Set that aside for now so you can concentrate on how Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egypt is sending 19 American NGO (non governmental organization) workers to trial for ‘crimes’ like promoting democracy and human rights and for receiving funds to support them and their mission.

The Muslim Brotherhood used the NGO’s to help overthrow former President Hosni Mubarak. The ‘democracy’ that got rid of Mubarak is no longer needed. Now, they are holding 43 of them prisoner and moving to the oppressive Sharia law.

One of the Americans held captive is Sam LaHood, the son of Secretary of  Transportation Ray LaHood. Sam LaHood is the head of the Egypt office of the Washington-based International Republican Institute.

I don’t attribute any of that as, like Joe Biden had warned, that President Obama will be tested on the international stage. This is a result of a combination of his inexperience, naivety, and his pre-occupation with transforming the United States into some form of government-controlled society where the federal government makes all decisions for you.

Three years ago, then Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) said . . .

Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.

And they have not stopped.

Makes one wonder if Biden made that statement because he knew what would follow when the top of the ticket is clueless on any subject besides ‘social justice.’

Link: Egypt sends American workers to trial

Some of what he said was ‘we can’t simply stand by with empty words.’

In the real world, what goes around comes around. The President is very convincing when he is speaking and has had the media hypnotized for years.

Anyone with a memory of the 2008 campaign will remember Sen. Obama criticizing Sen. Clinton for her ‘words, just words. Follow the link, you decide who owns empty words.

For years now, the United Nations has been complaining that they can’t continue to feed all they need to for a lack of money caused by the rising food cost. This is a direct consequence of bio-fuel nonsense where the United States is using food (corn) to put in our gas tank. This causes all kinds of food to be more expensive. Not just for foodstuffs made from corn, but meat and poultry products because it is also food for the livestock.

Compounding that is the enormous spending of the Federal Reserve. The effect of that has contributed to the increase in food prices not only here but everywhere else in the world.

Chriss W. Street at Big Government writes . . .

QE2 money quickly drove up commodity food prices around the world. This price rise is barely noticeable to Americans who only spend 10% of their personal income on food for three meals a day; but the impact of food inflation is devastating the over half the world that spends approximately 50% of personal income on food for two meals a day. The 15% QE2 induced commodity food price increase has reduced the amount of food poor people can purchase by almost 1/3.

The riots and revolutionary activity burning down Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt are about gut-level economics. Do you think Americans would riot and throwing out our government if we were forced to cut back to eating 1 1/3 meals a day? Once riots start people in cities hoard food to survive and becomes dangerous for farmers to transport food. This is exacerbates food shortages and drives prices even higher.

When you consider how lucky we are to live in the United States, where 10% of our income goes for food for three meals a day,  a rise in food prices is not as much of an issue as it is in other parts of the world like Egypt, where food consumes 50% of their income for two meals a day. Couple that with outrageously high unemployment while the ruling class lives the high life, and you have a powder keg in the making.

UPDATE 06:50:

As if there isn’t enough evidence of how government policies were accomplices in Egypt’s revolution, new evidence points to the role of labor unions and the American Left in orchestrating it:

For all the lack of clarity on where the Obama administration stands, one thing is becoming more and more clear: Signs are beginning to point more toward the likelihood that President Obama’s State Department, unions, as well as Left-leaning media corporations are more directly involved in helping to ignite the Mid-East turmoil than they are publicly admitting.

They are arguing over adjusting the imaginary global thermostat down 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees. While the world’s two biggest polluters, China and India, feel it is unfair that they be forced to participate, don’t want anything to do with it. They haven’t signed on to the Kyoto Protocol either.

Then there’s the rift as to who would manage the $100 billion per year fund that they say they need in order to meet their goal. The World Bank or the United Nations? No matter who it would be, you know it would be nothing more than a slush fund for dictators and despots around the world, helping them to play God while the United States mostly foots the bill for their folly.

Meanwhile, environment ministers began flying in Saturday, hoping to put new life in the U.N. talks. Don’t you wonder about ‘the cost’ that their carbon footprint places on our green earth?

Link:  Plodding climate talks stepping up to higher level

Meanwhile Christina Figueres, the UN climate chief, launched the annual climate change meeting in Cancun in Mexico, asking negotiators to strike a “compromise” and weave together elements of a solid response to global warming by drawing inspiration from the Mayan goddess of “reason and creativity.”

