RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/02/16/near-death-experiences-a-new-take-on-life-part-1-sam-parnia-explains-where-the-field-is-leading/?print=1

Sam Parnia is one of the world’s leading experts on death—on how people can medically be brought back from the dead, and on what happens to the mind, or soul, or consciousness, after people die.

Of UK origin, Parnia works these days as assistant professor of medicine at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He is also directing the joint American-Canadian-British AWARE study, which he calls “the world’s largest ever study of mind and brain during cardiac arrest.” And he is the author, most recently (with Josh Young), of Erasing Death, an up-to-date exploration of both of Parnia’s areas of expertise—resuscitation from death, and death itself.

About half of this book focuses on resuscitation science—which, since the 1960s, has been able to bring people back from states of clinical death. What Parnia has to say is interesting and informative, though it is not the reason I got hold of the book; I’m more interested in what could be called the mystical angle.

Basically, in Parnia’s telling, resuscitation science is both making unprecedented advances and not doing that well. Thanks to the new technique of cooling the body of a clinically dead person, cell deterioration in the body can be slowed down, and people can be resuscitated for ever-longer periods after death has occurred. On the other hand, survival rates—the percentages of people who are actually brought back to life—are still low and have not improved since the 1960s. “It’s really amazing,” Parnia says, “but absolutely true.”

What’s needed, Parnia contends, is for the resuscitation field to be much better organized, standardized, and coordinated. At this point, the quality of resuscitation care you get at a hospital—or whether you even get it—is pot luck. Parnia thinks the situation can be drastically improved, which would not only mean bringing a lot more people back to life, but restoring a lot more of them intact instead of in vegetative or brain-damaged states.

In August 2009 a chauffeur in New York City named Joe Tiralosi had a cardiac arrest and died. He was rushed to New York Presbyterian Hospital, where his body was cooled with ice packs and saline injections. It was then believed that, after ten minutes without a heartbeat, a patient can only be revived in a vegetative state. Joe Tiralosi was revived after forty minutes without a heartbeat. He then died again, was revived again, and eventually returned to his wife and two children in perfect health.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/is-france-going-national-socialist/?print=1

January 2014 will be remembered as an ominous turning point in French politics: the moment when explicit anti-Semitism was accepted again as a legitimate political view by at least a segment of the public.

First, there was the Dieudonné case. Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, 48, known as an artist as just Dieudonné, is an African-French former humorist who over the years has turned his shows into anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish gatherings. More recently he created and launched the “quenelle,” an inverted Hitlerian salute (one arm down, the other one touching the shoulder) to be used as an expression of contempt for Jews and everything related to the Holocaust.

As Dieudonné was about to start a grand tour of France in January, Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls issued orders and guidelines to préfets (local government commissioners) and mayors to ban his shows as public-safety risks. Moreover, the police raided Dieudonné’s home in Paris and found close to one million dollars in cash. Since Dieudonné and his wife and producer Noemie Montagne have repeatedly maintained they are nearly bankrupt, they may be investigated for tax evasion or money laundering.

While many citizens congratulated Valls for acting decisively against a dangerous agitator, many others — including in his own socialist and left-wing constituency — criticized him for “curbing free speech and expression” in line with his own “politically correct” agenda.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-colonialism-of-the-anti-israel-left/print/

The first error in John Judis’ book “Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict” is in its title. The genesis of this conflict took place thousands of years before Truman when the Roman Empire imposed its colonial rule on the Jewish population using Arab mercenaries and when the Muslim Arab conquerors colonized Israel.

Judis describes the Roman ethnic cleansing of Israel’s Jewish population as the land going “through different religious incarnations after the pagan Romans ousted the Maccabee.” This is akin to another type of revisionist historian describing the Holocaust as Europe going through a new religious incarnation after the pagan National Socialists ousted Jewish communal leaders.

All the familiar myths of anti-Israel revisionist historians are present in Judis’ Genesis making it the least original book on Israel in some time. There are the European Jewish colonists seizing Arab land and powerful American Jewish lobbies intimidating politicians concerned about the “Palestinians” who would not spring into existence until after the failed invasions of Israel by the Arab colonial powers.

The Arabs are treated as a majority when it comes to their claim on the land and as a minority when it comes to soliciting liberal sympathy on their behalf. Judis justifies this political juggling act by rewriting history so that the Jews of Israel are reduced to European colonists rather than an indigenous minority.

Middle Eastern Jews are largely absent in his Eurocentric narrative because their existence upends his depiction of the Jewish resettlement as a Western colonial assault against a hapless native population. The Middle Eastern Jews, whose existence the left denies or minimizes, demonstrate that Zionism was no different than the national liberation movements of minorities like the Kurds or the Armenians.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/woman-sexually-harassed-by-clinton-says-hillary-is-the-war-on-women/print/

Woman Sexually Harassed by Clinton says: “Hillary is the War on Women.” Posted By Daniel Greenfield

The Blair Papers which the media initially covered up and then diverted attention from, were quite revealing when it came to Hillary’s attitude toward not only her husband’s sexual misconduct, but even those of Republicans like Bob Packwood.

