RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the past month, Ben Sasse, the junior U.S. senator from Nebraska, has been tweeting out his “lessons from the ranch”—or, rather, his daughter’s lessons. While her peers across the country might have spent much of the past few weeks lolling about their bedrooms, staring at smartphones instead of doing homework, 14-year-old Corrie Sasse was hours from home, laboring as a farmhand in exchange for room and board.

“We just believe in work,” Mr. Sasse tells me. “In our family we try to figure out ways that our kids can work.” The freedom to do so is one benefit of home schooling, since Mr. Sasse and his wife, Melissa, clearly consider working hard an education in itself.

Corrie seems to have taken the ranch assignment in stride, texting updates to her father, who then shared them on Twitter. Production agriculture, she learned, can be a dusty, dirty, smelly business, not least during calving season, when this particular ranch expects 300 new arrivals.

Text #FromTheRanch: “Today we checked to confirm some cows were pregnant—which Megan did by jamming her hand up their rectum. Eww.”

We should confirm, for the uninitiated, that the pregnancy-check generally involves a shoulder-length disposable glove . . . but still. Mr. Sasse says that surprise, more than anything, helped his daughter overcome the ick factor: “It was just all of a sudden, the moment they were at, and she was told to do it, and that was the work that needed to be done that day.” Corrie donned the long glove too.

Text #FromTheRanch: “Am not going to call now. I need to get some sleep before checking cows—and feed the fats—at midnight. . . By the way, Dad, the ‘fats’ are cows soon to be slaughtered.”CONTINUE AT SITE

At Israeli Apartheid Week, campus haters claim to be fighting “colonialism” by fighting Jews. Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, dedicated to a country that doesn’t exist and which has produced nothing worth studying except terrorism, features diatribes such as Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh’s Palestine Re-Covered: Reading a Settler Colonial Landscape”. This word salad is a toxic stew of historical revisionism being used to justify the Muslim settler colonization of the indigenous Jewish population.

Colonialism is CPS’ favorite word. When Israeli social workers remove abused children from Muslim homes, that’s colonialism. Israeli farms are a form of environmental “colonialism”. When non-profits aren’t representative enough, it’s the fault of the “Israeli settler-colonial regime.” If it rains on Thursday, it’s caused by “colonialism,” preferably of the “Israeli Zionist colonial settler regime” variety.

But you can’t colonize colonizers. The Muslim population in Israel is a foreign colonist population. The indigenous Jewish population can resettle its own country, but it can’t colonize it.

Not even if you accuse Jews of being a “super-double-secret settler colonial regime.”

Muslims invaded, conquered and settled Israel. They forced their language and laws on the population. That’s the definition of colonialism. You can’t colonize and then complain that you’re being colonized when the natives take back the power that you stole from them.

There are Muslims in Israel for the same reason that there are Muslims in India. They are the remnants of a Muslim colonial regime that displaced and oppressed the indigenous non-Muslim population.

There are no serious historical arguments to be made against any of this.

“I can’t have a serious conversation with you about the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and violence because” this author’s question “is driven by a certain ideological agenda,” declared University of Denver Middle East studies professor Nader Hashemi. His dismissal typified the ideological blindness towards the MB of a March 17 presentation by the Islamist-aligned Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) before about thirty-five at Washington, DC’s National Press Club.

Hashemi concurred with his fellow panelists that enactment of the recently introduced Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act will “pour oil on the raging fires that are consuming” the Middle East. Despite the act’s extensive catalogue of MB violent support for Islamic supremacy in numerous affiliates across the Middle East, he echoed the panel in rejecting an American terrorist designation for the MB’s founding Egyptian branch. He contrasted a supposedly moderate MB with extremist groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and (Greater) Syria (ISIS) and warned that when “moderate forms of political Islam are crushed and denied a public voice, radical Islam thrives.”

Citing Rachid Ghannouchi of Tunisia’s MB-affiliated, deceptively moderate-sounding Ennahda party, Hashemi stated that the “only way to defeat ISIS is to offer a better product to the millions of young people in the Muslim world . . . Muslim democracy.” He drew from the swift fall of Arab dictators in the “Arab Spring” the lesson that “dictatorial rule is fundamentally precarious” and suffers from an “absence of internal political legitimacy.” The “Arab Spring” validated for him President George W. Bush’s 2003 statement that “stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty,” notwithstanding his costly Iraqi regime change experiment in “Muslim democracy.”

