Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=QlccsLr48Mw

Alice Dancing Under the Gallows -

A Quote:
For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion.

http://my.telegraph.co.uk/reasonmclucus ... l-society/

October 9th, 2010 4:54
Professor Emiritus Hal Lewis Resigns from American Physical Society
The following is a letter to the American Physical Society released to the public by Professor Emiritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

Tuesday, June 29, 2010
The World’s Oldest Hatred

Anti-Semitism is the world’s oldest hatred. Yet, it was a prejudice that I thought the world was moving passed. But clearly with the endless vitriol shown to Israel it is alive and well.

What’s that? Hatred of Israel is not motivated by Anti-Semitism? Yeah, I thought so too. I was even naïve enough to write column after column admonishing my fellow Jews not to jump to such simplistic conclusions. Surely hatred of Israel was due to the Jewish state being terrible at PR. Surely Israel, a lone democracy in a sea of tyranny, assumed that the justice of its cause was so self-evident as to require no explanation. A renewed PR effort was necessary. Or maybe the endless and unjust criticism of Israel was simply a manifestation of the world’s natural proclivity to champion the underdog. The Arabs, numbering in the hundreds of millions, have somehow successfully positioned themselves as being oppressed by six million Israeli Jews. All of this could account for why Israel, a thriving democracy where one million Israeli Arabs vote and have robust representation in the Israeli Knesset, is hated while its tyrannical, terrorist neighbors escape censure.

I now know that none of this is true and that hatred of Israel is just another manifestation of the world’s oldest hatred.

Believe me. It pains me to write this. It represents a fundamental defeat for my Jewish universalist worldview. I believe with every fiber of my being that we are all G-d’s children, part of an indivisible human family. That Arabs and Jews are equal before G-d and that we are all brothers. And the knowledge that I will never be fully included in that family due to a deep-seated hostility to my people is devastating beyond words.

But what else are we to conclude? Why would British academics ban their Israeli counterparts and not, say, the Chinese whose human rights abuses and slaughter of innocent civilians at Tiananmen Square took place before the whole world? The Turks bomb Kurdish independence fighters on a regular basis and continue to deny their genocide of more than a million helpless Armenians. Yet their condemnation of Israel over the Gaza flotilla gains international currency. Hugo Chavez brutally dismantles Venezuelan democracy, imprisons his political opponents, locks up judges, and persecutes a free press that criticizes him. But his condemnation of a genocidal Israel is lauded by countries throughout the world. And the UN censures Israel on a monthly basis while countries like Libya sit on its Human Rights Council. If that isn’t rank anti-Semitism than the word has no meaning.

Israel’s obviously not perfect. Like any moral democracy fighting for its very life it’s going to make mistakes. But compared to Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and so many other of its neighbors it is positively angelic. Disagree? Well, rather than engage in useless and endless debate let’s employ John F. Kennedy’s famous argument delivered in the summer of 1963 in his memorable ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ speech. Kennedy addressed the two world systems that were in mortal conflict, Capitalism and Communism. Each said their side was right. Each brought endless facts to make their case. “There are many people in the world,” Kennedy said, “who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world… There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future… And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists….” OK. A major dilemma. Two world systems each claiming to be righteous and asserting the other to be evil. How to adjudicate between them? Kennedy did so with memorable eloquence. “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.”

I say the same thing to you. If Israel really is so terrible, if it’s government is so evil, then let’s put it to the Kennedy test. If all of Israel’s most rabid critics were forced to choose to live either in Israel or under Hamas in Gaza, or under Assad in Syria, or under Ahmedenijad in Iran, or under Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, or even in communist China, which would they choose? In Israel they would have the freedom to mercilessly assail their government on the radio, in print, and in public squares. In any of these other countries they would be locked up or killed mid-way through their inaugural speech. In Israel if they were female or gay they would enjoy absolutely full rights and equal protection under the law. In Iran or Saudi Arabia, if female they would be severely punished for not adhering to a certain dress code, and if openly gay they would be lucky to escape with their lives.

Yet it is Israel which the world hates.

Go figure.

Or perhaps there is no need. This kind of hatred has a long and cruel precedent. It comes in many guises. Today it targets Israel but at its root it’s just good old-fashioned, unbridled, unapologetic Jew-hatred. Ecclesiastes had it right. There is nothing new under the sun.

