RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2013/10/two-words/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=9a3c883f97-Mosaic_2013_10_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-9a3c883f97-41165129

It’s time for American Jews to say thank-you to evangelicals—and to act accordingly.

Robert Nicholson’s “Evangelicals and Israel” should worry any Jewish supporter of Israel, for three major reasons.

The first is that ingratitude is a great sin—though one with deep roots in Jewish history. The story of the Jews in the Bible is replete with incidents of their ingratitude to God for His gifts to them: incidents that just as repeatedly merit and receive punishment. Here we go again: today’s American Jews are spectacularly ungrateful toward a huge community of evangelicals whose enthusiasm for Israel may become critical to its very survival and certainly to America’s continuing support of the Jewish state. The American Jewish population is dwindling, from a height of nearly 4 percent of the U.S. population to under 2 percent now. As Nicholson explains, Christian support, already enormously important, will become only more so.

The second reason for worry is the anti-Israel trend in the evangelical world: as Nicholson puts it, evangelical support for Israel may already have peaked. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: powerful currents in American culture, including the control of most university faculties (even in some evangelical colleges) and of the mass media by the voices of the liberal Left, are pushing young evangelicals away from the beliefs of their parents. Yet few American Jews know much about the evangelical community, let alone about the swings Nicholson lists and analyzes. Most will never have heard of the Palestinian Christian groups whose anti-Israel activities he describes, and are unaware of their growing influence among American evangelicals. For this reason alone, his article, providing new and valuable information, is an important wake-up call.

http://www.cis.org/paying-illeglas-to-stay To crib from Caesar, all immigration policy is divided into three parts: you can enforce the law and deport the illegals, you can ignore them (and there is a lot of that going around), or you can pay them to stay in this country. Not even the White House is publicly advocating the third […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Columbus may have outfoxed the Spanish court and his rivals, but he is falling victim to the court of political correctness.

The explorer who discovered America has become controversial because the very idea of America has become controversial.

There are counter-historical claims put forward by Muslim and Chinese scholars claiming that they discovered America first. And there are mobs of fake indigenous activists on every campus to whom the old Italian is as much of a villain as the bearded Uncle Sam.

Columbus Day parades are met with protests and some have been minimized or eliminated.

In California, Columbus Day became Indigenous People’s Day, which sounds like a Marxist terrorist group’s holiday. While it’s tempting to put that down to California political correctness, in South Dakota it was renamed Native American Day.

The shift from celebrating Columbus’ arrival in America to commemorating it as an American Nakba by focusing on the Indians, rather than the Americans, is a profound form of historical revisionism that hacks away at the origins of this country.

No American state has followed Venezuela’s lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which actually is a Marxist terrorist group’s holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and worst of all, politically incorrect.

Anti-Columbus Day protests are mounted by La Raza, whose members, despite their indigenous posturing, are actually mostly descended from Spanish colonists, but who know that most American liberals are too confused to rationally frame an objection to a protest by any minority group.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Call it Rabinstock or Rabinpallooza. It’s the annual anniversary of Yitzchak Rabin’s death transformed into a tawdry spirit rally for the even more tawdry remnants of Israel’s left.

The assassination of the former Israeli PM has become the “Camelot” of the left with Rabin as an unlikely JFK. American liberals nourished themselves on the fantasy that race relations would have been solved and Vietnam would have been avoided if only their golden boy hadn’t been shot in Dallas. It was more soothing than dealing with the reality that all the problems they cynically associated with Nixon would have happened even if Lee Harvey Oswald had stayed in Minsk.

The Israeli left has has always been behind the times. They had to wait until the Lebanon War for their Vietnam War and they are only now learning to embrace the post and multi everything order. And so they had to wait until the 90s for their own Camelot, their incarnation of the golden age that might have been if only Rabin hadn’t died.

Golden ages don’t depend on one man. If liberalism had led to a better America, it would have worked just as well when LBJ and Nixon implemented even more radical versions of JFK’s policies. If the peace process had worked, it would have worked under Peres and Barak and Olmert. It never did.

