RUTHFULLY YOURS

Small business government loans subsidized Rolex dealerships, country clubs, spas

A federal program expanded by President Obama to help small businesses on Main Street recover from the financial crisis has backed loans to Rolex and Lamborghini dealerships, plastic surgery clinics, Napa Valley wineries, country clubs, and other industries servicing recession-proof clientele, government records show.

In all, the U.S. Small Business Administration has guaranteed since 2007 about 35,000 loans totaling $67 billion to businesses that primarily service an affluent lifestyle, according to government data compiled by American Transparency’s OpenTheBooks.com, an online portal aggregating 1.3 billion lines of federal, state and local spending records.

The loan guarantees to luxury industries — each $1 million or more in size — amount to about 20 percent of the total handed out by SBA during that period, the agency said.

Mr. Obama increased SBA’s funding by $730 million on the heels of the recession, packaging it as part of the 2009 stimulus bill, so it could guarantee more loans to small businesses to help alleviate the so-called credit crunch at the time.

The White House heralded the effort and subsequent actions — such as increasing the SBA’s maximum loan amounts from $2 million to $5 million — as “a crucial step in supporting economic recovery and job creation.”

As a result, the number of million-dollar loans the SBA backed spiked 37 percent from 2007 to 2013, according to Open the Books. Last year, the SBA dispensed $14.8 billion in seven-figure loans guaranteed by the administration, whereas in 2007 the amount was $9.3 billion.

Much of the money was guided to recession-proof industries, not the Main Street, mom-and-pop shops which form “the backbone of the American economy,” or that “lead the way to the industries of the future,” as was trumpeted by the White House at the time as reason for the additional funding.

Another issue of great concern is the recent development of non-metallic bombs undetectable by airport scanners. That these can be hidden inside cell phones, computers and other electronic devices makes them especially dangerous and easy to smuggle onto planes.

The only solution that emerged from “high-level governmental negotiations” on this subject was to impose a ban on all hand luggage. Setting aside the fact that this does not address the question of non-detectable explosives placed in checked baggage, it was deemed unrealistic. And rightly so.

It has been inconvenient and pointless enough as it is for air travelers to hand over their water bottles and nail files while removing shoes and belts, before going through metal detectors prior to boarding. But not being allowed to get on a plane with any bag whatsoever will not fly, so to speak.

Awareness about the virtual impossibility of forcing passengers to part with their phones and laptops is causing what one security source referred to as “paralysis.”

But British authorities still do not seem to grasp that it is precisely this kind of paralysis that has enabled terrorists to be fruitful and multiply in the first place. Nor do they realize that in a country whose police force is basically unarmed, those in possession of knives, guns and bombs are de facto kings.

It boggles the mind to consider that even though the bloodbath planned for Christmas was discovered by the United States and subsequently revealed to Europe, it has not been thwarted. In other words, rather than giving thought to a ban on hand luggage, British authorities ought to be canceling all flights — or at least admitting they have no way of protecting anyone boarding a plane in the near future. Indeed, their new motto should be: “Fly and die at your own risk.”

The jihadists must be very pleased. Without detonating a single switch, they have managed to spread their reign of terror across European skies. Nor do they need to abort their original plot, which they can see is being met with helplessness of the stiff-upper-lip variety.

There have been so many days of infamy and warning of Islamic Jihad for the United States long before 9/11. On October 23, 1983 , Islamic Jihad took full credit for two truck bombs which struck separate buildings housing United States and French military forces—members of the Multinational Force in Lebanon—killing 299 American and French servicemen.
Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff, one of the navy chaplains present during the attack wrote :”Amidst the rubble, we found the plywood board which we had made for our “Peace-keeping Chapel.” The Chaplain Corps Seal had been hand-painted, with the words “Peace-keeping” above it, and “Chapel” beneath. Now “Peace-keeping” was legible, but the bottom of the plaque was destroyed, with only a few burned and splintered pieces of wood remaining. The idea of peace – above; the reality of war below.”
The United States President Ronald Reagan called it an act of terror but swiftly removed all American forces from Lebanon.
At 11:15 a.m. on Oct. 12, 2000, the Cole — a billion dollar destroyer armed with the most advanced weapons in the U.S. naval arsenal — was docked off the coast of Yemen for refueling when it was approached by a small skiff packed with explosives and manned by two suicide bombers. The resulting explosion ripped a 60-by-40-foot hole in the ship’s hull, trapping the bodies of many of the dead crew members in the wreckage. The attack killed 17 U.S. sailors and injured 38.
President Clinton was shocked and outraged….his scandal tainted second term was coming to a close…He stated ” “You will not find a safe harbor,….We will find you and justice will prevail.” And then he could not even bring himself to state that this was unequivocally the work of Al Qaeda.
We are coming to December 7th the anniversary of Pearl Harbor….I will post Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech- A Day of Infamy….when he eloquently expressed a nation’s outrage.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/ferguson-and-islamic-holy-war-against-america-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ernie White, a Civil Rights Activist, Morgan Brittany, a Conservative TV and Movie Star, and Mell Flynn, the President of Hollywood Congress of Republicans.

