RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Piketty-Saez data ignore changes in tax law and fail to count noncash compensation and Social Security benefits.

What the hockey-stick portrayal of global temperatures did in bringing a sense of crisis to the issue of global warming is now being replicated in the controversy over income inequality, thanks to a now-famous study by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, professors of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively. Whether the issue is climate change or income inequality, however, problems with the underlying data significantly distort the debate.

The chosen starting point for the most-quoted part of the Piketty-Saez study is 1979. In that year the inflation rate was 13.3%, interest rates were 15.5% and the poverty rate was rising, but economic misery was distributed more equally than in any year since. That misery led to the election of Ronald Reagan, whose economic policies helped usher in 25 years of lower interest rates, lower inflation and high economic growth. But Messrs. Piketty and Saez tell us it was also a period where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer and only a relatively small number of Americans benefited from the economic booms of the Reagan and Clinton years.

If that dark picture doesn’t sound like the country you lived in, that’s because it isn’t. The Piketty-Saez study looked only at pretax cash market income. It did not take into account taxes. It left out noncash compensation such as employer-provided health insurance and pension contributions. It left out Social Security payments, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and more than 100 other means-tested government programs. Realized capital gains were included, but not the first $500,000 from the sale of one’s home, which is tax-exempt. IRAs and 401(k)s were counted only when the money is taken out in retirement. Finally, the Piketty-Saez data are based on individual tax returns, which ignore, for any given household, the presence of multiple earners.

IRBIL, Iraq — The deaths of five nuclear scientists Sunday in an ambush outside Damascus has raised anew suspicions about whether Israel is conducting an assassination campaign intended to blunt Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

At least one of the men was an Iranian nuclear technician, according to Syrian state television, members of the internal security wing of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors violence in that country.

Rami Abdurrahman, the observatory’s director, described the dead as “five nuclear engineers” in a Facebook post and said they worked at a scientific research center “near the neighborhood of Barzeh, northern Damascus.” The Britain-based observatory, which works with a network of informants in Syria, has a reputation for accurate reports on events there.

Syrian government officials, speaking to government-friendly television stations, later confirmed that at least one of the men was an Iranian “scientific consultant,” but they released no other details on the nationalities of the other four men killed.

Both Iran and North Korea have provided Syria with technical nuclear expertise in the past, most notably at a secret reactor facility that the Israeli air force destroyed in a surprise attack in northern Syria in 2007. That previously unknown reactor facility was being built with the technical assistance of Iranian and North Korean scientists, according to statements made after the attack by American and Israeli intelligence officials. The facility, which U.S. and Israeli officials said hid a Syrian attempt to start a secret nuclear weapons program, was rendered unusable in the strike and later was dismantled by the Syrians.

“We can confirm that five scientific experts were martyred by terrorists as part of the ongoing plots of the Zionist entity,” a Hezbollah internal security commander said via instant messaging from Beirut. He insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to reporters. “This follows the pattern of the enemy who backs and controls terrorists inside Syria in a program to hurt the resistance axis.”

The commander also cited the assassination in December 2013 of Hassan Laqqis, a high-ranking Hezbollah official who reportedly was tied to the group’s technical programs, including advanced drone and missile technology, according to accounts in Hezbollah-controlled media outlets shortly after his death. He was killed by unknown gunmen outside a suburban Beirut safe house.

Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

They give you a temperate will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?

Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world’s noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.

His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy’s breast.

But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.

In twenty campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.

Boy Soldier’s WWII Diary Debuts on Veterans Day

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/boy-soldiers-wwii-diary-debuts-on-veterans-day?f=puball

World War II veteran, international architect and author Julian Kulski’s book, The Color of Courage – A Boy At War: The World War II Diary of Julian Kulski, will be published by Aquila Polonica on Veterans Day.

The Color of Courage is a rare and vivid day-by-day eyewitness account by a young boy who becomes a man far too soon under the brutal Nazi German occupation of Poland. Julian is a 10-year-old Boy Scout when the Germans invade his native Poland to start World War II. At an age when most boys are still playing with toys, Julian begins his own private war against the Germans with small acts of sabotage. At 12, he is recruited into the clandestine Underground Army by his Scoutmaster, and begins training on weapons and military tactics.