And, more talk of the need to transfer money and technology under the belief that the United Nations can adjust an imaginary global thermostat by moving vast amounts of money from one side of the earth to the other, if only the other side of the earth will go along. Guess who from? Leaving the rest of us in the dark.

Link:  The Climate Conference Echo Chamber |  UN climate change conference opens in Mexico

Families from Pakistan to Argentina to Congo are being battered by surging food prices that are dragging more people into poverty, fueling political tensions and forcing some to give up eating meat, fruit and even tomatoes.

With food costing up to 70 percent of family income in the poorest countries, rising prices are squeezing household budgets and threatening to worsen malnutrition, while inflation stays moderate in the United States and Europe. Compounding the problem in many countries: prices hardly fell from their peaks in 2008, when global food prices jumped in part due to a smaller U.S. wheat harvest and demand for crops to use in biofuels.

But it goes even further than that. In terms of the carbon footprint created in producing biofuels compared to that of fossil fuels, fossil fuels out-green biofuels. So how smart is it to do unnecessary harm to the environment while increasing food prices and hurting the poorer nations around the world?

More of history repeating itself happens when governments refuse to learn how markets operate and what happens to them when the government steps in with taxes and price controls.

Argentina’s government has responded with higher taxes, export limits, controls on supermarket prices of meat, wheat and corn, subsidies to food producers and pay hikes of 30 percent for union workers. The moves have temporarily eased the pain but beef producers have thinned their herds in response to government intervention and the price of meat has doubled in the last year.

“Before, we would eat meat three times a week. Now it’s once, with luck,” said Marta Esposito, a 45-year-old mother of two in Buenos Aires. “Tomatoes, don’t even talk about it. We eat whatever is the cheapest.”

The environmental movement really has to come clean on what their goal is. Is it to help the environment, or is it to handicap the United States?

Link: Surging costs hit food security in poorer nations |  Fossil Fuels Out-Green Biofuels |  United Nations Warns Of Food Fight

For those in the media whose memory seems to be as short as the combined length of the beards of binLaden’s wives, Hamas is at war with Israel. Hamas has been found to re-arm itself in shipments of humanitarian aid. The reason for the blockade is to insure that only humanitarian aid goes to Gaza. Israel is all for them getting the humanitarian aid they need and seeing to it that they get it. Especially since they know, as does the administration and the UN, that Hamas controls and runs Gaza and use aid as a weapon against their own people.

This ‘Freedom Flotilla’ was not about delivering aid. It was about starting a PR campaign to make Israel the bad guy. Terrorists were on board. The ship was under the Turkish flag. The ship refused to stop to be inspected, thereby provoking what took place afterward. That was the plan and Turkey knew it. People delivering humanitarian aid don’t arm themselves with clubs, knives, and guns to use against the Israeli soldiers there to insure that only aide is delivered. And the don’t have camera crews from Al Jazeera on board.

The Free Gaza Movement announced its intention to breach Israel’s barricade of Gaza – requiring it to violate Israel’s territorial waters.

The rubber is hitting the road Mr. President. A leadership moment is needed. Recall our Ambassador to Turkey in protest. And get off the anti-Israel bandwagon in the useless United Nations. Use your bully pulpit to call a spade a spade.

Link: Turkey Responsible for Flotilla Deaths

Permanent Security Council member China has joined Russia in opposing Washington’s plans to impose tough, wide-ranging sanctions on the Islamic Republic over its refusal to suspend sensitive uranium enrichment activity and open up fully to U.N. nuclear inspections.

If there ever was a legitimate reason to walk away from the United Nations club and form a ‘new world order,’ this is it.

Seems that limiting alternatives, like the Russia and China are doing, is their game. When the alternatives are limited, if tougher sanctions are off the table, the choice then becomes to let Iran develop a nuclear arsenal or go the military route, including a blockade. Whatever other sanctions could be imposed would be ameliorated by Russia and China.

It is diplomatic propaganda for Russia to characterize sanctions by the United States and the European Union and ‘other western nations’ as being unilateral if it does not include the United Nations. Clearly, they hang their hat on their puppet called the United Nations.

It’s crunch time for President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Their choices couldn’t be more clear. Does the United States stand with the EU and like-minded allies or will we find a face-saving way to leave the EU and the Middle East at risk and back down? I guess we will soon see exactly what Barack and Hillary mean when they speak of improving our image around the world.

