RUTHFULLY YOURS

Humanity would not have been possible without the extinction of dinosaurs et al. some 66 million years ago due to a large meteor impacting earth. Though many greens regret this, the rest of us are damned pleased. The lesson is that some destructions clear the way for a more enlightened future. As described here http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/dont-look-down, we are facing financial collapse, with the dollar’s death certificate likely to state the cause as hyperinflation. I noted that it could occur tomorrow or in a decade. And while this piece didn’t express horror of such collapse, further thought has convinced me to embrace a reset (not like I have a choice in the matter – as I keep telling my wife, my analyzing and writing about it won’t be the cause).

How could it be a good thing, asks the dinosaur? Well, consider where we are, just naming what is in the news currently: our president is an Islamist; he has set up an invasion of the southern border to create chaos with the added bonus of seeding a Democrat voting block; and Ferguson, MO, where John Lewis (Atlanta representative) wants martial law in order to protect the protesters (rioters), a St. Louis alderman believes that a black youth robbing a store is like having two beers at a ball game and driving home and the homie State Police captain now in charge calls off law enforcement so the rioters could burn down a market (this as of 7/16/14). Not to mention our dear RINOs.

As I noted in my Don’t Look Down essay, the hyperinflation I am referring to is a mass loss of confidence in the dollar. The true national debt is ~ $200 trillion that includes underfunded and unfunded obligations. States and localities add to this as do private pensions. But it doesn’t matter how much more because we aren’t going to be able to pay back or pay out no matter what the number is.

And then there are the derivatives for which there is little public information, but are estimated to have a notional value worldwide of $750 trillion to $1.5 quadrillion. Goldman Sachs and Citi each have derivative exposure in the ballpark of $70 trillion with assets of some $1.8 trillion. An event that causes the market (investors) to demand higher interest for bonds, for example, could / would trigger a derivative disaster. Trying to get a handle on them is impossible, for anyone. Lehman went down in 2008 because of them and an army of experts are still trying to unwind them – but never will because there are intertwining swaps, bets, debt insurance etc. with a vast number of counter-parties. They are like the crab grass that enters my yard each August – utterly entangled. It must be pulled up by their roots.

Two of the biggest news stories of the summer — the war between Israel and Hamas, ‎and now the shooting death of a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri and the ‎chaotic aftermath (protests, police in full battle mode, looting, riots and mob ‎violence by many from outside the area ) — have revealed a few truths about how ‎the American media quickly fix on a story line, and are loath to shift from it. With ‎four 24-hour all-news cable channels (Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and CNN Headline ‎News), not to mention Al Jazeera America (which purchased the network from Al ‎Gore and his partners, and apparently stiffed them on payment), these kinds of long run stories are the ‎closest thing to manna from the skies for the news stations, other than maybe ‎hurricanes and tornadoes.

In the case of the Israel-Hamas confrontation, there was precedent for how the ‎battle lines were to be laid out by the media. Israel had gone through this drill in ‎the 2006 summer war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and again in the ‎conflicts with Hamas in Gaza in 2009 and 2012. Israel was the big dog, with a ‎powerful military. And it suffered less than its enemy in each confrontation. Since ‎the country sustained few civilian casualties in the latest fighting (three dead, plus the three ‎murdered teens who had been kidnapped), and the Iron Dome system destroyed ‎many of the rockets fired at Israel’s population centers, Israel’s principal casualties ‎were soldiers, who were buried quickly and never seen on television. Hamas ‎fighters were rarely seen, and their leaders only appeared outside the country. But ‎there were plenty of dead, wounded and bedraggled Gazan civilians all over the ‎screen and in all major newspaper photographs.

The newspaper industry is in a state of near collapse in America, as both ‎advertising and circulation numbers disintegrate, with advertising revenue ‎migrating rapidly to websites and mobile devices. Younger Americans, for the ‎most part, seem to prefer to tweet and post photos on Facebook, rather than read ‎newspapers, and those who are conscious of the news, often get their minimal ‎daily dose from comedians (in reality, left-wing cynics) like Jon Stewart, who ‎played the part of Hamas cheerleader during the current fighting.

