From Pajamas Media:

Increasingly, government grants are used to defend dogma, not discover new truth: 28 percent of the scientists supported by NIH admitted recently to cooking data to support establishment theory, and 66 percent admitted to cutting corners to achieve the same end. I myself no longer trust the data claims appearing in the leading science journals…

The new Wreak-America Bill will throw billions of dollars more into global warming research, a field in which data cooking has become an open scandal. Once again, the data is being adjusted to confirm the establishment theory: humans are responsible for global warming. In actual fact, satellite observations show that the Earth is now cooling, and has been cooling for about 10 years. This confirms the anti-establishment theory that the Earth warmed prior to the late 1990s due to the then-increasing number of sunspots, and is now cooling due to the now decreasing number of sunspots. The Wreak-America bill contains funds to “adjust” those pesky satellite observations, so that the data will confirm what powerful politicians wish to be true.

 

We invite readers to consider the arguments, clearly put forward in this interview with the president of Muslims Against Sharia, for the annexation of Gaza by Egypt, and if they agree that the idea is good, to sign the petition at the end of it. 

Our view is that the very best thing that could happen to Gaza would be incorporation into Israel. Think what a great seaside resort it would quickly become! 

But that is very unlikely to happen. Next best would be Egypt taking responsibility for the territory, not in the perfunctory and inept way it did between 1948 and 1967, but fully and responsibly by annexing it.  

 From Commentary’s ‘contentions’ website:

The White House feigns ignorance about the objections to Freeman and says, via Robert Gibbs, ”I think people can be reasonably assured of where the president is on this and how he’ll be actively engaged in seeking Middle East peace.”

Well we aren’t assured of where he is because he placed someone in a high-level security role who, as Tapper points out, defended the Chinese crackdown on Tienanmen Square protesters and had a longstanding financial arrangement with the House of Saud. Throw in the fact that Freeman suggested that the U.S. bears responsibility for 9-11 and you can understand why people have questions about the president’s idea of credibility,

But aside from what Obama intends to do or not, Freeman’s appointment raises an issue that much of the press corps used to obsess over: the politicization of our intelligence agencies. The financial conflict of interest regarding Saudi Arabia is only one aspect. But more importantly, it is hard to believe that the president is going to get impartial, unpoliticized advice from Freeman. Is the man who published Mearsheimer and Walt’s screed on the “Israel Lobby” and who assessed responsibility for 9-11 as “exist[ing] in both directions” really the source of reliable judgment on national security matters? Or is he a propagandist for a particular viewpoint?

Gibbs can try a Scott McClellan “I have no clue what you mean” dodge for one presser, but I doubt the administration can successfully keep this up. For starters, there is a letter signed by nine congressmen, including the House Minority Leader John Boehner, asking the Inspector General to investigate Freeman’s financial ties to the Saudis. So if the president or Rahm Emanuel are asked directly, can they credibly deny knowledge of the controversy? The effort to appear clueless seems to be a strategy of limited utility.

‘Chas’ Freeman appointed chairman of the National intelligence Committee! The Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and the Communist government of China surely can’t believe their luck! 

The appointment is so obviously bad for the United States that the question presents itself: in whose interests is Obama governing his country? Has he any idea of the harm he is doing to it? If he has, why does he do it? 

 Of her visit to Gaza, Yvonne Green – an English visitor – reports (in part, read the whole article here) on how Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli response to continual rocket attacks by Hamas, accurately pinpointed its targets, and how little civilians were harmed by it. There is manifestly no ‘humanitarian disaster’ in Gaza, except for the forced condition of dependence on aid in which the people as a whole are forcibly kept as a political ploy by the Arab states and the Islamic world. The Palestinians have been cynically exploited since 1948 by their fellow Arabs, in deliberate disregard of any humanitarian considerations, in order to con compassion out of the more humane West, which has blindly and sentimentally responded with welfare aid, thus perpetuating the suffering and the lie.       

