I‘m not sure if I’ve got that third acronym right — Mad Mullahs For Nuking Israel, right? — but the first one sure undercut the second one yesterday, much to the detriment of the third one.

The NIE, National Intelligence Estimate, gave the MMFNI a bunch of breathing room when it came out last December, claiming that to the best of the combined knowledge of the U.S. intelligence community, Iran was not currently pursuing a nuclear weapon. Or at least we were “moderately confident” that was the case.

Israel, for whom mere “moderate confidence” could spell death, was not so sure.

Now it turns out that the IAEA, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, isn’t so sure either. Its report, released yesterday goes way beyond “moderate confidence” to say Iran’s nuclear weapons program is “a matter of serious concern” because of:

• Willful lack of cooperation
• 18 documents that indicate the Iranians are working on explosives, uranium processing and warhead design — activities the NYT bravely reports “could be associated with constructing nuclear weapons.” Duh.
• Failure to report R&D activities on faster, more productive centrifuges
• Iranian denial of access to sites where centrifuge components were being manufactured and where research of uranium enrichment was being conducted

In short:

“The Iranians are certainly being confronted with some pretty strong evidence of a nuclear weapons program, and they are being petulant and defensive,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now runs the Institute for Science and International Security. “The report lays out what the agency knows, and it is very damning. I’ve never seen it laid out quite like this.”

To which Baghdad Bob Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the atomic energy agency, responded

… that the report vindicated Iran’s nuclear activities. It “is another document that shows Iran’s entire nuclear activities are peaceful,” the semi-official Fars News Agency quoted him as saying.

Anyone who still believes the NIE presented an honest assessment of Iran’s nuke-quest has two choices when confronting the IAEA’s actions: They can admit they were wrong, and that at a minimum we can be “moderately confident” that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, or they can align themselves with the MMFNI.

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The Peacekeepers are back at it again — “piece-seeking,”‘ not peacekeeping — with their disgusting focus on the children they are sent to protect in war-torn nations. BBC reports on a report from Save The Children:

Save the Children says the most shocking aspect of child sex abuse is that most of it goes unreported and unpunished, with children too scared to speak out.

A 13-year-old girl, “Elizabeth” (pictured here) described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home.

“They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me… I tried to escape but there were 10 of them and I could do nothing,” she said.

“I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding.”

No action has been taken against the soldiers.

Don’t let that last sentence pass you by, because it’s the standard operating procedure. Under current Peacekeeping protocols, the UN has no criminal jurisdiction over Peacekeepers; it must rely on the offending Peacekeeper’s home country to prosecute. That’s the excuse, anyway. The UN could conduct a prosecutorial investigation of each alleged crime, forward the file to the Peacekeeper’s home judicial system, and pressure for prosecution. But it rarely does.

You can read the Save The Children report here and the organization’s press release on the report here. Some excerpts from the release:

A new report released today by Save the Children UK shows that children living in conflict-affected countries fear to report sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeeping troops and humanitarian aid workers.

Despite recent political commitments by governments and international organisations to tackle this problem, the report exposes the chronic under-reporting of such abuse, which leaves many children around the world suffering in silence. …

Save the Children UK’s research in Ivory Coast, Southern Sudan and Haiti shows that children as young as six are being abused by adults working for the international community. The children interviewed highlighted many different types of abuse, including trading food for sex, rape, child prostitution, pornography, indecent sexual assault and trafficking of children for sex.

“People don’t report it because they are worried that the agency will stop working here, and we need them”, explained a teenage boy in Southern Sudan….

The report reveals that the perpetrators of sexual abuse of children can be found in every type of humanitarian, peace and security organisation, at every grade of staff, and among both locally recruited and international staff.

