RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the past week, Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis have been competing for headlines with the terror attacks in Paris. If not for the latter, events surrounding the shooting death of another black male suspect during an altercation with police might have attracted the same level of attention as similar incidents around the nation.

The situation in Minneapolis is not ideal for the Black Lives Matter movement. The “victim” in this case isn’t particularly sympathetic, an alleged domestic abuser with prior arrests. Nevertheless, the local Black Lives Matter chapter has proceeded as if he were “executed” in cold blood by a malicious police department.

Joining a bipartisan panel of politicos from the area on the “Wrong About Everything” podcast this past weekend, I sought to understand the cultural context which produces these protests. The panel included Republican lobbyist and rural city council member Mike Franklin, Black Lives Matter activist and nonprofit professional Carin Mrotz, Democratic National Committeeman and local SEIU president Javier-Morillo-Alicea, and yours truly — Republican activist and suburban city council member Walter Hudson.

Just 100 years ago, Einstein announced his General Theory of Relativity. Four decades later, I used it to calculate the rate of a clock orbiting the Earth. It has turned out to be of importance for the GPS system, which depends on accurate clocks in navigation satellites.

Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity (GR)

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (“Without Albert Einstein, We’d All Be Lost”), Robbert Dijkgraaf (director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study) reminds us that on Nov. 4, 1915, Albert Einstein, working alone in wartime [World War-I, 1914-18] Berlin, submitted the first of four scientific papers that would change the course of physics and our view of the Cosmos: “His general theory of relativity (GR) is perhaps the greatest achievement of a single human mind.” Although it made Einstein the most famous scientist in history, he did not live to see the full impact of his ideas. He did not foresee earth satellites, lunar landings, or the application of GR to GPS, the Global Positioning System of navigation satellites.

As Dijkgraaf writes:

“Only now, a century later, are we gathering apples from the tree he planted: black holes that tear stars apart … ; cosmic gravitational lenses that distort images of faraway galaxies, as if seen through a funhouse mirror. And perhaps the biggest wonder of all: a comprehensive and detailed understanding of the evolution of the universe. Amazingly, in just 100 years, humankind has uncovered 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.

How far would you go to get a drug that could save your child’s life? Across an ocean? That is exactly what the federal government is forcing some American families with dying children to do.

In 2012, when Diego Morris was 11 years old, he was diagnosed with a deadly cancer in his leg called osteosarcoma. Doctors at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., removed the tumor, but the prognosis was poor. There was a significant risk that even extensive chemotherapy after surgery would not prevent the cancer from returning.

Fortunately, a team of doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City had developed a revolutionary new drug, mifamurtide (MTP), that can prevent osteosarcoma from coming back. A study by Dr. Eugenie Kleinerman of MD Anderson and Dr. Paul Meyers of Sloan Kettering showed the drug resulted in a 30% reduction in the osteosarcoma mortality rate at eight years after diagnosis.

The drug was approved in 2009 by the European Medicines Agency and is currently the standard of care in Europe, Israel and many other countries. In 2012 it received the prestigious Prix Galien Award, the gold medal for pharmaceutical research and development in the United Kingdom.

Sylvia Thompson is a black conservative writer whose aim is to counter the liberal spin on issues pertaining to race and culture.
If you are behind, you are not leading. You are either following or being left behind. Barack Obama is neither leading nor following; he is orchestrating the destruction of this country.

I think many Americans have had it up to the gills with pundits, spokespeople, and politicians trying desperately to excuse Obama’s deficiencies by claiming he is “leading from behind,” particularly in regard to foreign policy.

This ridiculous characterization is “political speak.” The people who describe Obama’s behavior this way fear lodging negative comments against him because he is, in their view, the “first American black president.” Technically, he is not. He is the first mixed-race American president (allowing for the possibility that other presidents may have had mixed heritage without being aware of it).

The distinction is worth noting in my view. The first black president will be an American black whose ancestors were brought to this country and who has lived the American black experience.

Be that as it may, the weak and the gullible continue to hide behind the “first black president” canard. Political operatives think that this reality absolves them of their duty to remove him from office, as the Constitution requires.

World leaders are astutely aware of what Obama is all about. Our traditional enemies recognize that it’s time to take advantage of his deliberate weakening of America’s global strength. They can now jockey for positions of control, before he is removed. Allies must determine in the interim how best to protect their countries from mutual enemies because Obama has effectively abandoned them.

More than four dozen U.S. intelligence analysts formally filed complaints that their honest intelligence evaluations regarding the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al-Qaida’s branch Al Nusra Front in Syria were altered by superiors to prop up President Barack Obama’s false proclamations that he and his “national security team” are winning the war.

