LIBEL TOURIST BACKS OFF OF WASH. INSTITUTE

A victory for free speech in America (Hat tip: Hot Air):

(WASHINGTON) — Yesterday, KinderUSA and Dr. Laila Al-Marayati dismissed with prejudice their libel suit, recently filed in California, against The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, its senior fellow Dr. Matthew Levitt, and Yale University Press. The suit involved passages contained in Dr. Levitt’s critically acclaimed and carefully researched book Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, published by Yale University Press.

In addition to dismissing its lawsuit, the plaintiffs released all their claims based on Dr. Levitt’s book. Dr. Levitt, The Washington Institute, and Yale University Press are not obligated to make any changes to Hamas, they are not limited in what they can write in the future, and they have not offered or given any compensation — monetary or otherwise, now or in the future — to plaintiffs for their dismissal of the suit.

“We view this early, voluntary, and full dismissal as a complete victory,” commented Dr. Robert Satloff, The Washington Institute’s executive director. “As a result of the dismissal, Dr. Levitt’s scholarship stands as it should be — on its own merit, unchanged by litigation or legal compromise. We were deeply concerned about the chilling effect lawsuits like this may have on other important scholars who are researching similar topics, and we hope that this result will help to create an environment more conducive to an open and honest discussion of such significant topics.”

KinderUSA and Dr. Al-Marayati dismissed their lawsuit shortly after The Washington Institute and Dr. Levitt filed a motion under California’s anti-SLAPP provisions supported by a declaration of Dr. Levitt contesting plaintiffs’ allegations. Yale University Press also filed its own anti-SLAPP motion. The anti-SLAPP statute provides a mechanism for quickly resolving lawsuits designed primarily to chill the valid exercise of constitutionally guaranteed rights, including free speech.

Note that this is in the US, though, where the case took place. If the suit were conducted from Britain, would the results be as successful? Excellent question. For now though, it's very fortunate that free speech has prevailed.

BRITAIN LETTING DISTASTE FOR JEWISH STATE GET IN THE WAY OF NOT HAVING A NUCLEAR WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Priorities:

The British government has blocked almost one third of British military exports to Israel this year, citing possible threats to regional stability and fears the equipment might facilitate human rights violations. According to official figures, the value of UK military sales arms to Israel declined by one third last year, and has fallen by a drastic 75 percent since 2005... in May the UK's Legal Services Commission, the state agency that provides funding for attorney's fees for indigent defendants, agreed to underwrite the costs of litigation brought by a Palestinian man in a British court seeking a ban on arms sales to Israel.

The British government is paying for someone to sue the British government to stop arms sales to Israel. That, brothers and sisters, is some solid work right there.

Anyway, this "regional tensions" thing is not just an excuse, it's an excuse that's so transparently false that you begin to suspect that Britain wants people to know that it's intentionally setting itself in opposition to Israel. There's only one thing that anyone can be really sure of about the Middle East: every time that a hostile Arab state reaches military parity with Israel, they take it as an invitation to start a war. Say what you will about deterrence theory or Israeli aggression or Arab intransigence: as a matter of undeniable historical fact, military parity between Israel and its Arab enemies is correlated with acts of war against Israel that spiral outward. And of course, the other neat thing about weakening Israel's conventional arsenal is that it forces Jerusalem to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons, both in terms of actual warfighting (if they get overrun) and in terms of the threshold for the weapons' use (to prevent same). Well played, Britain, well played.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]

UN AND GAZA BUSINESSMEN AGREE: IT'S ISRAEL'S FAULT THAT HAMAS HAS INTENTIONALLY CREATED A HUMANITARIAN DISASTER BY BLOCKING FOOD AND MEDICAL AID

Oh really?

UN officials and Gaza businessmen have warned that the coastal strip's economy could collapse unless Israel reopens crucial commercial trade crossings it closed after Hamas seized control of Gaza. Israel refuses to do business with the terrorist group that has killed hundreds of people in suicide bombings. In recent weeks, some border points were opened to transfer humanitarian supplies. But no industrial materials have entered Gaza, bringing construction activity and manufacturing to a halt. Forty-two percent of those Palestinians questioned said some food items were in short supply, and 80 percent of business owners polled said they were having difficulties getting raw materials.

