RUTHFULLY YOURS

U.S. Navy admiral and University of Texas, Austin, alumnus William H. McRaven returned to his alma mater last week to give seniors 10 lessons from basic SEAL training when he spoke at the school’s commencement.

McRaven, the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command who organized the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, stressed the importance of making your bed every morning, taking on obstacles headfirst, and realizing that it’s OK to be a “sugar cookie.”

All of his lessons were supported by personal stories from McRaven’s many years as a Navy SEAL.

“While these lessons were learned during my time in the military, I can assure you that it matters not whether you ever served a day in uniform,” McRaven told students. “It matters not your gender, your ethnic or religious background, your orientation, or your social status.”

Here are McRaven’s 10 lessons from his years of experience as a Navy SEAL, via University of Texas, Austin:

I have been a Navy SEAL for 36 years. But it all began when I left UT for Basic SEAL training in Coronado, California.

Basic SEAL training is six months of long torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the cold water off San Diego, obstacles courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep and always being cold, wet and miserable.

It is six months of being constantly harassed by professionally trained warriors who seek to find the weak of mind and body and eliminate them from ever becoming a Navy SEAL.

But, the training also seeks to find those students who can lead in an environment of constant stress, chaos, failure and hardships.

To me basic SEAL training was a life time of challenges crammed into six months.

So, here are the ten lesson’s I learned from basic SEAL training that hopefully will be of value to you as you move forward in life.

Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Viet Nam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed.

If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack—rack—that’s Navy talk for bed.

It was a simple task—mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle hardened SEALs—but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.

By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.

If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

JNS.org – Yedioth Ahronoth has interviewed Jay Leno, who after retiring from the Tonight Show is taking a trip to Israel.

Leno hosts the Genesis Prize ceremony on Thursday at the Jerusalem Theater in the presence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where the prize will be awarded for the first time to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“I love Israel, that’s why I’m here,” he told reporters after landing at Ben-Gurion Airport. Israel is “a little paradise in the Middle East,” he added in a later sit-down interview with Yedioth Ahronoth.

Leno also spoke about his plans and activities after leaving the Tonight Show. See the article and video clip from the interview here and here.

American television host Jay Leno arrived in Israel on Tuesday evening ahead of the Genesis Prize ceremony, which he will host on Thursday, and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

During the event, which will be held at the Jerusalem Theater in the presence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the prize will be awarded for the first time to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“I’m excited. It’s a real honor,” Leno told Ynet after landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, adding that the weather was great. “I love Israel, that’s why I’m here.”

The pope’s imminent visit to Israel will rightly attract much attention. But two largely untold stories about global Christianity have the capacity to shake the world order.

The first is the persecution of Christians in the developing world at the hands of Islam. Boko Haram, which has kidnapped more than 250 Christian schoolgirls in Nigeria, is merely one of many Islamist groups increasingly terrorizing and killing Christians across the developing world.

According to Open Doors, a nondenominational Christian group, about 100 million Christians are being persecuted in more than 65 countries, with radical Muslims the main perpetrators in 36 of them.

In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been attacked, murdered, and driven out. In December 2013, at least 1,000 Christians were killed in the Central African Republic. In February this year, jihadists bombed churches in Zanzibar as “dens of non-believers.” In March, members of Somalia’s al-Shabaab militia publicly beheaded a mother of two girls and her cousin after discovering they were Christians.

The same month in Nigeria, more than 150 Christians were butchered in a massacre in Kaduna; this week, hundreds died in bomb attacks in the Christian areas of the towns of Kano and Jos.

In Sudan, Christians have been hacked to death for refusing to convert to Islam or burned alive inside their churches.

Last week, a pregnant mother was sentenced to death there for allegedly converting to Christianity. In Eritrea, more than 3,000 Christians are in prison. In Iran, Christians are being jailed and thousands have fled. There are countless other examples.

Perhaps when our time is relegated to the history books it will be remembered as the “Era of Self-Important Divisiveness,” or something to that effect. Truth be told, there have been few times in the history of our nation when politics was so basely divisive. I say basely because although politics in the time of our Founders and Framers was combative, it was so on an intellectual level; a battlefield of higher thinking, as it were. Today, our politics is centered on the self-important stature of those whose only claim to narcissism is the falsely elevated self-esteem foisted upon them by the Progressive operatives who have commandeered the education system.

