RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/after-olympics-putins-real-games-begin-in-ukraine?f=puball

Job No. 1? Ukraine.

You can only imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin is none too pleased about the civil unrest there — and the less than flattering spotlight it’s shining on Russia — not to mention distracting attention from his signature sports event in Sochi.

But oozing confidence as the Olympic Games draw to a close, you can bet that once the snow and ice-making equipment are switched off at the balmy Black Sea resort, Putin will turn his full attention to those pesky protesters next door.

You see: Losing Kiev from Moscow’s orbit is simply a non-starter for the Kremlin & Co.

Russia wants to hold Ukraine firmly under its sway. Moscow sees the country as protecting its soft strategic underbelly where hopeful conquerors of the past (e.g., the Nazis) invaded Mother Russia.

Ukraine is a central part of Russia’s perception of its own history and security. It’s a critical buffer state between Russia and American-led NATO, surprisingly still part of the Kremlin’s paranoia two-plus decades after the end of the Cold War.

To keep Ukraine as a loyal part of its periphery and locked into its sphere of influence, Russia is willing to use whatever influence is necessary to ensure success.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/02/20/the-washington-post-notices-that-iran-harbors-al-qaeda-as-al-qaeda-leaves-iran/?print=1

The Washington Post finds it newsworthy that senior al-Qaeda figures are leaving (or being shown the door in) Iran. Obviously, it is an interesting development … but one is constrained to ask why the Post did not seem to think it much of a story that Iran was harboring al-Qaeda leaders in the first place.

Iran, as our friend Michael Ledeen has repeatedly observed (most recently, here), is the chief sponsor of jihadism in the world. That it is a Shiite jihadist regime has not made much difference where the West is concerned: the mullahs have trained, supplied, financed and harbored Sunni jihadists – al-Qaeda and Hamas prominently among them – for over 20 years. This is the most outrageous aspect of the U.S. government’s negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program, negotiations conducted by both the Bush and Obama administrations. The regime’s nuclear ambitions have been compartmentalized from its terror facilitation, notwithstanding that it is the regime’s propagation of revolutionary jihad that makes its potential acquisition of nukes so intolerable. We do not sit up at night worrying about, say, India’s nuclear weapons. We have anxiety over Iran because for its regime, “Death to America” is not a slogan, it is a ruthlessly pursued goal.

This is why Michael and I, among not nearly enough others, have urged for a decade that the problem in Iran is the regime, not the nukes, and that any sensible American foreign policy should make regime change in Iran an imperative. This has never necessarily meant a military invasion of Iran (although that option should always be on the table – not as saber-rattling but as something the mullahs become convinced is a realistic possibility). It has simply meant that we should have organized every aspect of American foreign policy – military, intelligence, economic, and diplomatic – on strangling the regime until it is deposed, hopefully by the Iranian people themselves but by external forces if that’s what it takes.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/harvards-rebel-without-a-clue/

It reads like parody, but it’s not. Appearing the other day in the Harvard Crimson, the article was headlined “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom: Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice.” Its author, a Harvard undergraduate named Sandra Y.L. Korn, argued that the concept of academic freedom should be replaced by one of academic justice. “When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression,” she proposed, “it should ensure that this research does not continue.” To a large extent, of course, the American academy is already under the thumb of the left-wing Thought Police; Ms. Korn only wants to complete the job. She’d like to see an academy in which, she explains, somebody like Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield – a conservative who would never be hired nowadays, but whose job is secure thanks to tenure – would be given the boot, the better to purify the sweet air of Harvard Yard.

Who is Sandra Y.L. Korn? The contributor’s note identifies her as a member of the class of 2014, a Crimson editorial writer and columnist, and “a joint history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House.” “Concentrator” is apparently Harvardese for “major.” Ms. Korn’s college education consists, then, of courses in Women’s Studies and in “History of Science,” which, according to Harvard’s website, “offers students the possibility of studying the history and social relations of science” but “does not require students to take science courses.” (Which, of course, is ridiculous: how can you begin to understand what science is without actually studying a science?) Ms. Korn, I also discovered, is working on a thesis about “how biologists have tried over and over again to explain gender difference by invoking ‘science.’” In other words, she’s learned about science – without really learning any science – in order to discredit “science,” a word she puts in scare quotes. (Her project is, note well, entirely consistent with Women’s Studies dogma, which teaches that science is “masculinist.”)

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/

The working class in the United States has no better champion than Barack Obama. Like most champions of the working class, he has never actually worked at a real job and instead divided his time between academia, non-profits and politics which explains his current work ethic in which he tries to get a speech in between every two vacations.

The progressive law professors, who are currently the only thing standing between the working class and the abyss, at least according to other progressive professors, not only haven’t worked for a living, but don’t know what working for a living entails and don’t even understand the concept.

