carnage and culture

MARTHA COAKLEY: TOO IMMORAL FOR TEDDY KENNEDY'S SEAT

2009-12-10T08:57:00.002-05:00

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
December 9, 2009

In Tuesday's primary election, Massachusetts Democrats chose as their Senate nominee a woman who kept a clearly innocent man in prison in order to advance her political career.

Martha Coakley isn't even fit for the late Teddy Kennedy's old seat. (What is it about this particular Senate seat?)

During the daycare/child molestation hysteria of the '80s, Gerald Amirault, his mother, Violet, and sister, Cheryl, were accused of raping children at the family's preschool in Malden, Mass., in what came to be known as the second-most notorious witch trial in Massachusetts history.

The allegations against the Amiraults were preposterous on their face. Children made claims of robots abusing them, a "bad clown" who took the children to a "magic room" for sex play, rape with a 2-foot butcher knife, other acts of sodomy with a "magic wand," naked children tied to trees within view of a highway, and -- standard fare in the child abuse hysteria era -- animal sacrifices.

There was not one shred of physical evidence to support the allegations -- no mutilated animals, no magic rooms, no butcher knives, no photographs, no physical signs of any abuse on the children.

Not one parent noticed so much as unusual behavior in their children -- until after the molestation hysteria began.

There were no witnesses to the alleged acts of abuse, despite the continuous and unannounced presence of staff members, teachers, parents and other visitors at the school.

Not one student ever spontaneously claimed to have been abused. Indeed, the allegations of abuse didn't arise until the child therapists arrived.

Nor was there anything in the backgrounds of the Amiraults that fit the profile of sadistic, child-abusing monsters. Violet Amirault had started the Fells Acre Day School 18 years before the child molestation hysteria erupted.

Thousands of happy and well-adjusted students had passed through Fells Acres. Many returned to visit the school; some even attended Cheryl's wedding a few years before the inquisition began.

It's one thing to put a person in prison for a crime he didn't commit. It's another to put an entire family in prison for a crime that didn't take place.

In the most outrageous miscarriage of justice since the Salem witch trials, in July 1986, Gerald Amirault was convicted of raping and assaulting six girls and three boys and sentenced to 30 to 40 years in prison. The following year, Violet and Cheryl Amirault were convicted of raping and assaulting three girls and a boy and were sentenced to 8 to 20 years.

The motto of the witch-hunters was "Believe the Children!" But the therapists resolutely refused to believe the children as long as they denied being abused. As the police advised the parents: In cases of child abuse, "no" can mean "yes."

To the children's credit, they held firm to their denials for heroic amounts of time in the face of relentless questioning.

But as copious research in the wake of the child abuse cases has demonstrated, small children are highly suggestible. It's surprisingly easy to implant false memories into young minds by simply asking the same questions over and over again.

Indeed, the interviewing techniques in the Amirault case were so successful that the children also made accusations against three other teachers, two imaginary people named "Mr. Gatt" and "Al" and even against the child therapist herself -- the one claim of abuse that was provably true.

But only the Amiraults were put on trial for any alleged acts of abuse.

Coakley wasn't the prosecutor on the original trial. What she did was worse.

At least the original prosecutors, craven and ambition-driven though they were, could claim to have been caught up in the child abuse panic of the '80s. There had not yet been extensive psychological studies on the suggestibility of small children. A dozen similar cases from around the country had not already been discredited and the innocent freed.

Of all the men and women falsely convicted during the child molestation hysteria of the '80s, by 2001, only Gerald Amirault still sat in prison. Even his sister and mother had been released after serving eight years in prison for crimes that never occurred.

In July 2001, the notoriously tough Massachusetts parole board voted unanimously to grant Gerald Amirault clemency. Although the parole board is not permitted to consider guilt or innocence, its recommendation said: "(I)t is clearly a matter of public knowledge that, at the minimum, real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner's conviction."

Immediately after the board's recommendation, The Boston Globe reported that Gov. Jane Swift was leaning toward accepting the board's recommendation and freeing Amirault.

Enter Martha Coakley, Middlesex district attorney. Gerald Amirault had already spent 15 years in prison for crimes he no more committed than anyone reading this column did. But Coakley put on a full court press to keep Amirault in prison simply to further her political ambitions.

By then, every sentient person knew that Amirault was innocent. But instead of saying nothing, Coakley frantically lobbied Gov. Jane Swift to keep him in prison to show that she was a take-no-prisoners prosecutor, who stood up for "the children." As a result of Coakley's efforts -- and her contagious ambition -- Gov. Swift denied Amirault's clemency.

Thanks to Martha Coakley, Gerald Amirault sat in prison for another three years.

Remember all that talk about President Bush shredding constitutional rights? Overzealous liberal prosecutors and feminist do-gooders allowed Gerald Amirault to sit in prison for 18 years for crimes that didn't exist -- except in the imaginations of small children under the influence of incompetent child "therapists."

Martha Coakley allowed her ambition to trump basic human decency as she campaigned to keep a patently innocent man in prison.

Anyone with the smallest sense of justice cannot vote to put this woman in any office. If you absolutely cannot vote for a Republican on Jan. 19, 2010, write in the name "Gerald Amirault."

COPYRIGHT 2009 ANN COULTER

A God Who Hates

2009-12-10T08:43:00.004-05:00

By Pamela Geller
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
10 December 2009

A God Who Hates: The Courageous Woman Who Inflamed the Muslim World Speaks Out Against the Evils of Islam.
By Wafa Sultan
St. Martin’s Press, 2009
256 pages

Wafa Sultan’s seminal moment was when she took on an Islamic cleric on Al-Jazeera. The clip went viral on Youtube, and it really was a defining moment in the clash of civilizations. Here was a woman, basically considered “property” in the Muslim world and expected to do what she was told, turning around after she had been interrupted numerous times, and saying in effect, “Quiet, it’s my turn.”

Now comes her new book, A God Who Hates, which will undoubtedly prove to be a key resource in the resistance to jihad and Islamization. In it, the brilliant psychiatrist from Syria, now an American citizen, tells her own story.

It is the story of a Muslim woman who grew up in a country where she was indoctrinated in Islamic ideology. So her perspective is very important in terms of establishing the credibility of scholars like Robert Spencer and Dr. Andrew Bostom. But what makes this book great, apart from its breathtaking honesty and truth and the clarity and urgency of its warning, is that it is also a beautiful love letter to America.

Wafa speaks powerfully about what America means to her. It manifests itself in little things. She leaves her house at 5 am and makes her way to Starbucks to have her coffee without fearing that someone might see her and accuse her of immoral behavior. To her, America means saying “good morning” to her neighbor and chatting with him for a few moments without being accused of having spent the night with him. America, for this courageous woman, means that her daughter can come home and tell her that she had lunch with her boyfriend without being beaten or accused of having impugned the family honor.

It is clear throughout A God Who Hates that Wafa Sultan was always a very independent thinker, even though there were times in her life when she did not immediately allow herself to go to the next step to which her thinking was leading her. She writes lovingly about her husband, who was very supportive of her. He was an open-minded thinker — initially more so than was Wafa herself. But she recounts in the book certain momentous events that jarred her thinking, such as in 1979 when Muslims screaming “Allahu akbar” murdered one of her professors, the ophthalmology lecturer Dr. Yusef Al-Yusef, whom she respected and admired. Wafa witnessed the murder – and at that exact moment started to question the nature of the Islamic faith.

“But I was afraid,” she explained when I interviewed her recently, “to express my feelings. I was afraid to express my thoughts, because under Islamic sharia, a Muslim who dares to leave Islam or dares to convert to any other religion is to be killed. And every Muslim has the right to kill someone who has left Islam without being asked a question. This is the Islamic law. Once you were born as a Muslim, you’re not allowed to leave it. This is simply the Islamic law, and it seems to me it’s very hard to convince Americans that this is the way it is.”

The recent Rifqa Bary apostasy case shows how right Wafa is about that, and how urgent her message is. Rifqa Bary is the teenage girl, a Muslim in Ohio, who left Islam four years ago and converted to Christianity. When her father found out about her conversion, she fled from her home in fear for her life. She said she ran away to Florida because she wanted to get as far away as she could — because not only her family but the mosque and the community in Ohio is very devout, and as an apostate she is in danger. But now she has been returned to Ohio, in large part because American authorities don’t know anything about Islamic apostasy law.

If they had read A God Who Hates, Rifqa might be in a safer place today. “This case,” said Wafa, “showed America in a very ugly light, that we will sacrifice a young girl on the altar of political correctness rather than do the right thing.”

A God Who Hates is a devastating book, coming from a most reliable witness. “My book,” Wafa told me, “is about my personal life. In my book I lead my readers step by step throughout my life, from A to Z, so they can figure out what has changed me, what has helped me to break free from Islam. It didn’t happen overnight. It took many years and a great deal of pain to reach where I am today. Through my book I am trying to send a message to the West, that Islam is a hateful ideology and it’s very dangerous for Islam to be established in this free country. This is my message to the West.”

Wafa Sultan is trying to get her message to the Muslim world, not just to the West. Hers is a very powerful voice, and one that Islamic supremacists would very much like to silence. As she told me in our interview: “It’s very dangerous to go against Islam. Prior to my book release I was forced to go into hiding, fearing for my safety and for my family’s safety. I received death threats on a daily basis, and I know what they mean by telling me that, I know how bitter they are, I was one of them. I can very much understand the mindset of Muslims.”

Nevertheless, despite the immense risks, A God Who Hates will be translated into Arabic and made available in the Arab-Muslim world. And it is a must read for all free people. This is a book that you not only have to read, but to give to the people in your office. Give it to your daughters, give it to your children. Show them why they should love America, and fight to defend her from the Islamic oppression that Wafa Sultan escaped.

- Pamela Geller is the founder, editor and publisher of the popular and award-winning weblog AtlasShrugs.com. She has won acclaim for her interviews with internationally renowned figures, including John Bolton, Geert Wilders, Bat Ye’or, Natan Sharansky, and many others, and has broken numerous important stories — notably the questionable sources of some of the financing of the Obama campaign. Her op-eds have been published in The Washington Times, The American Thinker, Israel National News, Frontpage Magazine, Big Government, World Net Daily, and New Media Journal, among other publications. She is the co-author (with Robert Spencer) of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (forward by Ambassador John Bolton), coming soon from Simon and Schuster.

THE GRAY MOUNTAIN STATE

2009-12-09T10:39:00.003-05:00

Mark Steyn on America
Tuesday, 08 December 2009

HAPPY WARRIOR
from the December 7th issue of National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/

As longtime readers know, the Demographic Deathwatch is not a novelty dance craze but a recurring feature of this column. But it’s not just for Europe, Russia, China, and Japan anymore! Some parts of America are acquiring demographic profiles that would qualify them for EU membership.

Take the Green Mountain State. As Howard Dean was fond of saying during his 2004 presidential campaign, “Vermont is the way America ought to be.”

If it is, we’re all done for. Its marquee brands are either Canadian-owned (Vermont Castings wood stoves) or European-owned (Ben & Jerry’s ice cream) and any non-foreign economic activity in the state long ago had any life regulated out of it.

But never mind all that. I ventured across the Connecticut River the other day and picked up the local paper, the Journal Opinion of Bradford, Vt.

And among the other front-page headlines (“Newbury Will Mail Town Reports”; “Upcoming Sand Pile Talk”) was a story on how local school districts were in merger talks. No underlying reason was immediately given for the suddenly pressing need to merge: It seemed to be accepted as a natural feature of life that you can’t do anything about. And then a gazillion paragraphs into the story, the reporter finally explained what was going on:

Throughout Vermont, student enrollment at public elementary and secondary schools is declining. According to figures from the state’s Department of Education, there were 104,559 students at those schools during the 1999–2000 school year. Last year, that figure was down to 92,572.

Which is quite a drop. In fact, Vermont school enrollments have declined 13 years in a row. Since 1996, they’ve fallen by 13 percent, slumping below 100,000 in 2004 and projected to fall below 90,000 in 2014. The part of the state that my corner of New Hampshire borders is admittedly rural, and it’s not an unusual phenomenon for small towns to drain population to the big cities. But a couple of days later I was in the capital, Montpelier, and its school board is in merger talks with the neighboring towns of Berlin and Calais.

If schoolkids are thin on the ground, the state’s total population has held steady — 604,000 in 1999, 621,000 today. So Vermont is getting proportionately more childless. Which is to say that Vermont, literally, has no future.

One school-board member whose enrollment has bumped from 600 to 500 and is now heading down to 400 told the paper: “What are we going to do? We’re not holding our breath that the state is going to solve this problem.”

I suppose by “the state” he means the department of education or, in a more general way, Montpelier. But in a very basic sense there is no “state”: Graying ponytailed hippies and chichi gay couples aren’t enough of a population base to run a functioning jurisdiction. To modify Howard Dean, Vermont is the way liberals think America ought to be, and you can’t make a living in it. So if you’re a cash-poor but land-rich native Vermonter taxed and regulated and hedged in on every front, you face a choice: In the new North Country folk wisdom, they won’t let you fish, so you might as well cut bait. Your outhouse is in breach of zoning regulations, so you might as well get off the pot. Etc. When he ran for president, Howard Dean was said to have inspired America’s youth. In Vermont, he mainly inspired them to move somewhere else. The number of young adults fell by 20 percent during the Dean years. And what’s left is a demographic disaster: The state’s women have the second lowest birthrate in the nation, and the state’s workforce is already America’s oldest. Last year, Chris Lafakis of Moody’s predicted Vermont would have “a really stagnant economy” not this year or this half-decade but for the next 30 years.

True, more gays appear to have moved in. In European terms, homosexuals are Vermont’s Muslims — no disrespect to either party, I hasten to add, before you press that fatwa button. And gay second-homers still require enough of a local populace to generate a scenic plaid-clad coot or two chewing tobaccy on the porch of a still-operating general store: It’s kind of a downer to drive past a bunch of abandoned farms and collapsed barns en route to your weekend pad.

Nowhere in the news reports of school-merger talks does anyone suggest trying to reverse the policies that drive out young families and make Vermont — what’s the word the eco-types dig? — “unsustainable.” When it comes to “climate change,” it’s taken for granted that we can transform the very heavens if only we cap’n’trade’n’tax’n’regulate you even more.

But the demographic death spiral? That’s just a fact of life, to question which puts you beyond political viability. The new Vermont prefers poseur politics and solutions for non-problems. A couple of years back, Gov. Jim Douglas, one of those famously moderate GOP New Englanders, finally noticed something was wrong in Green Mountain schoolhouses. So he acted decisively, signing legislation to protect the environment by forbidding school buses to run their engines while waiting for children to board.

Tough on the kids: On many buses, there are too few students to generate much in the way of body heat. But you’ve gotta be able to prioritize: “This is a great step forward for our state,” declared the governor. The wheels are coming off the Vermont bus, but at least its engine won’t be running as the thing falls apart.