Many students at Scripps College are absolutely furious that Madeleine Albright will be their commencement speaker — because Albright is a “white feminist.”

“It was announced recently that the 2016 commencement speaker will be none other than former Secretary of State, white feminist and repeated genocide enabler Madeleine Albright,” senior Kinzie Mabon wrote in a piece for the Student Life, the school’s official newspaper.

That’s right. Albright may have been the first female Secretary of State, but that doesn’t matter! She’s also white — something so awful that it automatically makes her an unacceptable choice.

Now, to be fair, not all of Mabon’s criticisms of the selection are unwarranted. For example: Mabon explains that — as a woman who does not support Hillary Clinton — she does not want to have to “sit quietly” and listen to someone who once insinuated that women who do not support Hillary Clinton have a “special place in Hell.” As a fellow woman in this category, this is definitely something I can understand.

According to an article in the Claremont Independent, however, much of the objection to Albright’s selection was specifically due to “the fact that Albright is white.”

The article chronicled some of students’ complaints on the matter, including:

2012 and like 2008 appeared to be people of color. but also SO MANY white women.

and

*Just out of curiosity* does anyone know how many POC we’ve had as guest commencement speakers at Scripps? 2…3?

We’re not quite at peak idiocy when looking at life on university campuses in 2016. But we’re getting damn close.

A student at Edinburgh University was threatened with being thrown out of a meeting because she raised her hand in a “safe space.”

The Telegraph:

Imogen Wilson, the vice-president for academic affairs at Edinburgh University Students’ Association (EUSA), spoke out against safe space rules becoming “a tool for the hard left to use when they disagree with people”, following the incident last week.

Ms Wilson, 22, was subject to a “safe space complaint” over her supposedly “inappropriate hand gestures” during a student council meeting.

According to the association’s rules, student council meetings should be held in a “safe space environment”, defined as “a space which is welcoming and safe and includes the prohibition of discriminatory language and actions”.

This includes “refraining from hand gestures which denote disagreement”, or “in any other way indicating disagreement with a point or points being made”.

“Disagreements should only be evident through the normal course of debate,” it says.

In other words, if you look cross-eyed at some dufus making a stupid argument, you can be called out for it and voted out of the meeting.

This new special edition of the Glazov Gang was joined by Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know. The discussion focused on Moronic Questions After Brussels, analyzing why the media keeps searching for a “motive” in Islamic terror attacks — and asking the same stupid questions since 9/11.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/05/moronic-questions-after-brussels-on-the-glazov-gang/

Don’t miss it!

“Islamophobia…is sort of like the ocean. It is working, it is churning, it is ebbing, it is flowing, even when we are asleep. There are larger systems of power and structures of power in place,” warns Georgetown University researcher Nathan Lean. Such conspiracy-mongering typifies the thesis of his book, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, of an inherently innocuous Islam slandered by the American military-industrial complex and Zionist Jews.

Lean is a perfect fit for his employer, the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). Amid ACMCU’s exclusion of opposing views, Lean rails against a vague “Islamophobia” as “discrimination against Muslims” but never defines what remains acceptable “[r]ational criticism of Islam or Muslims.”

Lean’s “Islamophobia” radar is especially sensitive when Muslims are the voices raising concern. He castigates former radical Maajid Nawaz, as a tool of bigoted neoconservatives. He has also called former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani an “anti-Muslim hate enabler” and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali someone “dangerously close to advocating genocide.”
Lean’s oceanographic observations occurred during a discussion of Islam and American military conflicts Feb. 23 at Washington, D.C.’s Rumi Forum, an entity in the empire of the shadowy Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gülen. “Islamophobia has really long been connected to American foreign policy and America’s military engagement with Muslim enemies real or perceived,” he said. “America’s first military engagement as a newly formed republic was with a Muslim enemy,” the Barbary Pirates, and “narratives emerge from the Barbary Wars about Muslims and Islam…very similar to a lot of kinds of things we hear today.”

Is the Muslim world as a whole responsible for the epidemic of jihadist terrorism that has rocked the globe in recent years? The question will strike many who consider themselves enlightened as offensive. And yet few of those who recoil from it reject out of hand the possibility that an entire society could be responsible for racially motivated terrorism.

Philosopher-turned-activist Cornel West is among those who do not seem to see any tension in this juxtaposition. On the January 15, 2016, episode of Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time, West admonished his host not to infer from the recent sexual attacks in Cologne, Germany, that the newly arrived Syrian migrants do not share European values. After all, West noted, many crimes are committed by non-Muslims, and many Muslims did not participate in the Cologne crimes.

