RUTHFULLY YOURS

I have had the pleasure of meeting and hearing Dr. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina- two intelligent, conservative and articulate Americans who whisper hints of presidential ambition. Stop now! The last thing conservatives need is a pre primary folly like we had in 2012 where all the wannabes spent more time criticizing and destroying each other until the last man standing- the honorable Mitt Romney was tarred by the gibes of the other “contenders.”

If we are to win we should politely tell people like Dr. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, gifted and credentialed as they are that they have no chance and no hope. A President, as we have learned, cannot be someone without the experience of governing- of controlling the national guard, a legislative agenda, a budget, and a fractious state legislature. Think of governors….Mike Pence, Scott Walker, Susana Martinez. And, for that matter, maybe Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. It’s true they lost but remember that Richard Nixon was in a political exile until he ran against a national icon like Hubert Humphrey- and won.

Carson and Fiorina would make great cabinet members….but they won’t be nominated if they throw their hats into the ring and muddy the candidate that will emerge….rsk

“Diaspora communities in Europe, Australia and South Africa are caught up in a maelstrom of violent hate. It is obvious that Jews, try as they might, can please or appease no one. Retreat is the beginning of all defeat. Consideration for the enemy means ultimate cruelty to kith and kin.National suicide is the final cost for being too clever.”

Israel and the cost of being too clever.Oslo marked a quick and extreme conversion from old beliefs to a new faith in miraculously turning enemies into friends by giving land away. But Israel is never thanked for it, indeed it is hated more, in the MidEast and the West. Surely there’s a lesson?

“Be not over righteous, nor too clever,” Solomon, a profoundly righteous and clever king, warns Israel for all time. His words speak cogently to modern Israel, at liberty to act for the good of its people, not least with regards to land.

If only Israel took the wise king’s early warning to heart. Echelons of Israeli leaders and society chose to be exactly what Solomon warned them not to be: over-righteous and too clever.

Can anyone dispute that more ingenuity has gone into schemes to give away territory won against the odds than into schemes to keep territory for the benefit of Israel’s own people. Magnanimous is hardly the word. Foolhardy might be.

I’m sure one could turn up some example, but you’d have to dig pretty deep to come up with another nation that gave away parts of a tiny country to a well-disposed neighbour. To come up with another nation that handed its land on a platter to implacable foes you’d have far deeper to dig. Foolhardy is hardly the word. Nihilistic might be.

Like a child craving attention, Israel looked about for compliments only to have to ward off cudgels. “Barbaric barbarians” a celebrity called Israel for the way it conducted the last of three mini wars in Gaza, the strip it had made a gift of to a rocket-firing, tunneling enemy. “Systematic murderers” a British documentary maker called Israel for the way it stemmed waves of suicide attacks rolling in from the ‘West Bank’, Israel’s gift of real estate to bombers in human disguise.

The world forgets Israel’s open-handed sharing, yet remembers her every ‘disproportionate’ attack. You’d have to dig pretty deep to come up with another people universally maligned after giving away land for nothing but the holy grail of peace. Ungrateful is hardly the word. Perverse might be…Or contempt, even from Israel’s big-brother ally.

The international smuggling ring paying off Western border officials to bring refugees into Europe Smugglers in Istanbul are bribing politicians, police chiefs and border guards in several European countries to turn a blind eye to a racket that is bringing tens thousands of desperate refugees to the continent

Sitting in the bustling open-air Istanbul café, a gold watch heavy on his wrist, the smuggler made little attempt to lower his voice as he spoke of his work illegally routing thousands of desperate refugees to Europe.

The Turkish intelligence agencies knew his job exactly, he said, and so did the police chiefs and border guards of the Western countries he sent his clients to – without them the smuggling operation wouldn’t be possible at all.

“I set up the journeys, but there are men above me who manage the whole network. They have contacts at a very high level [in the police and in governments] in the countries where we work,” said Abu Ali, a people smuggler.

Abu Ali is a key figure in an international smuggling ring that is bribing politicians, police chiefs and border guards in several European countries to turn a blind eye to a racket that is bringing tens thousands of desperate refugees to the continent.

The multi-billion-pound illegal network now extends across Europe to Britain, and as far as Canada. If refugees are able to pay and willing to risk dire, sometimes fatal conditions, smugglers can deliver their clients to European capitals including Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam and Stockholm – in each case with the help of immigration officers, they say.

“We can get you anywhere. We have connections in most European countries and further afield,” said Abu Ali. “And we smuggle from so many places: Turkey, Lebanon, Tunisia and Libya are just some examples.”

Imagine, for a moment, sitting at a prestigious steakhouse in Palm Beach, Florida, a hot spot for some of the most wealthy and famous — Donald Trump, Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, James Patterson, Rush Limbaugh, and hundreds more.

And, imagine dining with a handful of men you’ve only read about. Some of them are worth millions, others published best-selling books, and some have held prominent positions at the White House.

In essence, you’re sitting at a five-person table of VIPs.

