RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jimmy Carter made news recently for criticizing Barack Obama’s foreign policy record. Asked about Obama’s “successes,” Carter said they were “minimal,” adding, “I can’t think of many nations in the world where we have a better relationship now than we did when he took over.” He continued, “We have not improved our relationship with individual countries and I would say that the United States [sic] influence and prestige and respect in the world is [sic] probably lower now than it was six or seven years ago.” Perhaps thinking of his own dismal record, Carter anxiously repeated, “I’m not saying it’s his fault.”

Carter may be secretly relieved that he no longer holds the title as worst foreign policy president ever, but Obama’s failures come from the same bad ideas as Carter’s did: a distrust of American power and influence, a skepticism about America as a force for good in the world, and a preference for diplomatic engagement predicated on a massive failure of imagination in understanding the motives and aims of our adversaries.

How DHS is failing to heed its own warnings.

On June 22, 2015 the ICE Newsroom posted a startling “Top Story” news release under the category, “Document and Benefit Fraud.” The title of the news release was obviously crafted to create the illusion that a major vulnerability to U.S. national security, the threat of a terror attack, was being addressed: “ICE-DMV partnership combating identity, document fraud.”

The news release was accompanied by a poster. If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how many words the above poster is worth.

Here is how the news release begins:

If you walk into your local Department of Motor Vehicles office (DMV) on any given day, you’ll most likely find a crowd of people waiting to get a new license or updating their vehicle registration.

What many aren’t aware of is that while they’re waiting in anticipation of their number to be called there may be document and identity fraud taking place just a few feet away.

The Greeks gambled in their referendum that European elites were more committed to their ideological obsession with integrating Europe than with mere economics. Stand up to a bunch of corrupt Greek civil servants and Europe risks going back to the bad old days of nation states and independent economies.

It is likely that their bet will pay off.

After all even a cursory glance at the European Union shows positively Grecian levels of waste, fraud and economic mismanagement. The $1.8 billion IMF payment that Greece defaulted on is a hole in the bucket compared to an annual $6 billion in the European Union’s estimated budget fraud.

A radical left-wing government in Greece is betting that more moderate European Socialists will meet their demands rather than risk opening a chasm that will expose the economic unsustainablity of the existing system. The Greek economy may be a fraud, but it’s a fraud built on a bigger Euro fraud.

And that’s a familiar pattern.

This is the way that public sector unions browbeat their Democratic allies in Chicago, New York and California to extract insane concessions from their unworkable budgets. The budgets are already bankrupting cities and states, so why not tear off free cosmetic surgery or $80k salaries from the mess?

Greece is just treating the European experiment the way that the California Teachers Association treats the state. It’s a giant corrupt piggy bank, so why not raid it? It’s going to go bankrupt, but it will anyway.

“A great pushback is awakening here and abroad, but its timing, nature, and future remain mysterious.”

Given European socialism, and given its therapeutic culture that assumes morality is relative and situational, it is quite stunning — especially to the Greeks — that suddenly debts are to mean not endless negotiations, haggling, blame-gaming, and contextualization, but are reduced to something akin to Calvin Coolidge’s snarky alleged quote, “They hired the money, didn’t they?”

Aside from the threats of Vladimir Putin and the wobbling of the European Union, Europe is being overrun with illegal immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Once an impoverished foreign national arrives at any European shore, the European Union, either out of utopian piety or colonial guilt, feels obligated to accept him, without questioning much his legal status or the reasons for his arrival — much less why it should not extend such magnanimity to tens of millions of others who may well follow.

Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn is running for leadership of Britain’s Labour Party, with the support of George Galloway.

In 2012, Corbyn agreed to speak at a Ramadan celebration with Abdur Raheem Green, a Salafist preacher who has spoken of a “Yehudi [Jewish] … stench.” In addition, Green encourages men to hit their wives to “bring them to goodness,” and has called for the killing of homosexuals and adulterers.

In the wake of Britain’s general election, candidates with ties to anti-Semitic extremists and terror groups are standing for important political positions.

In May, George Galloway declared that he was vying to become Mayor of London. Those concerned with Galloway’s work with the Syrian and Iranian regimes expressed dismay at the news.

Now, a month later, the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn is running for leadership of Britain’s Labour Party, with the support of George Galloway.

Despite the pain it presages, Sunday’s overwhelming “no” vote at least leaves little doubt about where the Greeks stand. Greeks have rejected Europe’s latest bailout offer even after experiencing a taste of the ugly potential consequences of doing so—capital controls, limited ATM withdrawals and a banking crisis. Now they will have to live with those consequences.

It’s true the Greeks were given two bad choices, but they still chose the worst. Europe was offering more money to forestall a crisis in return for pension cuts and other reforms. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras claimed a “no” vote would help him extract better terms—by which he means even higher growth-killing taxes in return for fewer pension cuts. The Greeks chose the Tsipras ultimatum strategy, so they can’t blame the Germans for what comes next.

Bill Gates recently noted that the cost of decarbonization using today’s technology is ‘beyond astronomical.’
On June 30, one day after the Supreme Court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of mercury emissions from power plants, President Obama committed the United States to the goal of generating 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. This would nearly triple the amount of wind- and solar-generated electricity on the national grid.

The EPA ran afoul of the law by failing to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before it acted to reduce mercury emissions from coal-power plants. There is no objective cost-benefit analysis that could justify the president’s target for renewable energy.

Recently Bill Gates explained in an interview with the Financial Times why current renewables are dead-end technologies. They are unreliable. Battery storage is inadequate. Wind and solar output depends on the weather. The cost of decarbonization using today’s technology is “beyond astronomical,” Mr. Gates concluded.

You might expect the usual disputes over crowd size when a leftist group calls a “million man person march.” Usually these feature aerial photos and arguments over how many individuals are crowded how densely into a certain amount of space. But with the “million person march” that promised ‘the flag will come down,” called by Operation Ferguson yesterday in Columbia, SC, this was not a problem. The only photo available of the event shows three people, all of them onstage.
The great Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit spotted the utter flop. After waiting and waiting and waiting for photos:

Here is the only photo available from today’s Million Person March.

Only three people at the Million Person March…

Attention all armchair crusaders, warriors of the web, and victims of life, the universe, and everything:

Take a break from your e-rantings, your Twitter manifestos, and your Justrage railings. Stop screaming at your screens for a moment – they can wait, and the odds of them walking away are slim. Put down your Frappuccino, your Doritos, and your frozen pizza.

This is meant for you.

Not long ago, I happened upon an article on society’s newest scourge – one more aggressive than a microaggression, more fearsome than a raging Bull Connor, and more phallic than a good five-cent cigar – creeping sexism.

Terrified yet? Collect your thoughts, change your underwear, and get back to your screens as soon as you can.

Muggers are prowling Central Park once more while public nuisances shake down New York’s motorists and crime soars. Welcome to the increasingly bruised Big Apple of Mayor Bill de Blasio, his progressive agenda — and the inevitable results
Welcome to the 1970s! In New York, anyway, one of the decades Tom Wolfe denominated “purple” has made a stunning comeback. Consider crime. After a precipitous decline that began under the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani and continued under Michael Bloomberg, violent crime has soared in the city. From May 2014 to the end of May this year, shootings increased almost 10 per cent while murders jumped a stunning 19.5 per cent during the same period. Meanwhile, Central Park has once again become a haven for thieves and muggers. “Police are investigating another mugging in Central Park,” begins a May 20 story in the New York Post, “the latest in a string of robberies that has residents on edge.”