013.

De-regulate energy production NOW

If we would uncap our energy resources, our economy would rocket out of this recession/budding-depression. Instead, thanks to the flat-out anti-scientific dishonesty of our so-called "scientists," we are on the verge of destroying our economy out of trumped-up hysteria about global warming, even as we are already descending into a period of global cooling of who knows what depth. These eco-religionists are insane, and they are going to get a LOT of people killed.

Obama's Potemkin military reception, NO SCANDAL; Troops plan who will take what questions from Bush, HUGE SCANDAL

2009-04-09T11:18:00.000-07:00

"Cheered wildly by U.S. troops," begins Jennifer Democratic Operative Loven's AP report on Obama's surprise visit to Iraq on Tuesday.

Quite a contrast to the silent treatment Marines gave Obama at his Camp LeJeune speech in late February. Just how did Obama manage to fix that little problem?

According to a sergeant in Iraq:

We were pre-screened, asked by officials “Who voted for Obama?”, and then those who raised their hands were shuffled to the front of the receiving line. They even handed out digital cameras and asked them to hold them up. [Via Macsmind.]

As supporting evidence for the digital-cameras part of the story, the sergeant (or Mac, can't tell which), suggests that the identical cameras can be verified in the AP photos. Looks right:

Charles Dharapak/associated press

So will the press cover this evidence of a staged and unrepresentative show of military affection for our anti-military president? The reporters were there. Did they actually see the troops being sorted by whether they voted for Obama, which the sergeant describes as happening on the spot?

Stephen Hurst's AP report is upfront about Obama's fervent desire for a hero's welcome:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama went for the defining television shot by capping his first extended foreign tour with a surprise visit to Iraq.

He got it – pictures of hundreds of U.S. troops cheering wildly as he told them it was time for the Iraqis to take charge of their own future.

Just no mention of HOW Obama managed to fake this response: Obama lover's to the front!

FLASHBACK: How the press treated the merest impression of a staged troop response under President Bush, even when there was no actual manipulation

Remember this headline from 2005:

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged

It dominated the headlines and the television news-analysis for days, and the fabricated scandal was utterly dishonest. The so-called "staging" involved no manipulation whatsoever. A group of soldiers who were scheduled for a televised chat with President Bush were "caught on tape" discussing ahead of time who would answer questions on what subjects. There was NO discussion of WHAT should be said.

Now there is evidence that Obama perpetrated an actual fraud right under the watching eyes of the press, handpicking Obama voters to represent on television the views of our soldiers, and the press reports nothing but the fraudulent story.

Piling it on

Of course the AP stories about Obama's surprise Iraq trip are larded with other bits of pro-Obama, anti-Bush disinformation as well. Hurst ends with his own interpretation of the glorious new age of Obama:

The world has been alerted to a new U.S. approach that breaks with the "go it alone" style of Bush.

"Go it alone" as in going into Iraq with a coalition of 40 countries and an evenly split minority party (same degree of Democrat support in the Senate as opposition in the House).

Neither did the press note the glaring counterfactuals in Obama's speech. From The New York Times:

The president said that it was time for Iraqis “to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty.”

So why does it take Gateway Pundit to point out that sovereignty has already been transferred in 13 of 18 provinces?

All the disinformation that fits in print.

No, the first question is: "Why was nobody prepared to defend themselves and others?"

2009-04-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

Representative Maurice Hinchey, on the slaughter of immigrants taking citizenship tests in Binghamton New York:

"One of the first questions is going to be, what motivated this?" he said. "What caused this to happen? What was the kind of person who did it?"

The cause is simple. The citizens of New York are disarmed, promising every shitbag sociopath that he can kill without opposition for however many minutes it takes until the police arrive, an offer that is too tempting for some of these cesspools of envy and spite pass up.

As for the particulars of Liverlily Voong's pretended grievances against innocent people, who gives a damn? If he was an Islamofascist committing an act of war, the country needs to know that. Otherwise, his rancid reasons can go to the pit along with his rancid soul. The only thing that matters is that people be able to defend themselves against these monsters wherever they inevitably spring up, be they agents of the Wahhabist-Khomeinist war against liberty, or the authors of their own war against mankind.