Actually, Israel tried to reopen the crossings to send in food. But Hamas has banned all Israeli produce from the Gaza Strip - sixty trucks of produce went to waste just that day. Why would Hamas intentionally starve their own civilians? Because they want to hurt Israeli farmers and they know Israel will get the blame anyway. It's like a win-win-lose, and they don't particularly care about who's losing. They've also set up roadblocks to block medical aid. That doesn't really do anything to hurt Israeli farmers - but hey, at least Israel gets demonized. And sometimes, that's more than enough. At least the UN and the AP are refusing to reward Hamas's tactics by scapegoating Israel.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]

Loony Dutch Bishop wants to Replace "God" by "Allah"

This may not have made any English language publications yet but Bishop Muskens of Breda in the Netherlands wants to scrap the word God and use the word Allah instead because it would be a nice gesture to Muslims. "Why can't we all have the same name together" he mused in an interview.

The God of Love and the God of Jihad are one and the same, of course.


(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

GOOD AND BAD MUSLIMS

There is a generally insightful post here which tries with only partial success to explain the fact that the Jihadis are only a small minority in the Islamic world. Most Muslims just get on with their day-to-day lives as we all do and ask little more than to be left alone.

So where do the Jihadis come from? The answer is really simple. The Jihadis are people who are frustrated enough to act upon what Western Leftists say. A corrosive dissatisfaction with the world they live in is what characterizes Leftists and they express that dissatisfaction vociferously day in and day out. And the Jihadis are usually educated people who have often heard that constant angry wail.

And Muslims have got more to be angry about than most. By most criteria, Islamic societies are the anus of civilization. They are brutal, backward, stifling, sexually repressive and poor. They contribute nothing to the world and function principally as parasites on the West. But it is a great human failing to blame others for your own problems and the Jihadis grab with great satisfaction what the Leftists say: That all the ills of the world (including the ills of the Muslim world) are the fault of America and the West.

That is of course a thoroughly stupid message and it is notable that you usually seem to need a Western university education to believe it. The 9/11 bombers and the British doctor bombers were all highly educated people who had lived for years in the West. They were not Egyptian peasants.

So the Jihadis are simply people who are dumb enough and frustrated enough by their own societies to put into practice what the Left preaches. Leftism is the real enemy egging them on, not Islam. It is no wonder that the Left does all it can to protect them.


(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Feedbacks Misdiagnosed

I have been following the climate debates rather closely these days. I'd rather be doing IEC Fusion but that is stymied for lack of research funds. So the climate debate keeps my brain engaged until I can put it to more productive uses.

Let me start from the beginning. Here is how the warmists say global warming works:

1. Extra CO2 makes the atmosphere less transmissive of heat
2. That causes the atmosphere to get hotter
3. That causes more water vapor in the air
4. Which causes the atmosphere to get much hotter

Item #4 - more water vapor leads to heating is based on measurements and calculations. The measurements are pretty good in this case since they are done by satellites, so the question is are the calculations correct?

Roy Spencer says we are not doing the calculations right because we are assuming that certain things are uncorrelated when in fact they are correlated. He says that because of the way the calculations are done that this almost always leads to a positive feedback result from the calculations.

First he does a software experiment and proves his thesis with that. Well you can prove anything with computers. How about some real live data.

Now, what we really need in the climate system is some big, non-cloud source of radiative forcing, where the cloud feedback signal is not so contaminated by the obscuring effect of cloud forcing. The only good example we have of this during the satellite era is the cooling after the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.

And guess what? The SW [shortwave - ed.] cloud feedback calculation from the Pinatubo-caused variability in Forster and Gregory was – surprise, surprise! – anomalously negative, rather than positive like all of their other examples of feedback diagnosed from interannual variability!

So what is Roy's conclusion?

What I fear is that we have been fooling ourselves with what we thought was positive cloud feedback in observational data, when in fact what we have been seeing was mostly non-feedback cloud “forcing” of surface temperature. In order to have any hope of ferreting out feedback signals, we must stop averaging observational data to long time scales, and instead examine short time-scale behavior. This is why our GRL paper addressed daily variability.

Richard S. Lindzen has been saying this since at least 2001. Here is a somewhat less technical explanation with better pictures. Until this "experiment" Lindzen had no way to explain why what he thought was true was not explained by the data. It looks very much like the data is correct but our assumptions about its nature are not.

Which is another good reason why climate scientist must make public their data and methods. There could be other errors.

OK there is the science controversy. What does this mean politically? If the feed back is negative, not positive, CO2 is way less important than people have thought and the temperature rise from a given amount of CO2 will be much less than calculated by the current models.

