Al Gore: fond of israel and cowboy bootsThe invitees to last night’s Dan David Prize ceremony—during which generous awards were given to Former Vice President Al Gore, Amos Oz, and Sir Tom Stoppard, among others—were a mixed bunch. Young Israelis who regard flip flops as formal attire mingled with perfectly-coiffed, elderly American Jewish ladies. Scruffy journalists in t-shirts and Crocs mixed with distinguished diplomats. Israeli politicians and celebrities circulated among the anonymous masses.

A few things unified this mixed bag of guests, however:

1. Regardless of the formality of their dress, young hipsters and elegant elders alike pounced upon the refreshment bar as soon as the doors to the event opened.
   
2. In typical Israeli fashion, everyone had at least one cell phone and used it constantly.
   
3. Regardless of their dress or stature, everyone knew who the star of the evening was: Al Gore.

Al Gore is beloved by Israelis, so despite the fact that he was awarded the Dan David Prize last night in recognition of his contributions to raising awareness about our planetary environmental crisis, everyone attending the ceremony admired him for his support of the State of Israel as well. Israeli President Shimon Peres made this crystal clear when he said, during his address, that “Al Gore has many titles. I will not repeat them. Al Gore is a dear and good friend of the State of Israel.”

Gore, who with his slight Southern accent and cowboy boots (yes, he wore cowboy boots) appeared to be a type of environmental Lone Ranger, received the prize and addressed the audience with his characteristic charisma. After congratulating Israel on its recent Independence Day, he encouraged us all to act urgently in order to push the political tipping point and put renewable energy on the agenda. He said that, among other things, the environmental crisis is a political problem in that it's a matter of getting politicians to address these issues. What we need, Gore said, is “sufficient political will. But as the people of Israel know, sufficient political will is a renewable resource.”

In the meantime, Gore will be sponsoring other kinds of renewable energy. Today he'll deliver the opening lecture at a two-day conference called “Renewable Energy and Beyond” that will be held at Tel Aviv University. Among the topics to be discussed are global warming and geopolitics, Israel’s road to energy independence, and business opportunities for sustainable energy.

So, what is Al doing with his cool $1 million, you might ask? He’s donating 10% to young researchers in the field...and 90% to the Alliance for Climate Protection. And not spending any on new cowboy boots.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Haaretz (Tomer Appelbaum)

According to a high ranking official in Obama's campaign, JEWCY was informed this weekend that plans have been discussed for a joint Gore/Edwards endorsement of Barack Obama.

Why hasn't it already happened?

According to the official, the endorsement's value for Super Tuesday would be relatively minor given that it would only have 24 hours to circulate.

It would seem that the Obama campaign has determined that a Gore/Edwards endorsement would be more effective coming after what most expect to be a narrow Clinton win on Tuesday, helping the presidential hopeful rebound and regain some momentum going into the weekend's carousel of political talk shows.

The right wing, imperialist-sympathizing, Texas oil-funded, British political magazine, The New Statesman, has just published a piece on global warming in which the author, David Whitehouse, states:

For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a skeptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased.

For those who missed the sarcasm, The New Statesman is anything but right wing. Their interest in the threat of global warming could only be journalistic. Whitehouse holds a doctorate in astrophysics, and is the former on-line science editor of the BBC—which, as far as I know, gives him two more scientific credentials than Al Gore. So, when he explains:

[W]e are led to the conclusion that either the hypothesis of carbon dioxide induced global warming holds but its effects are being modified in what seems to be an improbable though not impossible way, or, and this really is heresy according to some, the working hypothesis does not stand the test of data,

You’d think people would listen. Why, then, is it a certainty that they won’t?

For starters, the anti-Western trend in left wing thought is all-encompassing. The West, so the story goes, has exploited everything it could get its hands on in order to feed its rapacious capitalist machine. The victims include all non-Westerners and, now, the planet itself. This is a very attractive approach for those looking to make a quick judgment along history’s good guy-bad guy lines. Why not? After all, it’s not without some merit. It’s easy to point to the slave trade and colonial rule, and make a sound moral determination in the non-West’s favor. Deeper digging produces some compelling counter-arguments, but if you’re looking for a go-to stance then “the West is evil” is a lay-up. In regards to global warming, the logic proceeds as follows: atmospheric warming is caused by CO2 emissions; CO2 emissions are the result of industrialization; industry is synonymous with the West. Thus, global warming is caused by the West, (the U.S. in particular.)

