RUTHFULLY YOURS

Periodically so-called “buzz words” and “buzz phrases” become fashionable. Of late, the concept of “wage equality” has been bandied about by members of the administration, politicians and some media personalities.

In point of fact, on July 15, 2014, the publication “Mail Online” published a report with a self- explanatory title: “America’s 1 percenters are even richer than we thought: Richest actually control 37 percent of U.S. Wealth”

It has been said that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Similarly, the term wage “equality” is an emotionally evocative term that is viewed as something good and worthwhile to achieve. Generally this is the proper perspective, but of course it is important to pose some significant questions. For example, “How will equality be attained?” It is also critical to understand what baseline will be established for achieving equality. (Will wages be increased or will some wages be decreased to bring about this change? If, in fact, some wages will be lowered, whose wages will be lowered?)

Finally, as we will see, sometimes inequality in wages may not be a bad thing, after all.

Before we consider the words many politicians use, we would be wise to consider two important quotes from George Orwell, the author of “1984” and other significant literary works.

“Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Having been forewarned let us now consider the definition of “equality.”

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines equality this way:

equal·i·ty

noun \i-ˈkwä-lə-tē\

: the quality or state of being equal : the quality or state of having the same rights, social status, etc.

The term equality is often equated with fairness and an entire government agency, the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) was established to combat discrimination against protected groups of workers who are treated disparately (unequally) because of factors such as race, religion, gender, disabilities or age.

Even young children inherently understand the concept of fairness — think of how many times a frustrated child is likely to complain bitterly that something or someone is “not fair!”

Recently various talk shows have discussed how the top one percent of Americans control a huge amount of wealth. Last week, the Los Angeles Times posted a video, “John Oliver tackles income inequality on ‘Last Week Tonight’“ in which Oliver spent considerable time on this issue.

America has made great strides to create a level playing field to provide all people with equal protection under our laws — indeed, the goal of the civil rights movement and the laws it inspired was to provide equal protection under our laws for all people, especially black Americans, going back to the issue of slavery, with equal treatment in the criminal justice system, where employment opportunities and where housing issues are concerned.

In short, equality has taken on the cloak of being, as the saying goes, “As American as apple pie.” Simply uttering the word “equality” evokes the emotional image of an American flag billowing in a gentle breeze with a clear blue sky serving as a backdrop.

Obviously if “equality” is good, “inequality” is bad. In most situations this is certainly true.

However, when Obama and other politicians, as well as talk show hosts, bring up wage inequality, they don’t ever discuss whose salaries will be used as the baseline against which paychecks should be compared as efforts are made to eliminate or reduce wage inequality. People tend to see and hear what they want to see and hear. It is akin to a Rorschach or inkblot test where the test subject is supposed to describe what they see in a blotch of ink.

The question that is never asked (or answered) is, “What groups are to be made more equal?” Today the average CEO of major corporations often earn salaries that are hundreds of times greater than the wages paid to the workers earning the least money in those corporations where, just a few decades ago, this disparity in wages was far smaller. It is naïve and, indeed, wishful thinking to believe that the push for “wage equality” is about narrowing the gap between the CEOs of most companies and the other employees of those companies, thereby expanding the middle class and increasing the standard of living for American middle class workers and their families.

In point of fact, the goal of the majority of advocates for the reduction of “wage inequality” is exactly the opposite: to lower the wages of American middle class workers and greatly reduce the gap between the middle class Americans and Americans living below the poverty line.

You will find proof of this in the prepared testimony provided by Alan Greenspan, when he testified before the Senate Immigration Subcommittee five years ago. We will get to his testimony shortly. His statements unequivocally dispel any doubt about the true goal of reducing wage inequality, the engineered destruction of America’s middle class.

The American Dream is inextricably linked to a vibrant and upwardly mobile middle class. The incentives for the creation of the middle class are created by an element of wage inequality. If this is confusing, consider that it is expected that generally, more highly skilled or educated workers should expect to earn more money than their lesser educated or skilled counterparts in the workforce.

This makes perfect sense and has, for generations, provided a strong incentive for American students, spurring them on to remain in school to obtain college degrees and even graduate degrees. This is why most people think of the money, time and effort expended in pursuit of advanced degrees or enhanced skills as an important investment in their futures. You could say that this is a case of “learn more to earn more.”

