On March 28, 2012, fifty former employees of the  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) signed a letter to Charles Bolden, NASA’s Administrator.

Here is most of it. It can be found in full at Powerline:

Dear Charlie,

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.

The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.

As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself. …

In particular, the “unproven remarks” are being made by James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, of whom John Hinderaker of Powerline writes:

One of the world’s four or five leading global warming alarmists is James Hansen, [who], traveling in China, denounced the United States and hailed China as the world’s “best hope” to stave off global warming. Hansen described Americans as “barbarians” with a fake democracy, and urged China’s rulers to lead a boycott of the United States in the hope that it would bring our economy to its knees.

The reputation of NASA took a hit when President Obama redefined its foremost task as “reaching out to the Muslim world”:

In a far-reaching restatement of goals for the nation’s space agency, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says President Obama has ordered him to pursue three new objectives: to “re-inspire children” to study science and math, to “expand our international relationships,” and to “reach out to the Muslim world.” Of those three goals, Bolden said in a recent interview with al-Jazeera, the mission to reach out to Muslims is “perhaps foremost,” because it will help Islamic nations “feel good” about their scientific accomplishments.

What scientific accomplishments would those be?

Pat Condell at his splendid best talks about “the bogus Palestinian cause”,  the “crooked court” of the UN, Saudi Arabia being “the moral anus of the universe”, the Organization of Islamic Co-operation being “the Organization of Islamic Fascists”, and more.

The UN must be destroyed.

Under daily observation from thousands of surveillance cameras mounted everywhere from street corners to taxicabs to public parks, Britons rank among the most-watched people on earth. But a new government plan is poised to take the gaze of this nation’s security services dramatically deeper: letting them examine the text messages, phone calls, e-mails and Web browsing habits of every person in the country.

According to the Washington Post report that we are quoting –

Britain generates more than 2 million e-mails a minute, and observers say the government may face technical challenges in capturing and storing such vast amounts of data. Currently, firms are required to store some communications data, such as phone calls, for one year. But the proposed law could compel them to store far more varied forms — such as Skype calls or online video game data — for at least twice as long.

Even with massive electronic help in selecting words and phrases to reduce the millions of messages, how  many people working how many hours would be needed to investigate the (surely still enormous) residue? And if they do come upon evidence of crime being plotted or committed, what will they do about it?

It’s not as if the police are really working to reduce crime (except maybe drug related crimes). For years now in Britain, if a crime is reported the police routinely issue the victim with a number but seldom investigate it. If the police investigate a crime, they seldom make an arrest; if they make an arrest, the case seldom comes to court;  if it comes to court the accused is seldom found guilty;  if the accused is found guilty, he is seldom convicted; if he is convicted he is seldom sentenced; if he is sentenced he seldom goes to prison; if he goes to prison he is seldom – no, he is never kept there even for the inadequately punitive time he is sentenced to serve.

Terrorists? If they are Muslim – and are there any terrorists other than Muslims now? – they are unlikely to be charged; if charged they are unlikely to be tried; if tried they are unlikely to be convicted; if convicted they are unlikely to be punished. Instead they are likely to be luxuriously housed and granted lavish incomes at tax-payers’ expense. (See our posts The tale of a Muslim terrorist parasite January 18, 2012, and A model citizen December 17, 2010.)

So what would the watching and listening really be for?

The only plausible answer is: for government power and control. But what is the feeble feckless government doing with its power? What is it controlling and to what end? Britain aims for nothing, has no vision of its future, and is unlikely to become an Iran-like or Afghanistan-like totalitarian state until Islam comes to power. Of course that won’t take long now, and Islam knows exactly what it will compel everyone to do. It will be nice for the Islamic Enforcers to find efficient means of surveillance already in place for them.

Let’s read on.

The “snooping” proposal set to be presented in Parliament later this year is sparking an uproar over privacy in Britain, fueling a debate over the lengths to which intelligence agencies should go in monitoring citizens — a debate that has resonance on both sides of the Atlantic.

Government officials say the new powers are critical to countering terrorism and other threats in an era of fast-changing social media, with criminals using even seemingly innocent venues such as Facebook and online games as means of communication. But furious citizen groups and some members of Parliament see the push as a part of Britain’s evolution into a “surveillance society” in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the 2005 London bombings.

