Archive for January, 2009
A Spotless Sun
By Alan Caruba
There’s a wonderful irony in the fact that, back in the 1970s, the Greens were issuing warnings and even writing books about the coming Ice Age. They would abandon this issue, based in well-known and accepted solar science, in favor of a vast international hoax alleging man-made global warming.
As the global warming hoax begins to lose its power to influence public opinion and policy, the Greens are not likely to be heeded for a long time to come because they were right about an Ice Age and lying through their teeth about global warming.
Scientists and laymen who follow the Ice Age cycles have been warning that, if not a full-fledged Ice Age, at the very least a Little Ice Age comparable to one that lasted from 1300 to around 1850 is on its way
Amidst all the media coverage of Hurricane Gustav and the Republican Convention, a report in DailyTech.com was not likely to get much attention, but it forecast a very cold world in the years to come. The Earth has already started to cool and scientists date the change from 1998.
Headlined, “Drop in solar activity has potential effect for climate on Earth”, the news is that, for the first time in 100 years, “an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.” The author, Michael Asher, noted that “The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity—which determines the number of sunspots—is an influencing factor for climate on Earth.”
My friend, Robert W. Felix, wrote an excellent book on this titled “Not by Fire, but by Ice” ($15.00, Sugarhouse Publishing, softcover, second edition) which can be purchased from his website at IceAgeNow.com.
“We’re beginning to realize that Earth is a violent and dangerous place to live,” wrote Felix. “We’re beginning to realize that mass extinctions have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on Earth.”
Felix has a new book soon to be published that addresses magnetic reversals, another cyclical factor affecting life on Earth. “During the last 4.5 million years, at least six out of nine radiolarian extinctions occurred at magnetic reversals.” They appear to be a factor in the sudden emergence of new species so Darwin’s theory is likely to be reexamined.
Posted in Part One: An Overview of American Islam
By Kathy Shaidle
RightSideNews Copyright © 2009
Imagine a Super Bowl with all male cheerleaders and half-time prayers. In that America, they drink Jihad Cola instead of Coke and thank Allah when they win an Oscar.
Luckily, that America is fictional, one vividly described in Robert Ferrigno's 2006 futuristic novel, Prayers for the Assassin, set in 2040. But is it really so hard to imagine, in a world in which a man named "Barack Hussein Obama" can get elected President just a few years after Muslim hijackers destroyed the world's tallest buildings in the heart of New York City?
Today many Americans are either blissfully ignorant of, or simply indifferent to, the slow, incremental growth of radical Islam in their midst.
We sometimes hear about terrorist cells or suspicious Muslim "compounds" on the news. However, these stories represent merely the tip of an Islamic iceberg that could very well doom America. Not today or tomorrow. But in our lifetimes? That is a real possibility.
And don't shrug off Islam as "just another religion." Muslim sharia law deems women to be inferior to men, and allows husbands to "lightly" beat their wives. Polygamy and child bride marriage are condoned and encouraged, due to the example of Mohammed himself, whose many wives included a nine year old. Anti-Semitism and slavery are enshrined in the Koran, as is exploitation of and even violence against all "unbelievers."
Radical Muslims have learned they don't require bombs or hijacked airliners to destroy America. They can just use America's own ideological infrastructure against itself.
Using a kind of ingenious political jujitsu, radical Muslims rely upon everything from the rights to freedom of speech and worship enshrined in the U.S. Constitution to the current atmosphere of hypersensitive political correctness to push their agenda.
For example, the "Islamification" of the educational system is now underway. Textbooks whitewash Islam's bloody history. Public school children forbidden to pray or recite the Pledge of Allegiance are, however, obliged to play "Muslim for a Day." Meanwhile, universities eagerly introduce footbaths, Muslim prayer rooms and hallal cafeteria food.
Increasingly, Muslim employees are suing companies for the "right" to refuse to handle "unclean" pork or alcohol, or the "right" to wear headscarves. It is no coincidence that these companies include household names like UPS, Wal-Mart and McDonalds's – radical Muslims are sending a message to smaller firms who won't have the means to fight similar suits in the future.
