Saudi Arabia Bans National Geographic with Pope on the Cover !

It would appear that the headline that speaks of Pope Francis’ ‘silent revolution’ has deeply angered the Saudi regime, ever fearful of riots and protests. For the religious authorities, the concept of a religion that is ‘fluid’ and open to ‘change’ and modernity (which is what the Argentine Pope is doing for the Catholic Church according to the magazine) is exactly what they are opposed to, maintaining a ‘pure’ and unchangeable version of filth they call Islam. Those who are placing their hopes and betting the future of the West on Islamic reform should consider that carefully.



“Riyadh censors National Geographic issue featuring Pope Francis,” Asia News, September 10, 2015:

Riyadh (AsiaNews / Agencies) – Riyadh authorities have censored the Arabic version of the August issue of National Geographic, which featured a cover photo of Pope Francis. Although officially there has been no explanation of the ban, the leaders of the Islamic country are reportedly “offended” by the of the head of the Catholic Church presence in the prestigious journal. 

In a brief Twitter message, the leaders of the Arabic version of National Geographic spoke of a “banned” edition for “cultural” reasons without providing further details.
According to reports from the site foreignpolicy.com, director Alsaad Omar al-Menhaly apologized to readers for the non-distribution of the August edition, due to the fact that the magazine “did not receive entry permission [into the country] for cultural reasons “. 

Saudi Arabia is based on Sharia, or Islamic law, which imposes the “death penalty” in cases of “gayness, murder, rape, drug trafficking and sorcery.”  In the outrageous ultra-conservative Sunni Wahhabi kingdom, women are forbidden to drive and must always be accompanied by a man with whom they have close ties of kinship. 

The Way I See It..... these days, the Pope foolishly continues to promote a policy of welcome and support for refugees fleeing from the wars in the Middle East, particularly the Syrians (mostly Muslims), opening the doors of the Vatican and inviting priests to do the same in parishes; compared to a Saudi Arabia that has never accepted any refugees in four years of conflict, and who have effectively sealed their borders.

UPDATE: Saudi Arabia still won't take any Syrian refugees, but offers to build 200 mosques for them in GERMANY. 

Don't Be the First to Stop Applauding !

To hear the professional left’s “culture commandos” tell it, revered conservative author, commentator, and documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza is a criminal — and stark, raving mad. A search for D’Souza online, and will quickly show that he’s a “convicted felon.” His Wikipedia page, for instance, references him as an “Indian American political commentator, convicted felon and author” — making sure his brush with the law is listed ahead of his status as a best-selling writer,

and well ahead of his status as the most successful conservative documentary filmmaker of all time.

If one searches for recent news about D’Souza, one will find that a federal judge recently ordered him to undergo ongoing psychiatric treatment as a condition of his probation. The government stooge stated, “Mr. D’Souza has weaknesses in controlling his own impulses and … is prone to anger in reaction to criticism.” 

Really? Or was he too successful in criticizing the black Messiah Barack Obama?  Navigating the fine print, one eventually learns that D’Souza’s “crime” involved relatively minor campaign finance infractions committed on behalf of his friend Wendy Long during her 2012 U.S. Senate race. Dig deeper, and it becomes readily apparent that D’Souza isn’t mentally ill — far from it!

Rather, he’s the latest victim of America’s “culture war” — an attempt to radically remake this nation in the image of Soviet Russia.

The tarring and feathering of D’Souza is but one high-profile example of a pervasive, anti-American assault on core conservative, constitutional values — and those who dare to advance them. It is no longer merely “government overreach,” “liberal bias in the media,” or “political correctness run amok.” It is something more sinister: an increasingly brazen totalitarian effort to remake American democracy in the image of statist, conformist, command-economy orthodoxy.

This “vast left-wing conspiracy” leverages regulatory edicts, PC “teachable moments,” and crony capitalist financial pressures to suppress the ideals and ideologies that once made our nation the envy of the civilized world. Its objectives? Compulsory tolerance, selective justice, the perpetual subsidization of American dependency culture, open borders, a disarmed populace, vaporized property rights, warrantless mass surveillance, the ceding of popular authority to the state (and American sovereignty to the world), the deification of progressive leaders, mass youth indoctrination via government-subsidized revisionist history, the debasing of religious freedom, the erosion of the U.S. Constitution, and the relegation of our nation’s two founding pillars — freedom and free markets — to the dustbin of history.

Think that’s hyperbolic? Consider retired liberal general Wesley Clark (photo left) — the former supreme NATO commander in Europe — who last month said American citizens who disagreed with their government should be sent to internment camps. Then consider U.S. senator and 2016 presidential candidate Lindsey Graham — who said he’d consider using military force on the U.S. Congress if it didn’t fund the Department of Defense to his liking.