“I think you have to distinguish between culture and morality,” West said. “Every culture has good morality and bad morality.”

On a CNN appearance several months earlier, in the aftermath of the notorious racially motivated Charleston shooting that left nine people dead at a church, West didn’t bother distinguishing between America’s racist culture and its (presumably deplorable) morality. He asserted that the “vicious legacy of white supremacy is still shot so deep in the culture” of the United States that politicians of both parties are unable to address it. In this social context, it makes sense to see racial terrorism as a manifestation of widely accepted racism.

According to Tuskegee University figures, some 4,743 “lynching” murders occurred between 1882 and 1968. That figure doesn’t even cover all of the terroristic racial murders during this period: so many bombs exploded in Birmingham, Ala., during the 1960s, targeting black homes and churches, that it earned the moniker “Bombingham.”

Several state attorneys general have joined in a campaign to prosecute energy companies for “misleading investors” on global warming.

These AGs claim a conspiracy implying that investors are unaware that climate changes may impact investments and have committed to using the power of the state to prove it. In November 2015, Exxon Mobil was targeted by New York State attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman by pursuing a strategy based on claimed similarities to the way tobacco companies were found guilty in 2006 of suppressing their own research showing tobacco being both harmful and addictive.

Virginia AG Mark Herring joined five other AGs and former Vice President Gore in the goal of determining “whether fossil fuel companies misled investors and the public on the impact of climate change on their businesses.” Herring is also a supporter of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP).

When scientific argument fails its cause, governmental legal prosecution becomes Plan B. “Attorneys General and law enforcement officials around the country have long held a vital role in ensuring that the progress we have made…” according to Gore. That is the “inconvenient truth” of governmental dogma.

Claiming disastrous climate change related to human activities, alarmists disregard eons of natural climate variations. Climate change is a vague term and is often undefined. No student of history denies that the climate changes. These AGs posturing as legal determiners of scientific truth join the current vogue to label variations in some idealized concept of an unchanging “normal” climate (the Goldilocks Climate) as a disaster. The evidence is otherwise: sea level rate-of-rise remains about 7 inches per century, droughts are cyclical, tornadoes are less frequent and less deadly, fewer hurricanes are hitting the U.S., even the polar bears are thriving. Global temperatures have plateaued for 18 years even as CO2 levels have increased 10 per cent (the recent El Nino caused an expected temperature spike).

Do you know who is selling you that souvenir T-shirt in the airport? You might want to.

In the late 1970s, it became known to international security agencies that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) owned a variety of duty-free shops in airports across Africa. They didn’t get too excited — selling newspapers and snack food didn’t seem particularly dangerous, and the breech of security posed by terrorists with all-airport access passes doesn’t seem to have aroused any great level of concern.

But that was before we stripped to our skivvies and dumped our lattes in order to board a plane. After years of hijackings and the horrors of 9/11, surely we’re smarter now.

Or not. Following the ISIS-orchestrated bombing at the Brussels Zaventem airport, part of a two-pronged attack that killed 31 people and injured more than 300, Belgian police disclosed that more than 50 known ISIS supporters are working in the airport as baggage handlers, cleaners, and catering staff. They have unprecedented access to passenger areas, back hallways, runways, and onto the airplanes themselves. The situation was so dire before the March 22nd bombing that Israeli inspectors warned the Belgian authorities of the danger. Similar warnings may also have come from the United States. No matter — nothing at all was done.

Some European countries, particularly the UK, have stepped up security around airports and other major facilities. But their focus is almost entirely on people passing through the system — passengers and their families — while the truth is the insider threat receives only perfunctory consideration in most Western venues.

Apart from airports, insider threats have been noted at nuclear power plants. In Belgium at least two atomic power stations have had jihadists working inside — at least two of whom went off to Syria to fight for ISIS. A plot, uncovered in Belgian authorities in February, appears to have targeted a senior scientist in hopes of acquiring nuclear material. Time magazine reported that 12 nuclear plant workers were stripped of their access badges — eight before the Zaventem bombing and four after.

The threat of an attack on a nuclear facility raises many horrific possibilities: a reactor meltdown, the theft of radioactive material for a dirty bomb, or holding a nuclear plant hostage threatening to destroy it unless specific conditions are met. But the most immediate and dire danger is a combination of an airplane hijacking and a 9/11 style hit on an atomic power plant.