These demands for accommodation extend even behind prison walls, where Muslim prisoners (indoctrinated by Muslim chaplains trained by foreign extremists) insist on getting special treatment as well.
"Lawfare" is on the rise, too. Muslim groups now file expensive, time-consuming lawsuits against critics of Islam, and while these suits are currently confined mostly to Canada and Europe, they have a "chilling" effect on American publishers, writers, journalists and filmmakers. Last year, it only took a couple of threatening emails to persuade a major U.S. publisher to cancel an upcoming novel about Mohammed.
Few Americans realize that their neighborhood mosque was probably built and financed by well-heeled terrorist sympathizers abroad. In fact, 80% of American mosques are Saudi-supported, and serve as safe gathering places for radical imams and dubious "charities" with anti-American agendas.
Islamic terrorism has also found a home on the internet, where (according to one UK think tank) a "virtual caliphate" (or Muslim supremacist empire) thrives, beyond the reach of authorities. The web has become an invaluable arena for radical Muslim recruiting, training, communication and organizing.
Americans looking to the government to protect them from these threats don't realize that federal agencies in the thrall of political correctness actually undermine the war of terrorism. Few Muslims currently hold public office in the United States, but this may change if Democrats begin to view them as a new source of donations and votes.
Over the next few months, I'll be your guide to the growth of radical Islam, both at home and abroad. You'll learn about "moderate" Muslim spokesmen who turn out to be anything but, and meet writers and authors censored by their governments for critiquing the Koran.
I'll be talking to experts in the fields of intelligence, religion, crime and foreign policy and sharing their insights with you.
Many Americans have already forgotten what happened on 9/11, or simply don't want to think about it anymore. Our fear, disgust or indifference is exactly what radical Muslims are counting on. As exhausting and demoralizing as it can be to educate ourselves on the facts, we must remember that "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
(Next: How prisons serve as incubators of radical Islam.)
Kathy Shaidle blogs at FiveFeetOfFury.com. Her new book, The Tyranny of Nice: How Canada crushes freedom in the name of human rights – and why it matters to Americans, features an introduction by Mark Steyn. Shaidle is also an advisor for the International Free Press Society.
Labor Union Perspective
By Thomas E. Brewton
As the proposed trade agreement with Colombia reveals, labor unions are organizations of self-centered greed, which disingenuously cloak themselves with pretense of God, country, and mom's apple pie.
President Bush, by calling for Congressional approval of the trade agreement with Colombia, is compelling liberal-progressives to choose between the high-flown, one-world internationalism to which they give lip service and kow-towing to organized labor.
Columnist Robert D. Novak described it this way in his April 4th article:
President Bush will send Congress a trade agreement next week forcing Democrats to make an unpleasant choice. Will they do the bidding of organized labor and reject a pact negotiated more than a year and a half ago with the country's strongest ally and best customer in South America?
…But to forget about a vote this year, as Pelosi wants, …would humiliate Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, a free-trader and a bulwark against the spreading influence in Latin America of Venezuela's leftist strongman, President Hugo Chávez.
Our liberal-progressive school system instructs callow youth that labor unions are agents of good and right. The facts are quite different.
The president of the United Auto Workers union has implicitly acknowledged the stark truth: industrial unions are killing American manufacturing jobs. Unions’ salvation, he says, must come from ukases promulgated by the commissars of a new socialistic, Democratic administration.
In a June 13, 2006, article by Jefrey McCracken, the Wall Street Journal reported:
United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger, acknowledging that his union confronts the toughest challenges in its 71-year history, told delegates to the UAW’s leadership convention that solutions to problems such as rising health-care costs or the rash of auto suppliers filing bankruptcy-law protection must come largely through the political process.
Union leaders expect a Democrat-socialist to win the presidency, and they expect a payoff via protectionist legislation that will reduce business profits, throwing non-union workers out of jobs and augmenting inflation, to the cost of the vast majority of citizens who are non-union members of the labor force.