This could be a big thing politically because if it holds up it means that we will not have to cut back our energy use while we work to solve our long term energy needs. Like with that fusion project I mentioned. Which could use $15 or 20 million for research. Contact me.

Lubos at The Reference Frame has some thoughts.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

MACON DISGUSTED BY DEMOCRAT, MUSLIM CONVERT, CHAVEZ-LOVING MAYOR

Macon (Ga.) residents may resort to demonstrations and boycotts. They are disgusted and outraged with their elected (Democrat) mayor, Jack Ellis, who is suddenly somewhat confused (to say the least). Not only has he converted to Islam but now he's sent by courier a 'declaration of solidarity' to Chavez who has called Bush 'the Devil'.

Former mayoral candidate David Corr said the mayor’s comments were “an outrage.” And state representative Allen Peake — a Macon Republican — said the mayor’s action taints the town. He said “We need to be doing things in this community that show the tremendous positives of Macon.”

Ellis praised the controversial leader as a champion for the common man who could offer aid to Macon’s residents. Chavez has subsidized the cost of heating fuel for some American low-income citizens.

Ellis said “This is about a humanitarian effort. This is NOT about politics.”

As long as you're the mayor, Ellis, this IS about politics. Go and hawk your hippy bulldust in the streets of Berkley and let somebody sane take over your job.

SOURCE

Cross-posted here

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES ROVE GETS AN MSM/TV JOB LIKE RUSSERT, MATTHEWS, OR STEPHANOPOULOS???

ZERO.

HIRING DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES LIKE RUSSERT AND MATTHEWS AND STEPHANOPOULOS IS FINE.

AND PARADING THEM ABOUT AS IF THEY WERE THE VERY EMBLEM OF POLITICAL MODERATION AND NON-PARTISANSHIP IS FINE WITH THEM, TOO. SHEESH.

AND THEY'RE PERFECTLY OKAY WITH NOT HIRING ANYONE FROM THE RIGHT OR THE GOP.

WHICH ALL PROVES WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW:

THE MSM LIKE THE ACADEMY IS DOMINATED BY LEFT-WINGERS AND DUPES.

[NOTE: ALL LINKS ARE FROM INSTAPUNDIT, SO YOU KNOW THEY HAVE TO BE TRUE.]

BTW: ONLY ROVE GOT SOMEONE RE-ELECTED TO THE WHITE HOUSE.

NOT JUST SOMEONE EITHER, BUT GEORGE FRIGGIN' W. BUSH!

MEANING: HE IS BY FAR THE SMARTEST OF THE BUNCH.

[ASIDE: I DO GIVE THE LEFTIE STEPHANOPOULOS A LITTLE CREDIT FOR QUITTING THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE WHEN THE BIMBO-LIES GOT TO DISGUSTING FOR HIM TO LIVE WITH. IT TOOK A FEW YEARS, BUT BETTER LATE THAN NEVER!)

I LIKE RUDY, MITT AND FRED, (EVEN MCCAIN IS A GREAT HAWK), BUT ONLY ONE OF THEM NEVER HAD CANCER

Rudy had prostate cancer; it's one reason he didn't run against Hillary in her first Senate race.

Fred has a Hodgkin's-type of cancer.

Even McCain had cancer a few times - and he has had some very serious surgery, too.

Only Mitt has a clean bill-of-health.

I think the vigor of the candidate is important, because the job is very demanding.

Just saying. (More on candidates and their health HERE.)

I mean, look at what 7 years in office has done to Bush - (the first pic' is from 2000; the second is from 2005, and the third from this year):

FRED THOMPSON SHOWS MORE SIGNS OF RUNNING

I don't think there's any doubt left out there that Fred Thompson will be running for president in 2008, but after seeing his latest video on imwithfred.com, I think the tiniest scintilla of doubt can now be erased. Why? Two reasons. One: it looks to me like he's lost a little bit of weight. Second: he seems to be bringing back the comb-over. Some have speculated in the cases of Rudy and Fred that the country might be hesitant to elect a bald man to the nation's highest office (we're long past the age of the muttonchops). Could Fred be playing it safe? As his supporters are known as "Fred Heads" I guess it's logical to make sure the head in question is looking its best.

Just a thought.