Totalitarian Sentimentality

2009-12-09T10:33:00.003-05:00

The Pursuit of Knowledge

By Roger Scruton from the December 2009-January 2010 issue of The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

Conservatives recognize that social order is hard to achieve and easy to destroy, that it is held in place by discipline and sacrifice, and that the indulgence of criminality and vice is not an act of kindness but an injustice for which all of us will pay. Conservatives therefore maintain severe and -- to many people -- unattractive attitudes. They favor retributive punishment in the criminal law; they uphold traditional marriage and the sacrifices that it requires; they believe in discipline in schools and the value of hard work and military service. They believe in the family and think that the father is an essential part in it. They see welfare provisions as necessary, but also as a potential threat to genuine charity, and a way both of rewarding antisocial conduct and creating a culture of dependency. They value the hard-won legal and constitutional inheritance of their country and believe that immigrants must also value it if they are to be allowed to settle here. Conservatives do not think that war is caused by military strength, but on the contrary by military weakness, of a kind that tempts adventurers and tyrants. And a properly ordered society must be prepared to fight wars -- even wars in foreign parts -- if it is to enjoy a lasting peace in its homeland. In short conservatives are a hard and unfriendly bunch who, in the world in which we live, must steel themselves to be reviled and despised by all people who make compassion into the cornerstone of the moral life.

Liberals are of course very different. They see criminals as victims of social hierarchy and unequal power, people who should be cured by kindness and not threatened with punishment. They wish all privileges to be shared by everyone, the privileges of marriage included. And if marriage can be reformed so as to remove the cost of it, so much the better. Children should be allowed to play and express their love of life; the last thing they need is discipline. Learning comes -- didn't Dewey prove as much? -- from self-expression; and as for sex education, which gives the heebie-jeebies to social conservatives, no better way has ever been found of liberating children from the grip of the family and teaching them to enjoy their bodily rights. Immigrants are just migrants, victims of economic necessity, and if they are forced to come here illegally that only increases their claim on our compassion. Welfare provisions are not rewards to those who receive them, but costs to those who give -- something that we owe to those less fortunate than ourselves. As for the legal and constitutional inheritance of the country, this is certainly to be respected -- but it must "adapt" to new situations, so as to extend its protection to the new victim class. Wars are caused by military strength, by "boys with their toys," who cannot resist the desire to flex their muscles, once they have acquired them. The way to peace is to get rid of the weapons, to reduce the army, and to educate children in the ways of soft power. In the world in which we live liberals are self-evidently lovable -- emphasizing in all their words and gestures that, unlike the social conservatives, they are in every issue on the side of those who need protecting, and against the hierarchies that oppress them.

Those two portraits are familiar to everyone, and I have no doubt on which side the readers of this magazine will stand. What all conservatives know, however, is that it is they who are motivated by compassion, and that their cold-heartedness is only apparent. They are the ones who have taken up the cause of society, and who are prepared to pay the cost of upholding the principles on which we all -- liberals included -- depend. To be known as a social conservative is to lose all hope of an academic career; it is to be denied any chance of those prestigious prizes, from the MacArthur to the Nobel Peace Prize, which liberals confer only on each other. For an intellectual it is to throw away the prospect of a favorable review -- or any review at all -- in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books. Only someone with a conscience could possibly wish to expose himself to the inevitable vilification that attends such an "enemy of the people." And this proves that the conservative conscience is governed not by self-interest but by a concern for the public good. Why else would anyone express it?

By contrast, as conservatives also know, the compassion displayed by the liberal is precisely that -- compassion displayed, though not necessarily felt. The liberal knows in his heart that his "compassionating zeal," as Rousseau described it, is a privilege for which he must thank the social order that sustains him. He knows that his emotion toward the victim class is (these days at least) more or less cost-free, that the few sacrifices he might have to make by way of proving his sincerity are nothing compared to the warm glow of approval by which he will be surrounded by declaring his sympathies. His compassion is a profoundly motivated state of mind, not the painful result of a conscience that will not be silenced, but the costless ticket to popular acclaim.

Why am I repeating those elementary truths, you ask? The answer is simple. The USA has descended from its special position as the principled guardian of Western civilization and joined the club of sentimentalists who have until now depended on American power. In the administration of President Obama we see the very same totalitarian sentimentality that has been at work in Europe, and which has replaced civil society with the state, the family with the adoption agency, work with welfare, and patriotic duty with universal "rights." The lesson of postwar Europe is that it is easy to flaunt compassion, but harder to bear the cost of it. Far preferable to the hard life in which disciplined teaching, costly charity, and responsible attachment are the ruling principles is the life of sentimental display, in which others are encouraged to admire you for virtues you do not possess. This life of phony compassion is a life of transferred costs. Liberals who wax lyrical on the sufferings of the poor do not, on the whole, give their time and money to helping those less fortunate than themselves. On the contrary, they campaign for the state to assume the burden. The inevitable result of their sentimental approach to suffering is the expansion of the state and the increase in its power both to tax us and to control our lives.

As the state takes charge of our needs, and relieves people of the burdens that should rightly be theirs -- the burdens that come from charity and neighborliness -- serious feeling retreats. In place of it comes an aggressive sentimentality that seeks to dominate the public square. I call this sentimentality "totalitarian" since -- like totalitarian government -- it seeks out opposition and carefully extinguishes it, in all the places where opposition might form. Its goal is to "solve" our social problems, by imposing burdens on responsible citizens, and lifting burdens from the "victims," who have a "right" to state support. The result is to replace old social problems, which might have been relieved by private charity, with the new and intransigent problems fostered by the state: for example, mass illegitimacy, the decline of the indigenous birthrate, and the emergence of the gang culture among the fatherless youth. We have seen this everywhere in Europe, whose situation is made worse by the pressure of mass immigration, subsidized by the state. The citizens whose taxes pay for the flood of incoming "victims" cannot protest, since the sentimentalists have succeeded in passing "hate speech" laws and in inventing crimes like "Islamophobia" which place their actions beyond discussion. This is just one example of a legislative tendency that can be observed in every area of social life: family, school, sexual relations, social initiatives, even the military -- all are being deprived of their authority and brought under the control of the "soft power" that rules from above.

This is how we should understand the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama. To his credit he has made clear that he does not deserve it -- though I assume he deserves it every bit as much as Al Gore. The prize is an endorsement from the European elite, a sigh of collective relief that America has at last taken the decisive step toward the modern consensus, by exchanging real for fake emotion, hard power for soft power, and truth for lies. What matters in Europe is the great fiction that things will stay in place forever, that peace will be permanent and society stable, just so long as everybody is "nice." Under President Bush (who was, of course, no exemplary president, and certainly not nice) America maintained its old image, of national self-confidence and belligerent assertion of the right to be successful. Bush was the voice of a property-owning democracy, in which hard work and family values still achieved a public endorsement. As a result he was hated by the European elites, and hated all the more because Europe needs America and knows that, without America, it will die. Obama is welcomed as a savior: the American president for whom the Europeans have been hoping -- the one who will rescue them from the truth.

How America itself will respond to this, however, remains doubtful. I suspect, from my neighbors in rural Virginia, that totalitarian sentimentality has no great appeal to them, and that they will be prepared to resist a government that seeks to destroy their savings and their social capital, for the sake of a compassion that it does not really feel.

- Roger Scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life (Continuum).

For Penn State’s Volleyball Coach, the Streak Is Beside the Point

2009-12-08T14:14:00.004-05:00

By JOHN BRANCH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
December 8, 2009

Mark Selders/Penn State Athletic Communications

The Nittany Lions are in for the 29th straight year with Coach Russ Rose, center.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — It can sometimes be difficult to determine just who is coaching the Penn State women’s volleyball team to this seemingly endless string of victories. During matches, when most coaches are pacing and shouting instructions, Russ Rose is usually sitting quietly, scribbling into a notebook.

Plenty of others track numbers, too, feeding them into a computer until they spit out of a printer as official N.C.A.A. statistics. Rose’s numbers and notes go into blue three-ring binders that few others ever see.

“My decisions in coaching are based on these statistics,” Rose said.

He pointed to shelves in his office lined with binders, filled with decades of handwritten scribbles and diarylike entries. Then he held up a computer printout from a recent match.

“Not these,” he said.

In 31 seasons at Penn State, Rose, 56, has always done things different from most, reflected in his droll, straight-faced sarcasm and his penchant for sweats, swear words and cigars.

“He’s like that black-sheep uncle,” said Adam Jarrett, a volunteer assistant for the program for 13 years.

But Rose’s success is registered in numbers, not quirks.

In the late 1970s, Rose wrote his master’s thesis on volleyball statistics. Today, he has a higher career winning percentage (.862) than any Division I women’s volleyball coach in history — and more than 100 points higher than the .751 of Joe Paterno, the far more famous football coach of the Nittany Lions. Rose’s top-ranked team is in the N.C.A.A. tournament for the 29th year in a row, on to the regionals, hoping to win its third consecutive national title this month.

Yet the number garnering the most attention is 98. And counting.

That is how many consecutive matches Penn State has won, dating to September 2007. It is the longest winning streak in N.C.A.A. Division I women’s sports history, and the second longest over all, trailing only the Miami men’s tennis program, winner of 137 straight from 1957 to 1964.

In recent weeks, Penn State volleyball passed, among others, the 88-game winning streak of John Wooden’s U.C.L.A. men’s basketball teams from 1971 to ’74, and the North Carolina women’s soccer program, which won 92 in a row from 1990 to 1994.

Count Rose as one person not keeping close track.

“The statistics that I’m interested in are performance-related, not historical,” Rose said. “The streak is historical.”

Rose says he considers each season’s team distinctly different and largely unrelated to earlier teams. By his calculation, there are three winning streaks: one of 26 matches in 2007, after two early losses; the 38-0 season of 2008; and this season’s 34-0 record heading into Friday’s Round of 16 match against Florida in Gainesville, Fla.

“I’ve heard people say that maybe we’d be better served had we lost,” Rose said. “I was kind of wondering what profession they were in. I wouldn’t want a lawyer representing me to think like that. I wouldn’t want a doctor operating on me to think like that.”

His office windows were open to a brisk afternoon. Rose was trying to clear the air of the smell of cigars sitting on the desk. (“Cuban contraband,” he called them.) He usually smokes them on the plaza outside Rec Hall, an old brick gym where thousands fill the bleachers for each volleyball match. He says he does not know if that is allowed and does not seem to care.

Rose, who arrived at Penn State in 1979 with bushy dark hair and a Tom Selleck mustache, now has close-cropped gray hair and glasses. He usually wears a blue sweater to matches — a well-worn blue sweater, occasionally mended by his wife. He has a closet full of sweaters that people give him. They share space with suits that Rose avoids wearing.

He prefers shorts and sweats. This day, he wore a sweatshirt and sweatpants.

Raised in Chicago, Rose does not believe in schmoozing or sugarcoating. (Several players, asked to describe their coach, used one word: honest.) He rarely rants and yells, teaching instead in whispers, smirks and knowing glances. He swears in casual conversation. His players seem unfazed by it.

“My grandmother might be a little upset if she came to practice,” Blair Brown, a junior and one of four all-Americans who returned from last year’s team, said with a smile and a shrug. “But it’s Coach. You can’t ask to change who he is. It’s working.”

Mark Selders/Penn State Athletic Communications

Alisha Glass, left, and Arielle Wilson blocking for Penn State in the N.C.A.A. tournament.

Administrators ask Rose to watch his language at matches. Rose will sometimes lift his notepad in front of his face and bark an expletive into it. Before a televised match recently, he spotted a courtside microphone near the Penn State bench. He unplugged it.

Rose thought he would be a gym teacher, maybe a basketball coach. But at George Williams College, he began playing volleyball under Jim Coleman, a former Olympic team coach and a future volleyball Hall of Famer. Coleman is credited with creating the modern volleyball statistics system, among other innovations.

Rose then spent two years at Nebraska, where his master’s thesis examined the skills most associated with winning. (“Passing predicts the level of play,” Rose said of his conclusion. “Hitting and blocking are most correlated with winning.”)

Official statistics have always bothered him. Most sports tally what the player did, not what he or she failed to do. He sees that as only half the equation. What about the rebound the basketball player should have had? Or the ground ball the shortstop did not reach? Or the dig that the volleyball player blew?

“On that sheet,” Rose said, pointing to a match’s official N.C.A.A score sheet, “if you don’t hit the ball, you don’t get a statistic. On mine, you do. You didn’t hit the ball.”

Most of his scribbles in the notebook reflect missed opportunities, what his players call “error control.” Rose grades each play, too, on a scale — not just whether the serve was in, for example, but how good the serve was.

“He keeps stats and gets stats of every play,” said Kaleena Davidson, a former player at Penn State who is in her first season as one of Rose’s assistants. “He knows everything you’d want to know. And everything you don’t want him to know.”

During matches, Rose will coax with sarcasm and freshly computed numbers.

“He’ll say, ‘You’re hitting negative right now,’ ” said the all-American setter Alisha Glass, meaning that a player has more errors than kills. “ ‘You might want to do something about that.’ ”

Glass said that “it’s all about the numbers” for Rose.

“His degree is in volleyball statistics or something,” she said.

“It is?” outside hitter Megan Hodge, widely considered the best player in the country, asked with wide eyes. “That explains a lot.”

Rose’s coaching strategy is largely one of playing devil’s advocate, a lonely role when thousands of fans see his team as unbeatable.

Since the winning streak began on Sept. 21, 2007 — after a loss to Stanford six days earlier — the Nittany Lions have won all 98 of their best-of-three-sets matches. They have won 294 sets; opponents have won 15.

Those numbers are not in any of Rose’s scribbled notebooks.

“I have my own stats,” Rose said. “Because I want to win.”

Immaculate Mary, Matchless in Grace

2009-12-08T13:27:00.003-05:00

By John Saward
Exerpted from Cradle of Redeeming Love: The Theology of the Christmas Mystery
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/

Glorious above all the other Christmas companions of Christ is the Blessed Maiden who gave Him human birth. At the Matins of Christmas Day, the Church cries out: 'Blessed Mary, the Mother of God, whose womb abideth intact, hath this day given birth to the Saviour of the world." [38]

Sandro Botticelli
The Cestello Annunciation, c.1489
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy

Each day of the octave, in the Canon of the Mass, the Latin Church venerates the 'inviolate virginity' that 'brought the Saviour into this world' and dedicates the whole of the eighth day to the divine motherhood--in the old rite in the content of the prayers and in the new rite in name as well as content. [39] Our Lady's conceiving and carrying of God the Son in her virginal womb are remembered throughout Advent, especially during the week of the O antiphons and, in the novus ordo Missae, on the fourth Sunday.