For its part, the UN (shown here, looking the other way) said it “welcomed” the report … as it has welcomed numerous reports in the past, dutifully commissioning studies and investigations, all of which have been beautifully bound and carefully set on shelves, but all of which have failed to stop the rapes. Claudia Rosette gets it right:

Oh, great. The UN can add this report to its research collection of previous reports on UN peacekeeper rape in Liberia and Sierra Leone and the Congo and so forth; and we can look forward to more UN statements on the issue, such as Kofi Annan’s “zero tolerance” policy of 2005, or his zero-zero tolerance policy of 2006 (when he “strengthened” the zero tolerance of 2005), and Assistant-Secretary-General Jane Holl Lute’s zero-zero-zero “zero tolerance” promises of 2007 …

Here are the 18 stories I’ve written previously on this topic. Outside of the blogsophere, good luck finding this level of reporting on the Peacekeeper rape crisis.

Imagine, if you will, the press coverage there would be if the abusers at Abu Ghraib kept coming back year after year, with ever more horrific abuse of the prisoners in their care. Even though Abu Ghraib is full of hardened terrorist fighters, not innocent under-age children, the press would be covering it in dozens of front-page stories.

But you don’t see that. You won’t see that. This latest report will slip beneath they tide of type because the media has more important things to do than protecting children from UN Peacekeepers. Yes, it’s a full-time job denigrating America — who has time for anything else?

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Does anyone remember happy days in Somalia? Didn’t think so.

There was a brief moment of hope in December 2006 when Ethiopian forces, backed by US air power, drove out the Islamists, but this is an enemy that doesn’t go away when driven out. It’s a cockroach that needs to be squashed flat to keep it from coming back.

The Union of Islamist Courts has been coming back, as witnessed yesterday when the UIC raided the town of Jowhar, held it briefly until they could free UIC prisoners (read: terrorists) held there, and withdrew, leaving 5 soldiers and 2 civilians dead.

In their drive to push Somalia into a totalitarian Islamist state, the Islamists have cared little about the humanitarian consequences, and it shows, according to BBC:

“It continues to deteriorate by the day,” the UN refugee agency’s Guillermo Bettocchi told the BBC.

“There are no signs of improvement on the ground, and those who are suffering the brunt of the conflict are the civilians, who are being either killed or displaced, and are in the middle of suffering that is unacceptable,” he said.

“In terms of child malnutrition, access to education, lack of access to clean water and sanitation facilities, indeed the situation in Somalia is the worst in the world… to be a child in Somalia today is something that means lots of suffering and a grim future.”

Record food prices, hyper-inflation and drought in many parts of the country have made the situation worse and seasonal rains due to start soon are also predicted to fail.

“For too long, the needs of ordinary Somalis have been forgotten,” the agencies said.

Our commitments in Iraq make our intervention in Somalia difficult, but the real stumbling block to use involvement is Clinton’s disastrous handling of Somalia, in which he timidly fled the country at the first sign of difficulty (and in the process doomed our fallen fighting men there to dying for nothing). No route remains for re-entry.

Now the UN is considering stepping in, as a proposal to send 27,000 peacekeepers there (Mothers, guard your children!). Wishful thinking, probably. The African Union has only been able to muster 2,400 troops after promising 8,000, and given the dismal progress of peacekeepers in other African war venues, approval and recruitment will be a tough slog.

Of course, the Islamists could turn the whole thing around by simply embracing other’s opinions and allowing some sort of representative government to be formed.

When pigs fly … to the mosque.

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Do read Angelina Jolie’s piece, Staying to Help in Iraq, in WaPo today. You would think that a high-profile star who’s tied at the hip to the UN would return from Iraq with a scathing report on the US effort, but think again.

Her subject, as you probably know, is displaced Iraqis in Syria and Jordan, so she has plenty of oportunity to blame the US for their condition, but she does not. She recounts pledges she got out of Gen. David Petraeus and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and makes a plea for increased funding for the UN’s humanitarian efforts with the refugees.

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and thought it was about to at the end, when I read:

As for the question of whether the surge is working …

But she went on:

… I can only state what I witnessed: U.N. staff and those of non-governmental
organizations seem to feel they have the right set of circumstances to attempt
to scale up their programs. And when I asked the troops if they wanted to go
home as soon as possible, they said that they miss home but feel invested in
Iraq. They have lost many friends and want to be a part of the humanitarian
progress they now feel is possible.

