RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69421
In After America (available here, he pleads, and the profits of which go to support my free-speech pushback against Michael E Mann), I write inter alia about Fort Hood, and in particular the disgraceful statement by General Casey, and the Pentagon’s absurd decision to classify what happened as “workplace violence”:

In the days after the slaughter, the news coverage read like a satirical novel that the author’s not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch-22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you muse openly on pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put that down as mere confirmation of your long-established “research interests”. If you’re psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there’s no terrorism angle, because, in a micro-regulated credential-obsessed society, it doesn’t count unless you’re found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

And “Allahu akbar?” That’s Arabic for “Nothing to see here”.

Pace General Casey, what happened was not a “tragedy” but a national scandal.

Anwar al-Awlaki and his comrades have bet that such a society is too sick to survive. Watch the nothing-to-see-here media driveling on about “combat stress” and the Pentagon diversicrats issuing memos on “workplace violence” like gibbering lunatics in a padded cell, and then think whether you’d really want to take that bet. The craven submission to political correctness, the willingness to leave your marbles with the Diversity Café hat-check girl, the wish for a quiet life leads to death, and not that quietly. When the chief of staff of the United States Army has got the disease, you’re in big (and probably terminal) trouble. And when the guy’s on the table firing wildly and screaming “Allahu akbar!”, the PC kindergarten teachers won’t be there for you.

That’s true not just during the attack but for the ensuing half-decade: General Casey and the other “parade generals” (in that useful British phrase) and the vast swollen Pentagon bureaucracy have not been there for them. Mariah Blake has a piece in Mother Jones, of all places, that lays out in painstaking detail how, for Major Hasan’s victims, the United States Government has spent the last four-and-a-half years adding insult to the injuries he inflicted.

Full disclosure: If Ms Blake’s name rings a bell with readers, she’s the lady who interviewed me for the Mother Jones story about Mann vs Steyn. I wasn’t too thrilled with the way that turned out, if only because it made me sound a bit of a loon. But, on reflection, I am a bit of a loon, so maybe Ms Blake just zeroed in on the salient feature. Be that as it may, her Fort Hood piece is unsparing in its bleak portrait of what happens after the President, the cabinet secretaries and the other bigshots have departed the memorial service and you’ve outlived your usefulness as photo-op prop. Take Army reservist Keara Bono-Torkelson, who was shot in the back by Hasan:

She recalls the nurse at the Army hospital where she was rushed for treatment patting her on the head and telling her she was fine. Only weeks later, when she visited her family doctor in Missouri, did she discover that she also had a bullet lodged in her head.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69416
Remember when Attorney General Eric Holder called Americans a “nation of cowards” who put “certain subjects . . . off limits”? Holder, of course, was referring to “subjects” that in fact we do nothing else but talk about non-stop – the refusal of whites to admit the persistence of white racism and its responsibility for all the ills afflicting the black underclass. To quote Paul Krugman for this received wisdom, “Race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.”

Yet Holder was unwittingly accurate, for there is a subject the mainstream culture and political discourse never touches: what Harlem Renaissance novelist Claude McKay called the “yellow complex.” This is the psychological condition of light-skinned blacks that was explored in novels of the 1920s like McKay’s Home to Harlem and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. Back then, the mulatto or light-complexioned black, especially the well educated, lived in a social and psychological limbo, excluded by racism from the white world, and forced by segregation to live among darker blacks whom they often despised and looked down on. Yet darker blacks themselves experienced conflicting emotions, at once attracted to and resentful of the light-skinned who scorned them.

Thurman’s Emma Lou is a sympathetic portrait of this complex from the perspective of a woman whose mother is a mulatto, but who inherited her father’s black skin: “Emma Lou had been born in a semi-white world, totally surrounded by an all-white one, and those few dark elements that had forced their way in had either been shooed away or else greeted with derisive laughter.” When she matriculates at an exclusive Negro college, she despises Hazel, another dark-skinned girl who attempts to befriend her, as “just a vulgar little n***** from down South.” Emma Lou “was determined to become associated only with those people who really mattered, northerners like herself or superior southerners, if there were any, who were different from whites only in so far as skin color was concerned.” What she discovers, however, is that most of the light-skinned students to whom she is attracted despise her as much as she despises Hazel.