Where are the charges against these traitors? And which federal judge is ordering them to be subjected to mental evaluations?

Let’s compare D’Souza’s “crime” to the conduct of former U.S. senator and Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards, who was indicted for allegedly funneling $1 million in campaign contributions to his mistress, Rielle Hunter. Edwards’s campaign finance scandal took place as he was running for president — and as he was conspiring to place the blame for his and Hunter’s love child on one of his staffers. Finally, the scandal took place as his wife was dying of cancer. This prick-bastard Edwards got off scot-free. Not one of the charges against him stuck. And no one accused him of being crazy.

D’Souza? He was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house and five years’ probation and ordered to pay $30,000 in fines. He was also required to undergo eight months of court-mandated “therapeutic counseling” by scumbag U.S. district court judge Richard Berman -- best known for his 2008 ruling forcing U.S. taxpayers to subsidize “halal” meals for deadshit Islamic criminals.

Yet to hear the vast left-wing conspirators tell it, D’Souza is the crazy one. Speaking of crazy, consider how the vast left-wing conspiracy treated the “gender evolution” of the athlete formerly known as Bruce Jenner. Obviously American citizens — as their means permit — are free to pursue their idealized selves. That’s what individual liberty and market freedom are all about. Jenner is free to call himself Caitlyn — and pay for multiple procedures to surgically transform himself from a man into a woman.

No one’s stopping him — or her — from doing that. In fact, no one did. Nor did any credible voice at any stage of the process argue that Jenner didn’t have the right to undergo such a transformation.
But acceptance wasn’t the left’s objective — force-fed tolerance was. It wasn’t enough for those of us who disagreed with (or were repulsed by) Jenner’s transformation to hold our tongues. According to the vast left-wing conspirators, we had to affirmatively applaud it.

For future Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre, even that wasn’t enough. Last month, The New York Post rebuked Favre for failing to clap with sufficient enthusiasm as Jenner took the stage at the 2015 ESPY Awards. “As the audience erupts with applause, the camera pans over to Favre as he claps slowly before rubbing his hands together,” the Post reported, arguing that Favre’s failure to sufficiently gush over Jenner made the ceremony “uncomfortable for everyone.”  Outrageous !

This is eerily reminiscent of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, in which the director

of a Moscow paper factory received a ten-year sentence for sitting down at the eleven-minute mark of a standing ovation to Joseph Stalin. For his crime of insufficient enthusiasm, he was arrested later that night on a trumped up charge and bluntly told by his interrogator, “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”

''That was how they discovered who the independent people were,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. “And that was how they went about eliminating them.” Make no mistake: this is where America is headed. The Political Correctness of ''Ninety-Eighty Four'' is here.

Consider what’s happening in Chappaqua, New York — hometown of not so popular 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. As part of its Orwellian ''neighbourhood engineering'' efforts, the administration of Barack Obama wants to force this Empire State hamlet to nullify its zoning ordinances to erect a low-income housing development.

Replete with racist assumptions of inferiority and intolerance, Obama’s compulsory integration permits government meddling in one of our most basic freedoms — where we choose to live.
Everywhere we turn, American freedoms and free markets are under attack — from Obamacare’s insidious individual mandate to the IRS persecution of conservative groups to the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance of all Americans.

 The Way I See It......the national debt is soaring, citizen's entitlements are on the verge of being exhausted, labor participation is at four-decade lows, wages are stagnant, the Census Dept. says a quarter of Americans are now in poverty, and America’s status as the world’s only superpower is crumbling every bit as fast as the rule of law is eroding here at home. The American Dream is dead.

In the documentary that made him a household name, Dinesh D’Souza criticized the Obama administration for eroding America from within — which is exactly what’s happening to our country. As D’Souza pays the price for his prescience, the vast left-wing conspiracy is sending a simple message to anyone who dares to follow in his footsteps: “Fall in line now.” Oh, and as the interrogator in Solzhenitsyn’s book warned, “don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”

Boston Uni Professor Blames U.S. for ISIS Sex Slavery !

“In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Rukmimi Callimachi describes.”   See, the Islamic State doesn’t practice sex slavery because it is sanctioned in the Qur’an and Sunnah, but because the U.S. did bad things in Iraq. This is what passes for analysis on most university campuses these days. Much more below.
 

“The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History Is More Complicated Than You Think,” by Kecia Ali, (photo right) Huffington Post,  August 19, 2015 



''Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so; indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point. It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so. Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.''

