(26Jan09) “....Now that the US election is out of the way and Barack Obama has been elected and inaugurated, and now that the effects of the economic meltdown are beginning to wash up on to every international shore , perhaps people may be more inclined to have a second look as to the cause, the politics and the personalities involved. It's difficult not to be drawn to the conclusion that in a national endeavour in the US to vote for the soaring and lofty rhetoric, the tip instead of the iceberg, the arsonists have been voted in as firemen....” Global Economic Crisis “....If this were only a United States problem that would be fair enough !!!! But it's not. Everyone's superannuation, property values and jobs have been put at risk and possibly sacrificed on the altar of United States “affirmative action” housing loans. The cut & pastes and links are from earlier postings but it's interesting to note that the first in the series, “Trillion Dollar Shakedown” is an observation from as far back as 2000....”
The ETS: Completely Unnecessary
(25Jan09) Probably the greatest debunking to date of AGW
So if there is no evidence to support AGW, and the missing hotspot shows that AGW is wrong, why does most of the world still believe in AGW? Part of the answer is that science changed direction after a large constituency of vested interests had invested in AGW.
“......From 1975 to 2001 the global temperature trended up. How do you empirically determine the cause of this global warming? It turns out we can learn a lot simply by observing where the warming occurred: each possible cause of global warming heats the atmosphere differently, heating some parts before others. The pattern of warming is the cause's "signature". The signature of an increased greenhouse effect consists of two features: a hotspot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics, and a combination of broad stratospheric cooling and broad tropospheric warming.... We have been observing temperatures in the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes - weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. The radiosonde measurements for 1979-1999 show broad stratospheric cooling and broad tropospheric warming, but they show no tropical hotspot. Not even a small one... Human carbon emissions were occurring at the time but the greenhouse effect did not increase. Therefore human carbon emissions did not increase the greenhouse effect, and did not cause global warming. So AGW is wrong, and carbon is innocent. Suspect exonerated - wrong signature....” The ETS: Completely Unnecessary , David Evans “....By the late 1990s ice core techniques had improved. In the old ice cores the data points were a few thousand years apart, but in the new ice core data they were only a few hundred years apart. In the early 1990s, New Scientist magazine anticipated that the higher-resolution data would seal the case for AGW. But the opposite occurred. By 2003 it had been established to everyone's satisfaction that temperature changes preceded corresponding carbon changes by an average of 800 years: so temperature changes caused carbon changes .... So the ice core data no longer supported AGW. The alarmists failed to effectively notify the public..... So if there is no evidence to support AGW, and the missing hotspot shows that AGW is wrong, why does most of the world still believe in AGW? Part of the answer is that science changed direction after a large constituency of vested interests had invested in AGW. The old ice core data provided support from 1985, the IPCC was established by the UN in 1988 to look into human changes to climate, and the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 to limit carbon emissions. By 1999 the western political class were doing something, the western media were rallying behind "saving the planet".....The remainder of the answer for the current belief in AGW is darker and more political. An offbeat theory in the 1970s, AGW was adopted by a group of about 45 atmospheric modelers and physicists. That group dominated climate science journals, peer reviewed each others papers, and hindered competing ideas by underhand methods...... The media has avoided presenting information that undermines AGW, until recently. Instead they promoted alarmism, and discredited skeptics as being in the pay of big oil - while giving a free pass to Gore, who made a movie based on an obvious lie then made millions selling carbon offsets.....
How the Presidents stack up ( Click the forward arrow in the bottom right hand corner)
Here's a political cartoon you're not likely to see in the world media.
Whitewashing History Before Our Eyes
(20Jan09) Ignore the "content deleted" msessage at the top of the page and scroll further down for the video in which Palestinian leader Fathi Hamad boasts of using civilians as human shields. Whitewashing History Before Our Eyes
The images they show..and those that they don't
(20Jan09) The situation in the Middle East comes down to a picture. Scroll down the page to see that ' These are the images they show- and also the images they dont show.
