RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-foundational-incoherence-of-western-foreign-policy/print/

The crisis in Ukraine is just the latest in a long series of foreign policy failures brought about by the incoherence in our thinking about foreign relations. On the one hand, we have championed ethnic-national self-determination as the highest international good, while on the other we have assumed that all these various nations and peoples share the same ideals, principles, and goods, and so can comprise a transnational order that will eliminate war and conflict and create peace and prosperity. Over a hundred years of history reveal these ideals not just to be incompatible, but also to foment and worsen inter-state violence.

To mean anything, ethnic-nationalist particularism must embody profound differences among nations, including languages, customs, mores, religions, ideals, and values. The identity of a people is defined by these differences, and that identity in turn creates interests and aims that necessarily clash with those of other peoples. To take one particularly important example, different countries have different attitudes about the legitimacy of using violence to achieve their goals. Russia under Vladimir Putin obviously sees no problem with using force or the threat of force to protect its interests in Moldova, Georgia, and now Crimea and Ukraine. The Muslim Middle East is rich with examples of the acceptability of violence, whether against external or internal enemies, in protecting a nation’s or a regime’s power and privilege. The brutal civil war in Syria is the obvious current example. Complaints about this brutality, moreover, on the part of victims usually are based on who is using violence, not the universal principle that violence is wrong. The same clerical revolutionaries in Iran who decried the brutality of the Shah’s secret police have had no problem using even worse brutality once they were in power, killing more Iranians in one year than the Savak did in 20. Violence, brutality, and torture are all fine depending on who the perpetrators are, and who the victims.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/03/09/kim-jong-un-orders-massacre-of-33-christians/

They’re being charged with attempting to overthrow the regime, but their real crime is that they were working with jailed South Korean Christian missionary Kim Jung-wook to set up 500 underground churches in North Korea.

They are not being “executed.” Using that word would lend some legality and moral framework to Kim’s action. This is nothing less than a massacre of innocent human beings — a slaughter that should raise an outcry in every civilized nation of the world.

The Daily Mail reports:

Thirty-three North Koreans face execution after being charged with attempting to overthrow the repressive regime of Kim Jong-un.

The Koreans have landed themselves in hot water after it emerged they had worked with South Korean Baptist missionary Kim Jung-wook and received money to set up 500 underground churches. It is understood they will be put to death in a cell at the State Security Department.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/putin-is-everything-and-more-but-not-stupid/?print=1 We keep hearing that Vladimir Putin is stupid. Does he not get that this is now the 21st century? No, he doesn’t. The fool seems mired either in the 19th of the czars, or the 20th of Bolsheviks. He certainly does. Didn’t Putin have to act to shore up falling domestic opinion? Maybe. Does […]

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2014/03/10/an-outrageous-abuse-of-executive-power/?print=1 So, Obama once again “delays” the law of the land on Obamacare. Why?  Because there is an election coming up, silly, and he wants to do what he can to protect vulnerable Democrats.  I pick this bit from the [1] Detroit News [1] more or less at random: “In announcing the latest postponement this […]

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/03/09/near-death-experiences-a-new-take-on-life-part-4-brian-millers-case-challenges-the-skeptics/?print=1

Skepticism is the right attitude if it means you insist on real, strong proof before being persuaded of something. It is not a good attitude if it means you’re set to deny and belittle proof of something no matter what.

Skeptics about whether near-death experiences are real tend to be in the second category. Millions of people have undergone them since the 1960s; a good summary of the confirmative evidence that arises from this vast trove of experience is here.

Just last month an NDE case in Ohio was reported (here, here, and here, for instance) that should give the skeptics a particularly hard time.

As The Blaze told it:

Brian Miller, 41, was hospitalized after suffering a major heart attack. While he was doing well at first, his heart eventually went into a deadly arrhythmia called Ventricular fibrillation, described by the Mayo Clinic as “a … rhythm problem that occurs when the heart beats with rapid, erratic electrical impulses.”

From that point, Miller was out cold. As a nurse affirmed, “He had no heart rate, he had no blood pressure, he had no pulse…. His brain had no oxygen for 45 minutes….”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/373025/print

Sorry but I don’t share this admiration for Ike….He undertook the largest demilitarization in American history; ended the Korean War ceding to the terms of the brutal Kim dynasty of the North; babbled about “the military-industrial complex”

and routed Israel, France and America in the Suez war forcing a total retreat. His Sec. of State John Foster Dulles was perhaps the most anti-Israel of all….setting the bar even higher than Kerry. Of course he ran against a pompous blowhard named Adlai Stevenson so it was better that he won…rsk

Obama admirers have created a complete distortion of “the Eisenhower era.”