The disingenuous reasoning here is appalling. Can’t anyone in academia deal with a topic honestly anymore? I know Kecia Ali is a university professor, and university professors today are mostly muddle-headed ideologues more interested in pushing their far-Left agenda than having rational discussion or searching for the truth, but this is ridiculous. There are so many things wrong with that paragraph that it is a breathtakingly compact example of how contemporary academics obscure, rather than expose, the truth. Here are a few of the ways Kecia Ali outrages the truth in that paragraph:

“Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so.”

Actually, the Qur’an tells Muslims that Muhammad is uswa hasana, an “excellent example” (33:21), which in Islamic theology has amounted to the proposition that if Muhammad did it, it is right and worthy of emulation. The fact that “the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it” actually inhibited the development of abolitionist movements within Islam, because of the absolute prohibition on declaring something to be wrong that Muhammad considered to be right.

“…indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point.”

Actually, it would settle the point if those majority-Muslim societies had outlawed slavery on the basis of Islamic principles, but they didn’t. They abolished slavery under pressure from the West. There was never an indigenous Muslim abolitionist movement, and to this day, slavery is practiced sub rosa in North Africa, Saudi Arabia, etc., and justified precisely on the contention that if the Qur’an assumes it and Muhammad practiced it, it cannot be wrong.

“It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so.”

Here again, this point is only valid if there were some mainstream Qur’anic case against slavery, reinterpreting the pro-slavery passages in a different way. But there isn’t. “Objective scholars” — as if Kecia Ali were one — may not find slavery in the Qur’an or Islamic law, but note that Kecia Ali is writing for an audience of Leftist non-Muslims in the Huffington Post: she is not trying to convince Islamic State slave owners that slavery is wrong on Islamic grounds. It is, in other words, far easier to lull non-Muslims into complacency about a human rights abuse that Muslims justify on Islamic grounds than it is to convince the Muslims who are perpetrating it to stop doing so.

“Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.”

Kecia Ali here assumes that the Bible and Qur’an are equivalent in their teachings and mainstream interpretation. In reality, the abolitionist movement arose in the UK and US among Christian clergymen who argued against the ongoing applicability of the Biblical passages justifying slavery on the basis of the idea that all human beings are created in the image of God and equal in dignity on that basis. The Qur’an and Islam, by contrast, make a sharp dichotomy between believers (“the best of people,” Qur’an 3:110) and unbelievers (“the most vile of created beings,” Qur’an 98:6), and consequently there was no teaching of the equal dignity of all human beings upon which an abolitionist movement could be based.
 

Kecia Ali probably knows all this, or should if she doesn’t. But she doesn’t tell her hapless HuffPo marks, that is, her dim-witted readers.

Slavery was pervasive in the late antique world in which the Quran arose. Early Muslims were part of societies in which various unfree statuses existed, including capture, purchase, inherited slave status and debt peonage. Thus, it is no surprise that the Quran, the Prophet’s normative practice and Islamic jurisprudence accepted slavery. What is known of Muhammad’s life is disputed, but his biographies uniformly report that slaves and freed slaves were part of his household. One was Mariyya the Copt. A gift from the Byzantine governor of Alexandria, she reportedly bore Muhammad a son; he freed her. Whatever the factual accuracy of this tale, its presence attests to a shared presumption that one leader could send another an enslaved female for sexual use.

What she leaves out (again) of all this is the normative character of the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example for Muslims. That normative character is not some crazy literalist subsect of Islam. It is mainstream Islamic theology among all sects and madhahib.

Like their earlier counterparts in Greece and Rome, jurists formulating Islamic law in the eighth to 10th centuries took slavery as a given. They formalized certain protections for slaves, including eventual freedom for women like Mariyya who bore children to their masters; such children were free and legitimate. Jurists sought to circumscribe slavery, prohibiting the enslavement of foundlings and prescribing automatic manumission for slaves beaten too harshly. But the idea that some people should dominate others was central to their conceptual world; they used slavery-related concepts to structure their increasingly hierarchical norms for marriage.

Yet again: Kecia Ali doesn’t tell her unfortunate readers that Islamic law is not considered to be some man-made document like the U.S. Constitution; on the contrary, in Islamic theology Sharia is considered to be the unchangeable and perfect law of Allah himself. As such, its allowance for slavery is considered to be as divinely inspired and unalterable as the rest of it.

“Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn’t particularly a religious institution” — an unsupported and false claim. 'Jurists’ ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across
religious boundaries” — everyone did it, you see, so it must be OK. This tu quoque argument might hold water if theologically-justified slavery persisted in religious contexts other than Islam today, but it doesn’t.

To say this is not to present an apologetic defense of Islam;

Don’t kid yourself, professor...