http://www.shmuley.com/articles/details ... st_hatred/

http://http://www.hulu.com/watch/170507/fox-news-specials-fox-news-reporting-honor-killing-in-america

http://www.citizenwarrior.com/2010/09/s ... -know.html

Citizen Warrior: September 11th, 2010: This
Much We Know
SINCE SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001, we have
been earnestly seeking answers to the
questions, "Why did this happen? Why
would someone do such a thing? What
were the hijackers trying to accomplish?
And what can we do about it?"
We may not have figured it all out, but we
can confidently say we've established at
least this much: That we in free nations
will not be able to preserve our freedoms
against orthodox Islam's relentless push for Sharia until enough of us understand
what we're dealing with.
Because some people speak confidently about Islam without any real knowledge
of it, and because some who know a lot about Islam speak with some other
agenda besides simply speaking honestly, and because of the principle of taqiyya,
the only way to know for sure what's true about Islam is to read the Quran
yourself.
We're wasting too much time debating each other. After everyone in the
conversation has read the Quran, we can begin a productive discussion. Until a
person has read the Quran, everything the person says and thinks about Islam is
permeated with secondhand ideas and opinions that must be taken, to some
degree, on faith. After a person reads the Quran, she or he will have the facts, not
opinions.
Armed with actual facts, we have a good chance of being able to manage the
problems we have ahead of us.
Until a majority of non-Muslims have read the Quran, orthodox Muslims can easily
gain ground toward the gradual implementation of Sharia in Western democracies
because confused non-Muslims tend to accommodate and concede. But taqiyya
only works on the ignorant.
Once enough of us have read the Quran, representatives who understand Islam
will be voted into office and appropriate policy decisions will be proposed and
endorsed.
But first, as many of us as possible need to read the Quran, starting with you.
So we have created a pledge site, and we're keeping it as simple as possible. We're
going to push this as an international campaign to get non-Muslims everywhere to
"take the Pledge" and read the Quran.
Please help us promote this in every way you can. Write to your favorite bloggers
and urge them to put the pledge on their site or promote it in their sidebar. When
you read comments by people on YouTube, Facebook, web sites or blogs —
people who obviously know nothing about Islam — urge them to take the Pledge
and read the Quran. Post links to the Pledge everywhere you can.
If you own a web site and you want to promote
this pledge, you can put a graphic like the one
on the left (or one of these) and link it to the
pledge, or you can actually put the pledge on
your site. We can provide you with the code.
Since the pledge is hosted on a separate site,
the interactive form and all the signatures and
comments will appear on your site, appearing as
if the pledge is yours. You can create your own
preamble. Write to us for more information.
Let's convince everyone we know to take the
pledge, and then let's convince them to convince
everyone they know to take the pledge. Let's
make it common knowledge that "reading the
Quran just once will inoculate you and yours
against taqiyya for the rest of your lives."
You can start right here and take the Pledge yourself: Sign the Pledge. If you've
already read the Quran, please sign the pledge and in the comments, say what
you learned.
We recommend a particular version of the Quran. It has only 203 pages and it is
written in modern English. It contains all the information in the Quran without any
repetition. And it gives you enough background information to understand what
each passage is about. Perhaps most importantly, it is written in chronological
order (this is important because of the principle of abrogation). The book is An
Abridged Koran, published by CSPI. When you are done with this book, you will
know what the Quran says.
If you want to make sure you have read every single verse of the Quran —
repetition and all — the other version we recommend is A Simple Koran, also by
CSPI.
If you don't have any money, or if you're in a hurry, or if you enjoy reading online,
several complete versions of the Quran are available. Here are a few.
We've created a page on Facebook where we'll be posting reasons to read the
Quran — not to convince you, but to help you convince your friends. If you
become a friend of the page, you can share these reasons easily with your
Facebook friends.
We've created several versions of this pledge, each for a different audience. This
one is for a general audience. It has a neutral point of view. This one is for
patriots. And this one is for young people who think the media and the
government are in a conspiracy to destroy the world.
Because of the Ground Zero mosque controversy, a window of opportunity has
opened, and we must sieze it. More people are curious about Islam than ever
before. We must help them satisfy their curiosity with real information and
prevent them from being lulled back to sleep with Muslim apologists like Karen
Armstrong or John L. Esposito. Convince them there is nothing like source
material, and you can't get closer to the core of Islam than reading the Quran.
We've come a long way in nine years. But let's make this next year reach a whole
new level. Let's create an international movement to get hundreds of millions of
non-Muslims to read the Quran. Then, armed with the facts, we will put a stop to
Islam's relentless encroachment. Let us gather the forces of freedom and push
back to regain liberties we've given up to appease or accomodate.
Many of us were awakened to Islam on September 11th, jarred awake by the
senseless deaths of our fellow citizens. In a sense, their horrific murder served to
arouse us from our slumber, and since then we have been groping our way out of
ignorance. But the work is not complete.

http://http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/pat-condell-on-ground-zero-mosque-is-it-possible-to-be-astonished-but-not-surprised.html

I have about 60 pdf documents, mostly on WWASP and/or the WWASP V Scheff case. There is a deposition from Cheryal Sudweek included. Also Mark's. There are several general affidavitts about WWASP. All the cases concerned are over and done with so its not like there is any new news - but they are something of a valuable historical record.

If anyone wants them I can try to email them in a zip file, of about 21.000 kb.