Watch for yet another apology tour, while China and Russia are ROTFL.

Link: Russia warns U.S. against unilateral Iran sanctions – Yahoo! News.

Phil Jones was forced to step down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after a series of leaked emails and other documents suggested that the data supporting global warming theories had been “cooked” and that opposing theories were being suppressed.

But this was not the end of the revelations.

“Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

“And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.”

What do you mean ‘statistically significant‘ you ask? According to Phil Jones . . .

This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level.

And associating climate change to man-made global warming, there’s this question to Jones . . .

“How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?”

Jones: “I’m 100 percent confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.”

OK fine. And we now know all about their data and record keeping problems.

So what’s the point? The whole point of this ‘man-made’ global warming hysteria is to execute a transfer of wealth through whatever way possible, under the pretense that we can adjust the global thermostat as well as sea-level. It’s is a political movement that has turned into a near religion with environmentalists.

Then there’s this gem about rising sea levels . . .

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

Whether it by by the United Nations, the Kyoto Protocol, and more locally, the administration’s Cap & Trade legislation, all of these schemes are designed to move money from our side of the earth to the other, with the side benefit of depressing our economy and raising prices even further. I mean it just makes sense. If you’re a slip and fall lawyer, you go after the money. In the global scale, the ‘richest’ nation in the world is right here. And for anyone who was in Copenhagen, you saw who the evil one was. It was the United States, and it was capitalism.

In light of what is now known, we are starting to see signs in the US of hopping off this man-made global warming bandwagon. But not everyone.

Know who is heavily invested in this scheme? Al Gore. He probably has the most to lose when the cap and trade and carbon credit trading schemes fall through. Starting with a company he and another investor started called Generation Investment Management LLP. I’m all for capitalism, and according to Al Gore and the media, he’s just putting his money where his mouth is. The reason capitalism works is because there is risk taking. When the market demands it, entrepreneurs will provide. Responding to the market, or not, determines who wins and who looses. Gore’s company is an associate member of the Chicago Climate Exchange. A carbon credit trading exchange. (Available right now at $.10/share. Their stock fell 33% after the Copenhagen global warming festival in December.) How much Gore has invested varies from guesstimates from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars. Suffice it to say, if things go the way he hopes they will, he’ll make George Soros’ wealth look like small change.

So yesterday, either in denial or a last ditch attempt to saves his investments, or both, Al Gore opines in the New York Times ‘We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change.’ The first sentence of his opinion piece says it all . . .

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Right. The sky is falling. On him. Then, from high on the mountain, not far from the burning bush, Gore ends with this. From Rick Moran at American Thinker.

Finally, this bit of weirdness that shows Gore for what he is; a megalomaniac:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis – inconvenient as ever – must still be faced.

Al Gore sees himself as a redeemer – as Jesus Christ. And where is there room in a democratic republic for someone who thinks that the rule of law should be an “instrument of redemption?”

Who else has put their money where their mouth is? Well, in a more muted and covert kind of way, the BBC has. They have $12.5 billion of their pension funds invested in companies whose future depends on the success of the whole man-made global warming movement and subsequent laws and regulations.

Just something to keep in mind the next time you see an article about a man-made global warming ‘crisis.’

UN scientist admits unverified data used for politics…
India, China won’t sign Copenhagen Accord…
Calls for UN climate chief to resign…
Scientists using ‘selective temperature data’…

‘Whites only’ basketball league announced

And in the ‘you gotta be kidding’ category, except that it doesn’t look like they are, some idiot thinks its a good idea to have a whites only basketball league.

According to the Chronicle, Lewis said he wants to emphasize “fundamental basketball” instead of “street ball” played by “people of color.”

“There’s nothing hatred about what we’re doing,” Lewis told the paper. “I don’t hate anyone of color.”

Lewis pointed out recent incidents in the NBA, including Gilbert Arenas’ suspension for bringing a gun into the Washington Wizards locker room, and said, “Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?”

The misguided premise here is that whites are better behaved than non-whites. Would cleaning up the NBA’s act kill the NBA, or make it better? Or, would wanting to clean up the NBA’s act be construed as some sort of bigoted or ‘racist’ motivation? Is it about the sport of basketball, or is it about franchises and money?

Excuse me, but where are my fries?