RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/who-knows-who-has-the-bomb-not-us?f=puball

The stunning revelation that a segment of the intelligence community believes that North Korea already has a nuclear weapon compact enough to be placed upon a ballistic missile shows anew the limits of what intelligence agencies can determine as to what goes on in closed societies. What matters from a standpoint of intelligence acuity is less whether Pyongyang can put a nuclear bomb atop a missile-though in the substantive sense of military and terror threats it hugely matters-than whether we can ascertain for sure if they can.

In fact, we rarely can ascertain such, if history is a guide. Our agencies have been serially surprised over the years. Days before the August 1949 detonation of the former Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb our intelligence asserted that the first test was several years away. We were caught flatfooted by China’s 1964 atomic and 1966 hydrogen bomb tests. We were blindsided by India’s 1974 test of what it called a “peaceful” explosion. And after India tested a military nuclear bomb in May 1998, we were surprised by Pakistan’s conducting five tests within a fortnight, a sequence that had to have been planned long in advance. When UN inspectors came to Baghdad after the Gulf War, they were surprised to see that Saddam Hussein was within a year or two of testing a nuclear bomb; we made the converse error as to possession of WMD stockpiles by Iraq in 2003, when they had been moved or destroyed prior to the March 2003 launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. And when North Korea told us in October 2002 that it had “the bomb,” we considered the issue unresolved. It took the North’s first test, four Octobers later, to convince us that for once Pyongyang had told the truth-when it was already too late for us to prevent their joining the nuclear club.

And now we see a split among our intelligence agencies, as to what, if anything nuclear, Pyongyang can fit inside a warhead and, if so, how far the missile can carry it. In apparent response to Japan’s stated intent to shoot down any missile headed for Japanese soil, the North threatened that “nuclear war is unavoidable” and that Tokyo would be “consumed in nuclear flames.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/living-in-the-governments-fishbowl You have to wonder why all the data gathering by the National Security Agency, Homeland Security, and the FBI failed to identify and surveil the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing? When even the Russians warned national security authorities about the Chechen brothers, Dzhokan and Tamerlan Tsaraev, they were reportedly interviewed and then ignored. […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/inventing-rights-and-the-enforcement-mechanism-that-goes-along-with-them

Washington is the home for rights promoters. Fads of the moment translate into rights with legal justification and a regulatory apparatus attached to them. This is the manner in which government expands without limit. Illustrations abound.

When healthcare became a right as noted in Obamacare, insurance became a requirement. If ignored, a fine will be imposed. As a consequence, a bureaucracy must be created to deal with adherence to the law. Since millions of Americans, indeed most Americans who haven’t been granted an exception, are involved, the size and scope of the bureaucratic system will be as large as any in the nation’s capital.

Whether one favors abortion or not, one point is clear: the Congress invented reproductive rights and the Supreme Court gave it the imprimatur of legitimacy. The net result is that the Department of Health and Human Services has expanded to accommodate this invented proposition and federal funds have been given to NARAL to make sure government encourages this right.

The food stamp program organized to avoid malnutrition in America has expanded in the last four years from 32 million to 49 million citizens, a rate of about one in seven people. With the war on poverty, emerged the right that every American is entitled to food. The vast program has doubled the size of the Department of Agriculture that has responsibility for its administration. Surely it is desirable to make sure every citizen is fed, but when nutrition became a right expansive government activity came with it.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/our-enemy-inside-the-gates

Review: American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, by Diana West

Where to begin?

In American Betrayal *, Diana West begins in 1933.

In the name of establishing historical causo-connections, I would have begun in 1781, when Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, a brain-cracking treatise which relied on reality to prove that reality was unknowable. That is, by reading his book, a real thing in your real hands, you were expected to agree with Kant that real things were only rough reflections of things whose “essences” existed beyond the evidence of our benighted, warping senses, in some other realm. Kant counted on everyone not noticing the contradiction and not seeing the ease with which his elaborately constructed mare’s nest could be exploded.