(18Jan09) The Hamas "dead baby" strategy - to cause as many civilian casualties as possible by firing its deadly rockets from schools and densely populated areas - is producing understandable outrage around the world. What is not understandable is why the outrage is directed against Israel, which is a victim of this strategy, rather than against Hamas, which is its perpetrator. Hamas knew exactly what it was doing when it fired more than 6,000 rockets at Israeli kindergartens, elementary schools and playgrounds from behind its own children. It was playing Russian roulette with the lives of Israeli children in order to provoke a defensive response from Israel…. Hamas also knew that Israel could not stop the rockets aimed at its children without accidentally killing some Palestinian children because Hamas was using Palestinian children as human shields for its rockets. Despite its best efforts to avoid killing civilians - Israel gains nothing from such "collateral damage" and loses much-Israeli missiles have killed dozens of innocent children who were deliberately placed in harm's way by Hamas terrorists….” Hamas' dead baby strategy , Alan Dershowitz, The Washington Times “….. When a Hamas rocket aimed at Israeli children misfired and killed two Palestinian children, Hamas censored all images of these dead Palestinian children, because they were killed directly by Hamas rockets rather than indirectly by Hamas using them as human shields. That is the way Hamas manipulates the media coverage of its gruesome "dead baby" strategy. The media, of course, serves as Hamas' facilitator…..” The international community - most especially the United Nations, which has done nothing about genocides committed by Muslims - is accusing Israel of "war crimes" for defending its civilians against Hamas war crimes. This too is part of the Hamas strategy which the United Nations facilitates…. Unless this "dead baby" strategy is exposed and rejected in the marketplace of morality, it's coming to a theater (or school or hospital) near you…..”
NASA: Solar cycle may cause “dangerous “ global cooling in a few years time
(17Jan09) “......Today, the Space and Science Research Center, (SSRC) in Orlando, Florida announces that it has confirmed the recent web announcement of NASA solar physicists that there are substantial changes occurring in the sun's surface. The SSRC has further researched these changes and has concluded they will bring about the next climate change to one of a long lasting cold era..... We today confirm the recent announcement by NASA that there are historic and important changes taking place on the sun's surface. This will have only one outcome - a new climate change is coming that will bring an extended period of deep cold to the planet. This is not however a unique event for the planet although it is critically important news to this and the next generations. It is but the normal sequence of alternating climate changes that has been going on for thousands of years.....All records of sunspot counts and other proxies of solar activity going back 6,000 years clearly validates our own findings that when we have sunspot counts lower then 50 it means only one thing - an intense cold climate, globally. NASA says the solar cycle 25, the one after the next that starts this spring will be at 50 or lower....” NASA: Solar cycle may cause “dangerous “ global cooling in a few years time “.....The last time this particular cycle regenerated was over 200 years ago. I call it the “Bi-Centennial Cycle” solar cycle. It took place between 1793 and 1830, the so-called Dalton Minimum, a period of extreme cold that resulted in what historian John D. Post called the ‘last great subsistence crisis.' With that cold came massive crops losses, food riots, famine and disease. I believe this next climate change will be much stronger and has the potential to once more cause widespread crop losses globally with the resultant ill effects.... Given the importance of the next climate change Casey was asked whether the government has been notified. “Yes, as soon as my research revealed these solar cycles and the prediction of the coming cold era with the next climate change, I notified all the key offices in the Bush administration including both parties in the Senate and House science committees as well as most of the nation's media outlets. Unfortunately, because of the intensity of coverage of the UN IPCC and man made global warming during 2007, the full story about climate change is very slow in getting told. These changes in the sun have begun. They are unstoppable.....”
The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe
(16Jan09) “......Since its founding in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood ( Hizb al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun ) has profoundly influenced the political life of the Middle East. Its motto is telling: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." ...... But the Middle East is only one part of the Muslim world. Europe has become an incubator for Islamist thought and political development. Since the early 1960s, Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers have moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organized network of mosques, charities, and Islamic organizations.... Four decades of teaching and cultivation have paid off. The student refugees who migrated from the Middle East forty years ago and their descendants now lead organizations that represent the local Muslim communities in their engagement with Europe's political elite. Funded by generous contributors from the Persian Gulf, they preside over a centralized network that spans nearly every European country.These organizations represent themselves as mainstream, even as they continue to embrace the Brotherhood's radical views and maintain links to terrorists..... While the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood has chosen Munich as its base of operations in Germany, its Syrian branch is headquartered in Aachen, a German town near the Dutch border.....” The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of Europe , Lorenzo Vidino Mid East Quarterly, Winter 2005 “......The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood base in Aachen kept close relations with their Egyptian counterparts. For example, confirming the tendency of important Muslim Brotherhood families to close alliance through intermarriage.....While the Muslim Brotherhood and their Saudi financiers have worked to cement Islamist influence over Germany's Muslim community, they have not limited their infiltration to Germany. Thanks to generous foreign funding, meticulous organization, and the naïveté of European elites, Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations have gained prominent positions throughout Europe.... In some cases, politicians simply fail to check the backgrounds of those who claim to be legitimate representatives for the Muslim community. As in the United States, self-described representatives for the Muslim community are far more radical than the populations they represent..... What most European politicians fail to understand is that by meeting with radical organizations, they empower them and grant the Muslim Brotherhood legitimacy. There is an implied endorsement to any meeting, especially when the same politicians ignore moderate voices that do not have access to generous Saudi funding. The ultimate irony is that Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna dreamed of spreading Islamism throughout Egypt and the Muslim world. He would have never dreamed that his vision might also become a reality in Europe.....”