THE GAZA I saw was societally intact. There were no homeless, walking wounded, hungry or underdressed people. The streets were busy, shops were hung with embroidered dresses and gigantic cooking pots, the markets were full of fresh meat and beautiful produce – the red radishes were bigger than grapefruits. Mothers accompanied by a 13-year-old boy told me they were bored of leaving home to sit on rubble all day to tell the press how they’d survived. Women graduates I met in Shijaya spoke of education as power as old men watched over them.

No one praised their government as they showed me the sites of tunnels where fighters had melted away. No one declared Hamas victorious for creating a forced civilian front line as they showed me the remains of booby trapped homes and schools.

From what I saw and was told in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead pinpointed a totalitarian regime’s power bases and largely neutralized Hamas’s plans to make Israel its tool for the sacrifice of civilian life.

Corroboration of my account may be found in tardy and piecemeal retractions of claims concerning the UNWRA school at Al-Fakhora; an isolated acknowledgment that Gaza is substantially intact by The New York Times; Internet media watch corrections; and the unresolved discrepancy between the alleged wounded and their unreported whereabouts.

Yet at the Sharm el Sheikh summit in Egypt, $4.5 million has been pledged to  relieve the ‘disastrous humanitarian situation in Gaza’.  It will of course go to the Hamas terrorists, who rule Gaza, and who will make more rockets  to bombard Israel. 

Among the donors are:

The European Commission $554m

Italy $100m

France $31.5m

Britain $45m

Australia $12.9m

Ireland $2.6 m

US $900m

And this in a time of severe recession in all those countries.

Why?

 American Thinker comments:

Could someone please pinch the US officials who attended the Gaza Reconstruction Conference?

Daniel Pipes quotes U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (Republican of Illinois): "To route $900 million to this area, and let’s say Hamas was only able to steal 10 percent of that, we would still become Hamas’ second-largest funder after Iran."

In other words, the Grad rockets that will fall on my head in Be’er Sheva when next time Hamas attacks Israeli civilians will have come from the taxes paid by my fellow compatriots.  Is this what Americans want?  Is this what America stands for?      

The few questions about the donors’ conference in Gaza that I would like to ask are not what this will do to us in Israel, but what it has already done to American officials, to the US itself, and to our whole civilization. What Mark Kirk said is just logical, yet the people in the Administration who came with this plan do not seem to realize how absurd what they are doing is. How can it be?

How can it be that the US Administration is giving millions to a genocidal organization whoseArticle 7 of the Hamas Charter reads "O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him’?

At what point did US officials start behaving like Soviet ones – saying things that they and everyone else, know are lies and yet they continue to do so?  How on Earth can these officials reconcile it with their own conscience?  But even assuming that they find a rationale, do they really believe that helping Hamas attack Israel is in the US interest? 

At what point have these officials stopped been challenged by the press?  Will anyone of the reporters ask Secretary of State Hillary Clinton how can she reconcile her beliefs with giving money to an organization so it can deliberately target civilians in Israeli cities?    

Where is the uproar? Where are the protests?

At what point has America changed?

Can someone please pinch these officials and remind them what the US used to stand for?

  From the Heritage Foundation:

 What is the ‘Cloward-Piven’ strategy?

 First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. 

It is the strategy being used by Obama and the governing Democrats to turn America into a Socialist state.

Read all about it in Discover the Networks. 

 It looks as if the undemocratic and corrupt European Union may break up soon. An eventuality devoutly to be wished. This from the International Herald Tribune:

The European Union is not a country, and the deep global contraction is stimulating nationalism, not consensus.

With uncertain leadership and few powerful collective institutions, the union is struggling with the strains this economic crisis has inevitably produced among 27 different countries with different economic histories. The traditional concept of "solidarity," of one for all, is being undermined by protectionist pressures from political leaders with national constituencies and agendas. 

