Alan Caruba

Unfortunately, Alan passed away in June of 2015 and he will be sorely missed - With a career that began in the 1960s as a young journalist, Alan Caruba has been writing ever since to include several books and numerous magazine articles over the years.  In addition, he has been a reviewer and charter member of The National Book Critics Circle, with membership in the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the Society of Professional Journalists.  He is best known and widely read these days for the commentaries he posts on his popular blog that cover a wide range of topics from politics to energy, environmentalism to education, and everything in between.  He is a graduate of the University of Miami (FL), served in the U.S. Army, and resides in New Jersey.  Caruba's blog, Warning Signs, has recently passed 2.3 million page views.  His monthly report on new books, Bookviews.com, is ideal for anyone who loves to read, reporting on many new fiction and non-fiction titles.   Information about his editorial and public relations services can be found on Caruba.com.  


Friday, 17 April 2015 15:05 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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I think if we were honest enough to admit it, we are all bigoted in some way. Our gender or religion doesn’t really qualify us as superior to anyone else, but we tend to fall back on these identities and, consciously or not, assume they give us a reason to feel that we are not only in possession of a special truth, but that it grants us the privilege to feel better than others.

When we examine the issue of race, however, the bigotry is inherent because racial groups are inclined to assign superior characteristics to their own. It’s called human nature.

There is something else “human” that we need to address, over and above skin color, eye color, hair and other visible differences.

“All human variants in DNA in all people alive today trace their origins to countless common ancestors, all of whom lived in Africa more than sixty thousand years ago. As humans, everyone is related by common ancient ancestry, and ultimately, everyone is African.”

That is the message of a new book by Daniel J. Fairbanks, the dean of the College of Science and Health at Utah Valley University, a distinguished research geneticist and author. “Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race” ($18.00. Prometheus Books, softcover). In a world where race is a component of our lives, Fairbanks says, “Unfortunately, few people are aware of how much is known about the genetic basis of race—or more accurately, the lack thereof.”

 
Sunday, 12 April 2015 16:00 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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When President Obama announced on March 31 that he intends to ensure that the U.S. will slash its “greenhouse gas emissions” 26% below 2005 emissions levels by 2025 in order to keep pledges made to fulfill the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, he failed to mention that such levels would be comparable to what they were in our Civil War era, 150 years ago.

He also failed to mention that the U.S. has made no such pledges as regards the 1992 “Kyoto Treaty” which was resoundingly rejected by the U.S. Senate when then Vice President Al Gore brought it back from the U.N. conference.

There is no need, globally or nationally, to reduce such emissions. It would be a crime against humanity, especially for the millions that would be denied electrical power or would see its cost rise exponentially. “The President has no credible evidence to back up his claims,” said H. Sterling Burnett, a Research Fellow with the free market think tank, The Heartland Institute. “Obama’s climate actions are likely to cause far more harm to people, especially the poor, than any purported threats from global warming.”

“Global warming” and “climate change” are attributed to the use of fossil fuels to manufacture and transport ourselves and our goods, and to create electrical energy, despite the fact that the Earth, its oceans and land areas naturally generate such gases.

 
Wednesday, 01 April 2015 21:36 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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I can recall John Kerry, Obama’s Secretary of State, from the days he testified to a congressional committee and slandered his fellow soldiers as the spokesman for Veterans Against the Vietnam War in 1971. I was appalled then and my opinion of the man has not changed since those days. I opposed the war, too, but I did not blame it on the men who were conscripted to fight it, nor did I believe the charges he leveled against some of them.

These days Kerry is engaged in securing an agreement with the Iranians, if not to stop their program to make their own nuclear weapons than to slow it to a later date. Never mind that the Iranian government is listed by our own government as a leading sponsor of terrorism worldwide or that they have signed such agreements in the past and then tossed out the inspectors.

Kerry is convinced that the Obama administration can get an agreement that is, in his own words, “not legally binding”, nor is it a treaty that the U.S. Senate would have to vote for or against. In point of fact, President Obama can make the deal—sign the agreement—just as Presidents have done for over two hundred years. It can then be abrogated by whoever the next President will be.

 
Tuesday, 24 March 2015 14:00 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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President Obama made no secret of his displeasure that Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected to be Israel’s Prime Minister. Only David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and one of the nation’s founders, served longer.

Obama lives in some parallel universe apart from the lessons of history and the realities of what is actually occurring. On May 18, 2009, not long after Netanyahu had been in office and was visiting the White House, Obama was demanding that he endorse Palestinian statehood and freeze the settlements on the West Bank.

Considering that the Palestinians had refused statehood from the day the United Nations endorsed Israel’s independence that has been a fool’s mission no matter who was President or Prime Minister.

As for Obama’s demands about settlements, who is Obama to tell the Israelis in 2009 where and if they can build the housing needed for its growing population? And yet Netanyahu, seeking to accommodate Obama, endorsed Palestinian statehood shortly thereafter and then announced a ten-month freeze on settlement development.

What did Netanyahu get in return? Nothing.

 
Tuesday, 10 March 2015 00:00 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, representing 1.7% of the total European population which, in turn, was about 60% of the Jewish world population, estimated to have been 15.2 million.

By 1945, in the wake of the Holocaust, two out of every three Jews would be dead.

By 2012 the global Jewish population by had reached 13.75 million. That is less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population.

The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reported that 43% of the world’s Jewish community lives in Israel. Sharing Israel as their home were 1,636,600 Arabs and a diverse population of Christians and non-Jews, numbering around 318,000.

If the Iranians make good on their threat to “wipe Israel off the map”, presumably with nuclear weapons they would acquire by stealth and deception, the Jewish world population would be cut nearly in half.

All of this will be on Benjamin Netanyahu’s mind when, as the Prime Minister of Israel, he addresses a joint meeting of Congress. It will be his third such speech. On July 10, 1996, he said the world must act to prevent Iran’s nuclearization, since “the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.”

 
Sunday, 01 March 2015 11:42 GFP Columnist - Alan Caruba
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Something very unpleasant is occurring in America. Those who have a strong religious faith are being denied the right to say “no” based on its teachings and values. This is particularly true these days as homosexuals, barely three percent of the population, demand that they be accommodated when their demand runs counter to thousands of years of what has been deemed moral behavior and, for many, still is.

When it comes to marriage. Gays insist they have a “right” to get married and call their union “marriage”, but there is absolutely nothing in the thousands of years of the Judeo-Christian ethic that defines same-sex unions as either moral or legal.

The most recent and egregious example of what can happen when someone obeys God rather than the state is Arlene’s Flowers, a small floral shop in Richland, Washington. Its owner, Barronelle Stuzman, declined to make flower arrangements for a gay couple’s wedding and, instead of finding a shop that would, they took their grievance to court. A judge ruled Ms. Stutzman violated the state’s anti-discrimination and consumer protection laws. 

 

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