...to the contrary, effective Muslim ethical thinking requires honesty and transparency about the lasting impact on Muslim thought on slavery and non-consensual sex.

Honesty and transparency on this issue would be refreshing, but it isn’t forthcoming in this article.

However, singling out slavery or rules governing marriage or punishments for a handful of crimes as constituting the enactment of “authentic” Islamic law surely reflects a distorted notion of a Muslim polity.

The Islamic State’s attempt to create an imagined pristine community relies on a superficial and selective enactment of certain provisions from scripture and law, an extreme case of a wider phenomenon.

Once again, an assertion without evidence. How is the Islamic State being superficial and selective in its interpretation of the Qur’an and Sharia? Kecia Ali doesn’t tell us. She just wants us to take her word for it.

Religious studies scholars, of course, must analyze their doctrines.

I’m all for that.

What beliefs do they express? How do they formulate them? What one mustn’t do is take them at face value, as the legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth.

And why mustn’t one do this? Because above all, Kecia Ali and the Huffington Post don’t want you to have a negative view of Islam. But why should one not think that the Islamic State’s practices are the “legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth”? Yet again, we just have to take Kecia Ali’s word for it.

In fact, the stress they put on the errors of their Muslim opponents, who actively dispute

their interpretations of many things including slavery, makes very clear that there is no one self-evident interpretation of Islam on these points.

Note that Kecia Ali doesn’t actually offer an alternative interpretation of the Qur’an passages that the Islamic State adduces in order to justify slavery. She just tells us that some unnamed “Muslim opponents” of the Islamic State have offered this. Who? When? Where? She doesn’t tell us. Why not? Could it be that this Muslim challenge to the Islamic State hasn’t actually happened at all?

…In the thousand-plus years in which Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christians, actively engaged in slaving, they cooperated and competed, enslaving and being enslaved, buying, selling and setting free. This complex history, which has generated scores of publications on Muslims and slavery in European languages alone, cannot be reduced to a simplistic proclamation of religious doctrine. The fact that the Islamic State must preface its collections of rulings for slaveholding by defining terms such as captive and concubine illustrates that it is drawing on archaic terms and rules, ones that no longer reflect anything like the current reality of the world.

I doubt that even the Islamic State jihadis would deny that these are old terms and rules that have fallen into desuetude. But they would argue that they are part of the law of Allah; the fact that they’re old and long unused doesn’t change that, and actually only increases the urgency of reviving them, so as to bring the practice of Muslims back in line with the commands of Allah. Here yet again, Kecia Ali is attempting a sleight-of-hand, pretending that this issue is all about human law, not about the

law that Muslims consider to be that of Allah himself.

By focusing on religious doctrine as an explanation for rape, Americans ignore the presence of sexual abuse and torture in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and in Assad’s Syria by the regime and other factions in its vicious ongoing war. None of this is to deny the horror of the systematic rapes Callimachi reports or the revolting nature of the theology she describes. It is to point out that there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis (photo right) is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity.

The idea that the New York Times is interesting in retailing “familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity” is beyond ludicrous. For years, the Times has again and again obscured and whitewashed numerous incidents of barbarity committed by Muslims and justified by their perpetrators by reference to Islamic texts and teachings. Rukmini Callimachi’s piece was highly anomalous in acknowledging, even in a slight and incomplete manner, that the Islamic State justifies its practices

by referring to teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah. But to admit that fact would be to expose as false and manipulative the ever-present narrative of Muslim victimhood, and Kecia Ali is not going to do that.

In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi (left) describes. Moral high ground is in short supply. The core idea animating enslavement is that some lives matter more than others. As any American who has been paying attention knows, this idea has not perished from the earth.

The Way I See It....the moral high ground is in short supply. The U.S. Constitution rightly continues to permit a form of enslavement as punishment for crime” (the 13th Amendment says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”). This academic dumbass says because of the West's tradition of incarceration of criminals we shouldn’t judge the Islamic State’s barbaric practice of sex slavery.
 

Kecia Ali’s moral equivalence here is nothing short of monstrous. But for her efforts, she will no doubt be hailed in Leftist circles and laden with honors, while the Islamic State’s sex slaves, for whose rights and human dignity she could have and should have spoken out instead of engaging in this gruesome apologetic for their enslavement, continue to suffer daily torture.
 

I'm afraid this is American academia today......morally corrupt, paying lip service to constitutional values and is teaching their young impressionable students to loath western accomplishments and capitalism's legacy. May they all go to Hell!

A Drowned Boy Exposes the Lie of War Refugees !