There are few papers that continue to staff foreign bureaus, and those papers ‎which continue to have correspondents and cameramen overseas, have increased ‎their influence, no paper more so than The New York Times. The cable news ‎stations and National Public Radio often seem to parrot during the day what they ‎read in the morning in that day’s New York Times, which effectively sets the ‎agenda (or as the paper self-promotes itself: “where the conversation begins.”) ‎When it comes to Israel, The Times has been hostile for years, and the paper is ‎now almost indistinguishable from Britain’s left-wing mainstay, The Guardian, a ‎longtime leader in fomenting anti-Israel propaganda, and now one whose ‎columnists recommend more Jew killing.

CONTENTS

1. Israel’s record on civilian casualties compares well to America’s
2. “Yet within six years of publishing his book, my grandfather had to flee Germany”
3. “For Jews in western (and Muslim) societies are expected to know their place”
4. “Was Sainsbury’s anti-Semitic? No. But it does shine a light on the modern phenomenon of acquiescence to anti-Semitism”
5. The pope is not naïve, so why the double standards?
6. “Once again Israel finds it has no alternative” (By Daniel Finkelstein, The Times of London, Aug. 13, 2014)
7. “It’s anti-Semitism, stupid” (By Efraim Karsh, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 11, 2014)
8. “The kosher controversy at Sainsbury’s speaks to a profound problem: acquiescence to anti-Semitism” (By Brendan O’Neill, Daily Telegraph, UK, Aug. 18, 2014)
9. “One cheer for Pope Francis” (By Lee Smith, Weekly Standard, Aug. 19, 2014)

An Abrahamic family: Imam’s Cordoba House highly supported by Chautauqua Faith leaders

Mark Opreaon

Eighth Century. Córdoba, Spain: At the time, the country was under Islamic rule, and cities like Córdoba absorbed the language, beliefs and religion of the Islamic people. Córdoba, now a World Heritage Site, was unique in the sense that there was unification between the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam — a notion of “shared worship” that, as evidenced in contemporary media, has increasingly diminished.

Despite these tensions, Feisal Abdul Rauf, an American Sufi imam and author, has held fast to this concept of Abrahamic harmony and brought it to the United States, where he translated it into a multi-faith, multi-national organization called the Cordoba Initiative.

It’s a program, Rauf said, with the aim to “bring harmony between America and the world of Islam,” while focusing on the aspect of religious tension.

The imam believes that much can be accomplished by building Muslim-American community centers around the world — that is, in the form of what he calls a “Cordoba House.”

“The purpose of the Cordoba House is to … have an impact — or a presence, actually — on how people think about you and [how] people want to engage with you,” Rauf said.

It is place where, Rauf said, “people — not just Muslims — can sing together, eat together, pray together,” one that welcomes all members of the Abrahamic family of religions.

What better place to start than Chautauqua Institution?

There was a failed secret US mission earlier this summer to rescue American hostages in Syria.

Senior administration officials revealed on Wednesday, Aug. 20, that a Special Operations team had attempted to rescue several American hostages held in Syria earlier this summer, including the now-deceased journalist James Foley, but that the mission ended in failure, according to a New York Times release.

The revelation was made a day after a video was made public by the Islamic State terrorists in which one of their operatives beheaded one of the American hostages, James Foley.

The statement described the mission as a “complicated operation,” which was authorized by President Obama.

American intelligence agencies believed the hostages were being held in an area in Syria, but when several dozen special ops commandos were dropped at the location, the hostages were not there.

Know your enemy. To know what ISIS is, we have to clear away the media myths about ISIS.

ISIS is not a new phenomenon.

Wahhabi armies have been attacking Iraq in order to wipe out Shiites for over two hundred years. One of the more notably brutal attacks took place during the administration of President Thomas Jefferson.

That same year the Marine Corps saw action against the Barbary Pirates and West Point opened, but even Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Howard Zinn chiming via Ouija board would have trouble blaming the Wahhabi assault on the Iraqi city of Kerbala in 1802 on the United States or an oil pipeline.

