RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sarahhonig.com/2014/03/05/worthless-guarantees/

Ultra-popular in cyberspace these days is a cartoon showing Vladimir Putin as a shrewd strategist executing moves on a chessboard, while a laid-back Barack Obama incongruously plays a single checkers piece and yells “Bingo!”

We may agree or disagree with this depiction but such is the widespread perception of the Ukrainian crisis and the invasion of Crimea. The Russian leader is regarded as having handily outmaneuvered the American president and with him the entire West.

For Israelis, though, this is no laughing matter. We aren’t mere spectators on the sidelines. This sad spectacle couldn’t be more relevant to Israel. The implications to our own predicaments are compelling and quite inescapable.

From our vantage point there are no saints in this scenario. Our sympathies aren’t clear-cut. Ukrainians are recalled in Jewish history as the second-greatest-ever mass-murderers of Jews – directly after the Germans (with whom many Ukrainians avidly collaborated during the darkest days of the Holocaust).

And yet there’s a key element in the current Ukrainian travails that is particularly pertinent to the complexities and pressures which Israel faces.

http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Israeli-strategy-in-the-case-of-a-new-Cold-War-344372?prmusr=W%2b55kjX%2f%2b8zBI%2bk%2fLwFHuiHfBDd5eKTl4a1v0s45AJ%2bbvwwZBQlSKluZMeE84zjw In the fashion of every other state, the state of Israel would exist more or less precariously, amidst the hardening animosities of a new Cold War. Photo by: REUTERS At first glance, whatever happens in the Ukraine ought not to have any obvious impact upon the Middle East, least of all upon Israel’s strategic […]

‘How We Die’ author Sherwin Nuland passes, aged 83 Jewish medical ethicist was critical of profession’s obsession with prolonging life when treatment was futile

DR. NULAND ALSO WROTE A SPLENDID BOOK ON MAIMONIDES IN 2008

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Maimonides (Jewish Encounters) by Sherwin B. Nuland (Aug 26, 2008)

HAMDEN, Connecticut — Dr. Sherwin Nuland, a medical ethicist who opposed assisted suicide and wrote an award-winning book about death called “How We Die,” died at age 83 on Monday.

He died of prostate cancer at his home in Hamden, said his daughter Amelia Nuland, who recalled how he told her he wasn’t ready for death because he loved life.

“He told me, ‘I’m not scared of dying, but I’ve built such a beautiful life, and I’m not ready to leave it,’” she said Tuesday.

Sherwin Nuland was born Shepsel Ber Nudelman in the East Bronx neighborhood of New York in December 1930 to a pair of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from what is today Moldova and Belarus.

He taught medical ethics at Yale University in New Haven. He was critical of the medical profession’s obsession with prolonging life when common sense would dictate further treatment is futile. He wrote nature “will always win in the end, as it must if our species is to survive.”

Chicago Tribune strongly endorses Truax for U.S. Senate

DOWNERS GROVE — In a strongly worded endorsement, the Chicago Tribune has recommended Doug Truax be nominated in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate.

If the Republican Party is to outgrow its loss of stature in Illinois, it needs to recruit and promote candidates who are more like Truax. At 43 he’s a West Point graduate, a former Army Ranger and captain, and majority owner of a small Oak Brook firm that helps employers address the costs of their health care, retirement and other benefits programs.

The endorsement continues:

Truax projects confidence in what a growth-oriented federal agenda could accomplish: He stresses that without more vibrant economic activity, America won’t solve chronic joblessness. He impresses us with smart ideas for rescuing entitlement programs, curbing federal tax loopholes, and empowering states to expand school choice: “I favor charter schools and maximum flexibility for parents and students to escape bad schools and a cycle of poverty.” And as a health insurance consultant, Truax offers fresh and detailed proposals for accomplishing what Obamacare cannot: affordably providing good coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions.

The Tribune sums up the choice:

THE ILLINOIS PRIMARY IS ON MARCH 18, 2014…AND THE ELECTION  SERIES AT FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS WILL HAVE THE FULL RESULTS…..DOUG TRUAX IS AN IMPRESSIVE CANDIDATE…. Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/03/hope_for_illinois_gop.html   Illinois is one of the bluest states in the country, but disgust with the mismanagement and corrupt leadership by Democrats, who have complete control of the […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Liberal media succeeds best when it isn’t identified as such. The reason for that can be seen in numerous polls where Americans of both parties identify themselves with conservative values.

The left is adept at selling its agenda through biased mainstream media coverage, but when it discards the disguise of objectivity on radio or television the end result is shrill, irritating and off-putting.

The playwright and director David Mamet achieved an epiphany while listening to NPR. Unfortunately for NPR the epiphany was that he was no longer a liberal. “I felt my facial muscles tightening,” he described, “and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f___ up.”

The unfiltered left with its onslaught of sanctimonious bleating often brings out that reaction.