The funeral of the drowned “Syrian” (actually Kurdish) boy Aylan Kurdi in his hometown of Kobane, Syria, less than two days after his death at sea off the Turkish coast, has definitely exposed as a lie the claims that the nonwhite invasion of Europe is the result of “war refugees.”

Kobane is 869 miles (1,400 kilometers) from Bodrum in Turkey, where the Kurdish boy was drowned after his parents irresponsibly loaded him onto an overcrowded dinghy, and is supposedly—if the controlled mass media is to be believed, in the middle of a “war zone.”

 

Yet Aylayn Kurdi’s father Abdullah (photo left) was able to take the bodies of not only Aylan, but also of his brother Ghalib and his wife Rehan, back to Kobane where they were buried, once again before the waiting press cameras.
 

The question which can well be asked is therefore, if the Kurdi family was “fleeing a war zone,” why was it possible for Abdullah Kurdi to travel so easily back to his hometown and arrange full public funerals in Kobane?

 

The very definition of a “war refugee” is, according to the official United Nations definition, as contained in the 1951 Refugee Convention:
 

“a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him—or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.”  (see Article 1A(2)).

 

The fact that Abdullah Kurdi could return overnight to Kobane to bury his family shows clearly that he—and all the so-called “refugees” do not qualify as “refugees” in any sense:

 

–They are not being persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion;

–They are able and willing to avail themselves of the protection of Syria (otherwise they would not have been able to go back there so easily); and

–They are easily able to return to their home without fear of persecution.

In other words, even under the UN’s own definition, the Kurdi family were not “refugees” in any sense of the word.

 

Furthermore, as the Leftist controlled media has now been forced to admit, the Kurdi family had been living in Turkey for three years before even trying to invade Europe, so Abdullah could get a good set of dentures--after their legal application to immigrate to Canada had been turned down by the Canadian authorities.

 

Further evidence of the outright lies being used by the nonwhite invaders, and their liberal promoters in the controlled mass media, came with the results of an in situ inspection of a “refugee center” in Mineo, Sicily, by the leader of the Lega Nord party, Matteo Salvini.
 

Writing on his Facebook page, Salvini (photo right) pointed out that of the 3,042 “refugees” in the center, only two had actually come from any of the supposed “war zones.”  He said that all the rest came from other Third World countries, including India and Bangladesh. (“Is there a war there?” he asked.) “Refugees or illegal immigrants? Do you see now?” Salvini concluded, correctly pointing out that the nonwhites had no right to be in Europe at all.

 

Meanwhile, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has joined the growing ranks of Central European nations to warn of the danger posed by the nonwhite invasion. Hitting out at Germany for saying it would accept requests from “Syrians” regardless of where they entered the European Union—a move which also breaks all previously established European Union rules—Orban said that this was only encouraging the invasion.

He also announced that Hungary is building a fence and tightening migration rules that it says will close Hungary off to migrants as of September 15. “The reality is that Europe is threatened by a mass inflow of people, many tens of millions of people could come to Europe,” Orban (photo-left) told public radio in a regular Friday interview. “Now we talk about hundreds of thousands but next year we will talk about millions and there is no end to this,” he said.
 

In May this year, Orban sent personal letters to eight million Hungarian voters in which he pledged to protect their livelihoods from immigrants. In July he said “political correctness in Europe” had enforced a “guilt-ridden silence” on the links between immigration and violent crime.

 

The Way I See It.......Europe for years did not intervene in Syria to stop the jihadist uprising which now resulted in sending hundreds of thousands of Syrians to Europe. Nor will it defend its borders against this army of immigrants, who have been joined by Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Africans and Balkans picked up en route.

 

And here is the troubling truth: the West's self-loathing means it will no longer defend what it no longer prizes, it welcomes those who will destroy what’s not destroyed already.....their cultural heritage and social fabric.

The 21st Century Climate Catastrophe is Not Taking Place !

In the Southern Hemisphere, sea-ice levels just smashed through the previous record highs across Antarctica, where there is now more ice than at any point since records began. In the Arctic, where global-warming theorists preferred to keep the public focused due to some decreases in ice levels over recent years, scientists said sea-ice melt in 2014 fell below the long-term mean.

Global temperatures, meanwhile, have remained steady for some 19 years and counting, contrary to United Nations models predicting more warming as carbon dioxide levels increased. Of course, all of that is great news for humanity — call off the carbon taxes and doomsday bunkers!

