RUTHFULLY YOURS

A reader sent me some interesting data on the actual track record of blacks in the Best Actor category of the Academy Awards. He writes:

The black population in the US is about 13%.

So, apparently according to Spike Lee et al, blacks must be given 13% of awards.

In the last nine years black actors won once which was 11% of the Best Actor awards.

In the last eleven years black actors won twice which was 18% of the Best Actor awards.

In the last fourteen years black actors won three times which was 21% of the Best Actor awards.

2013 – 20% of the nominees were black
2012 – 20%
2009 – 20%
2006 – 20%
2004 – 20%
2001 – 20%
1999 – 20%

In the last four years there have been 20 nominees for Best Actor. Two were black. Ten percent.

In his delightful book “The Fortunes of Permanence-Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia” Roger Kimball has a chapter “Rereading John Buchan. He writes” Buchan, who described himself as “high- low brow” was author of a spy thriller “Greenmantle” in 1916 which describes a German effort to manipulate a radical Islamist group in Turkey. Kimball quotes a protagonist in the book: “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.”

There’s more. Kimball mines this from another character in the book. “There is a great stirring in Islam, something moving on the face of the waters….Those religious revivals come in cycles, and one is due about now. And they are quite clear about the details. A seer has arisen of the blood of the Prophet, who will restore the Khalifate to its old glories and Islam to its old purity.”

Goodness gracious! Islamophobia in 1916!

In his delightful book “The Fortunes of Permanence-Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia” Roger Kimball has a chapter “Rereading John Buchan. He writes” Buchan, who described himself as “high- low brow” was author of a spy thriller “Greenmantle” in 1916 which describes a German effort to manipulate a radical Islamist group in Turkey. Kimball quotes a protagonist in the book: “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.”

There’s more. Kimball mines this from another character in the book. “There is a great stirring in Islam, something moving on the face of the waters….Those religious revivals come in cycles, and one is due about now. And they are quite clear about the details. A seer has arisen of the blood of the Prophet, who will restore the Khalifate to its old glories and Islam to its old purity.”

Goodness gracious! Islamophobia in 1916! rsk

Before Jack Higgins, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth, Wilbur Smith and all the other authors who have made the wrongly accused rogue male their hero, there was John Buchan’s urbane and gentlemanly Richard Hannay, still the most endearing of the lot
A century after publication, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps remains the quintessential spy thriller. There is no need to rediscover this novel, since it has never gone away. No work of fiction published during the Edwardian period is more widely available in bookstores in as many mass-market and scholarly editions. The presence of The Thirty-Nine Steps in popular culture has spread even further—the book’s title has a life of its own.

It is one of the first adult adventure novels I can remember reading, part of an early teenage thriller binge that included Jack Higgins, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth and Wilbur Smith, and a phase followed by a lasting engagement with the likes of Eric Ambler, Joseph Conrad and John le Carré.

The writing career of John Buchan, who died in 1940, predates all of the other authors I have just mentioned except Conrad. The Thirty-Nine Steps is the forerunner to countless subsequent spy thrillers and action movies where a lone hero is pitted against the forces of darkness, which is the scenario used by virtually all of them.

The Thirty-Nine Steps has spawned four feature-film adaptations, the first and best-known of which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1935. The novel has also been adapted many times for radio, most notably for broadcast by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in 1938. In recent years a comic stage version based on the Hitchcock film has been performed in many countries throughout the world, including South Korea, Russia, Israel, Poland and Australia, as well as enjoying a long run on the London stage that, at the time of writing, continues.

The opaqueness that marks both the Obama administration and Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime, makes it difficult to know how many unfrozen billions of dollars are going to the coffers of the Islamic Republic following the lifting of the sanctions. The Obama administration puts the figure between $50 billion to $100 billion. But according to Gholamreza Mesbahi Moghaddam, a leading member of the Majles Plan and Budget Commission, who served as the governor of the Iran’s Central Bank, the total figure is $130 billion.

Whatever the amount, it will allow the 76 years old sickly Khamenei, to immediately upturn Iranian hostilities in the Middle East and beyond.
The lifting of the sanctions came after international monitors concluded – based on Iran’s self-reporting – that it complied with the conditions set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Yet, Obama and Kerry are lauding this farce as a victory of diplomacy over war.

A little essay about the evils of Tabula Rosa–the idea that all people are born alike and can be easily molded by government. This is a truly toxic idea that is behind the current refugee crisis in Europe. Germany will not be able to digest Muslim immigrants no matter how hard they try and the evidence is everywhere. Just consider blacks in the US and gypsies in Europe. Lots of other examples, too. R.W.

Ideas have consequences but these can be deadly. Think the millions killed in seemingly endless religious strife and the carnage fueled by Marxism and Nazism. But less obvious is the damage inflicted by barely acknowledged bad ideas. The parallel might be death by carbon monoxide—scarcely noticed and almost painless but in the long run no less destructive than terrorism.

In today’s political landscape, the doctrine of human nature as a blank slate illustrates this carbon monoxide-like harm. Indeed, this culprit is so imperceptible that it barely makes any list of threats and those who embrace it often are actually celebrated for their hopeful views.