No contemporary, I gather, ever confronted Kant and said, “Herr Professor! If what you say is true, then this book is just a shadow, and the print in it, and all your words, too! What could they mean? How could they be true? Are your words noumena, or mere phenomena?”

But no one ever did confront Kant with his contradictions, fallacies, and cerebral legerdemain, except some Hegelian hair-splitters, and the Western world has been the worse for it.

1781. Just as the American Revolution, a product of the Enlightenment, was winding to a close with the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, with reality-loyal Americans winning their freedom from the British monarchy, Kant published his Critique, whose ideas, if not opposed and refuted, were guaranteed to destroy the freedom of their heirs. The Founders, as they later debated in Philadelphia the means and ends of a true republican government that would guarantee men’s freedom from each other, were not aware of the incubus that was birthing across the Atlantic and which would eventually infect American political philosophy with the syphilis of collectivism, moral relativism, and statism in the 19th century.

Kant was an enemy of the Enlightenment. Diana West, among her other arguments, contends that the political and intellectual leaders of the West by 1933 had abandoned reason and all Enlightenment ideas. Nay, with very few exceptions, they became as hostile to them as Kant ever was.

West begins in 1933. Of what significance is that year?

Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and Reichsstatthalter of Prussia on January 30th, 1933. From August 1934, he would be Führer of Germany until his suicide in April 1945.

Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt became the 32nd president of the United States on March 4th, 1933. He would remain in that office until his death in April 1945.

On November 20, 1933, at Roosevelt’s urging, the U.S. recognized the Soviet Union. West writes:

The West’s decision to recognize the USSR – and its determination to keep recognizing it, no matter how much lying and acquiescence to betrayal that entailed – did more to transform us than any single act before or since. The profound diplomatic shift – part Faustian bargain, part moral lobotomy – didn’t just invite the Soviet Union into the community of nations. To make room for the monster-régime, the United States had to surrender the terra firma of objective morality and reality-based judgment. No wonder, then, that tens of thousands of Dreyfus cases in Russia meant nothing to the “conscience of the civilized world….

Because the Communist régime was so openly and ideologically dedicated to our destruction, the act of recognition defied reason and the demands of self-preservation. Recognition and all that came with it, including alliance, would soon become the enemy of reason and self-preservation….

…It was here that we abandoned the lodestars of good and evil, the clarity of black and white. Closing our eyes, we dove head first into a weltering morass of exquisitely enervating and agonizing grays. (pp. 195-196)

In short, the U.S. government had by 1933 lost the capacity for making moral judgments. It cringed like a coward when asked to make one, and hissed and spat like a rabid animal at the mere suggestion of it. It still does when the subject of Islam comes up.

Recognition of the Soviet Union not only granted the murderous Communist dictatorship a moral sanction, it also opened the gates to the wholesale Soviet infiltration and subversive activities of its agents, American sympathizers or “fellow travelers,” and members of the Communist Party USA. The Soviets never honored any of the terms of that recognition.

The precedent had been set. We can see the insidious parallels today in our government’s refusal to withdraw moral sanctions from Islamic régimes and its tolerance of terrorist-founded and terrorist state-funded organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) within our own borders.

In March 1933, Harry Hopkins, a veteran of former New York Governor Roosevelt’s welfare programs, on Roosevelt’s invitation joins the new administration, at first running the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In this pre-war period he also established the National Youth Administration (NYA) and the Federal One Programs for artists and writers.

In May 1940, Roosevelt makes Hopkins his first counsel in all matters pertaining to Europe and the new war. Hopkins moves into the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House, his office and residence for the next three and a half years. Hopkins not only advises Roosevelt on foreign policy and war issues, but directs Lend-Lease, a program conceived by Armand Hammer, a notorious Sovietaphile, ostensibly created to aid the British in their fight against the Nazis, but actually intended to aid Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union.

Between 1932 and 1933, millions of Russians starved to death as Stalin’s government confiscated harvests in the brutal forced collectivization of Russian agriculture. Millions more would perish over the decade from starvation, from being sent as slaves in the Gulag, in mass executions, and in political purges.

