RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409004577156853773047844.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Measuring the Man in Charge A general’s life story and an inside look at his year in command in Afghanistan

THIS PARAGRAPH SAYS IT ALL AND DEMONSTRATES THE SMALL AND NARROW MIND OF THE MAN WHOSE APPALLING COIN STRATEGY AND RULES OF ENGAGEMENT AND “NATION BUILDING” COST AMERICAN LIVES. THIS SO CALLED BIG IDEA IS DRIVEL NOT EVEN WORTHY OF A LOWER LEVEL OFFICE BUREAUCRAT…..RSK

“Ms. Broadwell and Mr. Loeb begin by laying out the “four tasks” that Gen. Petraeus urges “strategic leaders” to perform. First, get “the big ideas right”; second, communicate those “big ideas”; third, oversee “the implementation of those big ideas”; and finally capture “best practices and lessons” and cycle them “back through the system to help refine the big ideas.” The authors then show how Gen. Petraeus applied this approach to such basic tasks as crafting rules on the use of force designed to strike a balance between being aggressive without causing unnecessary civilian casualties.”Paula Broadwell, a 1995 West Point graduate and former Army officer, went to work in 2008 on a doctoral dissertation at King’s College London on Gen. David Petraeus and his role in U.S. military innovation in the post-9/11 era. When the general, after striking success with the troop “surge” in Iraq, was appointed as the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan in July 2010, Ms. Broadwell decided to try to spin off a book from her research. She found a high-powered agent, she says in “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus,” who persuaded her to “go big” with a book of considerably wider scope and greater sales prospects than her dissertation. Vernon Loeb, an editor at the Washington Post, was recruited as her co-author.

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http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/understanding_islamofascism.html
Understanding Islamofascism By Yonatan Silverman

The exact identity of the person who coined the expression “Islamofascism” isn’t crystal-clear. But the late Christopher Hitchens should be given credit for defining the term.

The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. (“Death to the intellect! Long live death!” as Gen. Francisco Franco’s sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined “humiliations” and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression-especially to the repression of any sexual “deviance”-and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

Hitchens hit the nail on the head with respect to the cultural and political parallels in the concept Islamofascism. But the thing is that even though Hitchens perspicaciously pinpointed lines of convergence between Islam and fascism, the fact remains that fascism, in the strictest sense, is a narrow and even myopic political idea which emerged in the 20th century and has since expired.

Even though it is convenient to call brutal Islamic regimes like Iran Islamofascist, the brutality of these regimes emanates not from fascism — but from Islam. Among other things, fascism shuns religion and belief in God, while in Islam, everyone and everything submits to Allah and the Koran, along the traditional lines of religious devotion.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2010/Uncle-Sam-Hides-the-Truth-about-Kajaki.aspx
“We might even want to investigate those (Bush, Obama) whose horrendous idea it was to nation-build (bad idea) in the Islamic world (impossible) on the backs of the US military (Petraeus, Mullen, McChrystal and on down the senior brass line), and how to make sure it never happens again.”

AP photo and caption: “An Afghan man stands at the scene of Wednesday’s suicide attack in Kajaki, Helmand province south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. The suicide bomber blew himself up at a bridge under construction in Kajaki district of Helmand province, according to Mohammad Ismail, the deputy of the Afghan security forces coordination office in the area. Ismail said NATO troops also were working at the construction site, but it was unclear whether any were injured or killed.”

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/1/17/main-feature/1/america-the-biblical/e

The Greeks did not invent equality. Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and the gang famously believed that the rich are different from you and me—not merely because they are shaped by their privileges but because they are actually, literally made of superior stuff. The Greeks believed that the gods formed the rich from finer clay, with gold mixed in for the aristocrats, silver for the commercial class, and cheap iron and brass for the rest of us lowly plebeians. Almost invariably, great men were born to aristocratic parents, as Plato and Aristotle were. Inexplicably, plebian parents occasionally produced a superior man like Socrates; but this was rare.

Brazil Stiffs Obama on Oil Deal, Exposing President’s Incompetence – Yahoo! News   http://news.yahoo.com/brazil-stiffs-obama-oil-deal-exposing-presidents-incompetence-181200200.html   Brazil Stiffs Obama on Oil Deal, Exposing President’s Incompetence Mark Whittington, Yahoo News.com   President Barack Obama has suffered the second embarrassment over oil imports within the space of a week. Brazil, whose offshore deposits of oil were sought by […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ I’M GOING TO DISNEY WORLD It used to be that you were supposed to win a Super Bowl before celebrating with a trip to Disney World as a public figure, but Obama can’t stop doing his touchdown dances even as the country sinks faster. The similarities between Obama and Captain Francesco Schettino are a […]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,808252,00.html
Advance of the Zealots The Growing Influence of the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel By Juliane von Mittelstaedt

Veiled women, radical rabbis and gender segregation: Israel is facing a rise in the influence of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Their efforts to impose a strictly conservative worldview have led to growing tensions with the country’s secular society. A resolution to the conflict is vital for Israel’s future.

AND THIS IS THE PICTURE FOR THIS COLUMN:

Photo Gallery: Battle for the Soul of Israel

Outside is the Judean Wilderness, the Dead Sea shimmers in the distance. Naomi Machfud is sitting inside the self-built house, dreaming about making the world disappear. She wants to cover up her face with a veil, she says, her mouth, her nose and her eyes. A black veil, without even a vision slit, one that swallows every glance and submerges the world in darkness. The veil is the pinnacle of zniut, or modesty, the closest a person can get to God. But, she says with a sigh, “unfortunately I’m not that far yet.”