Jolie’s language is careful and deliberate. Surrounded as she is by those who blithely say “withdraw now” as if there would be nothing but positive consequences of such action, she looks at the refugee situation and says:

Can the United States afford to gamble that 4 million or more poor and displaced
people, in the heart of Middle East, won’t explode in violent desperation,
sending the whole region into further disorder?

This is a realistic acknowledgement of the fact that poverty, lack of opportunity and disenfranchisement are the engines that feed jihad — a simple notion for most of us, but one lost on the Hollywood Leftist Elite.

Jolie has removed herself from that crowd and proved herself not just a figurehead (despite, as we see, having both quite a figure and quite a head) ambassador, but a smart and powerful spokesperson.

Do you think the GOP could talk her into running for Prez in 2012?

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Google — which happily and profitably brings us porn, violence, pasteurized news from China and a wealth of other World Wide Wackiness — has decided to off (electronically at least) a vocal critic of UN corruption.

The world’s largest Internet conglomerate has decided to drop Matthew Lee’s Inner City Press from Google News, citing — apparently — “user complaints.” According to Fox News, Lee received this email from Google on Feb. 8:

“We periodically review news sources, particularly following user complaints, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users. When we reviewed your site we’ve found that we can no longer include it in Google News.”

He was cut on Feb. 13. Lee has been tenacious in his reporting on corruption at the UN, especially at the UN Development Programme, UNDP, which is also scrutinized regularly by Claudia Rosette and and is the only focus of a dedicated blog, UNDP Watch — indicative of juicy scandal aplenty.

Lee explains the cut:

Google, after being publicly questioned at the UN about not signing on to the human rights and anti-censorship principles of the Global Compact, responded not by joining the Compact and foreswearing from censorship but by moving to de-list from its Google News service the media organization which raised the question. More than two years after Inner City Press was included into Google News, in a February 8 message referring to the receipt of a complaint, Google said it would be removing Inner City Press from the news database. (Read the balance of his comprehensive post here.)

Fox describes Lee’s writing as “clunky,” his methods as “unorthodox (and often highly annoying)” and his news judgment as “sometimes more than a little off the mark,” but admits that “Lee has hit his share of bull’s-eyes and became an outlet for whistleblowers inside the U.N.”

Indeed, he appears to have a solid grip on the UN’s jugular as the lead stories on the site indicate today:

• Lockheed Rep on US Committee for UNDP, like UNICEF Germany, Raises Conflict Questions

• On Kosovo, UN’s Ban Takes Only Two Questions, then Rostrum Taken from Serbia Too

• Woman’s Death on UN Lawn Leaves Questions Unanswered, Photos Unexplained

Lee is trying to find out the source of the complaint against him (good luck!), and Google promises ICP will be back with Google News later this month — but if that’s so, why was it cut in the first place? It either “offers a high quality experience” for Google users, or it doesn’t.

A few words come to mind: Bullying, shot across the bow, warning. Oh, and unseemly, corrupt and corporate patsy to the UN, since Google has a contract with UNDP for mapping the UN’s anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals.

hat-tip: Jim

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How can you tell Iraq is getting safer? Just apply the “quaking diplomat” test:

AMMAN, Feb 18 (Reuters) – The U.N. refugee agency said on Monday it would send its first representative to Baghdad since 2003, when 22 people including U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello died in a bomb attack on its office in the Iraqi capital.

Antonio Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said the move was part of a “stepped up mobilisation of efforts” to allow the U.N. aid agency to better help Iraqis, either displaced or fleeing the country.

“Our representative now sits in Amman and I have decided to move this post immediately into Baghdad. I will be presenting in the next two weeks a new name to the Iraqi authorities (for their agreement),” Guterres said.

If the UN will go there, then not only must it be safe … there must be pretty good restaurants and caterers, too.