Although the plan is yet to be fully outlined by the Conservative-led government, observers say parts of it may go beyond even the ability of officials in the United States to quickly access private data. Critics say the sheer breadth and scope of the plan also could put Britain out in front of other European countries such as Germany, where the government acts to block some Web sites deemed objectionable, and Sweden, where a law passed in 2008 allows the government to intercept international communications conducted via phones or the Internet.

“I’m afraid that if this program gets introduced, the U.K. will be leapfrogging Iran in the business of surveilling its citizens,” said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International. “This program is so broad that no other country has even yet to try it, and I am dumbfounded they are even considering it here.”

The plan may authorize the national surveillance agency — which is known as GCHQ and whose Web site describes its mission as keeping “our society safe and successful in the Internet age” — to order the installation of thousands of devices linked to the networks of Internet service providers, giving agents broader access to everyday communications. The examination of the contents of those exchanges — such as the text or images contained in an e-mail — would still require special warrants. But for the first time, intelligence agencies might, for instance, access information such as the times, destinations and frequencies of phone calls, texts and e-mails without a warrant…

The measure reportedly would compel communications companies to grant intelligence agents instant access to real-time information in certain circumstances, such as data that could be used to target the location of a user’s mobile phone or computer if authorities suspected a crime was in progress. It remained unclear whether British authorities would need judicial or other authority before accessing such data.

“It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public,” Britain’s Home Office — a rough equivalent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — said in a statement.

Privacy advocates reacted swiftly Monday, saying the move would intrude so deeply into the lives of British citizens that it would rival or exceed measures used by totalitarian governments. They say it marks another of many steps that have curtailed privacy rights here in the post-Sept. 11 world, with one study by British police officials, for instance, indicating that a person strolling around London is captured on film by at least 68 cameras on any given day …

As it stands, key aspects of the proposal may go beyond the kind of surveillance now authorized in the United States, where privacy advocates were quick to raise concerns about the plan — especially given the heavy traffic of transatlantic communication. …

How does America do its watching?

Access in the United States to “metadata” — such as the time, who e-mailed whom and how often — depends on the kind of data and type of case. For example, authorities have to obtain court orders before accessing real-time data in both criminal and national security cases.

In criminal cases, authorities need a subpoena to get stored metadata on phone numbers dialed but a court order for e-mail information. In contrast, federal agents seeking stored e-mail header information in national security cases have contended that they may use a national security letter, which is an administrative subpoena that can be issued by an FBI field office. But some providers have refused access to such data without a court order.

Only some? And should that make us less worried?

Is it possible that sheer overreach could render government impotent? That freedom will be recovered because government has too big a body for its tiny brain, like dinosaurs, and will perish by taking on far more than it can ever accomplish, losing sight of what it means to accomplish and why?

Or would anarchy result? And would that make it easier or harder for Islam to take over?

(Hat tip to our reader True Freethinker for the link to the video)

This is from the International Herald Tribune:

Three children, all under the age of five [in Kabirwala, Pakistan], were ‘severely’ tortured by their teacher after they were caught plucking flowers from their madrassa’s garden.

Four-year-old Aasia, five-year-old Aqsa and four-year-old Junaid were beaten with sticks and were forced to lie under the sun with three bricks placed over their chests and legs after their teacher, Qari Asghar, got to know that they had plucked flowers from the garden. …

“We were plucking flowers for our female teacher who teaches us in the morning. Qari Asghar had put his leg on my neck and then grabbed my hair and beat me up,” said Aasia.

The parents found their children nearly fainting after they were called to the madrassa by some member of the staff. They said that the children were bleeding due to the bricks.

Qari Asghar, the torturer, “ran away from the madrassa after the incident”, but he was found and arrested. Will he be punished, we wonder? Why do we doubt it?

The children were taken to a hospital. The doctor “confirmed that the children were ‘severely tortured’.”

Irked by the incident, Aasia’s father Mukhtar Ahmed said that such a “brutal” person does not deserve to teach the Holy Quran.

We disagree with Mukhtar Ahmed. The perfect teacher of the Holy Quran is a sadist.

But no child deserves to be taught it.

Stories like these should be published widely in the West, precisely because they are painful to read, so those who take a tolerant view of Islam may be taught what to expect as they allow the slow encroachment of Islam into their countries.

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May by John William Waterhouse

“Only 60 amputations ” since Islam began?

We’ve heard Catholics claim that only a few dozen people were sentenced to be burnt to death by the Inquisition.

The lies indicate that they are ashamed of what they do or did. But if sharia law is imposed on Western countries – and it will be – the cruel punishments will be enforced.

