RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/06/19/living-in-fear-welcome-to-fascist-america/?print=1

Back in the ’80s when, on a couple of occasions, I visited the Soviet Union, I always wondered what was it really like to live in that godforsaken place. But it didn’t much matter. For all the creepy spying that was going on, I realized I’d be out of there in a week or two.

Now I know what it was like. It’s come home.

I live in fear.

I don’t want to admit it, but it’s true. Every phone call I make, every email I send, every text I message, every article I write including this one, I imagine being bugged or recorded.

1984 is here and it’s not pretty.

It infects everything we do.

For example, I want to criticize the IRS with every breath I take, but in the back of my head I worry — what if they come after me? What if I’m audited and have to spend the next few years and untold dollars on accountants and attorneys? Is this fair to my family? Is this how I want to spend my life?

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/jun/18/putin-right-syria-obama-wrong/#.UcBw4XW_iLE.twitter

WASHINGTON, June 18, 2013 ― Russian President Vladimir Putin advises us to keep our hands off Syria, but our own president is moving ahead anyway.

Fools keep rushing in. Apparently, President Obama has learned nothing from our folly in Egypt, where we traded in Hosni Mubarak for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Suppose we do help topple Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad with small arms and ammunition for the rebels, as Obama proposes to do?

One guess as to who is ready to replace him.

We seem to have a habit in this country to root for the underdog, even if the underdog is Al Capone.

Putin has his own selfish reasons for wanting the West to stay out (he is a supporter of Assad), but given Russia’s own misadventures against looming radical Islam in such places as Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Chechnya, Putin may have our best interests at heart after all. A Russian who cherishes an American Super bowl ring as much as he does can’t be all bad.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/why_not_zimbabwe.html

When I heard about President Barack Obama’s plans for a $100 million trip to Africa with his family and entourage, I was surprised that Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) is not on the itinerary.

I would think that Zimbabwe would be a place that President Obama would especially like to visit, because Zimbabwe is a country where almost all of Obama’s redistributionist dreams have come true. And Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe (an avowed Marxist) is surely among Obama’s pantheon of heroes and role models (along with Marx, Stalin, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Saul Alinsky and Rev. Jeremiah Wright).

Robert Mugabe has presided over the “fundamental transformation” of a thriving Rhodesia, once “the breadbasket of Africa” (and a nation with significant heavy industry including mining, iron, and steel) into a Zimbabwe dependent on imports of food and emergency relief supplies to fend off starvation of its population.

Mugabe favored a one-party state, total black rule, and a monopoly on land. He presided over the driving off (and sometimes the slaughter) of productive white farmers, and then gave the farms to unskilled blacks as rewards for military service or political loyalty. Agricultural productivity dropped by more than half, as did employment associated with running a successful agricultural enterprise.

Mugabe also presided over a treasury that printed more and more money to cover government debts, which resulted in such out-of-control inflation that Zimbabwe had to abandon its own currency and use foreign currencies such as the Euro, British pound, U.S. dollar, South African rand, and Botswanan pula.

A Disciplined Sentiment
Against the berserk certitude of idealists, Burke urged a deference to tradition and to the wisdom of felt attachments.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323949904578536270967604416.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

The great revolutions of history typically produce written works celebrating their achievement. The French Revolution, however, was immortalized by a denunciation. Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” appeared in 1790, when Britons were still welcoming the Revolution as a blow to Bourbon tyranny. Burke’s dissent has resounded through the ages. No reactionary diatribe, the “Reflections” promoted a “manly, moral, regulated liberty” and a cautious reform of the decadent French monarchy. But it lividly denounced the “short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy” seeking to remake France as a radical utopia, as if the “constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic.” Armed with a doctrinaire logic of rights, these revolutionaries were indifferent to history and hostile to tradition. “The age of chivalry is gone,” wrote Burke. “That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

The “Reflections” foretold, with a prescience that is freshly incredible on every rereading, the grisly mechanisms of the Terror, the execution of Louis XVI and the despotism of Napoleon. The book was faintly embarrassing when it first appeared. The British prime minister, William Pitt, derided it as “rhapsodies in which there is much to admire, and nothing to agree with.” Time would rebuke this judgment. The “Reflections on the Revolution in France” became the most famous statement of conservatism ever written.

