RUTHFULLY YOURS

The question of whether Socialism can be an effective economic system was famously raised when Margaret Thatcher said of the British Labor Party, “I think they’ve made the biggest financial mess that any government’s ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything.”

There are dire reports of people waiting in supermarket lines all day, only to discover that expected food deliveries never arrived and the shelves are empty.

There are horrific tales of desperate people slaughtering zoo animals to provide their only meal of the day. Even household pets are targeted as a much-needed source for food.

President Maduro is doubling down on the proven failed policies and philosophies of “Bolivarian Socialism,” while diverting attention away from the crisis — pointing fingers at so-called “enemies” of Venezuela such as the United States, Saudi Arabia and others.

A dozen eggs was last reported to cost $150, and the International Monetary Fund “predicts that inflation in Venezuela will hit 720% this year.

For many Venezuelans, by every economic, social and political measure, their nation is unravelling at breakneck speed.

Severe shortages of food, clean water, electricity, medicines and hospital supplies punctuate a dire scenario of crime-ridden streets in the impoverished neighborhoods of this nearly failed OPEC state, which at one time claimed to be the most prosperous nation in Latin America.

Mr. Kontorovich, a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, heads the international law department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, a think tank where Ms. Grunseid is a researcher.

The United Nations began its annual session this week, and Israel will be prominent on the agenda. Many fear the Security Council may consider a resolution setting definite territorial parameters, and a deadline, for the creation of a Palestinian state.

President Obama has hinted that in the final months of his term, he may reverse the traditional U.S. policy of vetoing such resolutions. The General Assembly, meanwhile, is likely to act as the chorus in this drama, reciting its yearly litany of resolutions criticizing Israel.

If Mr. Obama is seeking to leave his mark on the Israeli-Arab conflict—and outside the negotiated peace process that began in Oslo—there is no worse place to do it than the U.N. New research we have conducted shows that the U.N.’s focus on Israel not only undermines the organization’s legitimacy regarding the Jewish state. It also has apparently made the U.N. blind to the world’s many situations of occupation and settlements.

Our research shows that the U.N. uses an entirely different rhetoric and set of legal concepts when dealing with Israel compared with situations of occupation or settlements world-wide. For example, Israel is referred to as the “Occupying Power” 530 times in General Assembly resolutions. Yet in seven major instances of past or present prolonged military occupation—Indonesia in East Timor, Turkey in northern Cyprus, Russia in areas of Georgia, Morocco in Western Sahara, Vietnam in Cambodia, Armenia in areas of Azerbaijan, and Russia in Ukraine’s Crimea—the number is zero. The U.N. has not called any of these countries an “Occupying Power.” Not even once.

The Obama administration plans to raise the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. to 110,000 in the 2017 fiscal year starting Oct. 1, from 85,000 this fiscal year, according to an annual refugee report to Congress obtained by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

President Barack Obama was widely expected to announce an increase in the U.S. commitment ahead of a summit on refugees that he is convening next week during the United Nations General Assembly meeting.

The 110,000 target for 2017 for individuals fleeing persecution and conflict around the world represents a nearly 30% increase over this fiscal year and an almost 60% increase over the 70,000 admitted in 2015.

The last year that the U.S. committed to resettling as many refugees was in 1995, when President Bill Clinton set the ceiling at 112,000.

Each year, the president makes a determination of how many refugees will be admitted into the U.S.

Secretary of State John Kerry presented the new target, outlined in the report to Congress, in a closed session to members of the House and Senate judiciary committees on Tuesday.

As he left the meeting, Mr. Kerry refused to provide details, saying he was “going to wait until the president releases it.”

A State Department official confirmed that Mr. Kerry had held the closed briefing regarding the president’s plan to admit refugees and said the official determination would be issued in coming weeks.

Following terrorist attacks in Paris and the U.S., the resettlement of Muslim refugees, particularly from Syria, has become a contested issue at the state level and in the presidential campaign.

Last year, Republican governors in roughly two dozen states voiced opposition to receiving Syrians, and some states tried to halt resettlement with lawsuits, which they lost.