The Immaculate Conception is celebrated on the eighth of December as the first, preredemptive flowering of the grace for whose restoration Christ was born and crucified in the flesh. In the liturgical books of the Greek Church, the Mother of God is seemingly omnipresent on every day of the liturgical year, [40] but during the twelve days of Christmas, she receives special honours in canticles of outstanding praise, and on the second day she has a feast all of her own, the Synaxis of the Most Holy Theotokos, instituted after the Council of Ephesus in 431. On this second day of the Byzantine Christmas, the Mother of God appears before the Church as the Mystical Vine carrying in the branches of her arms 'the bunch of grapes that was never husbanded'. In the ecstasy of love she sings to her Child, 'Thou art my fruit, thou art my life; from thee have I learned that I remain what I was. Thou art my God: for seeing the seal of my virginity unbroken, I proclaim thee to be the unchangeable Word, now made incarnate.' [41]

Footnotes:

[38] Fifth responsory.
[39] In the novus ordo of the West, the first of January is called the 'Solemnity of Mary; the Mother of God'. In the Missal of 1962 it is called, as it had been for many centuries, the 'Circumcision of Our Lord' because of the passage read as the Gospel. However, both the Collect and the Postcommunion place most emphasis on the divine motherhood of our Lady.
[40] See S. Eustratiadès, Theotokarion (Chennevières-sur-Marne, 1931), and J. Ledit, Marie dans la liturgie de Byzance (Paris, 1976).
[41] Menaion, p. 292.

The Persistence of Islamic Anti-Semitism

2009-12-08T12:58:00.002-05:00

By Robert Spencer
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
8 December 2009

A new study released Sunday shows that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe. The “German Situation” study, which is conducted by the University of Bielefeld Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, found that across Europe in the last year, “Islamophobia” has declined, while anti-Semitic incidents have increased. True to form for such studies, however, it ignored the persistence and strength of Islamic anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism in the Islamic world has often been attributed to the baneful influence of Christianity. Many analysts assert that the Islamic designation of Jews (as well as Christians) as “People of the Book” indicates a higher level of respect for them than was manifested by Christians who derided Jews as bestial “Christ-killers.” Journalist Lawrence Wright asserts in this vein in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11:

Until the end of World War II … Jews lived safely—although submissively—under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice [anti-Semitism]. After the war, Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.

This is a common view, but in reality there is a strong native strain of anti-Semitism in Islam, which is rooted in the Qur’an. The Muslim holy book contains a great deal of material that forms the foundation for a hatred of Jews that exists independently of the Christian variety. It is also, in many ways, more virulent and harder to eradicate. The Qur’an portrays the Jews as the craftiest, most persistent, and most implacable enemies of the Muslims—and there is no Muslim equivalent of the Second Vatican Council to mitigate against destructive interpretations. The Qur’anic material on the Jews remains the prism through which far too many Muslims see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and Jews in general—to this day.

A vivid illustration of this came in 2004 from Islam Online, a website founded by, among others, the internationally influential Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in 1997. Although al-Qaradawi has won praise from Islamic scholar John Esposito for engaging in a “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism, and human rights,” that “reformist” impulse doesn’t seem to carry over to his view of Jews (he has justified suicide bombings against Israeli civilians), or the view of them he has allowed to be published on Islam Online. In 2004 the site posted an article titled “Jews as Depicted in the Qur’an,” in which Sheikh ‘Atiyyah Saqr, the former head of the Fatwa Committee at the most respected institution in Sunni Islam, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, depicts Jews in a chillingly negative light, illustrated with abundant quotations from the Qur’an. Among other charges he levels at the Jews, Saqr says that they “used to fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah”; they “love to listen to lies”; they disobey Allah and ignore his commands; they wish “evil for people” and try to “mislead them”; and they “feel pain to see others in happiness and are gleeful when others are afflicted with a calamity.” He adds that “it is easy for them to slay people and kill innocents,” for “they are merciless and heartless.” And each charge he follows with Qur’anic citations.

Though he offers many examples of the alleged evil traits of the Jews supported by the Qur’an, Saqr doesn’t mention the notorious Qur’anic passages that depict an angry Allah transforming Jews into apes and pigs: 2:63–66; 5:59–60; and 7:166. The first of those passages depicts Allah telling the Jews who “profaned the Sabbath”: “Be as apes despicable!” It goes on to say that these accursed ones serve “as a warning example for their time and for all times to come.” The second has Allah directing Muhammad to remind the “People of the Book” about “those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil.” The third essentially repeats this, saying of the Sabbath-breaking Jews that when “in their insolence they transgressed (all) prohibitions,” Allah said to them, “Be ye apes, despised and rejected.”

In traditional Islamic theology these passages have not been considered to apply to all Jews. The classic Qur’anic commentator Isma’il bin ‘Amr bin Kathir al Dimashqi (Ibn Kathir), whose commentary is widely distributed and respected among Muslims today, quotes earlier authorities saying that “those who violated the sanctity of the Sabbath were turned into monkeys, then they perished without offspring,” and that they “only lived on the earth for three days, for no transformed person ever lives more than three days.” While parts of the Qur’an are hostile to the Jews, Muhammad’s curse, in this case, was limited to these Sabbath-breakers, not to all Jews.

However, that hasn’t stopped contemporary jihadists from frequently referring to Jews as the “descendants of apes and swine.” The implication is that today’s Jews are bestial in character and are the enemies of Allah, just as the Sabbath-breakers were. The grand sheikh of Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the most respected cleric in the world among Sunni Muslims today, has called Jews “the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.” Saudi sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Sudayyis, imam of the principal mosque in the holiest city in Islam, Mecca, said in a sermon that Jews are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.”

Another Saudi sheikh, Ba’d bin Abdallah al-Ajameh al-Ghamidi, made the connection explicit: “The current behavior of the brothers of apes and pigs, their treachery, violation of agreements, and defiling of holy places … is connected with the deeds of their forefathers during the early period of Islam—which proves the great similarity between all the Jews living today and the Jews who lived at the dawn of Islam.” A 1996 Hamas publication says that today’s Jews are bestial in spirit, and this is a manifestation of the punishment of their forefathers. In January 2007, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas stated, “The sons of Israel are mentioned as those who are corrupting humanity on earth,” referring to Qur’an 5:64.

All this shows that leading Muslim authorities approach the Qur’an not as a document rooted in history, but as a blueprint for understanding the world today. Likewise, Sheikh ‘Atiyyah Saqr describes the Qur’anic teachings that because Jews “revolted against the Divine ordinances … they found no warm reception in all countries where they tried to reside. Rather, they would either be driven out or live in isolation.” Moreover, “Almighty Allah told us that He’d send to them people who’d pour on them rain of severe punishment that would last till the Day of Resurrection.” Then comes a threat: “All this gives us glad tidings of the coming victory of Muslims over them once Muslims stick to strong faith and belief in Allah and adopt the modern means of technology.” The “rain of severe punishment” resulting from adoption of the “modern means of technology” may come to fruition in Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions and implacable hostility to Israel. In January 2007 he warned that the “demise” of the “Zionist regime” is “imminent.” Does he plan to bring about that demise with a nuclear “rain of severe punishment”?

In the 1970s Sheikh Tantawi wrote a 700-page treatise, Jews in the Qur’an and the Traditions, in which he concluded:

[The] Qur’an describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness … only a minority of the Jews keep their word. … [A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.

Nor is this just a modern view. The classic Qur’anic commentators not do not mitigate the Qur’an’s words against Jews, but only add fuel to the fire. Ibn Kathir explained Qur’an 2:61 (“They were covered with humiliation and misery; they drew on themselves the wrath of Allah”) this way: “This Ayah [verse] indicates that the Children of Israel were plagued with humiliation, and that this will continue, meaning that it will never cease. They will continue to suffer humiliation at the hands of all who interact with them, along with the disgrace that they feel inwardly.” Another Middle Ages commentator of lingering influence, ‘Abdallah ibn ‘Umar al-Baidawi, explains the same verse this way: “The Jews are mostly humiliated and wretched either of their own accord, or out of coercion of the fear of having their jizya [punitive tax] doubled.”

Ibn Kathir notes Islamic traditions that predict that at the end of the world, “the Jews will support the Dajjal (False Messiah), and the Muslims, along with ‘Isa [Jesus], son of Mary, will kill the Jews.” The idea in Islam that the end times will be marked by Muslims killing Jews comes from the prophet Muhammad himself, who said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’” This is, not unexpectedly, a favorite motif among contemporary jihadists. On March 30, 2007, a spokesman for Hamas, Dr. Ismail Radwan, said on Palestinian Authority television:

The Hour [Resurrection] will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, and the rock and the tree will say: “Oh, Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, kill him!”

We must remind our Arab and Muslim nation, its leaders and people, its scholars and students, remind them that Palestine and the Al Aqsa mosque will not be liberated through summits nor by international resolutions, but it will be liberated through the rifle. It will not be liberated through negotiations, but through the rifle, since this occupation knows no language but the language of force.… O Allah, strengthen Islam and Muslims, and bring victory to your Jihad-fighting worshipers, in Palestine and everywhere.… Allah take the oppressor Jews and Americans and their supporters!

The history of Jews who lived under Muslim rule is a more or less unbroken record of theologically sanctioned humiliation and wretchedness. Although, like the Christians, Jews were allowed to practice their religion within restrictions, they were seldom allowed to forget their humiliation. Although the strictness with which the laws of dhimmitude (the subservient status of Jews and Christians) were enforced varied, they were never abolished, and during times of relaxation the subject populations always lived in fear that they would be enforced with new stringency. Muslim rulers did not forget that the Qur’an mandates that both Jews and Christians must “feel themselves subdued.” One notable instance is recounted by the Arab historian Phillip Hitti: “The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e. yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves, … and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.” A millennium later, in 1888, little had changed. A Tunisian Jew noted:

The Jew is prohibited in this country to wear the same clothes as a Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He can be seen to bow down with his whole body to a Muslim child and permit him the traditional privilege of striking him in the face, a gesture that can prove to be of the gravest consequence. Indeed, the present writer has received such blows. In such matters the offenders act with complete impunity, for this has been the custom from time immemorial.

In 1291 Isaac ben Samuel, a noted Kabbalist and Palestinian Jew, sought refuge in a Christian-controlled area of Spain after the collapse of the last Crusader kingdom in the Levant. He explained, “For, in the eyes of the Muslims, the children of Israel are as open to abuse as an unprotected field. Even in their law and statutes they rule that the testimony of a Muslim is always to be believed against that of a Jew. For this reason our rabbis of blessed memory have said, ‘Rather beneath the yoke of Edom [Christendom] than that of Ishmael [Islam]. They [the rabbis] plead for mercy before the Holy One, Blessed be He, saying, ‘Master of the World, either let us live beneath Thy shadow or else beneath that of the children of Edom’ (Talmud, Gittin 17a).”

Ben Samuel’s choice of Christian Spain is paradoxical, as Muslim Spain was supposed to have been a famous exception to the oppression of Jews that prevailed elsewhere among both Muslims and Christians. Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong enunciates the common wisdom when she says that “until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain—a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.” Even the U.S. State Department has proclaimed that “during the Islamic period in Spain, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace and mutual respect, creating a diverse society in which vibrant exchanges of ideas took place.”

Yet the philosopher Maimonides, a Jew who lived for a time in Muslim Spain and then fled that supposedly tolerant and pluralistic land, remarked, “You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us.…No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have.…We have borne their imposed degradation, their lies, and absurdities, which are beyond human power to bear.”

Notably, Maimonides directed that Jews could teach rabbinic law to Christians, but not to Muslims. For Muslims, he said, will interpret what they are taught “according to their erroneous principles and they will oppress us. [F]or this reason … they hate all [non-Muslims] who live among them.” But the Christians, he said, “admit that the text of the Torah, such as we have it, is intact”—as opposed to the Islamic view that the Jews and Christians have corrupted their scriptures. Christians, continued Maimonides, “do not find in their religious law any contradiction with ours.”

Even María Rosa Menocal, in her romantic and fantastic hagiography of Muslim Spain, The Ornament of the World, acknowledges the second-class status to which Jews and Christians were relegated there. “In return for this freedom of religious conscience the Peoples of the Book (pagans had no such privilege) were required to pay a special tax—no Muslims paid taxes—and to observe a number of restrictive regulations: Christians and Jews were prohibited from attempting to proselytize Muslims, from building new places of worship, from displaying crosses or ringing bells. In sum, they were forbidden most public displays of their religious rituals.”

According to historian Richard Fletcher, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.” On December 30, 1066, about four thousand Jews in Granada were murdered by rioting Muslim mobs—more than would be killed in the Crusaders’ infamous Rhineland pogroms of the mid-twelfth century. What enraged the Granadan Muslims was the political power of the Jewish vizier Samuel ibn Naghrila and his son Joseph: the mob resented the fact that these men had authority over Muslims, which they saw as a “breach of sharia.” The mob was incited to kill the Jews by a poem composed by Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq: “I myself arrived in Granada and saw that these Jews were meddling in its affairs. … So hasten to slaughter them as a good work whereby you will earn God’s favor, and offer them up in sacrifice, a well-fattened ram.” The mob heeded his call. A Muslim chronicler (and later sultan of Granada), ‘Abd Allah, said that “both the common people and the nobles were disgusted by the cunning of the Jews, the notorious changes they had brought in the order of things, and the positions they occupied in violation of their pact [of second-class status].” He recounted that the mob “put every Jew in the city to the sword and took vast quantities of their property.”

In The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, Andrew Bostom amasses an enormous amount of documentary evidence establishing the degradations the Jews suffered at the hands of Muslims throughout Islamic history. Bostom notes that jihadist designation of Jews as “apes and pigs,” in accord with the Qur’an, has ample historical precedent. Muhammad himself used it before ordering that every adult male of the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe, be killed, calling the Jews “you brothers of monkeys.” The poem that inspired the Muslims to massacre the Jews in Granada in 1066 included the line, “Many a pious Muslim is in awe of the vilest infidel ape,” (referring to the Jewish vizier). Zaynu’d-Din ‘Ali b. Said, praised the anti-Jewish riots and massacres in Baghdad in 1291 (which spread widely in the region), saying, “These apish Jews are done away and shent [ruined].” Bostom mentions another slaughter:

Referring to the Jews as “brothers of apes,” who repeatedly blasphemed the prophet Muhammad, and whose overall conduct reflected their hatred of Muslims, the Moroccan cleric al-Maghili (d. 1505) fomented, and then personally led, a Muslim pogrom (in ~1490) against the Jews of the southern Moroccan oasis of Touat, plundering and killing Jews en masse, and destroying their synagogue in neighboring Tamantit. Al-Maghili’s virulent Islamic antisemitism was perhaps captured best in a line from a verse diatribe he composed: “Love of the Prophet requires hatred of the Jews.”

Nevertheless, historian Bernard Lewis asserts that overall, Jews had it better in the Islamic world than they did in Catholic Europe. “There is nothing in Islamic history,” he says, “to compare with the Spanish expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Inquisition, the Auto da fe’s, the wars of religion, not to speak of more recent crimes of commission and acquiescence. There were occasional persecutions, but they were rare, and usually of brief duration, related to local and specific circumstances.” Dinesh D’Souza has made much of this in his recent attempts to portray Islam and Christianity as equally likely to give rise to violent impulses.