Where prospects for Americans, even those with the advanced degrees, achieving the “American Dream” in this economic era are concerned, a four-word phrase sums it up concisely:

Don’t count on it!

In December 2011 “Dan Rather Reports” aired a disconcerting hour-long report, “No Thanks for Everything” which reported on how highly educated and experienced American computer programmers are being replaced by programmers from India.

On May 15, 2007 a four-minute infuriating video was aired on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on CNN. It features an immigration lawyer’s conference in which lawyers were being coached to “not find qualified U.S. workers!” The lecturer is identified in the video as being Lawrence M. Lebowitz, the Vice President of Marketing for the firm of Cohen & Grigsby.

Contrary to international rules of warfare, Hamas has commandeered a large hospital in Gaza City as its “de facto headquarters,” the Washington Post reported.

Buried eight paragraphs in, The Post‘s correspondent, William Booth, wrote on July 15:

“At the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, crowds gathered to throw shoes and eggs at the Palestinian Authority’s health minister, who represents the crumbling ‘unity government’ in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The minister was turned away before he reached the hospital, which has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.”

Last week, The Post also reported, and also included near the end of an article, how Hamas was hiding rockets inside of a mosque, also against international rules of war. On Friday, buried toward’s the end of The Post’s dispatch from the front, one of its correspondents reported actually seeing rockets being moved into the mosque during Thursday’s five-hour humanitarian ceasefire:

“During the lull, a group of men at a mosque in northern Gaza said they had returned to clean up the green glass from windows shattered in the previous day’s bombardment. But they could be seen moving small rockets into the mosque.”

According to international rules of military engagement, civilian public and religious buildings cannot to be used to shield weapons, but that has been a long-held Hamas tactic in Gaza.

On Thursday, UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, said it discovered 20 rockets hidden in a vacant school it operated in Gaza.

UNRWA said the rockets were discovered during a “regular inspection” and that it immediately “informed the relevant parties and successfully took all necessary measures for the removal of the objects in order to preserve the safety and security of the school.”

The UNRWA came under criticism on social media for handing the rockets back to the “relevant parties,” who readers interpreted as being the Hamas militants who hid the arms in the school.

http://www.jpost.com/Operation-Protective-Edge/IDF-shows-photos-of-alleged-Hamas-rocket-sites-dug-into-hospital-mosques-368307
IDF shows photos of alleged Hamas rocket sites dug into hospital, mosques

The images were taken from the northeastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaia, which was the scene of heavy fighting in recent days.

Hamas fires rockets from Wafa Hospital in the Gaza neighborhood of Shejaia Photo: IDF SPOKESMAN’S OFFICE
The IDF on Monday released declassified photos showing how Hamas uses hospitals, mosques, and playgrounds as rocket launch sites.

The images were taken from the northeastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaia, which was the scene of heavy fighting in recent days.

Israel’s army said it had been targeting militants in the clashes, charging that they had fired rockets from Shejaia and built tunnels and command centers there. The army said it had warned civilians to leave two days earlier.

Sounds of explosions rocked Gaza City through the morning, with residents reporting heavy fighting in Shejaia and the adjacent Zeitoun neighborhood. Locals also said there was heavy shelling in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip.

“It seems we are heading towards a massacre in Beit Hanoun. They drove us out of our houses with their fire. We carried our kids and ran away,” said Abu Ahmed, he did not want to give his full name for fear of Israeli reprisals.

The Islamist group Hamas and its allies fired multiple missiles across southern and central Israel, and heavy fighting was reported in the north and east of Gaza.

Non-stop attacks lifted the Palestinian death toll to 496, including almost 100 children, since fighting started on July 8, Gaza health officials said. Israel says 18 of its soldiers have also died along with two civilians.

Despite worldwide calls for a cessation of the worst bout of Palestinian-Israeli violence for more than five years, Israeli ministers ruled out any swift truce.