As previously reported in the Conservative Base, Fox News’ Chief Intelligence Correspondent Catherine Herridge was informed by her anonymous but reliable source, who is an associate of the CENTCOM intelligence analysts, that they were instructed to avoid negative reports. In fact, they received two emails saying the analysts needed to “cut it out” and “toe the line,” when submitting reports.
In an earlier report published by the Conservative Base, it was reported that some of the intelligence community’s top analysts informed the Pentagon’s official watchdog that their reports have been systematically edited to backup President Obama’s — and his national security team’s — false narrative in which they claimed the air campaign against ISIS is more successful than it actually is.

Gratitude has been a prominent theme of National Review’s ​ since the beginning. Bill Buckley wrote a book bearing the title “Gratitude,” and his attitude was infectious. One indicator of what a remarkable man WFB was is that so many people feel such sincere gratitude for having known him, even if it was only through his work. I won’t embarrass my friends and colleagues by enumerating their gifts and charms here, but I am grateful to know them, and to share in National Review’s work.

Thanksgiving even more than Independence Day puts me in mind of the American idea; July 4 is about the American mode of government and political liberty, but Thanksgiving is about the much older American nation, which precedes the Declaration of Independence. Thanksgiving is about the weird ancient America, the religious fanatics and explorers and utopians and opportunists who came to what were then savage shores to freeze (the Mayflower landed in November) and starve and fight for — what?

Saadiq Long is an American-born Muslim (convert) and a US Air Force veteran. Per an exclusive report by Patrick Poole at PJM, Long and several family members have been detained in a Turkish jail under suspicion for being part of an ISIS cell. Here’s the back story:

Two years ago Long wanted to return to Oklahoma from Qatar, where he had been living with his wife and child, teaching English for a living. But he was unable to get back to the United States because his name was on the no-fly list. He claimed the only reason his name was on the list was because he was Muslim, that no-fly lists were “Islamophobic,” and that he had no affiliations with anyone that would raise suspicion about him.

Long got a lot of media attention as leftists rushed to his defense. Naturally CAIR got in on the act and successfully advocated for having Long’s name removed from the list long enough for him to return to Oklahoma. (Geez, what’s the point of being on this list if your name can be removed temporarily so you can fly?)

The Obama administration is pulling out all the stops to deny Christians in the Middle East any relief from their horrific plight. The door to the United States has been closed using an obscure bureaucratic angle that withholds recognition of official refugee status for Christians fleeing ISIS. And now an unnamed State Department representative has signaled that Middle Eastern Christians may be excluded from an official declaration of genocide. Per a report at NRO, Yazidis will be officially recognized as victims of genocide. And rightfully so. But Christians are not slated to be. And while this may seem like meaningless bureaucratic garbage compared to the reality that is unfolding in the Middle East, the implications are significant.

First, it would continue to render invisible the genocide that is being committed against Christians in the Middle East. There are no words to describe this disgrace, but sin comes to mind. For an overview of the savagery that has been, and continues to be, inflicted upon Christians in the Middle East, see the short summary of part of NRO article, below.

The State Department and the other US security agencies are telling us to be afraid. Not quite like that, but they’ve issued a dire “travel warning” and “terror alert.”

They overheard “chatter.” Obviously in Arabic and it wasn’t Happy Thanksgiving. Paris wasn’t enough. They want New York, again, though no place is safe.

This is the real deal. Should we be worried? Yes and no.

At a time when our president scoffs at Republicans and makes Jews and Christians feel like second-class citizens, it’s comforting to know that our national security officers (FBI, CIA) care for all of us equally. It is gratifying to know that somebody likes us and means to protect us from the barbarians who keep storming our borders.

That’s a relief, if only we knew exactly what to do about these warnings.

In Israel they don’t need “terror warnings” because the terror is with them every moment of every day.

If I’m being Islamophobic, very well, they made us that way. They made Brussels that way. The capital is on total lockdown because Islam came to town.

From time to time, something will leap out to me as an illustration of the fact that blacks and whites often inhabit separate realities. I’ve often told the story of the editorial in a black neighborhood newspaper in Philadelphia warning African-Americans to flee urban areas in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential elections because George W. Bush was planning to — this was presented as unquestionable fact – use nuclear weapons against the inner cities to suppress the black vote. This wasn’t somebody ranting on Twitter — this was in print, in a regularly published newspaper that was, in the early days of the 21st century, still a going concern.

I’ve come to call this sort of thing (with apologies to Richard Hofstadter) the paranoid style in African-American politics. Mild versions of conspiracy theories play a large role in mainstream American politics in the form of folk beliefs about how government works, the role of lobbyists and campaign contributions, and the like. For right-wing populists, it’s the “Establishment” and the “donor class,” for left-wingers it’s the Koch brothers, Big Oil, Big Money, Big Bigness, etc. We’ve all heard the story of how we could be running our automobiles on seawater if not for the fact that the petro-billionaires are suppressing the technology. The closer you get to the fringes, the more prominent the role of conspiracy theories. But it seems to me that conspiracy theory plays an outsize role in mainstream African-American political discourse.