RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/07/zombies-in-the-mineshaft/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=8f82571312-Mosaic_2013_7_3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-8f82571312-41165129

So I saw World War Z, the new Brad Pitt movie about a worldwide zombie outbreak, and here’s the surprising thing: I can’t decide whether it’s the most anti-Semitic movie ever made, or the most Zionist movie ever made.
I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t that the way with a deeply profound work of art—that it makes you question your assumptions and goes beyond narrow ideological categories? Well, yes. It is the way of a deeply profound work of art. But World War Z isn’t a deeply profound work of art. It’s not deep, it’s not profound, and it’s not art. It’s actually pretty dumb, as you can tell when you learn that the people who made it think the United Nations possesses its own deepwater navy and aircraft carrier. (If that were actually the case, I would probably support a zombie takeover of the earth.)

World War Z is a combination horror movie, disaster movie, war movie, and spy movie. It’s both very scary and very boring, though, I must confess, not at the same time. Which is to say, when it’s not frightening it’s incredibly dull, and when it’s not tedious it makes you gnaw on your fingernails and cover your eyes in horrified anticipation. It’s probably more boring than scary; but if you like scary, you’ll love it.

Okay—enough with the consumer guidance, and back to the anti-Semitism/Zionism question. About an hour into the movie, Brad Pitt is told by a CIA agent that the only place on earth where the zombies have been stymied is Israel. This led my friend Kyle Smith in the New York Post to say that the movie “takes a pernicious turn when Israel, alone, is said to have known about the zombie apocalypse in advance. In a world where perhaps hundreds of millions believe Israel knew about 9/11 beforehand, this shows poor judgment, to put it mildly.” So that’s the anti-Semitic part.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352591/inhospitable-earth-jonah-goldberg You just can’t out-gloom an environmentalist. The Atlantic invited some luminaries to answer the question “How and when will the world end?” Some contributions were funny. Others were simply plausible — a volcanic eruption from underneath Yellowstone National Park is frightfully overdue. But only an environmentalist like Bill McKibben could be a killjoy about […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/352590/will-egyptian-military-scrap-sharia-constitution-andrew-c-mccarthy If you read Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, you’re not surprised by anything that’s happening in Egypt. At the moment, the situation is fluid, so take reports with due caution. That said, “sources” inside the Egyptian military tell Reuters that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has drafted a “political roadmap” which it […]

http://www.rollcall.com/news/north_korea_is_no_paper_tiger_commentary-226001-1.html?pos=oopih North Korea fell off the front pages when the media decided Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un is a fat paper tiger. But North Korea is resolutely sending military advisors to help Syria, an embattled ally and an excellent customer for chemical weapons. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights notes that North Korean officers are […]

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/jul/2/engelhard-hemingway-and-generation-lost/ In the end, the will to die was stronger than the will to live. On the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway aimed a double-barreled, 12-guage shotgun at his head, pulled the trigger and thus ended the short happy life of America’s most famous writer. He was 61 and we do not know […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-common-core-straight-jacket?f=puball American education was based on some very fundamental principles and, from the 1640s until the 1840s, they were, in the words of Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, “real civics, real economics, and real virtues.” Bast is the co-author of “Education and Capitalism” and in a recent speech at the Eighth annual […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=4843 There is nothing to suggest that the mass demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi are any more indicative of hunger for democracy than the 2011 protests that led to the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak. This is not to say that the Egyptian people aren’t hungry. On the contrary, […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/living-in-a-backwards-world-2/

A new meme or figure of speech has begun to circulate among conservative writers and thinkers with increasing frequency and appositeness—namely, that we are living in a world turned upside down, to cite the title of a major book by Melanie Philips, itself derived from Christopher Hill’s study of revolutionary 17th century in England. (The term “world” is used by these writers to refer primarily to the Western sociopolitical domain or provinces thereof.) Almost everywhere we look we see this trope corroborated by extensive empirical testimony, of which I will flag only a few significant instances.