But 1933, writes West, was a crucial year in American history. In reprising the statements of historians and commentators about the wrongness of recognizing the Soviet régime as a legitimate government, given the known horrific consequences of forced collectivization, she states:

Dennis J. Dunn agrees with historian David Mayers, who has argued that the failure of the U.S. government under Roosevelt to reckon with the profound crime of the Terror Famine in negotiations over recognition made it – us – “a passive accomplice to Stalin in the Ukraine.”

I agree. Which makes 1933 the year of America’s Fall (p. 243)

Diana West steps up to lectern and confronts Professor Kant with some very incisive and inconvenient questions of her own. Who really won World War II? Was it really America’s “Good War”? Did the “greatest generation” fight to rid the world of one toxic dictatorship only to enable another to take its place? How is it that the only beneficiary of that war was the Soviet Union, which acquired an Eastern European empire? Were Americans conned, scammed, and robbed throughout the government-perpetuated Depression and then during the war? Who was really establishing American foreign policy in the 1930’s and 1940’s: Roosevelt, or Stalin through Harry Hopkins, who had Roosevelt’s ear 24/7, and countless Soviet agents and traitors embedded in our government dedicated to selling secrets, altruism, self-sacrifice and welfare statism?

Hopkins, West suggests, was the Soviets’ most important agent in the U.S. government. Whether or not he was “recruited” or “co-opted” by the Soviets, or was a volunteer agent, West was not able to determine with certainty. He is referred to in Soviet cables as “Agent 19.” The KGB boasted that he was the Soviet Union’s “most important agent.”

West performs a yeoman’s task and gets to the “essence” of that whole sorry and tragic period, proving in her narrative that the reality of our relationship with the Soviets is knowable, and moreover, that its “essence” was ugly, scary, and shameful. I would add, pertaining to all the actors in that period responsible for what West calls the “Big Lie,” criminal and treasonous.

What precedes and follows West’s statement is not for the weak of stomach or faint of heart. With a meticulous and excruciating fealty to the truth, and after exhaustive and often frustrating research (because many documents that once existed and that were evidence of the government’s complicity were destroyed or had simply vanished from government archives), West paints a picture of not only FDR’s complacency towards Soviet totalitarianism, but Harry Hopkins’s contribution to the fall, as well, in addition to that of a legion of liars, fabricators, Communist moles, agents, and spies who populated government positions.

If you think the Benghazi cover-up is a classic case of desperate political back-pedaling, official lies and semi-lies, face-saving, and walking away from reality, that episode is merely a miniature of the colossal con pulled on the whole country by Roosevelt and his minions from 1933 onward.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2545/Truth-Snowden-and-the-Surveillance-State.aspx

On November 14, 2002, the late, great New York Times columnist William Safire wrote a column called “You Are a Suspect.” It is posted below, an early signpost to our current state of dislocation and upset.

It is dislocating and upsetting to be confronted with the Edward Snowden leaks: the leaked court order, the leaked logistical scope of what is being aptly labeled the Surveillance State. This what Safire predicted would be foisted on Us, the People. We are told it is The Only Means Possible to prevent “another 9/11.”

The mendacity of this rationale is as appalling as the totalitarian structure of the hyper-state it supports.

Yesterday, I focused on the failures of former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden to comprehend the quite simple patterns of Islamic conquest that history is replete with, that our own era is undergoing, that Western civlization is being transformed by. Why would an intel chief draw such blanks? One reason might be hostile Islamic penetration of the policy-making chain, which appears to have influenced key actors inside our government. Congress blindly, resolutely refuses to examine any evidence of this. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s political career seems to have cratered after and because she quite logically and patriotically asked for Inspectors General outside Congress to examine the evidence and was demonized as a second coming of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Another wrong on its face, as my new book, American Betrayal, argues.

