RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

I rarely frequent movie theaters these days. Box office ticket prices are not the chief deterrent, nor the concession stand price of a barrel of popcorn or a box of Raisinets. Talkative members of audiences, and eardrum-splitting volumes of trailers are also deterrents, but they’re not why I avoid ticket windows. Rather it’s what’s showing in the theaters that stops me from sitting in the dark. I will make an exception, and pay for a ticket, if I think I ought to see a film. If I make the effort, it’s because I suspect there’s something odd about a film that I wouldn’t be able to identify unless I saw it instead of being misled or repelled by its trailers.

I happen to love movies. Good movies. Ones that uplift me, or instruct me in the art of storytelling, or enlighten me in some respect. But bad movies, or mediocre ones, have the same effect on me as does Andy Warhol’s poster of Campbell Soup cans. And there are far more of those films than there are of that anti-artist’s thirty-two soup cans.

I recently saw The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I suspected that, like its predecessor, it was more than just a story about a girl good with a bow and arrow, coming from a circa 1930’s West Virginia-like coal town, and populated with characters whose names seem to have been the result of a Scrabble game with no rules. The setting wasn’t supposed to be a post-war or post-anarchy America governed by PanAm – excuse me, “Panem” – an oppressive government located in some high-tech run Imperial Rome-like city that’s full of evil men and a populace of perversely effete, gaudily dressed clowns entertained by a form of gladiatorial combat. The weird names — Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, Finnick Odair, etc., all vaguely Celtic – didn’t fool me one bit, either. It was all an allegory on America.

So I learned that both Hunger Games movies – I saw the first one, also, and there will be a third, to judge by the ending of Number Two – were political statements about the evils of technology and capitalism and civilization and how virtuous living the simple life at a subsistence level trumps technology and cities and badly dressed people every time. The “message” was as thoroughly embedded in it as it was in another fantasy, Avatar.

As the American consciousness has been progressively foreshortened, minimalized, and cramped over several generations – chiefly by a public education philosophy committed not so much to the acquisition of knowledge and the honing of one’s cognitive powers and rationality, as to what the Progressives and the government wish to have Americans focus on (anti-intellectualism, pragmatism, conformity) – so has the “I.Q.” of films diminished in terms of scope, scale and attention span. This has occurred, not overnight, but incrementally, in generational jerks and spasms, in syncopated tandem with the dumbing down and the engineered cognitive and cultural myopia.

Instead of adapting novels that require a modicum of literacy and an extended attention span to read and grasp – an attention span beyond what a text message or a tweet demands – we are getting movies more and more adapted from graphic novels. From comic books. And if not from comic books, then from juvenile or “young adult” novels, or computer games. And often a computer-game-inspired movie will loop back into an advanced version of the game.

http://www.americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/an_antiisrael_tourism_subterfuge_.html

Under the guise of experiental, educational sojourns in the Middle East, an ongoing, extensive tourism subterfuge of global proportions is at work today. This comprehensive and coordinated fraudulent operation includes travel agency fronts, terrorist groups, international NGOs, Islamists, and Leftists. They include such organizations as the Siraj Center for Holy Land Studies, Abraham Path, the Soros Foundation to Promote Open Society, and others.

All of them, whether unwittingly or intentionally, are part of an effort to turn tourists, college students, and Christian pilgrims against the Jewish state of Israel. Using the rubric of “a connection between people from the Middle East,” these travel expeditions underhandedly buttress a political agenda that delegitimizes and demonizes Israel. They are part of a scheme to fundamentally transform the Western world, by undermining Judaism, the root of Christianity, and moving on to the destruction of Christianity as well.

A look at one of the organizations involved in the efforts, Abraham Path, provides insights into how these groups have created a dangerous mix of supposed humanitarian organizations and Islamic supremacists.

Abraham Path partners with the United Nations Tourism Organization and Harvard Law School and receives financial support from the Riyadh-based, Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation. Prince Talal, a Wahhabist, shortly after 9/11, admonished the United States to change its stance in the Middle East and turn toward the Palestinian cause, declaring, “Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.”

Talal implied that the U.S. position on Israel caused the 9/11 attacks. Offended by these statements, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani turned down $10 million offered by the Saudi prince in the aftermath of the attacks.

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon0408gw.html

The New York City charter delegates the “control” and “administration” of the NYPD to a police commissioner appointed by the city’s elected mayor. It further grants the commissioner responsibility “for the execution of all law and the rules and regulations of the department.” By agreeing to a court-appointed monitor for the NYPD earlier this year, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has violated those binding provisions. Bill Bratton, de Blasio’s choice for police commissioner—he called Bratton “the best police leader in the United States”—accepted the position knowing that the court-appointed monitor would be looking over his shoulder. Why? It’s a fair bet that Bratton hoped to salvage the policing techniques he pioneered during a previous stint as Gotham’s top cop, when he helped rescue New York City from its crime-plagued past.