A creation of racism and segregation, the psychology explored in this persistent theme of classic black literature was supposedly transcended by the “black is beautiful” movement of the 1960s. In black identity politics the poles of value were reversed: the snobbish mulattoes or blacks who lived by so-called “white” values were attacked for “acting white,” and authentic black identity comprised everything that separated blacks from the white majority, whether complexion, accent, or especially political ideology, morality, and virtue. Blacks of any shade who adopted proper English, social decorum, or traditional virtues were scorned as “Uncle Toms” and “race traitors.” Though millions of American blacks rejected much of this ideology, it reshaped public discourse and popular culture, and created today’s racial orthodoxy.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69413
In a stunning admission, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy revealed to House Science, Space and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) that the agency neither possesses, nor can produce, all of the scientific data used to justify the rules and regulations they have imposed on Americans via the Clean Air Act. In short, science has been trumped by the radical environmentalist agenda.

The admission follows the issuance of a subpoena by the full Committee last August. It was engendered by two years of EPA stonewalling, apparently aimed at preventing the raw data cited by EPA as the scientific foundation for those rules and regulations from being independently verified. Two studies, the 1993 Harvard Six Cities Study (HSC) and the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) 1995 Cancer Prevention Study II, had verified that fine airborne particles measuring 2.5 micrograms or less were responsible for killing thousands of Americans every year. They became the baseline by which the EPA regulated particulate emissions from power plants, factories and cars. Airborne particles of that size are equivalent to approximately 1/30th the diameter of a human hair.

Apparently Smith and other Republicans had an inkling of what was going on at the EPA last November. At that time, Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) introduced the Secret Science Reform Act aimed at barring the agency from proposing new regulations based on science that was neither transparent nor reproducible. “Public policy should come from public data, not based on the whims of far-left environmental groups,” Schweikert said in a statement. “For far too long, the EPA has approved regulations that have placed a crippling financial burden on economic growth in this country with no public evidence to justify their actions.”

The bill was co-sponored by Smith, as well as fellow House Science Committee members Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) and Randy Neugebauer (R-TX). Smith echoed the concern expressed by Schweikert. “It appears the EPA bends the law and stretches the science to justify its own objectives,” he said. “The EPA must either make the data public, or commit to no longer using secret science to support its regulations.”

At that time, McCarthy was singing a different tune. She defended the EPA’s “high-quality science,” and referenced a report by the Office of Inspector General praising the EPA for its research. In testimony before the Committee, she insisted that science is the “backbone of the EPA’s decision-making.”

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69410
Last Tuesday, on April 8, Brandeis University rescinded its invitation to human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary degree from the institution. Brandeis caved in the face of intimidation from CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups, as well as a student petition on Change.org and a faculty petition – the contents of which have now become known.

The faculty petition is a textbook case of leftist pathology and of how “progressives” demonize true heroic freedom fighters and push millions of victims of totalitarian regimes and ideologies into invisibility for the sake of their own egotistical and destructive agendas.

A case in point in this ugly leftist narrative is how the signatories of the Brandeis petition have succeeded in banning a woman from their university who is the victim of female genital mutilation (FGM), suffered under an Islamic knife because of Islamic doctrine. She represents millions of Muslim females — mutilated and mutilated-to-be. And yet the signatories of the petition are callously indifferent, because they have their progressive program to attend to and fulfill.

The Brandeis faculty petition, written on April 6 and addressed to President Lawrence, stresses “the horrible message” that inviting Ali to the university “sends to the Muslim and non-Muslim communities at Brandeis and beyond” because of Ali’s “virulently anti-Muslim public statements.” Aside from complaining about Ali’s truth-telling about Islam, the petition also issues a dire warning about the “unnecessary controversy” that the human rights activist’s presence would bring to the campus.

To be sure, who needs nightmarish scenarios like debate and intellectual diversity when the Marxist Left has already lovingly bestowed the peaceful the Party Line?

