RUTHFULLY YOURS

The past 10 days have seen three hysterical editorials from the New York Times pleading for a U.S. economic lifeline to the Castro brothers’ terror-sponsoring regime (i.e. to end the so-called embargo).

It’s the economy, stupid—Venezuela’s that is. Those plummeting oil prices (20% in the past few months) are playing havoc with the Cuban colony’s already-rotten economy. Venezuelan subsidies to Cuba last year, mostly in the form of essentially free oil, were estimated to total $10 billion. That’s more than double what the Soviets used to send.

But Castro’s Venezuelan puppet Maduro is now on very shaky ground. The only thing keeping this pathetic satrap in power—besides the 30,000 or so Cuban military and security “advisors” essentially running Venezuela—are the bread and circuses that sitting on top of the world’s largest oil reserves allows the Venezuelan regime to put on for Venezuelans.

Now this oil-fueled largesse looks imperiled—and with it the subsidies to Venezuela’s colonial overlords in Havana. Hence the Castro brothers’ desperation for a rescue from U.S. tourists and taxpayers—and the SOS to their regime’s traditional agents-of-influence worldwide, among whom the New York Times features very prominently.

“Fidel Castro…has largely vanished from public view in Cuba,” reads the second NY Times editorial on Oct. 14. “But the 88-year-old former president [italics mine] has not altogether abandoned the business of telling Cubans what to think.”

Is the Times — at long last! — acknowledging a totalitarian streak in the longest-reigning Stalinist dictator of modern history? Sure sounds like it. Now please pay close attention as the editorial continues:

On Tuesday [Oct. 14th], Mr. Castro dedicated a column to an editorial published in The [New York] Times on Sunday [Oct. 11] that called on the Obama administration to restore diplomatic ties with the Cuban government and end the counterproductive [italics mine] embargo the United States has imposed on the island for decades. His take was remarkable for one main reason…quoting nearly every paragraph in the [our] editorial…Hosts of Cuban state-run radio stations [also] read Mr. Castro’s column and discussed its content…

In brief: so closely did the New York Times echo the sentiments of a Stalinist dictator that he gleefully ordered their article disseminated—almost word for word – throughout his regime’s KGB-founded and mentored media. It gets better:

He [Fidel Castro] appeared to endorse the thrust of the editorial,” The second NY Times editorial boasts, “comparing it to an interview he gave in 1957 as a young rebel leader to a [New York] Times foreign correspondent at the time, Herbert Matthews…

Britain’s The Telegraph reports that Britain is aiming to take serious measures against the Muslim Brotherhood. The situation contrasts notably with the one in the U.S., where—among much else—the Obama administration has cut back ties with the current, geopolitically moderate Egyptian government because—backed by the most massive popular protest in world history—it came to power by overthrowing a Muslim Brotherhood regime that the administration favored.

As The Telegraph describes it:

Downing Street is to order a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and a network of Islamist groups accused of fuelling extremism in Britain and across the Arab world.

[Prime Minister] David Cameron launched an inquiry into the Brotherhood earlier this year, prompted by concerns it was stoking an Islamist ideology that had encouraged British jihadists to fight in Syria and Iraq.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), is an adviser to the inquiry and “is reported to have described [the Brotherhood] as ‘at heart a terrorist organization.’”

The Telegraph adds that:

A senior source close to the inquiry said its report—compiled but not yet published—had identified “an incredibly complex web” of up to 60 organisations in Britain, including charities, think tanks and even television channels, with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, which will all now come under scrutiny.

The inquiry, aided by the security services, has also investigated its network abroad. One expert said that the Brotherhood was now operating from three major bases—London, Istanbul and Doha, the capital of Qatar.

That the Brotherhood operates out of Turkey and Qatar is, of course, not news to politically sentient people in the Middle East, who are well aware of the Turkey-Qatar-Brotherhood-Hamas axis.

As for what Britain plans to do about its domestic Brotherhood terror base:

The Government crackdown will stop short of outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood but action is expected to include:

Þ Investigations into charities that are effectively “fronts” for the Brotherhood;

Canada has experienced two murderous jihad terror attacks in the last three days, not long after the Islamic State called for such attacks – but the denial and obfuscation are as thick as ever.

On Monday, Ahmad Rouleau, a convert to Islam, hit two Canadian soldiers with his car, murdering Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent. Then he led police on a high-speed chase, during which he called 911 and explained that he was doing it all “in the name of Allah.” The chase, and Rouleau’s jihad, ended when he flipped his car and then, brandishing a knife, charged police, who shot him dead. One of Rouleau’s close friends said: “It was a terrorist attack and Martin died like he wanted to. That’s what happened….He did this because he wanted to reach paradise and assure paradise for his family. He wanted to be a martyr….The caliphate called all the Muslims on earth to fight. He listened to what they had to say and he did his part here.”