American liberals in perpetual mourning for Camelot are forced to ascribe everything to charisma. Israeli leftists don’t even have that comfort. Rabin was hardly a charismatic figure. Unlike American liberals, whose attempts to blame JFK’s assassination by a fanatical leftist who had defected to the USSR and attempted to defect to Cuba created a growth industry in convoluted conspiracy theories; their Israeli counterparts take refuge in reducing everything to a blame game for the right.

Danbury, Connecticut was settled by colonists in 1685. The original name was Pahquioque after the local Indian tribe, but in 1687 it was formally named Danbury.
I lived near Danbury for over forty years. I have watched the city rise and fall and rise and fall. Sometimes it was mismanagement and sometimes it was a consequence of tragedy. In the early 1980s Danbury welcomed residents from New York City and from the New York suburbs seeking lower taxes and bucolic settings. Union Carbide the huge international conglomerate, built headquarters on Old Ridgebury Road and 3.300 workers relocated- the largest corporate relocation of its time. Union Carbide helped its employees find homes in the area. It gave them housing subsidies to ease their move. Danbury was on a roll. It had restaurants, movies, shops, and a first class hospital.
In December 1984, a pesticide plant Union carbide owned and operated in Bhopal, India exploded and released posion gas that killed many thousands and left an equal number permanently ill. The company’s fortunes receded and gloom and doom settled over Danbury as its economy faded.
In 1986, the enclosed Danbury Mall, the second largest in the state opened, and renewed the economy and hopes of local residents. A Federal Prison. Danbury Correctional Institution is now an all women prison. There are two high schools one of which is an excellent vocational training school, many parochial and private schools, including the Maimonides Academy. Danbury is also home to the Army Reserves Special Operation Unit the 411th Civil Affairs battalion, and uniformed soldiers are often seen at the shops and restaurants. Western Connecticut State University and the world class Richter Park Golf Course are located in Danbury as well.
The former Congressman Chris Murphy a democrat is now (alas) a Senator.
The foregoing shows that Danbury is not a village but requires great management skills and vision from its Mayor.
Since 1685 there has never been a better mayor than Mark Boughton (R.) who is considering a run for Governor of the state. See his website and read about his accomplishments. They are not hype….they are real. I was in Danbury yesterday and the improvements are amazing : http://www.ci.danbury.ct.us/content/21015/22147/

http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=9836 Abbas to UN: Arabs of Safed were “uprooted and thrown into exile” in 1948 Abbas on PA TV: Arabs of Safed “left” on their own, “overcome with fear” Abbas: “The [Arab] Liberation Army retreated from the city [Safed in 1948], causing the [Arab] people to begin emigrating. In Safed, just like Hebron, people were […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4258/egypt_to_renew_nuclear_program_in_another_setback_for_the_west US and European MidEast policy could be in tatters as Egypt aims to renew nuclear program In reports from the Egypt that have thus far eluded the Western media, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is reporting Friday that senior figures in the Egyptian government are now pledging to restart their once mothballed  […]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/10/pruden-banish-the-gobbledygook-pdq/

“The president is using the government to harass people, and it’s not just the National Park Service rangers who have been instructed to make life as miserable as they can for as many people as they can. As though to rub salt in the wounds of the veterans who were evicted from the World War II Memorial on the Mall, the White House approved an invitation to immigration amnesty groups to hold an amnesty rally near the very place the Park Service blocked the veterans, many in their 90s, who had come from thousands of miles away. The government’s message was plain and clear: thousands of illegal aliens are welcome, but the veterans, all of them American citizens, are not. Imaginative abuse is what the Republicans should be talking about, abuse and insult as a consequence of Mr. Obama’s shutdown — only somewhat of a shutdown, actually — and they should be talking about it in plain, blunt terms. No more talk of CRs, of OMB projections and the statistics beloved by the wonks and geeks.”

