RUTHFULLY YOURS

Matthew Tyrmand, the son of 20th century writer and anti-communist Leopold Tyrmand, is an investor and economist based in New York City. He co-runs a Chicago-based NGO focused on bringing transparency to government spending (www.openthebooks.com) which he hopes to introduce to Poland now that he has obtained Polish citizenship.

I was recently asked by a Polish venture capitalist what my thoughts were on a recession occurring in the Polish economy and if so what the timing and depth of it would be. What follows is my response.

The short answer on the timing of the recession that I am predicting is right after the national elections in 2015, though I do believe the cracks in the economy are starting to show and with the recent 50 basis point interest rate cut, I think the nomenklatura see it too and are trying to put a “bandage on a gunshot wound” ahead of next year’s elections. Hopefully this coming recession lasts two to three years at most and is accompanied by a changing of the political guard. If Polish politics follows the trend of most of Europe- that of Brussels led socialism- then it will look more like a lost generation in the manner that Japan has had and the likes of which the US and parts of the EU are embarking upon. In this case the coming recession will last closer to ten years than two or three. Politics matters.

My reasoning behind this recession and its depth primarily hinges upon the preponderance of political corruption that has undermined Poland’s free market. To understand why there is an economic reversal occurring or about to occur (but not yet having commenced if you believe the statistics out of the government) one has to understand the previous positive trends. Poland’s strong tailwinds, and strong they have been, will not guarantee perpetual growth. Poland has had over two decades of uninterrupted sequential quarterly GDP growth with nary a recessionary contraction. Growth rarely occurs in this straight a line and Poland has amazed the world for how long this straight line has been (thanks to Balcerowicz and his eponymous economic liberalization plan). This is similar to the China of the last 20 years in the sense that after 1989 in Poland there were huge amounts of pent up animal spirits ready to be unleashed on a free market (one need only look at the entrepreneurship that followed passage of Wilczek’s Law in 1988) . Poland weathered the recent crisis well because it decoupled from the Eurozone in large part due to the potency of this massive 20 year tailwind. In essence, 40mm people from a closer-to-third-world post- Soviet regime saw economic development that moved the nation toward the first world Western European middle class quality of life and with it much stronger consumption trends and a more potent rule of law when it comes to private property protection. This was more prevalent in Poland than other Soviet satellites due to a stronger education system and a civic minded population. There has always been, even throughout the dark years of communist oppression and now to this day still, a stronger moral center in this society (politicians not withstanding) rooted in the Catholic Church.

Arabs kill Jews, US urges restraint

It is not clear when a widespread and growing terror campaign becomes officially ‎labeled as a new intifada (the “car intifada” terminology is now being thrown ‎around).

In any case, as they have done many times before, the Palestinians have ‎shown that one area in which they are willing to innovate is to find new ways of ‎killing Jews in Israel. Suicide bombings, rockets from Gaza, tunnels dug into Israel — ‎when Israel responds with countermeasures to one form of terror, others are ‎introduced. Using automobiles to slam into pedestrians has been tried before, but ‎now seems to have become a more popular tactic. Stabbing Israelis does not kill as ‎many people as quickly as suicide bombings, but draws a weaker response from ‎Israel and a far weaker rebuke from the West. ‎

The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, well into his second unelected four-‎year term of office beyond the one term to which he was elected, is the Palestinian ‎leader that Israel has been waiting for, according to European and American ‎peacemakers. He is, they argue, a “moderate,” unlike Yassar Arafat, and his tenure ‎in office represents a real (and of course, likely final) opportunity to achieve the ‎two-state solution between Israel and “Palestine.” Final of course does not mean ‎final, since when peace talks break down, if they are ever resumed, the likes of John ‎Kerry and Martin Indyk and EU leaders like Catherine Ashton will claim that now, ‎this time, we have really reached that final opportunity, which will disappear if not ‎seized upon. ‎

Abbas, of course, has done everything in his power to stoke the violence, by ‎glorifying the murderers of Jews as martyrs, and honoring them, and calling for the ‎defense of Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, presumably under threat because some Jews ‎might mouth silent prayers on the Temple Mount. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ‎succumbed on this score, reassuring the Jordanians that Israel has not changed its ‎policy on the Temple Mount.

Once a new wave of violence begins, and it spreads to ‎a much broader area, as it has this week, Abbas may not be in control of how ‎quickly it gets tamped down, assuming he wants it tamped down. Palestinian ‎religious leaders are certainly not in any mood to eliminate or reduce the violence, calling Jerusalem the capital of the ‎global caliphate, and pushing for tens of millions of Muslims to march to the city to ‎protect Al-Aqsa from the infidels. ‎

FOX NEWS’ SHEPARD SMITH ACCUSED ISRAEL OF FOMENTING VIOLENCE:

At 3:40 Eastern Time, November 11, 2014, as I watched Shepard Smith on FOX News, I was STUNNED when in an interview-piece he was holding with a former US Middle East Ambassador, Smith ACCUSED Israeli Leaders of FOMENTING VIOLENCE in Israel.