However, such judgments betray less about the historical data than they do about Westerners judging Christians more severely than Muslims. This is a venerable tradition, going back, as the Islamic scholar Ibn Warraq points out, to Voltaire and Edward Gibbon:

Gibbon, like Voltaire, painted Islam in as favorable a light as possible to better contrast it with Christianity. The English historian emphasized Muhammad’s humanity as a means of indirectly criticizing the Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ. Gibbon’s anticlericalism led him to underline Islam’s supposed freedom from that accursed class, the priesthood. Indeed, the familiar pattern is reemerging—Islam is being used as a weapon against Christianity. Gibbon’s deistic view of Islam as a rational, priest-free religion, with Muhammad as a wise and tolerant lawgiver, enormously influenced the way all Europeans perceived their sister religion for years to come. Indeed, it established myths that are still accepted totally uncritically by scholars and laymen alike. Both Voltaire and Gibbon subscribed to the myth of Muslim tolerance, which to them meant Turkish tolerance.

Yet a question that is much more important than the respective awarding of historical points or demerits is whether Christian or Islamic anti-Semitism is likely to recur. Europe has in recent years grown hostile to Jews to an extent not seen since Nazism’s heyday, but the anti-Semites today are principally not native European Christians, but Muslim immigrants (and Muslims, by mid-century, could be the majority population of several European states).

In Britain, there were three times more anti-Semitic incidents in 2007 than there were in 1997. A December 2006 study, according to the Telegraph, determined that “in London and Manchester, where Muslims outnumber Jews by four to one, anti-Semitic offenses exceeded anti-Muslim offenses.” One rabbi was attacked in July 2006 by seven Pakistani Muslim teenagers, who shouted, “We are Pakistani, you are Jewish. We are going to kill you.” In Belgium in November 2006, according to Flanders News, “a group of young Turkish immigrants in the Limburg municipality of Beringen attacked a group of Jewish school children by throwing stones at them, shouting anti-Semitic slogans.” In summer 2006, after a Jewish man was assaulted in Oslo, Norwegian Jews were warned not to wear kippahs on the street, for fear they would be physically attacked.

And these are just a few recent examples of a long and ever lengthening string of such incidents. The European Union commissioned a report about the new rise of anti-Semitism in Europe in 2003, but buried it when its findings showed that anti-Semitic acts were largely the province of young Muslims. After an outcry, the report was released in 2004, but journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard noted that the results “had been consistently massaged by the EU watchdog to play down the role of North African youth.”

As time goes by, however, these new realities will be harder and harder to ignore.

- Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of eight books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, is available now from Regnery Publishing.

The climate-change travesty

2009-12-07T17:13:00.002-05:00

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Sunday, December 6, 2009

With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth's last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate-change meeting. Its organizers had hoped that it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone's choices.

China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate-change theater, promises only to reduce its "carbon intensity" -- carbon emissions per unit of production. So China's emissions will rise.

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Disclosure of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain -- a collaborator with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- reveals some scientists' willingness to suppress or massage data and rig the peer-review process and the publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer "consensus" and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority. Actually, never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.

The Post learns an odd lesson from the CRU materials: "Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them." These scientists overstated and censored because they were "goaded" by skepticism?

Were their science as unassailable as they insist it is, and were the consensus as broad as they say it is, and were they as brave as they claim to be, they would not be "goaded" into intellectual corruption. Nor would they meretriciously bandy the word "deniers" to disparage skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.

Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic man-made warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From millennia before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and for millennia hence, climate change is always a 100 percent certainty. Skeptics doubt that the scientists' models, which cannot explain the present, infallibly map the distant future.

The Financial Times' peculiar response to the CRU materials is: The scientific case for alarm about global warming "is growing more rather than less compelling." If so, then could anything make the case less compelling?
A CRU e-mail says: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment" -- this "moment" is in its second decade -- "and it is a travesty that we can't."

The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate-change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars -- and substantially diminished freedom.

Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet's fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer-review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over.

Consider the sociology of science, the push and pull of interests, incentives, appetites and passions. Governments' attempts to manipulate Earth's temperature now comprise one of the world's largest industries. Tens of billions of dollars are being dispensed, as by the U.S. Energy Department, which has suddenly become, in effect, a huge venture capital operation, speculating in green technologies. Political, commercial, academic and journalistic prestige and advancement can be contingent on not disrupting the (postulated) consensus that is propelling the gigantic and fabulously lucrative industry of combating global warming.

Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world's climate by breaking the world's -- especially America's -- population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth's last chance, until the next one.

georgewill@washpost.com

No Minarets, Please

2009-12-07T16:42:00.002-05:00

We're Swiss.

by Christopher Caldwell
The Weekly Standard
12/14/2009, Volume 015, Issue 13
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the Swiss justice minister, took to the airwaves as soon as her fellow citizens voted by a landslide majority to write a ban on minarets into their constitution. She wanted to make clear to the world that this was "not a vote against Islam." Her government issued a press release to that effect in Arabic.

The best piece of evidence that this was indeed a vote against Islam is that those who supported a "Yes" vote were not willing to avow it. "Yes" took 58 percent of the vote on November 29. But no poll in the weeks leading up to the vote found more than 37 percent of the public willing to say so. French Switzerland (including Geneva) rejected the constitutional ban; German Switzerland (including Zurich) voted for it.

No one suspected (or wanted to believe) that the low poll numbers reflected anything other than the smallness of the problem. Switzerland has lots of immigrants, but they are mostly tax exiles and rich retirees. Its Muslim population of 400,000--just over 5 percent of a country of 7.7 million--is not by Western European standards large. Switzerland has about 150 mosques but only four minarets, with two more in the works. The sort of social dislocation that has led elsewhere to strife between natives and immigrants is absent: Switzerland's unemployment rate, even now, is under 5 percent. It has not had a major terrorist incident.

But there is a more pessimistic way of looking at all of these things. That 20th of the Swiss population that professes Islam came primarily from the Balkan countries during the wars of the early 1990s--the Muslim presence in Switzerland until then was negligible. Should this population grow at its present rate for another half a generation, Switzerland will have Muslim minorities on the scale of Belgium's or France's. While the unemployment rate is low, it is growing, and four-fifths of the new claimants for benefits in October hold foreign passports, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

People should have realized what a tinderbox this outwardly calm country was, especially considering the overwhelming popularity of the Swiss People's party (SVP), which is highly skeptical of (and blunt to the point of rudeness about) immigration. A 2007 campaign poster urging the extradition of criminal foreigners brought condemnations for racism and caught the world's attention. The world was less attentive to the elections' result--it gave the SVP almost a third of the seats in the federal council, making it the mightiest political party the country has seen since the close of World War I.

Meanwhile, the Swiss are being asked, in many ways, to discard their national identity and content themselves with a new one. Part of the problem is banking. In recent years, Switzerland has eliminated almost every vestige of its banking secrecy, mostly as a result of U.S.-related complaints. Washington insisted on openness for a number of reasons: terrorist accounts, class-war rhetoric from U.S. politicians about Benedict Arnold billionaires, and a massive tax fraud case against the Swiss giant UBS.

But a bigger role in Switzerland's discomfiture has been played by -Tripoli. The Swiss import over 40,000 barrels of Libyan oil each day, and Muammar Qaddafi is seldom out of the Swiss news these days. Britain, of course, suffered a great loss of face last summer when it released the Lockerbie terrorist Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, probably in exchange for business considerations. But that humiliation is as nothing compared to what Switzerland has undergone.

In the summer of 2008, Qaddafi's son Hannibal was arrested in a luxury hotel in Geneva for beating two of his servants. This sort of thing has happened to him on many occasions in many European capitals. (In 2005, he pulled a 9mm machine pistol on gendarmes at the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris.) Usually, Libya claims diplomatic immunity and works to spring their man through behind-the-scenes negotiation, and that is exactly what happened in the Geneva case. Unfortunately, Hannibal spent 36 hours in jail before it did. His family vowed "an eye for an eye." Libya briefly stopped shipments of oil and arrested--or took hostage, if you want to put it less euphemistically--two Swiss businessmen who happened to be in Tripoli. The price of their release, it was made clear, would be an apology from the Swiss government. So in August, Hans-Rudolf Merz, the Swiss equivalent of a prime minister, flew to Libya to apologize for "the unjust arrest of Libyan diplomats by Geneva police," signed a written agreement to appoint a neutral arbitrator, and did not rule out arresting the police officers who had arrested Hannibal. At that point, Qaddafi put him back on the plane without the hostages.

Last week, two days after the minaret referendum, the hostages were sentenced to more than a year in prison. This is probably just the aroma of Muslim wrath, not the meal itself. One assumes Switzerland is at the beginning of economic pressures resembling those put on Denmark at the height of the cartoon crisis. The Swiss chocolate giant Nestlé, for instance, is by some measures the largest producer of halal food in the world and will surely be a target of agitators. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French politician, has urged rich Muslims to remove their money from Swiss bank accounts.

That will not change the result in Switzerland. Very little can, at least domestically. Unlike the United States, Switzerland does not have the kind of courts that act as brakes on inconvenient referendum results. Pressure to "reverse" the verdict or to hold a "re-vote" will come from abroad. A case against Switzerland will almost certainly be brought before the European Court of Human Rights. Meanwhile, the same distorted picture of public sentiment that appeared in polls before the referendum is being replicated in spectacles in the aftermath. The government, business consortia, most trade unions, several political parties, all manner of marchers, and a virtual unanimity of writers, intellectuals, and artists have spoken out against the referendum's result.

Even so, the vote has shaken politics all over Europe, if only because politicians elsewhere realize their countries have the same silent majorities and are trying to figure out how to address them without ticking off all those intellectuals and business groups. A typical encounter came in France, where integration minister Eric Besson sought to distinguish his own government's attempts to ban the burqa (the head-to-toe covering that some strict Muslim women wear) from the minaret referendum. The former was a matter of women's rights, he said. The latter was a matter of "urbanism."

No, it wasn't.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Tar Heels spoil Stanford's run at perfection

2009-12-07T16:26:00.002-05:00

By ROBERT CESSNA
robert.cessna@theeagle.com
The Bryan/College Station (TX) Eagle
http://www.theeagle.com/
Published Monday, December 07, 2009 6:05 AM

The Tar Heels pose with the championship trophy. This is UNC's 21st national title (20 NCAA, one AIAW) and third in four years. (AP)

North Carolina's remarkable seniors ended their careers with yet another national championship, and fittingly at the place it all started with an eye-opening loss.

The Tar Heels made an early goal by Jessica McDonald stand up for a 1-0 victory over the Stanford Cardinal on Sunday afternoon at the Aggie Soccer Stadium before 8,536 wet-but-enthusiastic fans.

It was the program's 21st national championship and the third for the senior class, which finished with a record of 94-9-3. The group's first game was a 1-0 loss in double overtime to Texas A&M in the 2006 season opener.

"I think that ending our careers here is quite a testament to how far we've come," said senior All-American Whitney Engen. "We all kinda looked at each other [after that first game]. We knew we came to Carolina to win, and here we'd lost our first game of the season. And to come full circle and to win our last game here, it meant a lot to a lot of us."

Engen was part of a smothering defense that throttled Stanford, which was the second-highest scoring team in the country.

The Cardinal (25-1-0) managed only nine shots -- including two in the first half, its lowest total of the season for any 45-minute period.

"They put you under pressure, and they make it difficult for you to get into a rhythm," Stanford head coach Paul Ratcliffe said. "It was hard for us to get into a rhythm and really play our type of soccer."

UNC never deviated from its style, which was to defend by attacking.

Engen, who was named the Women's College Cup's Most Outstanding Player on Defense, and fellow senior defender Rachel Givan played all 90 minutes. They made the all-tournament team along with senior goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris as the Tar Heels ended the season with 10 shutouts in their final 11 games.

UNC dominated from the get-go, making things easier for its defense.

McDonald, a junior, one-timed a perfect 25-yard bending pass from fellow forward Casey Nogueira at the 42:10 mark. Stanford defender Alina Garciamendez couldn't do a thing as McDonald flicked the ball past goalkeeper Kira Maker from just inside the 6-yard box.

"We have a unique style," UNC head coach Anson Dorrance said. "We sprint to close down people and make it difficult for any team to play. We've tried to develop a system that's hard to play against that's based on pressure and work ethic. I think it's hard for other teams to replicate that in practice. We try to play absolutely as fast as possible offensively."

That style allowed UNC to play fast, keeping Stanford on its heels.

The Tar Heels (22-3-1) kept the ball in the Cardinal's end for almost two-thirds of the first half. UNC had each of the half's seven corner kicks, just missing a couple of chances to take an insurmountable 2-0 lead.

"One of my graduates [former player Rita Tower] came up to me after the game and she said, 'Anson, do you guys work on corner kicks?,'" Dorrance said. "I said, 'Rita, give me a break, we work on all this stuff.'

"Here, the alumni aren't even satisfied that we won the championship, they're a little disappointed in our corner kicks. The alumni are tough to deal with [because] their standards are pretty high."

That's because UNC is the only program to play in all 28 NCAA Tournaments and is the only program with an unbeaten, untied season. The Tar Heels have done that four times -- 1991, '92, '93, and 2003.

The Cardinal opened the second half aggressively in trying to be the fifth team to accomplish that feat, but the Tar Heels still managed more shots even though they went with an extra defender.

Stanford's chances diminished when 26-goal scorer Kelley O'Hara received an automatic ejection after getting her second yellow card for sliding into Engen. That forced the Cardinal to play the last 17:45 a player short.

O'Hara, the nation's top scorer, and 21-goal scorer Christen Press combined for four shots, only one on goal.

"I had a lot of respect coming in for their front line," said Engen, who played with both players in the summer. "I also knew we had to trust in our system for it to work. We don't change our system for anyone. We held a great line today, and Ash came out big from behind and led us, and we played really well today."

Stanford struggled to string together 2-3 passes against Carolina's pressure.

"I felt like we had so many open players and we were just struggling to get them the ball," Press said.

Short-handed Stanford still managed a couple of chances late. Press rifled a 25-yard shot that Harris momentarily bobbled. Press also broke free at 88:12, firing a long shot past Harris for an apparent tying goal, but she was ruled offside.

UNC was able to clear the ball in the final seconds, which allowed senior Nogueira and sophomore forward Courtney Jones to hug right in front of the Tar Heels' bench in the final 10 seconds.

The players rushed toward Harris, several of them stopping to embrace along the way. They donned championship hats and T-shirts while awaiting the awards ceremony. And while the all-tournament team was being announced, third-string goalie Amanda Tucker managed to run down and douse Dorrance, who made a few good defensive moves to at first avoid the bath.

Stanford's two shots in the first 45 minutes were by Teresa Noyola at 27:45, which was well wide, and by Verloo weakly on goal with 2:30 left.

Stanford's best rush in the first half was waved off for being offside. Onrushing Press sent a crossing pass to Courtney Verloo, who shot it in the net, but the Carolina players were signaling offside before the ball even found the net.

The game was played on a 47-degree day with a light mist falling.

Nogueira was named the 2009 Women's College Cup's Most Outstanding Player on Offense. She scored in UNC's 1-0 victory over Notre Dame in the semifinals.

Other Tar Heels on the all-tournament team were McDonald and midfielder Tobin Heath, who also had an assist on McDonald's goal.

It was the second straight year North Carolina denied a team an unbeaten, untied season. Notre Dame also finished at 25-1 last year with a 2-1 loss to UNC in the championship.

