RUTHFULLY YOURS

In-depth reporting by the Wall Street Journal’s Nicholas Casey and Adam Entous takes us inside Gaza, into the minds, indoctrination and support system of Hamas. The report is here (but behind the paper’s subscriber wall).

It will be a tough one to refute for the willful blindness crowd – i.e., the bipartisan Beltway ruling class and its cooperative mainstream media – who insist that Islam is innately a religion of peace. The report illuminates the reality that Islamic study is the basic pathway to jihadist militancy and that, for members of Hamas, the jihad against Israel is not a parochial political affair but part and parcel of a global ideological movement that is very much driven by a perception of divine directive.

To observe what Hamas members and their supporters believe, and to learn that even non-adherents of Hamas respect the organization’s tenets as an entirely legitimate construction of Islam, is to elucidate the stubborn stupidity of the claim that “true” Islam is unconnected to terrorism committed by Muslims – and that we should regard such Muslims as irrational “violent extremists” rather than jihadists.

The report introduces us first to Abu Thoraya, a Hamas jihadist killed in the recent fighting:

[He was] in some respects a typical young man in his 20s. He was unmarried, worked a clerical job and lived with his parents, whom he and his brother supported. He took long morning runs down the Gaza Strip toward Egypt. He had a pious side which drew him to Hamas. He made connections to the group at the Abu Salim Mosque, an old stone prayer hall down the street from his home.

We learn from his brother that family members “didn’t share the same views” as Abu Thoraya, but it quickly becomes clear that the narrow disagreement is about jihadist aggression. The report explains that the brother is an “Islamist.” This means (although the report does not go into it) that he is an Islamic-supremacist: a supporter of sharia government – i.e., imposition of Islam’s societal framework and legal code. That is Hamas’s goal as well. The only real difference is that the brother belongs to an Islamic supremacist faction, the Dawa movement, that does not have a military wing.

Why is it so important to understand the ideological sympathies, rather than narrow disagreements about tactics that Western leaders obsess over? Because it shows that even dissenters from Hamas respect the terrorist organization’s beliefs and goals. Despite their differences, the report explains, “the family accepted and supported Mr. Abu Thoraya’s decision to plumb the world of Hamas through Islamic study and religious training.”

We have learned more about the thinking brain in the last 10-15 years than in all of human history.

More than a billion people were amazed this summer when a 29-year-old paraplegic man from Brazil raised his right leg and kicked a soccer ball to ceremonially begin the World Cup. The sight of a paralyzed person whose brain directly controlled a robotic exoskeleton (designed at Duke University) was thrilling.

We are now entering the golden age of neuroscience. We have learned more about the thinking brain in the last 10-15 years than in all of previous human history. A blizzard of the new technologies using advanced physics—resulting in scans and tests we know as fMRI, EEG, PET, DBS, CAT, TCM and TES—have allowed scientists to observe thoughts as they ricochet like a pong ball inside the living brain, and then begin the process of deciphering these thoughts using powerful computers.

The Pentagon, witnessing the human tragedy of the wounded warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan, has invested more than $150 million in the military’s Revolutionary Prosthetics program, so that injured veterans can bypass damaged limbs and spinal cords and mentally control state-of-the-art mechanical arms and legs. Already, the technology exists to let you walk into a room and mentally turn on the lights, control appliances, surf the Web, write and send emails, play videogames, dictate articles, control a distant robot or avatar, and even drive a car.

Not just our bodies, but even our memories are now being digitized. Last year at Wake Forest University and the University of Southern California, scientists for the first time were able to record and upload memories directly into an animal brain, which is something straight out of a sci-fi movie like “The Matrix.” Scientists there trained mice to perform certain simple tasks, which can be recorded by sensors placed in their brains. After they forget the task, the digitized memory can be reinserted back into their brain, allowing them to remember.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/trampling-on-coal-country-families?f=puball

Obama and EPA are determined to destroy U.S. coal, people’s lives and welfare be damned
Between 1989 and 2010, Congress rejected nearly 700 cap-tax-and-trade and similar bills that their proponents claimed would control Earth’s perpetually fickle climate and weather. So even as real world crises erupt, President Obama is using executive fiats and regulations to impose his anti-hydrocarbon agenda, slash America’s fossil fuel use, bankrupt coal and utility companies, make electricity prices skyrocket, and “fundamentally transform” our economic, social, legal and constitutional system.

Citing climate concerns, he has refused to permit construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and blocked or delayed Alaskan, western state and offshore oil and gas leasing and drilling. He’s proud that US oil production has climbed 58% and natural gas output has risen 21% since 2008. But he doesn’t mention that this is due to hydraulic fracturing on state and private lands; production has actually fallen in areas controlled by the federal government, and radical environmentalists oppose fracking all over the USA.