However, as global-warming theories continue to implode on the world stage, the latest developments will pose a major challenge for the UN and its member governments. Later this year, climate “dignitaries” will be meeting in New York to forge an international agreement in the face of no global warming for nearly two decades, record ice levels, and growing public skepticism about the alleged “science” underpinning “climate change” alarmism
.
As The New American reported, virtually every falsifiable prediction made by climate theorists — both the global-cooling mongers of a few decades ago and the warming alarmists more recently — has proven to be spectacularly wrong. In many cases, the opposite of what they forecasted took place. But perhaps nowhere have the failed global-warming doom and gloom predictions been more pronounced than in the Antarctic, where sea-ice levels have continued smashing through previous records. For each of the last three years, ice cover has hit a new record high.

The most recent data show that the Antarctic is currently surrounded by more sea ice than at any other point since records began. In all, there are right now about 20 million square kilometers of frozen sea area surrounding the Antarctic continent. That is 170,000 square kilometers more than last year’s previous all-time record, and more than 1.2 million square kilometers above the 1981-to-2010 mean, according to researchers.

“This is an area covered by sea ice which we've never seen from space before,” meteorologist and sea ice scientist Jan Lieser with the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) told Australia’s ABC. “Thirty-five years ago the first satellites went up which were reliably telling us what area, two dimensional area, of sea ice was covered and we've never seen that before, that much area. That is roughly double the size of the Antarctic continent and about three times the size of Australia.”

Despite having predicted less ice — not more — as a result of alleged man-made global warming, some alarmists have comically tried to blame the record ice on “global warming.”  Indeed, in a bizarre attempt to explain away the latest findings, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC boss Tony Worby (photo left) tried to blame “the depletion of ozone” and the “warming atmosphere” for the phenomenal growth in sea ice — contradicting previous forecasts by warming alarmists, who warned that ice would decrease as temperatures rose along with CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

The biggest problem with Worby’s claim, however, is the fact that the undisputed global temperature record shows there has been no warming for about 18 years and counting — contradicting every “climate model” cited by the UN to justify planetary alarmism, carbon taxes, energy rationing, massive wealth transfers, and more. Dozens of excuses have been concocted for what alarmists refer to as the “pause” in warming, as many as 50 by some estimates. The Obama administration’s preferred explanation, for which there is no observable evidence, is often ridiculed by critics as ''The Theory of the Ocean Ate My Global Warming''.

However, scientists and experts not funded by governments to promote the alarmist narrative say the observable evidence simply shows the man-made CO2 theories and “climate models” pushed by the climate industry are incorrect. More than a few climate experts and scientists have even warned that a prolonged period of global cooling is approaching quickly. The consequences could potentially be devastating — especially if warming alarmists succeed in quashing energy and food production under the guise of stopping non-existent “warming.”
     
Also in response to the fast-expanding ice, some die-hard alarmists and warming propagandists styling themselves “journalists” have recently been hyping a relatively tiny part of the Antarctic ice sheet that may — centuries or even millennia from now — go into the sea. Numerous independent scientists and experts quickly debunked the fear-mongering, however, pointing out that it was almost certainly due to natural causes and was nothing to worry about.

In an ironic incident that sparked laughter around the world, a team of “climate scientists” who set out to show how Antarctic ice was supposedly melting ended up getting their ship trapped in record-setting ice --- in the summer! (See my post ''Ship of Fools: Doomed By Wishful Thinking!'' -- 3 January, 2014).  Millions of taxpayer dollars and massive quantities of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions were required to rescue the stranded and embarrassed warming alarmists after their misguided adventure.
 
Another key tactic of the warmists to deflect attention from the expanding polar ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been to hype changes occurring in the Arctic instead. Unfortunately for the alarmists, however — critics often ridicule the movement as a “cult” for desperately clinging to its beliefs despite the evidence, not to mention the infamous ''Climategate Scandal'' — that will now be much harder to do with a straight face.

“After the very high melt rates of the 2007-2012 period, the trend reversed in 2013 and especially in 2014 when the melt fell below the long-term average,” exlained German professor and environment expert Fritz Vahrenholt, adding that the heat content of the North Atlantic was also plummeting. “In other words: The 21st century climate catastrophe is not taking place.”

Decades ago, of course, Newsweek reported that Arctic ice was growing so quickly due to man-made “global cooling” that scientists were proposing to melt the polar ice cap using black soot.  Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. More recently, climate guru Al Gore had been regularly predicting that the entire polar ice cap would be gone by now. Instead, it is now far more extensive than when he made his now-discredited predictions.  (Also see my post ''Warmist Leader, Al Gore Gutted By Climate Reality'' -- 15 September, 2014).