By 14, he is holding up German soldiers at gunpoint, has gone on a secret mission into the Warsaw Ghetto to liaise with Jewish resistance leaders, is captured by the Gestapo, beaten and interrogated, sentenced to Auschwitz, rescued, and joins a Commando unit of the Underground Army. At 15, he fights in the Warsaw Uprising, ending the war as a German POW.

The war’s end brings physical freedom but very little peace for the 16-year-old veteran suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). A wise army doctor advises Julian to write down his experiences to help lessen the psychological and emotional burdens of the war. The Color of Courage is the result. In this book, you will learn:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/top-us-general-dempsey-israel-went-to-extraordinary-lengths-to-protect-gaza-civilians?f=must_reads

Defenders of Israel’s conduct of this summer’s war in Gaza got a significant boost Thursday when General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, endorsed Israeli policies and procedures saying that Israel went to “extraordinary lengths” to prevent civilian casualties.

The Times of Israel reported the comments made at a forum at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in New York City. “I actually do think that Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties,” said General Dempsey. “In this kind of conflict, where you are held to a standard that your enemy is not held to, you’re going to be criticized for civilian casualties,” he added.

Dempsey’s comments contrast with those of Amnesty International, who issued a report Wednesday accusing Israel of war crimes in conducting operations in Gaza. AI said Israeli forces “brazenly flouted the laws of war” and showed “callous indifference to the carnage” caused by attacks on civilian targets. In some cases, said AI, Israeli airstrikes on inhabited Palestinian homes “amount to war crimes.”

israel blasted the AI report as being one-sided Hamas propaganda.

Dempsey stressed that Israel faced some special dangers in Gaza. The Hamas tunnels, he said, “caused the IDF some significant challenges.” Dempsey added that the Israelis “did some extraordinary things to try to limit civilian casualties, to include… making it known that they were going to destroy a particular structure.”

Dempsey listed Israel Defense Forces measures such as the “roof-knocking” (dropping small bomblets on the roof of a building to let those inside know the building was going to be hit soon) and the dropping of warning leaflets in neighborhoods and buildings where military targets existed as part of Israel’s attempts to protect civilian lives.

“The IDF is not interested in creating civilian casualties. They’re interested in stopping the shooting of rockets and missiles out of the Gaza Strip and into Israel,” Dempsey argued.

In fact, revealed Dempsey, an American delegation visited Israel three months ago to learn about how Israel handled the particular challenges of the war, particularly to learn about methods for preventing civilian casualties and how to counter Hamas tunneling.

If you follow big time college sports as I do, the latest news out of the University of North Carolina about bogus classes and inflated grades involving more than 3000 students over two decades has to be of great concern.

It has been apparent that the student-athlete in Division I schools is an oxymoron. There are occasional stories of the college graduate who reads at the third grade level or the football star who couldn’t find a classroom on campus. Now, however, a scandal has been reported bigger than any previously mentioned.

According to the report by former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein, football and basketball players took no-show courses in the college’s African and Afro-American Studies programs earning passing grades. Students didn’t have to show up for what was deemed a “shadow curriculum” in the 1993 to 2011 period. Within this period the cherished N.C. basketball team won three of its five national titles. And Coach Dean Smith was virtually beatified by alumni members as a venerable state leader.

Two people at the center of the controversy, former department chairman Julius Nyang’oro and retired administrator Deborah Crowder, have been cooperating with Mr. Wainstein after criminal charges were dropped. School Chancellor Carol Folt characterized the matter as “a case where you have bad actions of a few and inaction of many more.” This latest inquiry comes on the heels of an investigation by former Governor Jim Martin who found there were lecture classes in the 1990’s that never met.

Ms. Crowder claimed she simply wanted “to help students” who weren’t supported by the university. This, of course, is a curious way of providing assistance. Mr. Nyang’oro admitted to “leniency,” but dereliction of responsibility goes beyond leniency. This was a case of awarding high grades for little or no performance. And despite protestations of innocence, every administrator in the university and every coach in the football and basketball programs had to know what was going on.