 Two articles in Investor’s Business Daily show how wrong-headed the governing Democrats’ energy policy is:  

The first is about the inadequacy of wind and solar sources and their disproportionate costs:

Solar and wind together provide less than half of 1% of our electricity. Hydropower provides 7%, natural gas and nuclear about 20% each, and coal about half. Incredibly, a possible $50 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power was stripped from the stimulus in the committee conference process.

Just how renewable are renewable sources of energy? Although silicon is the most abundant element in the Earth’s crust after oxygen, it makes relatively inefficient cells that struggle to compete with electricity generated from fossil fuels. Silicon solar cells convert only 25% of light energy received to electricity.

More advanced solar cells that can achieve efficiencies of 40% or more use the metal iridium. But it constitutes just 0.25 parts per million of the earth’s crust, and there’s only a 10-year supply left. Alternatives may be found, but that’s not solar power’s only problem.

Two projects in development will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels. At noon on a cloudless day they are designed to produce 800 megawatts of electricity, about as much as one large coal-fired plant. But actual production will likely be one-third that, and at uncompetitive rates.

The Energy Administration reported in early 2008 that government subsidies, before the stimulus bill, amounted to $24.34 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for solar and $23.37 per MWh for wind.

Continued subsidies for inefficient energy sources at the expense of reliable and abundant sources will only drive up energy costs and the national debt, while making it harder for the energy-starved American economy to recover.

The second explains how opposition to efficient and cost-effective nuclear power is based not on science but on prejudice:

During a campaign forum in Las Vegas last year, then-candidate Obama commented as follows on the site designed to safely store spent fuel from America’s 104 operating commercial nuclear reactors: "I will end the notion of Yucca Mountain because it has not been based on the sort of sound science that can assure the people of Nevada that they’re going to be safe."

Now-President Obama has kept his promise by virtually zeroing out Yucca’s budget in 2010, leaving only enough for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to handle current licensing requests. House and Senate Democrats have already cut funding for the remainder of fiscal 2009 to a paltry $288 million, the lowest in recent years.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who represents Nevada and is a longtime Yucca opponent, is ecstatic. The budget cut is "a critical first step toward fulfilling his promise to end the Yucca Mountain project," Reid said in a statement. "President Obama recognizes that the proposed dump threatens the health and safety of Nevadans and millions of Americans."

Yucca Mountain is not a "dump," and it is not unsafe. Situated about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, it is quite possibly the safest, most geologically stable and most studied place on the planet.

The Department of Energy has long studied the rock at the planned repository, assessing how the repository would perform over tens of thousands of years. After 20 years and $9 billion, DOE has found Yucca Mountain to be quite stable and safe.

The DOE Web site says that after two decades "of carefully planned and reviewed scientific fieldwork, the Department of Energy has found that a repository at Yucca Mountain brings together the location, natural barriers and design elements most likely to protect the health and safety of the public, including those Americans living in the immediate vicinity, now and long into the future."

Reid may not want it in his back yard, but he doesn’t mind keeping America’s nuclear waste where it is right now — in everybody else’s back yard. Vast numbers of spent nuclear fuel rods are now stored at more than 130 above-ground facilities in 39 states. About 161 million Americans live within 75 miles of these existing sites.

We need the jobs nuclear power can provide, and we need the energy. The Energy Information Agency projects that by 2030 U.S. electricity demand will increase by 45%. Since nuclear power currently supplies 20%, the U.S. will need to have 35 additional nuclear power plants just to meet future demand.

Nuclear power is "green" energy, and the jobs it creates and supports are "green" jobs. Had America’s nuclear reactors not been operating, about 48 million tons of sulfur dioxide, 19 million tons of nitrogen oxide and 8.7 trillion (with a "t") tons of carbon dioxide would have been emitted since 1995, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.