This just might be the best proof to date that General Petraeus’ surge strategy is working, and al-Qaeda and related Islamofascists are on the run in Mesopotamia.

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A Curious Endorsement

Ed Morrisey, skipper of Captain’s Quarters has decided who he’s going to vote for and has published an endorsement. It’s Mitt Romney, and his thinking is much like mine, as I approach finality in my decision-making. (I need to decide by California’s Feb. 5 primary unless I vote absentee.)

No one’s the perfect conservative, but Mitt’ll do. Check. Executive leadership and experience. Check. The guy we want if the economy turns south. Check.

What is telling, very, very telling, is that the war against Islamic jihadists and Iraq is not mentioned once in Morissey’s endorsement. How could such a thoroughly exceptional an observer of our times make so monumental oversight?

In part, it’s because when looking at McCain, Romney and Giuliani, there’s strong confidence that any of them have the ability to faithfully and forcefully guide the mission.

And in part, it’s because we have a general and senior staff in the field who are getting the job done, taking the pressure off the president.

And that is also, perhaps, the reason for Morrissey’s oversight. With the war going well, one of the keenest observers of the war on terror simply forgot to mention it.

A Kennedy Endorsement

There’s news today that Ted Kennedy has come out of his fog long enough to endorse Obama tomorrow. Could I care any less? Checking …. No.

But who can’t take note, as I wrote last night, that Caroline Kennedy is endorsing Obama? That is golden; that has value; that has magic.

I still think of Caroline Kennedy as a little girl in a pretty coat standing by her mother as little John saluted. That image in our mind gives her a very special place in the American consciousness, as does how she has lived her life since: quietly and pretty darn normally.

So when this 40-year-old mother of teens who works in New York City’s’ schools writes of Obama in today’s NYT …

There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility. …

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

… it is a powerful thing for Obama, indeed.

I was Boy Scout age when Kennedy was killed, so I admit that some youthful romanticism is affecting my thinking. That said, I still think this endorsement is huge, and may have just iced Obama as the Dem nominee.

And we were so hoping to be able to take on Hillary.

Throwing Stones At Greenhouses

In case your copy of the journal from the Institut für Mathematische Physik at Germany’s Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina has been sitting around unread since last summer, here’s what you’re missing:

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896 and is still supported in global climatology essentially describes a fictitious mechanism in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 °C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

A hat-tip Bubba who led me to the post by Van Helsing at Moonbattery, who comments, “Someone get this to Al Gore quickly, before he makes a fool of himself. Whoops, too late.”

Russia Pumped Oil-for-Food For Bucks

Just when you thought the Oil-for-Food scandal was past its last outrage, just when you thought Putin’s Russia couldn’t get any more troubling, there’s always another story that shouts, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!” And this new one, from Sky News, is a doozey:

A former Russian spymaster has said his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500m (£252m) from the UN’s oil-for-food programme in Iraq.

Sergei Tretyakov says he helped Saddam Hussein’s regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the programme.

The scheme was set up to ease the suffering of ordinary Iraqis under UN sanctions imposed after Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

It allowed Iraq to sell oil provided the bulk of the proceeds were used to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian goods and to pay war reparations.

However, a UN investigation has accused 2,200 companies from 40 countries of cheating the scheme out of some $1.8bn (about £908m).

The former spy, who defected to the US in 2000 as a double agent, said this allowed Russia to skim profits on the scheme.

Of the UN, Tretyakov says,

“It’s an international spy nest. Inside the UN, we were fishing for knowledgeable diplomats who could give us first of all anti-American information.”

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing: Why do we pay to keep the UN alive when it’s used against us, when it steals from and rapes those it is supposed to help, and when it’s designed primarily to benefit our enemies?

Putin’s New Man At NATO

And while we’re on the subject of Putinville, let’s pause to consider Vlad the Tiny’s new appointment to represent Russia at NATO, Dmitri Rogozin. It’s an appointment, says Andreus Umland at History News Network, that should be seen as “a slap in the face of the West.”