This is tailor-made for an anti-U.S. institution like the United Nations. It’s also compelling stuff for universities, where anti-Western doctrine, and climate data, are generated. (This should get interesting, as China is about to surpass the U.S. as an emissions offender and there are virtually no checks on Chinese industrial pollution.) Out of concern for their careers, university researchers are scared to speak up against standard global warming theories.

The other engine driving the global warming scam is none-other than the evil lifeblood of industry itself: American capitalism. Al Gore and co. are fond of saying that when Americans find a model allowing them to make CO2 reduction profitable, they’ll lead the way in more considerate use of the planet. As it turns out, American marketers are far ahead of Al Gore. They’ve found that model. An article in the American Thinker has some interesting data comparing the countries that signed onto the lauded Kyoto treaty on emissions reductions to the U.S., who didn't sign:

* Emissions worldwide increased 18 percent.

* Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21 percent.

* Emissions from non-signers increased 10 percent.

* Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6 percent.

Clearly, something other than a commitment to international treaties has landed the U.S. in the 6.6 category. A few weeks ago, I read this off the label on my Poland Spring bottle:

The lightest 1⁄2 liter bottle ever produced*, the new, 100% recyclable Poland Spring Eco-Shape™ bottle is not only less impactful on the environment, it’s purposely designed to be easy to carry and hold. And because it’s lighter, it requires less energy to make – resulting in a reduction of CO2 emissions.

What thrilling news. I had been so guilt-wracked (not to mention physically burdened) drinking Poland Spring in the past. The company has tapped into the decision making process that most well-meaning people adopt when out shopping. If there’s a regular bottle and a “less impactful” bottle next to it, shoppers will opt for the one that eases their conscience. It’s the same process that drives the casual thinker to choose non-West over West. “Why not?” And it’s a marketing phenomenon with millions, if not billions, behind it. The earth can’t afford to stop warming. Too much money’s riding on that mercury.

A year ago, I was touring the Fox News newsroom (Fox News!) when my host told me with pride that they would soon be upgrading everything there to the most state-of-the-art environment-friendly equipment. Why not?

Here’s why not. Because, as a letter sent to the UN Secretary General, and signed by 100 prominent scientists, stated, “Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems."

Problems even more real and pressing than how to satisfy our anti-Western self-righteousness. Or how to assuage our own Western guilt by choosing a different bottle of water at the supermarket.

So, the planet cools while global warming fear mongers tell the corporations they despise exactly how best to get their dollar. Meanwhile, money and research that could be put towards the relief of a thousand genuine problems goes down the drain.

There’s another casualty of the climate madness: the integrity of scientific methodology and debate. People say, “most scientists now agree . . .” having forgotten that consensus of opinion is not a valid factor in scientific determination. Or at least it wasn’t. Now, a show of hands is all it takes to determine that “the debate is over.” This, unlike climate change, is catastrophic. As Whitehouse puts it, “[T]he wish to know exactly what is going on is independent of politics and scientists must never bend their desire for knowledge to any political cause, however noble.”

Whew! At least he didn’t say “any financial cause, however profitable.” It's Christmas, after all.

Is a vegan diet better for the environment than a vegetarian diet? Today, Slate asks that question. Either way, though, giving up meat is apparently good for the Earth: "going vegetarian has the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as switching from a Chevrolet Suburban to a Toyota Camry."

Personally, I don't really give a crap which one is better for the environment. I'm a vegetarian for bleeding-heart ethical reasons, and the same ethical concerns force me to acknowledge that recent human history would have been safer, kinder, and gentler had the modern environmental movement never existed. It doesn’t take a carnivore to see that environmentalist hysteria takes on a consistent pattern: affluent Westerners decide that some long-enjoyed privilege of modern life is evil, and set about depriving the people of developing countries of that privilege.

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Jura Watchmaker at Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War thinks Gore's win is bollocks but he's more troubled by the following:

In yesterday’s Guardian, David Adam reported on a court case brought by political activist and Kent school governor Stewart Dimmock, who objects to the government’s plan to show Gore’s film in secondary schools. The judge, Mr Justice Barton, refused to block the move, but criticised the film, and demanded that when it is presented in schools, the Department of Children, Schools and Families should make it clear that the film is not an impartial analysis of climate science.

