RUTHFULLY YOURS

In February 2015, Columbia University—currently ranked the fourth most distinguished academic institution in the United States by U.S. News and World Report—announced that all its students, undergraduate and graduate alike, would be obliged to take part in a “Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative.” This “new, required programming,” the Columbia bureaucracy explained, was designed to explore “the relationship between sexual respect and community membershi

Columbia’s students were given a menu of “participation options.” They could watch a minimum of two preselected videos about “rape culture” and gender identity and write a “reflection” about what they had learned. They could attend film screenings about sexual assault and masculinity and engage in a monitored discussion afterwards. They could create a “work of art” about the “relationship between sexual respect and University community membership.” Or, if they “identif[ied] as survivors, co-survivors, allies, or individuals who have experienced forms of secondary trauma,” they could attend workshops on “Finding Keys to Resiliency.”

Options in the “Finding Keys to Resiliency” module included a “mindfulness workshop” on “cultivating nonjudgmental awareness and being more present for their experience.” If attending the book launch for SLUT: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism got one too agitated about female oppression, one could unwind at a “Yoga class for women” or a “knitting circle.”

One by one, U.S. Senate Democrats are announcing that after much deliberation ‎‎(translated as arm twisting by President Barack Obama), they have decided to support the ‎Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, despite serious misgivings. Each of the senators wants you to ‎know that they were personally wrestling with this decision for weeks, talking to ‎experts (provided by the Obama administration for the most part), reading the ‎agreement carefully, weighing and balancing risk versus reward. Each Senate ‎Democrat joining the charade of moving from indecision to decision, whether ‎Claire McCaskill of Missouri or Kirsten Gillibrand of New York or Harry Reid of ‎Nevada, makes sure to add that they want to do everything to protect our ally ‎Israel, and will support other steps as necessary to remain vigilant on that front. ‎Some of the deal supporters call for more military aid in the future for Israel, ‎others for selling bunker buster bombs to Israel in case Iran violates the ‎agreement in obvious ways that even the Obama administration can not hide.

Donald Trump, who has repeatedly accused China of stealing manufacturing jobs from the U.S., acknowledged today that an array of Trump-branded clothes, accessories and other products are made in China.The real estate and casino mogul, who is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination, blamed China for the fact that Trump ties, Trump cufflinks and even Trump teddy bears come with a “Made in China” label.

“The answer is very simple: Because of the fact that China so manipulates their currency it makes it almost impossible for American companies to compete,” Trump told ABC News.

“You see it with all of the items you are talking about. You also see it with building products. If it continues this way, America won’t have any jobs, except for taking care of the elderly.”

Asked if he ever looked at having his Trump products manufactured in the U.S., Trump said, “Always do. There are very few companies that do it because they can’t compete with the manipulation.”

A school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a UN agency that deals exclusively with Palestinians, has published cartoons encouraging students and others to kill Jews by running them over. One of the cartoons is above. A spate of car attacks in recent months by Palestinians has left four Israelis dead and over 30 injured.
Former BBC foreign news producer Chris Gunness, who is chief spokesperson for UNRWA, has long been criticized for covering up for UNRWA’s unchecked extremists. Just two days ago, on August 23, Gunness (who is British but lives in Tel Aviv) tweeted: “An @UNRWA education is a passport to dignity amid rising extremism in the #MiddleEast.” Gunness posted a further comment that the education provided by UNRWA is “essential”.
(The cartoon story was unearthed by the intrepid anonymous blogger “Elder of Ziyon” who has exposed a series of scandals at UNRWA.)

Certainly you read about the six-year-old from Colorado Springs who got suspended from school for sexual harassment, specifically for kissing his little classmate on the hand. It was his second suspension, the first for kissing the same little girl on the cheek when he was five.

Think of what “the authorities” would have done to this menace if he had told his teacher he hated her, or worse, that he wished she were dead. Permanent exile? Reform school? Mandatory psychotherapy? Banishment to Siberia?

The point is that this child’s totally benign, even sweet, behavior was taken with dead seriousness by the [idiotic] powers-that-be, and if he had verbalized any angry feelings, you know the punishment would have been even more draconian.

Contrast this with the behavior of the man who occupies the Oval Office when listening over the past decades to the bellicose chants of the mad mullahs in Iran––“Death to America, Death to Israel”––with the man who apparently thinks it’s okay for Israel’s enemies today to chant: “Israel must be obliterated!”