Hillary Clinton defended her husband in a phone call with Blair. She said her husband had made a mistake by fooling around with the “narcissistic loony toon” Lewinsky, but was driven to it in part by his political adversaries, the loneliness of the presidency, and her own failures as a wife.

Hillary Clinton told Blair she had received “a letter from a psychologist who does family therapy and sexual infidelity problems,” who told the Yale Law School graduate, “most men with fidelity problems [were] raised by two women and felt conflicted between them.”

“She thinks she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns and struggles to realize the price he was paying.”

Hillary Clinton is pathetic, makes constant excuses for Bill Clinton, blames herself and blames the women that her husband goes after.

As a feminist role model, she’s right up there with her aide, Huma Abedin.

In a Dec. 3, 1993, diary entry, Blair recounted a conversation with the first lady about “Packwood”—a reference to then-Sen. Bob Packwood, an influential Republican on health care embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal.

“HC tired of all those whiney women, and she needs him on health care,” wrote Blair.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-islamic-grinch-who-stole-the-olympics-on-the-glazov-gang/print/ This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, Tommi Trudeau, the Producer of Groovy Foods, and Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know. The Gang gathered to discuss Jihad Migrating to Red States With Obama’s Blessings. The discussion occurred in Part I (starting at the […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/obamas-foreign-policy-enemy-action/print/

It’s often hard to determine whether a series of bad policies results from stupidity or malicious intent. Occam’s razor suggests that the former is the more likely explanation, as conspiracies assume a high degree of intelligence, complex organization, and secrecy among a large number of people, qualities that usually are much less frequent than the simple stupidity, disorganization, and inability to keep a secret more typical of our species. Yet surveying the nearly 6 years of Obama’s disastrous foreign policy blunders, I’m starting to lean towards Goldfinger’s Chicago mob-wisdom: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it’s enemy action.”

Obama’s ineptitude started with his general foreign policy philosophy. George Bush, so the narrative went, was a trigger-happy, unilateralist, blundering, “dead or alive” cowboy who rushed into an unnecessary war in Iraq after alienating our allies and insulting the Muslim world. Obama pledged to be different. As a Los Angeles Times editorial advised him in January 2009, “The Bush years, defined by ultimatums and unilateral actions around the world, must be brought to a swift close with a renewed emphasis on diplomacy, consultation and the forging of broad international coalitions.” Obama eagerly took this advice, reaching out not just to our allies, but also to sworn enemies like Syria, Venezuela, and Iran, and serially bowing to various potentates around the globe. He went on the apology tour, in which he confessed America’s “arrogant, dismissive, derisive” behavior and the “darker periods in our history.” And he followed up by initiating America’s retreat from international affairs, “leading from behind,” appeasing our enemies, and using rhetorical bluster as a substitute for coherent, forceful action. Here follow 3 of the many mistakes that suggest something other than inexperience and a lack of knowledge is driving Obama’s policies.

Russia

Remember the “reset” button Obama offered to Russia? In September 2009 he made a down payment on this policy by reversing George Bush’s plan to station a radar facility in the Czech Republic and 10 ground-based missile interceptors in Poland. Russia had complained about these defensive installations, even though they didn’t threaten Russian territory. So to appease the Russians, Obama abandoned Poland and the Czech Republic, who still live in the dark shadow of their more powerful former oppressors, while Russia’s Iranian clients were emboldened by their patron’s ability to make the superpower Americans back down. As George Marshall Fund fellow David J. Kramer prophesized at the time, Obama’s caving “to Russian pressure . . . will encourage leaders in Moscow to engage in more loud complaining and bully tactics (such as threatening Iskander missiles against the Poles and Czechs) because such behavior gets desired results.”

Obama followed up this blunder with the New START arms reduction treaty with Russia signed in 2010. This agreement didn’t include tactical nuclear weapons, leaving the Russians with a 10-1 advantage. Multiple warheads deployed on a missile were counted as one for purposes of the treaty, which meant that the Russians could exceed the 1550 limit. Numerous other problems plague this treaty, but the worst is the dependence on Russian honesty to comply with its terms. Yet as Keith B. Payne and Mark B. Schneider have written recently, for years Russia has serially violated the terms of every arms-control treaty it has signed, for obvious reasons: “These Russian actions demonstrate the importance the Kremlin attaches to its new nuclear-strike capabilities. They also show how little importance the Putin regime attaches to complying with agreements that interfere with those capabilities. Russia not only seems intent on creating new nuclear- and conventional-strike capabilities against U.S. allies and friends. It has made explicit threats against some of them in recent years.” Busy pushing the reset button, Obama has ignored all this cheating. Nor did Obama’s 2012 appeasing pledge to outgoing Russian President Dmitri Medvedev–– that after the election he would “have more flexibility” about the proposed European-based anti-missile defense system angering Russia––could convince Vladimir Putin to play ball with the U.S. on Iran and Syria. Obama’s groveling “reset” outreach has merely emboldened Russia to expand its influence and that of its satellites like Iran and Syria, at the expense of the interests and security of America and its allies.