Like it or not, the increasingly aggressive Iranian posture toward Israel suggests that sooner or later their conflict will develop into a ground and air war. Actions by Iran and its surrogates in the area of the Golan Heights already caused some Israeli land and retaliatory air moves, and more provocations could set off broader fighting. Israel has little choice but to deter the Iranian and Syria armies, and Hezbollah, from creating a security nightmare.

Iran has around 265 front line combat fighter aircraft. These consist of American F-14’s, F-4’s, F-5’s and 30 or more Hesa Saegeh locally made aircraft based on the F-5; Russian MIG 29’s; French Mirage F-1s, and Chinese F-7 Chengdu interceptors. The F-7s and F-5s are not a significant factor of any kind today. The F-14s and F-4s are old, but very capable, as are the Mirage and MiG planes. The Iranian F-4s have been upgraded and have new, modern radars and avionics from China. The F-4s also have the new Qader cruise missile which may also be usable on the other planes. The Hesa Saegeh F-5 knock off has engines that could have been smuggled into Iran from outside, no one is sure.

Of all these planes the most lethal is the F-14 because it carries Phoenix missiles. The Phoenix missile was the first true beyond visual range air to air missile with a range exceeding 100 miles. Such missiles were delivered to Iran under the Shah. But to assume they are not operational today would be a mistake because, in all likelihood, the Russians and Chinese have had their hands all over them. Can the Israelis knock such an improved Phoenix out? Possibly, if they use jamming. A better strategy would be to destroy the F-14s before they can do any damage. But this would depend on the quality of Iran’s air defenses, which have been improved lately by S-300 batteries that were delivered by Russia, and whether the Iranians can field an aircraft that can compete with Israel’s F-15s and F-16s.

Can the Israelis knock such an improved Phoenix out? Possibly, if they use jamming. A better strategy would be to destroy the F-14s before they can do any damage. But this would depend on the quality of Iran’s air defenses, which have been improved lately by S-300 batteries that were delivered by Russia, and whether the Iranians can field an aircraft that can compete with Israel’s F-15s and F-16s.

Furthermore, the possibility of a Russian sale of an advanced 4th generation plus fighter, like the Su-35 to Iran, could introduce a major problem for Israel, a problem that would not be solved by the F-35, which has such serious limitations and needs so many fixes that there is doubt it could be ever ready for combat. Because the F-35 cannot dogfight, the Su-35 has the key advantage especially in the role of territorial defense.

In Swedish Christianity, Jesus has been reduced from being the son of God, to an activist fighting for multiculturalism and open borders. According to Archbishop Antje Jackelén of the Church of Sweden, Jesus has clear political positions on both migration and integration policies.

According to a senior official in the Church of Sweden, the call to wear a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians is “un-Christian”.

One might describe the Swedish Christianity as a new religion that worships multiculturalism and leftist values in general.

“The leadership of the Church of Sweden no longer wants to lead a Christian community; they want to lead a general ethical association for humanistic values.” — Ann Heberlein, doctor of theology and lecturer at Lund University.

One can have different interpretations of what Jesus did or what opinions he had, but we can all agree that he did not serve the Emperor or other earthly rulers. Too many Christian leaders in Sweden have become the servants of earthly rulers by conveying the message of the political establishment in Sweden.

Christianity is a universal religion, therefore Christianity in Sweden should have many similarities with Christianity in other countries.

If Christianity in Sweden begins to embrace a doctrine that has nothing to do with the universal world religion of Christianity, Sweden has then invented a new religion.

If you look at how Christianity has developed in Sweden today, it seems that this is what Sweden is about to get.

Stefan Swärd is an influential Christian pastor in Sweden with a background in the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden. In an op-ed from September 2014, Swärd describes Christianity the following way:

“When congregations in Sweden meet in diversity and integration and integrate Africans, Chinese and Latin Americans, they express the very essence of the Christian community’s being.”

JUBA, South Sudan—South Sudan’s leaders have transferred millions of dollars of ill-gotten wealth outside the country while waging a civil war that has left nearly half the country’s people homeless or in urgent need of humanitarian aid, an anti-corruption group said Monday.

