RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/our_bored_president.html

Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s Rasputin, unwittingly provided us an answer to the question of why the Obama Presidency is such a man-caused disaster.

There are few people who are close to the notoriously insular Barack Obama (a former aide, Neera Tanden, said that “Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people”) but Valerie Jarrett is among the select few. They have been friends for decades; she introduced Barack to Michelle; she is a constant presence in the White House, and highly unusual for a White House aide, enjoys her own Secret Service protective detail. And when she described Barack Obama as having been “bored to death his whole life” she helped explained what lies behind a failed presidency.

People familiar with Barack Obama’s history realize he has a very low threshold for boredom. This is a trait shared by many millennials: they bore easily, and that character flaw is one reason employers refrain from hiring them. Yet they feel entitled to promotions as a way for others to display gratitude towards them and to give them an ego booster shot. They want to be stimulated and entertained all the time and find work tedious and…boring.

Obama’s boredom began early.

When interviewed upon becoming the first black Harvard Law Review President he told the Associated Press, “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me”; by inference, suburbanites bore him, as well — and we know how he feels about small-town Americans). Ah…to be jaded and judgmental so early in life and to feel free to spout stereotypes.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/inside-the-saudi-911-coverup?f=puball, http://nypost.com/2013/12/15/inside-the-saudi-911-coverup/

After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.

But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.

It was kept secret and remains so today.

President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words).

A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.

Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’ve proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304477704579252482831363744?mod=New_York_newsreel_2
Rightly Identified—At Last
‘Armenian Jew, Ellis Island Immigrant, 1926’ Is Actually a Picture of Shalom Nadoff

The picture captures the face of a new American, one of the more than 164,000 immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island in 1926.

Shalom Nadoff was ‘nowhere near to being Armenian.’ Lewis W. Hine/George Eastman House/Getty Images

It is of a man, in a suit and tie with a hat, looking straight ahead. The photographer was Lewis Hine, who devoted his life to documenting the human condition.

Mr. Hine titled his photo “Armenian Jew, Ellis Island Immigrant, 1926.”

Over the years, the haunting stare came to symbolize the loneliness that immigrants—many eastern Europeans—faced in their adopted homeland.

The man, though, wasn’t an Armenian Jew. He was Shalom Nadoff, a Yemenite rabbi, and today, officials at two museums, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the George Eastman House in upstate New York, are working to correct the record almost 90 years after Mr. Hine tripped the shutter.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303932504579256390785052798?mod=trending_now_1

Mike Tyson Explores Kierkegaard

I’m currently reading “The Quotable Kierkegaard,” edited by Gordon Marino, a collection of awesome quotes from that great Danish philosopher. (He wanted his epitaph to read: “In yet a little while / I shall have won; / Then the whole fight / Will all at once be done.”) I love reading philosophy. Most philosophers are so politically incorrect—challenging the status quo, even challenging God. Nietzsche’s my favorite. He’s just insane. You have to have an IQ of at least 300 to truly understand him. Apart from philosophy, I’m always reading about history. Someone very wise once said the past is just the present in funny clothes. I read everything about Alexander, so I downloaded “Alexander the Great: The Macedonian Who Conquered the World” by Sean Patrick. Everyone thinks Alexander was this giant, but he was really a runt. “I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity,” he said. I so related to that, coming from Brownsville, Brooklyn.
What did I have to look forward to—going in and out of prison, maybe getting shot and killed, or just a life of scuffling around like a common thief? Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, even a cold pimp like Iceberg Slim—they were all mama’s boys. That’s why Alexander kept pushing forward. He didn’t want to have to go home and be dominated by his mother. In general, I’m a sucker for collections of letters. You think you’ve got deep feelings? Read Napoleon’s love letters to Josephine. It’ll make you think that love is a form of insanity. Or read Virginia Woolf’s last letter to her husband before she loaded her coat up with stones and drowned herself in a river. I don’t really do any light reading, just deep, deep stuff. I’m not a light kind of guy.

— Mr. Tyson is the author of “The Undisputed Truth.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303949504579260510644966826?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories

A leading Saudi prince demanded a place for his country at talks with Iran, assailing the Obama administration for working behind Riyadh’s back and panning other recent U.S. steps in the Middle East.

MONACO—A leading Saudi prince demanded a place for his country at talks with Iran, assailing the Obama administration for working behind Riyadh’s back and panning other recent U.S. steps in the Middle East.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, an Arab royal and a brother of Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, said Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states were stunned by the secret American-Iranian diplomacy that led to the breakthrough deal between Iran and other world powers last month.
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Prince Turki al-Faisal says Gulf states must play a direct role in Iran talks. Reuters

His comments in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, rare in their bluntness, came on the sidelines of a security conference here at which he publicly blistered the U.S. for its role in Syria and in the region.

The Arab royal said the failure by Washington and the United Nations to take decisive steps to end the violence in Syria—which has claimed over 130,000 lives—bordered on “criminal negligence.”

Last week, the State Department said it had suspended nonlethal aid to the Syrian rebels after warehouses they controlled in northern Syria were overrun by Islamic militants with ties to al Qaeda. Saudi Arabia has armed some of those same rebels.

“The U.S. gave us the impression that they were going to do things in Syria that they finally didn’t,” Prince Turki said on the sidelines of the World Policy Conference in Monaco. “The aid they’re giving to the Free Syrian Army is irrelevant. Now they say they’re going to stop the aid: OK, stop it. It’s not doing anything anyway.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/5456#.Uqz-xaVF7yD

Historical Contexts: Brewing a Deadly Potion

Violins and Gas Chambers

In 1892, cofounder of the World Zionist Organization and social critic Max Nordau wrote his most famous work, Degeneration, which presented a scathing critique of European society as it devolved into what he described as a “horrible train of murder, incendiarism, rapine, [and] torture.” Nordau systematically analyzed and dismantled theories put forth by elite thinkers in his time, such as Nietzsche and Tolstoy. Specifically, Nietzsche’s premise, that, ‘there is no good and there is no evil,’ and his praise of sin as man’s ‘great consolation,’ was what Nordau found repugnant. The explicit approval of such notions was visible in European art and literature. In French society, for example, the “contempt for traditional views and customs of morality” led to conspicuous consumption and a devaluation of moral virtue, and by extent, a deterioration of societal structures which had till then promoted social cohesion. This was illustrated by the French’s inclination to imitate art which was inherently unrestrained and subject to fleeting passions as opposed to principles of decency. Nordau found the praise of such ideas and pseudo-intellectuals by elite society to be doubly offensive. In addition to advocating for morally bankrupt principles, calling such principles ‘enlightened‘ was a gross inversion of objective norms and values, a reflection of the degenerate state into which European society became immersed.

www.israpundit.com/archives/63592388 Everybody knows that it is either going to be “settlements” or a “Palestinian State”. Both cannot coexist side by side. The fate of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria is the most important single defining issue for the future of the Jewish people. After Yasser Arafat convinced the Israelis that “delivering” Arabs to the […]

worldtribune.com In 1967 Rudi Dutschke, a flamboyant leader of post-World War II European student radicals looking back on two centuries of failed revolutions, had an epiphany: instead of attacking prevailing institutions head on, he advocated his fellow revolutionaries should take a “long march through the institutions’ of power to create radical change from within government […]

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-perils-of-hate-speech-and-crime.html Defense attorney and seasoned trial lawyer Perry Mason never lost a case to a prosecutor who charged his clients with “hate speech” or with a “hate crime.” Or at least no defendant of Mason’s was every indicted, charged with, tried for, or found guilty of it. That is because the concepts of “hate speech” […]