Victory for San Diego Firefighters: No Longer Forced to Drive in Homosexual Display

Excerpt:

The San Diego Fire Department has dropped its requirement for on-duty firefighters to drive the gay parade routes after firemen complained of sexual harassment this summer. Now only volunteers will drive the route, the San Diego Tribune reports. Early this August four firefighters were forced by their superior to drive in the parade in the Hillcrest neighborhood of the city on July 21. On August 1 they filed complaints of sexual harassment with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing after receiving sexually explicit taunts and gestures as they drove in the parade. They complained against the fire department that had forced them to be exposed to the harassment by requiring them to participate in the parade.

As a result, the Fire Chief Tracy Jarman and San Diego Firefighters Local 145 revised their policy to ensure that only volunteers will drive in the parade. Going into effect immediately, the Fire Department will offer four hours of overtime pay to anyone who volunteers to drive in the parade. In this way, officials hope that enough firefighters will step forward, ensuring that unwilling drivers will not have to participate. Fire department spokesperson Maurice Luque was confident that the department will find enough volunteers, saying, "Someone is going to step up and want four hours of overtime."

More here

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

FOLLOW-UP TO THE RECENT NASA CLIMBDOWN

An excerpt below from a long post in which Steve McIntyre looks at the defensive reaction from warmists to the recent NASA adjustments of the U.S. temperature record. In the excerpt below he notes with remarkable politeness the problems inherent in using U.S. weather station records that are sited in artificially warm locations. He notes that adjustments have allegedly been made for such locational problems but is politely appalled by the secrecy surrounding the adjustments. Science that does not make available enough detail of its research to enable replication of that research by others is just not science. He notes that at least one adjustment was UPWARDS rather than downwards, as one would expect. He also notes that, corrupted though the US data may be, it is undoubtedley less corrupted than much of the ROW (rest of the world) data -- suggesting that the recently improved U.S. record may be a better model of world effects than the corrupt figures at present in use. It is at any event now clear that we do not have GLOBAL warming. Warming that leaves out the USA is not global. At most we have ROW warming. GISS is NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, led by the frantically Warmist James Hansen.

Can GISS Adjustments "Fix" Bad Data?

Now my original interest in GISS adjustments did not arise abstractly, but in the context of surface station quality. Climatological stations are supposed to meet a variety of quality standards, including the relatively undemanding requirement of being 100 feet (30 meters) from paved surfaces. Anthony Watts and volunteers of surfacestations.org have documented one defective site after another, including a weather station in a parking lot at the University of Arizona where MBH coauthor Malcolm Hughes is employed,

These revelations resulted in a variety of aggressive counter-attacks in the climate blogosphere, many of which argued that, while these individual sites may be contaminated, the "expert" software at GISS and NOAA could fix these problems

"Fixing" bad data with software is by no means an easy thing to do (as witness Mann's unreported modification of principal components methodology on tree ring networks.) The GISS adjustment schemes (despite protestations from Schmidt that they are "clearly outlined") are not at all easy to replicate using the existing opaque descriptions. For example, there is nothing in the methodological description that hints at the change in data provenance before and after 2000 that caused the Hansen error. Because many sites are affected by climate change, a general urban heat island effect and local microsite changes, adjustment for heat island effects and local microsite changes raises some complicated statistical questions, that are nowhere discussed in the underlying references (Hansen et al 1999, 2001). In particular, the adjustment methods are not techniques that can be looked up in statistical literature, where their properties and biases might be discerned. They are rather ad hoc and local techniques that may or may not be equal to the task of "fixing" the bad data.

Making readers run the gauntlet of trying to guess the precise data sets and precise methodologies obviously makes it very difficult to achieve any assessment of the statistical properties. In order to test the GISS adjustments, I requested that GISS provide me with details on their adjustment code. They refused. Nevertheless, there are enough different versions of U.S. station data (USHCN raw, USHCN time-of-observation adjusted, USHCN adjusted, GHCN raw, GHCN adjusted) that one can compare GISS raw and GISS adjusted data to other versions to get some idea of what they did.

In the course of reviewing quality problems at various surface sites, among other things, I compared these different versions of station data, including a comparison of the Tucson weather station shown above to the Grand Canyon weather station, which is presumably less affected by urban problems. This comparison demonstrated a very odd pattern discussed here. The adjustments show that the trend in the problematic Tucson site was reduced in the course of the adjustments, but they also showed that the Grand Canyon data was also adjusted, so that, instead of the 1930s being warmer than the present as in the raw data, the 2000s were warmer than the 1930s, with a sharp increase in the 2000s.