The opposition to nuclear power in general and Yucca Mountain in particular is more ideological than scientific. References to storing "waste" at a "dump" are totally false. As we have noted, the French long ago achieved energy independence by relying on nuclear energy for most of their power needs. But they also lead the world in processing this "waste" to create even more energy.

Jack Spencer, research fellow for nuclear energy policy at the Thomas A. Rowe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, says the "waste" to be stored at Yucca has enough energy to power every U.S. household for a dozen years. Since beginning operations, France’s La Hague plant has safely processed more than 23,000 tons of used fuel — enough to power France for 14 years.

The U.S. pioneered the technology to recapture that energy decades ago, then banned its commercial use in 1977. An energy plan that does not involve continued and even increased use of nuclear power is no plan at all.

 From Spiegel Online International:

In effect, Pakistan, a nuclear power, has relinquished its sovereignty over an important part of the country.

The once-idyllic Swat Valley has been in a state of war since 2007. The military sent a total of 12,000 troops to the region in an attempt to curb the influence of the extremists, who have beheaded 70 policemen, banned girls’ education and destroyed hundred of schools in the valley.

The clashes resulted in a great deal of bloodshed, including the deaths of at least 1,200 civilians and 180 Pakistani soldiers. But the outcome of these military operations was fatal for the government. Today, the Taliban control more than 80 percent of the Malakand region, compared with only a handful of villages a year ago.

Civilians found themselves caught between the combatants. "The army ordered us to leave the village ahead of the fighting, but the Taliban forced us to stay there," a frantic hotel owner reports by telephone from a village near Malam Jabba, once a popular ski resort…

Many even claim that the military has deliberately spared the Taliban leadership to avoid provoking further Taliban animosity against itself and the government. Others believe that the security forces were just too weak to defeat the 3,000 armed extremists. Both views are probably correct. The militants installed their regime in the mountainous tribal areas after being ousted from Afghanistan in 2001. Now their power is starting to spill over into Pakistan’s heartland, which includes the Swat Valley.

After the sun has set in the Swat Valley, small groups of men furtively enter the house of Khalil Mullah. The visitors are Taliban spies, and they have come to report to Khalil – whose name means "friend" in Arabic – about who has broken the laws of Allah in the region they control. They will report who has been seen dancing exuberantly, had his beard shaved, committed adultery or expressed sympathy for the government in Islamabad – in short, who is a traitor.

Khalil Mullah begins his daily radio show on FM 91, a Taliban radio station, at about 8 p.m. The residents of the snow-covered plateau listen to Khalil’s religious broadcast to hear the names he reads at the end. Acting as both judge and prosecutor, he announces the names of those required to appear before the Taliban’s Sharia count – and of those who have already been sentenced.

 

DER SPIEGEL

Map: The Swat Valley

The bodies of these unfortunate residents can be found the next morning on the market square in Mingora. The corpses are hanging by their legs, their heads cut off and placed onto the soles of their feet as a final form of disgrace for the dead. A note under each body reads: "The same penalty will await those who dare to remove or bury these spies and traitors."

 

The extremists are led by Maulana Fazlullah, 33, a self-proclaimed cleric who once worked as a laborer on a ski lift. The people of Malakand call him simply the "radio mullah." It was Fazlullah who first took his terrorist network to the airwaves.

In his broadcasts, he promised more efficiency and justice to citizens disappointed by the corrupt and lethargic Pakistani authorities. But the station quickly turned into a parallel government of sorts. In each day’s broadcast, Fazlullah’s holy warriors issue new rules that reflect their own interpretation of Sharia. Women are already banned from visiting markets, under penalty of death, and girls prohibited from attending school. Police officers who obey orders from Islamabad risk having their ears cut off or being killed. Some 800 policemen have already deserted their posts to join the Taliban.

The death lists draw no class distinctions and include people from all walks of life. The Taliban’s victims range from barbers and teachers to tribal elders, ministers and more liberal clerics who oppose Fazlullah.