Syria

Syria is another American enemy Obama thought his charm offensive could win over. To do so he had to ignore Syria’s long history of supporting terrorists outfits like Hezbollah, murdering its sectarian and political rivals, assassinating Lebanon’s anti-Syrian Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, and facilitating the transit of jihadists–– during one period over 90% of foreign fighters–– into Iraq to kill Americans. Yet Obama sent diplomatic officials on 6 trips to Syria in an attempt to make strongman Bashar al Assad play nice. In return, in 2010 Assad hosted a cozy conference with Hezbollah terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah and the genocidal Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, where they discussed “a Middle East without Zionists and without colonialists.” Despite such rhetoric, even as the uprising against Assad was unfolding in March 2011, Secretary of State Clinton said, “There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/371280/print Secretary of State John Kerry spent his weekend discussing climate change in Indonesia: “We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts,” Kerry told the audience gathered at a U.S. Embassy-run American Center in a Jakarta shopping mall. “Nor should we allow any […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4729/global_warming_did_not_cause_uk_storms_and_floods_says_expert
With the British media and many high profile scientists and activists blaming the storms and floods on global warming, it is a major embarrassment that a top “mainstream” scientist has said it has nothing to do with it

In a major embarrassment to “consensus” views on global warming in general and the recent storms and flooding in the UK in particular a senior scientist connected with the Met Office and also the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has poured cold water on the widespread notion that recent events have anything at all to do with global warming.

Professor Mat Collins was quoted by the Daily Mail this weekend as saying the storms were driven by the Jet Stream moving south for reasons that are simply unknown:

“There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge,” he said.

Professor Collins’ dramatic intervention flies in the face of a veritable deluge of reports and features from mainstream media outlets such as the BBC and Sky NEWS the thrust of which have blamed the much publicised flooding on human-induced climate change.

Dissenters from what is habitually referred to as the “consensus” on climate change range in their views from those who argue that human induced climate change via CO2 emissions is real but may not amount to much to those who argue that the science has become highly politicised, skewered by the vast amounts of funding it attracts, and is in any case dubious.

The Mail pointed out that: “In 2007, the Met Office said that globally, the decade 2004-2014 would see warming of 0.3C. In fact, the world has not got any warmer at all in this period.”

It is verifiable facts such as these that have caused many people to adopt a sceptical stance in relation to claims about catastrophic climate change. Supporters of the “consensus” say they are dealing with complex phenomena but that the fundamentals of their arguments stand up to scrutiny.

If so, counter the sceptics, why do “consensus” scientists and activists resort to ad hominem attacks on their opponents or even, as in the case of celebrated journalist and climate sceptic Mark Steyn, attempt to use legal means to shut them up?

The “international community” is a shifty and shadowy ideal. Demands and verdicts are made on its behalf. The casualty is usually Israel, which tells you pretty much all you need to know

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4732/the_international_community_a_figment_of_the_mind

In two words we trust. How many people, and how often when they want to make a viewpoint sound like a fact, defer to a bodiless power called the International Community. Legend, we know, is often better than reality, and far more useful than mere facts.

According to legend, then – according to a real power named Wikipedia, the international community is,

“A term used to imply the existence of common duties and obligations between countries. Activists, politicians and commentators often use the term, particularly in the context of calls for action to be taken against political repression and to protect human rights.”

‘Imply’ would be the operative word. Activists and politicians calling “for action…to protect human rights” would be the give-away reference to people and bodies that view Israel and the devil in one frame, and who cloak what ails them by deferring to a ghost community.

Useful ghosts have to be incorporeal. The spectral community “with common duties and obligations” is the epitome of a useful ghost. It has no address, no defined constituents, and can’t be touched or seen.

But this hardly matters. It may even help, considering that a notional body can pack a punch above its weight. With power and concept being what they are – inverted buddies – the less defined and real a concept the greater its power to manipulate the masses.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371249/getting-know-oliver-stone-john-fund

At first, I was appalled that Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone (JFK, Nixon) was appearing on a panel at this year’s conference of Students for Liberty, a nationwide libertarian youth organization. Stone is a conspiracy-monger of the first order whose twisted historical revisionism has deluded millions. He recently told the Daily Beast that the United States is an “international terror” that other nations should keep down.

But I was wrong; the event proved quite educational.

Stone appeared on a panel called “The National Security State,” along with Jeremy Scahill (the national-security correspondent for The Nation magazine) and Peter Kuznick (a history professor who co-wrote Stone’s loopy 2012 Showtime series Untold History of the United States).

The major surprise was just how bitter some left-wingers are with the Obama administration’s national-security record. Scahill tried to feed into the libertarian ethos of the 1,000 students in the audience by declaring that “when it comes to national-security policy, we only have one party: the war party.” But all the panelists reserved their tartest taunts for Democrats.

Scahill zinged Fox News for trying to paint President Obama as a “Muslim Manchurian candidate,” but also dismissed MSNBC as “like a DNC meet-up.” He blamed that network and other liberal outlets for defending Obama policies: “Obama has convinced liberals he is fighting a clean war,” he said, or, alternatively, “Democrats have checked their conscience at the door of the Obama presidency.”