How indicative that the victims were taking a citizenship test, while the State of New York was forcing them and everyone around them to fail the first duty of citizenship: to be prepared to defend themselves and each other.

UPDATE: And when the police do arrive, they might not be in any hurry to take on the shooter:

Police heard no gunfire after they arrived but waited for about an hour before entering the building to make sure it was safe for officers.

That's with 26 people still hiding in the basement. If the police did hear shooting, would they have been less cautious, or more cautious? Not saying the police were wrong here. Two officers were murdered in Oakland last month when then weren't cautious enough in going after a spree killer. It is just a measure of people's need to be able to defend themselves.

Press refuses again to check and report the facts, this time in BART shooting

2009-03-31T13:44:00.000-07:00

The crescent memorial to Flight 93 would have been stopped long ago if the media was willing to check and report simple facts like the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent. The same thing happens whenever the facts of a case are not congenial to our left-wing elites.

Another extreme example is now taking place in Oakland California, where inflammatory reports of police criminality in the New Year's Day shooting of Oscar Grant are held up by the Oakland street mob as justication for last week's murder of four police officers. Even after this massacre of Oakland police, the press still refuses to publish dramatic exculpatory evidence in the Oscar Grant case.

Video proof that Oscar Grant swung his own arm up onto his own back AFTER he was shot by BART officer Johannes Mehserle

Oscar Grant was lying face down on the ground when he was shot in the back by BART officer Johannes Mehserle, who seems to have thought he was firing his newly issued Taser. (Fellow officer Tony Pirone told investigators that Mehserle said he was going to Tase Grant, then warned him to get clear just before firing.)

If Mehserle did experience Taser confusion then he is not guilty of ANY crime. This is what the DA asserted in an earlier California case of Taser confusion:

Wyatt explained that without the intent of criminal negligence, criminal charges against Noriega could not be sustained.

“The required aggravation ... did not occur in this case,” he said.

Criminal negligence is based on foreseeable consequences. If Mehserle thought he was firing his Taser, he can only be liable for the foreseeable consequences of firing his Taser, not his gun. The shooting at that point is just an accident, and the only person who is responsible for creating the dangerous situation in which that accident occurred is Oscar Grant, with his reckless and criminal decision to fight with the police for 30 seconds.

Alameda District Attorney Tom Orloff set aside the Noriega precedent on the grounds that:

... both of Grant's hands were behind his back, a position hands are commonly placed in by police officers in order to handcuff individuals, when the shot was fired into his body.

Orloff somehow decided that the fact that Grant’s hands seemed to be in a compliance position made the shooting “an intentional act” that calls for a charge of murder.

This makes little sense. We already know that Mehserle intended to pull the trigger. His claim is that he thought he was pulling the trigger on his Taser, a point which is unaffected by the position of Grant's hands. Nevertheless, this is the weak reed upon which Orloff decided to hang murder charges, and it turns out to be verifiably false. Grant's hands were NOT both on his back when the shot was fired, as can be seen when the video is slowed down.

Here is an animation of the fatal second:

37;05 – 37;29 of KTVU’s highlighted cell phone video of the shooting, slowed to 1/2 second a frame. Red circle (added) shows the first appearance of officer Mehserle's muzzle flash.

At the start of the animation (after the black frame), Officer Pirone (kneeling on Grant’s shoulder and neck) has just gotten control of Grant’s right hand, pulling it up behind Grant’s back. As the action starts, Pirone lets go and draws back (presumably in response to Mehserle’s Taser warning). Look at the spot where Pirone’s arm pulls back behind his own body. From about this same spot in the image, Grant’s left arm then appears, as Grant starts to swing his own arm up towards his own back. One frame after Grant's left arm first appears (1/15th of a second later), Mehserle’s muzzle-flash first appears (red circle). Then Grant finishes swinging his own arm up onto his own back.

Here is a frame grab of the fatal instant (37;17):

When Mehserle's muzzle flash first appears (red circle) Grant has just started to swing his own left arm (circled in blue) around behind his own back (presumably in a belated attempt to avoid getting Tased).