The Gang gathered to discuss Ferguson and Islamic Holy War Against America, analyzing how Islamic supremacist groups are co-opting the strife and riots as part of their own Jihad [starts at 10 minute mark]. The guests also focused on Obama and the Ferguson Lynch Mob, Bye Bye Hagel, The Mullahs Inch toward the Bomb, and much, much more.

Don’t miss it!

His mistake was not to feel “huge hatred” for Jews, but to express that feeling in front of cameras. Davutoglu and his cabinet have had a problem with the governor’s speech. They have no problem with his sentiments.

“We would view an insult or humiliation against an Alevi citizen or an adherent of any other religion as an insult against all of us, and won’t accept it.” The powerful line is from a speech by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Nov. 23. So nice. If only the reality were not worlds apart from the fairy tales Davutoglu keeps on telling.

Davutoglu’s Putin-Medvedev-style master, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is notorious for his Sunni supremacist (and anti-Alevi) views. During his election campaign in 2011, he reminded tens of thousands of party fans at rallies in seven different cities that his political rival and main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, was an Alevi. “You know, he is an Alevi,” Erdogan told crowds in a cynical way while thousands booed “the Alevi Kilicdaroglu.” In that election, Erdogan’s votes in all seven cities rose from the previous election.

Only three weeks before Davutoglu’s speech, a professional German-Turkish footballer, Deniz Naki, announced that he decided to leave his club and Turkey following a religious and racist attack. Naki, who in the past was the victim of abuses and insults for being a Kurdish Alevi and carrying a tattoo revealing his faith, had been attacked by unknown assailants in Ankara and suffered minor injuries. “This is the first warning,” the assailants told him. The footballer said he now feared to go out alone in Ankara and had decided to leave Turkey for Germany.

An Alevi Muslim would feel safer in Germany than in Muslim Turkey! An Alevi Muslim feared going out alone in the Turkish capital, while Davutoglu speaks of “not accepting an insult or humiliation of an Alevi or an adherent of any other religion.”

Another incident that coincided with the “fairy tales from Davutoglu” and its aftermath reveal that the prime minister cannot be serious about his pro-pluralism rhetoric.

Those who serve in the United States military and take an oath to protect our nation are lauded for their service, and rightfully so. Yet, it is highly immoral, if not outright evil and traitorous, for someone who has served in the U.S. military to exploit their military connections whilst taking leadership roles within groups associated with terror. It appears that that is what Muslim convert Wilfredo Amr Ruiz has done and is doing with his work for Islamist groups CAIR and AMANA, and his actions deserve scrutiny, reprimand and repudiation.

Wilfredo Ruiz has served in the U.S. Navy in two capacities, once as a lawyer under the Navy’s Judge Advocate General (JAG), from the years 1993 through 1997, and once as a chaplain under the Navy’s Chaplain Candidate Officer’s Program, which he took on after he had begun religious studies, in 2005, at a seminary in Hartford, Connecticut.

Sometime in 2003, during the time between his two Naval exercises, he made the decision to convert to Islam. He came to the States via Puerto Rico, where he grew up practicing Catholicism.

Not only did he embrace his new religion, but right away he embraced the extremist ideology that is a part of it, leading him to actively pursue a course that is causing death and destruction worldwide. According to corporate filings, in September 2003, Ruiz was the Director of the Puerto Rico office for AMANA.

AMANA is the brainchild of Palestinian activist Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout. Zakkout is the former Vice President of the now defunct Health Resource Center for Palestine (HRCP), a group associated with Hamas that operated out of Deerfield Beach, Florida.