As police commissioner under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the mid-1990s, Bratton called the patrol tactic properly known as stop, question, and frisk (but more commonly known as stop-and-frisk) “a basic tool” that is “the most fundamental practice in American policing . . . done every day, probably by every city force in America.” And, he added, “If the police are not doing it, they are probably not doing their job.”

Bratton was correct. In 1990, Mayor David Dinkins’s first year in office, an astounding 2,245 murders took place in New York. In 2012, after almost 20 years of stop, question, and frisk—and other innovative policing techniques—the number of murders had fallen to just 417, a decline of 81 percent. Other major crimes had similarly declined, despite a 10 percent increase in New York’s population. The verdict on stop, question, and frisk? New Yorkers won and criminals lost.

The Brandeis students issued a fatwa: the invitation to Ali had to be rescinded. The school newspaper, The Justice (yes, the irony!) ran both a “news article” and an editorial denouncing the decision to give Ali an honorary degree.I

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/brandeis-caves-to-pressure-withdraws-honor-to-ayaan-hirsi-ali/2014/04/09/0/

In a complete collapse of rectitude, Brandeis University’s president Fred Lawrence issued a statement on Tuesday evening, April 8, announcing the withdrawal of women’s and human rights champion Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a recipient of an honorary degree from the school at this year’s commencement.

For two days Muslim students and supporters raged against the decision to honor Ali because, they claimed, she is Islampohobic.

Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. In 1992 she escaped an impending arranged marriage to a relative, running to the Netherlands, where she learned the language and established a life. She rose to become a member of the Dutch parliament, where she worked to further the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society.

In 2004, Ali made a film with her friend, Theo Van Gogh. That film, “Submission,” is about the oppression of women in conservative Islamic cultures.

After “Submission” was aired on Dutch television, an Islamic extremist murdered Van Gogh who was enraged by the portrayal of Islam. A letter pinned to his body contained a death threat to Ali. She eventually fled Holland and Ayaan Hirsi Ali now lives in the United States.

Ali evolved from being a devout Muslim to one who questioned her faith, to ultimately and resolutely rejecting it.

“I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.” That is a quote from Ali’s book, “Infidel.”

http://www.investigativeproject.org/4347/moroccan-allegedly-plotted-to-use-remote-toy

A Moroccan national living in Bridgeport, Conn. was arrested Monday after allegedly plotting to bomb a university and federal building using a remote-controlled toy airplane.

A complaint charges El Mehdi Semlali Fathi with making a series of false statements in an asylum claim. In it, however, an FBI agent details his effort to target the public buildings.

In recorded conversations, Fathi “claimed that he has been ‘studying’ the bomb attack operation for months.” He added that “everything available [to make the bomb] was available in Southern California on the border.”

Fathi claimed that he made a chemical bomb while attending high school in Morocco, adding “there are three things that scare people in the United States: causing harm to schools, the economy, and their sense of security.”

Fathi was ordered deported from the U.S. in 2009 after his student visa expired. He later won asylum in after claiming he faced persecution if sent back to Morocco.

The story was a lie, the affidavit alleges. His claims that he was “repeatedly arrested by the Moroccan government and assaulted by government officials” were fabricated. In a recording, Fathi said a fellow inmate suggested the asylum ploy while he was in custody. He laughed about it, saying he could not believe it worked.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/florida-part-ii-of-ii-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand?f=puball
Florida (Part II of II): 2014 Candidates for Congress – Where They Stand

by RUTH KING, 2014 CANDIDATES FOR CONGRESS
Florida 2014: Districts 14 through 27 – See Below

Florida 2014: Districts 1 through 13 – Click Here

2014 state logo for all

Filing Deadline (Federal Candidates): May 2, 2014 – Please note that filing is still open for challengers.

Primary: August 26, 2014

Deadline for Registering to Vote: You must be registered for at least 29 days before you can vote in an election. Since Florida is a closed primary state, only voters who are registered members of a political parties may vote for their respective party’s candidates in a primary election.

To see the actual voting records of all incumbents on other issues such as Foreign Policy, Second Amendment Issues, Homeland Security, and other issues as well as their rankings by special interest groups please use the links followed by two stars (**).

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-methane-hoax-cranks-up?f=puball

Having spent decades trying to convince everyone that carbon dioxide (CO2) was a “greenhouse gas” that was going to cause the Earth to heat up, the same environmental charlatans are now embarking on a campaign to do the same with methane. In the U.S. the first move was announced by the White House in late March.

The carbon dioxide hoax fell apart in the wake of a cooling cycle affecting the Earth that began around 1997 and continues to this day. Warming and cooling cycles are natural events and both are tied to the activity or lack of it of the Sun. Humans have nothing to do with the climate other to enjoy or endure it.