Hayden, of course, is not alone. Indeed, he exemplifies the hollowness at the very top of our security bureacracies: FBI Director Mueller, DNI Clapper, JCC Dempsey, DHS Secretary Napolitano. CIA Director John Brennan, overtly sympathetic and even protective of Islam, is another bird entirely. He may well be a Muslim himself.

Under the fundamentally flawed guidance of such hollow people, a terrifying super-state has arisen to defend their beliefs, their ideology, not the Constitution.

It doesn’t protect the public, either, although this is the rationale that is supposed to excuse the “overreach.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/u-s-sovereignty-under-siege-on-the-chandler-gang/

On this week’s Glazov Gang, Michael Chandler filled in as host for Jamie and produced a stellar episode with guests Larry Greenfield, a Senior Fellow at the American Freedom Alliance, Hollywood actor Dwight Schultz (dwightschultzfansite.nl) and Lloyd Romeo, an Electronics Engineer and Patriot.

The Glazov Gangsters gathered to discuss Why Wasn’t There a Military Response To Benghazi? The episode also featured the themes: The Obama Doctrine, U.S. Sovereignty Under Siege, and much, much more.

To watch both parts of this riveting episode, see below:

Part I:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/denial-about-stockholm/

Why are leading conservative magazines buying into the lie that the Swedish riots have nothing to do with Islam?

The June 4 issue of National Review contained a piece entitled “Torching Utopia” and subtitled “Sweden’s problem is not Islam, it’s multiculturalism.” Its author, Tino Sanandaji, an Iranian Kurd who has lived in Sweden for many years and who studied economics in the U.S., had one principal point to make: that there does exist a “fierce hostility toward Swedish culture” in Sweden, but that it originates not with Muslim immigrants but with Swedish elites. To support this claim, he cited one Swedish politician’s declaration, some years ago, that “Swedes are jealous of immigrants” because the latter “have a culture, an identity, a history, something that binds you together,” while Swedes have only “Midsummer’s Eve and other lame things.” What Sanandaji chose not to point out was that the politician who made that statement, Mona Sahlin, made it while addressing an audience of Muslims in a mosque; and she didn’t say that Swedes were jealous of immigrants generally – she said that they were jealous of Muslims, because Islamic culture is wonderful and manifestly superior to Swedish culture.

Yes, Swedish elites hold Swedish culture in contempt. But so do Muslim immigrants – in the same way that they hold the local culture in contempt in every non-Muslim country in which they reside. Yes, the Swedish elites’ contempt for their own culture has made it easier for Muslims to express their contempt – but the Muslims would feel that contempt anyway. And it’s the palpable contempt of Muslims in Sweden for Swedish culture that has motivated the Swedish elite – in a perverse, pathetic, and increasingly desperate attempt to please and pacify the Muslims among them – to express their own contempt for Swedish society so openly.

Many of Sanandaji’s points were splendid, as far as they went. “Cultural self-confidence is essential for integration,” he wrote. He complained that there’s no established “social contract wherein Swedes accept immigrants as one of their own once certain obligations are fulfilled”; that Sweden isn’t an easy country to integrate into, because “Swedes tend to be reticent, solitary, and reserved,” with “a complex culture, full of subtle rules and opaque codes of conduct”; and that “Swedes are conformist and quite intolerant of deviation from group norms….Icy Scandinavia was never a particularly well-chosen testing ground for the multiculturalist experiment.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-dumb-police-state/ Investigative work is built on selective mistrust. The difference between a state in which there are police and a police state is the scope of that mistrust. A state in which there are police will pursue criminals by using investigative techniques to profile suspects while a police state criminalizes everyone by treating the entire […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The dominant struggle of the 20th Century was the attempt to reconcile the growth of industrial economies with the social welfare demands of the left. The various attempts to “Steal the Thunder” of the left by adopting its social programs led to horrors such as Nazism on the one hand and the growth of the welfare state on the other.

Communism was finally defeated by adopting its program. The national battle against a Russian
Communist empire was won while the domestic struggle against the left was lost.