“This is not the time to talk of a ceasefire,” said Gilad Erdan, communications minister and a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner security cabinet.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/55180#.U8xixZD7uuk.yahoomail

Lethal Narratives

Many of you are drowning in floods of information, can’t keep up with your email correspondence, don’t have time to read the best compilations let alone the middling ones, not even time for the “must reads” sent by trusted sources… But I encourage you to buy and read my book, Al Dura: Long Range Ballistic Myth. It sheds original light on events that are turning our world upside down, with the Middle East as the pivot. While Israeli civilians run for the bunkers to escape the murderous intentions of Hamas rockets and Israeli soldiers confront Hamas mujahidin on their own territory in the confines of the Gaza Strip, “international opinion” has mobilized for another round of lethal narrative warfare. On the third day of an all-out Hamas offensive against Israeli civilians, the lethal narrative kicked in. Today it has reached the height of frenzy. And Western media have gone berserk, in step with the raging crowd.

Metula News Agency [Cessez-le-feu humanitaire (info # 022007/14) ] reports today that several journalists that wanted to leave Gaza were blocked at the Erez Crossing by Hamas operatives. Why? Might they fear that once outside Gaza, journalists would report the truth about what is happening there? Western media fervently defends the fighting forces of a jihad movement that would just as easily behead them as enslave them, but would never allow them to report freely as they are doing today. Even though they abuse that freedom, they enjoy it.

The question is not “why do they act against their own interests”? It’s like asking a gun why it shoots bullets at this or that target. A gun is a weapon in the hands of a gunman. The media, academia, international organizations, charities…the list is endless of entities and institutions that have become weapons of 21st century jihad conquest. Israel, a democratic nation, is the target of an all-out genocidal assault from the Hamas branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and one week after it mobilizes in self-defense, Kill-the-Jews stampedes are on the march worldwide, and the facts have disappeared from mass media. We are assailed by something that is not reportage. It is not biased, one-sided, twisted; it is non-existent, and it fills the eyes and ears for hours on end. It’s not news, not journalism, it’s lethal narrative. A weapon. And it works.

Kill-the-Jews stampede in Paris on July 13, 2014

My brief article published in Tablet http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/179169/anti-israel-protestors-attack-paris-synagogues was based on information available at the time. When the July 14th holiday weekend ended I started to receive eyewitness accounts from Web sites, Jewish radio, and my own sources. It became apparent that the original Agence France Presse release, used by outlets worldwide, was concocted in lethal narrative format. Now we have videos of the “demonstration” from start to middle to semi-finish at Place de la Bastille that reveal its true nature. It was not a peaceful gathering slightly tarnished by a few rowdies at the last minute. [annotated links to videos below] Distinguished members of the Jewish community who were in the synagogue, including the Chief Rabbi of France, testified to the violence of the attempted intrusion. A [bad] translation of a text by a member of the congregation is posted on Tablet.

Interviewed on radio Communauté Juive, a peace & love novelist, Valerie Zeccati, eloquently described the mobs that fanned out from the Bastille into the nearby Marais: they were filled with murderous rage, they wanted to kill, they were thrilled by their own blood lust, the masses of demonstrators applauded them as they ran screaming, “We’re going to smash the Jews!” The “imam” on the sound truck declared “No provocation, and segued to a resounding allahou akhbar followed by other blood lust cries.

A Belgian-Israeli Jew and a Dutch Muslim developed Israel Under Attack, a new computer tool for mapping rocket trajectories from Gaza.

A new computer tool showing the trajectory of Hamas rockets fired at Israel from Gaza is not only getting traction on social media, but constitutes an example of Jewish-Arab public diplomacy coexistence in action.

The brainchild of 18-year-old Samuel Lespes Cardillo and 22-year-old Farid el-Nasire, the program – “Israel Under Attack” – is a map of incoming red alerts, showing both their target in Israel and their point of origin.

Cardillo is a Jew from Belgium who immigrated to Israel six months ago. El-Nasire is a pro-Israel Muslim from the Netherlands, whose family is originally from Morocco. The two met on Facebook, in a group called Innovation Israel, a mere week before launching the tool on the morning of July 20.

Realizing through chats that they shared a similar idea for faster and more precise Red Alerts, they collaborated via Skype and phone between Hoorn and Herzliya, spending what Cardillo described to ISRAEL21c as “many white nights” to get the tool ready and up and running as quickly as possible for the safety of the Israeli public.

Unlike the Red Alert audio app for smartphones, which shows the area a rocket or missile is headed and warns the residents of that area to take cover in a shelter or safe room, Israel Under Attack enables users to visualize the process, from launch to interception or hit. It also indicates, with a digital clock, how many hours, minutes and seconds it has been “since Israel was targeted by Hamas rockets.” When there is an actual alert, it makes a deep and startling twanging sound.