Wadeye: Failed State as Cultural Triumph
This unusually long “cut and paste” reflects the depth, substance and length of the article…The read is well worth the effort.
(15Jan09) “.....The politically expedient and prideful apology from Kevin Rudd to all Aboriginal people on behalf of all Australians angered me. That it was so popular drove me to despair. I cannot shake off the feeling that this current fad amongst left-wing governments (even the Vatican) to apologise for past wrongs is really scraping the very bottom of the “spin” barrel and is in fact a form of political arrogance that will do more to exacerbate past tragedies than to redress them.... Wadeye has a population of about 2500 in its general vicinity. The main settlement has an airstrip, a Catholic school, a swimming pool, a Catholic church, a store, an art centre, a museum, a post office, municipal offices, a mechanics shop, locked petrol bowsers ($2.60 per litre) and a Centrelink office..... Wadeye’s Catholic church and the school sealed their fate with a bilingual policy that dominated from 1972 till the mid-nineties, so people over about forty years of age, who were pre-bilingual education (pre-self-determination, pre-alcoholism, pre-invasion/genocide/stolen generation, pre-apology and pre-“racism”) can still read and write. People under forty, however, cannot speak English, are functionally illiterate and have little idea of number.....The school where I am working attempts to teach children to read and write, but exaggerates its attendance figures. It needs to be constantly employing new teachers, as they often only last a matter of days or weeks before they are overwhelmed by the extent of the problem, the complete lack of discipline and the primitive circumstances under which they must work and live. There is no need to play up the extent of the massive social and educational “disadvantage” or more specifically, the mayhem, anger or passive revolution here—it is obvious....There is an unstated assumption that all teachers be apologists—that they accept the black-armband orthodoxy.... The indigenous co-principal and the whitefella co-principal attend regular conferences all over Australia.... Centrelink pays unemployment benefits to almost the entire community of Wadeye without ever breaching a person for not making an effort to find work....” Wadeye: Failed State as Cultural Triumph, Patrick McCauley, Quadrant Magazine “....They say that the kids run Wadeye, and I can see what they mean. The children throw rocks into the beautiful new blue swimming pool every night, they defecate around the school and in the pool changing rooms as a kind of retribution against the pool manager and teachers, who require them to abide by minimal rules.....The people of Wadeye mostly treat whitefellas as their servants. First thing in the morning, my students demand that I get their breakfast, and then throw a tantrum if I don’t pick up the rubbish they throw on the ground. The settlement is covered with rubbish all the time and yet it is a candidate in the “Tidy Towns” competition.... This school must be one of the most expensive schools in Australia to keep running due to its isolation and the vandalism and the stealing. If something is broken it is replaced—a leg of a barbecue was lost, so three new barbecues were ordered.... There is no greater example of the evil of the mis-information and false histories of the orthodoxy than Wadeye, and there is no greater example of the failure of CDEP, self-determination, reconciliation and all the other welfare-based, falsely compassionate, anti-Australian, civilisation-hating doctrines, than Wadeye.... The addiction, child abuse and violence that it has spawned are real, and both Christianity and the compassionate Left are standing by watching. It is only a matter of time before this place will be abandoned completely by human thought because the Left cannot bring itself to confront the uselessness of its compassion..... The Northern Territory is full of public servants with tertiary degrees and masters degrees of one thing or another who are uninterested in anything but their own careers, and when faced with difficult problems such as the one in Wadeye, fall into denial and uselessness.... If Zimbabwe is a “failed state”, it is not as “failed” as this place. Wadeye produces nothing, all the functioning business is run by whitefellas, and most is funded by our government.... Today, a young boy, maybe two years old, naked, held his third finger up at me with a hateful sneer and called out “motherfucker” as I stood outside his house trying to convince his older brother to come to school... The school business manager asked me what I was doing here, why I came here, if I do not believe in invasion, genocide and the stolen generation.....”