Of course, UN bureaucrats, many of whom depend on sustainable alarmism for their livelihood, still have their heads in the sand about the implosion of their theory. On a call with reporters last week, for example, UN “climate team director” Selwin Hart, who serves under Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, claimed an upcoming global-warming summit “will be a major turning point in the way the world is approaching climate change.” He may be right, though probably not in the way he intended. The conference, which will be skipped by key world leaders, is meant to put climate alarmism “back on top of the international agenda,” Hart added.

In the United States, meanwhile, as the evidence continues to contradict the alarmist predictions, polls consistently show that a solid majority of Americans reject the UN's man-made-global-warming theories. Like the UN, however, Obama continues to act as if he's ''stoned'' on something believing the discredited theories were gospel, promising to save humanity from their carbon sins by lawlessly bypassing the U.S. Senate and the Constitution to foist a planetary ''climate' regime'' on the American people. Lawmakers have vowed to prevent any such schemes, but it remains unclear how far the White House is willing to push the issue. After failing even with a Democrat-controlled Congress, the EPA is already working to impose Obama's anti-CO2 schemes on America by executive decree.

With the evidence discrediting UN global-warming theories literally piling up on both ends of the Earth and everywhere in between, alarmists face an increasingly Herculean task in their bid to shackle humanity to a “climate regime'' at the UN summit in Paris. However, to protect the public — and especially the poor and third-world countries — from the devastation such a planetary scheme would entail. Americans must continue to expose the baseless alarmism underpinning what countless scientists  now refer to as the “climate scam.”

The Way I See It.......
As the diagram above shows, the temperature balance was pretty close for 7000 years, until the cooling accelerated over the last 3000 years.

My enlightenment was in seeing that the summer melt is actually the enormous effort by the ocean to recover water trapped as sea ice in the Arctic. The ice extent varies greatly over the centuries and we know from artifacts that it has been both greater and smaller than presently.  In this time of global warming alarmism, some of us watching the melt season find ourselves hoping for the ice to gain extent, simply to take away that basis for claiming the end is nigh.

Let’s be clear. In this contest between the ice and ocean, we humans should be rooting for the ocean, and so would plants and animals if they knew what was going on. None of us want another ice age, so it is a good thing that the ocean has been gaining on the sea ice extent in the last 150 years.
Once again warmists have got it backwards. The Arctic is a canary all right: The more ice there is in September, the closer we are to the next ice age. Open water in the Arctic is a good thing for the ocean and for the planet.

So taking off the warmist glasses, we should be cheering as the water extent grows and the ice retreats. We don’t wish for a record low because that would drive the alarmists into a frenzy.  Anything around 5M km2 for September would signify nothing unusual is happening, so for these fraudsters scary things must be found elsewhere.

Conclusion:
I am not so naive to think that this perspective has much chance against the warmist PR juggernaut. Already the lessening of Antarctic sea ice this year is trumpeted as proof of CO2 warming, and not a celebration of fresh water added to the ocean. At least I tried to help you to become enlightened too.

 

Fiddling with Temperature Data Can Be Seen as a Scandal !!

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified. This is known as homogenization and at times a lower temp is noted.

Two weeks ago, under the headline ''How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming''   Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming. This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, (photo right) who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely  “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.

One of the first examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post, “Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed by those of the past 20 years.

Homewood’s interest in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.

By far the most comprehensive account of this wholesale corruption of proper science is a paper written for the Science and Public Policy Institute, “Surface Temperature Records: Policy-Driven Deception?”, by two veteran US meteorologists, Joseph D’Aleo and WUWT’s Anthony Watts (photo left).  Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

The Way I See It......one of the more provocative points arising from the debate over those claims that 2014 was “the hottest year evah” came from the Canadian academic Dr Timothy Ball when, in a recent post on WUWT, he used the evidence of ice-core data to argue that the Earth’s recent temperatures rank in the lowest 3 per cent of all those recorded since the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago.

In reality, the implications of such distortions of the data go much further than just representing one of the most bizarre aberrations in the history of science. The fact that our politicians have fallen for all this scary chicanery has given Britain the most suicidally crazy energy policy (useless windmills and all) of any country in the world.

But at least, if they’re hoping to see that “universal climate treaty” signed in Paris this December, we can be pretty sure that it is no more going to happen than that 2014 was the hottest year in history.

Why Australia Needs Thorium in its Future !

Australia has foolishly developed something of an allergic reaction to any mention of uranium or nuclear energy. Blessed as we are with abundant reserves of coal, oil and gas, we have never had to ask the hard questions many other nations have had to ask – questions the answer to which has been “nuclear” for many of those nations. (Editor's Note: Even tiny Belgium has 9 nuclear reactors).

Yet with the looming spectre of climate change and greater calls for a shift away from fossil fuels, nuclear power is once again on the agenda. The South Australian government has even called for a
royal commission to investigate the plausibility of nuclear power in this country.