It’s not rocket science

It all began a few days ago, when el-Nasire asked the Facebook group where he could get the Red Alert information; simultaneously, Cardillo posed the same question. Another member of the group responded by posting a link to the Home Front Command (Pikud HaOref) site.

“That’s when we started building our site,” el-Nasire, a computer programmer at the Amsterdam Web Agency, told ISRAEL21c via Skype from Holland. “And we did it by receiving the area codes of the places where sirens go off, and then calculating the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, and how much time it takes a rocket to arrive at its destination.”

‘Investigation’ can’t reveal what we already know.

Most of the news coverage of the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 has been ridiculous if not positively annoying. For days, we’ve been bored by breathless reports of “black boxes” gone missing, the accident scene “contaminated,” moved bodies, and calls for independent international investigations.

Now that BFFs John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have agreed that there needs to be — according to a Russian Foreign Ministry announcement — “an absolutely unbiased, independent and open international investigation” into the “crash” of the Malaysian airliner, we are apparently being told to relax because the “crash” is in safe hands.

What absolute nonsense. It wasn’t a crash: Russian separatists shot the airliner down with one or more Russian SA-11 “Buk” surface to air missiles. Our reconnaissance satellites would have, within seconds, detected the missile launch and pinpointed the spot of the launch to within a few dozen yards. If mobile surface-to-air missile batteries had license plates, some of our satellites would have been able to read them. We know from that information, with about 99% certainty, who launched it: the Russian-backed insurgents fighting to dominate Ukraine. The launch was performed with or without the assistance of Russian military trainers. (There’s a recording of a conversation between the local commanders — which may or may not be authentic and could have been staged for listeners — indicating confusion as to the identity of the target aircraft.)

The aircraft’s flight data recorders (the “black boxes” in reporter-speak) won’t tell us why the missile(s) were launched, how many were launched, or what the missile battery crew knew or intended when they launched it. We know that it was no accidental launch. The wreckage of the aircraft, the bodies of the victims, or anything else on the ground won’t tell us anything of value.

We won’t learn from any investigation whether the Russian surrogates intended to shoot down a civilian airliner or thought they were shooting at a Ukrainian military cargo aircraft. That will never be discovered because the people who fired the missile or missiles will never be reliably identified or charged with a crime in any court. Some of the missile batteries — and we don’t know if the Russian separatists have three or three dozen of them — have apparently been moved back toward or across Ukraine’s border with Russia.

Once again, the Obama administration is content to bury an incident with a pointless and never-ending investigation. These investigations are a delaying tactic, a substitute for action. At this point, we know all we need to know. Some European governments — Britain and the Netherlands — are calling for the European Union to “review” its relationship with Russia as a result of the shoot-down. The EUnuchs will certainly review their relationship with the supplier of about one-third of their natural gas and decide that things are just hunky-dory. They will tut-tut at Putin and President Obama may impose more of the sanctions he’s already imposed on Russian businesses and some of Putin’s pals. But nothing will be done that will result in any change to what Putin is doing on his Ukrainian playground.

By Abraham H. Miller | 07/21/14http://nyoobserver.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/brandeis_university_admissions_night.jpg
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati. He has served on the faculty of the University of California, Davis and the University of Illinois, Urbana.

Brandeis University, most recently known for withdrawing an invitation to human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak at graduation, is back in the news and not for anything of which it should be proud. The private university with Jewish roots has been hosting an anti-Semitic, anti-American faculty listserv. Thanks to the intrepid work of Brandeis student Daniel Mael some of that correspondence has been made public and more is underway.

If the Brandeis faculty haters had spewed their invective about any groups other than Jews, they would be facing disciplinary proceedings. But when it comes to hating Jews and invoking cynical Holocaust terminology, even a private university cannot restrain itself from shielding its faculty.

The faculty listserv and its ninety-some members reveal far more than the hatred of a few bigots on the periphery of academia. In many ways, they are academia.

http://nyoobserver.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/brandeiss-money-shot-3.png

Brandeis LangeEmails from Donald Hindley to a Brandeis faculty listserv. Click to enlarge.