The protectors of the working class, currently presiding over a country where over 90 million adults are not in the workforce, have a plan to wipe out another 500,000 jobs. Before Obama, 63 percent of working age Americans had jobs. Today it’s 58 percent. And Obama is trying to see if he can drop the country below the 50 percent mark.

A minimum wage hike sounds like a great idea to a progressive professor who, like Marie Antoinette, wonders why the poor can’t just eat cake during a bread shortage. If the poor aren’t making enough money, just raise their salaries.

The first casualty of the minimum wage hike will be some 500,000 jobs. While just 19 percent of the minimum wage increase will go to those below the poverty line, the same isn’t true of that 500,000. The most disposable workers also tend to be the poorest. They are the first ones out the door when a small business comes up against the ObamaCare employer mandate or a minimum wage hike. It doesn’t take much to push them out from full-time to part-time and from part-time to the unemployment line and from the unemployment line to permanent unemployment.

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/progressive-insanity-and-the-global-warming-cult/

Progressives will do virtually anything to advance their agenda. In the arena of global warming, they have resorted to hysteria and angry denunciation of those who dare to question their infallible “wisdom.” And as it is with every aspect of their agenda, such wisdom must be imposed at the expense of liberty.

Leading the charge is Secretary of State John Kerry, who epitomized the above approach in a speech to Indonesian students, civic leaders and government officials in Jakarta, Indonesia. First he laced into one the left’s favorite punching bags, namely the coal and oil industries he accused of “hijacking” the conversation. ”We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts,” he declared. ”Nor should we allow any room for those who think that the costs associated with doing the right thing outweigh the benefits. The science is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand. We don’t have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society.”

Possibly suspecting that his presentation might be insufficient to galvanize the unwashed masses, Kerry added a dash of fear to the mix. ”This city, this country, this region, is really on the front lines of climate change,” Kerry warned. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that your entire way of life here is at risk. In a sense, climate change can now be considered the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even, the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” he added.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Walking across the marsh and down to the river in a driving snowstorm a week ago, I marveled at the power of nature. There is nothing that man has devised that can head off a meteor, hurricane, tornado, typhoon or snow storm. We have split the atom, placed a man on the moon and can send messages from one computer to another in milliseconds, yet we can’t divert rain from where it falls in abundance to where it is needed. Despite the bleatings to the contrary from those like Secretary of State John Kerry in Indonesia three days ago, man, as powerful as he is, has been no more successful at trapping nature than was King Canute 1000 years ago. As Professor Mat Collins, a senior scientist associated with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said this past weekend about the storms and flooding in the UK: they were driven by the Jet Stream moving south “for reasons that are simply unknown…If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge.”

President Obama recently blamed the droughts in California on global warming – placing blame on fossil fuels. He responds by unilaterally ordering the development of higher standards for truck manufacturing, rather than re-routing water his EPA had earlier diverted from California farms so that the Delta smelt might live. We may want all species to survive, but food should come first.

Ironically, much of the East Coast has experienced snowier and colder winters than normal. Apart from winter sports enthusiasts, most people are getting tired of the ice and snow; they long for spring. Depending on the town, Connecticut schools have been closed 6 or 8 days so far this school year, meaning that summer vacation will be shortened by a like number of days. USA Today reported last week that since December 1st, 75,000 domestic airline flights had been cancelled. Yet John Kerry, Al Gore and Barack Obama have the arrogance to believe that man is more powerful than nature – that responsibility lies with a small number of Republicans and a few evil oil and gas producers. It is not enough for them to acknowledge that, yes, man does leave his imprint on the natural world, which is the opinion of every sensible person. But they insist that if man would simply adhere to policy recommendations of elitist Washington bureaucrats the world would remain as it is – the oceans would recede, storms would subside, temperatures cool and polar bears would no longer be seen riding ice floes into the sunny regions of Michael Moore’s camera. Tempus cessat.

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/02/20/ukraine-should-vote-on-partition/?print=1

I’ve argued for years that partition is the best solution for Ukraine, which never was a country but an almalgam of provinces left over from failed empires–Russian, Austrian, Lithuanian, Ottoman–cobbled together into a Soviet “republic” and cast adrift after the collapse of Communism. Lviv (Lemberg) was a German-speaking city, part of Silesia; before World War II a quarter of its people were Jews. Jews were two-fifths of the population of Odessa.

A fifth of the population, mainly in the East, are ethnic Russians; a tenth, mainly in the West, are Uniate Catholics, who have a special place in Catholic policy since the papacy of John Paul II. Ukrainian nationality is as dubious as Byelorussian nationality: neither of them had a dictionary of their language until 1918.