The new NATO envoy is an infamous nationalist with manifold links to racist and antisemitic circles throughout his political career. From the beginning of his rise, Rogozin’s image has been that of a “protector” of ethnic Russians in and outside the Russian Federation, as well as of a rabidly anti-Western pan-Slavist. He was founder and co-founder of various nationalist groupings one of which openly demanded, among other things, to make homosexualism a criminal offense.

At a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Rogozin made Europe responsible for the horrors of Soviet communism – in as far as Marxism was imported to Russia from the West.

Just Putin’s type, eh?

Bans And Lifting Bans

Spiegel has a couple interesting stories today on bans — one on a busybody secularist ban that forces a change in many folks’ lifestyle, all to aggrandize the Nanny State, and one a ban that’s being lifted in order to squelch secularism — an action that makes me nervous.

First, from Germany, the nation that brought us stern bauhaus avant guarde denizens, always with a cigarette dangling, there’s this:

Helmut Schmidt, former German chancellor, former minister of defense and co-publisher of the influential weekly newspaper Die Zeit, is being accused of breaking the law — for violating Germany’s new ban on smoking in public places.

Committed smokers Helmut Schmidt and his wife Loki — aged a lung-cancer-defying 89 and 88, respectively — are being investigated by Hamburg public prosecutors under suspicion of breaking the smoking ban and endangering public health, the mass-circulation daily Bild reported Friday. The complaint was brought by the Wiesbaden Non-Smokers Initiative, an anti-smoking organization based in the town of Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt.

If you’re almost 90 and you want to light up, and you’re the guest of honor at the event, shouldn’t you be able to? Of course not!

The Nanny Staters saw in Schmidt a target to publicize campaign to control our lives, so he and Loki are now potentially common criminals, all in the name of people who know what’s good for us (and not smoking is definitely good for us) telling us what to do.

Then, from Turkey, there’s this:

Women at Turkish universities could soon show up in class wearing traditional Islamic head scarves, as the government moves towards lifting a ban on the practice.

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has its root in an Islamist religious movement, reached an agreement with an opposition nationalist party on Thursday to cooperate on legislation to lift the two decade-old ban.

“Agreement has been reached … the issue of the head scarf was evaluated in terms of rights and freedoms,” read a joint statement released by the AKP and the opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The two parties control enough seats in parliament to end the ban with a vote that could be held as early as next week.

A lift on the ban would anger Turkey’s secular elite, who view the wearing of head scarves as a political statement aimed at undermining the nation’s secular principles.

Anyone following Turkish politics could see this coming. Fundamentally (bad choice of words?), my response should be “good,” because government shouldn’t be setting dress codes for schools. If a Muslim girl wants to wear a scarf, then why shouldn’t she be able to?

But things are never simple in Turkey, or with Islam. The ban is more like a social dike, keeping all the harsh and restrictive tenants of Islam from overtaking the university. It’s a symbol that there’s a place where free thought is still allowed — even as banning the scarves is a symbol that there’s a place where free thought is not allowed.

Big picture: Turkey is on its way to losing its important symbolic role as the world’s foremost secular Islamic nation. I fear that once scarves are allowed on campus, any girl trying to go to school without one will become the victim of Islamist thugs, and Islam will grab the nation’s free spirit in its chilling, vice-like grip.

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Cloverfield, Nevada Style

The film Cloverfield has used viral internet marketing to become quite a sensation — but at its heart, it’s just a Godzilla movie, with a big mean monster wreaking havoc in New York.

And yesterday, a little, pale monster wreaked havoc in the glitter gulches and dusty desert towns of Nevada. And today, just as I predicted, we are suffering through the media coverage of it:

Boy, oh, boy! Hidden behind all the hoopla, headlines and the Nevada caucus victories of Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton is one little-noticed but stunning political development and number:

Ron Paul, the one-time Libertarian candidate and 10-term Republican congressman from Texas, was in second place. That’s right, Second Place. The 72-year-old ob-gyn who’s always on the end of the line at GOP debates or barred altogether, was running ahead of John McCain, Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, in fact, ahead of….

all other Republicans except Romney, who easily captured his second state in a week after Michigan.