It is a world, as we have just seen, in which respectable and knowledgeable anti-jihadist freedom fighters Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller are forbidden entry to the U.K. as disturbers of public order and social peace while avowed terrorists are welcomed into the country and allowed to live handsomely on the public dole. It is in this same benighted nation that anti-Sharia activists Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll of the English Defence League are arrested for entering a Sharia-controlled zone in Tower Hamlets, a borough of London, on their way to Woolwich to honor Drummer Lee Rigby, slaughtered by Islamic terrorists. As reported on The Gates of Vienna website, “the Metropolitan police have now taken on the responsibility of enforcing the borders of these shariah-controlled zones, applying the rules laid down by the Islamic inhabitants.”

It is a world in which courageous media analyst Philippe Karsenty, who has shown beyond doubt that the infamous al-Dura event implicating Israel is an out-and-out hoax perpetrated by France 2 TV, finds himself convicted by the French courts for defamation—the Dreyfus affair redux. The Court of Cassation’s decision to remand the case to the Court of Appeals, which had originally acquitted Karsenty and then overturned its prior verdict, is not only “outrageous,” as Karsenty justifiably claimed, but legally problematic. As the JTA news source reported, “In returning the case to the appeals court, the high court said the appeals court had overstepped its bounds in ordering France 2 to send it the rushes of the report.” In other words, from the perspective of the High Court, soliciting evidence is impermissible. Shades of Canada’s Human Rights Tribunals and Supreme Court decision, which regard truth as unacceptable in their proceedings if it offends a member of a designated minority group. The same travesty exists in many European nations.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ There was once an America that built its shining cities on a hill in the name of virtue. That nation has been replaced by another nation that builds housing projects in the name of guilt. We used to elect the best men for the job, or at least we believed we did. Now we […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352533/stop-and-frisk-works-editors

We have our complaints about Michael Bloomberg, the prissy little autocrat who on occasion treats governing New York City as though it were very little more than a large-scale psychotherapy session for his own neuroses. But as the kerfuffle over the city’s stop-and-frisk program reminds us: We are going to miss him when he is gone.

If a mayor of New York can prevent the city’s backsliding into its pre-Giuliani state of criminal chaos, he can call himself successful. After crime prevention, everything else is a distant second for any big-city mayor, as Rahm Emanuel is learning the hard way in Chicago. There are many factors supporting New York’s success in tamping down crime, and stop-and-frisk is one of them.

The program is controversial because most of those who are stopped and frisked are black or Latino. That is less surprising than it may sound: Most New Yorkers are black or Latino. Critics of stop-and-frisk allege that the program is racially biased because blacks and Latinos are stopped and frisked at rates disproportionate to their share of the population. In fact, they constitute 87 percent of the stop-and-frisk targets. It is not surprising that blacks and Latinos are stopped and frisked at rates higher than would be expected if the program were being randomly administered across the entire population — because the program is not random. It is applied most robustly in high-crime areas, which tend to be disproportionately black and Latino. It is applied in response to specific information, such as witness testimony. Noting that, Mayor Bloomberg argued that the stop-and-frisk program might be stopping blacks and Latinos too infrequently: More than 90 percent of those being sought in New York City murder cases are described as being black or Latino.
Which is to say, stop-and-frisk is used to help prevent crime in largely black and Latino neighborhoods, where largely black and Latino witnesses describe largely black and Latino suspects perpetrating crimes against largely black and Latino victims in a largely black and Latino city. For acknowledging this reality and defending an essential tool in the city’s anticrime toolbox, Bloomberg has been ritually denounced — mostly by Democrats hoping to replace him. Public advocate Bill de Blasio called the remarks “outrageous,” while Bill Thompson called them “incredibly insulting.” Christine Quinn, a city councilwoman and one of the leading candidates to become the next mayor, said that the program must be gutted “precisely because young men of color are disproportionately stopped in New York.”