RUTHFULLY YOURS

No one knows what exactly happened to the deceased Freddie Gray, except that it should not have happened. Between what is outlined in the indictments and what will be proven in court is an unknown abyss. But the more dramatic the short-term exuberance over the sweeping indictments, the more likely the long-term fury when the charges are likely to be substantially reduced or unproven in court.

Almost everyone blames the subsequent Baltimore rioting on some –ism — endemic racism, economic inequality, the lack of jobs, the legacy of slavery, systematic police brutality and insensitivity, the pathologies of the black underclass, the destruction of the black family and on and on. However, most of America, rich and poor, black, white and other, liberal and conservative can more or less chart the conditions that explain a Ferguson or Baltimore — and remain quiet about it. At this point, I don’t think much will change until action follows rhetoric and someone like Barack Obama symbolically puts his kids in the public schools rather than at Sidwell Friends, or some of the loud MSNBC team choose to live, in desegregated style, in the Baltimore inner city, or Apple and Google grandees mentor East Palo Alto gangbangers, or an Al Gore recruits inner-city youth on his green staffs, or a Warren Buffett leads a national effort on the part of plutocrats to invest money in Detroit or Oakland shopping centers.

“It is ridiculous to hope that Islam can or will reform. Leave that Pollyanna-ism to Egypt’s President el Sisi. The only sure way to protect our values – the best the world has ever experienced – is to prevent too many Muslims from coming here. Full stop. End of story.”
If you don’t stand for Western values, as Senator Sinodinis conspicuously failed to do on a recent Q&A, you’ll fall for the blind and pernicious cliches of the multi-culti left. What’s so hard to grasp in the simple and unimpeachable statement that Islam and modernity’s hard-won freedoms are oil and water?

“It is ridiculous to hope that Islam can or will reform. Leave that Pollyanna-ism to Egypt’s President el Sisi. The only sure way to protect our values – the best the world has ever experienced – is to prevent too many Muslims from coming here. Full stop. End of story.”

Place: Balmain coffee shop. Made-up conversation. Circa recently:

“All people should live in peace and harmony with each other; respecting each other’s lifestyles, cultures, religions, and political views.”

“Hold on! How about penis gourds? I don’t want my children subject to men wearing only penis gourds at my local coffee shop, even on the very hottest of days.”

“True enough, there are always limits. How about living in harmony with people whose children might want to cut your head off?”

“Oh, that’s alright, we must be politically correct. Be non-discriminatory and show what well-rounded compassionate people we are.”

MAYBE OBAMA SHOULD BOW TO THE PRESENT KING AS HE DID DURING HIS FIRST VISIT TO THE MIDDLE EAST……RSK
There’s a great line in the latest James Bond trailer. Warning Bond of his ignorance of danger, Mr. White remarks: “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane.” It’s a perfect analogy for President Obama’s policy in the Middle East: a kite dancing in the spiraling hurricane of sectarian politics. Unfortunately, President Obama isn’t James Bond. And today, with America’s kite lost in the wind, Saudi Arabia’s leaders are reverting to sectarian paranoia. If we decipher the causes of the U.S.–Saudi breakdown, two specific events stand out. First, the American withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011.

That decision led to Iran’s seizure of Iraqi political dialogue and to Iraq’s sectarian fragmentation, delivering it into the hands of ISIS. Second, President Obama’s repeated WMD “red line” impotence in Syria. Repeated, because Assad has repeatedly murdered Syrian civilians with chlorine gas since his Ghouta massacre of August 2013. These two events encouraged the Saudis to believe that President Obama is unreliable and uninterested in their concerns.

Their view has been reinforced by subsequent events. The president’s malleability toward Iran, for example, has been especially problematic. Witnessing Iran’s growing empire of Khomeinism and President Obama’s apparent acquiescence to that endeavor — take Obama’s silence to this week’s capture of a vessel that was under U.S. protection — the Saudis are panicking. The central problem is that while both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are aware of Iran’s aggressive ambitions, each nation has a different conception of America’s deterrent power against Iran. Where President Obama sees American regional strength via the (semi) formidable U.S. military presence in the Gulf, the Saudis see America’s regional weakness via Iran’s political domination in Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, and now Sana’a, Yemen. And the distinctions seem to reveal something deeper.

Having watched closely the manner in which questions of liberty and power are batted around in the first part of the 21st century — most recently during the disgraceful contretemps that Indiana’s rather tame Religious Freedom Restoration Act provoked across the land — I have come to wonder of late whether the Bill of Rights could be ratified today.

In its classical mode, liberalism requires the citizenry that it serves to respect the crucial distinction that obtains between the principle of a given rule and the consequences that the rule might feasibly yield. Simply put, a country in which the people regard certain individual rights as inviolable axioms of nature — and who accept with alacrity, therefore, that they will often be used for ill — will be a country that boasts protections of those rights within its national charter. A country in which the people are focused primarily on what might be done with those rights, by contrast, will be a country that prefers to elevate and to abide by the whims of transient majorities — or, perhaps, by the discretion of a supposedly enlightened few. In Indiana, we were given an insight into which of these countries the people of the United States would rather live in.

Hill and Bill can’t hide from shady deals exposed in ‘Clinton Cash’

The Clintons have been playing the political press for idiots.

Revealing what they’ve been up to took a little bit of work. It wasn’t obvious. While Bill Clinton was giving a speech about fighting AIDS in Africa, or about educating girls in Asia, reporters simply regurgitated the press release. They didn’t ask: Who’s that shady guy standing next to Bill? What are his interests? How much money has he given to, or raised for, Bill, Hillary and their foundation? And what favorable treatment did the shady guy subsequently receive from Hillary?