Politics occasionally drive John Boehner to tears, but rarely to plain English. Gobbledygook is the Washington disease, and the Republicans have a bad case of it. Wonkery was not invented in Washington, but Washington is where it thrives.

Corporate-speak is closely related to government gobbledygook, and those most fluent in the tongue have been carefully trained and tutored in using words not to amplify meanings, but to hide them. One way to do this is to use five words when one or two will do. Perfumed words are preferred. Initials and acronyms are best of all.

The Democrats are rarely wordsmiths, but they understand that plain people — i.e., most of us — understand plain words. Short words are good, Winston Churchill observed, and familiar words are better. Short, familiar words are best of all. Ronald Reagan knew this, which is why he was called the great communicator. Many Republicans, having inherited corporate genes, have never learned it.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/decision-based-evidence-making-more-disgrace-from-un-panel-on-climate-change/?print=1

They claim more certainty than ever in dangerous warming, while their own report’s data contradict the statement.

Most science teachers undergo the unpleasant experience of catching students fudging experimental data so as to yield desired results. If the data is not easily faked, students may simply run the experiment repeatedly until the “right” data are collected. They then discard the contradictory data.

Some such cheaters make it right through the education system; perhaps some become politicians, willing to direct staff to find evidence supporting decisions they have already made for political reasons. So it goes with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which deserves to be disbanded following the release of their latest report.

With the Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group I part of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) along with the draft full report now released, we have an extreme example of such “decision-based evidence-making.” Since its last Assessment Reports in 2007, the IPCC has been revealed as committing most, if not all, of the below evidence-making ploys to prop up the global warming scare:

Ignoring contradictory data, and acting as it does not exist.
Releasing preliminary results before they are confirmed when those results support already decided-upon conclusions. Corrections made later rarely get as much attention as the initial announcement and so politicians ignore them.
Highlighting apparently supportive information that is true, but irrelevant. In the hands of a skilled communicator, such information can be made to sound significant to the uninformed.
Choosing supportive information from biased and/or unqualified sources.
Making the underlying foundational science so complex that even qualified experts need weeks to assess it. This gives politically motivated bureaucrats a window of opportunity to make grandiose announcements that almost no one recognizes are inconsistent with the underlying data.
Without consulting the experts who assembled a report, strategically editing the document just before release to the public so as to support political objectives while asserting that the report is supported by experts.
Outright fabrication of data to support expedient conclusions.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/10/12/its-always-worse-than-you-think-washington-d-c-edition/?print=1

You’re busy, right? You have a lot on your plate. I know that, and I am going to help you out. Forget about the pseudo-shutdown and the posturing by Reid and Obama on one side and Boehner on the other. The only thing you really need to read this weekend is Andy McCarthy’s piece at NRO, “Funding Jihadists while Denying Military Benefits. [1]” It’s only about 1200 words. You can read it in a few minutes. But you’ll remember it for a very long time. Think you’re disgusted with business-as-usual in Washington? Just wait till you get your mind around what Andy has to say about how these clowns are actually conducting, or failing to conduct, the people’s business. And by “clowns” I very much include the Republican as well as the Democratic establishment. Listen:

The Republican establishment — the guys who told us that for a trillion dollars and several thousand American casualties, we could build “Islamic democracies” that would be reliable U.S. allies in the War on Terror — say it is Ted Cruz who is “delusional” and the effort to stave off Obamacare that is “unattainable.”

These self-appointed sages are, of course, the same guys who told us the way to “stabilize” and “democratize” Libya was to help jihadists topple and kill the resident dictator — who, at the time, was a U.S. ally, providing intelligence about the jihadists using his eastern badlands as a springboard for the anti-American terror insurgency in Iraq. That’s probably worth remembering this week, during which some of our new “allies” abducted Libya’s president while others car-bombed Sweden’s consulate in Benghazi — site of the still unavenged terrorist massacre of American ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials 13 months ago.

Feeling bad yet?