Then on Wednesday, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who has been widely reported to be a recent convert to Islam but whose father is a veteran of the jihad in Libya and who has been a Muslim for at least three years, went on a shooting rampage in Ottawa, murdering military reservist Corporal Nathan Cirillo and engaging in a gun battle inside Canada’s Parliament building. Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird said that there was “no evidence at this stage” that Zehaf-Bibeau had connections to any jihad groups, but CNN reported that “according to a U.S. counterterrorism source, Zehaf-Bibeau was connected to Hasibullah Yusufzai through social media. Yusufzai is wanted by Canadian authorities for traveling overseas to fight alongside Islamist fighters in Syria.” And “other radicalized people connected to Zehaf-Bibeau are still believed to be living in Canada, two U.S. law enforcement officials said.”

So Zehaf-Bibeau had connections to at least one jihadist who went to Syria to wage jihad, and Rouleau listened to what the Islamic State was saying, and “did his part” in Canada. What was the Islamic State saying? Late in September, the Islamic State’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani, urged Muslims to murder non-Muslims in the West. “Rely upon Allah,” he thundered, “and kill him in any manner or way however it may be. Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict. Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling.” He also addressed Western non-Muslims: “You will not feel secure even in your bedrooms. You will pay the price when this crusade of yours collapses, and thereafter we will strike you in your homeland, and you will never be able to harm anyone afterwards.”

I said yesterday that I got angrier about the events in Ottawa as the day went on. My anger continued today.

“…apropos Muslim ‘reverts’ who want to engage in what the Premier of Quebec calls ‘spontaneous acts of extremism’, I’m tired of being told that we have to change to accommodate them. They are the ones who have to change, or have change forced upon them.

“And, rather than confiscating passports and preventing these guys from leaving to fight for ISIS, I think we should wait till they get there to cancel their passports: If they prefer to be citizens of Headhackistan, so be it. But, if they attempt to return to Canada (or America, Britain, Australia, Europe), they should be charged with treason.”

Here’s my full interview with Alan Jones. I look forward to seeing Alan in studio when I’m Down Under in a couple of months.

A group of New York police officers were attacked by a hatchet-wielding assailant today, and CNN is reporting that the man’s Facebook page has “links to extremism.” The details:

Four police officers and a woman were injured, and a hatchet-wielding man was fatally shot during a bloody altercation Thursday in Queens.

Four rookie police officers were working near 162nd Street and Jamaica Avenue when a freelance photographer asked them to pose for a photo in front of a Conway store. While they were posing, another man, described as a 32-year-old male, attacked without saying a word, Commissioner Bratton said at a press conference Thursday.

“The suspect was described as having charged at the officers,” Bratton said.

Swinging an 18-inch metal hatchet, the man first hit a 24-year-old officer in the right arm — he was later taken to Jamaica Hospital in stable condition.

The suspect kept swinging, striking a second officer in the back of the head, critically injuring the 25-year-old.

The other officers fired multiple shots, killed the suspect at the scene.

A 29-year-old woman passing by was struck by gunfire in the lower back. She underwent surgery at Jamaica Hospital and is in stable condition.

Bratton said he didn’t believe the photographer was working with the attacker, but they are now reviewing his pictures.

Only eight days ago, October 15, I wrote a piece asking “Could It Possibly Get Any Worse? [1]” Although I was only half-serious and thought I was just being intentionally hyperbolic, it already did!

Today, in my birth city of New York, within hours of each other, we had a doctor come down with Ebola and another quasi-Islamo-lunatic bash a cop in the head with a hatchet, only a day after a similar event in Canada.

The most amazing part of the cop attack was, at approximately 7PM West Coast time, after millions of people had been hearing about it on cable television for hours, according to Ed Henry on Fox, an administration spokesperson didn’t even know it had happened. They’re probably waiting to make sure it’s “workplace violence.”

Meanwhile, the infected doctor, who had just returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea, had been riding the subway only hours before being diagnosed. He had also gone bowling. Was that part of the latest CDC protocol or the pilot for a television series — “Bowling for Ebola”? In this new reality show/game you have to guess which ball doesn’t have infected fluids from the previous contestant inside its little holes. The winner gets to go on but the loser, well… you know…

It’s all very reassuring, no?

Okay, no more Mr. Nice Blogger. Anyone who doesn’t realize our country is being governed by incompetents somewhere between Caligula and Nero (with golf replacing the violin) hasn’t been paying the slightest attention or, as many liberals are these days, is so delusional they are willing to sacrifice their children in a manner that would make even Aztecs recoil. Those latter people are what is known as “progressives,” a term so distorted and misapplied it could destroy the English language all by itself.

No leavening humor here…they make dough while battering sanity….rsk

A deli in Melbourne, Australia is apparently selling genderless, organic, vegan gingerbread cookies for those who may be offended by the phrase “gingerbread man.”

A picture of the quintessential Christmas cookie next to a sign that reads “organic, genderless gingerbread figures” and “vegan” was posted on Reddit this week.

The cookie is also rather environmentally friendly — after all, the Organic Food & Wine Deli also makes sure that its walls are painted with ”biopaint” and its shelves are made of low-emission timber, according to the Daily Mail.

The BBC reported that Internet commenters’ most common response to the cookie was one of annoyance, with posts such as “that’s so politically correct it makes my brain hurt,” and a tongue-in-cheek prediction that soon the word “ginger” will also be taken out of the name of the cookies so as not to offend redheads.