Grant’s left hand was NEVER under either officer’s control, after they both fought for 30 seconds to get control of it, with Mehserle telling Pirone from the beginning that he thought Grant was “going for his waistband”. Thus Mehserle was certainly justified in trying to Tase Grant, and the clear evidence that he WAS trying to Tase Grant makes this almost certainly an accidental shooting, in which case Mehserle is innocent of ANY crime.

Alec Rawls (the author of these blobgurst posts) has been trying for six weeks to get Bay Area print and television news to let the public know about about this video proof that Orloff's stated grounds for charging officer Mehserle with murder is FALSE. This isn't just news. It vitiates the state's own accusations of criminal behavior, now being used to justify acts of war against the Oakland Police, yet despite repeated outreach to most of the reporters who have been covering this story, the local press still won't report it.

The press also refuses to fact-check Pirone’s claim that the video shows Grant kneeing him multiple times in the groin

Oakland is also inflamed by another portion of the Oscar Grant video, about a minute and a half before the shooting, where Officer Pirone knocks Grant to the ground with a forearm to his head. KTVU interviewed two law professors who both interpreted the blow as an unprovoked criminal assault. Professor Peter Keane, of UC Hastings was the most emphatic:

That officer is committing a crime. … There’s no question in my mind that that’s vivid powerful evidence that he committed a vicious physical assault, unprovoked, upon a citizen, for absolutely no reason.

UC Boalt Professor Franklin Zimring added an important qualification, but unless the public learns that the qualification does in fact apply, the effect is the same:

Unless there’s something more that we don’t see, then the degree of force that was use, and the way it was used, are not justified.

Officer Pirone’s lawyer Bill Rapoport told the press that a frame by frame analysis of the video shows that Pirone was responding to multiple knees to the groin by Grant, but again, our biased media is refusing to fact-check and reported on the accuracy of this easy to verify claim. All they have to do is slow down the video and take a look. Immediately before Pirone strikes Grant, Grant can be seen driving his knees up above 90° into Pirone’s groin. Here is a frame grab of one of the knees:

9;05 from KTVU’s raw cell phone video. Surrounding frames show the denim “7” shape in this frame to be Oscar Grant’s right knee, coming up above 90° as Grant tries to knee Pirone in the groin. Full segment here:

The accusations of criminal assault by Pirone are FALSE. He was defending himself against a criminal assault, as anyone can verify just by looking.

KTVU actually slowed the video down for professors Keane and Zimring, but obviously not enough. All KTVU has to do to verify the accuracy of Pirone’s claims is open up their laptop again and slow the video down a bit more, but they have yet to report this video proof that Pirone was defending himself against a vicious assault by Oscar Grant.

If prosecutors claimed that frame by frame analysis showed some previously undetected evidence of police criminality, the frame by frame video would be prime time news for a week. Since it proves Pirone’s innocence, the press is not interested. Even with the murder of four policemen being justified as retaliation for the alleged criminal behavior of Mehserle and Pirone, the entire bay area media remains silent.

So let’s us break the story. The innocence of Pirone and the almost certain innocence of Mehserle are major unreported news. Shout it at the top of your blogs!

If we can break this story, not only might we save some lives in blue, but we can direct the resulting attention to other explosive facts that the media refuses to examine and report, like the terrorist memorial mosque now being built on the Flight 93 crash site.

The Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent makes it a mihrab, the central feature around which every mosque is built. They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, remains exactly as it was in the original Crescent of Embrace design. It is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

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Obama's laughter: amused by the win-win uncertainty of what kind of hero he will turn out to be

2009-03-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

Obama's laughter about the financial crisis could be "gallows humor," as he contends, but it looks more like genuine amusement. Real gallows humor is morbid, not mirthful.

Michael Goodwin recounts a comment from a fellow journalist during the presidential campaign: "I know Obama is a Manchurian candidate, I just can't figure out what for." Obama might not know yet either. Depending on whether his policies crash the economy or not, there are two ways he can be a hero, and indifference between them would explain his laughter. Teetering on the edge of the abyss is a win-win situation for Barack Hussein Obama.

Will he be an eco-leftist hero, or a Muslim hero?