Now some portion of the post-2000 jump in adjusted Grand Canyon values shown here is due to Hansen's Y2K error, but it only accounts for a 0.5 deg C jump after 2000 and does not explain why Grand Canyon values should have been adjusted so much. In this case, the adjustments are primarily at the USHCN stage. The USHCN station history adjustments appear particularly troublesome to me, not just here but at other sites (e.g. Orland CA). They end up making material changes to sites identified as "good" sites and my impression is that the USHCN adjustment procedures may be adjusting some of the very "best" sites (in terms of appearance and reported history) to better fit histories from sites that are clearly non-compliant with WMO standards (e.g. Marysville, Tucson).

There are some real and interesting statistical issues with the USHCN station history adjustment procedure and it is ridiculous that the source code for these adjustments (and the subsequent GISS adjustments - see bottom panel) is not available

Closing the circle: my original interest in GISS adjustment procedures was not an abstract interest, but a specific interest in whether GISS adjustment procedures were equal to the challenge of "fixing" bad data. If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in the course of their programming.

According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and USHCN) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined. This was a crying need prior to the identification of the Hansen error and would have been a crying need even without the Hansen error.

The U.S. and the Rest of the World

Schmidt observed that the U.S. accounts for only 2% of the world's land surface and that the correction of this error in the U.S. has "minimal impact on the world data", which he illustrated by comparing the U.S. index to the global index. I've re-plotted this from original data on a common scale. Even without the recent changes, the U.S. history contrasts with the global history: the U.S. history has a rather minimal trend if any since the 1930s, while the ROW has a very pronounced trend since the 1930s

These differences are attributed to "regional" differences and it is quite possible that this is a complete explanation. However, this conclusion is complicated by a number of important methodological differences between the U.S. and the ROW. In the U.S., despite the criticisms being rendered at surfacestations.org, there are many rural stations that have been in existence over a relatively long period of time; while one may cavil at how NOAA and/or GISS have carried out adjustments, they have collected metadata for many stations and made a concerted effort to adjust for such metadata.

On the other hand, many of the stations in China, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere are in urban areas (such as Shanghai or Beijing). In some of the major indexes (CRU,NOAA), there appears to be no attempt whatever to adjust for urbanization. GISS does report an effort to adjust for urbanization in some cases, but their ability to do so depends on the existence of nearby rural stations, which are not always available. Thus, ithere is a real concern that the need for urban adjustment is most severe in the very areas where adjustments are either not made or not accurately made.

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

IMAGINE NO RELIGION?

IT ISN'T HARD TO DO...

HERE ARE A FEW OF THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS ATHEIST PROGRESSIVES...

























HERE'S THE WORLD THEY MADE...












SOCIALISM: THE ROAD TO SERFDOM.











FOR LEFTIES AND THEIR DUPES.























I GOTTA BETTER SUGGESTION:











IMAGINE IF THERE WERE NO LEFTIES OR DUPES!

OH, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL WORLD!

(I'D SETTLE FOR NO DUPES!)

KARL ROVE

They are likely to nominate a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate by the name of Hillary Rodham Clinton.--Karl Rove

Karl Rove was loved by many conservatives and hated by the left. Whatever you want to say about him he's been a huge force in the political realm. To be honest I was shocked today to hear the news that he was leaving a year early. I asked my radio guest, Bill Price (who personally knows Rove) if he saw this coming and he said he didn't.

Paul Gigot describes Karl Rove in his column as "relaxed and cheerful". That is amazing to me when you look at the amount of stress he's been under for numerous years and how much he is vilified by so many. Yet, in the brief amount of time that I got to meet him last September that was my impression of him as well.

As Gigot points out, Karl Rove has clearly been extremely influential and I would argue that its been an influence for good.

I love his quote about Hillary at the top, I can't think of a more accurate term for her than "fatally flawed".

THIS DATE IN HISTORY: THE LEFT-WING COLLECTIVISTS WHO BUILT THE BERLIN WALL, CLOSED THE BORDER IN BETWEEN EAST AND WEST BERLIN

AUGUST 13, 1961:

As the Cold War continued, many East Germans began leaving East Germany for the West. East Germany closed the borders between East and West Germany in 1952, but did not seal off West Berlin; because there was freedom of movement between West Berlin and West Germany, Easterners could use the city as a transit point to the West. It was in large part to stop this drain that the East German government built the Berlin Wall, thus physically closing off West Berlin from East Germany, on August 13, 1961.

