RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/02/21/wonderful-world-of-kerry/?print=1

I can’t say I was surprised when I read, via a Drudge link, that John Kerry made his first foreign policy speech [1] as secretary of State on the heavyweight scientific subject of climate change (the perils thereof, of course).

But I did have a chuckle, remembering that sometime during or after the 2004 presidential campaign it was revealed that Kerry did even more poorly at Yale [2] than the supposedly dopey George W. Bush. In fact, the former Massachusetts senator received four “Ds” in his freshman year, including one in geology.

Many of us will recall that geology, often known as “Rocks for Jocks,” was the preferred method of fulfilling the college science requirement for those challenged in that area. But a “D” was still pretty disgraceful. I know, having attended Dartmouth and Yale in the same era. (I wasn’t the greatest student, but I was a lot better than Kerry or Bush without a whole lot of effort.)

We can assume that our new Sec’y of State is not a science whiz. Nevertheless, Mr. Kerry is apparently certain that anthropogenic global warming is a great danger to the human race and should be the object of a major international effort.

Why does he think so? Because he assumes the vast majority of scientists say so, I would imagine. And also because that’s what the bien pensant think and there is no one more orthodox in his views than John Kerry.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324162304578305710253751052.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Law schools are in trouble. Applications are down almost 50% to an estimated 54,000 this year from 100,000 in 2004. Little wonder. According to the National Association for Law Placement, barely 65% of 2011 graduates had landed law-related employment within nine months of graduation, the lowest rate since NALP began reporting in 1985. Even the 65% number is suspect, given the powerful, rankings-driven incentives schools have to cook the figures. Meanwhile, many of the unemployed graduates have law-school debt exceeding $100,000.

It is a true crisis, and law schools are scrambling to figure out how to manage with fewer tuition-paying students. Law-school budgets have soared for several decades as faculties multiplied, salaries rose and facilities became ever grander. With annual tuition approaching or even exceeding $40,000 at most schools, even a dozen fewer students a year blows a $500,000 hole in the budget.

Riding to the rescue is the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education. The task force’s assignment is to study and make recommendations addressing the economics, delivery and regulation of legal education.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323495104578314751130285998.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

A police psychologist has told me that after an attempt on your life, things may appear somewhat fuzzy. After a while details of what happened may all of a sudden become clear as you remember more and more of this most distressing occurrence.That hasn’t been my experience. What took place on Tuesday, Feb. 5, is as clear and vivid to me now as it was seconds after it happened.

Shortly after 11 a.m., I was preparing to leave my apartment for the half-hour commute to my newspaper office in Malmo, Sweden, when the door-phone buzzed. The phone doesn’t work properly—I can hear that I have visitors but not communicate with them. Nor can I buzz them in.

I opened a window in my apartment to see who was down below at the front door. A man dressed in a red jacket with the logo of the Danish postal service was waiting at the door. He said he had a package for me. I answered that I couldn’t buzz open the door and would instead come downstairs to get the package.

I went down and opened the front door. The man repeated that he had a package, which he handed to me. As I held the package (which the police later determined was empty), he immediately pulled out a gun and fired at my head.

Between my taking the package and the shot there was less than a second, so I had no inkling of what was going on.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/fixing-our-mental-health-system/?print=1

The recent tragedy in Newtown has finally woken Americans up to the pitiful state of our mental health system. We have had many dozens of these tragedies over the last three decades, and certainly, the pattern has been clear since at least 2000: people with recognized serious mental-illness problems are about half of these mass murderers [1], and it seems likely that much of the rest had unrecognized or perhaps merely undocumented problems. (What sane person murders a bunch of complete strangers, then commits suicide?)

I have been banging the drum on this for several years, and each time, someone asks, “How are you going to pay for all this?” Mental hospitals are expensive to build, especially because so many states have either closed or demolished their state institutions. Once built, operating costs are substantial. In an era when many state governments are already in financial trouble, where is the money coming from to create a safer and more humane society?

We are already spending the money; we just aren’t spending it very efficiently, because we are spending it on cleanup. Drawing chalk marks around bodies, having medical examiners do autopsies, assigning extra police to schools across the country after each disaster — these aren’t free.

Many of these mass murderers do not commit suicide, and trying them is expensive. The public defender costs alone for capital murder trials [2] in Clark County, Nevada, for 2009-2011 were $229,800; for non-capital murder cases, $60,100. It seems quite believable that including prosecution costs, time spent operating the courts and investigating the crime, and the inevitable appeals a non-capital murder trial can easily cost the government $500,000, especially because mentally ill defendants are almost always indigent, and thus receive public defenders. I almost forgot: because these are mentally ill murderers, the costs of experts to evaluate the defendant’s mental competency for trial almost certainly drives these costs up even higher.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/south-american-mexican-hezbollah-jihadis-threaten-the-united-states?f=puball The Iranians and their terrorist proxy Hezbollah has been building forward operating bases in the Tri-Border area of South America and Mexico for the last three decades. Venezuela’s uranium deposits have been an important and rarely reported on component fueling Iran’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people in Latin America […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/witness-the-decline

Listening to Obama deliver his State of the Union speech was painful, considering that he promised that his agenda would “not add a dime to the deficit” while spelling out twenty-nine new programs involving the expansion of government to further extend its tentacles into everyone’s life. And, of course, the only way to pay for this is more taxes.