My own view is that An Inconvenient Truth is based largely on scientific fact, but this is embellished and distorted in the service of a personal political agenda. In the past I’ve objected to taxpayers’ money being spent on feeding this propaganda to British school students. I now accept that this battle is lost, and advocate that the film be accompanied by teacher-produced discussion notes that put Al Gore’s contribution to the climate change debate into political context.

The judge, I think, was right. But what text or film peddled by tax-funded schools to whatever nation's children is not equally dubious? Try reading a high school U.S. civics book sometime and see if you don't come away feeling that milk-and-cookies propaganda is not what it amounts to. P.J. O'Rourke, in his funny years, actually flipped through one: "What U.S. president overcame a handicap to bravely lead our nation through one of its darkest hours?" P.J.: "Surprisingly, the answer wasn't Ronald Reagan, his handicap being Nancy."

Also, what Nobel laureate hasn't overdone things a bit in light of a "personal political agenda"? A campaign undertaken with enough monomaniacal passion to qualify as a "crusade" -- which is what Oslo typically honors -- is surely driven by a personal political agenda. The 1997 Peace Prize recipient was a woman named Jody Williams. She won it for her relentless efforts to get land mines banned internationally. Question: Is a woman who devotes her life singularly to seeing a devastating and outmoded weapon enter the dustbin of history not putting top priority on something that is arguably not the most urgent crisis facing humanity? (AIDS kills more people per annum than land mines do.) Of course she is. Do I think global warming is a greater threat than the collected forces of theocratic fascism? No, I don't.

But nor do I think that anyone who agrees with me in waging as merciless a war against Al Qaeda and company gives a good damn about a public relations bauble tied to "awareness" and "consciousness-raising." Gore did what Nobel clearly prefers, so why not let him have his prize? Given the committee's track record, can't you think of other possible winners who would have made once again a complete farce of the whole proceeding?

Not to cross streams with our lovely litterateur Elisa Albert, but I actually think the Swedish academy excelled this year. Doris Lessing is of a generation of postwar English novelists that I'd assumed had been forgotten entirely, not just by the prize syndicate but by the international readership. Now comes the unsurprising news that Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize. You can quibble that his minatory work on global warming hardly relates to "peace," but there is no doubt that his tireless advocacy has done a world, so to speak, of good:

“We face a true planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in the statement. “The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”

I don't know about "spiritual," but the point is taken.

A cynic would be justified in saying that the committee in Oslo wanted to bury another rapier in the side of the sitting American president. Carter, ElBaradei, Gore: "Anybody But Bush" sounds about right.

Yet Gore has been an environmentalist far longer than Carter has been a champion of "stability" in the Middle East (it was his administration, after all, that coaxed Saddam Hussein into invading Iran); longer than ElBaradei has been going about, in his oh-so-multilateral way, atomic regulation. For once, then, it can truly be said that the Peace plaudit went to someone who has spent a lifetime earning it, rather than a mere election cycle. It's a day like today in which he must wonder if being the leader of the free world is all it's cracked up to be.

HITLER FANCIED JEW TUNES

THE NEWS:

Hitler had a secret music collection of Russian and Jewish artists. [Guardian Unlimited]

THE CHATTER:

German magazine Der Spiegel reported hundreds of gramophone records were discovered in the attic of a former Soviet intelligence officer, Lev Besymenski. Professor Wolfgang Wippermann, a historian at the Berlin University of the Arts, said, “I'm not surprised that he would, secretly of course, listen to those composers. Hitler loved classical music and he could best relax with his music.” [ABC News]

The Forward’s Bintel bloggers ask if Hitler dug Jewish music. [The Jewish Daily Forward]

REMEMBERING A JEWISH-BORN CATHOLIC CARDINAL

THE NEWS:

Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jewish-born convert to Catholicism who became a top Vatican figure, died this week. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

As he lay in a Paris hospice, Cardinal Lustiger reached out to his longtime friend Rabbi Israel Singer.

The Jewish-born Catholic official, who served for decades as a conduit between the Vatican and the Jewish community, called Singer, a former senior official of the World Jewish Congress and a major player in the effort to build Catholic-Jewish ties. Singer flew to Paris and the two met several times before Lustiger succumbed to cancer on Sunday. He was 80.