The Soviet "progressives" didn't stop with walls:

Seventeen years after German reunification, archivists have found the first written proof that East German border guards were ordered to shoot to kill at anyone trying to escape to West Germany, including women and children.

The seven-page order, dated Oct. 1, 1973, was discovered last week in the regional archive office in the eastern German city of Magdeburg. Though it is unsigned, it shows that the Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, had told guards that they must “stop or liquidate” anyone trying to cross the border.

“Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is breached in the company of women and children, which is a tactic the traitors have often used,” the document said.

The discovery of the written order, which has stunned politicians here across the political spectrum, comes just before the 46th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, which divided the city and became the symbol of the cold war. It was erected on Aug. 13, 1961, and remained for 28 years until it was toppled on Nov. 9, 1989, paving the way for the reunification of the city and the two Germanies.

ALL ideologies and political movements - whether nativistic or "progressive" - that can only operate from compulsion and coercion under threat of violence and death are all EVIL.

This is another thing the jihadists have in common with the communists.

There's another lesson in the history of this date: We should always remember that what brought the wall down wasn't detente or containment - it wasn't appeasement or accommodation; it was the courageously confrontational anti-totalitarian foreign policy of Reagan. Reagan called the commies what they were - an evil empire, and he sought to undermine them everywhere.

We need MORE of that kind of honesty and courage today.

Walls to keep people locked-in never ever created utopia, not anywhere or anytime.

And appeasement never won a war or liberated a single human soul.

We need to tear down those walls. Just like Reagan said.

We need to confront today's evil empire - the islamo-fascists of al Qaeda and Iran.

There's only one thing the thugs of the Soviet Union and the thugs of al Qaeda and Iran understand. IOW: No more hudnas.

More here.

TO WIN WW4, WE DON'T NEED UNITY AT HOME; WE ONLY NEED A MAJORITY

FACTS HERE, FROM PUNDITARIAN.

History shows that there has always been a strong anti-war element in American politics. WHY NOT?! After all, appeasement is part of human nature - like COWARDICE.

America has been lucky in that the cowards haven't always won the day - as they did in 1975 when they forced the USA to abandon the nascent democracy of South Vietnam and looked the other way when the North violated the Paris Peace Accord and invaded the South.

Let's hope that doesn't happen again.

The only way to guarantee it doesn't is to make sure we don't elect ANY Dem to the White House.

AN OLD CITY SECURITY GUARD'S HEROISM IN STOPPING A TERRORIST

There was a terrorist attack in the Old City of Jerusalem last Friday. Fortunately, the filth was stopped, and, there's a video here of what happened:

For more, here's an INN article about the case.

A TERRORIST'S WIFE LOSES CITIZENSHIP IN TUNISIA

And who might that be? Suha Arafat:

Yasser Arafat's widow Suha lost her Tunisian citizenship, the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi reported Monday.

Reportedly, the instruction to withdraw Arafat's naturalized status comes from Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

The Tunisian government did not state a reason for revoking the citizenship, but sources in the justice system said Arafat lost her "moral and material rights."

Arafat, who has been living with her daughter in Tunisia since the death of her husband in 2004, was naturalized in 2006. Al-Hayat, another London-based Arabic daily, reported that Suha Arafat left Tunisia last month. A reason for her leaving the country was not given.

It probably doesn't matter either. All that matters is that she's being punished for being as evil as her horrible husband, now thankfully deceased.

RELIAPUNDIT: I added a pic's of Hillary kissing Suha. At the time, Clitnon was making nicey-nicey to her hubby Arafat; and at the same time, Rudy was DISSING Arafat. WHO WAS RIGHT!? Rudy. And it was not about pandering to the city's Jews: NYC's Jewish population is overwhelminly Democrat and liberal and supported Clinton and Oslo. Rudy was being forthright and principled. Arafat was still a terrorist at the time, and Rudy felt that terrorism should not be appeased.

This alone makes Rudy MORE qualified than Hillary.

GLOBAL WARMING??? IT SOUNDS TO ME LIKE THE EARTH IS COOLING

Mark Steyn on some media corrections and intellectual attitudes. An excerpt:

Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's Web site and look at the "U.S. surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures.

The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 – plummeted even lower down the Hot 100.