TO PARAPHRASE . . . In a passing statement, Shepard Smith effectively said that BOTH Palestinian and Israeli LEADERS are EQUALLY responsible for the violence.

HOW DARE HE?

If Shepard Smith isn’t an anti-Semite, he is certainly anti-Israeli, since this isn’t the first time I’ve heard Smith unfairly SMACK-DOWN Israel.

I would be very interested to know EXACTLY what Netanyahu (Israel’s Prime Minister) has said to INCITE Jews against Arabs, such as Abbas has done, and does continuously to INCITE Arabs against Jews?

Has Netanyahu encouraged Israeli Jews to attack Arabs? Has he ever openly celebrated when an Israeli Jew MURDERED an Arab? Has he ever declared that Israel should be ARAB-FREE?

What was it that Netanyahu did or said about doing harm to Israeli Arabs, or SO-CALLED Palestinian Arabs that would MERIT this CANARD from Shepard Smith?

Friend,

With the elections over, the Obama administration is going “all in” on climate.

On election day the President suffered a major vote of no confidence in his policies. What better way to seek cover, than a pivot to the heavily propagandized, hard to verify, holier-than-thou world of climate politics?

The White House memo on the deal states that this new agreement calls for the United States to reduce its emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025, while China’s emissions would be permitted to peak by “around 2030, with the intention to try to peak early, and to increase the share of non-fossil fuel share of all energy to around 20% by 2030.”

In effect, the U.S. agreed to reduce CO2 emissions now, while China can go on expanding until 2030. As Senator Inhofe pointed out, China is currently opening a new coal plant every ten days. Does anyone really think that expanding the Chinese economy, while contracting the U.S. economy will have a meaningful impact on world temperature?

Ironically, this agreement comes at a time when Antarctic ice is at record levels, polar bears are increasing in numbers, and global temperatures haven’t risen in 18+ years. The climate computer models on which the entire global warming scare depends on have yet to be right.

China is playing Obama for the fool. It will do what is best to obtain competitive advantage for China, and is only too delighted to watch the free world raise its costs of production. The main effect of deals such as this is to shift manufacturing overseas to countries like China and India who will gladly produce for us, and emit CO2 for us.

For a third time, I find that I have to turn to your unconstitutional and illegal collection of name and e-mail addresses of people who oppose your “Health Care Reform”. While that is one topic of my paper, there are others that should put me firmly on your Nixon-Like Enemies List. The difference, of course, is there was no Internet or Personal computers to aid Nixon in collecting millions of names instead of a handful.

You are much smarter and way more popular than Nixon ever was. Nixon could get away with changing our course with Communist China. You, on the other hand, may be able to change the course of American civilization

Below is the paper on why you scare me that I am circulating on the Internet. It is somewhat lengthy because you have done many things that really scare me.

Recently, I had a call for a relative whom I dearly love. She was upset because I had sent a message to the family and segued into a comment I heard by Obama and I used the term “Messiah”. I finally told her that I was afraid, scared by what Obama was doing and that it would affect her and her child (our Grandchild) even more than it affects me since I am 70.

Here are the things that scare and dismay me about Obama and his administration. Think of the implications of not being able to discuss or criticize a president and his policies.

All of my claims are easily verifiable. I am not providing links because I prefer the skeptics do their own research to see if I am right or wrong. Providing the links let’s people say that I “cherry picked” my references. By researching it themselves, they will have to make their own decisions without having an easy out.

The Jewish faith has bestowed many wondrous divine blessings upon the world. Among them is, of course, the Sabbath day.

The Day of Rest, the Seventh Day, the Sabbath, is the one precious and humanitarian day set aside from the rest of the week’s labors. It is a day of freedom and leisure but one which allows the human spirit the opportunity to turn to the lofty considerations of divine holiness.

Interestingly, this marvelous and utterly civilized concept was quite inexplicable to the Greeks and the Romans. Indeed, Tacitus, Juvenal and Plutarch scoffed at such an idea for it was undreamt of by them.

But these are the words of a great ethicist and contributor to the revival of Hebrew as a living language, Achad Ha-Am, who said of the Sabbath:

“Far more than Israel has kept the Sabbath; it is the Sabbath that has kept Israel.”

And so it should be with a sense of horror and utter distress that the world should know that Muslim Arabs in Jerusalem deliberately and maliciously desecrate the peace on the eve of every Jewish Sabbath.

Muslims, who impudently claim their superiority over Jews and Christians, and who have since the 7th century arrogated to themselves core Jewish and Christian beliefs, including their own version of the Sabbath, blast the peace of the Jewish Sabbath by setting off noisy firecrackers while employing loudspeakers to blast, at viciously high decibel levels, inflammatory Muslim imprecations from minarets. This occurs in those Arab settlements adjoining Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem.

Well this much is for sure. The play-acting is no more and Mahmoud Abbas isn’t even pretending to be a “peace partner.” He’s gone rogue.

These days this Fatah warlord openly calls for the murder of any and all Israelis and the Jewish blood that’s been spilled from Jerusalem onward — men, women, 3-month-old babies – places him at the heart and center of the reign of terror now being inflicted upon the Jewish State.

