RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203335504578086450730075938.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Yesterday’s man of destiny is today’s peddler of spent ideas.

On the eve of the U.S. presidential election four years ago, educated people nearly everywhere understood that China was the country of the future, green was the energy of the future, and Barack Obama was a man of destiny. How quaint it all seems now.

In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism last week in the New York Times, reporter David Barboza identified assets worth $2.7 billion belonging to various members of the family of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, including his 90-year-old mother, a retired schoolteacher named Yang Zhiyun.

“The details of how Ms. Yang, a widow, accumulated such wealth are not known, or even if she was aware of the holdings in her name,” Mr. Barboza reports. “But it happened after her son was elevated to China’s ruling elite, first in 1998 as vice prime minister and then five years later as prime minister.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/real_leaders_dont_promote_dependency.html While campaigning in Colorado on Sept. 2 en route to the Democratic National Convention, President Obama boasted: “You know, he [Romney] calls it ObamaCare. I like the name. I do care. I guess you call his plan ‘Romney doesn’t care.’” As with all liberals vying for votes during the past 35 years, Mr. Obama […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/331866

In the most scurrilous ad of a scurrilous campaign, President Obama’s allies at the Democratic super PAC Patriot Majority have released a new ad denouncing Mitt Romney as an “economic traitor” — their actual words — while the president identifies his own policies as the “new economic patriotism.” Of course it is not patriotism but nationalism, albeit nationalism of a funny sort — nationalism for people who do not regard the nation itself as anything particularly remarkable.

At issue is an automotive-sensor plant located in Illinois. The plant had been owned by Honeywell, which in 2011 sold its automotive-sensor operators to Sensata, a worldwide manufacturer that had never intended to keep the Illinois plant open and had made no secret of the fact. The Massachusetts-based Sensata manufactures all over the world, but 75 percent of its automotive business is in Asia, and so it is consolidating the related manufacturing there — hardly an unexpected decision, especially given that Illinois is one of our least competitive and most highly taxed states. Jesse Jackson of course was immediately on the scene, and Sensata employees and other protesters began attempting to occupy the plant, leading to two dozen arrests and causing the company to consider shuttering the facility ahead of schedule. Leave it to Jesse Jackson to conclude that if a particular location is economically uncompetitive, the natural solution is a mini-riot.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/secret-u-s-iranian-meetings-to-continue/

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/secret-us-iranian-meetings-to-continue-obama-said-to-need-diplomatic-victory-badly-after-benghazi?f=must_reads

The United States and Iran are moving forward with secret negotiations, despite denying earlier meetings took place, according to a source highly placed in the Islamic government.

The source, who remains anonymous for security reasons, added that teams from both sides will resume the talks in the coming days with the hope of reaching agreement to announce a breakthrough before the U.S. elections.

The source said the Obama administration seems to need a diplomatic victory before the elections in the wake of the attack in Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans because the administration failed to adequately protect the Benghazi consulate.

If President Obama is not re-elected, however, the source contends any agreement reached after the elections will be announced and enforced while he is still in office, once Iran’s supreme leader receives written guarantees from Obama.

The source adds, on a related note, that President Obama chose not to destroy the American, sensitive-technology RQ-170 stealth drone, which was captured by the Iranian forces after it crashed in Iran in December of 2011, because he feared jeopardizing the ongoing secret negotiations.

The negotiations to date have reportedly gone beyond the Iranian nuclear program to include such issues as South America, the Persian Gulf and Syria. On the latter issue, the U.S. has already stepped back from its demand that President Bashar Assad be removed. The source added that both parties have agreed on a broad range of incentives that have been offered to the Islamic regime and which will be revealed in time.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-welfare-state-of-mind
I was recently advised by my office manager, who was responding to the building manager’s office receipt of complaints, that I could not smoke outside near a side entrance to our office building, as I had been for years, because it offended non-smokers who were coming and going and who claimed to be super-sensitive to smoke, and also that somehow the smoke was also getting inside the building where the slightest trace of smoke also bothered them. I was advised to use the designated smoking area on the other side of the building. The catch was that this area, too, is subject to the same conditions.