A leader of the free world not to be feared

2009-12-05T12:12:00.003-05:00

By MARK STEYN
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/sections/opinion/
2009-12-04 10:15:24

If you happen to live in Kabul or Jalalabad, Ghurian or Kandahar, then a U.S. presidential speech about Afghanistan is, indeed, about Afghanistan. If you live anywhere else on the planet, a U.S. presidential speech about Afghanistan is really about America – about American will, American purpose, American energy. How quickly the bright new dawn fades to the gray morning after. In Europe, the long-awaited unveiling of this most thoughtful of presidents' deliberations got mixed reviews – some bad, some brutal. Der Spiegel called it "half-hearted," The Guardian called it "desperate." And those are his friends.

You could watch the great orator's listless, tentative performance with the sound down and get the basic message: I don't need this in my life right now. If you read the text, it made even less sense. There's something for everyone: A surge! ... and a withdrawal. He's agreed to surge for a bit, but only in preparation for a de-surge in 18 months' time. I said on the radio that the speech reminded me of the English nursery rhyme:

"The Grand Old Duke of York

He had ten thousand men

He marched them up to the top of the hill

And he marched them down again."

The Grand Young Duke of Hope has 30,000 men. He'll march them up the Khyber Pass but he'll march them down again in July 2011. If you're some village headman who's been making nice to the Americans, the Taliban have a whole new pitch for you: In a year and a half, the Yanks are going. But we'll still be here.

"Our goal in war," wrote Basil Liddell Hart, the great strategist of armored warfare, "can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will." In other words, the object of war is not to destroy the enemy's tanks but the enemy's will. That goes treble if, like the Taliban and al-Qaida, he hasn't got any tanks in the first place. So what do you think Obama's speech did for the enemy's will? He basically told 'em: We can only stick another 19 months, so all you gotta do is hang in there for 20. And in an astonishingly vulgar line even by the standards of this White House's crass speechwriters, he justified his announcement of an exit date by saying it was "because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own." Or, as Frank Sinatra once observed, "It's Very Nice To Go Trav'ling/But it's so much nicer ... to come home":

"It's very nice to just wander the camel route to Iraq. ... But it's so much nicer, yes, it's oh so nice to wander back."

As I said, Obama's speech is only about Afghanistan if you're in Afghanistan. If you're in Moscow or Tehran, Pyongyang or Caracas, it's about America. And what it told them is that, if you're a local strongman with regional ambitions, or a rogue state going nuclear, or a mischief-making kleptocracy dusting off old tsarist dreams, this president is not going to be pressing your reset button. Strange how an allegedly compelling speaker is unable to fake even perfunctory determination and resilience.
Strange, too, how all the sophisticated nuances of post-Bush foreign policy "realism" seem so unreal when you're up there trying to sell them as a coherent strategy. Go back half-a-decade, to when the administration was threatening to shove democracy down the throats of every two-bit basket case whether they want it or not. Democratizing the planet is, in a Council of Foreign Relations sense, "unrealistic," but talking it up is a very realistic way of messing with the dictators' heads. A pipsqueak like Boy Assad sleeps far more soundly today than he did back when he thought Bush meant it, and so did the demonstrators threatening his local enforcers in Lebanon.

As for Assad's friends in Tehran, you wonder if they're not now flouting "world opinion" merely to see how ever more watery and qualified the threats from Washington get. The tireless Anne Bayefsky reported this week that the administration's latest response to Iran's nuclear provocations is to "start shifting our focus to the track of pressure." It's a good thing the diplomatic cable is a mostly metaphorical concept these days because, priced per word, Washington's are getting expensive. Starting to shift our focus to the track of pressure isn't the same as "pressure." Nor is it even a first step on "the track of pressure." Nor isit even a commitment to "focus" on "the track of pressure." But it does represent a clear start to shifting the administration's focus from whatever it's focusing on right now to focusing on the possibility of shifting its focus to the track of pressure with the possible goal, once it's focused on shifting to the track of pressure, of eventually applying some. Not now. Not next month. But maybe at some point sometime, once we've figured out what meaningless gestures the Russians and Chinese would agree not to veto.

Like Europe, the Obama administration's "realists" have decided that, if the alternative is summoning up the will to prevent a nuclear Iran, it's easier to live with it. The realpolitik crowd's biggest turn-on among their many peculiar fetishes is "stability," yet they're stringing along with what will be the single biggest destabilizing factor in geopolitics in a generation. Iran's president may be a millennial crackpot but he's thinking more realistically than the "realists." If you can bulldoze your way into the nuclear club without paying a price, why not go for it? Pakistan had to do it quietly, in the shadows. Iran's done it brazenly, daring the world to stop her. We didn't – notwithstanding that the Islamic Republic has a 30-year track record of saying what it means and then doing it. If you were ever going to hold the nuclear line, this is the place to do it. And the fact that we didn't is a huge victory for the mullahs long before the first nukes are ready to fly.

One of the most interesting developments in recent months has been the emerging alliances of convenience between Iran and its clients, on the one hand, and the likes of Russia, North Korea and Venezuela on the other.
Some of this is simple mischief-making, but, in the vacuum of the Hopeychange, a lot of it shows a shrewd strategic calculation. A nuclear Tehran, for example, serves Moscow's interest in promoting itself as a guarantor of Eastern European "security." It's one of the oldest of protection rackets: You need me to protect you from my psycho friend. For their part, the Sunni Arab dictatorships will soon face the choice of accepting de facto Persian regional hegemony or embarking on their own nuclearization. As for Israel, they'll either be living under the ever-present threat of annihilation. Or they'll be dead.

Whatever your view of this scenario, "stability" doesn't seem to cover it. In his speech, the so-called "leader of the free world" all but physically recoiled from the job description. Sorry about that. Not his bag. In the more toxic presidential palaces, you would have to be awfully virtuous not to take advantage of such a man. And soon.

©MARK STEYN

Welcome to Copenhagen to Save the Planet From Global Warming

2009-12-04T07:27:00.002-05:00

by Terry Easton
http://www.humanevents.com
12/04/2009

Well, gang, it’s time for Copenhagen, another of those great photo ops for the good and the famous and all the world’s leaders flying in to save the planet from Global Warming -- caused by all that evil Carbon Dioxide being emitted as exhaust fumes of…jet planes!

The parade of planes is led by the Progressive-in-Chief, Barack Obama, in his super-jumbo 747 Air Force One, and backed up by a cadre of additional planes for support personal, secret service, armored Limousine One, and the press. But wait, he’s really doing a two-for-one flight, making the extra effort to pick up his hard-earned Nobel Prize for Peace.

A modest suggestion. Since most jet fuel is used in just taking off, perhaps Obama could simply do a fly-by Stockholm and lower one of those navy tailhooks to snatch up the Nobel Prize from the Committee below. Think of all the drowning baby polar bears that would be saved by reducing the melting ice caps in the process. That action in itself would probably be worthy of another Nobel Prize -- in conservation -- to be issued by the political hacks on the Peace Prize Committee.

Then there’s the fleet of other government jets: 727’s, Airbuses, and baby jets like Gulfstreams which will all be fighting over parking spaces and refueling stations at the Copenhagen International Airport. I sure hope that Exxon and Shell can make some good money out of this. We need their tax payments.

But the most fun is always had by the great and good, the most highly esteemed and wisest members of our society: the Hollywood movie stars! And many will be in Copenhagen too. That’s where all the cameras will be.

It seems like lots of Hollywood Progressives who tell us it is important to save the world by cutting back on our own wasteful carbon dioxide emissions (like, perhaps breathing?) are themselves proud owners of their own big carbon dioxide spewing private jets. And no, it’s not an innocent plant food that helps trees grow. The 0.380% of the Earth’s atmosphere, this trace gas called carbon dioxide, is in fact a deadly human-produced killer, or so these good people tell us.

First there’s Oprah and her Gulfstream IV (it holds 13 people!). And Al Gore. And Paris Hilton. And Bob Geldorf. And Jennifer Aniston. There are hundreds more. Some are even a bit frugal in their ways. They “timeshare” their planes by sharing ownership with other important people or, lower down the food chain, renting time on global fleets totaling over one thousand jets.

Does the word hypocrite come to mind, here?

Perhaps the most interesting specimens of this interesting sub-species of “concerned folk out to save the world” are those superstars who own a fleet of private jets – and fly them themselves all over the world in their quest to help protect humanity from the deadly human-caused global warming catastrophe.

Top on the list are megastars like Tom Cruise, who bought his wife Katie Holmes their fifth plane, a Gulfstream. Tom is a global warming believer.

Then there’s Harrison Ford, close buddy of Bill Clinton who does commercials for EarthShare. He too owns 5 planes including a Cessna Citation jet, and a Bell 407 helicopter to boot. Now Harrison Ford is, in fact, a genuine real-life hero. He uses his planes to help firefighting around his Wyoming home, and he has even rescued a lost boy scout in Yellowstone National Park. So, maybe Ford deserves a pass.

But what about John Travolta and his fleet of 5 private jets, ranging from a 707 downwards? He helps support this hobby by standing in front of them wearing an expensive “up market” watch. The ads are everywhere.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, for talented people who’ve made a lot of money to spend it on their hobbies. Some collect cars. Some collect boats, some collect houses. Some collect all three.

But there is something a bit bizarre in these people having permission to preach to others what they don’t do themselves. Oh wait, many also own Hondas and Toyota Prius hybrid cars. They sometimes drive them to the airports to board their private jets. Question: has the Prius become the hypocrite’s “Get Out of Jail Card”?

Or sometimes they buy “carbon credits”, fictional guilt-payments, sort of like the old
Indulgences that Roman Catholics could pay the Church to assuage their sins during the middle ages. And who can they buy these carbon credits from? Why another Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore and his financier partner David Blood -- yes Blood & Gore -- who are making millions selling their carbon credit schemes out of London through their Generation Investment Management partnership. One goal of GIM is to clearly pass on lots of money - to the next Blood and Gore generations…

So when the “reporters” start gushing all over the TV channels from Copenhagen next week, talking about how everyone has come together to save the world from the impending doom of Global Warming, think about how all the great and good got there. Perhaps they’ll even show you a clip or two of each politician emerging from their private government jets, waiving to the adoring carefully-arranged crowds.

Then remember that these same politicians are now adding “carbon taxes” to the airfares of commercial airlines, so the poor suckers who have to fly in overcrowded coach can help subsidize the elites’ travel habits. Oh, and lots of objective reporters from the main stream media hitch a ride on these private jets whenever they can. “For the story”. Right. Oink. Oink.

Mr. Easton teaches University economics and is passionate about technology and entrepreneurship. He is rosy about the long-term future: The glass isn't half full, it's overflowing!

This will not end well

2009-12-03T11:14:00.003-05:00

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Thursday, December 3, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com

A traveler asks a farmer how to get to a particular village. The farmer replies, "If I were you, I wouldn't start from here." Barack Obama, who asked to be president, nevertheless deserves sympathy for having to start where America is in Afghanistan.

But after 11 months of graceless disparagements of the 43rd president, the 44th acts as though he is the first president whose predecessor bequeathed a problematic world. And Obama's second new Afghanistan policy in less than nine months strikingly resembles his predecessor's plan for Iraq, which was: As Iraq's security forces stand up, U.S. forces will stand down.

Having vowed to "finish the job," Obama revealed Tuesday that he thinks the job in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan. This is an unserious policy.

Obama's surge will bring to 51,000 his Afghanistan escalation since March. Supposedly this will buy time for Afghan forces to become adequate. But it is not intended to buy much time: Although the war is in its 98th month, Obama's "Mission Accomplished" banner will be unfurled 19 months from now -- when Afghanistan's security forces supposedly will be self-sufficient. He must know this will not happen.

In a spate of mid-November interviews -- while participating in the president's protracted rethinking of policy -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described America's Afghanistan goal(s) somewhat differently. They are "to defeat al-Qaeda and its extremist allies" because "al-Qaeda and the other extremists are part of a syndicate of terror, with al-Qaeda still being an inspiration, a funder, a trainer, an equipper and director of a lot of what goes on." And: "We want to do everything we can to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda." And: "We want to get the people who attacked us." And: "We want to get al-Qaeda." And: "We are in Afghanistan because we cannot permit the return of a staging platform for terrorists."

But al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan do not number in the tens of thousands, or even thousands. Or perhaps even hundreds. Although "the people who attacked us" were al-Qaeda, the threat that justifies today's escalation is, Clinton says, a "syndicate of terror" of which al-Qaeda is just an important part. But is Afghanistan central to the syndicate?

George W. Bush waged preventive war in Iraq regarding (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction. Obama is waging preventive war in Afghanistan to prevent it from again becoming "a staging platform for terrorists," which Somalia, Yemen or other sovereignty near-vacuums also could become. To prevent the "staging platform" scenario, U.S. forces might have to be engaged in Afghanistan for decades before its government can prevent that by itself.

Before Tuesday, the administration had said (through White House spokesman Robert Gibbs) that U.S. forces will not be there "another eight or nine years." Tuesday, the Taliban heard a distant U.S. trumpet sounding withdrawal beginning in 19 months. Also hearing it were Afghans who must decide whether to bet their lives on the Americans, who will begin striking their tents in July 2011, or on the Taliban, who are not going home, because they are at home.

Many Democrats, who think the $787 billion stimulus was too small and want another one (but by another name), are flinching from the $30 billion one-year cost of the Afghan surge. Considering that the GM and GMAC bailouts ($63 billion) are five times bigger than Afghanistan's gross domestic product ($12 billion), Democrats seem to be selective worriers about deficits. Of course, their real worry is how to wriggle out of their endorsement of the "necessary" war in Afghanistan, which was a merely tactical endorsement intended to disparage the "war of choice" in Iraq.

The president's party will not support his new policy, his budget will not accommodate it, our overstretched and worn-down military will be hard-pressed to execute it, and Americans' patience will not be commensurate with Afghanistan's limitless demands for it. This will not end well.

A case can be made for a serious -- meaning larger and more protracted -- surge. A better case can be made for a radically reduced investment of resources and prestige in that forlorn country. Obama has not made a convincing case for his tentative surgelet.

George Orwell said that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it. But Obama's halfhearted embrace of a half-baked nonstrategy -- briefly feinting toward the Taliban (or al-Qaeda, or a "syndicate of terror") while lunging for the exit ramp -- makes a protracted loss probable.

georgewill@washpost.com

Groupthink and the Global-Warming Industry

2009-12-03T11:09:00.002-05:00

Scientific cliques and journalistic tribalism.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
December 03, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

By now you might have heard something about the scandal rocking the climate-change industry, though you can be forgiven if you haven’t, since it hasn’t gotten nearly the coverage it should. Computer hackers broke into the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England and downloaded thousands of e-mails and other documents. The CRU is one of the world’s leading global-warming data hubs, providing much of the number-crunching that global policymakers need on climate change. And, boy, can they crunch numbers.