When you’re a political reporter, complexity is boring. Curiosity takes work. Asking questions and looking up information can lead to dead ends.

It’s much easier to do gaffe patrol. Go to press conferences. Quote party hacks who call you every day with juicy little observations. Or, when all else fails, simply write down your opinions and call it “analysis” or attribute your thoughts to “critics.”

Thank goodness, then, for Peter Schweizer and his blockbuster expose “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” (Very rich: The pair have made at least $136.5 million since 2001).

The details of the Clinton operation vary, but the overall M.O. is fairly consistent, he writes.

Across Bangkok, there are dozens of offices, unmarked and unbillboarded, with unlisted telephone numbers and extensions, trying to reach the perfect ratio of attracting no attention whatsoever while committing maximum, preferably violent harm on a small number of human targets.

The sharp-eyed might have noticed some of those offices last week by the extremely late-burning lights.

Three and a half years ago, the men and women in those offices, helped by almost unbelievably good luck, took a series of actions that shut down plans for terrorist attacks in Bangkok and, probably, upcountry. The plans were put to sleep but now there are suspicions the planners have awakened — regrouped, refreshed and restarted.

http://dailycaller.com/2015/05/03/breaking-shooting-in-texas-outside-of-muslim-cartoon-event-attended-by-geert-wilders/ Two men who opened fire Sunday outside of an event in Garland, Texas attended by Geert Wilders, a Dutch lawmaker and outspoken critic of radical Islam, have been killed by police. “As today’s Muhammad Art Exhibit event at the Curtis Culwell Center was coming to an end, two males drove up to the front […]

“To modify Lady Macbeth, not all the diarrhea in Africa can wash away the stench of the Clinton Foundation.”

One of the lessons learned by the Clintons back in the Nineties is that, if you’re gonna have a scandal, have a hundred of ’em. And then it’s all too complicated and just gives everyone a big headache, and they go back to watching “Friends” or “Baywatch” or whatever it was back then. When a scandal gets too easy to follow, that’s where the danger lies.

As things stand, Vladimir Putin has wound up with control of 20 per cent of American uranium production.

That’s almost too funny an update of the line variously attributed to Lenin, Stalin and others: “The capitalists will sell us the rope by which we will hang them.” In this case, we’ve sold Putin the uranium by which he will nuke us. As the Russian news agency TASS reported two years ago:

MOSCOW, May 22 (Itar-Tass) – Russia’s nuclear power corporation Rosatom controls 20 percent of all uranium reserves in the United States, the corporation’s chief, Sergei Kiriyenko told the State Duma on Wednesday…

“I am pleased to inform you that today we control 20 percent of uranium in the United States. If we need that uranium, we shall be able to use it any time,” Kiriyenko said.

Great! By the way, before he became America’s fastest rising uranium executive, Mr Kiriyenko was Prime Minister of Russia.

In return for facilitating the transfer to Putin of one-fifth of US uranium, the Clintons were given tens of millions of dollars by Vancouver businessman Frank Giustra (the founder of “Uranium One” in its pre-Putin days) and various of his associates. In 2006, Mr Giustra told The New Yorker:

The putative climate “debate” that has been raging for the last thirty years or so has now reached the point of duncical irrationality. (I put “debate” in scare quotes since what we are observing is not so much a debate as an ideological crusade that brooks no resistance; in effect, a political jihad against those who oppose the Warmist orthodoxy.) The upcoming Paris COP (climate treaty conference) slated for December of this year, which Obama is expected to ratify, renders the situation increasingly urgent.

The world’s leading politicians, abetted by the dubious claims of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are plainly eager to sign an accord which, if implemented, would lead to record levels of poverty and unemployment in both the developed and Third worlds. In the words [1] of Director of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) Tom Harris, “in formulating public policy on climate change, our leaders gloss over the uncertainties and close the door to evidence that does not fit the alarmist agenda.” There is little any concerned citizen can do but register his skepticism, doubts and defiance — that is, his resolute and fact-based denial, despite the social and professional stigma associated with being a “denier” and the threat of various forms of punitive action [2], especially in the academy. (See, for example, the “Statement on Climate Change” [3] professing allegiance to the IPCC signed by the faculty of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A & M University. Skeptics, regardless of their credentials, would never be hired in such a restrictive milieu.) By marshalling the reasons justifying such denial and disseminating them to the public, one hopes against hope to mitigate the disaster — not the so-called meteorological “disaster” of global warming but the economic disaster of uncertain science and crippling legislation — before it becomes irreversible.

On April 27, the media quoted Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman — the foreign policy wizard who engineered the fiasco of the North Korean nuclear deal under Pres. Clinton and who is now working her diplomatic legerdemain on Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran — threatened Israel. She said that if Prime Minister Netanyahu’s new coalition government does not pledge allegiance to the Two-State Solution (TSS), the U.S. will “find it difficult” to back Israel in the U.N. Security Council as U.S. administrations have in the past scores of times by casting a veto.

With the U.N’s roster of member-states almost one-third officially Muslim, if not for the United States the Council would long ago have crippled Israel with sanctions like those passed against Apartheid South Africa that helped bring that racist system down. In 1975, the General Assembly judged Zionism in UNGA Resolution 3379 to be “a form of racism” too. That resolution was repealed in 1991 but not the fifty-three other General Assembly resolutions passed over the years that explicitly liken Israel to Apartheid South Africa.