President Salva Kiir and some his top associates, along with Riek Machar, the country’s former vice president, have invested millions of dollars in real estate in Kenya, Uganda and Australia, according to a report by the Sentry, which investigates corruption and organized crime in Africa, following a two-year probe. The watchdog group was founded by Hollywood actor George Clooney and John Prendergast, a former official in the Clinton administration.

According to the report, these powerful political figures and their immediate relatives have large ownership interests in local oil, construction, security and gambling businesses—in violation of South Sudanese law barring officeholders from engaging in commercial activity.

The report accuses the two leaders of perpetuating conflict in South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, to amass personal wealth.

“The leaders of South Sudan’s warring parties manipulate and exploit ethnic divisions in order to drum up support for a conflict that serves the interests only of the top leaders of these two kleptocratic networks and, ultimately, the international facilitators whose services the networks utilize and on which they rely,” it says.

A spokesman for Mr. Kiir didn’t immediately reply to calls and messages requesting comment. A spokesman for Mr. Machar said he would study the report and respond to it later. Messrs. Clooney and Prendergast said Monday they would meet with U.S. President Barack Obama, State Secretary John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to present the investigation and lobby for the use of antiterrorism and anti-money-laundering rules to seize the South Sudanese leaders’ assets.

Mr. Kiir’s presidential salary is about $60,000 annually. Mr. Machar drew a government salary $54,000 annually until he was ousted in July after the collapse of a power-sharing agreement. He is now in neighboring Sudan.

Foreign donors sponsored South Sudan’s independence declaration in 2011 and have supplied billions of dollars in aid since the two political rivals pitted their tribes and armies against each other nearly three years ago, with the U.S. topping the list with $1.6 billion in assistance.

German police detained three Syrians believed to be members of Islamic State who traveled to Germany last November, possibly to carry out an attack, officials said Tuesday, in what is believed to be the first arrests of a group of foreign fighters sent to the country by the Sunni Muslim extremist group.

More than 200 police officers carried out raids on homes of refugees in the states of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein early Tuesday after receiving a tip from other asylum seekers, officials for the Federal Criminal Police Office and General Prosecutor said.

Three men—ages 17, 18 and 26—were arrested and documents seized, the prosecutor said. Identification of criminal suspects is barred under German law.

“The three accused are strongly suspected of having traveled to Germany in November 2015 on behalf of terror group Islamic State to execute an existing order or to be on standby for instructions,” said the prosecutor said.

The arrest is more bad news for Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose standing in opinion polls has dropped since she opened the country’s doors to hundreds of thousands of refugees last year.

Surveys show a majority of Germans are concerned about the influx and about potential attackers among the migrants.

Two attacks committed by refugees and claimed by Islamic State rattled the country this summer. Several of the attackers in last November’s deadly assaults in Paris are also known to have traveled to Europe while posing as refugees.

The prosecutor said the three men detained Tuesday were sent to Germany via Turkey and Greece by an Islamic State official responsible for foreign operations. The men were under orders to carry out an attack or await instructions, he said, adding that no specific details of a plan had been found.

The men are believed to have received passports and cash, as well as mobile phones with a preinstalled communication program, according to the prosecutor.

The raids come as recent terror attacks in Paris and Brussels showed that Islamic State was planting fighters into the stream of migrants flowing to Europe, a spokeswoman for the Federal Criminal Police Office said. CONTINUE AT SITE

FROM E-PAL ED CLINE……”FOR SOMETHING HE NEVER DID….”

Four Americans died in the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, and those who survived saw their stories of heroism told in a Hollywood movie, but the filmmaker whose work was wrongly blamed for touching off the event lives in obscurity, poverty and fear, FoxNews.com has learned.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the Coptic Christian whose short video “The Innocence of Muslims” was initially faulted for sparking the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack at U.S. diplomatic compounds in Libya, is now living in a homeless shelter run by First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif. He has served time in prison, been shamed publicly by the White House and threatened with death.

Nakoula, seen here with the Rev. Wiley S. Drake, lives in a homeless shelter. (FoxNews.com)

“I don’t believe in democracy anymore,” Nakoula told FoxNews.com. “I don’t think there is such a thing as freedom of speech.”

