RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was not elected to make Washington “work” but to keep Washington from working against Americans.

The Republican party’s conservative base has a major problem. In assessing the 2014 midterm elections, a tidal wave in which the base propelled the GOP to substantial majorities in both houses of Congress, conservatives are in full agreement with President Obama and completely at odds with Republican leadership.

The president boldly declared that, while he was not on the ballot, his policies were. He could not have been more right.

GOP leadership boldly declares that the election was a case of voters trusting Republicans with an opportunity to “prove we can govern” — to demonstrate that GOP lawmakers can work effectively with the president. They could not be more wrong.

In an attempt to make educational books more friendly to practicing
Jews and Muslims, Oxford University Press publishers are banning any
mention of pigs, bacon, or sausage in their youth books.

Schoolbooks will not be allowed to publish references to pork, for
fear of offending Muslims or Jews.

According to a speech made Monday on BBC Radio 4, a leading
educational publisher, Oxford University Press, is banning the
reference to pigs, sausages, or anything pork-related in their books.

The Guardian, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, does for the reading public what Common Core books, also supported by the Gateses, do for American students – it provides a wealth of misinformation with an agenda. In its Global Development section, writer Liz Ford wrote of the role of girls and women under Islam, specifically Palestinians, and the violence to which they are subjected in their society.

Because her itemization was inaccurate and lacking references, I can provide some specifics about their driving force:

Koran 4:34 Allah has made men superior to women and, therefore, women must be obedient or be admonished and beaten.
M10-12 If the wife is rebellious, the man may warn her, follow with hitting, and beating but not breaking her bones or damaging her face. He may even imprison her in a room and withhold food and clothing.
M10:4 A man may forbid his wife to leave the home.
022:1 Women may never become judges (they are not equal)
L10:3 A woman’s value is half that of a man, because her “mind is deficient.” A woman should receive half the money of a man in an indemnity case, because women lack in intelligence and religion.
2:282 Her testimony is worth half the man’s.

A 12-year US Army Special Operations veteran who was severely wounded by an IED blast during his service in Afghanistan is now in Israel to help the IDF as part of a volunteer project, and to show support for the Jewish State, the Israeli 0404 News site reported Thursday. Brian Mast, who lost both legs and sustained other injuries in an attack in July 2010, arrived on Jan. 10 as a Sar-El program volunteer. The group’s itinerary includes logistics and maintenance work on bases, hikes and field trips around the country, and seminars on Israel and Jewish life. Mast is volunteering at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv as part of his two-week experience, according to the group.

Missing in more ways that one On Sunday, at the great Paris rally, the whole world was Charlie. By Tuesday, the veneer of solidarity was exposed as tissue thin. It began dissolving as soon as the real, remaining Charlie Hebdo put out its post-massacre issue featuring a Muhammad cover that, as The New York Times put it, “reignited the debate pitting free speech against religious sensitivities.”

Again? Already? Had not 4 million marchers and 44 foreign leaders just turned out on the streets of France to declare “No” to intimidation, and pledging solidarity, indeed identification with (“Je suis Charlie”), a satirical weekly specializing in the most outrageous and often tasteless portrayals of Muhammad?

And yet, within 48 hours, the new Charlie Hebdo issue featuring the image of Muhammad — albeit a sorrowful, indeed sympathetic Muhammad — sparked new protests, denunciations and threats of violence, which in turn evinced another round of doubt and self-flagellation in the West about the propriety and limits of free expression. Hopeless.

ISIS continues to gain substantial ground in Syria, despite nearly 800 airstrikes in the American-led campaign to break its grip there.
At least one-third of the country’s territory is now under ISIS influence, with recent gains in rural areas that can serve as a conduit to major cities that the so-called Islamic State hopes to eventually claim as part of its caliphate. Meanwhile, the Islamic extremist group does not appear to have suffered any major ground losses since the strikes began. The result is a net ground gain for ISIS, according to information compiled by two groups with on-the-ground sources.
In Syria, ISIS “has not any lost any key terrain,” Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War who studies the Syrian conflict, explained to The Daily Beast.
Even U.S. military officials privately conceded to The Daily Beast that ISIS has gained ground in some areas, even as the Pentagon claims its seized territory elsewhere, largely around the northern city of Kobani. That’s been the focus of the U.S.-led campaign, and ISIS has not been able to take the town, despite its best efforts.
Other than that, they are short on specifics.