In critique of the George W. Bush administration, and in praise of the perceived foreign-policy restraint of Obama’s first five years in the White House, a persistent myth has arisen that Obama is reminiscent of Eisenhower — in the sense of being a president who kept America out of other nations’ affairs and did not waste blood and treasure chasing imaginary enemies.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Andrew Bacevich, Fareed Zakaria (“Why Barack Is like Ike”), and a host of others have made such romantic, but quite misleading, arguments about the good old days under the man they consider the last good Republican president.

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/03/obamas_surgeon_corporal.html You’d think that the Obama administration would, in a crucial election year, be a smidgen less confrontational when it comes to appointees requiring congressional approval.  Immediately on the heels of a failed Justice Department nomination of another liberal radical minority candidate, the tone-deaf but determined apparatchiks surrounding our part-time president have forwarded another dubious […]

For President Putin, a Ukrainian piece prize beats a Nobel. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303795904579431273717815640?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond&mg=reno64-wsj Barack Obama thinks Vladimir Putin isn’t such a smart guy. “There’s a suggestion somehow that the Russian actions have been clever, strategically,” Mr. Obama said last week about Moscow’s bloodless coup de main in Crimea. “I actually think that this is not been a […]

MOUNTAIN MAN NEWS….NO URL THE AUTHOR IS CONNECTED TO ME BY HAVING THE SAME PARENTS

The NY Times, wrote a journalistic essay (how dare they) explaining that the College Boreds will no longer require essays in their SAT exams. Nor will they penalize guessing. I’m guessing (that’s allowed now) that they will soon eliminate English and Math altogether. After all, I-phones have calculators anyway, and texting requires neither a large vocabulary nor spelling. President Obama will not only see to it that every young person attends a college, but each of them will have a macbook, I-pad and I-phone as well. The SAT exams will also attempt to increase the number of minority students entering college, so hire education should be gearing for an influx of Asians and Jews. Oh wait, they’re not minorities. I mean how many Hispanics do you see in Chinatown?
Now some of my colleagues at USC anticipated the future. After all, academics and intellectuals are fantastic fortune tellers. Witness how those economists have constantly steered us against any fiscal troubles. Faced with large classes, many of my colleagues have been giving multiple choice exams which a trained orangutang could grade. Now it’s not that academics want to shirk their obligations. Multiple choice exams not only do not penalize guessing but encourage it. Essays, unfortunately, stimulate critical thinking and if students were allowed to develop this, they might start to ask pointed questions.
They might, for example, wonder about the need to have so many courses in one department. We have reached the point that if you are going to be an English major, you really need to take a separate course in the English novels produced over each fifteen year period. Fifteen year periods are inadequate in studying American history. The course delineations should cover five year periods. Now I hope that my gentle readers won’t be too critical. College departments have long ago discovered that the cause of truth requires that they grow in size and get more money and more staff. Why should they be any different than the Department of Education or Transportation? Intellectual discipline? Come on now..
I can only hope that the SAT decisions are only the first step in democratizing education in America. Personally, I would eliminate the need for any exams prior to and even in college. As a matter of fact, why not grant a B.A. to every child at birth? Now of course that shouldn’t apply to our millions of illegal immigrants. They should only get a High School Equivalency degree and the B.A. should be withheld until they have worked in the U.S. for a minimum of two weeks.
Now I fear, gentle readers, that you might accuse me of being sarcastic. Au contraire, my dear friends. If Americans are to continue electing greedy and incompetent politicians and accept the idea that insurance companies and corporations are striving for our benefit, then I think it really would be best if literacy and critical thinking would disappear. We would all be happier. As for math, why would any American worker want to know the ratio of his CEO’s income to that of his own salary? Let’s hear it for the College Boreds. They know what’s good for us.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/ The number of democracies has been declining for eight years, according to Freedom House’s country-by-country annual survey of political rights and civil liberties. In 2000, according to the recent issue of The Economist, 120 of the world’s 190 countries were classified as democracies. By 2013, that number had dropped to 86. What’s going on? […]