His PA (Palestinian Authority) gangs heed him word for word when he demands Jewish blood “by any means.”

Murder by automobile is the latest Islamic trick, and if that doesn’t work, Palestinian Arabs are urged to slash their victims to death.

So finally the mask is off. The double-talking, the double-dealing, the fakery of tolerant coexistence – this is finished.
This the Arabs have been doing repeatedly and gladly.

(Where, by the way, is the Left that was so outraged against the Price Taggers? Hello? We can’t hear you!)

Fattened by standing ovations at the UN, intoxicated by support from the EU, bloated by the wishful romance of a Palestinian State (to exact further terror), adopted by the Left, embraced by the media, it is no wonder that this man Abbas feels that the world belongs to him

Thank Allah It’s “Jum’ah Friday” (TAIJF) at The National Cathedral—A Guide For Perplexed Non-Muslims

November 11, 1914, the Ottoman Sheikh ul-Islam (supreme Muslim religious authority) issued fatwas (religious edicts) declaring a jihad against non-Muslim state enemies of the last Muslim “Caliphate.” Subsequent fatwas (see here; here) disseminated during the World War I era would target Christian minorities, under Sharia-based Ottoman Muslim rule, for genocidal jihadism against these hapless non-Muslim victims.

Notwithstanding the recent horrific spate of atrocities committed against the Christian communities of northern Iraq by the Islamic State (IS/IL) jihadists, the Ottoman jihad ravages were equally barbaric, depraved, and far more extensive. Occurring, primarily between 1915-16 (although continuing through at least 1918), some one million Armenian, and 250,000 Assyro-Chaldean and Syrian Orthodox Christians were brutally slaughtered, or starved to death during forced deportations through desert wastelands. The identical gruesome means used by IS/IL to humiliate and massacre its hapless Christian victims, were employed on a scale that was an order of magnitude greater by the Ottoman Muslim Turks, often abetted by local Muslim collaborators (the latter being another phenomenon which also happened during the IS/IL jihad campaign against Iraq’s Christians).

At best, willfully oblivious to this grim centennial remembrance—worse still, perhaps even callously disregarding it—Muslim spokespersons are trumpeting their forthcoming midday Islamic service, to be held Friday, November 14, 2014, in the National Cathedral, one of the most iconic Christian houses of worship in the U.S.

READ ABOUT THIS IN THE HARVARD CRIMSON PROTEST
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1982/9/16/the-law-school-controversy-two-views/
Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch belonged to a student group that brought Jew-hating Palestinian terrorists to Harvard Law School every year she was a member.
Lynch belonged to the Harvard Black Law Students Association (BLSA) from 1981-1984 when she was a student.
During those years the radical black group brought representatives from the Palestinian Liberation Operation (PLO).
The group’s leader, Mohammed Kenyatta, called for the “liberation of Palestine” and expressed support for the terrorist organization.
The BLSA defended bringing the terrorists in a letter to the editor of the Harvard student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.
Jewish student organizations protested the speeches, especially in 1984. Liberal professor Alan Dershowitz joined the anti-PLO protests.
The Harvard Crimson condemned the response of Lynch’s organization in 1984.

The Black Law Students Association (BALSA) committed an unjustifiable and discriminatory violation of student liberties last week when it denied Jewish students an opportunity to participate in a campus forum featuring a representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
More than 30 Jewish Law Students Association (JLSA) members attended the panel discussion, outnumbering members of BALSA and the Third World Coalition, the event’s sponsors. But after opening the forum to questions from the floor, BALSA moderator Muhammad I. Kenyatta refused to recognize any of the white hands raised in the audience. BALSA and TWC members were to be given priority, he announced, proceeding to call on a Black student who hadn’t raised his hand.
We defend the PLO’s right to appear in an open forum at Harvard. All groups have a right to present their views; had Kenyatta permitted all students to challenge the speaker with critical questions, the ensuing discussion might have provided a constructive exchange of ideas and opinions.
By stifling debate, however, Kenyatta reduced the event to little more than a propaganda platform for a terrorist organization that has pledged to destroy the State of Israel. His refusal to open the floor to all students views showed a glaring disregard for the principles of free discussion that are vital to an enlightened academic community.

Apparently they don’t think much of Gen. Dempsey’s expertise. Or they don’t care.

When Israel launched Operation Protective Edge to stop the flood of rockets being launched at its cities, and particularly when it mounted a short ground operation to locate and destroy infiltration tunnels under the border, there was the predictable response from the UN, the NGOs and Israel’s usual critics that it was causing ‘disproportionate’ civilian casualties in Gaza. Surprisingly (or not), the Obama Administration and State Department joined the chorus.

You probably recall John Kerry’s sarcastic remark that Israel had carried out a “hell of a pinpoint operation.” And you may remember that back in July, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said that “there’s more that could be done [by Israel]” to reduce civilian casualties. There are also reports of a particularly ‘combative’ phone call from President Obama to PM Netanyahu during the war.