Why methane? It has a lot to do with the development of hydraulic fracturing, commonly called “fracking”, and the way it unlocks natural gas, aka methane, all of which portends an America that is energy independent, along with its huge reserves of coal and oil. If, of course, the government permits this to occur.

As we know, the Obama administration does not want that. It would mean more jobs, greater prosperity, and the ability to pay down the national debt, not to mention drive down the cost of electricity, gasoline, and everything else that depends on energy.

Despite the cooling cycle that is likely to last for many more years, Steve Hamburg, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was quoted by the Washington Post saying that “ounce for ounce, methane is 84 times as potent as a greenhouse gas over 20 years” compared to carbon dioxide. “More than a third of the warming that we’ll see as a result of today’s emissions over the next couple of decades comes from, essentially, methane. We need to remain focused on carbon dioxide emissions, but doing so is not enough.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/why-is-israel-losing-the-pr-battle-at-am-campuses

From the birth of the state of Israel in 1948 to the 1980’s, comments about this Jewish nation were uniformly and reflexively positive. Jews and non-Jews alike took pride in the resourcefulness of a people who could make the desert bloom and who had the backbone and will to defend themselves against Arab invaders.

Somewhere along the way this view changed. It wasn’t a sudden event, albeit the astonishing alacrity of an Israeli victory over its enemies in 1967 seemed to turn the underdog into a dominant force. It was a shift borne of economic, cultural and political factors.

On the economics front, the reliance of the West on Middle Eastern oil to run their industries gave Arab states leverage they did not possess at any time in the past. Israel became a target and a refuge. On the one hand, the argument was made that Israel is an occupying nation that had displaced Palestinian refugees; on the other hand, the Arab states could hide behind the claim of Nakba or “the catastrophe” as they violated human rights in their own nations. Israel became a useful source of hostility even though Arab states did almost nothing to mitigate the plight of the refugees they claimed to represent.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/issa-report-slams-dem-collaboration-with-the-irs/

A bombshell report released by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) completely refutes Democratic Party talking points that the IRS scandal involved unwarranted targeting of both liberal and conservative groups. “Time and again, (Democrats) have claimed that the IRS targeted liberal- and progressive-oriented groups as well—and that, therefore, there was no political animus to the IRS’s actions” the report states. “These Democratic claims are flat-out wrong and have no basis in any thorough examination of the fact. Yet the Administration’s chief defenders continue to make these assertions in a concerted effort to deflate and distract from the truth about the IRS’s targeting of tax-exempt applicants.”

The report reveals far more about the early stages of Tea Party targeting conducted by the tax collection agency, identifying the initial three cases sent to Washington, D.C. for additional scrutiny in 2010. Two of the three abandoned their applications rather than face additional IRS questioning. The third group is still waiting for its case to be resolved.

Several other key findings of the report are equally troubling. Perhaps the most troubling of all was that the IRS itself “selectively prioritized and produced” documents for the Committee to support the narrative that their targeting had been bipartisan. It noted that on June 24, 2013, Acting IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel asserted during a press conference that the agency misconduct was “broader” that conservative applicants, even as he refused to discuss the criteria that led him to that conclusion. Nonetheless, the IRS subsequently produced “hundreds of pages of self-selected documents that supported his assertion,” even as they had only provided the Committee with less than 2000 total pages of IRS material. “Congressional Democrats had no qualms in putting these self-selected documents to use,” the report states.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/the-united-kingdoms-continuing-koran-censorship/print/

Mark Stephenson confessed at a February 28, 2014, United Kingdom trial “threatening behavior” while watching a December 7, 2013, Birmingham soccer game. Stephenson’s behavior involved Koran desecration, merely the latest case demonstrating deferential British censorship with respect to Islam’s holy book.

According to one news account, a woman gave pages of a Koran taken from her handbag to Stephenson and about 20 other soccer fans during the game. Stephenson ripped the pages and pretended to burn them with a lighter while saying to a stadium worker that he had the “Muslim bible, we hate Muslims.” Another worker overheard fans shouting “Koran, Muslims and burning.”

Stephenson received a £235 fine for a “religiously-aggravated public order offence,” a British hate crime that, among things, encompasses “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behavior.” “We hope that in the future you will not ever, ever participate in any such incident,” Judge Ronald Healey declared in sentencing Stephenson. It is “considered extremely offensive to some members of the community.”

“It’s disgraceful to allow pure hatred to come to an area like” Birmingham “with a high Muslim population,” Muslim Member of Parliament Khalid Mahmood had said of the incident in his hometown in December. The “culprits should be dealt with severely and be charged with incitement,” he demanded. A Middlesbrough Football Club spokesperson also condemned the incident involving the club’s Koran-desecrating fans as violating a desire to “eradicate racism in all its forms.”