Above all, the President’s war on hydrocarbons is a war on Coal Country families. For 21 states that still rely on coal to produce 40-96% of their electricity, it is a war on people’s livelihoods and living standards – on the very survival of small businesses and entire communities. The price of electricity has already risen 1-2 cents per kilowatt-hour in those states, from as little as 5.6 cents/kWh in 2009. If it soars to the 14.6 to 15.7 cents/kWh paid in “job-mecca states” like California and New York – which rely on coal for less than 3% of their electricity – the impacts will churn through coal-dependant states like a tsunami.

Yet that is where rates are headed, as the Obama EPA’s carbon dioxide and other restrictions kick in. Hundreds of baseload coal-fired power plants (some 180 gigawatts of electric generation capacity) will be forced into premature retirement between 2010 and 2020. That’s more than 15% of the United States’ total installed capacity – enough electricity to power nearly 90 million average homes or small businesses. EPA assumes it can be replaced by expensive, unreliable, habitat-gobbling wind and solar power. It can’t.

EPA rules mean the price of everything people do will skyrocket: heating and air conditioning, lights and refrigeration, televisions, computers, medical equipment, machinery and every other gizmo that runs on electricity. Poor, minority and blue-collar families will have to find hundreds of dollars a year somewhere in their already stretched budgets. Shops and other small businesses will have to discover thousands of dollars, by delaying other purchases or laying people off. Factories, malls, school districts, hospitals and cities will have to send out search parties to locate millions a year at the end of rainbows.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/race-baiting-no-cure-for-ebola?f=puball
Seeing health care workers from the U.S. and other countries rush to care for Africans stricken with Ebola is proof of remarkable progress toward achieving color blind medicine.

It’s a spectacle of heroic humanitarianism.

But this week, powerful voices leveled false charges of racism.

Here are the facts. There is no cure for Ebola. There are several drugs in development that haven’t been tested on humans. One is ZMapp, made by a San Diego company. A team from Doctors Without Borders got ZMapp samples from the company and considered using them on Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, Sierra Leone’s renowned virologist stricken while treating patients. But the team decided ZMapp might do more harm than good, perhaps a flawed decision. Khan died on July 29, and the unused doses were then sent to Liberia, where they ended up being given to two American healthcare workers.

The Americans, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, appear to have benefited.

In a front page story on Wednesday, the New York Times claimed that giving ZMapp “to foreign aid workers has raised broad ethical questions about the disparities in treatment between white outsiders and the Africans who form the overwhelming majority of victims in the epidemic.”

That’s racial demagoguery. Had doctors first used this untested drug on an African and he had died, some would have charged racism. That may have deterred Dr. Khan’s team from trying the drug.

Humanity would not have been possible without the extinction of dinosaurs et al. some 66 million years ago due to a large meteor impacting earth. Though many greens regret this, the rest of us are damned pleased. The lesson is that some destructions clear the way for a more enlightened future. As described here http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/dont-look-down, we are facing financial collapse, with the dollar’s death certificate likely to state the cause as hyperinflation. I noted that it could occur tomorrow or in a decade. And while this piece didn’t express horror of such collapse, further thought has convinced me to embrace a reset (not like I have a choice in the matter – as I keep telling my wife, my analyzing and writing about it won’t be the cause).

How could it be a good thing, asks the dinosaur? Well, consider where we are, just naming what is in the news currently: our president is an Islamist; he has set up an invasion of the southern border to create chaos with the added bonus of seeding a Democrat voting block; and Ferguson, MO, where John Lewis (Atlanta representative) wants martial law in order to protect the protesters (rioters), a St. Louis alderman believes that a black youth robbing a store is like having two beers at a ball game and driving home and the homie State Police captain now in charge calls off law enforcement so the rioters could burn down a market (this as of 7/16/14). Not to mention our dear RINOs.

As I noted in my Don’t Look Down essay, the hyperinflation I am referring to is a mass loss of confidence in the dollar. The true national debt is ~ $200 trillion that includes underfunded and unfunded obligations. States and localities add to this as do private pensions. But it doesn’t matter how much more because we aren’t going to be able to pay back or pay out no matter what the number is.

And then there are the derivatives for which there is little public information, but are estimated to have a notional value worldwide of $750 trillion to $1.5 quadrillion. Goldman Sachs and Citi each have derivative exposure in the ballpark of $70 trillion with assets of some $1.8 trillion. An event that causes the market (investors) to demand higher interest for bonds, for example, could / would trigger a derivative disaster. Trying to get a handle on them is impossible, for anyone. Lehman went down in 2008 because of them and an army of experts are still trying to unwind them – but never will because there are intertwining swaps, bets, debt insurance etc. with a vast number of counter-parties. They are like the crab grass that enters my yard each August – utterly entangled. It must be pulled up by their roots.

Two of the biggest news stories of the summer — the war between Israel and Hamas, ‎and now the shooting death of a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri and the ‎chaotic aftermath (protests, police in full battle mode, looting, riots and mob ‎violence by many from outside the area ) — have revealed a few truths about how ‎the American media quickly fix on a story line, and are loath to shift from it. With ‎four 24-hour all-news cable channels (Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and CNN Headline ‎News), not to mention Al Jazeera America (which purchased the network from Al ‎Gore and his partners, and apparently stiffed them on payment), these kinds of long run stories are the ‎closest thing to manna from the skies for the news stations, other than maybe ‎hurricanes and tornadoes.