A Second Mortgage Disaster On The Horizon?
(13Jan09) “.....As it turns out the abyss is deeper than most people think because there is a second mortgage shock heading for the economy. In the executive suites of Wall Street and Washington, you're beginning to hear alarm about a new wave of mortgages with strange names that are about to become all too familiar. If you thought sub-primes were insanely reckless wait until you hear what's coming......The trouble now is that the insanity didn't end with sub-primes. There were two other kinds of exotic mortgages that became popular, called " Alt-A " and " option ARMs ” A Second Mortgage Disaster On The Horizon? “....The option ARMs, in particular, lured borrowers in with low initial interest rates - so-called teaser rates - sometimes as low as one percent. But after two, three or five years those rates "reset." They went up. And so did the monthly payment. A mortgage of $800 dollars a month could easily jump to $1,500. Now the Alt-A and option ARM loans made back in the heyday are starting to reset, causing the mortgage payments to go up and homeowners to default....”
Real Face of Hamas, the Murderer Of Palestinans
The ‘oldest hatred' lives, from Gaza to Florida
The media coverage by TV network France 2 was obviously about creating searing images and indelible first impressions on to the public imagination...Anyone who believes this kind of news manipulation was broadcast accidently is foolish and naive at best.
(11Jan09) “.....In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year's Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from Jan. 1, 2009, but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast "accidentally.".... In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely assaulted by 20 youths taunting, "Palestine will kill the Jews"; in Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, "Jews must die."..... ponder the reaction to Gaza in Scandinavia, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and golly, even Florida.....” The ‘oldest hatred' lives, from Gaza to Florida , Mark Stayn The Orange County Register “.....As the delegitimization of Israel has metastasized, we are assured that criticism of the Jewish state is not the same as anti-Semitism. We are further assured that anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism, which is a wee bit more of a stretch. Only Israel attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its very existence. For the purposes of comparison, let's take a state that came into existence at the exact same time as the Zionist Entity, and involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the creation of Pakistan was the greatest failure of post-war British imperial policy. But the fact is that Pakistan exists, and if I were to launch a movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift.... But, even allowing for that, what has a schoolgirl in Villiers-le-Bel to do with Israeli government policy? Just weeks ago, terrorists attacked Mumbai, seized hostages, tortured them, killed them, and mutilated their bodies. The police intercepts of the phone conversations between the terrorists and their controllers make for lively reading.....”
(11Jan09)“.....Palestinian civilians continue to be murdered in cold blood — several dozen just last weekend. Many of the victims were gunned down inside hospitals and schools. If you've been following the latest Middle East conflict, this will not surprise you. What might: The fact that the assailants were Palestinians — Hamas members targeting those affiliated with the rival Fatah organization. Only scattered and buried mentions of these attacks have appeared in such newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post . There's been little or nothing on television...... “ Hamas's Other Wa r, Clifford D. May“.... 35 Fatah activists have been summarily executed, while more than twice that number have been shot in the legs or had their hands broken. This is the other war, the war ignored by most media, academics, diplomats and human rights groups, the war between Hamas — a militant Islamist terrorist group strongly backed by Iran — and Fatah, an organization that is difficult to describe accurately in few words...... Hamas fighters also threw several of their Fatah opponents off the roofs of high-rise buildings. In European and Arab capitals, demonstrations did not break out.... In the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy can be useful — but that doesn't make him my friend....”
REPOSTED!! Pallywood
(originally posted in 2005) When watching any media coverage from the Middle East its worth keeping this 18 minute clip “Pallywood” in mind..As you will see, a great deal of the video footage you see on MSM is not what it seems.
“…This website is devoted to exploring some of the problems and issues that plague modern journalism. In this age of globalization, the media has unprecedented influence on the way we see the world. And yet, whether out of misplaced good intentions, unconscious agendas and predispositions, or unwarranted faith in false information, they can get the story dramatically wrong…” I think you'll find this 18 min clip Pallywood “ According to Palestinian sources ” particularly instructive (it's the 5th video from the top of the home page).
