RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Lies of Günter Grass Posted By David Solway

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/10/exposing-the-lies-of-gunter-grass/

It’s a curious fact that the reputation of many contemporary novelists of popular distinction rests on a single book. Think, for example, of Umberto Eco. Had he not written The Name of the Rose, he would be better known today as an essayist and semiotician who had also published some interesting if not particularly memorable fiction. (The one exception to the rule might be Foucault’s Pendulum.) This is even truer of Norwegian antisemite, Jostein Gaarder, whose Sophie’s World catapulted him to international acclaim. The works that followed might best be portrayed as competent-to-forgettable. Ditto the anti-Zionist Louis De Bernière whose Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was his one resonant success, and Portuguese antisemite and Nobel Laureate José Saramago, whose only readable book was The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.

As for Germany’s most famous living novelist, Günter Grass pretty well consorts with the paradigm, The Tin Drum having established him as a major literary and political voice of the twentieth century. Admittedly, subsequent books like Dog Years and The Flounder were notable achievements. But absent the beating of The Tin Drum, the callithumpian parade of Grass’ works in the public arena would have been far less spectacular. He cannot be dismissed as a one-shot Johnny, but his oeuvre arguably does not justify his inflated réclame. Indeed, for some time now, he has been living off the interest from the capital he invested in his heyday. Sadly, Grass lost it long ago.

The Center for American Progress’ War on Veteran Posted By Daniel Greenfield

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/10/the-center-for-american-progress%e2%80%99-war-on-veterans/

The shameful treatment of Vietnam veterans is one of the ugliest chapters in our history and it is a chapter that the Obama Administration appears eager to revisit under the guiding inspiration of the Center for American Progress.

While spending under Obama has dramatically increased, the only part of the budget that the radical administration appears to be willing to cut is military spending. But cuts to military spending don’t just involve hardware, but also target human beings. The most shameful cuts involve dramatic increases to health care costs for veterans.

Tricare provides medical benefits to active duty personnel and their families, as well as veterans. With military salaries that are below average for Federal workers, those who serve and have served their country depend on it. After ten years of war and fifteen thousand wounded men and women, Tricare is a small payment on the debt that can never be repaid.

Unfortunately the Party of Treason, not satisfied with stabbing soldiers in the back while they were fighting, has refused to cease its campaign against them even after they have come home. The Center for American Progress, the leftist think-tank that has been described as the brains of the Democratic Party, has made Tricare into a target.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Feral children deprived of language develop their own forms of communication and it may be that societies deprived of religion develop their own belief systems. Religion is at its core a means of explaining the world and it becomes absurdly easy for science to slip into the habits of religion. To break down religion […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11756/pub_detail.asp
While the Road to Serfdom is paved with good intentions gone awry; the road to self fulfillment—the dream of the modern person—is constructed with freedom stones resembling personal license. What is emerging in the United States, based in part on the empirical data in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, is a selective version of morality. If it feels good, do it. The constraints inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition, our genetic inheritance, even our sex, are mere trifles compared to personal choice and desire. To my astonishment, even murder is justified as an act of personal morality.

Francesca Minerva argues that since babies have not formed desires and plans, they may be killed (she calls it “after birth abortion”) if they interfere with the desires and plans of other people who have formed desires and plans, namely their parents and other immediate relatives and also society as a whole. She writes:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11758/pub_detail.asp

Exploding the Myth Eco-Puritanism Is Harmless Rich Trzupek

“All and all, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read. The chapter entitled “A Climate Rooster Becomes President” should be required reading for every voter. Isaac outlines President Obama’s multi-pronged, all-out war on fossil fuels, which is sure to continue to have serious economic repercussions far into the future. Still, she remains hopeful that the wave of this particular apocalyptic movement has already crested. Indeed, fewer and fewer Americans profess to worried about man-made climate change every year. “Roosters of the Apocalypse” explains why.”

Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming Nearly Bankrupted the Western World, is available from the Heartland Institute.

One of the difficulties inherent to combatting the excesses of environmental activists is that their message sounds so innocuous on the surface. Who can be against a cleaner world? How can anyone not want to protect the wonders of nature? And, if the green crowd may take things a tad too far at times, what’s the harm? After all, better safe than sorry, right?

Author Rael Jean Isaac explodes the myth that eco-puritanism is harmless in her new book Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming Nearly Bankrupted the Western World, published by the Heartland Institute. It’s a devastating take-down of the excesses of the environmental movement past and present, in the form of a well-reasoned, easy to digest analysis that packs equal parts reason and entertainment into a surprisingly compact package.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3000/obama-russia-space For the men in the Kremlin, nuclear weapons are the last shred of superpower status they have left, and anything that even slightly reduces the threat of their missile force is a menace to be fought with every tool available. The Undersecretary of State for Arms Control recently offered to provide Russia with classified […]

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/04/09/gsa-rocks-vegas

The federal civil service — Obama’s scandalous governing class — shows its true colors.