Forget the media portrayals of ISIS as a new extreme group that even the newly moderate Al Qaeda thinks is over the top, its armies are doing the same things that Wahhabi armies have been doing for centuries. ISIS has Twitter accounts, pickup trucks and other borrowed Western technology, but otherwise it’s just a recurring phenomenon that has always been part of Islam. Sunnis and Shiites have been killing each other for over a thousand years. Declaring other Muslims to be infidels and killing them is also a lot older than the suicide bomb vest.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are at odds because its Iraqi namesake had a different agenda. Al Qaeda always had different factions with their own agendas. These factions were not more extreme or less extreme. They just had different nationalistic backgrounds and aims.

The Egyptian wing of Al Qaeda was obsessed with Egypt. Bin Laden was obsessed with Saudi Arabia. Some in Al Qaeda wanted a total world war. Others wanted to focus on taking over Muslim countries as bases. These differences sometimes led to threats and even violence among Al Qaeda members.

Bin Laden prioritized Saudi Arabia and America. That made it possible for Al Qaeda to pick up training from Hezbollah which helped make 9/11 possible. This low level cooperation with Iran was endangered when Al Qaeda in Iraq made fighting a religious war with Shiites into its priority.

That did not mean that Bin Laden liked Shiites and thought that AQIQ was “extreme” for killing them. This was a tactical disagreement over means.

Edward Said: Oppressed Fraud By Daniel Greenfield

Edward Said was the world’s second most famous Palestinian. And much like Palestine, his biography was a fake and his culture was nothing more than the advocacy of a perpetual supremacist conflict against the indigenous Jewish inhabitants whom the colonial myth of Palestine was meant to displace.

The great genius of Arab and Islamic supremacism was their pretense that the Jewish story of an indigenous minority resisting their colonialism was really their own story. Having failed to destroy every culture that they had conquered, they instead appropriated their stories, painting their fallen empires as the tragic victims of the imperialism of the very people whom they had conquered and oppressed.

Arabs and Muslims still remained the dominant and domineering group in the Middle East repressing other cultures and religions from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, but they flipped the history books over so that the descendants of caliphs and conquerors who had ground the Jews and other indigenous peoples under their boots could reinvent themselves as the victims of Jewish oppression. The members of vast families and clans spanning the Middle East selectively embraced a Palestinian identity if they happened, at any point in their lives, to find themselves within the borders of the Jewish State.

That is both the larger theme of Joshua Muravchik’s Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel and of its chapter on Edward Said, who helped turn the history books upside down.

Like many of the professionally oppressed, Edward Said came from wealth and privilege. Like Arafat, the world’s most famous Palestinian, Said, the world’s second most famous Palestinian came out of Cairo.

His childhood in “Palestine” was as much of a fiction as Palestine itself. Instead his mother had traveled to give birth in Jerusalem to take advantage of Jewish medical expertise. From that tiny act of occupation came the vast cultural appropriation that the newly baptized “Palestinian” would go on to inflict on the indigenous inhabitants of Jerusalem.

Edward Said’s career trajectory took him deep within academia where he denounced rival scholars for constructing simplistic stereotypes of the Middle East by constructing a simplistic stereotype of them as “Orientalists” who were “othering” the east.

In a typically tribal display of hypocrisy, Edward Said was othering the very people he was accusing of othering his own people.

Mark Christian’s Journey From Islam to Jesus Christ — on The Glazov Gang »

A former Muslim from Egypt shares his brave and precarious journey out of a totalitarian ideology — and the dire threats he has suffered since.

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Dr. Mark Christian, the President and Executive Director of the Global Faith Institute. He is the son and nephew of high ranking leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in his home country of Egypt. After his conversion from Islam to Christianity, Dr. Christian dedicated his life and work to the proposition that “the first victims of Islam are the Muslim themselves.”