This past July, as reported in Breitbart, Zakkout posted on his Facebook page the following in Arabic: “Praise be to God, each day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel. Your brother, Sofian”

While Zakkout is the main driving force behind AMANA, Ruiz is not a minor player. Ruiz plays a major role in promoting the group’s Islamist agenda.

As an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a “dialogue of the demented” in her book The World Turned Upside Down, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is continuing a long tradition of attempting to de-Judaize Jerusalem by expressing his mendacious notion that, as he put it, “Jerusalem has a special flavor and taste not only in our hearts, but also in the hearts of all Arabs and Muslims and Christians,” and “Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Palestinian state and without it there will be no state.” The same scholar of history who wrote a doctoral dissertation that questioned the extent and truthfulness of the Holocaust was now making his own historical claim that there had never been a Jewish presence and history in the world’s holiest city.

In recent weeks, Abbas has been at it again, adding new layers of rhetoric to his tactical campaign to de-Judaize Jerusalem, in general, and to the Temple Mount, specifically. In an October PA TV broadcast, Abbas made the breathtakingly absurd claim that Jews not only had no historic claim to the Temple Mount, but they also should never even be allowed to have their presence known at that location. “The settlers have arrived . . . ,” he said. “This is our Sanctuary, our Al-Aqsa and our Church [of the Holy Sepulchre]. They have no right to enter it . . . [or] right to defile it. We must prevent them . . . .”

Only in an alternate, Orwellian universe could only one group of people on earth—Jews—be enjoined from praying on the single site most holy to their faith, and, moreover, be told that their presence there is not only provocative but is repugnant and befouls the very ground on which those of another faith—Muslims—have staked a triumphalist religious claim and now wish gather and pray.

This attempt to airbrush out a Jewish presence from Jerusalem—in fact, all of historic Palestine—is not a new message for Abbas, of course. In 2000 he expressed similar contempt for the idea that a Jewish temple had ever existed on the Temple Mount and that, even if it had existed, the offenses committed by Israel against the Palestinians negated any claim Jews might have enjoyed, absent their perfidy. “Anyone who wants to forget the past [i.e., the Israelis] cannot come and claim that the [Jewish] temple is situated beneath the Haram,” Abbas absurdly asserted in an article in Kul Al-Arab, an Israeli Arabic-language weekly newspaper. “ . . . But even if it is so, we do not accept it, because it is not logical for someone who wants a practical peace.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393713/liberalism-ruins-victor-davis-hanson

Obama’s hubristic promises have been followed by a total discrediting of his ideology.

Barack Obama will end his tenure with the ruin of Hope and Change. The implosion was brought about not by the marginalization of Hope and Change, but by the power of the U.S. government to reify the slogan in a way we have not seen since the 1930s.

Survey the wreckage.

The hope-and-change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from “leading from behind” to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of a war against ISIS.

There were only two saving graces to Obama’s misadventures abroad. One, as was also true of the alphabet stew of domestic scandals, each ensuing disaster seemed to divert attention from the prior calamity. Two, Obama was not able to halt new energy exploration on private lands as he had done with federal leasing. So followed a gas and oil renaissance that he opposed but can now claim as a great boon to American global leverage. Otherwise, what Barack Obama has accomplished, in the fashion of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in the Twenties and Thirties, will be to avoid minor confrontations on his watch — if he is lucky — while ensuring catastrophic ones for his successors.

Obama’s immigration legacy will be the juxtaposition of his serial insistence that he was not a king or an emperor, and could not contravene the Constitution by granting a blanket amnesty, with his efforts to do just that when it was no longer politically inexpedient. I don’t think a president has ever quite so habitually warned the country of the dangers that would soon emanate from himself.

Illegal immigration is praised only by those who benefit directly from it, whether in the familial sense of inexpensive nannies, cooks, or gardeners; or in the corporate interest of cheap labor in the hospitality industries, agriculture, and construction; or in the political sense of new liberal constituents; or in the tribal sense of expanding the so-called La Raza base. But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues.

My last post (“May the Farce Be With You“) drew 280 comments, most of them infuriated, and most of them ill-informed. By way of remedy, I repost below an April 4, 2007 review-essay on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Children of Hurin. My literary friends point out that Tolkien’s style is turgid and his literary muse is lame. I don’t care. No writer in the English language did more to uplift popular culture. Star Wars, I observe, derives from Richard Wagner’s noxious Ring cycle by way of the odious Joseph Campbell, and had a corrupting effect on the culture. The contrast with Tolkien is instructive. Rather than remasticate the pagan idea of the hero, Tolkien created a pagan anti-hero (specifically, an anti-Beowulf and anti-Siegfried) in the tragic figure of Turin. Reconstructed from manuscripts by Tolkien’s son Christopher, the Turin story sheds light on the broader purpose of The Lord of the Rings, and illuminates the fraught relationship between the pagan and Christian worlds.