Anwar Eshki, a retired major general in the Saudi armed forces, has made it his personal goal to strike peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

A former top adviser to the Saudi government, Eshki raised eyebrows in June when he appeared alongside Israeli Foreign Ministry Director-General and longtime confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Dore Gold at a conference held by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC, espousing desires to build a Saudi-Israel peace, especially to counter the regionally destabilizing expansion of Iran.

“The main project between me and Dore Gold is to bring peace between Arab countries and Israel,” said Eshki.

The former general noted that while the initiative is “personal,” Riyadh “knows about the project” and “isn’t against it, because we need peace.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/423003/print

Donald Trump is the king of the superlative. To The Donald, things are always the best, the worst, the greatest of all time. Love him or hate him, we know Donald Trump’s opinion on many topics. Even if those topics mostly have to do with himself.

We present the top, the biggest, the greatest of The Donald’s superlatives:

1. “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”

America needs jobs. The Donald will deliver.

2. “I’m really rich! I’ll show you that in a second. And by the way: I’m not even saying that in a brag.”

Trump is richer than you. And more humble, too.

3. “I’m the most militaristic person ever.”

Is that actually a good quality? I would have gone with Genghis Khan . . .

4. “I will build a great wall . . . and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me.”

We will probably have to take The Donald’s word on this one.

5. “Hillary Clinton was the worst secretary of state in the history of the United States. Hillary was the worst. In the history of the United States there’s never been a secretary of state so bad as Hillary.”

Whoa now. Don’t sell John Kerry short.

6. “I would use the greatest minds. I know the best negotiators. I’m in New York – I know the good ones, the bad ones. I always say: ‘I know the ones people think are good.’ I know people you’ve never heard of that are better than all of them.”

The man behind The Apprentice will stock his cabinet with the best of the best.

7. “If you really love this country you have a very, very hard time convincing people that what you’re doing is right and that you’re really smart. And, like, a lot of us are really smart. I’m really smart – I went to the Wharton School of Finance.”

Trump attended an Ivy League school, so he’s not like those bozos George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

8. “I would hit [ISIS] so hard your head would spin.”

Trump is probably right about this one. He has, after all, been inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment’s Hall of Fame.

— Mark Antonio Wright is an intern at National Review.

This month, the Environmental Protection Agency released its new guidelines for the states to follow in reducing emissions from the power plants that provide reliable electricity for our homes, schools, offices, and hospitals. These regulations will do little to improve the environment, but will significantly increase our monthly electric bills, cause frequent power outages, destroy millions of jobs, and shut down entire companies at a time when the economy needs a boost, not a brake.

The EPA’s “Clean Power Plan for Existing Power Plants” requires states to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants by almost a third from what they were in 2005 — and to do it in just 15 years. Coal-burning power plants and even the cleaner-burning natural-gas-fired plants are the targets, and the Obama administration intends for “green” energy sources like wind and solar to replace them.

How could Hillary Clinton’s staff let her get away with it?

It’s one of the most perplexing questions surrounding the massive scandal over Clinton’s use of an unsecured, private e-mail server when she served as secretary of state. How could it be that no one in the State Department pointed out that Clinton was violating government policy and putting sensitive information at risk? Why didn’t her closest advisers warn that the move could torpedo her resurgent presidential ambitions?

State Department staffers aren’t talking — not yet, at least. But the thousands of Clinton e-mails reluctantly released by the State Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit are illuminating. They reveal a Secretary of State heavily insulated from her agency’s rank-and-file by a devoted inner circle, one which relentlessly lavished praise on Clinton and sometimes functioned more like receptionists than top strategic advisers. Many of the same confidantes appear set to take high-level jobs in a future Clinton White House, meaning her “yes-man problem” is likely to persist should she become president.

Leftwingers’ taunts in 2008 and 2012 have come back to haunt them.
In the jubilation of the Obama election victories of 2008 and 2012, the Left warned Republicans that the party of McCain and Romney was now “too old, too white, too male — and too few.” Columnists between 2008 and 2012 ad nauseam berated Republicans on the grounds that their national candidates “no longer looked like America.” The New York Times stable crowed that the Republicans of 2008 were “all white and nearly all male” — not too long before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running-mate. In reaction to the defeats of McCain and Romney, Salon and Harper’s ran stories on the “Grand Old White Party” and “Angry White Men.”

For Democratic progressives, Hawaiian Barack Obama could not be of mixed ancestry and decidedly middle class, but simply “black” or “African American” — as if he had shared the Jim Crow experience of Clarence Thomas. Nor was there any allowance that race itself had become hard to sort into neat categories in a nation of immigration, intermarriage, and assimilation, in which millions of Americans were one-half this and one-quarter that. Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King proved that well enough by successfully constructing themselves as white for quite a long time.