From time to time we quote a day’s count of deadly Islamic terrorist attacks kept by the excellent site, The Religion of Peace.

Here is the tally for March 31:

Islam’s Latest Contributions to Peace

2012.03.31 (Yala, Thailand) – A Religion of Peace bombing at a hotel ignites a fire that kills five and injures over three-hundred.

2012.03.31 (Yala, Thailand) – A brutal double-bombing in a commercial hub leaves at least nine shoppers dead and over one-hundred injured.

2012.03.30 (Askira Uba, Nigeria) – Radical Islamists shoot two people to death at a bank.

2012.03.30 (Yayakhil, Afghanistan) – Nine Afghan police are shot to death in their sleep by a Taliban wearing a uniform.

2012.03.29 (Quetta, Pakistan) – Sunni militants open up on a group of Shiites with automatic weapons, taking down at least five, including a woman.

2012.03.28 (Nazimabad, Pakistan) – Wahhabi gunmen pick off a Shiite tailor outside his shop.

Today the total of deadly terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims since 9/11, quoted daily in our margin, stands at 18,665.

AP reports:

Pakistani acid attack victim Fakhra Younus had endured more than three dozen surgeries over more than a decade to repair her severely damaged face and body when she finally decided life was no longer worth living. … [She] jumped from the sixth floor of a building in Rome, where she had been living and receiving treatment. …

She had been a dancer. Her husband, Bilal Khar, a “law-maker”, poured the acid over her.

It must have been excruciatingly painful, and it hideously disfigured her.

Bilal Khar was brought to trial and acquitted.

“Many believe he used his connections to escape the law’s grip –  a common occurrence in Pakistan.”

His father was Ghulam Mustafa Khar, who had been governor of Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab.

The couple was married for three years, but Younus eventually left him because he …  physically and verbally abused her….

He came to her mother’s house, found her lying asleep and “poured acid all over her”.

He will suffer no punishment. He walks a free man.

More than 8,500 acid attacks, forced marriages and other forms of violence against women were reported in Pakistan in 2011 … The figure is likely an undercount…

Pat Condell eloquently derides the UN, Islam, and political correctness.

We applaud his scorching derision.

The UN must be destroyed.

Mohammad Merah the Muslim Murderer

Expressing the sort and degree of indignation we wish we heard more often, Daniel Greenfield writes at Canada Free Press:

There was a time when Jewish children were hunted down and killed in France. Their killers believed themselves to be members of a superior group that was destined to rule the world and enslave or exterminate members of inferior groups. The cowardice and appeasement of the French authorities allowed them to operate freely, to kill Jews and launch attacks on other countries.

What was then is now again. The occupying army doesn’t wear uniforms, it wears keffiyahs. It doesn’t speak German, it speaks Arabic. It doesn’t believe that it is superior for reasons of race as much as for reasons of religion. It does not view all others as Untermenschen, but as infidels. It looks forward not to a thousand year Reich, but to a thousand year Caliphate.

Mohammed Merah did not chase down a French-Jewish [eight-year-old] girl, put a gun to her head and pull the trigger because he came from an economically depressed area or any of the other media spin. He was only doing what Muslims had been doing to non-Muslims for over a thousand years. He didn’t do what he did because he was “radicalized”, he did it because he became a fully committed Muslim. …

Between all the non-stop coverage, the expressions of grief, the political pandering, no one is stating the obvious. France has been occupied all over again. Once again, the occupation has been carried out with the consent of the authorities who have decided that cowardice is the only way. Vichy France has become Vichy Europe, Vichy America, Vichy Australia, where the blatant appeasement is disguised as honor, treason is portrayed as responsible leadership, and collaboration in the mass murder of your own people is never acknowledged as such. …

Muslims have hated Jews before the telephone, the telegraph, the steam engine, gunpowder, movable type and paper currency. And now, surrounded by smartphones, credit cards and jet planes, they still hate them. That simple undeniable fact is denied by government, in every university and in every center of culture. And every one of those deniers has blood on his hands.

Not only the blood of the Jewish children murdered by Mohammed Merah. Not only the blood of Jews murdered by Muslims in France. But the blood of all those who have been killed by Muslim immigrants, no matter of what generation, in the name of Islam.

