RUTHFULLY YOURS

There’s no room in the president’s comfort zone for assessing the practical costs of his ideas. A week after his State of the Union address, political observers are still trying to figure out what President Obama’s game is. That’s because rhetorically and substantively, he seems to be in another world.

In his State of the Union address, Obama refused to even take note of the GOP’s historic midterm gains and the fact the House and Senate are now both under Republican control. On foreign policy, Obama talked as if everything was going swimmingly abroad, prompting even the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to marvel at Obama’s “disconnect” from what is happening in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Russia.

And Obama’s policy agenda — “free” community college, tax hikes, mandatory sick leave — failed to take into account that it was dead-before-arrival in this Congress.

Chantal Lebon last saw her son at a bus stop in Brussels. That was two years ago in October “at exactly 10:25 p.m.,” she says. Abdel had driven his mother there in a car, stopped in a parking spot and lifted her suitcase onto the sidewalk.

“Au revoir, maman,” he said. “Au revoir, mon fils,” she replied. It was only months later that she would again see her son’s face — in a YouTube video. It showed him wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh and holding a Kalashnikov. The video was stamped with the flag used by the Islamic State in Syria.

Chantal Lebon is a small, energetic 64-year-old retired nursery school teacher with blue eyes and graying hair. She has come to a café to tell us the story of her son Abdel, the story of a Belgian child who became a radical Islamist fighter at the age of 23. Abdel had nothing to do with the attack plans in Belgium, his mother says. But, she confirms, her son is a jihadist.

On the way to the Brussels café, she saw the soldiers standing guard in front of police stations, court houses and the city hall. The Belgian government raised the country’s terror alert to the second highest level after officials were able to foil attacks targeting police and Jewish schools earlier this month. At the European Parliament, events with more than 100 foreign guests have been banned and a military vehicle guards the entrance to the European Commission.

Since Jan. 15, the day two potential attackers died in Verviers during a police raid and the terror threat in the country became obvious to all, much has changed in Belgium.

Thirteen terror suspects have been arrested in the country this month, but the suspected ringleader of the alleged attack plans, a 27-year-old named Abdelhamid Abaaoud, remains at large and is thought to be in Greece. “I pray that Allah destroys all those who oppose Him,” he said in a video. Like Chantal Lebon’s son, Abaaoud also lived in Molenbeek, a district in western Brussels. Because she is worried that her son Abdel could be behind the next terror plot in Belgium, she would rather remain anonymous and her name, as well as that of her son, has been changed for this story.

Recently Fox News apologized for referring to several areas in Europe as “no-go zones.” The apology followed an interview with Steven Emerson, Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, who incorrectly claimed Birmingham, England was a Muslim city. The apology claimed the “no-go zone” statement was also incorrect. Julie Banderas asserted, “we have made some regrettable errors on air regarding the Muslim population in Europe, particularly with regard to England and France. To be clear, there is no formal designation of these zones in either country and no credible information to support the assertion there are specific areas in these countries that exclude individuals based solely on their religion.” Fox’s Jeanine Pirro, host of “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” also apologized stating, “Last week on this program a guest made a serious factual error that we wrongly let stand unchallenged and uncorrected. The guest asserted that the city of Birmingham, England, is totally Muslim and that it is a place where non-Muslims don’t go. Both are incorrect.”

Wrangel Island is a godforsaken patch of land several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle between the Chukchi and East Siberian seas. The closest mainland is Northern Siberia.

While a number of people visited the island over the years, including native Chukchis, Russian fur traders, and German seafarers, nobody ever bothered to put in a claim for the place until an 1881 expedition by the Corwin claimed it for the U.S. An expedition by the Rodgers later that year that included renowned naturalist John Muir conducted a thorough survey.

In 1916 the island was seized by Imperial Russia with no protest from the U.S. – it’s likely nobody recalled that it was American. The Russians renamed it Ostrov Vrangelya.

In the 20s, a Canadian group attempted to claim the island out of the blue, oddly enough utilizing several American citizens to do it. The brief diplomatic squabble that ensued was the last anyone heard of Wrangel for half a century.

Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah; and those with him are forceful against the disbelievers, merciful among themselves. Quran 48:29

America’s greatest threat is climate change. Obama, 2015

Do not let Obama or Islamists deceive you: the Qur’an is very clear about the double standards and the discriminative theology of Islam.