Gaza has its version of rocket scientists
(9Jan09) “....So how was your holiday season? Over in Gaza, whether or not they're putting the Christ back in Christmas, they're certainly putting the crucifixion back in Easter. According to the London-based Arabic newspaper al Hayat, on Dec. 23 Hamas legislators voted to introduce Sharia – Islamic law – to the Palestinian territories, including crucifixion... The following day, Christmas Eve, Samuel Huntington died at his home at Martha's Vineyard. A decade and a half ago, in his most famous book "The Clash Of Civilizations," professor Huntington argued that Western elites' view of man as homo economicus was reductive and misleading – that cultural identity is a more profound behavioral indicator than lazy assumptions about the universal appeal of Western-style economic liberty and the benefits it brings..... "The great majority of Palestinian people," Condi Rice, the secretary of state, said to commentator Cal Thomas a couple of years back, "they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society....Thomas asked a sharp follow-up: "Do you think this or do you know this?" "Well, I think I know it," said Secretary Rice. "You think you know it?" "I think I know it." Gaza has its version of rocket scientists , Mark Steyn, The Orange County Register “....In Gaza, they don't vote for Hamas because they want access to university education. Or, if they do, it's to get Junior into the Saudi-funded, Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza, where majoring in rocket science involves making one and firing it at the Zionist Entity. In 2007, as part of their attempt to recover Gaza from Hamas, Fatah seized 1,000 Qassam rockets at the university, as well as seven Iranian military trainers. At a certain unspoken level, we understand that the Huntington thesis is right, and the Rice view is wishful thinking..... Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman who received considerate and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, returned to that same hospital packed with explosives in order to blow herself up and kill the doctors and nurses who restored her to health. Well, what do you expect? It's "desperation" born of "poverty" and "occupation." If it was, it would be easy to fix. But what if it's not? What if it's about something more primal than land borders and economic aid?....The civilizational clashes of professor Huntington's book are not inevitable. Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something the West no longer has the stomach for. Unfortunately, the Saudis do, and so do the Iranians. And not just in Gaza but elsewhere the trend is away from "moderation" and toward something fiercer and ever more implacable....”
The Plain Truth about Glorious Carbon Dioxide
(9Jan09)“....Okay, children, let's all sit up straight at our desks. We are going to begin 2009 with a lesson about carbon dioxide (CO2). Why do we need to know about CO2? Because the President-elect, several of his choices for environmental and energy agencies, the Supreme Court and much of the U.S. Congress has no idea what they are talking about and, worse, want to pass legislation and regulations that will further bankrupt the United States of America.... Suffice it to say that if any of the nitwits babbling about CO2 and global warming ever went to any of the several dozen excellent websites that provide accurate scientific data and analysis, they would cease from their abusive manipulation of the public and perhaps find honest work....To begin at the beginning; at the heart of the global warming hoax is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While it purports to represent the views of thousands of scientists, it does not..... Here's what you need to know; if an increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) is directly related, i.e. causes changes in the Earth's temperature, there would be a direct correlation between the two. As CO2 rose, we would see a comparable rise in the Earth's temperature. This correlation does not exist....” The Plain Truth about Glorious Carbon Dioxide , Alan Caruba, Canada Free Press “....Global warming liars, however, insist that CO2 builds up on the atmosphere over a 50 to 250 year period, but this is untrue. Every year around April, increased CO2 absorption by plants in the Northern Hemisphere starts reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere, and the reduction continues until around mid-to-late August when plants start to go dormant.....The IPCC, however, with its agenda to tax and control energy use that produces CO2, is not based on either the obvious or more complex science involved. Its “data” is the invention of computer models that are deliberately manipulated to produce false results which, in turn, can be announced and repeated worldwide.... no regulation by man is necessary because CO2 is not a pollutant; it is part of the animal-plant life cycle. Without it, life would not exist on Earth. Increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases plant growth, which is a very good thing during a period of world population growth and an increasing demand for food.” Dr. Tim Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, recently asked, “How many failed predictions, discredited assumptions and evidence of incorrect data are required before an idea loses credibility? CO2 is not causing warming or climate change. It is not a toxic substance or a pollutant.....”
“For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel...This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly....” Hamas Parliamentarian Fathi Hammad on Al-Aqsa TV February 29, 2008.