Today, our society lauds the illiterate rap artist and the talentless faux-beauties of Hollywood; thugs with a cursory grasp of rhythm but not music, and surgically enhanced spotlight seekers completely devoid of talent. Today, our culture’s media places more importance in the political opinions of an American Idol runner-up, than those who served in government during an era when the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union disappeared from the maps of the world.

So, it is no surprise that our narrative-controlling media (or at least that’s what they strive for) would be wasting the precious “attention span time” of the non-engaged and no- and low-information American public with the candidacy of Clay Aiken, nominee in the North Carolina 2nd congressional district election. Not to take anything away from Mr. Aiken’s musical talents (he is a talented singer), but to quote a superior musician, Frank Zappa, “There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.”

The Washington Times is reporting:

“Democrat congressional candidate Clay Aiken has reportedly deleted a tweet in which he fantasized about punching conservative author Ann Coulter ‘in the face.’

“‘Anyone else watching @piersmorgan want to punch Ann Coulter in the face?’ the former American Idol runner-up tweeted in October 2012…

“Mr. Aiken won the North Carolina Democrat nomination last week with a lead of less than 400 votes, just one day after his main contender, Keith Crisco, was found dead in his home.”

On Tuesday, May 20, 2014, Georgia held its state primary to narrow the field in both parties for Senate and Congress to the final contenders. Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss (R) is retiring in 2014. Two outstanding Congressmen gave up their seats to run for Senate. They were both defeated and now their seats are open to new contenders. Too bad…rsk

Phil Gingrey M.D. (R) who served as U.S. Congressman District 11
http://gingrey.house.gov/

http://www.ontheissues.org/GA/Phil_Gingrey.htm ** http://gingrey.com/

•Rated -5 by AAI, indicating a anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)
•Oppose Arms Treaty that limits gun trade to Israel & Taiwan. (Nov 2012)
•Commitment to unbreakable U.S.-Israel bond. (Mar 2010)

ISSUES

HEALTHCARE President Obama’s takeover of America’s health care system has been a disaster from day one. Hard-working men and women here in the state of Georgia have seen their existing plans canceled and face premium rates increases as high as 198 percent. As a doctor and as an individual who has taken the Hippocratic Oath, this is unacceptable. It is time for Republicans in Washington to stop talking about how they want to repeal and defund Obamacare, and stand up and lead the fight to do it. I intend to do just that.

IMMIGRATION Illegal immigration is threatening the very fabric of our nation. Liberal politicians on both sides of the aisle fail to grasp just how prevalent this problem is and its ultimate cost to our society. We must start by securing our borders and denying anyone who comes to our country illegally amnesty. I also believe we must insist that immigrants learn to speak English so we can continue to work together using our English language.

ENERGY Achieving energy independence is paramount to restoring economic prosperity and ensuring national security. We must remove the regulatory handcuffs on energy producers, allow states more control of their resources, and fast-track drilling permits. An “all-of-the-above” energy approach to developing traditional and emerging energy sources will help create jobs and lower prices at the pump. Unlike Obama, who favors taxpayer-funded disasters like Solyndra to privately-funded projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline, I don’t believe the government should pick winners and losers.
and
Paul Broun M.D. (R) who served as Congressman for District 10

http://www.paulbroun.com/ http://broun.house.gov/

http://www.ontheissues.org/GA/Paul_Broun.htm **

ISSUES

HEALTHCARE Dr. Broun voted against the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and for repeal.

ENERGY : Dr. Broun is a strong supporter of domestic energy production and construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline without limiting amendments.

•Rated -2 by AAI, indicating a anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)
•Oppose Arms Treaty that limits gun trade to Israel & Taiwan. (Nov 2012)
•Commitment to unbreakable U.S.-Israel bond. (Mar 2010)

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/discredited-in-benghazi?f=puball

The abandonment of the State Department-CIA mission in Benghazi that came under attack on September 11, 2012 marked the failure of the Obama administration’s foreign policy toward the Muslim world. That American generals and admirals raised no protest to the decision not to go to the American contingent’s defense dishonored our military and undercut its sense of duty, responsibility, and self-respect. The discredit brought upon the United States by foolish, dishonest foreign policies is dangerous and hard enough to live down. But history teaches that militaries whose moral qualities have been undermined court disaster, and that restoring those qualities is very hard.