The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they do grind, and convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmieh Yousef Odeh learned that the hard way on November 10 when a Detroit jury found her guilty of committing immigration fraud. She faces up to 10 years in a federal penitentiary and deportation following her incarceration.

The story began on Friday, February 21, 1969 when two unsuspecting Israeli university students, Leon Kaner, 21, and Edward Jaffe, 22, stopped at a Jerusalem supermarket to pick up some last minute provisions for a hike the two were planning to take. They never made it and were blown to bits by a bomb placed in coffee cans on a shelf. Nine others were injured in the blast. Jaffe and Kaner, as well as the nine injured civilians, were targeted for no other reason other than the fact that they were Jews with the temerity to live in their ancestral land.

A second bomb, timed to go off just as first responders arrived, was diffused by security forces. A third bomb placed near the British consulate office in Jerusalem was also discovered and destroyed in a controlled detonation, though another bomb placed near the same vicinity some days later did manage to cause structural damage.

The terrorists had chosen Friday to carry out their act of depravity because they knew the supermarket would be packed with civilians shopping for the upcoming Sabbath. It was their intent to cause a bloodbath and inflict maximum civilian casualties. In a testament to Israeli resiliency, the supermarket, belonging to the “Supersol” supermarket chain, opened for business just two days later.

On March 1, 1969, Odeh, her sister and three others were arrested for the bombings. All were members of the notorious Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist group designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

Odeh was convicted of all charges and spent the next 10 years in an Israeli prison. She was released in 1979 as part of a prisoner exchange with the PFLP and spent the next four years living in Lebanon. Following that, she moved to Jordan and then made her way to the United States where her father lived.

CHECK OUT CAIR’S 10TH ANNIVERSARY GALA FEATURING ILLINOIS SENATOR DICK DURBIN:

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2014/03/24/dick-durbin-the-cairing-illinois-senator/

DURBIN RANKS A + 5 ON THE ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE’S SCORECARD FOR LEGISLATORS INDICATING A VERY PRO-ARAB VOTING RECORD. HE RECENTLY GRATIFIED HIS SUPPORTERS BY ATTENDING A CAIR 10TH ANNIVERSARY GALA.
CAIR has been designated by the FBI and several in Congress as a supporter of U.S.-designated terrorist groups.
“For more than 10 years, CAIR-Chicago has enhanced the understanding of Islam within our communities by facilitating dialogue, protecting civil liberties, empowering American Muslims, and building coalitions which promote justice and mutual understanding. I applaud your commitment to guaranteeing that our country’s ideals are fully respected and realized for all.”
– Dick Durbin
U.S. Senator, State of Illinois

On the night of Saturday, November 8, the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of CAIR held its 20th Anniversary Banquet at the Santa Clara Convention Center. It was fitting that two out of three of the event’s featured speakers have been associated with terrorism, as 20 years ago CAIR was founded as a main component of a Palestinian terrorist enterprise inside the United States.

CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations has been in existence for 20 years — since June 1994 — when it opened up its national headquarters in Washington, D.C. The group was established as being a part of the American Palestine Committee, an umbrella organization run by then-global Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook, who was based in the U.S. at the time and who now operates out of Egypt as a spokesman for Hamas.

The other members of the umbrella included a Hamas financing wing, Holy Land Foundation (HLF); a Hamas propaganda wing, Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP); and a Hamas command center, United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which was then led by Ahmed Yousef, who later left the U.S. for Gaza to become Senior Political Adviser to Hamas leader Ismail Haniya.

The founding and current National Executive Director of CAIR is Nihad Awad. Just prior to co-founding CAIR, Awad held the position of Public Relations Director for the IAP. As the propaganda wing of Hamas, the IAP had been involved in distributing Hamas terrorist videos and publishing vehemently anti-Jewish and anti-Israel materials, including the Hamas charter in different languages.

Only months before the creation of CAIR, Awad announced his support for Hamas.