In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America's Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast.

If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone's ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn't have a word to say about it.

Propaganda Wise

Ever since Steve McIntyre nudged the Goddard Institute for Space Studies to correct its error in the "adjusted" data many of the AGW folks (global warming is man made) have been saying that this is a minor correction. [in the comments]

Without "the hottest year on record was 1998" the climate looks more naturally variable.

Scientifically this is minor correction.

Propaganda wise it is a big thing.

It has also alerted people to the idea that data and methods must be open in science.

Update 13 Aug 007 1709z:

Steve McIntyre on why Hansen's Error Matters.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

Arizona: Sheriff Arpaio is "Racist" for Tracking Down Illegal Immigrants

Excerpt:

"Arpaio is speaking about the Latino activists who have condemned a hotline he established to receive tips about illegal immigration. Hispanic community leaders say that Arpaio is involved in a form of racial profiling. They've established hotlines of their own that they hope will highlight abuses.

"I don't understand why they are going after me," he said. "We got 1,100 calls (on the hotline), and we arrested eight people the other day. If I was abusing the hotline, with that may calls, we would have been knocking down doors and everything. But we are very careful. We don't just go around grabbing someone who is trimming palm trees and all of that. . . . You don't respond to every tip. If we get probable cause like we do on every other case, then OK."

That's not how the activists see it. State Rep. Steve Gallardo, one of those leading the effort against Arpaio, told The Republic, "We need this hotline taken down. This hotline is solely set up for racial profiling. ... We need Sheriff Joe Arpaio to do his job in enforcing the laws without using race as the sole purpose of trying to determine if someone is here illegally."

Their big, public protest is helping to boost the exposure for a hotline that most people didn't even know existed.

Source

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Communism and Nazism

Excerpt from a review of: 'Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe' by Robert Gellately. There is a longer review here. That the Hitler regime differed in being more popular is undoubted. Detailed background on the Hitler regime here

In their different ways they were as bad as each other, the three monsters of 20th-century Europe. That is an oddly controversial statement. Hitler is almost universally vilified; Lenin remains entombed on Red Square as Russia's most distinguished corpse; and modern Russia is looking more kindly on Stalin's memory.

Robert Gellately elegantly scrutinises their differences and highlights their similarities. He places all three men in the context of a Europe shattered by the first world war. "Before 1914 they were marginal figures," he writes, without "the slightest hope of entering political life." The whirlwind of destruction that started in 1914 turned their fantasies of racial purity and class dictatorship into reality, killing people on a scale unknown in human history.

Anyone who still believes in the myth-assiduously propagated by the Soviet Union and its admirers-of the "good Lenin" will find the book uncomfortable reading. The author outlines with exemplary clarity Lenin's cruelty, his illegal and brutal seizure of power, his glee in ordering executions, the institution of mass terror as a means of political control and the construction of the first camps in what later became the gulag. "Far from perverting or undermining Lenin's legacy, as is sometimes assumed, Stalin was Lenin's logical heir," he writes icily.

Mr Gellately busts another myth too: that Hitler seized power by fear and force. The combination of anti-Jewish and anti-Bolshevik rhetoric played well with the German public. People felt humiliated by defeat and impoverished by recession, and Hitler blamed "the Jews" for both. Hitler looked on Soviet methods with contempt. His model was what Mr Gellately calls "consensus dictatorship": cautious, sounding out public opinion and changing course when necessary. Unlike Stalin, Hitler did not make a habit of murdering his closest allies. The Nazi party never experienced the ritual purges that were a habitual feature of Soviet Communist Party life under Stalin. Hitler's adversaries were so demoralised by the seeming success of his regime that few offered systematic resistance. It was only as defeat loomed in the last months of the war that ordinary Germans had a taste of the official paranoia that had been their Soviet counterparts' daily fare for 25 years.

The argument about the origins of Nazism will run and run. But there is little danger of Germany rehabilitating Hitler, even in the driest and most academic corners of historical theory. In Russia, by contrast, Stalin's memory is being burnished. A new guide for history teachers describes Stalin as the Soviet Union's "most successful leader"; it admits that "political repression" took place, but says it "was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite." President Vladimir Putin, welcoming this guide, compared Stalin's Great Terror of 1937 with the allied bombing of Hiroshima. It would be interesting to hear Mr Putin's tame historians debate the Stalin era with Mr Gellately.

Source

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)