Public discourse has focused on whether the destruction of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was spontaneous or a planned terrorist attack, as well as on why the mission had not been provided with adequate security. But these questions are important chiefly from the standpoint of domestic politics.

Of greater importance to our nation is that the so-called consulate annex was destroyed by a regular, conventional military assault and finished off by very accurate mortar fire. This annex, a CIA outpost, seems to have been facilitating the transfer of weapons to Syrian rebel factions-something that the Obama administration was doing quietly while publicly debating whether to do it- as well as engaging in other covert activities in the region. More likely than not, this is how it could become the target of a regular military attack. This may also explain why a CIA team swept the ruins of the annex for two weeks before FBI investigators were allowed to enter it.

As bloody bodies and smoke rise into the air after a cry of Allahu Akbar and a bomb detonation, each Muslim terrorist attack is followed by “Muslimsplaining” why the latest act of Islamic violence had nothing to do with Islam.

Sometimes the Muslimsplainers are Muslims. Often they aren’t even Muslims.

When Boko Haram, an Islamic terrorist group aligned with Al Qaeda, kidnapped Nigerian girls, the media’s Muslimsplainers sprang into action to explain why it had nothing to do with Islam.

Time featured “5 Reasons Boko Haram is Un-Islamic”; a listicle friendly article from one of those non-Muslim experts on why Islam is feminist

“With their sustained campaign of murders and kidnappings, the members of Boko Haram conduct themselves in a manner that could barely be more alien to the Prophet Muhammad teachings,” the article claimed.

Mohammed spread Islam through a sustained campaign of murders and kidnappings. Claiming that murder was alien to Mohammed is like claiming that pledge drives are alien to PBS.

As proof, Time cited a statement from Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, that Boko Haram was “set up to smear the image of Islam.”

This is the same Sheikh al-Sheikh who called for destroying all the churches in the region and marrying off 10-year-old girls. Destroying churches and raping schoolgirls is exactly what Boko Haram stands for. If you believe the media, the same grand mufti who supports raping children in Saudi Arabia as Islamic… opposes raping them in Nigeria as un-Islamic.

The only reason the double Sheikh who speaks out of both sides of his mouth denounces Boko Haram and other Al Qaeda groups is because he is a mouthpiece for the Saudi ruling family which opposes them.

Saudi Arabia isn’t opposed to Al Qaeda because it’s un-Islamic. It’s opposed to Al Qaeda because the Islamic group wants to replace the House of Saud, upsetting the deal between Wahhab and Saud that created a balance between the tyrannical royal family and the mosque.

In the beginning, when Britain ruled Palestine, mere glimpses emerge: of twenty-three Jewish frogmen and their British commander disappearing without a trace on a seaborne mission against Vichy Lebanon (1941);1 of Jewish soldiers learning naval skills at the British naval base in Haifa (1943); and of Jewish workers posing proudly next to two minesweepers they have constructed for the Royal Navy in Tel Aviv harbor (1944).

The historian, however, begins his labors where he will, and our story commences not in British Palestine but at Fleet Landing in distant Newport, Rhode Island. It was here in April 1946 that a motorized liberty launch put in carrying crewmembers of the USS Massey and their guests—a group of Annapolis midshipmen who had come aboard for two weeks of drills. On reaching land, some of the midshipmen and crewmembers bounded ashore only to be summoned back to the launch, where they received an informative lecture from Lieutenant Paul Shulman, the Massey’s engineering officer. The topic was standard disembarkation from a naval vessel, and the take home message was this: If the sailors wanted to do things according to regulations, then officers were to debark first, followed by midshipmen (since they were destined to be officers) and finally crewmembers. While highly enlightening, the lecture seems not to have been appreciated by men anxious to begin their liberty—although they did do a commendable job of applying their new knowledge when Shulman finally let them leave the launch.2

Gruffness was nothing new to Paul Shulman. His biographer, J. Wandres, relates that five years earlier, while an Annapolis midshipman himself, he had had a terse exchange with a revered houseguest at his parents’ home. The visitor had remarked that he was delighted that Jewish boys like Shulman were studying to be naval officers since an independent Jewish state, once it came into being, would require men with such skills. Shulman snapped back that he intended to be a career officer in the U.S. Navy and wished the houseguest luck with recruitment elsewhere.3 The houseguest, David Ben-Gurion, found Shulman’s sense of commitment impressive and did not forget him.

