RUTHFULLY YOURS

Communities — cities — need Catholic schools. Why? What is to be done in an environment when the closing of Catholic elementary and secondary schools have big cities and small towns alike? In their book Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America, Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Garnett document the importance of the schools and the damage done by their disappearance. It’s a sobering, encouraging, and challenging read. Kathryn Jean Lopez: What are the chief ways a neighborhood suffers when a school disappears?

Margaret F. Brinig: When a Catholic school closes, entire neighborhoods suffer. That is, we found that the negative effects of school closures are experienced not just by the members of a school community. What we can demonstrate statistically is that after a Catholic school closes, the “social capital” — the web of connections and trust between people — in the neighborhood declines. People are less likely to feel that their neighbors will help them shovel if it snows, keep an eye on children playing outside, unite for a community project, and so forth.

When they are less likely to feel trust and bonding to one another, eventually other bad things start to happen, too — there are more signs of disorder, like cigarette butts or broken bottles on the sidewalk or in the streets, more groups loitering on street corners, more prostitution, and so forth. Ultimately there’s more crime. Although we study a time when crime was declining across the U.S., we found that crime declines more slowly in neighborhoods, in Chicago and in Philadelphia, that lost Catholic schools. Between 1995 and 2005 in Chicago, serious crime declined 25 percent citywide but only 17 percent in police beats that lost Catholic schools.

The Saudis are sort of allies, but he treats them like best friends.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Secretary of State John Kerry argued that although extremists may cite Islam as a justification for terrorism, the world should refrain from using the term “Islamic radicals.” Extremism, Kerry maintained, is apart from Islam, and the millions who support or engage in violence in its name are driven by “criminal conduct rooted in alienation, poverty, thrill seeking, and other factors.”

This soothing, half-baked philosophy is cant in the Obama administration. So when the Islamic State took credit for the beheading of Japanese hostage Haruna Yukawa, it shouldn’t have been surprising that the most important thing Rick Stengel, undersecretary of state for happy thoughts, could think to tweet to his followers was that there was “nothing religious about it.”

We’ve gone from incessantly offering (appropriate) distinctions among factions of Islam to fantasizing that terrorists are a bunch of shiftless, underprivileged adrenaline junkies with no particular philosophy at all. Religion is an organized collection of beliefs that makes sense of existence. Under no definition of “faith” is there a stipulation that it must be devoid of any violence. And whether or not violence used in Islam is a distortion of the faith is for people of that religion to work out for themselves.

Have you heard about the secret conspiracy between the Saudis and the White House? I haven’t either, probably because there isn’t one. But events are playing out exactly as one would expect if such a conspiracy existed.

With no help from Barack Obama, the U.S. has launched an energy revolution, becoming the world’s leading oil and natural-gas producer. This has dismayed environmentalists and donors in and out of the Obama administration. After all, Obama bet big — really big — on green energy. The oil and gas boom is not the energy revolution Obama was looking for.

Saudi Arabia and other petro-monarchies aren’t happy about it either (which is one reason the United Arab Emirates and other OPEC states bankroll anti-fracking propaganda in the West). Until recently, Saudi Arabia was the world’s biggest oil producer, and it is still arguably the most important one in global markets because its oil is so easy to get out of the ground. The cheaper it is to extract, the easier it is to maintain profits when prices go down. That means the Saudis have an outsized ability to affect the global price of oil.

It is well known in legal circles that Eric Holder’s Justice Department has become so politicized, so unprincipled, and so ethically shoddy that Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s appointee to replace Holder, had to assure senators at her confirmation hearing that she was not Eric Holder.

Lynch was properly grilled on her views on immigration enforcement, executive orders, and terrorist prosecutions. But so far no senator has dug deep into some of the most abusive cases that Justice has filed, and asked why lower-case justice hasn’t been done.

One of the most notorious is Justice’s role in California’s “Moonlight Fire,” a conflagration on Labor Day 2007 that burned 20,000 acres of state forest in the Sierra Nevada along with 45,000 acres of federal forest. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection decided that Sierra Pacific Industries, a family-owned company that is the nation’s second-largest timber supplier, was responsible for the damage. Government investigators claim the blade of one of the company’s bulldozers hit a rock, creating a spark that started the blaze. Sierra Pacific pointed out clear holes in that theory, but Cal Fire nonetheless fined the timber company $8 million to pay for related costs. Because the fire burned more than 40,000 acres of national forest, the federal government also went after Sierra Pacific; in 2012, after five years of litigation, Sierra Pacific reluctantly agreed to a settlement that entailed paying the feds $4 million and giving Uncle Sam 22,500 acres of forest land.

Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine).

While senators such as Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) have vehemently opposed the Obama administration’s rapprochement and concessions toward Cuba, some Republicans have banded together to let President Obama know that they have an eye on lifting the decades-old embargo.

Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — incidentally, the two Senate Republicans likely to vote against the Menendez-Kirk sanctions legislation on Iran — told Obama in a letter that they “have sought reforms to restrictions on travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba and the removal of hurdles that hamstring trade.”