You’re about to take a bite of your New York strip when one of the men, a top U.S. intelligence agent, slams a 164-page document in the middle of the table.

This document, you soon find out, contains damning evidence that a network of politicians, corporations, and scientists have conspired together to promote the fear of “global warming” . . . despite evidence clearly stating no such “global warming” exists.

The motive: $22 billion per year.

To be clear . . . that’s $22 billion of taxpayers’ money . . . the amount that our government pays to stop the “global warming” epidemic.

That comes out to $41,856 every minute.

Or, to put it in perspective, that is twice as much as what our government spends on securing our borders.

Then, imagine this top U.S. intelligence agent turning to you, and asking for you to join him on a mission to out those involved in the “global warming” lie.

Doing so would cost a lot of money, a lot of time, and could cost you your reputation. But, pretending you never saw the document, and carrying on with your life, would allow the scandal to continue and actually put lives at risk.

The truth is, Turkey’s longer-than-half a-century journey to full EU membership offers volumes of thick picture books full of similar smiling faces, most of them no longer alive. But both the club and the applicant know that Turkey has been dragged planets away from the EU in terms of culture and socio-politics. Turkey is sometimes even hostile to Europe.

While the Europeans wasted their time in self-deception – that Turkey’s Islamists were in fact pro-EU, post-Islamist reformers – Turkey was implementing a plan to turn into, not a member of, but a Muslim challenge to what its leaders privately view as a hostile “Christendom.”

Turkey, under Islamist rule, has keenly pretended that it wants EU membership, while in reality deeply disliking “Christian” culture; and the EU leaders have pretended that Turkey would one day join the club, while knowing that it would not.

Judging from fancy, Kodak-moment photos that appeared in the press over the past week as well as related statements from European Union [EU] and Turkish bigwigs, one could be tempted to think that things are coming up roses between Ankara and Brussels. Facts, as often, are quite different from what smiling faces and repeated optimism reveal.

On Dec. 6, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, accompanied by nine Turkish cabinet members, visited his Greek counterpart, Antonis Samaras, in Athens, where the leaders of these traditional Aegean rivals happily glossed over major differences and expressed support for closer relations.

Davutoglu said that Turkey supports the return of the Parthenon marbles to Greece. That was sweet. But no one cares about whether Turkey does or does not support the return of the ancient marbles. And Samaras said he supported Turkey’s quest for EU membership, provided it fulfilled the entry requirements. That was sweet, too, except that Greece has been repeating the same wording and Turkey has been fulfilling the entry requirements since 1987.

We have heard over and over again that America is still the world’s fountain of innovation, the home of fracking and Facebook. The two “F’s” of American innovation are about to become one: The collapse of oil prices portends a collapse of the shale boom. High-yield energy bond yields have soared from 5% to 12% in the past few months, and investors are fighting to get to the door. Most unconventional oil and gas projects are unprofitable at $60 a barrel, and that’s where oil will trade for the next year or two.

Facebook is a clever gimmick, but it doesn’t do much for productivity.

It doesn’t help to crank up the theme from Rocky and chant, “We’re Number One!” We are in trouble, with a stagnating economy and falling incomes, and we are about to be in much, much worse trouble.

What’s left of the U.S. economy net of alternative hydrocarbons doesn’t look impressive. Here are a few facts about American capital investment:

Take out the energy sector, and capital investment by S&P companies remains 8% below the 2008 peak. We never had an investment recovery.

Take out the top six companies in the S&P technology sector (IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Micron), and S&P tech capital expenditures are down by a 40% since 2000 and down by 25% since 2013. The top six account for 75% of all capital expenditures among S&P tech companies (in 2000, it was less than 50%). All but the quasi-monopoly tech giants show an investment depression.

In deflated dollars, nondefense capital goods orders from American manufacturers are 20% below the 2000 peak and 5% below 2008.

The problem with a victim culture is that so many people want to join the ranks of victimhood that eventually you run short of oppressors. As I say in my new book (personally autographed copies of which make a Christmas gift your loved one will cherish forever), Elizabeth Warren is the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out, but a dubious claim to be one 32nd Cherokee was enough to persuade Harvard Law School to promote her as their first “woman of color”. No wonder so many Democrats prefer her to Hillary: The first “woman of color” in the Oval Office! The first Cherokee!

If you’re not fortunate enough to have a great-great-great-grandmother who’s listed as Cherokee in the online transcription of an 1894 marriage application, what do you do? Lena Dunham is an upper-middle-class child of white privilege who’s had a charmed life, but she’s a victim, too. According to her new memoir, she was raped by “Barry”, the token conservative at Oberlin. The real-life Barry the Conservative denies raping her, and Random House has been forced to issue a statement “regretting the confusion” and to cover his legal bills, which he’d been paying for by “crowd-funding”. The publisher couldn’t resist a parting sneer:

We are offering to pay the fees Mr. Minc has billed his client to date. Our offer will allow Mr. Minc and his client to donate all of the crowd-funding raised to not-for-profit organizations assisting survivors of rape and sexual assault.