Uh-huh. But let’s keep our heads on straight. It was Romney with 51% of the votes (all 22,659 of them!) followed by the pale imp with 14%, attracting a whopping 6,087 to his cause — a full 436 more people than John McCain attracted.

Photo clipped from: Dino’s Forum

Marking History

They laid an historical marker outside a house in Port Arthur, Texas today. Here’s the story.

In that house there once lived a little four-year-old girl who grew up to live far too short a life as Summer of Love diva Janis Joplin. There was another house she lived in earlier, but it’s gone now, so this is her official childhood home.

The marker was placed today as opposed to any other day you might think of because it marks what would have been Joplin’s 65th birthday.

Whoa, am I feeling old.

I was 17, I think, when I first put Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills on my little stereo and heard her gravely voice. And I’m still 17 in my head when I think about her … how could she have been born 65 years ago?

New Euro-Islamist Threat

This is not something I’m quite prepared to think about:

The source implied that the [Spanish intelligence agency] CNI had specific information on itinerant terrorists heading for the UK, France and Portugal.

The squib, from a London Times article, troubles me not just because Incredible Daughter #1 is in Paris, but because I’ve never seen the words “itinerant terrorists” before. We have in America a tradition of itinerant preachers and judges; from sick Islam, we get itinerant terrorists, travelling from place to place, killing innocents in the name of Allah.

Terrorists Get 72 Raisins?

Amidst a lengthy and interesting story at Act! For America covering the suppression of ancient Islamic texts in Germany, so anyone interested in a revisionist view of the Koran cannot get access to them, was this interesting tidbit:

According to an Islam tradition, Muslim martyrs will go to paradise and marry 72 black-eyed virgins. But some Koran scholars point to a less sexy paradise. While beautifully written, Islamic texts are often obscure. The Arabic language was born as a written language with the Koran, and growing evidence suggests that many of the words were Syriac or Aramaic.

Specifically, the Koran says martyrs going to heaven will get “hur,” and the word was taken by early commentators to mean “virgins,” hence those 72 concubines. But in Aramaic, hur actually meant “white” and was commonly used to specifically mean “white grapes.”

It’s easy to crack a joke over this, but if there’s any question at all about the nature of so critical a text — a text that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents a year — why does the keeper of the archive, Angelika Neuwirth, protect them from anyone other than pro-Islamist researchers?

For more on this fascinating story, see Andrew Higgins’ WSJ article, The Lost Archives.

hat-tip: What Bubba Knows

Pulling The Plug On Terrorists

Just wait ’til some Palestinians start crying about having to eat cold falafels in the dark — oh, how the anti-Israeli press will rain an ink-storm on Israel. Here’s the story, from Sky News:

Large parts of the Gaza Strip have been plunged into darkness after its main power plant shut down.

It comes after Israel blocked fuel supplies to the Hamas-run territory and closed its borders.

Israel says the blocklade is a response to rocket attacks by militants.

It claims 230 rockets have been fired at border towns in a new wave of aggression.

“It claims?” I don’t suppose we can expect the media to actually report that rockets are falling like locusts on Israel.

Already, the Palestinian PR machine is busy maximizing the impact:

“The catastrophe will affect hospitals, medical clinics, water wells, houses, factories, all aspects of life.”

Oh, boo hoo. First, stop sending rockets into civilian neighborhoods, especially when there’s no war going on. And second, get your act together, Palestine. You’ve had 60 years to provide for yourself, but here you are, dependent on Israel for your power … with fuel purchased by Europe.

How these people garner so much sympathy and so little criticism amazes me.

Human-Animal Embryo Research

Two research companies in England have been granted licenses to mix up human and animal embryos, reports Science Daily.

One is going to take the genetic matter out of cow embryos and mix ‘em up with human embryos, in a quest for better human stem cells.