Career plans enunciated by 18-year-olds are apt to change. And so it was in the case of young Shulman. The Holocaust—and Britain’s subsequent refusal to allow the survivors of that catastrophe to immigrate to the Jewish National Home in Mandatory Palestine—made a deep impression on the maturing officer. Obtaining his release from active naval duty in 1946, he helped front an organization that purchased decommissioned U.S. and Canadian naval vessels for use in smuggling European Jews to Palestine in the teeth of Britain’s draconian blockade. (Unfortunately, the Royal Navy intercepted most of these vessels, sending the passengers back to Europe or to internment on Cyprus.)4

In April 1948, the 25-year-old Shulman accepted an offer to serve as Chief-of-Staff for naval training in the nascent Israeli Navy.5 Weeks later—on May 15th—five Arab armies crossed the frontier of the newborn Jewish state intent on annihilating it. Within the navy, at this time, there existed two competing operational philosophies. The Palyam—a frogman-based commando unit—believed that commando operations could meet all of Israel’s naval requirements, including staging attacks, keeping sea-lanes open, blockading enemy ports and transporting marines.6 Shulman adhered to the rival view, outlined by former Royal Navy officer, Robert Stephenson Miller, that a traditional navy would better serve Israel’s needs.

“The Che Guevara of the Palestinians” is set to visit Palestinian Authority-controlled Judea and Samaria next week, beginning in Bethlehem, and the city of Jesus’s birth is already in high excitement. The bearer of that illustrious title is none other than Pope Francis. According to Israel National News, “Rabbi Sergio Bergman, a member of the Argentinian parliament and close friend of Pope Francis…said that the pope intends to define himself as the ‘Che Guevera of the Palestinians’ and support their ‘struggle and rights’ during his visit.”

If the Pope or anyone around him has expressed a similar intention to speak out about the Muslim persecution of Palestinian Christians, it has not been recorded – in sharp contrast to the abundance of signals that the Pope has sent to Palestinian Authority officials. Fr. Jamal Khader of the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem explained: “He is taking a helicopter directly from Jordan to Palestine — to Bethlehem. It’s a kind of sign of recognizing Palestine.” In anticipation of his doing just that officially, Palestinian officials have put up posters proclaiming “State of Palestine” and depicting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Pope Francis, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople.

Not only that, but while in Bethlehem, Pope Francis will meet with Abbas; he also plans to celebrate Mass there rather than in Jerusalem, a move that Israel National News says “has been called a show of support for the PA.” He then plans to visit a Palestinian “refugee camp.”

Khader predicted: “Knowing who he is, and his sensitivity for all those who suffer, I am sure that he will say something defending all those who are suffering, including the Palestinians who live under occupation.” Ziyyad Bandak, Abbas’s adviser for Christian affairs, was enthusiastic: “This visit will help us in supporting our struggle to end the longest occupation in history….We welcome this visit and consider it as support for the Palestinian people, and confirmation from the Vatican of the need to end the occupation.”

All this comes after a Church official in Jerusalem criticized Israeli authorities for asking that a sign announcing the Pope’s visit be taken down from a historic site on which such signs are prohibited for preservation reasons. The unnamed official referenced recent Hebrew-language hate graffiti spray-painted on mosques and churches, saying that he and other Church officials “question the fact that the police, instead of taking action against the extremists who paint hate slogans on mosques and churches, choose to remove a sign with a positive message that welcomes the pope in three languages. We hope the police will act with the same determination to prevent the growing incitement and violence against Christians.”