Because even if Barry the Conservative never raped Lena Dunham, odds are he’s raped someone else, right? As Ann Coulter put it:

How about donating it to organizations that assist survivors of false rape accusations?

Rather than an epidemic of campus rape, there seems to be some sort of psychological inversion of “white flight”, in which untold numbers feel the need to flee their bland middle-class suburbs and pitch up in edgier ghettos. You’ll have noticed the recent uptick in news of the transgendered – indeed, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, author of the now discredited University of Virginia gang-rape story, was previously reporting on the epidemic of trans rape (Ms Erdely appears to be the Rape Correspondent of Rolling Stone). I note there are some three times as many male-to-female transgenders as there are female-to-male. So all that “gender fluidity” is a vast net transfer from the male brutalizer sector to the female victim sector. At some point it would seem likely to become a flood. After all, it’s not so difficult to imagine, a fake gang-rape story or three down the line, elite universities requiring gender reassignment as a condition of continued male admission. In some sense, the swollen ranks of the transgendered seem to have intuited that the jig is up for guys. Might as well check out of the guy business entirely. I’m thinking of pitching Marvel Comics a new superhero group featuring a transwoman, an ambigender, a pangender, an intergender, a bigender and a 2-spirited called Ex-Men.

In the last week or so, we’ve been marking the fifth anniversary of Climategate’s fascinating glimpse into how the science got settled. The subordination of the scientific method to ideological goals is well summed up by the headline of Matt Ridley’s column – “Policy-based evidence making”:

As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith. Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough. What’s worse is the reluctance of scientific leaders to criticise the bad apples. Science as a philosophy is in good health; science as an institution increasingly stinks.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics published a report last week that found evidence of scientists increasingly “employing less rigorous research methods” in response to funding pressures. A 2009 survey found that almost 2 per cent of scientists admitting that they have fabricated results; 14 per cent say that their colleagues have done so.

Lord Ridley gives three recent examples of “poor scientific practice”. Here’s the second:

Last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 — with an error range of one tenth of a degree. True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that.

An inspiring black military hero who deserves the Medal of Honor. Where is the Congressional Black Caucus?
At a time of so much racial strife and discord, we should never lose sight of the fact that our military forces were the first, and remain the best, example of a fully integrated America. Yes there are problems from time to time, but there are few other places in our society where blacks, whites and Hispanics have learned to live and work together with a common mission as in our military. And that is an example that we seldom hear about from our media.

Instead we are treated by our sensationalist media to endless examples of lawlessness in black communities and the vitriol of the race-baiters like Farrakhan, vowing “We’ll tear this go**amn country up!” and unending charges of racism leveled against whites who question the values of black culture. However, we all, black, white, brown and whatever, should keep in mind the reality that we have family members out there serving shoulder to shoulder around this world, with some of them dying in the process.Such is the case of Sergeant First Class Alwyn C. Cashe, who, on October 17, 2005, sacrificed his life to save those of the troops in his care. With his unit under enemy fire, SFC Cashe, his uniform soaked with fuel from a roadside explosion which ruptured the fuel tank of his Bradley Fighting Vehicle and set it afire, repeatedly entered the fiery interior to rescue his men who were trapped inside. Even with his uniform burned away and his flesh ablaze, SFC Cashe managed to pull six soldiers from the flaming interior. Four of them later succumbed to their burn wounds as did, some three weeks later, SFC Cashe.

For his incredibly selfless valor, SFC Cashe was awarded the Silver Star, an award that seems to many of us in the military and veteran communities, insufficient to the events of that terrible day. Colonels have been known to be awarded the Silver Star for monitoring and directing ground combat from the relative comfort of an overhead helicopter. I would wager that among all warriors, soldiers, sailors, aviators, etc., fear of death by burning or being horribly injured and disfigured by fire is greater than any other dread associated with combat. Yet SFC Cashe overcame that fundamental fear and charged directly into the flames repeatedly to save his young soldiers. A Silver Star seems a bit inadequate to reward that level of courage and self-sacrifice.

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/law/news/events/2014/04/09_conference_international_law_and_the_state_of_israel.page

Conference: International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism

17 – 19 April 2015

This conference will be the first of its kind and constitutes a ground-breaking historical event on the road towards justice and enduring peace in historic Palestine. It is unique because it concerns the legitimacy in International Law of the Jewish state of Israel. Rather than focusing on Israeli actions in the 1967 Occupied Territories, the conference will focus on exploring themes of Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism; all of which are posed by Israel’s very nature.

The conference aims to explore the relatedness of the suffering and injustice in Palestine to the foundation and protection of a state of such nature and asks what role International Law should play in the situation.

The conference will take place over a whole weekend and will involve leading thinkers: scholars from law, politics, philosophy, theology, anthropology, cultural studies history and other connected disciplines.

The key speakers and various panels will diagnose the legal position with regard to the nature of Israel thus enabling a much needed platform for scholarly debate and disagreement.

For further information and to register please visit our conference website.