I cite this incident because it underscores a phenomenon I have watched grow over five decades, from the first time I began to observe and evaluate men’s behavior to my current and far more incisive cogitations, which is how quickly and easily men submit to government authority and the consensus of the collective, and how inured they can become to being taken care of and protected. The anti-smoking campaign that has been waged for decades is merely one facet of the phenomenon. I suspect that much of the anti-smoking stances adopted by non-smokers is feigned and likely psychosomatic. Having been patronized and protected and legislated for by way of lobbies and pressure group warfare, they are amenable to more of the same.

My gut response to the advice could have been any one of the following: They don’t own the air. Shall I wear a Star of David, too, so that non-smokers can better identify and avoid me? What are they going to do about it? Beat me up? Call the Green Police? Behave like picture- and video- and insult-maddened Muslims? Pressure my employer to fire me if I don’t cave in? Ask the police to ticket me?

But the welfare state is not just laws or legislative acts that encourage individuals to become dependent on the State. The welfare state is first and foremost a “state of mind.”

A welfare state would not work if it did not inculcate, either by education, by mandated indoctrination, by incessant propaganda, or by cultural osmosis, the proper “state of mind” in a population, that is, to instill in men an individual’s alleged duty or obligation to submit to a consensus propagated by a variety of authorities, especially government authorities. A welfare state would evaporate almost immediately without first having pulled a fraud on the electorate. However, a welfare state could not establish itself without the overt or tacit approval of a large component of a country’s population. This consensus requires as well the consensual sanction or silence of the targets of a welfare state and its vanquished, ill-informed, or willing population and electorate. And if the opponents do not consent, they are simply ignored.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/benghazi-october-surprise

First, the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was blamed on the YouTube video “Innocence of Muslims”. According to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, it caused a demonstration out in front of the U.S. Consulate that “began spontaneously” and “then spun out of control”,

“The information, the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video. People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent and those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately are quite common in post-revolutionary Libya and that then spun out of control.”

“But we don’t see at this point signs this was a coordinated plan, premeditated attack. Obviously, we will wait for the results of the investigation and we don’t want to jump to conclusions before then. But I do think it’s important for the American people to know our best current assessment.”

We all know how it went, everyone from the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to the Press Secretary Jay Carney, to the Director of National Security James Clapper and President Obama himself all were on the YouTube video bandwagon until the wheels fell off.

But as time has gone on, new bits and pieces have emerged. The information on the attack makes the deaths of the four Americans that much more senseless. Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, both former Navy SEALs working under the State Department, were killed alongside information management officer Sean Smith and U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.

Emails from Benghazi have surfaced showing that Obama, the FBI, CIA, the State Department, the military, as well as other intelligence offices within the government knew within two hours, that the attack on the Benghazi consulate had been carried out by terrorists.

benghazi email 1

benghazi email 2

benghazi email 3

A live feed of audio and video were being watched at the White House and now we find out from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that the request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate as well as the attack hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA command.

Two times the CIA operatives were told to “stand down” when they requested to go to the aid of the Ambassador and his team.

It has also come out that the 2 former SEALs who were murdered had gone against orders and rescued those who remained at the consulate along with the body of Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack.

Given what can only be called a “cover-up” by the Obama Administration I sat down with one person I know and trust when it comes to matters of the CIA, Clare Lopez, Vice President of the Intelligence Summit.

Clare M. Lopez’s bio is by itself a who’s who of counter-intelligence. She is a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on Middle East, homeland security, national defense, and counterterrorism issues. Lopez began her career as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), serving domestically and abroad for 20 years in a variety of assignments, acquiring extensive expertise in counterintelligence, counternarcotics, and counterproliferation issues with a career regional focus on the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. She has served in or visited over two dozen nations worldwide, speaks several languages, including Spanish, Bulgarian, French, German, and Russian, and currently is studying Farsi.

Now a private consultant, Lopez is a Professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre- www.cicentre.com ). Formerly, she was Executive Director of the Iran Policy Committee, a Washington, DC think tank, from 2005-2006. She has served as a Senior Scientific Researcher at the Battelle Memorial Institute; a Senior Intelligence Analyst, Subject Matter Expert, and Program Manager at HawkEye Systems, LLC.; and previously produced Technical Threat Assessments for U.S. Embassies at the Department of State, Bureau of Diplomatic Security, where she worked as a Senior Intelligence Analyst for Chugach Systems Integration.

