RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Constitution’s 227th birthday last week went almost unnoticed, except in Washington where Senator Harry Reid continued his assault on the First Amendment – which he would change so as to harness his political opponents, but which permits him to say whatever he wishes from one of the most powerful pulpits in the land.

Also last week, a poll of high school students and teachers regarding the Constitution’s First Amendment was released. It was conducted by the Florida-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Its findings were startling: Thirty-eight percent of the high school teachers believe the First Amendment provides too much freedom. Students appeared to better understand than their teachers the importance of the First Amendment in their everyday lives. Nevertheless, a still surprising 24% agreed that it is too liberal. This misunderstanding of the Bill of Rights is not limited to teachers and their students. Seventy-six percent of Americans, according to a Harris Poll released earlier this year, said they thought the First Amendment guaranteed freedom from religion, as well as the freedom to pray as one chooses.

I was astonished by the findings, but perhaps I should not have been. Political correctness has affected the way American history is taught, and the Left dominates the teaching staffs in our schools and universities.. It is axiomatic that the larger the role government plays in our lives, the fewer our rights The Left feeds on those who are dependent on government. The numbers favor them. The bottom 40% of all federal taxpayers pay a negative 9.1% of all federal taxes, while the top 40% pay 106.1%. An immersion in government has effectively divided us into two classes – those who pay the bills and those who do not.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/09/22/video-feminism-vs-truth/

See this video which debunks the so called “war on women”…..
Prager University is an online resource for knowledge and clarity. There are no fees, books, homework assignments, or grueling midterms here – just clear, life changing ideas from world-renowned thinkers. With short videos on political science, economics, history, religion and life, Prager University offers big ideas on big topics. Five minutes is all the time we need to communicate these important ideas. Just as a shot of espresso boosts your energy, a shot of Prager University boosts your brain. Because not only will you have more knowledge – you will have more clarity. If you’re ready to grow intellectually, we’re ready for you.

The other day, I had the pleasure of joining an earnest group of serious thinkers in a freewheeling discussion with Henry Kissinger at a disclosed, but still secure, location at Yale. The occasion for the discussion was Kissinger’s new book, World Order [1], a brilliant historical conspectus of the major political dispensations that have imposed, or — in some lucky places — merely coaxed order out of the recalcitrant matter that is humanity.

There is a lot that might be said about World Order, about Henry Kissinger (who is well into his 92nd year), and about the huge topic that is the subject of his latest book: world order, a quality that seems in short supply in these increasingly fraught days.

For now, however, I’d like to focus on discrete subset of that capacious topic. At one point in the afternoon’s discussion, Kissinger was asked about ISIS, AKA, Islamic State, the newly declared caliphate whose favorite book seems to be Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading [2].

As my readers surely know, President Obama recently took to the airwaves [3] to scold ISIS. The problem, as Kissinger and others have pointed out, is that the president’s speech was long on detailing what he was not going to do and rather short on positive statements of policy. As one wag put it, the president’s performance amounted to a reverse Teddy Roosevelt: Talk harshly and carry a soft stick. That, more or less, was the president’s message. His tone was plenty bellicose, but his strategy (and remember, just a week before, he admitted that he didn’t yet have a strategy [4] for dealing with ISIS) was flaccid.

I doubt that the world can boast a more circumspect diplomat than Henry Kissinger. And yet the former secretary of State was blistering about Obama’s response to public beheadings carried out by Islamic State. No nation, Kissinger observed, can stand by while two of its citizens are brutally and publicly murdered, outrages compounded by the worldwide publicity assured by the circulation of internet videos of the incidents. Such actions must be met by swift and decisive force, obliterating the actors. But what has Obama actually done? To date, he has authorized a series of pin pricks, a few dozen, low-yield sorties. (Update: “U.S. Launches First Allied Airstrikes to Hit ISIS Targets in Syria [5].”)

The tale of two Soviet Jews—one an Israeli politician, the other a disgraced KGB informant—is a sly parable about Zionism.

A few months ago, the Canadian novelist David Bezmozgis wrote an essay about Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Like most observers, he was distressed by the violence in the region and the prospects of military escalation. Yet he also had a somewhat more selfish concern: For four years he had been working on a novel about an Israeli politician who flees to the Crimean city of Yalta after a personal scandal hits the front pages. “I’d wanted to write a novel that, among other things, engaged with current politics,” he wrote; instead, “world events conspired to undermine my designs for the book.”

Mr. Bezmozgis surely had a few dark nights of the soul. Yet “The Betrayers” seems only to benefit from its sudden disconnection from the headlines. Set in a parallel reality in which Israel has voted to withdraw from its West Bank settlements and Crimea is still an uncontested part of Ukraine, the novel takes on contentious questions about Zionism and the fate of post-Soviet Jewry, undistracted by the caprices of the news ticker or the polemics of the moment. It bears out Israeli writer Amos Oz’s claim that “the novelist has no political aim but is concerned with truth, not facts.”