It would be difficult to imagine any Attorney General nominee who could guarantee a more seamless transition from the Eric Holder years than Loretta Lynch, who has been the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York since 2010. Her uncanny ability to detect phantoms of white racism lurking ominously around every corner is proof-positive of her fitness to serve as Holder’s successor in the Obama administration.

Lynch believes that voter ID laws are part of a racist effort to suppress minority turnout at the polls. “Fifty years after the civil rights movement,” she avers, “we stand in this country at a time when we see people trying to take back so much of what Dr. [Martin Luther] King fought for … and [to] reverse the [gains] that have been made in voting in this country.” Consequently, Lynch is eminently “proud” that the Justice Department has filed suit against states which have enacted voter ID laws “seek[ing] to limit our ability to stand up and exercise our rights as citizens.” Lynch also supports efforts to restore the voting rights of (disproportionately black) convicted felons who “have served their debt to society”—a measure that would “en[d] the chain of permanent disenfranchisement that visits many of them.”

By Lynch’s reckoning, school discipline policies that result in higher rates of suspension and expulsion for nonwhite children than for whites, are racist as well. “Zero-tolerance programs,” she told a mostly black audience in 2013, “are often used [to] take our babies, minority children, black children, Hispanic children, and they put them out of school before they have a chance to learn.” Building on this theme, Lynch praised the Justice Department for having “gone into the South, although we’re looking further, and brought the first … ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ cases against school districts in Alabama.” The question of whether black youth exhibit disproportionate levels of disruptive behavior in the classroom—perhaps partially as a consequence of the black community’s high rate of father-absent households—did not spark Lynch’s curiosity in the least. The tidy, all-purpose explanation of racial insensitivity was sufficient for her purposes.

In April 2014, Lynch participated in a panel titled “Strengthening the Relationship Between Law Enforcement and Communities of Color” alongside Eric Holder and none other than Al Sharpton, who has never been known to squander an opportunity to depict white police officers as trigger-happy bigots when dealing with black suspects. One of the panel’s “action items” stated authoritatively: “Remember that racial bias is pervasive. Research has shown that people who are not consciously mistrustful of African Americans or intentionally racist can still behave in a way that is influenced by racial bias.” In other words, even well-meaning whites in law-enforcement are little more unwitting Klansmen.

Yesterday afternoon a young woman stood by the side of a road holding up a sign. It read “Gush Etzion.” Those two words summon up spittle-flecked rants about Zionist settlements from the anti-Israel left.

But for Dalia, it was just home. And then it wasn’t.

Dalia caught a ride to a bus stop on the way home from her job as a children’s occupational therapist. Her next stop was a shift at Yad Sarah, a volunteer organization for the elderly and disabled. But before that could happen, a Muslim attacker did what songs, cartoons and posters distributed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas encouraging “Car Jihad” had been telling him to do.

He ran her over with a Mazda van.

With the 26-year-old woman on the ground, the courageous Islamic Jihadist stabbed her as she lay dying. Then shouting Allahu Akbar, he began slashing at an unarmed man who had stopped to help. When the unarmed man fighting him off with his bare hands proved too much for the knife-wielding Jihadist, the killer fled, was wounded and taken into custody.

Dalia’s father, a volunteer with Magen David Adom, Israel’s Red Cross, heard that there had been an attack. He did what countless Israeli fathers and mothers began doing right after they heard the news.

He called his daughter. There was no answer.

Despite being only in her twenties, Dalia knew what was coming. This wasn’t her killer’s first act of terrorism and it wasn’t her first time as a victim of Islamic terrorism.

When she was seventeen years old, Dalia was attacked by a knife-wielding terrorist in the same place. But the terrorist didn’t have a van and there were armed men at the scene.

“I stood on February 28, 2006 at Gush Etzion Junction when a terrorist came and began to stab those standing at a hitchhiking station,” she would later write.

She described terrorists for whom prison life is “like a hotel”, who watch television, take courses and contact their lawyers. “Those who stab Jews have their rights and privileges. The injustice cries out to Heaven.”

“Punish and expel those who threaten us,” Dalia wrote, “no matter the cost to them. They must pay the price for their terror. That is the only way the terrorism will end.”