The names of Chamberlain, Petain and Quisling have become eternally infamous because they stand for appeasement and collaboration. But, then, what do we make of the names Blair, Sarkozy and Stoltenberg [Prime Minister of Norway]? What have the latter done differently from their predecessors? The left likes to pretend that its collaboration with Islam is moral, while the collaboration with Nazism was immoral. It’s a distinction without a difference.

Does it really matter whether the men murdering children in the name of their Fuhrer call him Adolf or Mohammed? Does it matter whether they call themselves Hans or Mohammed? Does it matter whether their fantasies of superiority are based on bad science or bad religion? What matters is the end result. A foreign enemy controls your cities, murders at will, and takes your future for his own.

The Toulouse Massacre did not come out of the blue, it follows decades of Muslim violence in France—a Kristalnacht that has been going on year after year. It will not stop here. Not while there are five million Muslim in France, some of whom are bound to pick up the Koran and take it seriously. The “radical” clerics that Mohammed Merah listened to did not innovate a new religion, there has never been any basis to the teachings of the so-called radicals other than the Koran. The only book more popular in the Muslim world than Mein Kampf. …

The question, as always, after every act of Muslim terror is how many more must die? How many? Because the killing will continue. It has gone on for over a thousand years. It is not about to stop now. Muslim leaders who condemn these acts do it for tactical reasons, not moral ones. They don’t believe it’s wrong to kill rebellious non-Muslims… unless the act rebounds against non-Muslims.

The difference between the “radicals” and the “moderates” is that the radicals want to engage in genocide even while they are a minority, while the moderates want to wait until they are a majority. The radicals are satisfied with killing a few Hindus, Christians, Jews, here and there. The moderates want to wait and kill millions. Neither are our allies. Both are our murderers. …

There is no peace to be had with a creed that defines peace exclusively in terms of its own dominance over others.

Islam, like Nazism, is a disease of the soul, a twin sense of superiority and victimhood possessed by the angry corner dwellers of the world, who are certain that they would rule if only it wasn’t for all the others holding them back. To understand a Nazi or a Muslim, you don’t need to learn their creeds, just stare into the eyes of a wife beater, a pedophile or any bully, and you will see that same smirk which easily transforms into outrage, the arrogant tone that turns unctuous when it is set back on its heels, the flickering eyes that are always looking at what they can’t have.

You don’t need to read the Koran to understand Mohammed Merah, you can just as easily understand the Koran by reading about what Mohammed Merah did.

The day will come when …  the peoples of the free world will learn what true Muslim terror really is, as the peoples of Africa and Asia, as the many other religions of the Middle East including the Jews learned, in the day of the original Mohammed.

There is nothing extraordinary about what Mohammed Merah did. You may think that there is, but that is because you are a citizen of the free world, and you have become used to that rare thing known as civilized behavior. But when your nations opened their borders to people who consider your infidel lands, the Dar Al-Harb, the House of the Sword, then civilization gets its throat cut, it gets chased down at a school, has a gun put to its head and the trigger gets pulled.

Killing children is not a shocking act in the [Muslim] Middle East … Parents routinely kill their own children for minor offenses that would hardly get an American child grounded. When they move to America or Canada, they kill their children there too, and we considerately look away. If they do that to their children, why do you think they will have any more mercy on yours?

There is no point in holding Mohammed Merah accountable for what he did, just as there was no point in bringing Nazi leaders to trial for crimes against humanity. Mohammed recognizes no form of law other than the law of Islam, just as the Nazis recognized no other form of humanity than their own. There is no common moral or legal system that we share with Islam. Equality before the law, the cornerstone of our system, is so much noise in the windy corridors of the mosque. How can the Subhuman be equal to the Aryan, how can the Infidel be equal to the Muslim?

Mohammed Merah is a mad dog and should be treated as what he is. Accountability is for those who share our moral system. It is for our own leaders who continue perpetuating the macabre myth of a religion of peace, even while attending the funerals of its victims. Accountability is for the Petains, the Chamberlains and the Quislings who have led us into this hole and keep waving in more Mohammeds to come and join the party.

The old Nazis marched in at the head of an army. The new Nazis bought a plane ticket. The old Nazis had to get by the French Armed Forces and the Royal Air Force. The new Nazis are welcomed in and anyone who says a word otherwise faces trials and jail sentences. The old Nazis deported Jews to camps. The new Nazis kill them right in the cities. And the killing will not stop until the Muslim occupation of Europe comes to an end.

Miriam Monsonego, 8, murdered by Mohammad Merah. He also killed Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two sons, three-year-old Gavriel and six-year-old Aryeh.