How we got to this point in higher education is a long and complicated story for another time. Suffice it for me to render the short version: the agitators, who slammed into the deans’ offices in the 1960s and 70s seeking to politicize the universities, now are the deans, the provosts and the presidents. If not incarnated in the same person, in the same politically correct leftist mentality.

My academic elders told me that the politicization of the academy would create political interest groups masquerading as academic departments. I thought these old salts were resisting the virtuous tide of social change. I too wanted to use the university to end the Vietnam War, help the civil rights struggle, and let the oppressed teach their own history in little incestuous fiefdoms removed from real accountability to the standards of any discipline.

My generation should have listened because when a university becomes an interest group for social change, it does not just lose its objectivity; it loses its essence, its very soul. It recruits faculty of a lesser god. Even worse, it becomes a therapeutic society for professors to act out their psychological issues in the classroom before a captive audience and, as Brandeis shows us, on faculty listservs.

Herbert London,President- London Center for Policy Research
http://londoncenter.org/
The winds of moral equivalence in the Middle East are persistent. As the war between terrorists in Gaza and the Israeli government escalates, the media resists the idea of taking sides. CNN contends there are valid positions on both sides of the divide. Ethan Bonner, the New York Times correspondent contends the wall separating Gaza from Israel and Israel from the West Bank is the real impediment to peace.

But is this true? Israel has been attacked unmercifully with 1500 rockets fired indiscriminately at Israeli population centers. These rockets have only one purpose: instill panic. Israel has responded in the way any nation under siege would. It has fired back forcefully at all the launch sites in Gaza. This has led to collateral damage with about 400 Palestinians killed. What hasn’t been emphasized is that Gazan rockets have been fired from mosques, hospitals and schools. Human shields are the tactical defense for terrorism.

On the Israeli side, people are protected from rockets; on the Gazan side rockets are protected from people. There isn’t an obvious moral equivalence between sides. Moreover, the Palestinian population rejoiced over the murder of three young Jewish students. The mother of one of the assailants said she admired her son’s action. When a group of Israeli youths retaliated by apprehending a Palestinian boy and burning him to death, the Israeli officials were appalled and quickly brought the murderers to justice. Is Jewish blood worth less than the blood of Palestinians?

There isn’t any world leader who can tolerate terror bombing on his people without a response. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been patient, but when he speaks he has noted that Jews whatever their political persuasion are united in battling the terror and are prepared to respond with whatever force is necessary to eliminate the threat.

Children should not live their lives in fear that the sound of a siren might mean the end of life. This is the life of an Israeli today. Some contend that there are more deaths on the Gazan side reflecting the use of disproportionate Israeli action. Clearly the loss of any innocent life is tragic. However, it is Hamas that has put its own people in jeopardy. The placement of its rockets reflects the barbarous view of Arab leadership.

This is not a war to end war since the beating heart of bitterness and hatred is everywhere present in the Middle East. However, the immediate threat of Hamas, that has 100,000 missiles in its arsenal, goes to the very survival of Israel. Gaza must be disarmed. If occupation is necessary, so be it. The pockets of arms throughout this strip of land must be discovered and destroyed. There isn’t any alternative.

Israel’s military operation to degrade Hamas’ ability to rain rockets down on Israeli cities has stirred up the usual noisy and nasty protests in Europe. We need not dwell on demonstrations by Muslim immigrants, whose genocidal Jew-hatred has been an Islamic tradition for 14 centuries. More revealing is the hatred of Israel by so many Europeans, ranging from leftover leftists and idealizers of the dark-skinned “other,” to far-right xenophobes and morally addled Christians. Whatever its origins, one thing their bitter hatred of Israel does not have is any foundation in coherent principle.

Take the displeasure aroused by the continually publicized disparity in deaths between Gazans and Israelis in the current ground operation to stop the rockets. Many critics seem affronted that Israel has taken great pains to protect its citizens by building bomb shelters and developing the Iron Dome anti-missile defenses, and so have suffered only 2 civilian deaths. They see the videos of dead Palestinian Arab children and blame those deaths on Israel’s “disproportionate response” instead of Hamas’ indifference to their own people’s safety. They ignore Hamas’s tactic of using their own women and children as human shields, ordering them not to flee the fighting, and storing explosives and munitions in tunnels under mosques, hospitals, apartment buildings, and schools, subterranean space that could be used to protect their people. They wink at Hamas’ conscious aim to engineer such casualties in order to create the “propaganda of the deed,” the purpose of which is to elicit precisely the uncritical condemnations of Israel that European useful idiots reflexively provide. They disregard Israel’s unprecedented efforts to warn civilians that bombs are headed their way––phoning them on cell phones and land-lines, sending text messages, scattering leaflets, and dropping warning duds on the roofs of targets. And of course, the Israel-haters don’t care that Israel’s actions are always a defensive response to terrorist aggression.