In a long string of embarrassing e-mail exchanges, CRU scientists discuss with friendly outside colleagues, including Penn State University’s Michael Mann, how to manipulate the data they want to show the world, and how to hide the often-flawed data they don’t. In one exchange, they discuss the “trick” of how to “hide the decline” in global temperatures since the 1960s. Again and again, the researchers don’t object to just inconvenient truths but also inconvenient truth-tellers. They contemplate and orchestrate efforts to purge scientists and journals who won’t sing from the same global-warming hymnal.

In one instance, Phil Jones, the CRU director, says a scientific journal must “rid (itself) of this troublesome editor,” who happened to publish a problematic paper. In another, Jones says we “will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

These documents reveal the trick behind how they hide the dissent. Climate-change activists often dismiss critics by noting that the skeptics haven’t offered their arguments in peer-reviewed literature. Hence why they work so hard to keep dissenters out of the literature! Indeed, whatever the final verdict on the CRU’s shenanigans, two things are already firmly established by even a sympathetic reading of these documents.

First, the climate-change industry is shot through with groupthink (or what climate scientist Judith Curry calls “climate tribalism”). Activists would have us believe that the overwhelming majority of “real” scientists agree with them while the few dissenters are all either crazed or greedy “deniers” akin to flat-earthers and creationists. These e-mails show that what’s really at work is a very large clique of scientists attempting to excommunicate perceived heretics for reasons that have more to do with psychology and sociology than physics or climatology.

Second, the climate industry really is an industry. Climate scientists make their money and careers from government, academia, the United Nations, and foundations. The grantors want the grantees to confirm the global-warming “consensus.” The tenure and peer-review processes likewise hinge on conformity. That doesn’t necessarily mean climate change isn’t happening, but it does mean sloppiness and bias are unavoidable.

How big a scandal this is for the scientific community is being hotly debated on the Internet. But in big newspapers and TV news, the story has gotten less attention. And that’s a scandal, too. The New York Times’s leading climate reporter, Andrew Revkin (whose name appears in some of the e-mails), won’t publish the contents of the e-mail on the grounds it would violate the scientists’ privacy. Can anyone imagine the Times being so prissy if such damning e-mails were from ExxonMobil, never mind Dick Cheney?

Indeed, the closer you look at the scandal, the more you realize it’s all one big outrage. The same journalistic tribalism that allowed Dan Rather to destroy his career over “Memogate” keeps reinforcing itself. Rather picked sources who said what he wanted to hear, then he reported what they said as if it were indisputable. The same thing is happening on climate change. Ideological bias is a major factor in the news media’s work as a transmission belt for the climate industry. But part of the problem is also that the journalists do a bad job when the majority of “respected” experts agree on anything complicated. For instance, it was pretty impossible for reporters to independently investigate whether Saddam Hussein had WMDs, and since the most established authorities agreed he had to have them, the news media reported the consensus, which turned out to be wrong.

Likewise, most journalists aren’t qualified or capable of working through the climate data. So they opt for the consensus. But there are important differences, too. While there’s often reason for governments to hide classified intelligence, there’s no reason for climate data to be classified. If the science is a slam dunk, why are CRU researchers keen on hiding their research? After the WMD fiasco, journalists agonized over their mistakes. Why no soul-searching over the CRU fiasco? Climate change hasn’t been “debunked” by these documents. But the integrity of the “consensus” has been.

Also, keep in mind that the stakes are higher. In Copenhagen this month, the U.S. government will try to join the global bandwagon to spend trillions in fighting climate change. That money will not only enrich corporations, weaken U.S. sovereignty, and hinder global growth, it will come out of funds that could be spent on fighting disease and poverty. Surely that’s worth some journalistic skepticism?

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Ovechkin's No-fear factor

2009-12-03T08:53:00.002-05:00

By Thomas Boswell
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Alex Ovechkin should slow down and live. If he can.

Athletes in many sports use the same expression for someone who plays with a reckless abandon that borders on self-destruction: "He plays like he's using somebody else's body." It's meant as a compliment to courage, but there's also an overtone of disaster.

Suddenly this season, his fifth in the NHL, two-time MVP Ovechkin is discovering that it really is his own body, not some Cyborg rental unit, that he's using as a blunt instrument to bash everybody in sight. Usually within the rules, but sometimes -- and too often recently -- outside them.

Washington's Alex Ovechkin is helped off the ice after injuring his knee on Monday.

On Tuesday, the news was fairly good. Ovechkin skated briefly at the Capitals' practice rink after a knee-to-knee hit Monday night that, in addition to getting him an ejection and game-misconduct penalty, looked like it could have been a serious injury. On slow-motion replays, his knee clearly buckled sideways. But it held. This time.

So, Ovechkin's knee will get better, just like the shoulder injury that sidelined him six games earlier this season. Are these just warning shots from Mother Nature? What's clear is, at 24, Ovie is no longer indestructible, even if he thinks he is. The time has come for him to evaluate how he will play the rest of his career.

We know his view. After being ejected just three games ago when he ran Patrick Kaleta face-first into the glass, Ovechkin said of his all-aggression, all-the-time style: "I can't do nothing about it. I just play my game. It's not going to change. It's me."

Ovechkin is all of a piece -- a live-on-the-edge outlier. What looks like excessive violence to others may look like a thrill or a challenge to him. His $300,000 Black Series AMG Mercedes -- the one with the AOGR8 license plate -- is a "supercar" with 12 cylinders, two turbo chargers and 700 horsepower. It can go 200 mph. He's had his other cars customized so they can go faster. In an ESPN feature piece, he appeared to take the reporter from zero-to-warp-speed in about four seconds.

"We are a little worried about his driving habits," Caps General Manager George McPhee said at the time.

So, sympathize with the Caps' front office. Fear for Ovechkin himself. But also appreciate that his teammates adore this break-neck style and wouldn't change him for the world. Whether scoring a goal or stalking a foe to blow up at full speed, Mr. Chaos creates space and opportunity for others, inspires teammates and excites the crowd.

Yet everything has its limits. And Ovechkin is at or past the edge. On Tuesday, the NHL suspended him for two games for his knee-to-knee collision with Carolina's Tim Gleason, his second five-minute-major hit within a week.

"He's pretty reckless," Coach Bruce Boudreau told reporters. "It's hard telling a guy that scores 60 goals a year to change the way he plays. At the same time, I don't want to see him getting hurt. Maybe he has to pick his spots a little better."

Would the Caps talk to Ovechkin about toning down a bit? "As a coach, and someone who admires him, I just don't want to see him put himself in harm's way. So, we'll see," Boudreau said. "I don't think anything said is going to change the way he plays."

In all sports, the star that's a compulsive risk-taker is begged to realize, "You are too valuable to take so many chances. Don't stop. Just rein it in." Most can, to a degree. Some can't, or won't.

If Ovechkin is the latter, then we should take a good look at the Great Eight while he's still in one piece and at the peak of his powers. Maybe, like Gordie Howe, Ovechkin will combine goals and big hits for a full career. But in the last few weeks, the opposite outcome has emerged for the first time. If he keeps playing at the edge and in constant pursuit of a hit that tops all his other highlight clips, can Ovechkin still have a 60-goal body by the time the Caps run at a Stanley Cup?

While Washington worries about his health, the events of the last week have refocused discussion on whether Ovechkin is a dirty player. At the extremes, in Pittsburgh, he's called a gifted goon, coddled by the sport's hierarchy. In D.C., he's the pinnacle of toughness. Everybody else is just jealous they don't have him.

If you review the tapes of his most controversial hits -- not just Gleason and Kaleta in the last week but Sergei Gonchar, Dennis Wideman, Rich Peverley, Daniel Briere, Jamie Heward, Dustin Brown, Evgeni Malkin and others -- it does seem that Ovechkin has entered a worrisome gray area. What is most gripping about his hits is that his premise seems to be: Wow, what a chance for an amazing collision! He may get hurt, I won't.

No great athlete in any sport plays more wildly, with less regard for injury, to himself or his foe, than Alex Ovechkin right now.

If he could turn his aggression down just a notch, he would be just as great but have a longer career that is even more admirable.

That doesn't sound like much. And to some it isn't. But to others, it's impossible. The way they play is who they are, right down to the bone.

If Ovechkin, all 700 horsepower, can't find a way to downshift, we'll just have to cross our fingers. Every night, every shift, he's going on all 12 cylinders, running in the red. That's why we love to watch him. From now on, it's also why we'll hold our breath.

Washington, Home of Intellectual Hypocrisy

2009-12-02T11:13:00.002-05:00

Believing you can run other peoples’ lives when you can barely run your own.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
December 02, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

I think I’ve had my fill of moral hypocrisy. We routinely hear stories of evangelical ministers who “mentor” hookers at $500 an hour, “family values” politicians who like the cut of a congressional page’s jib, or senators who love to press the flesh, one bathroom stall at a time. And, given the times, we increasingly hear stories about progressive politicians and columnists who — gasp! — have bigger carbon footprints than they want the rest of us to have: CO2 emissions for me and not for thee! For shame.

The press loves stories of moral hypocrisy. Catching a finger-wagging politician violating his or her own moral code warms the cockles of every reporter’s heart. Indeed, sometimes journalists confuse hypocrisy for the real crime. “If a politician murders his mother,” the late Washington Post editorial page editor Meg Greenfield once said, “the first response of the press . . . will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before, he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.”

The crusade against moral hypocrisy necessarily hits conservatives harder, not because conservatives are more immoral, but because they uphold morality more publicly, making them richer targets. The Left aims much of its moralizing at moralizing itself — “thou shalt not judge.” Meanwhile, the Right focuses on the oldies but goodies — adultery, drug use, etc. I think we’re right to uphold a standard even if we sometimes fail to live up to it.

What I don’t think we hear enough about is intellectual hypocrisy. What’s that? Well, if moral hypocrisy is saying what values people should live by while failing to follow them yourself, intellectual hypocrisy is believing you are smart enough to run other peoples’ lives when you can barely run your own.

I know many smart liberals for whom no idea is too complex, no concept or organizational flow chart too hard to grasp. They want government to take over this, run that, manage some other things, and in all cases put people exactly like them in charge of pretty much everything. Many are geniuses, with SAT scores so high you could get a bloody nose just looking at them.

But you wouldn’t ask one to run a car wash.

The chairman of a small college’s English department thinks it’s obvious intellectuals should take over health care, but he can’t manage the class schedules of three professors or run a meeting without it coming to blows or tears. A pundit defends government intervention in almost every sphere of economic life, but he can’t figure out how to manage the interns or his checking account.

The most famous story of an intellectual hypocrite getting his comeuppance is the tale of George McGovern and his inn. The senator, 1972 presidential nominee and college professor thought he could run a vast, technologically sophisticated nation with a diverse population and an entrepreneurial culture. Then, after leaving Washington, he bought an inn in Connecticut to while away his retirement years. For a guy as smart as him, running an inn should have been child’s play. But it went belly-up before the end of the year, with a contritely befuddled McGovern marveling at how much harder running a business was than he thought.

Or consider Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), currently subject of a House ethics investigation. Rangel heads the Ways and Means Committee, which writes the tax code. He backs the imposition of an income-tax surcharge on high earners to pay for health care, calling it “the moral thing to do.” Yet he can’t seem to figure out how to file his own taxes properly or, perhaps, legally.

Now, I also know lots of conservatives who are basket cases at everything other than reading and writing books and articles, giving speeches, and thinking Big Thoughts (likewise, I know liberals who despise conservative moralizing about sex and religion who nonetheless live chaste, pious lives themselves). The point is that conservatives don’t presume to be smart enough to run everything, because conservative dogma takes it as an article of faith that no one can be that smart.

Moral hypocrisy is still worth exposing, I guess. But we are living in a moment when revealing intellectual hypocrisy should take precedence. A J. P. Morgan chart reprinted on the “Enterprise Blog” shows that less than 10 percent of President Obama’s cabinet has private-sector experience, the least of any cabinet in a century. From the stimulus to health-care reform and cap-and-trade, Washington is now run by people who think they know how to run everything, when in reality they can barely run anything.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Setting up our military to fail

2009-12-02T11:07:00.002-05:00

By RALPH PETERS
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
December 2, 2009

Just plain nuts: That's the only possible characterization for last night's presidential declaration of surrender in advance of a renewed campaign in Afghanistan.

President Obama will send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan -- but he'll "begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011." Then why send them?

If you're going to tell the Taliban to be patient because we're leaving, what's the point in upping the blood ante? For what will come down to a single year by the time the troops hit the ground?

Does Obama really expect to achieve in one year what we haven't been able to do in more than eight?

Adding to the confusion, Obama qualified his timeline by insisting that "we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground."

If conditions of the ground are key, why announce a pullout date?

And what did this "new strategy" come down to, otherwise? More of the same, but more: More troops, more civilians, more partnership.

Well, the troops will go, the civilians won't -- and the partnerships are a fantasy.

Our president is setting up our military to fail -- but he'll be able to claim that he gave the generals what they wanted. Failure will be their fault.

He's covering his strong-on-security flank, even as he plays to our white-flag wavers. His cynicism's worthy of a Saddam.

Obama's right about one thing, though: The Afghans "will ultimately be responsible for their own country." So why undercut them with an arbitrary timeline that doesn't begin to allow adequate time to expand and train sufficient Afghan forces? Does he really believe that young Afghans are going to line up to join the army and police knowing that we plan to abandon them in mid-2011?

Does the 2012 election ring a bell?

What messages did our president's bait-and-switch speech just send?

To our troops: Risk your lives for a mission I've written off.

To our allies: Race you to the exit ramp.

To the Taliban: Allah is merciful, your prayers will soon be answered.

To Afghan leaders: Get your stolen wealth out of the country.

To Pakistan: Renew your Taliban friendships now (and be nice to al Qaeda).

This isn't just stupid: It's immoral. No American president has ever espoused such a worthless, self-absorbed non-strategy for his own political gratification.

On the other hand, the stage lighting and the camera angles at West Point were terrific. Our president looked good. Jaw jutting high (in his "hope" pose), he decried political partisanship -- but spent more time blaming Bush and Iraq for our Afghan problems than he spent blaming the Taliban (check it with a stop-watch).

Nor did Obama miss a single chance to praise himself, insisting that he's already transformed our relationship with the Middle East (please notify the Iranians, al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas) and that all of his dithering demonstrated wisdom.

This guy loves to hear himself talk. The last quarter of the speech was boiler-plate rhetoric that wandered off into the clouds. And that human-rights stuff? Where was that during his visits to China and Saudi Arabia? Hypocrisy, thy name is Barack.

Above all, where was the strategy? And where are the four-star resignations over a policy designed to squander American lives just to give an administration political cover?

After eight years of failure to create effective Afghan security forces and a responsible government, does anyone believe we can do it in 12 to 18 months?

"Target the insurgency"? Does that mean our soldiers will finally be permitted to go after our enemies and kill them? Nope. Those troops are going to "secure population centers." We'll be passive and let the enemy choose where and when to strike.

When fighting insurgents and terrorists, if you're not slamming them up against the wall and breaking their bones, you're losing. Obama isn't sending more troops -- he's sending more targets.

How do the Marines and soldiers slated to go to Afghanistan feel today, knowing that their commander-in-chief has already declared defeat?