The country also is a basket case. At its present fertility rate (1.3 children per female), its 47 million people will shrink to only 15 million by the end of the century. There are presently 11 million Ukrainian women aged 15 to 49 (although a very large number are working abroad); by the end of the century this will fall to just 2.8 million. There were 52 million Ukrainian citizens when Communism fell in 1989. Its GDP at about $157 billion is a fifth of Turkey’s and half of Switzerland’s. Ukrainians want to join the European Union rather than Russia so they can emigrate. It is of no strategic, economic, or demographic importance to the West.

The film uses scholars, activists and carefully selected film clips to unravel the magical marketing mystery of J Street, which promotes an empty bottle as the elusive elixir of Middle East peace.

Read more at: http://www.jewishpress.com/news/film-expose-of-j-street-reveals-decaying-core-of-moral-narcissism/2014/02/21/

Is it really possible to get all of the most important information about the no-longer upstart, but still disingenuous J Street into a one hour film, one that provides sufficient background information for the uninitiated to be able to grasp just what could be wrong with the organization that promotes itself as “pro-peace, pro-Israel”? It is. The Boston-based Americans for Peace and Tolerance have done it. Here’s how they did it with the film “The J Street Challenge.” They used a secret weapon: truth. In this hour long exposé, executive producer, director and writer Avi Goldwasser and his colleagues lined up everything J Street says, who runs it, who funds it, and reveals the organization to be nearly the inverse of what it claims to be. The film is worth it just to see acting Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas say the exact opposite of what Jeremy Ben-Ami describes him as saying. Or to have another leader of the Fatah Central Committee refute entirely what J Street fellow traveler Naomi Chazan claims the Fatah leadership says. Or any of at least another half dozen blatant misrepresentations made by J Street to sell its version of reality. But the most significant achievement of the film is that it explains what J Street, at its core, is trying to do. As Ben-Ami himself explains in one chilling segment, J Street is about redefining the meaning of pro-Israel. Rather than accepting that the definition of being pro-Israel should be “unquestioning support for the government of Israel,”(can you hear the sneer come through as you read this? It comes through in the movie), here, in Ben-Ami’s own words, is the J Street re-definition of being “pro-Israel”: We define it as the active, urgent action to facilitate the Two State Solution. “Pro-Israel,” in J Street-speak, means pro-Two State Solution. And that’s all it means. To be perfectly blunt: for J Street, “pro-Israel” simply means “Palestine Now.”

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/A-dose-of-Nuance-Give-peace-a-chance-342083
To this day, no Palestinian leader will look at their people and say “The Jews, too, are indigenous here. They, too, have a right to a homeland here, so let’s share.”

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow’s main character Von Humboldt Fleisher is the consummate American, caring about America more than anything else. He also reads voraciously, but the more he reads, the more despondent he becomes – because he’s not seeking that sort of complexity. He wants a simpler universe.

“History,” Bellow says of Humboldt the American, “was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s sleep.”

Fifty years before Bellow’s novel, in 1907, Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote his third and final play, A Strange Land. In it, he introduces the young Russian Jew, Gonta, just back from several years in America. Gonta had gone to America “to forget,” he says. And when asked what it was that he was hoping to forget, he responds, “Who I was.”

Two utterly different writers, one American and one European, separated by an ocean, by largely competing ideologies and by half a century. Yet for both, America was the place where one could essentially put on blinders.

In America, you could forget who you were; in America, you could get a good night’s sleep even in the midst of the nightmare called history.

That, of course, has been key to America’s greatness, to its optimism, to its sense that every problem has a solution. It has come of age fighting most of its wars in lands far away, buffered by large oceans that make the world the object of interest – but not the source of personal distress.

Israel could not be more different. No one goes to Israel, temporarily or permanently, to forget who they are. No one goes to Israel to get a good night’s sleep in the midst of the nightmare called history.

To go to Israel is to have who you are be the focus of your very existence.

To go to Israel is to sometimes live the nightmare even when you’re awake.

http://www.kansascity.com/2014/02/21/4839153/judge-spying-on-nj-muslims-by.html#storylink=cpy

A federal judge has ruled that the New York Police Department’s surveillance of Muslims in New Jersey was a lawful effort to prevent terrorism, not a civil rights violation.

In a decision filed Thursday in federal court in Newark, U.S. District Judge William Martini dismissed a lawsuit brought in 2012 by eight Muslims who alleged that the NYPD’s surveillance programs were unconstitutional because they focused on religion, national origin and race. The suit accused the department of spying on ordinary people at mosques, restaurants and schools in New Jersey since 2002.

Martini said he was not convinced that the plaintiffs were targeted solely because of their religion. “The more likely explanation for the surveillance was to locate budding terrorist conspiracies,” he wrote.

The judge added: “The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself.”

Farhaj Hassan, a plaintiff in the case and a U.S. soldier who served in Iraq, said he was disappointed by the ruling.