"He was completely conscious and aware," said Singer, who called Lustiger by his Hebrew name. "Some of the conversations were 25 years old. They were very moving."

THE CHATTER:

Speaking of Jews pining for communion, Jewcy writer Aaron Hamburger explores his own love affair with Catholicism. [Jewcy]

If a Jew can become a top Vatican figure, then why can’t Bugs Bunny be Jewish? David Kaufmann, of the Forward, asks this pivotal question. [The Jewish Daily Forward]

JEWS MUST ACT LIKE LEO AND AL GORE

THE NEWS:

Rabbi Steve Gutow, the executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, writes in a JTA op-ed that energy conservation and reducing greenhouse emissions are an obligation Jews have to the world. Gutgow writes, “The Jewish community is right to make Israel's safety and thwarting Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons top priorities, but energy independence and global warming are equally important in the long run and deserving of the same level of attention.” [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

THE CHATTER:

Jews should not only be concerned with passing on a healthy planet to their children and grandchildren but also the potential impacts of global warming on the nation of Israel: “A national assessment conducted by the Israeli government in 2000 raised the specter of Mediterranean Sea level increases in the narrow coastal strip where 60 percent of Israel’s population lives, changes in rainfall patterns that could disrupt agricultural production and major drops in water supplies.” [The Jewish Week]

Could the fight against global warming finally stop the Darfur genocide, which has been called the world’s first “climate-change conflict”? [Canadian Coalition]

Or, in the wonderful spirit of bigotry and lunacy, we could all just listen to CNN cable TV and syndicated radio host Glenn Beck. [Grist]

Beck said Gore using "same tactic" in fight against global warming as Hitler did against Jews. [Media Matters]

Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government.

You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the U.N.'s enemy: global warming.

BAT MITZVAH GIRL DOES THE UNTHINKABLE

THE NEWS:

Samantha Resnick donated $100,000 worth of Bat Mitzvah money to the Jewish National Fund to build a new playground in Sapir Park in the Arava Valley of Israel. [The Jerusalem Post]

THE CHATTER:

JBloggers say she’s a Bat Mitzvah girl who gets it. [Israel Forum]

Google’s gone screwy: “crazy russian extreme street climbing video” was one of the links that showed up when I searched “Samantha Resnick.” Check it out. Warning: it’s cool but will almost certainly give you a headache. [Google Video]

ALSO IN JEWISH NEWS:

In a groundbreaking move to recognize the experiences of transgender Jews, the Reform movement has published several prayers for sanctifying the sex-change process. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

Isaac Larian, an Iranian Jewish immigrant, set out in 2000 to create an alternative to Barbie. Seven years later, his line of Bratz dolls is a billion-dollar industry with a new motion picture in theaters. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

The tendency to ascribe greater significance to natural phenomena is nothing new – ever since a dozy Egyptian Pharaoh misinterpreted a perfectly ordinary plague of frogs as a sign from God, we’ve tended to read our own beliefs, fears and prejudices into natural disasters. The US had a notable example of this a couple of years ago, of course, when Katrina left New Orleans underwater. Depending on who you asked, Katrina was retribution for America’s obsession with abortion, the gay pride parade planned for New Orleans that week, or the invasion of Iraq. The delightful Rabbi Ovadia Yosef even blamed the disaster on US support for the disengagement from Gaza. 

At the time, there was a bit of a controversy in Britain over the tone of some of the reports: Tony Blair privately described the BBC’s coverage as ‘full of hatred of America’ and ‘gloating at the country's plight’, and he may well have been right. There was a definite subtext in our [liberal] media that seemed to be saying, This is what you get for refusing to sign up to Kyoto, or not having a civilised welfare state [sic] like ours, or for neglecting the racial divide in your country. Maybe not schadenfreude, perhaps; but certainly a rather British superciliousness.

Well, no-one’s sneering now.

 Tewkesbury

As I write this, large swathes of England are underwater, in a vast arc from London through Oxford up to the Welsh border. It’s the worst flooding the country has seen in modern times, and follows hot on the heels of similar problems in the north a couple of weeks ago. And sure enough, commentators have not been slow to share their opinions on what has caused this misery for hundreds of thousands of people.