Dr. Christian joined the show to discuss A Journey From Islam to Jesus Christ, sharing his brave and precarious journey out of a totalitarian ideology — and the dire threats he has suffered since (starts at 12:25 mark). He also discussed Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood in the American Heartland, explaining Global Faith’s battle to stop Muslim Brotherhood front groups’ malicious plans within the “Tri-Faith Initiative” in Omaha, Nebraska. Within the dialogue, he unveiled ISIS’s Islamic inspirations, the true nature of Islam, and much more:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/mark-christians-journey-from-islam-to-jesus-christ-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

It had seemed to the four clean-cut college freshman that night like a typical McDonald’s: spanking clean, well-lighted, and safe. It was in a good neighborhood too, right next to Texas A&M University in College Station – a campus known for its friendly atmosphere and official down-home greeting: “howdy”

Out on a double date, the two couples pulled into the parking lot of so-called “University McDonald’s” shortly after 2 a.m. that Sunday – and beheld a scene unlike anything portrayed in all those wholesome McDonald’s television commercials. Before them, hundreds of young black males were loitering about, some without shirts.

Other local residents — the more cynical and world-weary, both whites and most blacks — would have taken one look at the crowd and driven off, dismissing many of the young and posturing black males as thugs. But not them: innocent white kids from the suburbs. They presumed this was post-racial America — and that they were in an easy-going college town.

Twenty minutes later, two of them were dead.

Incredibly, the race of the assailants was scrubbed from local news coverage; and utterly missing from tersely written wire-service stories about a Brazos County jury’s whopping $27 million negligence verdict on July 30 against “University McDonald’s” – an outlet owned by the Oak Brook, Illinois-based fast-food giant. What the media considered unmentionable nevertheless loomed over a riveting seven-day trial, which came amid the growing phenomenon of black-on-white violence — unprovoked attacks on whites and black mob violence like the so-called “knock-out game.”

Chris Hamilton, lead lawyer of the small Dallas firm that humbled the corporate giant, was asked, during a phone interview, how many reporters had even bothered to inquire about the race of the assailants during the many interviews he gave.

“You’re the only one,” he replied.

Race, of course, was irrelevant to the high-stakes negligence trial that revolved around McDonald’s lack of on-site security and corporate responsibility. Yet shortly before the trial, Hamilton hinted at the issue of race – suggesting that two very different worlds were colliding at University McDonald’s during its after-midnight hours – a mix that was potentially volatile. The trial, he told a local television reporter, was not only about seeking justice for his clients — but about the public’s need “to know what’s really going on at McDonald’s: what the risks are; what the dangers are of sending your kids there, particularly after midnight.”

“Paul Ryan is moving to reframe the debate on regulations,” notes The Hill, “arguing that the nation’s poor are the real victims of the red tape spewing from Washington.” The Wisconsin Republican’s “Expanding Opportunity in America” initiative intends to address what the Obama administration calls “income equality,” which persists despite massive federal efforts.

According to the House Budget Committee majority staff, at least 92 federal programs purport to help lower-income Americans. These include dozens of education and job-training programs, 17 food-aid programs, and more than 20 housing programs. In fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $799 billion on these programs. Ryan is hardly alone in charging that some of these programs hurt the poor. He cites Creighton University economics professor Diana Thomas, who says that Department of Transportation regulations requiring rear-view cameras will impact low-income car buyers, who prefer to spend their money elsewhere.

Those in the lowest fifth of income spend the greatest share of their incomes on energy. Earners in the lowest income quintile spend 24 percent of their pre-tax income on energy, as opposed to 4 percent in the highest quintile. Therefore, as this analysis from the Manhattan Institute notes, “America’s poorest citizens will be hurt most by the new EPA regulations” on emissions and “it is the poor who will have their budgets squeezed as they struggle to pay for gas and electricity.”

Sofie E. Miller, senior policy analyst at the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, writes that federal regulations “often leave low-income Americans paying a heavier price than their neighbors.” Energy standards for appliances “cause prices to increase and push some low-income consumers out of the market.” Likewise, Diana Thomas says “regulation has a regressive effect: It redistributes wealth from lower-income households to higher-income households by causing lower-income households to pay for risk reduction worth more to the wealthy.”

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist for the Department of Labor argues that new “cap and trade” environmental regulations “will reduce opportunities for the poorest Americans.” The regulations “impose real costs on the economy,” and deprive workers of “the security of employment that comes from industrial activity.” Citing rent control, Stephanie Slade charges that “it’s liberals who continue to support laws that, whatever their intentions, have turned out to be disproportionately harmful to the poorest members of society.”