At the heart of “The Betrayers” is the magnetic Baruch Kotler. He is a former refusenik—a Soviet Jew denied permission to emigrate to Israel—who was imprisoned in Russia for 13 years after a show trial found him guilty of treason. Finally released, he arrived in Israel a “dissident champion” and formed a staunchly right-wing Russian immigrant party, which he has led with outspoken pugnacity for more than two decades. He is “famously stubborn” in a “notoriously obstinate country,” and Mr. Bezmozgis brilliantly captures a man who is as flawed as he is principled.

This description will quickly call to mind the former Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, but Kotler has been extensively fictionalized. In particular, Mr. Bezmozgis implicates him in an affair with a headstrong young staffer named Leora (no such scandal has ever been attached to Mr. Sharansky). When Kotler speaks out against the Israeli Parliament’s plan for unilateral withdrawal, his opponents leak incriminating photos. “The scandale Kotler” becomes 24-hour-a-day news, and he sneaks out of the country with Leora, flying to Yalta.

LOST IN THE MIRE OF WATERGATE AND THE DREADFUL PRESIDENCY OF JIMMY CARTER IS THE BETRAYAL OF TAIWAN BY THE UNITED STATES, FORGED IN THE SHABBY DEAL THAT NIXON/KISSINGER MADE WITH THE TYRANTS OF MAINLAND CHINA….RSK

A political showdown looms in Hong Kong. Beijing has stripped the city of the high degree of autonomy it promised in a 1984 treaty with the United Kingdom. Local residents are preparing a campaign of civil disobedience in protest. Yet London has failed to express even mild criticism of Beijing’s treaty violation.

The people of Hong Kong overwhelmingly want to elect their next Chief Executive, a reform that until a month ago seemed within reach. On Monday university and secondary students began a week-long boycott of classes to demonstrate for democracy. A new poll from Chinese University shows that one-fifth of the population is considering emigration because of the city’s uncertain future.

This turmoil is the result of Beijing’s shock decision at the end of August to rig the 2017 Chief Executive election with the most antidemocratic system tabled by its local supporters. Only politicians who receive majority support from a committee packed with Beijing’s supporters will be allowed to run.

The Communist Party’s response to criticism is that any election conducted with universal suffrage is a step forward. The Sino-British Joint Declaration did not explicitly promise democracy, and the British didn’t introduce elections for legislators until five years before their departure. So it is the “rankest hypocrisy,” in the words of the Chinese ambassador to the U.K., for Chris Patten, the last colonial governor, to claim London has a moral responsibility to speak up for Hong Kong.

Yet the desire for greater democracy was the critical issue facing Hong Kong long before the 1997 handover. Beginning in 1985, a drafting committee of local residents and Chinese officials created a constitutional document, the Basic Law, reflecting the Sino-British Joint Declaration’s promise of self-government. “How Hong Kong develops its democracy in the future is completely within the sphere of the autonomy of Hong Kong,” Lu Ping, China’s top official on Hong Kong matters, promised in the People’s Daily in March 1993. “The central government will not interfere.”

Every president gets things wrong. What sets Obama apart is his ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance.

Serious people feel an obligation to listen whenever Barack Obama speaks. They furrow their brow and hold their chin and parse every word. They assume that most everything a president says is significant, which is true. They assume that what’s significant must also be well-informed. Not necessarily.

I’ve been thinking about this as it becomes clear that, even at an elementary level, Mr. Obama often doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It isn’t so much his analysis of global events that’s wrong, though it is. The deeper problem is the foundation of knowledge on which that analysis is built.

Here, for instance, is Mr. Obama answering a question posed in August by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who wanted the president’s thoughts on the new global disorder.

“You can’t generalize across the globe,” the president replied. “Because there are a bunch of places where good news keeps on coming. Asia continues to grow . . . and not only is it growing but you’re starting to see democracies in places like Indonesia solidifying.”

“The trend lines in Latin America are good,” he added. “Overall, there’s still cause for optimism.”

Here, now, is reality: In Japan, the economy is contracting. China’s real-estate market is a bubble waiting to burst. Indonesia’s democracy may be solidifying, but so is Islamism and the persecution of religious minorities. Democracy has been overthrown in Thailand. The march toward freedom in Burma—supposedly one of Mr. Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s ) signature diplomatic victories—has stalled. India may do better than before under its new prime minister, Narendra Modi, but gone are the days when serious people think of India as a future superpower. The government of Pakistan is, as ever, on the verge of collapse.

It’s not every college girl who gets to have her claim of sexual assault aired on the front page of the NYTimes Arts Section or reported by the leading art critic of that paper. In this case, Emma Sulkowicz, the self-reported victim, has not been satisfied by the hearings that were authorized by Columbia University after she reported this rape; the assailant was found to be not responsible and that finding was upheld by a subsequent appeal. Emma followed up by attempting to file charges with the NYC police but she found this so “upsetting” that she dropped that plan.