By the time Obama finally got to Pakistan -- the refuge of evil -- he was spouting pure nonsense: "We are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect and mutual trust." But our interests diverge, we don't respect each other and we certainly don't trust each other.

Sounded good, though.

Mr. President, how can you send our troops to war without backing them all the way? How could you pull the strategic rug out from under them in advance? Why did you reassure the Taliban that we've already fixed a sell-by date? What's the bloody point?

At West Point last night, President Obama's delivery was superb. But what he was delivering was a funeral oration for his promised strategy.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "The War After Armageddon."

Bob Dylan Rocks

2009-12-02T10:56:00.002-05:00

By Max Schulz on 12.2.09 @ 6:09AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

Interviewing Bob Dylan several years ago, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner kept badgering the legendary artist to admit that the world is going to seed and things look grim. Dylan demurred, asking Wenner just what he was getting at. "We seem to be hell-bent on destruction," said Wenner, who then quizzed Dylan if he worried about global warming.

Bob Dylan, a clever enough fellow that he once attained the amorous affections of Raquel Welch despite looking like a homeless person, refused to take his interlocutor's bait. "Where's the global warming?" he asked Wenner. "It's freezing here."

That exchange came immediately to mind when the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) announced Monday that Dylan's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall will serve as the theme song for the historic global climate change conference that gets underway next week in Copenhagen.

The UN is putting out a short film called Hard Rain that sets the Dylan classic to a montage of striking photographs meant to highlight the perils of fossil fuel use and global warming: Bangladeshi refugees, barren Haitian forests, the melting Greenland ice sheet, an oil-soaked bird on a Brazilian beach, etc. Accompanying the film is a specially commissioned essay entitled "The Urgency of Now" written by green activist Lloyd Timberlake. UNEP is also distributing a book of the photographs. This is all part of something called the Hard Rain Project, which aims to "reinvent the world so it's compatible with nature and human nature."

The project largely is the, er, brainchild of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The UNEP press release quotes him saying, rather loftily, "If Hard Rain is a photographic elegy, it is also an impassioned cry for change. Forceful, dramatic and disturbing, it is driven by what Martin Luther King called 'the fierce urgency of now' -- and I believe the call for a truly global response to climate change is an idea whose time has finally come."

At first listen A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall would seem to be right up the alley of those invested in warning about the impending eco-apocalypse. The lyrics make reference to dead oceans, sad forests, a child beside a dead pony, a newborn surrounded by wolves, and a woman on fire. One line has the singer describing the depths of a black forest, "where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters."

It is an unsettling song and, frankly, an inscrutable one. But that hasn't stopped the masters of environmental hyperbole at UNEP from deciding that Dylan is speaking the gospel of planetary doom.

"The dark and evocative lyrics of A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall echo the kind of impacts the world faces if climate change continues unchecked," said Achim Steiner, UNEP's Executive Director.

The only problem is that there's no reason to think this interpretation of Dylan's classic is correct. A constant complaint in Dylan's interviews over the years is that people often misinterpret his songs. Originally people thought A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall was about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nope, he wrote and performed it a month before that 1962 saga. That didn't stop a generation of folks believing the hard rain referred to nuclear fallout.

Dylan tried to put that notion to rest in a famous interview conducted by Studs Terkel: "No, it's not atomic rain, it's just a hard rain. It isn't the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that's just gotta happen." Whatever that means.

But clearly all that lingo about the despoiled environment is about, well, environmental destruction, right? Maybe not. As Dylan himself explained, "In the last verse, when I say, 'the pellets of poison are flooding their waters', that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers."

Oh.

A curious thing about Dylan is that he is regarded by many as the embodiment of the spirit of protest and raised consciousness of the 1960s. Yet he has always seemed uncomfortable with that role. In his own eyes he's just a musician. He writes and performs songs. That's what he does.

So the notion of enlisting Dylan to be the voice of a new green generation is a little silly. The guy did a commercial for Cadillac's gargantuan Escalade SUV two years ago, after all. That, like the Rolling Stone interview, is just another clue that Dylan might not be marching in lockstep with fashionable society when it comes to global warming groupthink.

The earnest alarmists at the United Nations are undeterred by the silliness of this campaign. Dylan and his music are iconic, and should be put to use in the furtherance of a noble cause. Or as Mr. Steiner put it, "Bob Dylan had another song. One that reflects a strong and positive Copenhagen outcome that puts the world on a low-carbon path -- The Times They Are A-Changin."

Groan-inducing to be sure. But while we're at it, perhaps Steiner, Gordon Brown, and the rest of the Hard Rain brigade might consider mining the Dylan songbook a bit further. They need to come up with something to describe the virtually nonexistent prospects of getting a landmark international agreement at Copenhagen, despite the labors of PM Brown, President Obama, and other world leaders. May I suggest Blowin' in the Wind?

Max Schulz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Film Reviews: Ninja Assassin

2009-12-02T06:18:00.005-05:00

Ninjas slash as slash can

By KYLE SMITH
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
November 25, 2009

Not to brag, but who is this "Ninja Assassin" fellow compared to me? He: gets sliced to the bone by whirling blades, is blasted unconscious by stun guns and does handstands on a bed of nails. I: sat through "Old Dogs."

Korean pop singer Rain plays Raizo, a child raised in the world's coolest orphanage: Chores include learning to maim and slash the other children, who are being raised to be ninja assassins by their dark master Lord Ozunu. These orphans don't beg, unless it's to say, "Please, sir, I want some more whoop-ass."

Despite all this happy carnage -- the arterial spray throughout is of lawn-sprinkler force, and many a wall exists only to get Jackson Pollocked with bright red viscous goo -- Raizo comes to doubt his brethren. The outfit considers membership to be nonrevocable, though, and sends dedicated field representatives out to explore the possibility of carving Raizo into Raisinets, if possible while inflicting extravagant doses of pain.

The evil ninjas seem to be unaware of exactly who it is they are dealing with: Raizo once spent a year training blindfolded, which is exactly how I wish I had seen "Old Dogs." He also devises an ingenious way to fend off a ninja kill technique disguised as clean laundry.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, a police forensics analyst (Naomie Harris) begins looking into a network of something or other involving a trail of yada yada that leads wherever. Her group, Europol, goes after the ninjas, including Raizo, but one cop makes a big mistake when he brazenly refers to the ninjas as "a few whack jobs wearing pajamas." No, that's conservative bloggers.

Europol becomes a target of the rest of the Ozunus, who can't allow anyone to jump the queue when it comes to torturing Raizo. The forensics expert, though, joins forces with Raizo after receiving a warning letter containing the evil ninjas' trademark black sand.

I can tell her that an invitation to attend a screening of a new Disney movie that stars Robin Williams would have been equally unsettling.

"Ninja Assassin," which is bloodier than peak hour at the abattoir, offers about 2½ films' worth of roaring action -- Raizo is so handy with a chain that surrounding ninjas fall like dandelions against a weed whacker -- played with an earnest B-movie fervor. Despite the pace, though -- pedal, have you met my friend metal? -- "Ninja Assassin" still has some of its best stuff left at the end, when the master returns to demonstrate his extra-special, super-most-deadliest technique. This movie knows exactly what it is: Gonzo silliness about bodies turned into human salsa.

Ninja Assassin -- Film Review

By Ethan Alter, November 11, 2009 05:01 ET
The Hollywood Reporter
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/

Chances are if you're willingly walking into a movie entitled "Ninja Assassin," you're expecting to see three basic things: 1) ninjas, 2) lots of them, 3) fighting each other with all sorts of cool weapons your parents never would let you own.

It's a pleasure to report, then, that this contemporary chopsocky feature, produced by the Wachowski brothers and directed by James McTeigue ("V for Vendetta"), delivers on those essential elements. It is indeed filled with lots of ninjas who are constantly at each other's throats with all manner of sharp implements.

The film is likely to enjoy only a modest run in theaters, but its chances at a successful home entertainment afterlife seem strong.

Made for the relatively modest price tag of $50 million, "Ninja" often appears as if it cost twice that, thanks to its lush visuals (lensed by Karl Walter Lindenlaub) and terrific special effects, pulled off with a combination of practical and digital tricks. In terms of narrative, though, it's a B-picture all the way.

The somewhat jumbled story line centers on Raizo (South Korean pop singer Rain), a skilled warrior raised from an early age to be a foot soldier in a secret army of ninja assassins. But after his brutal master kills the girl he loves, Raizo goes rogue and wages war on his former employers with the help of an Interpol agent (Naomie Harris) investigating this shadowy world of sword-wielding hitmen.

A plot this thin requires charismatic actors to give the proceedings any dramatic weight. Unfortunately, that's the primary area where "Ninja" falls short. Rain might be a superstar in concert, but he's not very interesting onscreen. Granted, the serviceable screenplay by Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski only gives him glum angst to play, but his perpetual blank stare doesn't suggest much range.

It's also a shame to see Harris, who had such a steely, badass presence in her breakthrough role in "28 Days Later," stuck playing the out-of-her-depth sidekick.

Where the movie excels is the action sequences, largely because McTeigue takes full advantage of his R rating to indulge in lots of blood-soaked slicing-and-dicing, while displaying a sense of humor the rest of the film lacks.

In typical Wachowski fashion, these set pieces embrace both comic book and video game aesthetics: The frames are carefully composed and packed with rich colors, but the camera is rarely locked down, toggling around the space as if McTeigue were controlling it with a joystick. This approach might upset old-school kung fu movie fans, but it results in some of the most entertaining and over-the-top martial arts action this side of the "Kill Bill" films.

"Ninja" isn't a great movie, but if you're in the right frame of mind, it is a bloody good time.

Opens: Wednesday, Nov. 25 (Warner Bros.)
Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Silver Pictures, Legendary Pictures, Dark Castle Entertainment, Anarchos Prods., Studio Babelsberg
Cast: Rain, Naomie Harris, Ben Miles, Rick Yune, Sho Kosugi, Guido Foehrweisser, Stephen Marcus, Wladimir Tarasjanz, Randall Duk Kim, Sung Kang
Director: James McTeigue
Screenwriters: Matthew Sand, J. Michael Straczynski
Story: Matthew Sand
Producers: Joel Silver, Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski, Grant Hill
Executive Producers: Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni, Steve Richards
Director of Photography: Karl Walter Lindenlaub
Production Designer: Graham Walker
Music by Ilan Eshkeri
Costume Designer: Carlo Poggioli
Edited by Gian Ganziano, Joseph Jett Sally
Rated R, 99 minutes

O's Window Dressing

2009-12-01T08:42:00.003-05:00

By RALPH PETERS
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
December 1, 2009

In the art-auction world, the trick to selling a bad painting is to put it in a terrific frame. That's the logic behind President Obama's West Point speech tonight.

Condemned by his own vacillation to sketching a picture repulsive to multiple constituencies, Obama will use the impressive frame of West Point to lend his remarks an illusion of glorious leadership.

The event will be impressive: The US Military Academy does pomp and circumstance well. The cadets will be immaculate and perfectly behaved, applauding on cue (no Joe Wilson "You lie!" shout-outs from this hyper-disciplined bunch).

Flags, formality and hallowed tradition will be at the service of a policy announcement that, by tomorrow morning, the establishment media will hail as rivaling the Gettysburg Address (to the journalistic herd, every Obama utterance is greater than the last -- from Cairo to Fort Hood to West Point).

So it's clear why Obama's packagers chose West Point: military glamour, a star-struck audience of undergraduates and the subliminal message that anyone who questions the president's wisdom opposes "duty, honor, country."

But the choice also reveals how politically gun shy Obama has become. Above all else, West Point's safe.

A president serious about strategic policy would have given this speech at the National War College, or to the Joint Staff in the Pentagon auditorium, or to a joint session of Congress, or from the Oval Office. He would have addressed his strategy to those charged with overseeing and implementing it.

Instead, he's created an enormous disruption at West Point to speak to apprentice officers whose responsibilities after commissioning will be to lead platoons of 20 to 40 soldiers. These are splendid young Americans, but they're not an appropriate audience for game-changing policy announcements.

To resurrect Marshall McLuhan's phrase from the 1960s, "The medium is the message" for the Obama administration -- the packaging trumps the content. Aware that his strategy's a muddled compromise that won't come to grips with our top security challenges, Obama's staging a media event. But he still won't deliver leadership.

His primary strength remains a hollow charisma to which the media remain embarrassingly susceptible. The president's delivery is superb (when the teleprompter works), but the content of his globe-trotting sermons avoids nasty realities.

Tonight, he'll announce a measured troop surge, justifying it with boilerplate remarks. He won't tell us why holding Afghan dirt matters more than killing America's enemies.

But he'll also seek to soothe his base on the left, hinting at sharp limits on our commitment.

It's the worst of both worlds: As if, during World War II, we'd told the Japanese and Germans that we really meant business, but intended to quit by 1944.

I believe that increasing our commitment to the loathsome Afghan government and occupying worthless Afghan real estate is folly. Yet, given a decision by the president to surge more troops, I want the effort to succeed. It won't have a chance, though, if the Taliban are told that they just have to hang on. Afghans are very good at hanging on.

The key word to listen for in tonight's speech is "Pakistan." Afghanistan's an elusive booby prize -- while, next door, we're supporting (and strategically hostage to) a country that revels in anti-Americanism, harbors terrorists and sponsors terrorism. We have met the enemy -- and written him a big, fat check.

Any strategy that doesn't come to grips with Pakistan -- beyond generalities about enhanced cooperation -- is doomed.

But strategic success isn't Obama's ultimate concern. He wants political cover and is doing all he can to ensure that he's not on the blame-line, no matter what happens.

He wants to appear strong -- but without unleashing our strength. He'll send more troops -- but won't let them do more. Their primary mission will be to protect our enemies.

As you watch and listen to the president tonight, separate what's said from the setting's grandeur. Dig beneath the fancy bow, ribbons and gift wrap to find out if anything's in Obama's box.

You'll find this strategic gift is half bicycle, half pony -- and charged to your account.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "The War After Armageddon."

Their Finest Hour

2009-12-01T08:23:00.002-05:00

Books in Review

By Jason Emerson from the December 2009-January 2010 issue of The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America
By Craig Shirley
(ISI Books, 740 pages, $30)

The landslide outcome of the 1980 presidential election now seems a foregone conclusion. With double-digit inflation and interest rates, high taxes, a loss of international prestige, and the indignity of American hostages in Iran, President Jimmy Carter's loss to former California governor Ronald Reagan seems inevitable. The electoral blowout of 489-49 and the popular victory by almost 9 million votes seems as unsurprising in retrospect as Franklin Roosevelt's fourth term. But as Craig Shirley shows in his new book, Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America, Reagan's path to the White House -- from the Republican primaries to the general election -- was anything but a smooth journey, and nearly ended in failure.