The scientists would attempt to extract stem cells from the blastocyst after six days. Stem cells are building blocks that can grow into any type of tissue such as liver, heart and muscle cells. The quality and the viability of stem cells would then be checked to see if nuclear transfer technique has worked. The scientists would also be observing the way that the cells are reprogrammed after fusion to see if there are useful processes they could replicate in the laboratory. The embryo would have to be destroyed at 14 days old in accordance with the licence.

I have to admit, this all goes way, way over my head. I understand that there’s nothing about this license that will allow any intermingled animal/human embryonic material to (1) live or (2) get into humans, but the research is taking the science to another new level, and after that will be another new level.

At some time, a mistake will occur or a license will be granted that shouldn’t have been. That’s just the way it goes with us inquisitive humans. All this going too far will make a great novel … and it’s one work of nonfiction I hope I never read.

George Clooney, Messenger Of Peace

Position to fill: International shell game operator needs good looking individual with real swoon-power, a hard-left orientation and a history of supporting the wrong side in global causes to cover up organization’s myriad global failures.

Position filled! The Rosett Report reports:

As Hollywood buffs and UN money-raisers already know, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has just named actor George Clooney as the UN’s newest Messenger of Peace, with a “special focus on UN peacekeeping.” Clooney, currently visiting Sudan, is expected to “receive his designation” Jan. 31st at UN headquarters in New York.

Oh, great. We get to see even more of Clooney opening his mouth and letting his politics spew out. Rosett’s not expecting much good of it to come, either:

This would all be great if UN peacekeeping actually produced peace. But the illusion that the UN is a grand force for good in this world deserves to be catalogued somewhere between World’s Most Amazing Scams and Believe It-Or-Not Best-in-Special-Effects. The reality of today’s UN is more like a cross between “Animal House” (the movie, with John Belushi) and “Animal Farm” (the book, by George Orwell).

Her post is a gem. Do read the whole thing.

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Vladamir Putin is still the president of Russia, and Russia remains the world’s biggest bully:

Russia warned Kosovo’s leaders Wednesday that if they declare independence the territory will never become a member of the United Nations or other international political institutions.

Kosovo, which is run by the UN (what a nightmare that must be!), is hoping to declare its independence from Serbia in February — but Russia intends to veto such a move. America and England support Kosovo’s independence, of course, but it really gets Moscow’s goat:

“Going down the way of unilateral moves, Kosovo is not going to join the ranks of fully recognized members of the international community,” [Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin] said. “It may get some recognitions, regrettably … but it’s not going to come to this building as full-fledged member of the international community. It’s not going to be able to join other political international institutions.”

Maybe this photo of Kosovo students demonstrating for independence has something to do with Russia’s pro-Serbia, anti-freedom stand:

Could it be that Russia is afraid of too much independence in the Balkan states?

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The Warmie bureaucrats are boarding their jetliners by the hundreds and flying home frm Bali, their carbon footprints trailing behind them like so many size 14s.

Behind them, mounds of paper spell out the paths the UN negotiations will follow as they lead to a replacement for the soon-defunct Kyoto treaty. Basically the US won, knocking off an EU proposal to hit specific greenhouse gas reductions by 25 to 40 percent by 2040.

In the global media’s haste to cover these shenanigans left largely uncovered was a letter from 100 scientists to UN Sec Gen Ban Ki-Moon that calls the UN’s effort to prevent global climate change “futile” and “a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems.”

The letter accuses UN policy-makers of buy-in to a political, not a scientific, thesis:

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by ­government ­representatives. The great ­majority of IPCC contributors and ­reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts. (emphasis added)

Signatories make these points about these fallacies of the current UN global warming group-think:

• Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.

• The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.

• Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today’s computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.

Does it matter to the charging lemmings at the UN that the debate on global warming is definitely not over? Definitely not! Perhaps they see in global warming a threat to the world, perhaps not. But they definitely know a grand bureaucratic reason for being when they see one, with regulations and confabs and reports galore, easily enough to sustain even the youngest of them through the rest of their careers.

hat-tip: Greenie Watch

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