While referring to the graffiti as “incitement and violence against Christians,” however, Church officials have been much more reticent regarding Muslim persecution of Palestinian Christians, even when it has included actual violence. According to Israel National News, “Christian Arab residents of the village of El-Khader in the Bethlehem area were savagely attacked by local Muslims as they celebrated a Christian holiday two weeks ago. A report by CAMERA, an organization which monitors anti-Israel bias in the media, reported that Christians attempting to enter Saint George’s Monastery in the village were intimidated and attacked with rocks and stones.”

In the last two decades, New York City has made tremendous strides in helping people move off welfare dependency, according to a new study by E. J. McMahon for the Manhattan Institute, “Trends in Assistance and Dependency: Tracking Programs for New York City’s Poor, 1956–2014.” In the last 19 years, there has been a 71 percent drop in New Yorkers on welfare. McMahon, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership and president of the Empire Center for Public Policy, Inc., talks with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the history and future of welfare policy in the Big Apple and elsewhere.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What is the most significant take-away from a study of welfare in New York City over the past 19 years?

E. J. McMAHON: The decrease in welfare dependency has been as striking and dramatic as the decrease in crime in New York City, which started just a few years earlier. During Mayor John Lindsay’s heyday in the 1960s, New York City became known as the nation’s welfare capital. Not by coincidence, it also was the epicenter of what became a national “welfare rights” movement. The welfare rolls increased from about 400,000 to over a million people in the early 1970s, which so alarmed Governor Rockefeller and the legislature that they started pulling in the reins from Albany, with little effect. Even at the peak of the city’s economic recovery in the late 1980s, the caseload never dipped below 810,000. By 1995, Rudy Giuliani’s second year as mayor, the number of New Yorkers essentially on the dole was back to 1.16 million. By the time he left office, it was at 462,000, and it’s now about 339,000. This is essentially the baseline for assessing Bill de Blasio’s welfare policies over the next four years.

LOPEZ: What explains the city’s drop in welfare dependency?

McMAHON: The 1996 federal welfare reform — Bill Clinton’s bargain with a Republican Congress to truly “end welfare as we know it” — was the big trigger, of course. But that was not the whole answer. Rudy Giuliani and Jason Turner, who became the city’s commissioner for welfare and Medicaid eligibility in 1998, were deeply committed to the principle that getting poor people into a job, any job, is better than simply writing them a check. And in pursuing that goal, they adopted the same sort of performance-driven, stat-focused approach the city had applied to policing. Mayor Bloomberg basically stuck with that all the way. In fact, the welfare commissioner for most of Bloomberg’s tenure, Robert Doar, previously had been Governor Pataki’s state welfare commissioner, and had done a lot to promote key reforms at the state level.

LOPEZ: Is this all good news? Do we know how people are doing once off welfare?

McMAHON: What we know for sure is that poor people are much better off working, even in an entry-level job, than on welfare. As the report points out, a nonworking single mother with two children can collect cash benefits or cash substitute worth $16,032, well below the federal poverty level, but she can more than double that, earning about $34,000, by working. One big part of the difference consists of $8,787 in federal, state, and city earned-income tax credits, which is a very important means of support for low-income workers.

The city’s official poverty rate went down every year for five years after welfare reform, and stayed essentially flat for the next eight years. Although the poverty rate has risen since 2008, it still hasn’t returned to the levels of the mid 1990s. Child poverty, in particular, is appreciably lower than it used to be, which reflects the city’s emphasis on providing support for working parents with dependents. And New York has a lower poverty rate than Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, or San Antonio. The city’s alternative measure of poverty, which starts at a higher income threshold and counts cash income supports from public sources, is actually slightly lower than the official measure, which is based on census data.

LOPEZ: The number of people on food stamps and Medicaid is at an all-time high in New York City. What do these numbers say to you?

McMAHON: There have been several things going on. Eligibility for the federal food-stamps program was expanded in a big way starting around 2002, and New York State began expanding its Medicaid program to families well above the poverty level around the same time, years before Obamacare arrived and started doing the same thing. But there also was a deliberate effort under Mayor Bloomberg to sign more people up for food stamps and Medicaid. He viewed these as “work supports” rather than welfare. The idea was that it was better for a poor person to be working, with the help of food stamps and Medicaid, than to be unemployed and cashing checks. Of course, the ideal would be complete self-sufficiency, and too much of the population is still far from that.