Edmund Burke: The First Conservative

By Jesse Norman

(Basic, 325 pages, $27.99)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324021104578551291160259734.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Tocqueville saw a nation of individuals who were defiant of authority. Today? Welcome to Planet Government. In “Democracy in America,” published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. “The inhabitant of the United States,” he wrote, “has only a defiant and restive regard for social […]

http://unitedpatriotsworldwide.com/vinienco/ The Destruction of the Syrian Air Force The Destruction of the Syrian Air Force: The Syrian Air Force has suffered major losses in the last year, as the aircraft and helicopters were unleashed on rebels (and civilian supporters) and took a beating. Of the 370 usable fixed wing war planes the Syrian Air Force […]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/169056#.UcF_5K8UHQw

Terrorist Earns Hebrew U. Doctorate, Refuses to Shake Hands

Two-time terrorist who planned a suicide bombing is given his degree. He refuses to shake the university president’s hand.

Maayana Miskin

A terrorist who served two prison terms for involvement in terrorism, including a plot to carry out a suicide bombing, has been awarded his doctorate in chemistry from Hebrew University, Maariv reports.

The terrorist is an Israeli citizen and a resident of eastern Jerusalem.

During the graduation ceremony in Hebrew University’s Har Hatzofim campus he refused to shake hands with Hebrew University President Professor Menachem Ben-Sasson. His name was read aloud at the ceremony and he was applauded by the crowd.

He began working on his doctorate prior to his second terror conviction, several years after serving time in prison for membership in a terrorist organization. He did his research in the Hebrew University laboratories.

At the same time, he was in close touch with local terrorist groups and assisted them in plotting a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem. He assisted in finding a young Arab man to carry out the planned attack.

http://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/135066/ruth-wisse-jokes

Jewish Comedy Has Earned Big Praise, But Is It Time to Stop the Joke-Telling?Scholar Ruth Wisse likes to laugh as much anyone, but also sees peril when Jews can’t seem to quit clowning around. In ‘No Joke’ she explains why.

What are the three words a woman never wants to hear when she’s making love? Honey, I’m home. Whether their circumstances are happy or fraught, Jews have been pointing out the humor in their predicaments since the biblical era, when Sarah the matriarch saw the fact that she’d bear a child at her advanced age as a cruel joke. But it was only since the Enlightenment that, as a people, the Jews became known as a witty lot—reveling in word play, contradiction, and self-deprecation. Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse loves a good punchline (and, with her grandmotherly comportment, has perfected the straight-man delivery) but rejects the idea that Jewish humor is a uniform thing and, furthermore, that it’s something of which to be proud.

In No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, Wisse considers the variations of humor from Heinrich Heine to YouTube. She joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to share some gallows humor, to compare the jokes of the Haskalah to those told in yeshivas, and to argue that engaging in humor that distracts us from suffering, rather than confronting it, is not worth the laughs. [Running time: 32:16.]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

In Venezuela, savvy shoppers are hunting down scarce supplies of toilet paper with a smartphone app. The smartphones, compact packages of electronics, are several generations more advanced than the white square, but they are available when the toilet paper isn’t, because unlike the toilet paper they aren’t subsidized and price controlled.

While Hugo Chavez did at one point unveil a Chavezphone for the poor, he succumbed to the wonders of Cuba’s Socialist medicine before they could become as big as Obamaphones. But if Venezuela ever falls to the dumbphone, then there won’t be a smartphone app to find a smartphone with.

The sight of modern men and women hunting down toilet paper with smartphones seems like the Soviet Union as reimagined by William Gibson, but it’s a common enough outcome in an economy that is really a patchwork of uneven subsidies.

The Arab Spring was fueled by the social media apps of smartphones and anger over insufficient subsidies for staples such as bread and fuel. The smartphones may bring you the revolution, but it’s the toilet paper and bread shortages that set them off.

The problem is a commonplace one that Americans will shortly begin experiencing with the subsidized medicine of Obamacare.

  www.israelnationalnews.com Outraged French Jews will hold a demonstration Sunday over a government-funded Paris museum exhibit glorifying suicide bombers. The exhibit, which featuresphotographs by Palestinian Authority Arab photographer Ahlam Shibli, is entitled “Death.” It is being shown at the Jeu de Paume museum. The exhibit features portraits of Arab suicide bombers, from the military wing of PA […]