Many readers objected to the way I threw Harry Potter into the same kettle as Luke Skywalker. A qualification is in order: J.K. Rowling stole from Star Wars as well as from Tolkien (and of course from Thomas Hughes), so that one can read a variety of different standpoints into her work. They all are there, in unhappy cohabitation.
Tolkien’s Christianity and the pagan tragedy

The Children of Hurin, by J R R Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

Reviewed by Spengler

J R R Tolkien was the most Christian of 20th-century writers, not because he produced Christian allegory and apologetics like his friend C S Lewis, but because he uniquely portrayed the tragic nature of what Christianity replaced. Thanks to the diligence of his son Christopher, who reconstructed the present volume from several manuscripts, we have before us a treasure that sheds light on the greater purpose of his The Lord of the Rings.

In The Children of Hurin, a tragedy set some 6,000 years before the tales recounted in The Lord of the Rings, we see clearly why it was that Tolkien sought to give the English-speaking peoples a new pre-Christian mythology. It is a commonplace of Tolkien scholarship that the writer, the leading Anglo-Saxon scholar of his generation, sought to restore to the English their lost mythology. In this respect the standard critical sources (for example Edmund Wainwright) mistake Tolkien’s profoundly Christian motive. In place of the heroes Siegfried and Beowulf, the exemplars of German and Anglo-Saxon pagan myth, we have the accursed warrior Turin, whose pride of blood and loyalty to tribe leave him vulnerable to manipulation by the forces of evil.

In Marked for Death [1], Geert Wilders argues that Islam has marked not only him but ultimately every freedom-loving individual and so-called “Islamophobe” for death because of the supremacist nature of its doctrines. What outrages Wilders, in addition to the Islamic threat and the demographic inroads the religion of war is carving into the European urban landscape, is the scandalous complicity of Europe’s governing elites, leading to the eventual subversion of the continent. Although Wilders does not address American vulnerability in any detailed way, what must surely strike a disinterested observer is the equal complicity with which the commander in chief of the United States is pursuing a program of American decline. On the domestic, economic, military, and foreign policy fronts, Obama is energetically and probably irretrievably weakening the country he has sworn to defend, with surprisingly little concerted opposition, or even awareness, from many politicians or from the still-infatuated members of his constituency.

To start with Islam, it is mind-boggling to observe an American president vigorously facilitating the Islamic imperial agenda in a number of different but equally effective ways. He could not do better — or worse — if he were a transplanted Qatari sheikh. One notes the infamous Cairo address [2] with its bloat of lies and factoids. The UN speeches [3], such as “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” The elevation of Muslim Brotherhood operatives [4] into sensitive posts in his administration. Islamic outreach through official institutions such as NASA, once designed for space exploration, now, apparently, for Muslim apologetics. Iftar dinners at the White House. Congratulatory letters to mosques [5] and his designation of terror attacks as “workplace violence,” “man-caused disasters” and “traffic incidents.” His concessionary engaging in a secret correspondence [6] with Iran’s anti-American and anti-Semitic Ayatollah Khamenei. The withdrawing of troops from Iraq, thus opening the way for the establishment of the Islamic State [7]. The purging of FBI training manuals of all reference to jihad. And the interviews [8] in which Obama claims that the U.S. is “one of the biggest Muslim nations.” (In actuality, professing Muslims count for 1.5% of the American people, in comparison, for example, to Muslims amounting to 13% of India’s census.) [9]

But it doesn’t stop there. Obama is not only manifestly pro-Islam; he is demonstrably anti-American. His policies across the board are all of a piece. Domestically, his economic projects have been calamitous. Obama has pied-pipered the nation to the brink of fiscal ruin, “increasing the national debt,” as Conrad Black writes [10], “from the $10-trillion accumulated in 233 years of American independence prior to 2009 to $18-trillion in six years.” His racial interventions have set race relations back a generation or more — most recently his urging the Ferguson rioters to “stay on course [11].” His attack on the Constitution is systematically undermining the republican nature of the U.S. Former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey cites [12] the president for violating the Constitution 24 times with regard to Obamacare alone.