The blank slate view, frequently called by its Latin name Tabula Rasa basically holds that all humans are born without any mental content so, for better or worse, they are creatures of the environment. The opposite is that many human traits are hard-wired genetically and thus impervious to environmental manipulation. Going one step further, as a result of evolutionary divergence people sharing similar physical traits, for example, members of various racial or ethnic groups, differ at birth in terms of propensity for violence, intellectual ability, and multiple other readily measureable (and often obvious) dispositions. Current unspeakable popular stereotypes reflect this reality—the hard-working orderly German or the loquacious Irish. Note well—no psychologist who studies this subject claims that innate group differences are totally determinative. There will always be some lazy Germans or tongue-tied Irishmen.

Press Briefing by Press Secretary Josh Earnest, January 19, 2016:

MR. EARNEST: “…the release of five Americans who are being unjustly detained inside of Iran…What we saw was that essentially was a humanitarian gesture that was offered up by the Iranians. We made a reciprocal humanitarian gesture by releasing seven individuals…”
“QUESTION: …the Department of State announced this payment of $1.7 billion to the government of Iran just before the plane carrying the freed Americans landed in Geneva. You’re really telling me that this is an absolute coincidence?…
MR. EARNEST: I think we’ve made pretty clear that this is not a coincidence. The fact is, these kinds of diplomatic opportunities…
QUESTION: …Paul Ryan has suggested this was a ransom payment…
MR. EARNEST: What I’m suggesting is that the successful resolution of our concerns about Iran’s nuclear program created a series of diplomatic opportunities…”

UN Secretary-General’s Remarks (January 15, 2016) at General Assembly Presentation of the Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism (January 7, 2016):

“Definitions of “terrorism” and “violent extremism” are the prerogative of Member States…”

For more human rights and United Nations coverage see www.HumanRightsVoices.org.

WASHINGTON—The U.S. military has spent five years developing advanced cyberweapon and digital capabilities and is likely to deploy them more publicly soon, the head of the Pentagon’s U.S. Cyber Command said Thursday.

Adm. Mike Rogers, who is also director of the National Security Agency, said U.S. policy makers have largely agreed on rules of engagement for when cyberweapons can be used for defense.

There is still an open discussion, however, about when cyberweapons should be used for “offense,” such as carrying out attacks against a group or foreign country.

“You can tell we are at the tipping point now,” Adm. Rogers said. “The capacity and the capability are starting to come online [and] really starting to pay off in some really tangible capabilities that you will start to see us apply in a broader and broader way.”

Still, Adm. Rogers stopped short of specifying how exactly these cyberpowers could be deployed in coming months.

The definition of this colloquialism is: ” one should not presume to know the outcome of an event which is still in progress. More specifically, the phrase is used when a situation is (or appears to be) nearing its conclusion.”

Her pac and friends are still humming“Now it’s time for us to stand up with Hillary.” Well, she can’t wash Bernie Sanders or the FBI right out of her hair…

Hmmmm…perhaps she should learn the lyrics to “This Nearly Was Mine” from South Pacific…

Earlier this week, the big breaking news was the release of five Americans that had been held hostage in Iran, just days after I ran a column in this space asking why the administration wasn’t doing more to release them. That led the Village Voice to slam me for not understanding how hostage negotiations really work — and for daring to suggest that President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry weren’t doing enough to handle the problem.

Then, bit by bit, the truth began to come out. Now we know Obama and Kerry weren’t up to the job, and instead have managed to — once again — make us foolish in the eyes of the Iranians, and everyone else involved.

We’ve learned that in exchange for the release of the five Americans, the administration agreed to drop all charges against seven Iranians accused of helping Tehran dodge sanctions on its military and nuclear-weapons program — the same program Iran isn’t supposed to have anymore.

The administration also included a sweetener in the form for a $1.7 billion settlement on claims relating to the sale of military equipment to Iran before the 1979 revolution — that is, in the days of the hated Shah. That’s in addition to the $100 billion in unfrozen assets Tehran has access to, now that sanctions are lifted — lifted the same day, as it happens, as the prisoners were released.

The release Saturday during a prisoner swap of four Americans held by Iran, including the reporter Jason Rezaian and Christian pastor Saeed Abedini, is certainly welcome news. But the details of this deal, arranged after a year of secret negotiations, are troubling.

In exchange the U.S. freed seven Iranian men, six with dual American citizenship—though they seem to have decided against returning to Iran. Most were charged with export violations: in other words, smuggling goods and technology, including those with military applications, from the U.S. to Iran. By making this deal, which traded law-abiding U.S. citizens for Iranian defendants charged with or convicted of federal crimes that jeopardize U.S. national security, the administration has stooped to Iran’s level. That’s a high price to pay, and it sets a dangerous precedent for federal law enforcement.

I served as an assistant U.S. attorney for 23 years, working with counter-proliferation agents from Homeland Security Investigations to investigate and prosecute unlawful arms procurement by Iran. The reason for our focus on Iran was its sustained effort over decades to obtain munitions from the U.S.
One of the defendants I helped to prosecute was Amir Ardebili, an agent operating from Shiraz, Iran, who attempted to buy weapons components from American companies. Starting in 2004 Mr. Ardebili dealt with Cross International, a Pennsylvania-based front company run by undercover agents. Among the components he agreed to buy from Cross were microchips used in phased-array radar (for missile tracking and target acquisition) and a digital air-data computer for the F-4 Phantom fighter aircraft.