The petition then references the major issues with which Ali is concerned: female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and honor killings. “These phenomena,” the petition flippantly notes, are not “exclusive to Islam.” This is a standard and perpetual tactic of obfuscation and equivocation employed by the Left whenever a monstrous evil is labelled in a totalitarian enemy. It serves as an excuse for inaction by presupposing that if a crime is committed by someone else, somewhere else, that it somehow justifies doing and saying nothing in the face of a crime being perpetrated on a mass scale right before our eyes – and one that we can do something about.

The former NSA contractor, in league with journalist Glenn Greenwald and others, has exposed nothing illegal. He has done great harm.
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69407
Mr. Fox, a British Conservative, is a member of Parliament and former secretary of state for defense.

Peace and security are not the natural state of affairs. It is a fact of life that many of those who live comfortable middle-class existences in affluent, liberal, pluralistic democracies in the 21st century seem to have forgotten. Those who live without a full grasp of the risks and sacrifices taken by others on their behalf will not understand the constant battle for law and freedom against disorder, anarchy and terror. Just as a gardener fights a constant war against untrammeled nature, but casual observers see only order and tranquillity, a constant struggle is being waged against the forces of disruption and destruction so that we can take the safety and security of our daily lives for granted.

For our intelligence services to operate effectively, and to protect us from these threats, they need to be able to do things in secret, secrets whose public disclosure would be damaging to our national interests. We depend on the legal and moral partnership of our governments and the employees and contractors it uses to maintain the confidentiality of these secrets. Yet all of this has been imperiled over the past 10 months by the slow public parading of intelligence secrets stolen by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, working with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and others. As recently as last month secrets were still being spilled, this time about an NSA malware program.

What are the size and scale of our intelligence agencies that so agitate their critics? In the case of United Kingdom, it is around £2 billion a year. Put another way, this is less than 0.3% of total government expenditure or the equivalent of how much we spend on the National Health Service every six days.

For the U.S., the comparable figures are 0.7% of total government spending, around only 5% of the defense budget.

Is the American President still interested in his job?
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69404
The White House on Monday said there was “overwhelming evidence” that Russia is stirring the unrest in eastern Ukraine, but President Obama hasn’t yet decided if further sanction are warranted. That’s how the Associated Press put its dispatch from Washington on the crisis in Ukraine, and the juxtaposition is a perfect summary of the current state of U.S. foreign policy.

Vladimir Putin uses Russian special forces to cow a neighbor and steal territory, while Mr. Obama agonizes about what to do.

“We are actively evaluating what is happening in eastern Ukraine, what actions Russia has taken, what transgressions they’ve engaged in,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. “And we are working with our partners and assessing for ourselves what response we may choose.” This is from the same President who has been saying for weeks that any further Russian transgressions into Ukraine would be met with harsh sanctions. Mr. Putin must laugh out loud when he reads this stuff.

Meanwhile, the government in Kiev is getting the message that it had better fend for itself and has begun to meet one of the offers from Mr. Putin that it can’t refuse. Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov said he is now open to a national referendum that would grant greater autonomy to regions of the country. Mr. Putin wants to hive off eastern and southern Ukraine into what would essentially be a Russian protectorate and leave Kiev with a rump state. The U.S. has refused to send Ukraine lethal military aid, and Kiev may be looking to sue for peace to avoid an outright invasion.

We know Mr. Obama didn’t run for President to engage in great power politics, but it is still part of the job description. Is he still interested in doing his job?

Stephens is absolutely right about Paul…but Jeb Bush is also out of the question….rsk
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303663604579501441901549788?mod=hp_opinion&mg=reno64-wsj

Republicans, let’s get it over with. Fast forward to the finish line. Avoid the long and winding primary road. It can only weaken the nominee. And we know who he—yes, he—has to be.

Not Jeb Bush, who plainly is unsuited to be president. He is insufficiently hostile to Mexicans. He holds heretical views on the Common Core, which, as we well know, is the defining issue of our time. And he’s a Bush. Another installment of a political dynasty just isn’t going to fly with the American people, who want some fresh blood in their politics.

Unless the dynasty is named Clinton. Or Kennedy. Or Nunn. Or Carter. Or, come to think of it, Paul. In that case, dynasties are just fine, thank you.