“$2.50?” a commenter wrote. “That’s just insensitive to broke people. This bakery needs to check its privilege.”

“Why they gotta be so white?” asked another.

By the way, Organic Food & Wine isn’t the only business on the genderless cookie bandwagon. A bakery in Dublin is apparently selling “Halloween gingerbread fun people,” according to a picture posted on Twitter as reported by news.au.com.

— Katherine Timpf is a reporter at National Review Online.

There is an enormous amount of whining these days about our ideological debates. This gets the problem wrong. Ideological debates are fought over ideas, but politics is more often about competing stories, or, as the eggheads call them, “narratives.”

Much has been written about the power of ideas. “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood,” John Maynard Keynes famously wrote. “Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”

Victor Hugo even more famously declared, “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”

Maybe so, but the only reason an idea’s time ever arrives is that some story gives birth to it.

Of course, the two overlap. You may boil down your beliefs to a series of ideas, but odds are that every lesson you ever learned came at the end of a story, either one you lived or one you watched unfold. All great religions are taught to us as stories. Every great journalistic exposé came in the form of a story. We evolved to learn through stories. We may as well be called homo relator, or storytelling man.

Ideas are surprisingly easy to let go of, if pried loose by the right story. Stories, meanwhile, are shockingly difficult to let go of, even if they convey a bad idea. Just try to tell someone who has gotten a raw deal in life that their story is not typical of America. Or, if you prefer, try to tell someone who’s been fortunate at every turn that their story isn’t typical either.

For much of the summer, large numbers of Americans insisted that the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., was one kind of story. It was a tale of institutional racism in which the police are the villains and young African-American men the innocent victims. This was the storyline many in the media wanted, and it was one they were determined to get.

The Poll Tax That Wasn’t If voter ID laws are such a nefarious scheme, why don’t the tools of social science detect it?

When the Supreme Court rejected a petition to stop a Texas voter-ID law from going into effect for the midterms, the left commenced its wailing and gnashing of teeth.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the law “purposely discriminatory,” and everyone piled in behind her with denunciations of the Lone Star State’s blatant racism.

For the left, voter ID is tantamount to a poll tax. If so, the nation is awash in neo-segregationist election rules. According to a recent Government Accountability Office report on voter-ID laws, 33 states now have them.

A valid ID is a necessity of modern life, and requiring one to vote hardly seems an undue imposition. Especially if you are willing to give one out gratis. Of the 17 states that have strict requirements for a photo or government-issued ID, the GAO notes, 16 provide a free ID to eligible voters.

The critics complain that people may not have the relevant underlying documents to get the free ID, and there is a cost to obtaining them.

Well, yes. In Indiana, for instance, it costs $10 to obtain a birth certificate. In Arkansas, it costs $12. In North Dakota, $7.

The GAO report focuses on the voter-ID states of Kansas and Tennessee, where voters whose eligibility to vote is in doubt may vote provisionally. Then they have a period after the election to establish their eligibility. How many voters are showing up to vote, only to be foiled by the ID requirement?

According to the GAO, in Kansas in 2012, 1,115,281 ballots were cast. There were 38,865 provisional ballots, and of these, 838 were cast for voter-ID reasons.

In Tennessee, 2,480,182 ballots were cast. There were 7,089 provisional ballots, and of these, 673 were cast for voter-ID reasons.

The president is upset. Very upset. Frustrated and angry. Seething about the government’s handling of Ebola, said the front-page headline in the New York Times last Saturday.

There’s only one problem with this pose, so obligingly transcribed for him by the Times. It’s his government. He’s president. Has been for almost six years. Yet Barack Obama reflexively insists on playing the shocked outsider when something goes wrong within his own administration.

IRS? “It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it,” he thundered in May 2013, when the story broke of the agency’s targeting of conservative groups. “I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but especially in the IRS.”

Except that within nine months, Obama had grown far more tolerant, retroactively declaring this to be a phony scandal without “a smidgen of corruption.”

Obamacare rollout? “Nobody is more frustrated by that than I am,” said an aggrieved Obama about the botching of the central element of his signature legislative achievement. “Nobody is madder than me.”

Veterans Affairs scandal? Presidential chief of staff Denis McDonough explained: “Secretary [Eric] Shinseki said yesterday . . . that he’s mad as hell and the president is madder than hell.” A nice touch — taking anger to the next level.

The president himself declared: “I will not stand for it.” But since the administration itself said the problem was longstanding, indeed predating Obama, this means he had stood for it for five and a half years.

The one scandal where you could credit the president with genuine anger and obliviousness involves the recent breaches of White House Secret Service protection. The Washington Post described the first lady and president as “angry and upset,” and no doubt they were. But the first Secret Service scandal — the hookers of Cartagena — evinced this from the president: “If it turns out that some of the allegations that have been made in the press are confirmed, then of course I’ll be angry.” An innovation in ostentatious distancing: future conditional indignation.

These shows of calculated outrage — and thus distance — are becoming not just unconvincing but unamusing. In our system, the president is both head of state and head of government. Obama seems to enjoy the monarchical parts, but when it comes to the actual business of running government, he shows little interest and even less aptitude.