So what’s the underlying principle behind criticisms of “disproportionate” actions and casualties? That tactical and matériel advantages in war are unfair? A war is not a game like golf, where an inferior player is given a handicap when he plays a better opponent. The objective is to stop the aggression and save lives, using all the resources at your disposal. Do you think during WWII that anyone gave a damn about “disproportionate” casualties? Japanese bombs killed 74 U.S. civilians during WWII, 68 at Pearl Harbor and an Oregon family of 6 killed by a booby-trapped balloon. The U.S. bombing of Japan killed 500,000. Those are the tragic wages of aggression, what Aeschylus meant when he said, “The doer suffers.”

But the obsession with Palestinian Arab casualties, nearly all of them the consequence of Arab aggression and callous disregard for even their own families, is just another expression of the irrational hatred of Israel. If one calculated, just based on the global media’s intense coverage, how many Arabs have died because of Israel’s defense of its people, you’d think the conflict has taken the lives of millions. In fact, since WWII, 41 million people have died in violent conflicts all over the world––but about 40,000 Arabs have died at the hands of Israel, most the result of 3 wars of aggression waged against the Jewish state. Meanwhile, 11 million Muslims have died in other conflicts, 90% of them killed by fellow Muslims. Indeed, even as international critics are devoting hours of coverage to the casualties in Gaza, tens of thousands of Muslims are dying in Syria and Iraq at the hands of other Muslims. Nor is Israel the premier non-Muslim killer of Muslims. If killing Muslims is an excuse for homicidal hatred, there are much grosser offenders than Israel. Russia killed 100,000 Muslims during the 1979-89 Afghan war, and more recently slaughtered about 150,000 Chechnyans, most of them Muslims. But Russia doesn’t receive a fraction of the global hatred and opprobrium Israel suffers when it defends itself against terrorists like Hamas and Fatah.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-downing-of-a-malaysian-airliner-over-ukraine-a-new-instrument-of-terror-in-play?f=puball

It started with a crisis in Ukraine; it then became a Russian invasion of Ukraine and “taking back its legitimate territory” from the Putin-led Russian perspective. It has continued with an intermittently savage conflict on Ukrainian territory with pressure fostered in part by so-called “Russian separatists” working to reduce further the size of the territory controlled by the government in Kiev.

This is Russian map re-writing at work.

One would think after being caught by surprise by the takeover of Crimea by Russia that DNI Clapper would have put significant tasking on all American intelligence assets to keep a sharp focus on that geographic part of world. As previously written:

It has been widely reported that there was a breakdown in US Intelligence Community on US strategic warning of Russia making a move on Ukraine. Regardless of DNI Clapper’s public statements some very good reporting is coming out about a strategic intelligence failure of the first order. It will take time to see the real facts of the IC’s performance.

Overtime, Congress is fully capable of seeing that if NSA can read the private e-mails of the Presidents of Brazil and Germany what did they do in the case of Russian and Ukraine leaders?

This should be a very high priority work in progress to bring disclosure to the American people; after all they paid for all this. With the revelations of the overzealous and highly inappropriate attack on world leaders by NSA, and early strategic miscalculations about Russian intentions a continuing bi-partisan serious effort by Congress to address “all things NSA” is important.

http://www.sldinfo.com/meeting-the-challenges-of-the-beaten-zone-at-sea-shaping-a-way-ahead/

With a swift destruction of a Malaysian airliner by the use of a sophisticated surface to air missiles shot from Ukrainian territory, a new instrument of terror in the hands of those who wish to use it has been clearly demonstrated. And in the world of terrorists, imitation of success is a demonstrated way forward.

Putting the entire civil aviation industry at its feet is a distinct possibility. When terrorists slammed into the World Trade Center and stuck the Pentagon, the effect on the civil aviation industry was immediate. With ground missiles in the hands of terrorists the same dynamic can easily be unleashed.