In the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seized on the anti-Islamist film as the cause of a spontaneous protest that turned violent. U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed when armed terrorists laid siege to the compound and set it ablaze.

The story was told in the Michael Bay-directed film “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” which starred John Krasinski.

Nakoula, seen here in 2013 being escorted out of his home in Cerritos, Calif., lives under constant threat.(Reuters)

Nakoula’s video trailer, posted online and credited to “Sam Bacile,” mocked the Islamic prophet Mohammad – depicting him as everything from a bozo and womanizer to predator and homosexual. Although Obama and Clinton were later forced to acknowledge that the attack was an organized assault by Al Qaeda-linked terrorists, Nakoula was soon charged with eight counts of probation violation, jailed without bail and deemed a “danger to the community.”

Nakoula had previously been convicted of charges relating to bank and credit fraud, and federal prosecutors found his use of the Internet to post the video violated his terms of probation.

Nakoula, who is in his late fifties and has been in the U.S since 1984, declined to elaborate on his post-jail experiences, but said he plans to write a book about his ordeal.

For now, he deferred queries to the Rev. Wiley S. Drake, pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church. In August 2013, Nakoula was relocated from prison to a halfway house

Socialism depends on three all-too-human factors: ignorance, naiveté and duplicity. The first is common if not disastrously ubiquitous, affecting large strata of any given population. The latter two pertain, in extreme measure and without the tendency to conscious self-correction, to the various ranges of the leftist elite, whom Yugoslavian dissident Milovan Djilas in his must-read The New Class called “the managerial class” — the caste that dominates and exploits the political landscape under the pretense of far-sighted and compassionate stewardship. Obviously, no one is exempt from these character defects, but here it is a question of degree, of intensity and persistence. Let us consider these three factors in turn.

Ignorance

A few years ago students in my home province of Quebec went on strike and closed down the colleges and universities on the assumption that they were owed free tuition, free textbooks, free transportation and in many cases free meal chits and dormitory lodging. I met with a representative group and inquired where the money would come from. The response was: “le gouvernement.” When I suggested that nothing is free and that someone has to pay for someone else’s “free stuff,” the fact simply did not register.

What I found startling was the consummate ignorance of the students and, indeed, of many people who believe “the government” actually produces wealth rather than merely administers it. Government does control the mint, but cranking out dollar bills does not create wealth; currency is only a means of facilitating exchange. The students I spoke with had no idea of so palpable a distinction. They had never heard of hyperinflation. They did not understand that money means nothing unless it is based on a sound economic foundation. Money is more likely to come from trees — and it often does, to wit, Quebec’s maple syrup and logging companies — than from bureaucratic shuffling and administrative directives.

Such public sycophancy as the students demonstrated springs from conceiving of government in loco parentis, a father figure that magically provides for offspring needs and demands nothing in return but love and loyalty. Anyone with a functioning cortex should know that government produces nothing tangible. The revenue it needs to operate must come from somewhere else. And that somewhere else has three major addresses: industry, commerce and taxation, in other words, from the pockets of working people. Ignorance of how a prosperous society actually works, the refusal to study the dismal history of the socialist experiment in political paternalism, is a sine qua non of the socialist hallucination. That the province’s student cohort voted as a bloc for the socialist/secessionist Parti Québécois was no accident. A sovereign Quebec would lead to a socialist utopia where the necessities of life would be available to all and everyone would be equal — except, as Orwell pointed out, those who weren’t.

“Militants????” what happened to the word “terrorists” ?????? RSK

Two militants dressed as doctors raided a hospital in Kandahar supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday, killing at least one emergency room patient in an hourlong firefight, Afghan officials said.

The men, armed with pistols and suicide vests, wounded two other people before being shot dead by Afghan security forces, the officials said. The firefight took place in wards among patients, they said.

The first militant was quickly shot by an intelligence agent, while the second escaped further into the hospital before being killed by security forces about an hour later, said a spokesman for the Kandahar governor. Angry families outside protested to be allowed into the compound to rescue trapped relatives as the gunfire rang out across Afghanistan’s second largest city.

An Afghan intelligence officer and a policeman were also killed in the attack, a foreign official in the country said. Afghan authorities didn’t confirm their deaths.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.