The welfare state created a fifth column of bureaucrats and recipients to act as the left’s electorate. Instead of stealing the left’s thunder, they subsidized the triumphant long march of the left.

The liberal Republican prescription is still to Outleft the left, adopting some of its more popular ideas and social policies in a more sensible fashion. And they have never understood that the strategy, even when it succeeds in the short term, is doomed. You don’t win by making your enemy stronger. The left understands that. That is why it’s strategies once in power involve deepening and expanding its institutional power while destroying those of the right.

The temptation to Outleft the left is always there and always doomed because adopting the ideas and positions of the left means that you have already lost.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350806/our-idols-and-ourselves-kathryn-jean-lopez

In “those rare moments when we find ourselves alone and the gadgetry silent, we feel we are at a loss,” Elizabeth Scalia writes in Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols in Everyday Life. “With nothing to distract us, we come face to face with a keening emptiness.” Scalia, known on the Internet as “The Anchoress,” says that “silence” can be “terrifying” then. ”But only because it lays bare our loneliness, our self-recriminations, and our doubts. Possessing nothing that is equal to those depths, we sense the need to distract ourselves and the cycle begins to churn again.”

Sound familiar? Read on. Scalia talks with NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about her new book.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What’s so “strange” about the idols of modern American life?

ELIZABETH SCALIA: Perhaps primarily what is strange about our idols — beyond the fact that they are strange gods we were never meant to place before the Creator — is that they are so interior to us. When you mention an idol, the first image most people will conjure up is the golden calf the Hebrews created while Moses was on the mountain. It was an external thing, something outside of the people themselves — and they understood the God of Abraham to be outside of themselves, too. We are more sophisticated in our understanding, now — so comfortable with the notion of “God within” that we barely think what it means.

We may still have idols residing outside of ourselves — if we allow our things, our possessions and creations to stand between us and God, and to essentially own us — but we are very adept at burnishing the godlings of the mind, the ideas and opinions and beliefs formed interiorly. These are petted and loved and fed, and they grow directly in proportion to how much we indulge them, until they become the object of our enthrallment and the entity we serve. If our ideology, for instance, has become an idol, then we nourish it by reading only what suits our point of view; we speak and gather with only those who think as we think; we visit websites that echo our thoughts back to us, until we lose sight of anything beyond it — even the humanity of the one who does not conform to our beliefs. We begin to serve the idol of the idea, alone.

LOPEZ: Do you come close to sacrilege when you write, “As a Catholic priest stands ‘in persona Christi,’ Obama stood, ‘in persona meum’” in 2008? Was it so in 2012, too? Now?

SCALIA: Wow, that’s a big question. Sacrilege? No, I don’t think so. It is a rather apt comparison. As a Catholic, I believe that a priest truly does stand “in persona Christi,” and as a living, breathing observer of the world, I do believe that for some people, in 2008, Obama was a personification of the wonderfulness of themselves, made manifest. And I think Obama would agree. In The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He completely got the idol thing; he knew he was an idol, and in 2008 he brilliantly exploited it. The grandiose speech in Germany, the Greek columns behind him at the Democratic National Convention — Obama, I believe, understood that these events and props were as much meant to flatter his admirers as to shape world opinion. People who thought themselves smart, urbane, sophisticated globalists saw themselves shining in Obama, just as the Hebrews saw their reflections coming back to them with the golden calf. There is a line from the musical Evita: “I came from the people/ they need to adore me/ so Christian Dior me/from my head to my toes.” The idol flatters the idolator. The idolator wants to be flattered.

And by the way, in 2008, the idol-as-candidate model was also true on the right, but it was the veep candidate, Sarah Palin, and not John McCain, who was the adorable reflector: People looked at Palin, with her despised non-Ivy degree and her “you betcha” ways and her blue-collar background, and they saw themselves, their values. When she was savaged by the media, they saw themselves being savaged, and they got to the point where they — like the Obama lovers — would not tolerate a negative word said about her. Palin, quite unlike Obama, didn’t realize she was an idol until after the election, when her patina quickly rubbed away.