All of Obama's mentors are communist or Islamofascist, with a few, like William "Abu Zyad" Ayers, being both. If these are his loyalties, then Obama is just waiting to find out what kind of hero he is going to be. If America can successfully transform in the socialist-green direction that he is taking us, then he will be a leftist hero. If this attempt to remake America destroys America, then he will be a Muslim hero.

The laughter shows how open he is to being the Muslim hero. He recognizes that there is a theater-of-the-absurd aspect to it, but if this is the kind of hero he turns out to be, this is the kind of hero he turns out to be, eliciting a big "whoud'a thunk it" laugh that bubbles straight up from inside.

If this is the source of Obama's mirth, we won't have proof until it is too late. As I have said more than once before:

This is why it is a mistake to elect someone with extensive Islamo-fascist ties in the first place.

Pretty much ALL of Obama's mentors and confidants are not just Muslim, but Islamofascist

1. William Ayers, who put Obama on the board of the Annenberg Challenge (where the two of them funneled education funds to Afro-centric racists like Obama's pastor/mentor Jeremiah Wright), gave himself the Nation of Islam name "Abu Zayd" (a reference to his naming his son after Black Panther/Nation of Islam thug Zayd Malik Shakur, who murdered a NJ policeman Werner Forrester in 1973).

2. Kenyan Prime Minister and Obama "cousin" and confidant Raila Odinga, who like Obama calls himself a Christian, but was outed by Muslim leaders in Kenya for secretly declaring himself to actually be a Muslim and promising to impose Sharia law on Kenya. (Odinga recently removed his rationalizations for the Memorandum of Understanding from his Odinga for President website, but I saved a copy.)

3. "Ex-Muslim" Jeremiah Wright, Obama's "Christian" pastor (the Koran urges Muslims in infidel countries to hide their true faith, verse 16:106), who champions Louis Farrakhan and teaches the Muslim version of the law of love: to love members of your own group and to hate outsiders (in particular, he teaches hatred of white people, as NOI leader Louis Farrakhan does).

4. Khalid Al-Mansour, who managed Obama's admission to Harvard Law, is another radical Nation of Islam racist, who once declared that God wanted blacks to go around cutting white people's noses off.

5. Obama best dinner buddy Rashid Khalidi is a PLO terror supporter.

6. The only identifiable mentor/confidante of Obama who is not a known Islamofascist is Frank Marshall Davis, the communist pedophile who shepherded Obama as a boy in Hawaii. (Davis wrote in his memoirs that he didn't want to "disappoint" a 13 year old girl by not having sex with her.)

7. Then there is Obama's Muslim/Communist/racist father, who Obama never met, but does dream about. Barrack Sr. was a member of a Kenyan opposition party when he slammed the sitting regime for not being socialist enough or Afro-centric enough, calling instead for "Europeans" and "Asians" to be stripped of their property.

8. Last and probably least is Michelle, whose Princeton thesis favored a black-separatist viewpoint, and is lauded by her husband as a "fellow traveler."

Of course they are laughing.

No Mt. Redoubt eruption please

2009-03-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

We have too much global cooling already. A cooling earth is harsh for man and beast alike. At least with the global cooling that is now being caused by the ongoing extended lull in solar activity, we get a silver lining. If lack of solar-magnetic activity is demonstrated to cool the earth, it won't be possible to hide from the public what all the scientists already know: that the small bit of late 20th century warming was almost certainly caused by the "grand maximum" levels of solar activity from 1940-2000, NOT by CO2. If we have to freeze our butts off, at least this natural calamity might save us (MIGHT save us) from the un-natural calamity of having our economy unplugged by the anti-CO2 lunatics who now occupy the White House.

Eruption of Mt. Redoubt, on the other hand, would be a pure bad, like getting hit with a good-size asteroid. Not only would a large eruption substantially hasten harmful global cooling, but it would give the eco-liars something to blame the cooling on besides the lull in solar activity, allowing them to pretend that, if not for the eruption, the world would still be warming, and that warming is still the danger.

The eco-religionists don't need much more time. With control of the White House, another couple years of unchecked alarmism could be all they need to get their anti-CO2 policies in place, and then we are done. We will have pulled the plug on heat, light and power just as the planet is descending into freezing cold.

Sit Mt. Redoubt. Stay. Be a good Iditardog.

UPDATE: Bad dog.