The Bishop of Carlisle shocked his sleepy flock by labelling the first wave of floods a sign of God’s anger at new gay equality legislation. This was a particular surprise: Church of England vicars are normally too timid even to ask for biscuits with their tea. A couple of days later, the horrendous left-wing columnist Polly Toynbee – a woman so awful that if you were trapped in an elevator with her and Ann Coulter and had two bullets left, you’d shoot her, twice, just to be absolutely sure – tried to claim that if the floods had been happening in the south of the country rather than the impoverished North, they would be taken more seriously by the media, gleefully ignoring the brainless wall-to-wall coverage of the rising waters from welly-clad anchors on all the major channels. Either way, she got her wish: the floods have now hit the leafy south, and the news channels have once again despatched their star names to wade through sodden fields and streets bringing us up-to-the-minute footage of water lapping at doors with all the pompous solemnity that the great British media can muster when it really tries.

Inevitably, of course, the blame has now shifted from God and poverty to that favourite bugbear of the European media, climate change. (We used to call it 'global warming', but nowadays floods, droughts, heavy rain, sparse rain, warm weather and cold snaps are all mobilised as evidence of the impending meteorological Armaggedon.) In today's Guardian newspaper, columnist Jackie Ashley takes us all to task for ignoring the signs of global catastrophe, citing the dire warnings of political Britain's US pin-up du jour, Al Gore - a man who, for writers on papers like the Guardian and the Independent, is as close to secular sainthood as anyone this side of Fidel Castro - and noting with approval the praise heaped on him by the new Prime Minister and his team of dullards and no-marks. And the beauty of this global warming climate change evidence, anecdotal as much of it is, is that it's non-falsifiable; Katrina and the unusually severe hurricane season of 2005 are identified as harbingers of doom by such as Gore, who described it - with unusual elegance - as "the first sip, the first taste, of a bitter cup that will be proffered to us over and over again", but who was strangely silent 12 months later when 2006 drew to a close with not a single hurricane making landfall in the US.

That's not to say that I deny that our climate may well change, and for the worse, as the impact of man on the environment grows ever more stark, nor to assert that we don't need to act to reduce the negative 'footprint' that we leave on the planet, and act promptly. But this gathering bandwagon of vacuous celebrities, ignorant journalists and opportunist politicians drives me to quiet despair; and watching government ministers scramble to apply a thin veneer of greenplate to every policy announcement, in a desperate attempt to persuade us that they're raising our taxes for the sake of the children, fills me with a deep, boiling rage. It almost makes you yearn for the old days, when they just bent us over and hosed us the old-fashioned way.

Green Refuse?Toilets have been on my mind a lot lately. Last week I temped a job at Harvard University and noticed that the toilet had two levers for the flush, one for the big jobs and the other for smaller, more discreet ones. Unfortunately, I flushed multiple times defeating its purpose because I had no idea what the symbols actually meant. I had seen this type of contraption in Israel (where water is scarce), but never before in the U.S. so I made note of it.

Then the other night, I heard Jay Leno poke fun at the use of compost toilets, the energy-saving, environmentally green alternative to toilet paper. And suddenly these toilets are turning up everywhere. There's even an entire site dedicated to it. Friday, as I waited 2.5 hours at the DMV to renew my driver's license, I then read an article about celebrities practicing green living solutions (Earth Day is next month already after all). About the time I read about Pierce Brosnan and his wife owning one of these composters, I thought back to Leno's apropos joke about a hose and a hair dryer being equally as effective as one of these $1600 machines. Moreover, can't celebrities afford to hire people to wipe their own asses?

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Hey comrade, can you spare a Prius?: Vaclav KlausI didn't say it, Czech President Vaclav Klaus did:

'Communism has been replaced by the threat of an ambitious environmentalism,' Klaus wrote in response to questions from the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce.

[...]

'[Poor countries] will not be able to absorb new technological standards required by the anti-greenhouse religion, their products will have difficulty accessing the developed markets, and as a result the gap between them and the developed world will widen,' he wrote.

'This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the slogans of their protection – similarly to the old Marxists – wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world,' he added.

Actually, Marxists are much closer to anti-Kyoto skeptics of global warming since both think unfettered industrialization is a good thing. But one appreciates the point of turning a push for societal reform into an encompassing, messianic ideology.

That Al Gore has little time for anything else besides chlorofluorocarbons and soggy glaciers is termed "passion" in the American press. In Eastern Europe, it's reason to crank up the Velvet Underground.