If one were to try to identify the decline of the American society and system of governance, it would be tempting to say it began with the election of Barack Hussein Obama, but it began much earlier. I am inclined to believe it began in the 1960s when the nation’s educational system was taken over by the teacher’s unions and when education-a word that does not appear in the Constitution-became a federal government department in 1979. The systematic dumbing down and indoctrination of several generations of Americans began in earnest.

One could go back further to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected four times (1933-1945). FDR vastly expanded the federal government, offering many of the same failed programs to “solve” the Great Depression that Obama put forth in his first term. FDR actually prolonged the Depression which ended with the advent of the nation’s entry into World War II. It mobilized America’s manufacturing sector and, after the war ended, was the basis for a booming economy in the 1950s.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

IT IS VERY INSTRUCTIVE TO REVISIT THE KOREAN WAR WHICH WAS NOT WON BUT ENDED BY EISENHOWER LEAVING THE BRUTAL KIM DYNASTY IN PLACE. IT WAS THE BEGINNING OF WARS NOT WON BY AMERICA…AND WHAT FOLLOWS IN THE ABSENCE OF TOTAL VICTORY AND SURRENDER…..RSK

Some wars are lost in a matter of moments, others stretch on indefinitely. The defeat in Afghanistan crept up silently on the national consciousness and even though we are negotiating with the Taliban, the “D” word is hardly used by anyone.
According to Obama, in one of his interminable speeches which all run together and sound the same, there really isn’t a war, just a mission, and the old mission is now becoming a new sort of mission, and the missions, all of them, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, have been successful which is why we are wrapping them up, except that we aren’t really. And that’s about as clear as the message from the big white building with the neatly mowed lawn out front gets, except for the part about how its occupant singlehandedly parachuted into Pakistan, killed Bin Laden, and then stopped off for some curry and a humanitarian award.

Had McCain won in 2008, we would no doubt he hearing a lot about the “D” word and the quagmire in Afghanistan. But the “Q” word doesn’t really get mentioned either. No war has been lost. Only a mission is ending. And missions, unlike wars, can be defined in so many creative ways that it’s hard to know what to make of them. It’s easy to tell when a war has been lost, but a mission can never be lost, only renamed. And renaming is what Obama did to the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan. Those wars weren’t lost; they’re only hiding out in the history books under new names and identities.

EVEN MADELEINE HALFBRIGHT IS SMARTER….RSK

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/rice-investigation-into-lies-about-benghazi-worse-than-murder-of-four-americans/print/

It’s a tradition now that whenever any member of Obama Inc. wants to say something horribly self-centered and inappropriate about Benghazi, he, she or it goes on the Late Show to deliver a line about it being “not optimal” or a “bump in the road” to the sympathetic smirk of Jon Stewart.

Now it was Susan Rice’s turn to explain that the investigation into her lies about Benghazi was worse than the murder of four Americans. And from her perspective, it no doubt was.

“There’s always confusion when you have a tragedy of that sort and Americans are killed,” Rice told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on Thursday. “The bigger tragedy, Jon, is we’ve spent all of these months trying to figure out the origin of some talking points, which were cleared at the highest levels of the intelligence community and, in my opinion, not enough time doing the service that we owe to our fallen colleagues.”

The bigger tragedy is apparently not the crime or the coverup, but the investigation of the coverup. Note also how Rice uses the passive voice and ambiguous language. Rather than discussing a murder or a terrorist attack, she talks about a tragedy in which Americans were killed by person or persons unknown.

Just think. This woman could have been Secretary of State.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/swedes-propose-open-borders-polygamy/ No matter how much jaw-dropping news of dhimmitude one may read from day to day, originating in virtually every corner of the Western world and bringing shameful and outrageous tidings of virtually every imaginable type of capitulation to Islam, it seems that one always ends up exclaiming: “Those crazy Swedes!” Here’s the latest bit […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/secretary-of-state-john-kerrys-alarming-priorities/print/ Al Qaeda and its affiliates are running all over North Africa and the Middle East while remaining a serious threat to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Approximately 70,000 Syrians are dead in a civil war exploited by Iran, Russia and Islamist jihadists. Egypt is an economic basket case, ruled by an increasingly unpopular authoritarian Islamist regime. […]