Gadi Adelman: Clare, thank you so much for this interview. Let me jump right in to this. You and I pretty much knew, and I say you and I, I mean along with many other people in the counter-terror field, we knew right from the beginning that something wasn’t right and Amb. Susan Rice was out there on 5 TV shows saying that this was a spontaneous riot that erupted from a demonstration.

At what point did you realize that something’s not Kosher here?

Clare Lopez: You mean as far as the Administrations characterization of the attack?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rDRz2DLct4&feature=youtu.be

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/5252/features/art-and-idolatry-in-austria/

Art transforms life through beauty but inspires a possessiveness unlike any other. Collectors tend toward obsession, which overwhelms morality; museums, like the medieval church, wash away sin with exhibitions for the public good. Andrew Shea’s new documentary, Portrait of Wally (subtitled “the face that launched a thousand lawsuits”), examines these phenomena through the journey of a Viennese painting from a Jewish owner to Nazi loot to Austrian icon, a process interrupted—temporarily—by a family and the Manhattan District Attorney.

The Viennese painter Egon Schiele, born in 1890, is renowned for his phantasmagoric female nudes—louche and erotic, hovering between desperation and exhaustion. Schiele, a protégé of Gustav Klimt, was an indefatigable womanizer. Both artists displayed fin de siècle attitudes toward sexuality and figurative art: the naturalistic purity of line breaks to display uncertainty, neurosis, and compulsion.

But Schiele’s non-nudes were penetrating. His self-portraits revealed a man well aware of his obsessions, defiant unconventionality and grotesquerie, whose distortions reflected deeper truth. And his portrait of his mistress—Valerie Neuzil, or Wally—showed a woman who understood Schiele completely. Her large blue eyes and tilted head bespoke resignation, indulgence, and love, her beauty a striking contrast to the distortions of Schiele’s decadence.

Portrait of Wally, as it became known, belonged to Lea Bondi, a Viennese Jewish art dealer and one of Schiele’s first enthusiasts. A gift from the artist, it hung in her apartment. In 1939, a Nazi art dealer seized her gallery, then charged into her home and pulled the portrait off the wall. Bondi left London for Vienna the next day and never saw Wally again.

http://www.jidaily.com/09d4f?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider&utm_campaign=28801e9a1e-Insider&utm_medium=email

I felt like cheering last week when Avigdor Lieberman told his unelected EU counterpart, Catherine Ashton, to mind her own business.

Irked by the latest Brussels demand on settlements, Israel’s foreign minister pointedly suggested that the EU focus on its own growing problems before lecturing others.

You can see why Eurocrats are happier hectoring Israel than dealing with the euro. But being rude about the Jewish state isn’t simply a displacement activity. Almost every European Parliament session brings a condemnatory resolution, a proposal to restrict trade, or a demand for differential labelling for exports from “occupied Palestine”. Israel sometimes deserves criticism; like all countries, it makes mistakes. But that doesn’t explain the disproportionate focus on a state that is one 30th of the size of the UK.

Some blame antisemitism, some anti-Americanism, some an over-sensitivity to the imagined prejudices of Muslim voters in Europe. There might be a smidgen of truth in these explanations. Yet they all miss the main point. The reason most Euro-enthusiasts resent Israel is that it is the supreme embodiment of the national principle – that is, of the desire of every people to form their own state. For 2,000 years, Jews were scattered and stateless, yet never lost the aspiration for an independent homeland: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Then one day, against all the odds – providentially, even – they fulfilled it.

Eurocrats hate Israel’s success as a nation

http://www.timesofisrael.com/uk-academic-union-to-face-claims-of-institutional-anti-semitism/ The UK’s trade union for academics, the University and College Union, is “institutionally anti-semitic,” a London employment tribunal heard Monday. The claim was made on the opening day of a potentially landmark case, which partially revolves around UCU’s resolutions concerning an academic boycott of Israel. The claimant, freelance mathematics lecturer Ronnie Fraser, is alleging […]