RUTHFULLY YOURS

Crude obfuscation is the stock in trade of many political actors. Not so the president of Iran.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304302704579333101938929802

This column is about Iran. But first a word about a bearded bully closer to home.

On Monday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman accused this newspaper of “crude obfuscation” for failing to run a correction for a mistake I made in a recent column on income inequality. “Oh, and for the record,” he wrote with his customary charm, “at the time of writing this elementary error had not been corrected on the Journal’s website.”

In fact, a formal correction was posted on Jan. 5 and I addressed the subject at length on Jan. 3.

Columnists make mistakes, and when we do we post timely corrections. Well, some of us do. What’s amusing about Mr. Krugman is that he should now commit his own elementary error in the service of a loudmouth accusation. While he’s paying attention, maybe he can explain his August 2002 contention that ” Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble,” or his January 2010 claim that “Europe is an economic success.” Misreading Census Bureau data, as I accidentally did, is a misdemeanor intellectual offense compared with those whoppers.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304302704579332393806457848?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Now that President Obama’s promise in December of a “pretty definitive statement” about the nation’s electronic intelligence-gathering practices has been fulfilled with Friday’s speech, it is worth looking at what will actually happen as a result, at least in the near term, and what won’t.

The speech was preceded by seven months of arguably the most damaging leaks of national-security information—how we collect electronic intelligence—in the nation’s history, as the result of disclosures by former government contractor Edward Snowden. Yet the president made no recommendation as to how such leaks might be stopped.

To be sure, he mentioned the “avalanche of unauthorized disclosures” that resulted in “revealing methods to our adversaries that could impact our operations . . . for years to come.” But the rhetorical afterburners immediately kicked in to carry us to a higher altitude: “[T]he task before us now is greater than simply repairing the damage done to our operations or preventing more disclosures from taking place in the future.”

Forgive this brief demurrer, but consider: A young man gets a medical discharge from the military notwithstanding that his avocations include kickboxing, then has a rocky and brief tenure at the CIA that ends with his negotiated retention of his security clearance—which allowed him then to be employed by a military contractor in a job that gave him access to the secrets he later leaked—and then he manages to disable a complex computer system and steal more than a million-and-a-half documents. Are we not entitled at least to some brief assurance that the holes in the system that allowed Edward Snowden to do what he did have been sewn up?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/the_inventor_of_the_global_warming_hockey_stick_doubles_down.html Professor Michael Mann, the inventor of the Hockeystick temperature graph, had a contentious editorial essay in the January 17th issue of the New York Times.  [The Hockeystick graph purports to show that temperatures of the last thousand years declined steadily — until the 20th century, when there was a sudden large rise.]  I am […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4627/the_two_state_solution_so_israel_and Not even the UN could plan for a Palestinian state before there was a Palestinian people to govern it. Just who or what will scramble for Palestine if independence ever comes we don’t rightly know. How much the world takes for granted. Here’s Barak Obama’s envoy John Kerry blithely and mindlessly toiling ahead, thinking […]

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The last American government push was “The Affordable Health Care Act”, previously known as “Obamacare”. We know how well that is working out.

Now they are diverting our attention to “Income Inequality” because that is supposed to be a very bad thing; it is unfair, it is un-American. Equality means absolutely equal. Period. It does not mean less inequality. However, this smacks of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”: “All the animals are equal but some are more equal than others”.

If we are to have income equality, then a homeless person and Tiger Woods have to make absolutely the same amount of money. Either everyone makes nothing or everyone makes $74 million a year. If everyone makes $74 million a year, then $74 million is effectively nothing. We can take the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic as an example but Zimbabwe makes an even better example. $1 Zimbabwe dollar became $1 Trillion Zimbabwe dollars and a loaf of bread cost $1 trillion Zimbabwe dollars.

There would be an advantage if this happened in the United States: we could pay off the National Debt with 18 loaves of bread.

https://www.embooks.com/blog/single/lies-bigotry-and-silence-britains-permanent-stain British Jews who care about this sort of thing have had the disturbing experience of observing not one but three examples of public, home-grown anti-Jewish bigotry over the past few days. First off the block was the former labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who in an article in the Independent repeated not only his […]

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-soldier-and-the-refusenik-a-case-study-in-psychopathic-self-abhorrence/#ixzz2qwr3ElfH

Maya Wind and Eran Efrati are alleged peace activists who are touring the country and warning university students about the sins of the Jewish people. They call themselves “The Soldier and the Refusenik; and my friends and I had the unfortunate opportunity of seeing them lecture at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Efrati, a former IDF soldier who now hates both the IDF and his own country, talks a good game. He begins his introduction to the students with a well rehearsed sentimental story of how he was a sweet naive soldier who, in a desire to see love and peace between Arabs and Jews develop, offered candy to a young Arab child, in Hebron. Later, allegedly, in a random house drawing exhibition on the part of the IDF, Efrati finds himself in that same boy’s house. After making the mistake of pointing a gun at the child and, due to his own negligence, getting the boy’s father arrested, Efrati apparently then sees the proverbial light, and decides to fight against Israel, Zionism, and the self-determination of his own people. All because of his own stupidity which he of course blames on the very existence of the Jewish state. So, like most psychopaths, he blames his own pathologies on a completely unrelated entity, namely Israel, and to justify this action, makes up stories about the Zionist state. For example, He laments the checkpoints, which keep Israelis, both Jews and Arabs, safe from terror attacks. He says checkpoints are axiomatic proof of “apartheid,” (which by this standard means that the JFK airport is proof of American “apartheid” as well).

  http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/korol/140120 I became aware of an invitation issued to 125 libraries across our nation, a lure for these institutions of learning to participate in a five-part reading and discussion series, titled “Let’s Talk About It: Muslim Journeys.”  I do not use the term “lure” lightly, inasmuch as this is a strategy of the Muslim […]

  http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | When anything bipartisan comes out of a polarized Washington, one should be grateful. That’s why a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the September 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans represents progress of sorts. The committee, chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D-CA), faults […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4138/palestinians-israelis-minds-of-peace “Normalization [with Israel] is an act of treason.” — Large poster outside Ramallah peace conference. If Israelis and Palestinians are unable even to talk about peace, what would happen if and when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas signs a peace deal with Israel? Might he, too, find himself being escorted out of Ramallah under […]