(9Jan09)“.....Imagine that it's 1964. President Lyndon Baines Johnson just signed the landmark Civil Rights Act. Martin Luther King, Jr. celebrates by ordering his supporters to launch missiles from black neighborhoods into white communities. Picture the rockets' red glare as they rise from Watts and land in Beverly Hills. Up they soar in Harlem, and down they rain on the Upper West Side.... While imperfect, this analogy approximates today's conflict between Palestinians and Israelis in the Gaza Strip. Israel's current military retaliation would have been unnecessary had Gaza's leaders capitalized on the excellent hand they were dealt... In the ultimate goodwill gesture, Israelis withdrew from Gaza in August 2005. Israeli soldiers literally dragged devout Jews kicking and screaming from land they believed the Torah granted them....Gaza's leaders had the opportunity of a millennium... A Gazan MLK could have asked JPMorgan Chase to help construct the Middle East's most modern financial system. He could have called Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic to help build world-class hospitals. Teams from Georgetown, NYU, and Stanford could have helped establish universities whose graduates could outthink anyone from Cairo to Kabul. Estonian experts could have jetted in to explain how free trade and a flat tax can enrich small nations with powerful next-door neighbors. Club Med could have helped Gaza's Mediterranean beaches lure free-spending tourists.....” Choosing Death Over Life , Deroy Murdock “.....The world would have come running to help elevate this benighted, Denver-sized territory into an oasis from which the mirage of Middle East peace could blossom into reality — if Gazans had only asked.... But no. Top Gazans had a different development strategy: pound Israel with rockets.... Israel's critics scream when Palestinians tragically suffer collateral damage from its attacks on Hamas's armaments. But they hush up when Hamas uses Gazans as human shields. Hamas's TV broadcasts ask civilian men, women, and children to protect suspected terror sites from expected Israeli strikes. Hamas wins either way: If Israel retreats, to spare unarmed civilians, Hamas ridicules Israeli weakness. And if Israel attacks, Hamas hollers about Israel's anti-Palestinian carnage... On Christmas Eve, Hamas's parliament in Gaza backed legislation to punish certain activities under sharia law. If it receives final approval, “any Palestinian caught drinking or selling wine would suffer 40 lashes at the whipping post,” the Jerusalem Post reported . For other violations, “punishments include whipping, severing hands, crucifixion, and hanging.” So, two millennia after Christ, crucifixion returns to the Holy Land....As Gazans curse Israel's jets, tanks, and soldiers, they should remind themselves that they had a perfect chance to make the world proud, and they blew it....”
Politicians Power and a New Religion
(3Jan09)“....Since this is the moment in the year when forecasts are demanded, I shall pick a sad certainty. Parliament will create more offences, lots of them. The Government, astonishingly, has apparently created a new imprisonable offence every four days for the past decade. Curiously little row has been made about this, least of all by what passes for the parliamentary Opposition. Many of the new offences in the coming year are sure to stem from the new religion: global warming.... Its extent and scale may still be an issue among scientists, but politicians have latched on to this crusade fervently. The reason is simple. It increases the power of government. Never, never underestimate this urge. Anyone wanting to understand politics must understand this. And when it comes to global warming - it is a politicians' dream. The scope for governmental interference and pious lectures is limitless...The cult of planet-saving is, however, even more fascinating for a variety of reasons. One is the apparent oddity that the menace of global warming is so widely accepted, despite the fact that most of are shivering in the cold.....” Politicians Power and a New Religion , Andrew Alexander, MailOnline “....,History shows that the planet has over the ages warmed up and cooled down over long periods before any SUVs or indeed anything on wheels. Since we are entirely dependent on the sun's explosions for heat, this is not altogether surprising. Yet the alarmist belief is firm that variation in temperature has all been one way of late. So far as the scientific debate is concerned, it is fascinating to observe the rush to join the catastrophist school.... The assiduous statistician Professor Bjorn Lomborg of Copenhagen is a pest to the catastrophists. He deals strictly in numbers - and is prepared to accept evidence that man is indeed contributing to global warming. But not much, least of all to the crazed extent argued by Al Gore in his famous and fatuous film An Inconvenient Truth. The fact is that satellite measures show the global sea level rising by a truly tiny amount, with no rise for the past two years.....Temperatures have fallen in the past year-and-a-half, leaving the global position unchanged over the past decade. And even if all the Kyoto agreements were fulfilled, he calculates, it would reduce the global temperature in the year 2100 by only .0075 degrees. Britain's contribution would be tiny to the point of immeasurable - though painfully measurable financially.... ”