Chris Christie is also unfit to be president. His aides caused a traffic jam in the service of a petty political vendetta. The New Jersey governor may not have known about it, but it doesn’t matter because the mere taint of scandal makes him unfit to be the Republican nominee, much less the president.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/congressman-awarding-the-pulitzer-to-snowden-enablers-is-a-disgrace/?print=1

WASHINGTON — Congress has left the District for the Passover and Easter break, with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) heading to Afghanistan and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) heading to President Obama’s home base of Chicago to promote school choice.

But today’s announcement of the 2014 Pulitzer Prizes stoked an old debate about whether a former NSA contractor who leaked details about the surveillance programs — among other leaks — is a traitor or a whistleblower. Today, he was the muse of award winners.

“Awarding the Pulitzer to Snowden enablers is a disgrace,” tweeted Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.).

The Guardian and the Washington Post shared the Public Service Pulitzer for the “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, marked by authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security” and “helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy.”

The heads of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), have solidly put Snowden in the traitor category, but remained mum about the win.

Budget cuts can’t be at enlisted men’s expense.

http://spectator.org/print/58719

Judging by the horse he gave Defense Secretary Chuckie Hagel a couple of days ago, Mongolian Defense Minister Dashdemberel must be a very diligent student of the defense budget that Congress is now trying to craft. The horse, of course, is a gelding.

When the president announced his proposed budget and Hagel went to Congress to state the party line, I wrote that several indispensable weapon systems — the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, the A-10 Warthog attack aircraft, and half of the Navy’s 22 cruisers among them — would be retired. Under the president’s plan, military pay raises would be capped at 1% for the second straight year. Most of the fictive strategy the president brags about would have to be abandoned if the budget went through.

Because of these and other inanities in the president’s proposal, the House rejected it out of hand earlier this month by a margin of 413-2.

Now comes the hard part because Congress has to pass an authorization bill to enable the Defense Department to spend money in Fiscal 2015. That means coming up with its own defense budget in the absence of a non-risible one from the Obama administration.

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2014/April/38/4/magazine/article/13654
In April 1904, Scottish geographer Halford Mackinder gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. His paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” caused a sensation and marked the birth of geopolitics as an autonomous discipline. According to Mackinder, control over the Eurasian “World-Island” is the key to global hegemony. At its core is the “pivot area,” the Heartland, which extends from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic. “My concern is with the general physical control, rather than the causes of universal history,” Mackinder declared.

At the end of the Great War, profoundly concerned with what he saw as the need for an effective barrier of nations between Germany and Russia, Mackinder summarized his theory as follows:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island controls the world.

This dictum helps explain the essence of the Ukrainian crisis, as well as the motivation behind the continuing ambition of some U.S. policymakers to expand NATO eastward.

The model has undergone several modifications since Mackinder. In his 1942 book America’s Strategy in World Politics, Nicholas Spykman sought to “develop a grand strategy for both war and peace based on the implications of its geographic location in the world.” In the 19th century, he wrote, Russian pressure from the “heartland” was countered by British naval power in the “great game,” and it was America’s destiny to take over that role once World War II was over. Six months before the Battle of Stalingrad Spykman wrote that a “Russian state from the Urals to the North Sea can be no great improvement over a German state from the North Sea to the Urals.” For Spykman the key region of world politics was the coastal region bordering the “Heartland,” which he called the “rimland.” He changed Mac­kinder’s formula accordingly: “Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

Spykman died in 1943, but his ideas were reflected four years later in Harry Truman’s strategy of containment. Holding on to the rimland, from Norway across Central Europe to Greece and Turkey, was the mainstay of America’s Cold War strategy and the rationale behind the creation of NATO in 1949. Containment swiftly turned into a massive rollback, however, when the Soviet Union disintegrated. In 1996 Bill Clinton violated the commitment against NATO expansion made by his predecessor, and the alliance reached Russia’s czarist borders. In 2004 it expanded almost to the suburbs of St. Petersburg with the inclusion of the three Baltic republics. All along Ukraine had remained the glittering prize, however, the key to limiting Russia’s access to the Black Sea, and a potential geostrategic knife in southern Russia’s soft underbelly.