Can we all agree on one thing: that it is never acceptable to put an individual to death over an insult? Would it be fair to say that exercising such restraint is a foundation of modernity? Among civilized societies, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

However, the belief that insulting the Prophet of Islam is a capital offense is nearly ubiquitous among Muslims, whether Shiite or Sunni. The only real point of contention isn’t whether the offender should die, but rather what gyrations must take place before their throat is opened to the afternoon air.

Many Imams and Muslim commentators who decried the attack on Charlie Hebdo did so not because they believed the murder was wrong, but instead that the miscreants should have been arrested, tried in an Islamic court and then killed, which of course is so totally different.

WHAT A NAME…”EARTH JUSTICE”…THESE PHONY ENVIRONMENTALISTS SPRING UP EVERYWHERE LIKE SOUTHERN KUDZU WEED…..RSK

Calls on Congress to put this special place off-limits to oil and gas development…

Washington, D.C. — The following is a statement from Earthjustice President Trip Van Noppen:
“We applaud and thank President Obama for adopting a conservation plan that for the first time proposes to designate a large portion of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness to protect it from exploitation and development. We call on Congress to follow the President’s lead.

“Known as ‘The Sacred Place Where Life Begins’ to Alaska Native communities and teeming with rare wildlife, this is a place of incalculable beauty and value, to be protected like Yellowstone and Yosemite, not turned into another polluted oil patch.”

Looks like the environmental movement should come with a “Made in Moscow” label. And considering that the Center for American Progress is the group with the single biggest policy influence on Obama and is now on board with Ready for Hillary, Russian money going into it should be worrying as Free Beacon’s Lachlan Markay reports.

A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.

Rep. Trey Gowdy is Chairman of the Benghazi Select Committee and for the record isRated -3 by AAI, indicating anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012) …rsk

Rep. Trey Gowdy came out swinging at Tuesday’s hearing of his Select Committee, laying into Democrats for playing political games and blasting the State Department for refusing to produce documents and for preventing witnesses from testifying before the committee.

As the hearing began, Gowdy had to cut off his microphone to conduct a private conversation with ranking Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who has been carrying the administration’s water consistently.

While the two men remained personally cordial to each other, the “comity” of earlier hearings was gone.

On Monday, Gowdy released a scathing letter to Cummings that set the table for Tuesday’s hearing.

Over Christmas I finally got around to reading Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth. I cannot recommend this book – newly translated from the German – highly enough. It challenges and indeed changes nearly all received wisdom about the leading figure behind the genocide of European Jews during World War II.

The title of course refers to Hannah Arendt’s omnipresent and over-praised account of Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. I would say that Stangneth’s book not merely surpasses but actually buries Arendt’s account. Not least in showing how Arendt was fooled by Eichmann’s role-play in the dock in Jerusalem. For whereas Arendt famously portrayed the man in the glass booth as a type of bureaucrat, Stangneth shows not only that Eichmann was not the man Arendt took him to be, but that she fell for a very carefully curated and prepared performance. Putting together a whole library of scattered documents from Eichmann’s exile in Argentina in the 1950s, Stangneth puts the actual, unrepentant Eichmann back centre stage.

Is the tech term, as in computer hacker, connected with the verb hakn, meaning to chop?

Mosaic reader Max J. Katz writes:

I am interested in the etymology of “hacker” as it is used in computer technology to mean variously an expert, gamester, or someone who maliciously intrudes upon someone else’s computer to change or manipulate it. In particular, I wonder whether there is a connection with the Yiddish verb hakn, meaning to chop.

There is an extensive literature on the history of “hacker”—and also extensive disagreement. One thing there is no argument about is that the term was first used for computer buffs in the early 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Originally, it seems, a hacker at MIT was not specifically a lover of computers and their programs; rather, he was anyone who was more passionate about an extra-curricular hobby than about his academic studies. The earliest documentation of the word denoting such students dates to the late 1950s, when members of an MIT model-railroad club used it for themselves.

From this point on, the questions take over. Were the first program hackers out from the start to gain control of other people’s computers for nefarious purposes, or were they simply digital fun-lovers whose pranks meant no harm? If the latter, should the meaning of “hacker” be revised to rid it of the negative connotations that have colored it strongly since the 1980s, so that it once again refers to all programming enthusiasts and not just the criminally minded? And if so, what should criminal hackers be called? (Among the terms suggested have been “computer vandals,” “crackers,” and “white-hat hackers” as opposed to “black-hat hackers.”)