(3Jan09)“....Watching both this week's war and the world's predictable reaction to it, we can recall the Gaza rules. Most are reflections of our postmodern age, and completely at odds with the past protocols of war. First is the now-familiar Middle East doctrine of proportionality. Legitimate military action is strangely defined by the relative strength of the combatants. World opinion more vehemently condemns Israel's countermeasures, apparently because its rockets are far more accurate and deadly than previous Hamas barrages that are poorly targeted and thus not so lethal. If America had accepted such rules in, say, World War II, then by late 1944 we, not the Axis, would have been the culpable party, since by then once-aggressive German, Italian and Japanese forces were increasingly on the defensive and far less lethal than the Allies....Killing Palestinian civilians is incidental to Israeli military operations and proves counterproductive to its objectives. Blowing up Israeli non-combatants is the aim of Hamas' barrages: the more children, aged and women who die, the more it expects political concessions from Tel Aviv.....” The Gaza Rules , Victor Davis Hanson, Real Clear Politics “....By this logic, the 1999 American bombing of Belgrade -- aimed at stopping the genocide of Slobodan Milosevic -- was, because of collateral damage, the moral equivalent of the carefully planned Serbian massacres of Muslim civilians at Srebrenica in 1995... according to the Gaza rules, both sides always deserve equal blame. Indeed, this weird war mimics the politically correct, zero-tolerance policies of our public schools, where both the bully and his victim are suspended once physical violence occurs. According to such morally equivalent reasoning, World War II was only a tragedy, not a result of German aggression. Once the dead mounted up, it mattered little what were the catalysts of the outbreak of fighting. With instantaneous streaming video from the impact sites in Gaza, context becomes meaningless. Our attention is glued to the violence of the last hour, not that of the last month that incited the war....victimization is crucial. Hamas daily sends barrages into Israel, as its hooded thugs thump their chests and brag of their radical Islamic militancy. But when the payback comes, suddenly warriors are transmogrified into weeping victims, posing teary-eyed for the news camera as they deplore "genocide" and "the Palestinian Holocaust....."
Groundhog Day for the Fifth Column Of Malice
(31 Dec08) “.... Nothing is clearer than Hamas's strategy. It gives Israel the choice between rockets and media , and Hamas thinks it is a situation of, ‘We win or you lose.'...The smug smiles are wiped off the faces of Hamas leaders. Yet they have one more weapon, their reserves, they call up the media. Those arrogant, heroic, macho victors of yesterday--literally yesterday as the process takes only a few hours--are transformed into pitiful victims. Casualty figures are announced by Hamas, and accepted by reporters who are not on the spot. Everyone hit is, of course, a civilian. No soldiers here. And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way..... But for exercising its legal duty in accordance with international law, Israel is condemned and told to stop by politicians such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The moral inversion is staggering. Miliband has called for an immediate ceasefire by Israel. The implication is that Israel should suffer the Palestinian rockets attacks indefinitely.... Israel has demonstrably not been targeting civilians but Hamas terrorists. Despite the wicked impression given by the media, most of the casualties in this operation have been Hamas operatives. Even Hamas itself has admitted that the vast majority of sites Israel has hit were part of their military infrastructure...” Groundhog Day for the Fifth Column Of Malice , Melanie Phillips , Spectator “....If by ‘disproportionate' is meant merely an imbalance in the numbers who are killed on either side, this is actually inescapable if the infrastructure of aggression is to be defeated. Many more died in Afghanistan than in the 9/11 attacks; yet that war was necessary to destroy the Taleban. Many more died in Nazi Germany or Japan than in Britain or America during World War Two. Yet the scale of the Allied offensive was necessary to defeat Nazism and prevent yet more carnage amongst its designated victims. The disgusting fifth column in the Gaza conflict, however, is – as ever – the western media..If the media have mentioned the attacks on Israel at all, they have done so as an afterthought. The main story is ‘disproportionate' Israeli violence.... it is Hamas that is refusing wounded Gazans access into Egypt for treatment -- and indeed the Egyptians even opened fire on them. So where are the screams about Egyptian and Hamas brutality? Where are Amnesty and Oxfam's condemnation of Hamas and Egypt? Hamas has been blamed for this war by Mahmoud Abbas, who said Hamas could have avoided this attack if it had prolonged its ‘cease-fire'. It has been blamed for this war by Egypt; and Arab states which are terrified of Islamism in general and Iran in particular are privately rooting for Israel to wipe Hamas out. Even the Israeli left is supporting this operation. The only people taking the side of the genocidal terrorists of Hamas are the western media, parroting their propaganda....”
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