In truth, Reagan's 1980 victory began with his 1976 sliver-thin loss to then president Gerald R. Ford in the Republican primaries. Reagan's convention speech that year galvanized the Republican Party -- and made many wonder if they had chosen the wrong candidate. Reagan spent the four years from 1976 to 1980 speaking and writing about conservative causes and ideals, and campaigning for GOP candidates across the country. He entered the 1980 Republican primary as the clear front-runner, but by no means the only candidate. It became a race not just for the leading of America, but for the soul of the Republican Party. It was a contest between men of vastly different political ideologies: liberal Republicans such as John Anderson, moderate, country club Republicans like George H. W. Bush, and conservatives such as Ronald Reagan.

Who knows or remembers today how perilously close Reagan came to losing the nomination that year? Shirley reveals the Reagan campaign's strategy and characters in more detail than has ever been accomplished, from the arrogant yet brilliant campaign manager John Sears, to the involvement of Nancy Reagan, to the vagaries of the candidate himself. As Shirley clearly shows, Ronald Reagan was an exceptional visionary, politician, and campaigner, but his great weakness was his penchant for coasting through a campaign if he was not challenged. This, in fact, along with bad advice to avoid campaigning in the all-important first primary in New Hampshire, led to Reagan's shocking loss to George H. W. Bush in the Granite State. After this loss, Reagan was "on the brink of political oblivion," as Shirley states.

From this first loss until his ultimate victory in the primaries, we see Reagan not as a flawless conservative hero, but as the man and the candidate that he honestly was, one with great strengths and also weaknesses. His political acumen, his intelligence and charm, his ability to communicate and connect with voters, all are evident. But while Shirley clearly admires Reagan, the author pulls no punches and makes no excuses for the Gipper's flaws. He shows time and again how Reagan "coasted" through certain areas and aspects of the campaign; how Reagan made mistakes by skipping debates and made misstatements on the trail; that Reagan at times put too much faith in certain of his advisers, and as a consequence even betrayed the loyalty of other friends and advisers, such as the firing of longtime friend and adviser Michael Deaver. Shirley shows Reagan's occasional temper, such as when his argument with campaign manager John Sears nearly ended with Reagan punching the obstinate and arrogant man in the face.

The narrative of Rendezvous with Destiny flows smoothly from campaign to campaign, showing the workings and strategies, the successes and failures of all the candidates: Reagan, Bush, Anderson, John Connally, Bob Dole, Howard Baker, and the waffling indecision of former President Ford. There also is equal study given to the Democratic primary race between President Carter and Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy -- a race that showed Carter's ruthless campaign tactics, and bloodied him up severely for the general election. As the reader is moved through these interweaving stories, the classic events of the campaign are always looming on the horizon, such as the great two-man debate at Nashua High School in New Hampshire where Reagan outflanked his main opponent, George Bush, by bringing the other non-invited candidates to the stage. When the moderator tried to turn off Reagan's microphone, the governor's angry shout of, "I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!" resounds through the story.

The exhaustive study of both the Republican and Democratic primary races is followed by an equally meticulous recounting of the general election between Reagan and Carter. In this epochal race, the outcome of which ultimately transformed the entire American political landscape and national direction, Shirley reveals many of the criticisms that dogged Reagan throughout his two terms as president, such as his advanced age (which Shirley says Reagan's enemies chewed on "like a mongrel dog on a soup bone"), and his perceived "warmongering" and lack of intelligence. Though all without merit, these attacks were continuous by his Republican opponents, by President Carter, and by the national media, and the repetition of these attacks aggravated Reagan to no end.

As with the description of the GOP primary races, Shirley's narrative of the general election flows liquidly between the two campaigns, examining their highs and lows. Reagan's relentless optimism is as shiningly evident throughout the story as Carter's depressing pessimism. The story is as exhilarating as it is illuminating, as the sense of expectation builds toward the famous lone debate between Reagan and Carter, in which Reagan quips, "There you go again," and then on to election night, when Carter concedes before the polls are even closed and Reagan takes the call while standing in a towel just after a shower.

One of the many interesting subtexts of this book is a full accounting of former president Gerald Ford's place in the 1980 election. Would he run in the primaries or would he not? Would he endorse a candidate or would he not? After Reagan won the nomination, where did Ford stand in relation to his 1976 opponent, whom the former president believed had lost him the election to Jimmy Carter four years previous? Also included is the full story of the nearly-accomplished-but-not-to-be "dream ticket" of Reagan-Ford at the Detroit convention. How did this potential pairing occur? Why would Reagan have considered such an arrangement? And how exactly did the idea fall apart to make way for George Bush as Reagan's running mate? All of these questions are answered, and show the pragmatism as well as the wisdom of candidate Reagan.

Interestingly, it is a chapter that seems to stall the narrative flow that is actually one of the great moments in the book. For nearly 30 years there has been a mystery as to how and by whose hand the Reagan presidential campaign had obtained President Carter's top-secret debate briefing books. There was even a congressional inquiry into the theft in 1983, with no solution reached. Craig Shirley has unearthed the answer, and reveals it to have been unsavory political operative -- in fact a former Communist organizer -- Paul Corbin. Corbin was a friend of the Kennedy family and an earnest supporter of Edward Kennedy's bid to dethrone President Carter in 1980. Yet when Kennedy failed to win the nomination, Corbin's hatred of Carter led him to assist the Reagan campaign.

Shirley shows how Corbin offered to help the campaign with organized labor, and that campaign manager Jim Baker (brought over from the Bush primary campaign) had a hand in bringing him in, despite his dislike of the man. Corbin claimed his position was to produce research reports on Florida, but in reality his intention was not so much to help Reagan as it was to destroy Carter. Shirley shows how Corbin obtained the books, who knew about it in the Reagan campaign, and how the 1983 congressional inquiry failed to name the thief.

This revelation is an impressive bit of historical sleuthing, and a microcosm of the craftsmanship
of the entire book. Shirley's sources are vast and impressive, utilizing not only primary and secondary source books, but dozens of archival collections from across the country; volumes of contemporary news accounts in newspapers, periodicals, and television; and nearly 200 interviews with all the major players throughout the entire 1980 election season. These sources augment the author's clear and complete understanding of his subject matter.

Shirley has proven himself a master of presidential campaign histories -- a true heir to Theodore White, whose histories of the presidential campaigns of 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972 are benchmarks for political literature and campaign histories. Shirley's first book, Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All (Nelson Current, 2005), tackled the history of Reagan's quest to wrest the 1976 Republican presidential nomination away from then president Gerald R. Ford. That book was not merely an applause at near victory; it was an exhaustive study of the entire campaign, the national scene, the state of the political parties, the nature of every candidate and every state primary. It showed Reagan virtuous and flawed, winner and loser, and immaculately set the stage for Shirley's latest offering in Rendezvous with Destiny. Likewise, this book will make readers hungry for a study of the 1984 presidential campaign, which Shirley has already begun, and which promises to be the concluding masterstroke in his triptych of Reagan campaign studies.

Perhaps George Will explains Rendezvous with Destiny best when he writes in his foreword to the book, "This book is both a primer on practical politics and a meditation on the practicality of idealism. It arrives, serendipitously, at a moment when conservatives are much in need of an inspiring examination of their finest hour."

History vindicates truth; that is an axiom of the historical profession. We are now at the beginnings of the dispassionate historical study of Reagan's legacy. It takes decades for contemporary passions to cool, for the memoirs of those who knew and worked with Reagan to be written and digested. Now comes the time of the research historian.

The historiography of all epochal figures runs the same schedule. Abraham Lincoln's legacy was at first clouded by his martyrdom, then by the passions of the Civil War generation. As sociologist Barry Schwartz has so deftly explained his book, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, it took decades for Lincoln to be examined objectively, and it took a new generation of Americans to appreciate Lincoln for his faults as well as his virtues.

The study of Ronald Reagan is following this same path. It is now in the beginning stages of objective inquiry, where Reagan's strengths and his weaknesses, his virtues as well as faults, are all under consideration to give a complete view of this iconic man. It is a crucial period when historical objectivity is coupled with the knowledge and reminiscences of people who knew Reagan. Craig Shirley's Rendezvous with Destiny, just as in his previous book, Reagan's Revolution, is a paradigm of this period of Reagan scholarship. It is an exhaustive study that will be at the very core of the Reagan bibliography for future generations, and will not anytime soon -- if ever -- be surpassed.

- Jason Emerson is the author of Lincoln the Inventor, The Madness of Mary Todd Lincoln, and a forthcoming biography of Robert Todd Lincoln.

Switzerland Says “No” to the Bayonets of Islam

2009-11-30T11:21:00.002-05:00

by Baron Bodissey
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/
Sunday, November 29, 2009

The Swiss people went to the polls today in a referendum on the banning of minarets in Switzerland.

By the time they voted, they were well aware of the stakes in the issue. If they voted to approve the minaret ban, they would certify themselves as “racists” and “xenophobes”. They would show that hate and intolerance had won. They would be identified as worthy heirs of the Third Reich.

Yet, despite all of that, despite the pariah status that awaited them, the Swiss people voted overwhelmingly to approve the minaret ban.

So what happens next? What can the “world community” do to teach Switzerland a lesson?

If it were a member of the European Union, the solution would be easy. The example of Austria a few years back shows how the EU handles a member state whose internal politics violate the sensibilities of the bien-pensants in Brussels.

But Switzerland is a tougher nut to crack. Will the OIC call on its member states to boycott cuckoo clocks and watches? Will the jet set give up their skiing holidays in Switzerland? Will the rich and powerful close their numbered Swiss bank accounts and put their money elsewhere?

In any case, the Swiss people have made their opinion clear. According to AFP:

Switzerland votes to ban minarets

GENEVA — Switzerland on Sunday voted to impose a blanket ban on the building of minarets across the country, backing an initiative by far-right politicians.

A clear majority of 57.5 percent of the population and 22 out of 26 cantons voted to ban the towers or turrets attached on mosques from where Muslims are called to prayer.

Far-right politicians celebrated the results, while the government sought to assure the Muslim minority that a ban on minarets was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.”

The Swiss People’s Party (SVP) — Switzerland’s biggest party — had forced a referendum under Swiss regulations on the issue after collecting 100,000 signatures within 18 months from eligible voters.

Having won a double majority — both in terms of cantons and absolute numbers, the initiative will now be inscribed in the country’s constitution.

“The Federal Council (government) respects this decision. Consequently the construction of new minarets in Switzerland is no longer permitted,” said the government, which had firmly opposed the ban, in a statement.

Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said the result “reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies.”

“These concerns have to be taken seriously… However, the Federal Council takes the view that a ban on the construction of new minarets is not a feasible means of countering extremist tendencies,” she stressed.

She also sought to reassure the Muslim population, saying: “Today’s popular decision is only directed against the construction of new minarets.

“It is not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture. Of that, the Federal Council gives its assurance.”

But the Muslim community, which makes up 400,000 out of 7.5 million people in Switzerland, was dismayed.

“The most painful for us is not the minaret ban, but the symbol sent by this vote. Muslims do not feel accepted as a religious community,” said Farhad Afshar, who heads the Coordination of Islamic Organisations in Switzerland.

The Christian community also expressed dismay, saying it was “inadmissible that the religious minority now have to subject to unequal treatment.”

For Amnesty International, the minaret ban is a “violation of religious freedom, incompatible with the conventions signed by Switzerland.”

“The initiators (of the referendum) have unfortunately managed to exploit fears towards Islam and stirred up xenophobic sentiments, it’s regrettable,” said Daniel Bolomey, who heads the Swiss chapter of the rights group.

Meanwhile, SVP Vice-President Yvan Perrin cheered the fact that his party had won the vote “without difficulty.”

He told Radio Suisse Romande that Swiss companies should not worry about suffering from a possible backlash from Muslim countries.

“If our companies continue to make good quality products, they have nothing to worry about,” he said.

Noting that the Swiss had made their decision after fervent debate on the issue, he said: “We won respectably.”

Today's Tune: Southside Johnny - All the Way Home (Live)

2009-11-29T11:57:00.005-05:00

(Click on title to play video)

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

2009-11-29T11:47:00.002-05:00

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
The Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Published: 6:10PM GMT 28 Nov 2009

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p.

Kill the Bills. Do Health Reform Right.

2009-11-29T11:39:00.002-05:00

The bill is irredeemable.

By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.nationalreview.com/
November 27, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

The United States has the best health care in the world — but because of its inefficiencies, also the most expensive. The fundamental problem with the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill (as with its 2,014-page House counterpart) is that it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees, and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.

Worse, they are packed into a monstrous package without any regard to each other. The only thing linking these changes — such as the 118 new boards, commissions, and programs — is political expediency. Each must be able to garner just enough votes to pass. There is not even a pretense of a unifying vision or conceptual harmony.

The result is an overregulated, overbureaucratized system of surpassing arbitrariness and inefficiency. Throw a dart at the Senate tome:

You’ll find mandates with financial penalties — the amounts picked out of a hat.

You’ll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give risk factors, such as age. Currently, insurance premiums for 20-somethings are about one-sixth the premiums for 60-somethings. The House bill dictates the young shall now pay at minimum one-half; the Senate bill, one-third — numbers picked out of a hat.

You’ll find sliding scales for health-insurance subsidies — percentages picked out of a hat — that will radically raise marginal income tax rates for middle-class recipients, among other crazy unintended consequences.

The bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.

Then do health care the right way — one reform at a time, each simple and simplifying, aimed at reducing complexity, arbitrariness, and inefficiency.

First, tort reform. This is money — the low-end estimate is about half a trillion per decade — wasted in two ways. Part is simply hemorrhaged into the legal system to benefit a few jackpot lawsuit winners and an army of extravagantly rich malpractice lawyers such as John Edwards.

The rest is wasted within the medical system in the millions of unnecessary tests, procedures, and referrals undertaken solely to fend off lawsuits — resources wasted on patients who don’t need them and which could be redirected to the uninsured who really do.

In the 4,000-plus pages of the two bills, there is no tort reform. Indeed, the House bill actually penalizes states that dare “limit attorneys’ fees or impose caps on damages.” Why? Because, as Howard Dean has openly admitted, Democrats don’t want “to take on the trial lawyers.” What he didn’t say — he didn’t need to — is that they give millions to the Democrats for precisely this kind of protection.

Second, even more simple and simplifying, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines.

Some states have very few health insurers. Rates are high. So why not allow interstate competition? After all, you can buy oranges across state lines. If you couldn’t, oranges would be extremely expensive in Wisconsin, especially in winter.

And the answer to the resulting high Wisconsin orange prices wouldn’t be the establishment of a public option — a federally run orange-growing company in Wisconsin — to introduce “competition.” It would be to allow Wisconsin residents to buy Florida oranges.

But neither bill lifts the prohibition on interstate competition for health insurance. Because this would obviate the need — the excuse — for the public option, which the left wing of the Democratic party sees (correctly) as the royal road to fully socialized medicine.

Third, tax employer-provided health insurance. This is an accrued inefficiency of 65 years, an accident of World War II wage controls. It creates a $250 billion annual loss of federal revenues — the largest tax break for individuals in the entire federal budget.

This reform is the most difficult to enact, for two reasons. The unions oppose it. And the Obama campaign savaged the idea when John McCain proposed it during last year’s election.

Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method — a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.

The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one — tort reform, interstate purchasing. and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 — and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2009, The Washington Post Writers Group