With discussion of uranium seeming to be out-of-bounds in some idiotic quarters, a growing community of devotees has sprung up around an alternative nuclear fuel: thorium. But is it right for Australia?

The call for thorium power is not without precedent worldwide. India has pursued thorium technology for decades. And China is revisiting a molten salt reactor design mothballed by the USA in the 70’s. Recently, several companies have sought to commercialise thorium energy, including an Australian-Czech alliance.

Thorium: critically different

Thorium (atomic number 90) shares several similarities with its neighbour two doors down on the periodic table, uranium (atomic number 92). Both elements are silvery metals and are mildly radioactive as ores. They are each moderately abundant in the Earth’s crust, and can release

prodigious amounts of energy under the right conditions.

One critical difference is that thorium, in its natural state, is resistant to fission. This is the process whereby the atomic nucleus splits apart, thus releasing energy that can then be harnessed to generate electricity.

Uranium can undergo fission relatively easily, but for thorium to undergo fission – and be useful in a nuclear power plant – it must first be converted into a usable form. This is done via a process known as “breeding”, where the thorium absorbs a neutron, thus transmuting into a heavier element that can later undergo fission.

Thorium was first studied as an energy source during the Manhatten Project, but uranium proved much easier to work with. During the post-war commercialisation of nuclear energy this dominance was reinforced. Engineers identified myriad paths to design reactors based on uranium, while the added complexities of thorium meant that alternatives didn’t get much of a look in.

Today, advocates of thorium typically point to a variety of advantages over uranium. These include fail-safe reactor operation, because most thorium reactor designs are incapable of an explosion or meltdown, as was seen at Chernobyl or Fukushima. Another is resistance to weapons proliferation, because thorium reactors create by-products that make the fuel unsuitable for use in nuclear weapons.
Other advantages include greater abundance of natural reserves of thorium, less radioactive waste and higher utilisation of fuel in thorium reactors. Thorium is often cast as “good nuclear”, while uranium gets to carry the can as “bad nuclear”.

Not so different

While compelling at first glance, the details reveal a somewhat more murky picture. The molten salt architecture ( diagram below ) which gives certain thorium reactors high intrinsic safety equally applies to proposed

fourth-generation designs using uranium. It is also true that nuclear physics technicalities make thorium much less attractive for weapons production, but it is by no means impossible; the USA and USSR each tested a thorium-based atomic bomb in 1955.

Other perceived advantages similarly diminish under scrutiny. There is plenty of uranium ore in the world and hence the fourfold abundance advantage of thorium is a moot point. Producing less long-lived radioactive waste is certainly beneficial, but the vexed question remains of how to deal with it.
Stating that thorium is more efficiently consumed is the most mischievous of the claimed benefits. Fast-breeder uranium reactors have much the same fuel efficiency as thorium reactors. However, they weren’t economic as the price of uranium turned out to be rather low.

Peering into the crystal ball

None of these factors are reasons to ignore thorium, which may yet prove to have a significant role to play. New thorium-based reactors under construction in India and China will focus attention once again on the viability of thorium power. However, only time will tell whether thorium can strike a disruptive path forward.

From a national perspective, the development of thorium technology would be a major boost. Australia possesses around 10-15% of the world's thorium reserves, in addition to its 30% share of uranium reserves.

Developing a market for thorium would also solve a serious problem for the green-technology rare earth industry. Thorium is an unwelcome contaminant in rare earth ores, making the tailings slightly radioactive. This leads to social and political problems in the processing phase as seen recently in the licensing struggles of Australian-owned Lynas Corporation (photo below) in Malaysia. Having an avenue to sell the extracted thorium would change the whole dynamics of rare earth processing.

As for whether thorium might reframe the discussion of nuclear power in Australia, the question comes too soon. The engineering and economics of thorium must first be demonstrated. No thorium reactors operate commercially worldwide, whereas 430 operating uranium reactors produce 11% of global electricity. Are you Greens, Labor and environmental assholes ready to stick your ideology up your backsides?

If Australia does eventually decide to build nuclear power plants, the best choice would almost certainly be a proven design based on existing third-generation uranium technology.

The Way I See It.....such a decision is, however, a long way down the road. As a nation we haven’t even managed to figure out the best way to handle slightly radioactive gloves in hospitals, let alone have a mature conversation about nuclear power.

The real question is whether Australia can find a way forward to have a civilised discussion about how to generate non-fossil base-load power without counting on the inefficient solar and wind approach. And so, by all means, we should talk about thorium, but let’s not left idiots of the Left demonise uranium at the same time.