But Machfud, a 30-year-old woman with six children, has already created an insulating layer of material between herself and the outside world. She is wearing a wool robe, an apron, a blouse, three floor-length corduroy skirts, a black skirt and trousers. She has a piece of black wool material wrapped loosely around her head. Underneath it is a tight, black veil, and underneath that is a pale pink veil. Not a single hair is visible. She is wearing a pair of earrings, but she takes them off when she leaves the house.

Machfud is a Jewish woman married to a Jewish man. They live in a settlement in the West Bank, but she dresses as if she lived in Afghanistan. In Israel, the veiled women are referred to as the “Taliban,” while they refer to themselves as women of the shawl. Machfud claims that there are thousands of women like her, but it is more likely that they number in the hundreds. They are usually seen in Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox Me’ah She’arim neighborhood, black, shapeless figures, holding the hands of their daughters, who look like miniature versions of their mothers.

One could call these women crazy. Or one could see them as the product of a religious community that is becoming more and more extremist.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/288664
Willard Mitt Romney these days could not be more explicit about abandoning President Obama’s carbon dioxide restrictions.
“Irresponsibly,” Romney wrote in an August 28 op-ed for the Foster’s Daily Democrat in New Hampshire, “the EPA declared carbon dioxide, the same carbon dioxide that humans exhale, to be a ‘pollutant’ that poses risks to human health.” He also observed: “Congress had the good sense not to compound our economic challenges by imposing cap-and-trade’s extraordinary costs on the American people.”
Romney’s website offers this carbon-friendly promise: “Mitt Romney will eliminate the regulations promulgated in pursuit of the Obama administration’s costly and ineffective anti-carbon agenda.”
Well — surprise, surprise! Unlike this conservative cantata, Romney sang a totally different tune as Massachusetts’s liberal-Republican governor.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/288778/sinking-west-mark-steyn

Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine tweets:

Is there any chance that Mark Steyn won’t use the Italian captain fleeing the sinking ship as the lead metaphor in a column on EU collapse?

Oh, dear. You’ve got to get up early in the morning to beat me to civilizational-collapse metaphors. Been there, done that. See page 185 of my most recent book, where I contrast the orderly, dignified, and moving behavior of those on the Titanic (the ship, not the mendacious Hollywood blockbuster) with that manifested in more recent disasters. There was no orderly evacuation from the Costa Concordia, just chaos punctuated by individual acts of courage from, for example, an Hungarian violinist in the orchestra and a ship’s entertainer in a Spiderman costume, both of whom helped children to safety, the former paying with his life.

The miserable Captain Schettino, by contrast, is presently under house arrest, charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship. His explanation is that, when the vessel listed suddenly, he fell into a lifeboat and was unable to climb out. Seriously. Could happen to anyone, slippery decks and all that. Next thing you know, he was safe on shore, leaving his passengers all at sea. On the other hand, the audio of him being ordered by Coast Guard officers to return to his ship and refusing to do so is not helpful to this version of events.

http://www.mererhetoric.com/

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Clenched On Assad’s Side, Supplying Him With Weapons
Posted on January 19, 2012
Iran supplying weapons to Syria crackdown: US officials: The United States believes Iran is supplying munitions to aid Syria’s bloody protest crackdown in an initiative spearheaded by Tehran’s revolutionary guard supremo, according to senior US officials. Qasem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps elite Quds force, was in…

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Clenched Against The EU For Being A “US Client”
Posted on January 19, 2012
Iran cautions EU on acting as US client: Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast describes the European Union (EU) as a major rival of the US, cautioning the bloc against the consequences of acting as a Washington client. The US seeks to beat out its rival, Mehmanparast told reporters during…

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Clenched And Pouring Billions Into Anti-US Latin American Alliances
Posted on January 19, 2012
Iran seeking to expand influence in Latin America: Iran is quietly seeking to expand its ties with Latin America in what U.S. officials and regional experts say is an effort to circumvent economic sanctions and gain access to much-needed markets and raw materials. The new diplomatic offensive, which comes amid…

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Clenched Confidently Thanks To Obama’s “Pathetically Weak” Response To Provocations – Elliott Abrams
Posted on January 19, 2012
Iran’s Obligations, and Ours: President Obama’s reaction to the looting of the Embassy is pathetically weak. He said today that “for rioters, essentially, to be able to overrun the embassy and set it on fire is an indication that the Iranian government is not taking its international obligations seriously.” Not…

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Clenched And Openly Mocking Obama With Offers Of A Toy Drone
Posted on January 19, 2012
Iran: State radio says Iranian company will give US a toy model of downed American drone: State radio says an Iranian company is sending the United States a model of the American surveillance drone captured by the Islamic Republic. Tuesday’s report said the company will send the miniature of the…

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Clenched Against The Imprisoned Christians They Attacked Over Christmas
Posted on January 18, 2012
Concern over condition of four detainees arrested in AOG church of Ahwaz : Following an attack on the Assemblies of God Church of Ahwaz which resulted in the arrest of a number of Christians and their children, concerns are growing over the conditions of four of these detainees. According to…

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