“Obama will protect the bureaucracy that is his willing instrument of governance, and those who infest the federal agencies as permanent employees will be carrying out his will even if a Republican replaces Obama in November.”

One of the few reasons to not mourn the death of Elvis Presley is that the General Services Administration’s event planners would probably have hired him to sing at their October 2010 “conference” at the ritzy-glitzy M Resort Spa Casino in Las Vegas. Instead, they had to settle for asongcelebrating government waste by one of their own.

According to the April 2 report by the GSA’s Inspector General, the “conference” cost $822,751. So, for a mere $2,742 per person in taxpayers’ money, the GSA event featured essential government functions such as a $75,000 team-building session in which attendees were challenged to build a bicycle, a session with an entertainer-mind reader ($3,200), almost $150,000 in food expenses as well as paying for clothing and tuxedo rentals for GSA employees,

http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2012/02/Alaska.html

The 49th state was built by Jewish people, Jewish money and Jewish know-how. And although their numbers are small, Jews are still disproportionately prominent in commercial and public life.

In 1938, as the Nazis laid plans to annihilate European Jewry, a few desperate Jews dreamed of escaping to the other side of the world: Alaska. Joachim Hein, from Breslau, Germany, was one of many who wrote to the American Department of Interior for permission to immigrate to the vast northern territory with his wife, Anna, and daughter, Henny. “We shall in no way [be] a burden for the country,” he wrote in a letter now in the National Archives, “because we take our electric machines from here and furnish a manufacture in aprons and linen, like we have had here. But if this business is not agreeable to your Excellency, we are prepared to [do] every work.”

Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and a few others in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration liked the idea of resettling German Jews in Alaska. Despite the isolationist and anti-Jewish sentiments prevalent at the time, they proposed to establish “a haven for Jewish refugees from Germany and other areas in Europe where the Jews are subjected to oppressive restrictions.” According to Ickes’s diaries, President Roosevelt wanted to move 10,000 settlers to Alaska each year for five years, but only 10 percent would be Jewish “to avoid the undoubted criticism” the program would receive if it brought too many Jews into the country. With Ickes’s support, Interior Undersecretary Harold Slattery wrote a formal proposal titled “The Problem of Alaskan Development,” which became known as the Slattery Report. It emphasized economic-development benefits rather than humanitarian relief: The Jewish refugees, Ickes reasoned, would “open up opportunities in the industrial and professional fields now closed to the Jews in Germany.”

http://spme.net/articles/8647/3/11/Genocidal-Liberalism-The-Universitys-Jihad-Against-Israel-Jews.html

“…….In subtler ways, the debasement of academic liberalism itself rendered its practitioners incapable of recognizing that Israel’s foundation was one of the greatest affirmations a martyred people had ever made. Liberalism grew more and more dogmatic and dictatorial, inclined to transform certain academic disciplines into “grievance” studies, receptive to the (fascist) idea that physiology determines culture, unashamed to select political desperadoes like MIT’s Louis Kampf to run their professional organizations. More and more they singled out Israel as the globe’s most blatant “anachronism” in a world that was (supposedly) moving happily away from the very idea of the nation-state and national religious identity. Apologetics for what Michael Lerner had called the “earned antisemitism” of black violence against Jews in America now became the trademark of advanced liberals when estimating Palestinian violence against Israelis.”

By locating a genocidal impulse at work in today’s universities, the explosive title of this book (somewhat weakened by that unfortunate word “jihad”) inevitably calls to mind an earlier book called Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People (YIVO, 1946), by Max Weinreich. That classic text cast a backward look at the multitude of German professors (almost none of them “liberal”) who served their dictatorial master’s needs by making antisemitism academically respectable and openly complicit in the destruction of European Jewry. Their task was to put scholarship at the service of “the Jewish question.” But now, so Professor Cravatts argues, the Jewish question has been renamed “the Israeli question” and the “scholars” who zealously pursue it are mainly liberals. Whereas Hitler’s professors kept asking “Do Jews have the right to live?” their liberal descendants keep asking: “Does Israel have the right to exist?” The latter, like the former, answer NO.

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/04/09/what-judicial-activism A court is doing its duty, not legislating, when it strikes down an unconstitutional law. Last week, President Barack Obama warned the Supreme Court against the perils of judicial activism. Specifically, he warned against the Court ruling unconstitutional Obamacare. “Ultimately,” said the President, “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would […]