In the case of the Israel-Hamas confrontation, there was precedent for how the ‎battle lines were to be laid out by the media. Israel had gone through this drill in ‎the 2006 summer war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and again in the ‎conflicts with Hamas in Gaza in 2009 and 2012. Israel was the big dog, with a ‎powerful military. And it suffered less than its enemy in each confrontation. Since ‎the country sustained few civilian casualties in the latest fighting (three dead, plus the three ‎murdered teens who had been kidnapped), and the Iron Dome system destroyed ‎many of the rockets fired at Israel’s population centers, Israel’s principal casualties ‎were soldiers, who were buried quickly and never seen on television. Hamas ‎fighters were rarely seen, and their leaders only appeared outside the country. But ‎there were plenty of dead, wounded and bedraggled Gazan civilians all over the ‎screen and in all major newspaper photographs.

The newspaper industry is in a state of near collapse in America, as both ‎advertising and circulation numbers disintegrate, with advertising revenue ‎migrating rapidly to websites and mobile devices. Younger Americans, for the ‎most part, seem to prefer to tweet and post photos on Facebook, rather than read ‎newspapers, and those who are conscious of the news, often get their minimal ‎daily dose from comedians (in reality, left-wing cynics) like Jon Stewart, who ‎played the part of Hamas cheerleader during the current fighting.

There are few papers that continue to staff foreign bureaus, and those papers ‎which continue to have correspondents and cameramen overseas, have increased ‎their influence, no paper more so than The New York Times. The cable news ‎stations and National Public Radio often seem to parrot during the day what they ‎read in the morning in that day’s New York Times, which effectively sets the ‎agenda (or as the paper self-promotes itself: “where the conversation begins.”) ‎When it comes to Israel, The Times has been hostile for years, and the paper is ‎now almost indistinguishable from Britain’s left-wing mainstay, The Guardian, a ‎longtime leader in fomenting anti-Israel propaganda, and now one whose ‎columnists recommend more Jew killing.

CONTENTS

1. Israel’s record on civilian casualties compares well to America’s
2. “Yet within six years of publishing his book, my grandfather had to flee Germany”
3. “For Jews in western (and Muslim) societies are expected to know their place”
4. “Was Sainsbury’s anti-Semitic? No. But it does shine a light on the modern phenomenon of acquiescence to anti-Semitism”
5. The pope is not naïve, so why the double standards?
6. “Once again Israel finds it has no alternative” (By Daniel Finkelstein, The Times of London, Aug. 13, 2014)
7. “It’s anti-Semitism, stupid” (By Efraim Karsh, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 11, 2014)
8. “The kosher controversy at Sainsbury’s speaks to a profound problem: acquiescence to anti-Semitism” (By Brendan O’Neill, Daily Telegraph, UK, Aug. 18, 2014)
9. “One cheer for Pope Francis” (By Lee Smith, Weekly Standard, Aug. 19, 2014)

An Abrahamic family: Imam’s Cordoba House highly supported by Chautauqua Faith leaders

Mark Opreaon

Eighth Century. Córdoba, Spain: At the time, the country was under Islamic rule, and cities like Córdoba absorbed the language, beliefs and religion of the Islamic people. Córdoba, now a World Heritage Site, was unique in the sense that there was unification between the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam — a notion of “shared worship” that, as evidenced in contemporary media, has increasingly diminished.

Despite these tensions, Feisal Abdul Rauf, an American Sufi imam and author, has held fast to this concept of Abrahamic harmony and brought it to the United States, where he translated it into a multi-faith, multi-national organization called the Cordoba Initiative.

It’s a program, Rauf said, with the aim to “bring harmony between America and the world of Islam,” while focusing on the aspect of religious tension.

The imam believes that much can be accomplished by building Muslim-American community centers around the world — that is, in the form of what he calls a “Cordoba House.”

“The purpose of the Cordoba House is to … have an impact — or a presence, actually — on how people think about you and [how] people want to engage with you,” Rauf said.

It is place where, Rauf said, “people — not just Muslims — can sing together, eat together, pray together,” one that welcomes all members of the Abrahamic family of religions.

What better place to start than Chautauqua Institution?

There was a failed secret US mission earlier this summer to rescue American hostages in Syria.

Senior administration officials revealed on Wednesday, Aug. 20, that a Special Operations team had attempted to rescue several American hostages held in Syria earlier this summer, including the now-deceased journalist James Foley, but that the mission ended in failure, according to a New York Times release.

The revelation was made a day after a video was made public by the Islamic State terrorists in which one of their operatives beheaded one of the American hostages, James Foley.

The statement described the mission as a “complicated operation,” which was authorized by President Obama.

American intelligence agencies believed the hostages were being held in an area in Syria, but when several dozen special ops commandos were dropped at the location, the hostages were not there.