It’s why Air America not only couldn’t compete with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative talk radio hosts, but it couldn’t even remain solvent. MSNBC, the bastard child of a ridiculous union between Microsoft and NBC, spent years drifting in search of an identity only to become the new Air America.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Do science, technology and humanitarian relief affect natural selection, in regards to the human species? Will these developments have unintended adverse consequences for the propagation of our species? In studying evolution, Charles Darwin developed the theory of natural selection, which stated that only the fittest of any species would survive. In simple terms, that meant the healthy, strong and intelligent. In the interest of improving the human condition, have we altered natural development?

Over the four and a half billion-year life of our planet, thousands of species from mammals to plants have come into being and subsequently died out; so, too, will man, at some point. It is the natural order of things. What allows one species to survive longer than another is the ability to adapt to such inevitable changes as weather, pestilence and predators. While Homo sapiens date back a mere 100,000 years, there has been life on Earth for a long time. The Trilobite, for example, dates to the Devonshire Period, 400 million years ago. In the last few years species such as the Pinta Island Tortoise and the Western Black Rhinoceros have died out. Other species have recently been discovered, like the Carolina Hammerhead Shark and the New Turkish Scorpion.

Better medicines and healthcare and improved humanitarian efforts, like the Feed the World Campaign that began in Ethiopia in 1984, have allowed millions of children to live that only a few years ago would have died. The population of Ethiopia, during the ensuing thirty years has grown from 34 million to 86 million. The country remains one of the poorest in the world, with an estimated annual income per person of $410. While mortality statistics have improved substantially, infant mortality at 58.3 per 1000 births is still one of the highest in the world, as is maternal mortality at 590 per 100,000. Humanitarian aid has allowed the population to expand, but has done little for the well-being of the people. In the West, drugs and healthier lifestyles have allowed the average person to live longer, while some relatively newer practices, like better sanitation, risk compromising immune systems.

Yesterday I attended a lecture by Rabbi-Professor Daniel Gordis who spoke about his new book and its subject in the most  intelligent, appreciative, knowledgeable and actually moving presentation I have ever heard on the subject and the man. Rabbi Gordis is not a man of the right or the Likud or the legacy of Jabotinsky, […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/can-reuniting-israel-end-the-violence/print/

No word is more seductive to politicians than “solution.”

In an age of wealth and power when anything seems possible, politicians cannot grasp that some problems are caused by human nature and have no easy answer. Instead they tackle problems with experts, blue-ribbon committees, studies and proposals. Once the “solution” has been identified, it becomes unchallenged political dogma.

Few problems lead to as much blind faith in unworkable solutions as the problems of war and the solutions of peace.

Chamberlain brought back “peace for our time.” When challenged by Churchill, he retorted that if it were impossible to have “friendly relation… with totalitarian States… there is no future hope for civilisation or for any of the things that make life worth living.”

It takes a strong mind to reject the seductive solution of a piece of paper from the enemy promising peace and to look at the alternatives that can actually preserve civilization. That is what Caroline Glick has done in her latest book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/preaching-islamophobia-to-the-choir-at-saudi-funded-georgetown/print/

“I don’t have any desire to debate Robert Spencer….I would never give someone like that a forum,” Hofstra University Professor Daniel Martin Varisco declared at Georgetown University on February 26, 2014. Addressing the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding (ACMCU), Varisco’s equally flawed outlooks on Islam and intellectual inquiry had disturbing implications for modern academia.

Prior perusal of the opening pages of Varisco’s 2007 Reading Orientalism: Said and Unsaid did not raise hopes for his briefing “Khutba vs. Khutzpa: Islamophobia on the Internet.” In this book, Varisco analyzes leftwing intellectual Edward Said’s Orientalism and its legacy, expressing agreement “with most of Said’s political positions on the real Orient.” Varisco reveals his discipleship of Said with condemnations of post-World War II United States having “become by stealth and wealth the neo-colonial superpower” in which a “neocon clique…engineered the wars” not just “against” Iraq but also Afghanistan. Varisco’s one-sided estimate of historical harms includes a “PhD cataloguing of what the West did to the East and self-unfillfulling political punditry about what real individuals in the East say they want to do to the West.”

Yet, Varisco writes, “Said hardly scratched the surface of the vast sewerage of racist and ethnocentrist writing, art, and cinema that for so long has severed an imaginary East from the dominating West.” “In particular,” Varisco emphasizes,

almost anything that Muslims would consider holy has at one time or another been profaned by Western writers. Perhaps the frustrated worldwide Muslim anger at Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was emetic justice for centuries of vicious and malicious verbal abuse from the West, where this controversial best seller incubated.

Both matters of principle and practicality deter further reading of Varisco. “Truth with a capital T does not exist for anyone,” Varisco nonsensically proclaims as one of his “own operational truths,” thereby placing in doubt Varisco’s views. Varisco’s attempts at humor also do not amuse, such as when he describes the book’s “anal citational flow of endnotes” designed to allow a person to “read for entertainment” Varisco’s turgid tome.