Some mitigating factors in this story are that Emma had two previous consensual sexual experiences with the fellow student whom she then accused of rape the third time. Although it’s entirely possible that this is exactly what happened, there is also the lingering possibility that two yeses paved the way for the third attempt which was less a rape than a misunderstanding between a couple who had already been intimate twice before. In other words, this was a more “nuanced” assault than one which occurs between two strangers or between two people who have never been physically intimate before. It’s easy to imagine the problems of a panel hearing these accounts and trying to sort out what each person expected based on their past experience. Yes, yes, no is a more complicated situation to parse than NO! followed by a scream for help.

“Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”

Productive vs. Parasitical Societies

Daniel Greenfield, writing as Sultan Knish, penned an excellent and perceptive essay, “The Rationing Society.” My chief problem with the essay is in the choice of the terms “production society” and “rationing society,” which misdirect attention from the fundamental issues. Mr. Greenfield’s focus in the essay is the mechanics of wealth distribution in a “rationing society,” at least of such wealth would remain in an economy crippled by controls. I have selected a few of Greenfield’s statements to throw some light on their validity.

The best literary depiction of a dystopian or “rationing society” or polity is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Regardless of the value of Orwell’s perceptive insights into the means and ends of totalitarianism – and they are many and spot-on – his basic conception of a functioning totalitarian regime was flawed. A “production society” means free minds, minds free to innovate and sustain a technological or industrial civilization, free to act, and free to trade and to move about and assemble with others or not. A “rationing society” depends on the very attribute in men it wishes to leash or exterminate: free minds free to act.

Orwell’s other famous novel, the parable Animal Farm, was merely an attack by a “democratic socialist” on Stalin’s regime. Stalin and Soviet Russia lost many supporters in the West on the occasion of the Non-Aggression Pact signed by Stalin and Hitler in 1939. But when Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia, its Western supporters hurried back into the fold.

A rationing or authoritarian society seeks to freeze things in a state of stagnation, the better to control things and everyone, but even a technologically stagnant society still needs minds that can sustain it. This is an implicit confession that the state is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. A rationing society will put a premium on the competence to even repair a telescreen or a “Floating Fortress” or weaponry or manufacture razor blades. A free, independent mind is such a society’s primary enemy. The result of leashing or punishing it is the impoverishment of nearly everyone but the entrenched political class – and then collapse.

Until the collapse occurs, competent minds able to prop up dwindling products such as shoes and razor blades and food which must now be rationed, until the assembly lines halt, raw materials become scare, and the stockpiles are depleted. The minds that could have replaced them will have been snuffed out, or, as happens in Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, those minds will finally have gone on strike and disappeared. Rand noted in The New Intellectual:

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Renaissance Woman Ann Marie Murrell, the Editor-in Chief of PolitiChicks.com and the co-author of the new book, What Women Really Want.

Ann-Marie was joined by Shillman Journalism Fellow Daniel Greenfield, who came on the show to discuss “ISIS Rising,” analyzing Obama’s policy of fighting terrorists by arming terrorists.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/daniel-greenfield-on-isis-rising-on-the-glazov-gang/

Jihadi violence serves not only to advance the terrorist’s delusion of immortality, but also to add, however perversely, an apparent and desperately needed erotic satisfaction, using religion as the justification.

Persuasive promises of immortality — the desperate hope to live forever — underlie virtually all major religions.

Washington and Jerusalem should finally address what needs to be done in addition to military remediation — reinforcing efforts to convince these terrorists that their expected martyrdom is ultimately just an elaborate fiction.

Even after witnessing several beheadings and mass executions, American and Western strategists dealing with Jihadist terror still miss the key point. Whatever the particular terrorist group of the moment — the Islamic State [IS or ISIS], Hamas, al-Qaeda, or some other kindred terror organization — the core struggle is never really about territory, geography, or democracy. Always — in Iraq, Afghanistan Syria, or Gaza — this enemy seeks something far more important and compelling. In essence, Jihadi violence serves not only to advance the terrorist’s delusion of immortality, but also to add, however perversely, an apparent and desperately needed erotic satisfaction, using religion as the justification.This core point is not difficult to understand. Persuasive promises of immortality — the desperate hope to live forever — underlie virtually all major religions. Yet this point remains neglected or misunderstood in Washington, Jerusalem, and all other Western capitals.

The Jihadi terrorist claims to “love death,” but in his or her mind, that “suicide” is anything but final. Ironically, these Islamist terrorists aim to conquer mortality by “killing themselves.” The would-be killer has been promised that death will represent just a trivial and momentary inconvenience, a minor detour on just one more glorious “martyr’s” fiery trajectory toward a life everlasting, in Paradise.

How can one ever hope to counter such a seductive promise? How can any promise compete with the incomparable promise of immortality?