Pundits agonize over President Obama's resistance to calling Islamist terror "Islamist terror." How can he not see the obvious? How can he ignore the overwhelming and ever-increasing evidence? How can he insist that his subordinates continue their buffoonish insistence that Islamist terror has nothing to do with Islam and that they-secularized Christians and non-observant Jews-know Islam's character better than Moslems themselves? It's easy. President Obama and his commissars fit the longstanding pattern of behavior (insistence, denial, castigation) that the hard left has embraced for generations.  Just as Obama's ideological predecessors could never criticize Stalin, so their successors today can never cricize Mohammed.

The European Parliament voted last week (1/13) to let countries decide their own policies on growing genetically modified crops. The vote allows countries such as Britain to press ahead because of hard evidence that such crops are good for the environment, good for consumers and good for farmers; and let countries such as Austria continue to ban the things despite such evidence. It's a strange-bedfellow  alliance of the rational with the superstitious against the bureaucratic. Indeed, the untold story is that it was a triumph of subtle diplomacy by Owen Paterson - the Euroskeptic former UK environment minister who knows how to work the Brussels system. Last year he denounced what he called The Green Blob - "the network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape." It was the Green Blob that suffered defeat in Brussels last week.

If we could prevent or cure all cancer, what would we die of? The new year has begun with a war of words over whether cancer is mostly bad luck, as suggested by a new study from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and over whether it's a good way to die, compared with the alternatives, as suggested by Dr Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Cancer is now the leading cause of death in Britain even though it is ever more survivable, with roughly half of people who contract it living long enough to die of something else. But what else? Often another cancer.  Cancer's growing dominance of the mortality tables is not because it's getting worse but because we are avoiding other causes of death and living longer. It is worth remembering that some scientists and anti-pesticide enviros in the 1960s were convinced that by now lifespans would be much shorter because of cancer caused by pesticides and other chemicals in the environment. In the 1950s Wilhelm Hueper - a director of the US National Cancer Institute and mentor to Rachel Carson, the environmentalist author of Silent Spring - was so concerned that pesticides were causing cancer that he thought the theory that lung cancer was caused by smoking was a plot by the chemical industry to divert attention from its own culpability: "Cigarette smoking is not a major factor in the causation of lung cancer," he insisted. In fact it turns out that pollution causes very little cancer and cigarettes cause a lot. But aside from smoking, most cancers are indeed bad luck.

[Note:  this essay may be most fruitfully read in conjunction with Terrorism and Tiny Zibbs from September 2003-JW] When the Kurdish peshmerga forces broke the siege of Mount Sinjar last week, there was no trace of the 5,000 Yazidi women and children abducted from the area in August. It is thought that they have been mostly sold as concubines to jihadist fighters of Islamic State. When the London Times reporters posed as two British girls interested in joining Islamic State, they were told: "The only way to guarantee being together is marrying the same man." Meanwhile, the 219 girls still missing in Nigeria after being abducted in April have been "married off," according to the leader of Boko Haram. My point in connecting these incidents is that throughout history polygamy has fueled violence. Might it be worth suggesting to Moslem leaders, religious and secular, that they push for monogamous norms as one way to reduce violence and bring more peace to the Middle East and to north and west Africa?

Have you heard of "parallel construction"? If not, take a breath, this one is rather shocking. Here's what parallel construction is, as Wikipedia reports it: "A process of building a parallel - or separate - evidentiary basis for...creating criminal cases against Americans that are actually based on NSA warrantless surveillance." If this sounds like a rights violation to you, you're correct. Warrantless surveillance is a blatant violation of the fourth amendment, and illegally-obtained evidence is generally inadmissible under the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine. Nonetheless, this is exactly what's happening these days. The NSA is grabbing nearly 100% of all American Internet traffic, emails, etc., sorting it all, then handing it off to be used in criminal prosecutions. And to prevent cases like this from getting thrown out of court, the they have developed special tricks, like parallel construction. Here's how it works, and how to protect yourself from it.

Banks are intermediaries, and it's the business of the internet to eliminate unnecessay ones.  Thus a friend of mine observes:

What Lending Club and other P2P lenders do is provide an online market-place that connects borrowers and lenders directly; think the eBay of loans and you have the right conceptual grasp. Moreover, the business model of online market-place lending breaks with a banking tradition, dating back to 14th century Florence, of operating on a 'fractional reserve' basis. 

Vladimir Putin has lost control of Russia's economy and may be forced to impose Soviet-style exchange controls after "shock and awe" action by the central bank failed to stem the collapse of the ruble. "The situation is critical," said the central bank's vice-chairman, Sergei Shvetsov. "What is happening is a nightmare that we could not even have imagined a year ago." The currency spiked from 71 to 98 against the euro yesterday (12/16) in the biggest one-day drop since the default crisis in 1998 as capital flight gathered pace, despite a drastic rise in interest rates to 17% the day before (12/15) intended to crush speculators and show resolve. It closed at 87, and at this writing today (12/17) is at 83. Yields on two-year Russian bonds spiraled to 15.36%, while credit default swaps are pricing in a one-third chance of a sovereign default. The shares of Russia's biggest lender, Sberbank, fell 18%. Neil Shearing, from Capital Economics, said the spectacular failure of the rate shock may bring matters to a head. "If a rise of 650 basis points won't do the job, we are near the end. That means stringent capital controls," he said. In Washington, the White House said it had no intention of easing pressure on Russia to halt the freefall. "It is President Putin's decision to make. The aim is to sharpen the choice that he faces," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest yesterday. After years of bluster and suggestions by Mr. Putin that the US is a paper tiger, the Kremlin is now coming face to face with the cataclysmic consequences of what it has done by invading Ukraine and changing Europe's borders by force.

As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith. Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough. What's worse is the reluctance of scientific leaders to criticize the bad apples. Science as a philosophy is in good health; science as an institution increasingly stinks. This past week has seen three egregious examples of poor scientific practice. The most recent was the revelation last week that scientists appeared to scheme with environmental activists to get neonicotinoid pesticides banned, rather than open-mindedly assessing all the evidence. Second example: last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 - with an error range of one tenth of a degree. In any case, the year is not over with 16% of the 2014 data not yet recorded, so why the announcement now? Oh yes, there's a political climate summit in Lima this week.

China's stock market boom has reached outright mania, with equities galloping higher at a parabolic rate, despite threats of a crackdown by regulators and the continued slowdown of the national economy. The Shanghai Composite Index has risen 32% in the past six weeks, blowing through 3,000 to a three-and-a-half-year high even though corporate earnings are declining steeply. The China Securities Regulatory Commission said late last week that it would "increase market supervision, resolutely crack down and earnestly safeguard normal market order." It warned that stock manipulators had been "raising their head" and would be dealt with. The cautionary words have been ignored by retail investors as they throng brokerage offices, lured by momentum trades. For the stock boom comes as Chinese industry battles with massive overcapacity in everything from steel to shipbuilding, coal output, cement and solar panels. The bottom line is that it may be impossible for China to deflate its epic bubble painlessly.