RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-fray-What-an-idiot-328445
Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid is the most dangerous man in Israeli politics today, a good-looking, charismatic, overconfident fool, an affable ignoramus with no intellectual gravitas, devoid of moral principle, but with the gift of a silver tongue and the unmistakable – and largely undisguised – penchant for demagoguery and dictatorship.
I am saying what we need to do is something – Yair Lapid – in The New York Times, on the Palestinian issue.

Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid is the most dangerous man in Israeli politics today, a good-looking, charismatic, overconfident fool, an affable ignoramus with no intellectual gravitas, devoid of moral principle, but with the gift of a silver tongue and the unmistakable – and largely undisguised – penchant for demagoguery and dictatorship.

This is not the topic I had planned to write on this week. I had something entirely different in mind. But Lapid’s two infuriatingly smug interviews with Charlie Rose earlier this week made a change of priorities imperative.

Uninformed know-all

The spectacle of someone, without any background in military matters; who admits to having no understanding of economics; with no knowledge of international affairs and certainly no experience in their conduct; whose scholastic achievements do not even include high school matriculation, pontificating to all and sundry on how the affairs of the nation should be run, is so galling that it cannot be left without riposte.

It is even more vexing since Lapid has conceded that he has been forced to discard many of his preconceived opinions he held prior to entering politics, once he encountered the realities after entering them, confessing earlier this year to The New York Times: “I used to have so many opinions before I learned the facts.”

Yet judging from the Rose interview, this has left him unchastened. His brashness undiminished, he continues issuing – with commendable self-assuredness – proclamations that were either meaningless, self-contradictory or unfounded.

Indeed, Lapid has the telegenic presence and charm to make utter nonsense sound almost intelligent, the wildly implausible, almost reasonable – unless you listen to what he has to say.

As one of the creators of the Lapidometer, a satirical website that parodies Lapid’s pronounced penchant for the use of social media, commented: “We noticed that the Yesh Atid party spends a lot of time on Facebook instead of engaging in parliamentary activities [but], their posts don’t say anything. They’re full of beautiful text and very little substance. A bit like Yair Lapid.”

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5943 If further evidence were needed to show that the rise of abbreviated Internet lingo has led to a dangerous decline in literacy, it was provided in spades this week. As part of an educational series commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the Israel Defense Forces has been tweeting posts relating to […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamadontcare-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by intellectual Michael Chandler, Conservative TV and Movie Star Morgan Brittany and Filmmaker Orestes Matacena (“Two de Force“).

This week the Gang discussed Netanyahu vs. Iran. The discussion occurred in Part II (starting at the 12:50 mark) and focused on when Israel will have to make its move against the Mullahs’ bomb. The dialogue was preceded by an analysis of Republicans are Jihadists? — which analyzed how the Left uses the words against its political opponents that it never dares utter about Islamic terrorists.

Part II:

Don’t miss Part I of this special episode which shed light on Secrets Behind the Shutdown and ObamaDon’tCare:

Part I:

To watch previous Glazov Gang episodes, Click here.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/passage-to-marseille/print/ Marseille, with a population of something under a million, is France’s second largest city, and, as the BBC reported last year, “it’s likely to become the first Western European metropolis where the majority of the population will be Muslim.” With a candor for which it has not always been known, the BBC acknowledged that […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-battle-of-the-redskins/ Over the summer, those two legendary sources of sports coverage, Salon Magazine and MSNBC, or as they are known in some places the S Word and the M Word, announced that they would begin referring to the Redskins football team as the R Word. Ordinarily liberals would not be too eager to call a […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/aymenn-jawad-al-tamimi/reza-aslan-authority-on-islam-and-the-middle-east/ An author who came to widespread attention during the past couple of months over the release of his book Zealot (July 2013) on the life Jesus, Reza Aslan has been known primarily as an authority on Islam and the Middle East. He has been hailed by an array of commentators, most notably the celebrity […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/360974/print As the federal shutdown grinds on, Team Obama’s message to the American people is sadly consistent: Shove it — as painfully as possible. Obama’s strategic sadism disregards regular Americans’ basic needs and tortures those who resist. And if this damages people, so what? “We are winning,” a senior administration official told the Wall Street […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4247/who_s_afraid_of_barack_obama
While no longer accepting any special responsibility on the world stage, Obama pretends that we are all citizens together. Like Hamlet the President soliloquises; he does not act

On March 4, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson gave his second inaugural address. “We are provincials no longer,” he declared. “The tragic events of the thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world.” Five months before, he had been re-elected on the slogan: “He kept us out of the war.”

But in the meantime, the Germans had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. By the time Wilson spoke, he had resolved to side with the Allies. The true significance of American intervention in a European conflict would extend far beyond its ultimately decisive impact on the war itself. Wilson grasped that the United States was acknowledging that its “manifest destiny” now embraced defending liberty and justice, not only on a continental but on a global scale: “There can be no turning back.”

Wilson was drawing on a long history of thinking about what it might mean to be a citizen of the world, going back at least to Immanuel Kant’s vision of “perpetual peace”. Even Machiavelli recognised ethical constraints on rulers, as Phillip Bobbitt shows in his new study of the Renaissance sage, The Garments of Court and Palace. What we would call genocide and ethnic cleansing “are such vile practices, not only incompatible with a Christian way of life but with any civilised form of living, that every man should abhor such methods and decide to live as a private citizen rather than rule at the cost of such devastation to others”.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303342104579099060830782406.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Why isn’t the wind industry subject to the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act?

For some environmentalists, the threat of climate change is so great that we must allow wind turbines to kill bald and golden eagles. The argument I’ve heard is that renewables, including wind energy, will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Less carbon dioxide reduces the threat posed by climate change, which benefits eagles and other wildlife.

In other words, we have to kill eagles in order to save them.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider the notice that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published in the Federal Register on Sept. 27. It seeks public comment on a proposed permit that will allow a wind project to kill up to five golden eagles over a five-year period, despite their protected status under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.

The permit is sought for the Shiloh IV Wind Project in Solano County, Calif. If it is granted, it would formally recognize a legal double standard that is already in existence with regard to wildlife protection in America.

Wind projects routinely violate the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but no wind farm has ever faced a single prosecution. Meanwhile, companies in the oil and gas industry and other sectors are routinely indicted for violating those same statutes.

The illegal bird kills are not insubstantial. On Sept. 11, some of Fish and Wildlife’s top raptor biologists published a study in the Journal of Raptor Research that found the number of eagles killed by wind turbines increased to 24 in 2011 from two in 2007. In all, some 85 eagles have been killed since 1997. Joel Pagel, the study’s lead author, recently told me that the figure is “an absolute minimum.” Among the carcasses: six bald eagles.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-face-of-tyranny?f=puball The history of civilization dating back some five millennia is one of unrelenting tyranny, rapaciousness, arrogance, and stupidity. The players and the places changed, but the slaughter was unremitting, the suffering broken only by occasional brief periods of peace, good weather and crops. For most of the past, war, famine, and disease killed most […]