Full Disclosure: I never write to shows, as I know they probably pay scant attention. They make the big bucks. Why should they listen to a groundling occasional viewer?

But I was goaded beyond tolerance by Mr. Jon Stewart’s latest jibe against Israel.

His slur concerning the Paris march — that those who assembled were hardly (I paraphrase, so annoyed that I could not bear to listen a moment longer to this once-funny Jewish comedian) paragons of free speech was initially well taken.

Stewart mocked the march for free speech in Paris by indicating that the heads of state attending included despots and those hypocritically against free speech in their own domestic domains. Can’t argue with that. Representatives of Turkey and Jordan, African despotisms and Middle Eastern caliphates, were in attendance, all clutching the arms of the likes of Germany’s Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, leftist tete of la bellicose France. Stewart attacked Egypt by just muttering its name, hesitating in well-oiled comic timing, and reaping a huge rolling thunder of audience accommodation. I mean, laughs. Laffs.

So, just as President Obama is giving a big speech on cyber-security, the jihackists of the Islamic State manage to take over the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the Pentagon’s Central Command. The juxtaposition would be too cheap and heavy-handed for any discerning playwright or novelist, but these days reality is less fussy: It’s Mohammed’s world, we just live in it.

Hacking into the Pentagon’s social media accounts isn’t the same as hacking into the Pentagon’s classified databases. But as a thumb in the eye to the Great Satan it has a certain style.

And it’s not irrelevant to the central question facing the still freeish world after the 17 dead in Paris last week.

There are those of us who think the issue is Islam – not all of Islam or at any rate not all Muslims, but a strain of Islam, and the one that’s making all the running in the Muslim world today.

And there are those who say pay no attention to all the fellows howling “Allahu Akbar” and hooting about avenging the Prophet: There’s no Islam to see here.

The Joy of Yurts and Jam-Jar Glassware

In Part Two of our series on Melbourne University’s Sustainable Society Institute we visit the enchanted isle of Entropia, the eco-aware settlement where bad poets and oboe players celebrate the death of capitalism with lentil casseroles, home-made port, free love and no small amount of green-haloed self-regard.

Futurology is a mainstay in the writing about global warming, not just forecasting but the more difficult art of time-travel.

We’ve had a vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, discovering in 2004 that our own Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, was killed by a warming-caused disease in 2039. Then we had Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes writing last July that global warming in 2023 would kill our puppies and kittens, our ‘faithful and trusted companions”. And three months ago, the scienc-y World Meteorological Organisation lined up real-life TV weather presenters who pretended to be reporting in 2050 about tornados hitting Berlin, a 50-day heat wave in Tokyo and so on.

Closer to home, we have Dr Sam Alexander, research fellow of the Melbourne University’s Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) and lecturer with the university’s Office for Environmental Programs. Last year he wrote a book Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation about someone looking back from a post-apocalyptic year 2099. It is published ($21.99 in paperback) by the Simplicity Institute, of which he co-founded and is a co-director.

Pegida’s worries about the Islamization of Germany concern the seeming intolerance and religious fanaticism that have grown hand-in-hand with the arrival of the Muslim populations unwilling to adapt to Western values.

The terror attacks in France Had “nothing to do with Islam.” — German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière.

By decrying Pegida’s views as “xenophobic,” narrow minded” and even “inhuman,” Germany’s ruling establishment shows how deeply out of touch it is with the worries of a large segment of the population.

Perhaps the people in the East just want to avoid the situation that the Western part of the country is in. Having gone through decades of Communist dictatorship, perhaps they are less inclined to trust that their political leaders have the people’s best interests in mind with their policies.

Every Monday evening since last October, thousands of citizens have marched through the city of Dresden as well as other German cities to protest the Islamization of their country. They belong to an organization, established only three months ago, called Pegida, the German abbreviation for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West.”