“Given the statutory nature of restrictions on activities related to Cuba, real and permanent change to U.S.-Cuba policy will be achieved through successful legislative initiatives,” they wrote.

Like a few million other Israelis, the first thing I checked on Thursday morning was whether we were at war.

We’re not—for now. Israeli forces did not act against Hizballah or Syrian targets overnight—even though, on Wednesday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had said: “Those behind today’s attack will pay the full price.”

Wednesday’s attack involved Hizballah’s firing from Syria of antitank missiles at two Israeli military vehicles in the Galilee, and of mortars at the Mt. Hermon ski site on the Israeli Golan Heights. Two soldiers in the vehicles were killed and seven were lightly wounded. All civilian visitors had to be evacuated from the Mt. Hermon site, where there were no casualties.

Hizballah’s attack came in retaliation for an Israel missile strike on January 18 against two vehicles of the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis on the Syrian part of the Golan Heights. Along with others, that attack killed two major Hizballah commanders along with an Iranian general who was advising the Syrian army.

Another case of typical, tit-for-tat, cross-border violence between Israel and its foes? The U.S. State Department related to it that way [2], with spokeswoman Jen Psaki saying: “We support Israel’s legitimate right to self-defense” and adding: “We urge all parties to refrain from any action that could escalate the situation.”

Actually, though, there is much more here than might meet the eye in a superficial glance.

The especially urgent problems now associated with a steadily nuclearizing Iran should not have to be addressed by Israel on a case-by-case or ad hoc basis.

Oddly, perhaps, especially at a time of expanding existential peril, Israel has yet to make any substantive policy disclosures about its nuclear deterrent. To be sure, two former prime ministers, during their respective governing tenures, exhibited substantial “slips of the tongue” on this sensitive issue. Nonetheless, no purposefully explicit or meaningfully nuanced strategic details were ever disclosed by Premiers Shimon Peres or Ehud Olmert. Always, the bomb remained deliberately vague and obscure, still carefully well-hidden in the country’s metaphoric “basement.”

Even today, with an apt regard for specific Israeli policies, key components, and operational details, everything nuclear is shrouded in “deliberate ambiguity.” For Jerusalem, everything nuclear continues to be “opaque.” This is policy.

But is this policy smart?

The Kaiser and Hitler each invaded Belgium, neither quite managing to make a permanent success of the enterprise. Muslim fundamentalist Abu Imran makes no bones that his strategy is better: father lots of Muslim babies and breed the mussel-eating kufar into submission

Visit Brussels and make like a tourist. You know, check out the Museum of Musical Instruments, visit the palaces, admire the ornate Grand Place, then finish the day with a bowl of steaming mussels, the national dish, washed down with a draft or two of that splendid Belgian beer.

If that agenda figures in your plans for the next holiday jaunt, better hurry because, in the not too distant future, Abu Imran and his Islamist followers intend to make sure that menu choices, not to mention traditional Western freedoms, are considerably reduced. Alcohol and shellfish? Not when Sharia kicks in, and Imran reckons that will happen just a few short years down the road, given that Muslims now constitute one-in-four of the capital’s residents.

“It’s just a matter of time,” says a supremely confident Imran in the clip below.

Anyone can be a prophet of doom: Pick a spot on the globe, any spot, and state with oracular authority that it will suffer most from runaway climate change. Tim Flannery fancied Perth, for example, which has yet to become his predicted ghost town, but he has plenty of company in the dunce’s corner.

Why can’t the global-warming catastrophe industry convince the public that the scare underwriting its meal ticket is real? Even the CSIRO’s annual survey last year showed that 53% of Australians reject the official story. And even on the CSIRO’s figures, Aussies rank climate fourteenth out of sixteen concerns overall, and we rate it only seventh out of eight even among environmental concerns. In Britain, more of the same, with a new survey showing those who describe themselves “very concerned” about climate change falling to 18%, down from 44% in 2005.

Partly to blame is that dratted 18-year halt to global warming, even as man-made CO2 continues to pour into the skies. But my theory is that the global warming industry has made itself so ridiculous over the past 30 years, so hyperventilatingly ludicrous, by predicting ever-more-dire catastrophes by the year 20XX. But then year 20XX comes and goes and life continues as normal.

My first encounter with Charles Blow was back in 2010 at a huge Dallas Tea Party rally.

He came to Dallas with a headline in mind: “Everybody at the tea party is racist”. He was on a mission, a mission to tell the world that this spontaneous movement of Americans concerned about their kids’ future was nothing more than another expression of racism.

Then he wrote one of the most outrageous columns in recent memory:

“I had specifically come to this rally because it was supposed to be especially diverse.

And, on the stage at least, it was.

The speakers included a black doctor who bashed Democrats for crying racism, a Hispanic immigrant who said that she had never received a single government entitlement and a Vietnamese immigrant who said that the Tea Party leader was God.

It felt like a bizarre spoof of a 1980s Benetton ad.”