Let me know by PM or email if you want them.

http://http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/2010-4-28-ACLULettertoPresidentObama.pdf


April 28, 2010

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

On behalf of the ACLU and its 500,000 members, I am writing to express our
profound concern about recent reports indicating that you have authorized a
program that contemplates the killing of suspected terrorists – including U.S.
citizens – located far away from zones of actual armed conflict. If accurately
described, this program violates international law and, at least insofar as it
affects U.S. citizens, it is also unconstitutional.
The U.S. is engaged in non-international armed conflict in Afghanistan and
Iraq and the lawfulness of its actions must be judged in that context. The
program that you have reportedly authorized appears to envision the use of
lethal force not just on the battlefield in Iraq, Afghanistan, or even the
Pakistani border regions, but anywhere in the world, including against
individuals who may not constitute lawful targets. The entire world is not a
war zone, and wartime tactics that may be permitted on the battlefields in
Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be deployed anywhere in the world where a
terrorism suspect happens to be located. Your administration has eschewed
the rhetoric of the “Global War on Terror.” You should now disavow the
sweeping legal theory that underlies that slogan.
Even in an armed conflict zone, individuals may be targeted only if they take
a direct part in hostilities, for such time as they do so, or if they have taken up
a continuous combat function. Propagandists, financiers, and other noncombat
“supporters” of hostile groups cannot lawfully be targeted with lethal
force. Applicable international humanitarian law also prohibits targeted
killing except in order to prevent an individual’s future participation in
hostilities; fighters cannot be targeted solely as retribution for past actions.
Furthermore, basic law-of-armed-conflict principles require that in such
operations, civilians who are not taking direct part in hostilities must not be
targeted, precautions must always be taken to spare the civilian population,
anticipated civilian casualties must never be disproportionate to the expected
concrete military advantage, and strikes must only occur when required by
military necessity.

Outside armed conflict zones, the use of lethal force by the United States is strictly
limited by international law and, at least in some circumstances, the Constitution. These
laws permit lethal force to be used only as a last resort, and only to prevent imminent
attacks that are likely to cause death or serious physical injury. According to news
reports, the program you have authorized is based on “kill lists” to which names are
added, sometimes for months at a time, after a secret internal process. Such a program of
long-premeditated and bureaucratized killing is plainly not limited to targeting genuinely
imminent threats. Any such program is far more sweeping than the law allows and raises
grave constitutional and human rights concerns.
In a series of cases involving prisoners currently held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay,
your administration has taken the position that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military
Force permits the detention of individuals captured anywhere in the world, even
individuals who have no connection to the battlefield. For example, your administration
has advanced that argument in the case of one of our clients – Mohammedou Salahi –
who was detained in Mauritania. We do not think the AUMF can be read so broadly. In
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court interpreted the AUMF consistently with
international law, permitting the detention of a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan only
because the detention of battlefield combatants was “so fundamental and accepted an
incident to war as to be an exercise of the ‘necessary and appropriate force’ Congress has
authorized the President to use.” 542 U.S. 507, 518 (2004). But even if the AUMF could
be read to authorize the detention of suspected terrorists apprehended far from any zone
of actual combat, it is a far more radical thing to propose that the AUMF authorizes the
extrajudicial execution of those people. Outside of armed conflict zones, human rights
law and the Constitution prescribe strict limits on the use of lethal force, limits that are
narrower than those applicable in armed conflicts, and narrower than the standards
governing detention. Targeted killing of suspects away from the battlefield is not a
“fundamental and accepted . . . incident to war.” Based on the available information,
neither does your targeted killing program appear to be an exercise of “necessary and
appropriate force” used only as a last resort to prevent imminent threats. The AUMF
may be broad, but the authority it granted was not limitless, and it cannot now be
construed to have silently overridden the limits prescribed by international law.
The program you have reportedly endorsed is not simply illegal but also unwise, because
how our country responds to the threat of terrorism will in large measure determine the
rules that govern every nation’s conduct in similar contexts. If the United States claims
the authority to use lethal force against suspected enemies of the U.S. anywhere in the
world – using unmanned drones or other means – then other countries will regard that
conduct as justified. The prospect of foreign governments hunting and killing their
enemies within our borders or those of our allies is abhorrent.
The program you have endorsed also risks the deaths of innocent people. Over the last
eight years, we have seen the government over and over again detain men as “terrorists,”
only to discover later that the evidence was weak, wrong, or non-existent. Of the many
hundreds of individuals previously detained at Guantánamo, the vast majority have been
released or are awaiting release. Furthermore, the government has failed to prove the
3
lawfulness of imprisoning individual Guantánamo detainees in 34 of the 48 cases that
have been reviewed by the federal courts thus far, even though the government had years
to gather and analyze evidence for those cases and had itself determined that those
prisoners were detainable. This experience should lead you to reject out of hand a
program that would invest the CIA or the U.S. military with the unchecked authority to
impose an extrajudicial death sentence on U.S. citizens and others found far from any
actual battlefield.

Sincerely,
Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director


AMERICAN CIVIL
LIBERTIES UNION
NATIONAL OFFICE
125 BROAD STREET, 18TH FL.
NEW YORK, NY 1004-2400
T/212.549.2500
WWW.ACLU.ORG
OFFICERS AND DIRECTORS
SUSAN N. HERMAN
PRESIDENT
ANTHONY D. ROMERO
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
ROBERT B. REMAR
TREASURER