RUTHFULLY YOURS

Christians the world over celebrated the resurrection of their savior on Sunday with worship services and family gatherings. Thirty-eight-year-old Sonia Garro shares the faith too, but she spent the holiday in a Cuban dungeon as a prisoner of conscience, just as she has for the past two years.

Ms. Garro is a member of the Christian dissident group Ladies in White, started in Havana in 2003 by sisters, wives and mothers of political prisoners to peacefully protest the unjust incarceration of their loved ones. It has since expanded to other parts of the country and added many recruits. The group’s growing popularity has worried the Castros, and they have responded with increasing brutality.

Cuba’s military government wants us to believe that the Brothers Fidel and Raul Castro are “reforming.” To buy that line you have to pretend that Ms. Garro and her sisters in Christ don’t exist. Of course that’s often the impression one gets from Havana-based reporters working for foreign media outlets.

They’ve been invited into the country not to serve the truth but to serve the dictatorship. Fortunately, there are brave and independent Cuban journalists who continue to tell the Ladies’ story, despite scant resources.

In the late winter of 2012, Cubans were looking forward to a visit from Pope Benedict XVI and the Ladies were lobbying the Vatican for an audience. Their relentless pleading was embarrassing the dictatorship, which had been beating them in the streets on their way to Sunday Mass for almost a decade. It was also making the Church, which had already cut its own deal with the regime on the terms of the visit, look bad. On the weekend of March 17 Castro sent the Ladies a warning by locking up some 70 of their members.

Most of those detained, including leader Berta Soler, had been freed by the time the pontiff touched down in Cuba nine days later, but Ms. Garro was not. Benedict celebrated some Masses, did photo ops with the despots and left.

It was a clever strategy: The world saw the release of the many Ladies, which obscured the continued detention of the one. That one—poor, black and not well known internationally—serves, to this day, as a constant reminder of the wrath Castro will bring down on anyone in the barrios who gets out of line.

Not quite….in congress the majority of the Republican, and about 20 Democrat incumbents are on to this ruse and on to the fig leaf offered by amending a requirement that the government have environmental oversight. This is a big economy and energy issue and will play a large role in November 2014…..rsk

“The Koch brothers may get the media attention, but the billionaire getting the most political bang for his buck is Tom Steyer. The hedge-fund politico has pledged to raise $100 million to help Democrats keep the Senate, and on Friday he received a major return on his investment when the State Department again delayed its decision on the Keystone XL pipeline.

State’s excuse is that it wants to wait on the outcome of a legal challenge in Nebraska, but that’s no reason for the federal government not to declare itself. Earlier this year State’s latest environmental review found no net climate harm from the pipeline, which would take oil from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast. State found that the oil sands will be developed even if the Keystone XL isn’t built.

The real reason for the delay is Democratic politics. Mr. Steyer and the party’s liberal financiers are climate-change absolutists who have made killing Keystone a non-negotiable demand. But the White House doesn’t want to reject the pipeline before November because several Senate Democrats running for re-election claim to favor it. We say “claim” because Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and others can’t even get Majority Leader Harry Reid to give them a vote on the floor.

So Senate Democrats get to have it both ways. They can benefit this year from the riches of Mr. Steyer, who pronounced himself well pleased by the delay. But they can also run in support of the XL pipeline and the thousands of new jobs it would create. Then President Obama can formally nix it next year.

Intellectuals fretting about income disparity are oddly silent regarding the decline of the two-parent family.

Mr. Maranto is a professor in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, where Mr. Crouch is a researcher.

“Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can’t change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn’t some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?

Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. From economist Susan Mayer’s 1997 book “What Money Can’t Buy” to Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” in 2012, clear-eyed studies of the modern family affirm the conventional wisdom that two parents work better than one.

“Americans have always thought that growing up with only one parent is bad for children,” Ms. Mayer wrote. “The rapid spread of single-parent families over the past generation does not seem to have altered this consensus much.”

I was reading a recent copy of one of Britain’s popular newspapers, the Daily Express, when a particular item caught my eye.

The highly respected writer, Niall Ferguson, warned that, “President Obama’s policy of non-intervention, or, as he puts it, his being “resolved only to avoid being George W Bush,” resembles the incoherent foreign policies of British Liberals a century ago before the First World War.”

Ferguson was opining that despite the swirling tensions in the ever perilous Middle East and the current hostilities between Russia and the Ukraine, the real powder keg that could ignite a potential World War Three lies in the Far East as Japan and China fight over ownership of five uninhabited islands and three barren rocks.

Japan calls the territory the Senkaku Islands, and is using an ever increasing number of naval ships and warplanes to guard them while at the same time trying to involve the US.

On the other hand, China views the “nationalisation” of what it calls the Diaoyu Islands by the Japanese in 2012 as a serious provocation and will do whatever is necessary to assert its sovereignty.

The real danger is that if war were to break out between China and Japan, the US is bound by treaty to come to the aid of Japan. This would be another red line for Obama but following his experience with Syria, it is unclear how he would act, if indeed at all.

Brad Williams, a professor of Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong, made comparisons of the Sino-Japan tensions to those that led to the First World War; known as the Great War.

“Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzi Abe,” Professor Williams said, “probably sees China as a modern-day imperial Germany that is prone to aggressive behavior. That, of course, could trigger conflict despite the deep economic inter-dependence between the two countries.”

Indeed, Japan has stated that the tensions are similar to those between England and Germany before World War One – the war to end all wars.

At the end of Part One of this column, I asked: Was the law was on the government’s side and not on Cliven Bundy’s? What kind of law is it? And how is it being enforced throughout the country?
Few sitting politicians have remarked on the Bundy/BLM standoff. However, Christopher Agee, in his Western Journalism article of April 18th, “Obama Accused by Congressman of Illegal Action at Bundy Ranch,” reported:
Immediately after what many considered a victory against a tyrannical federal agency, a number of leftist voices – most notably, Sen. Harry Reid – indicated the action against this family will continue. In response, Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman sent a letter to Barack Obama, Department of the Interior Sec. Sally Jewell, and BLM Director Neil Kornze, laying out his position that any such action by the agency would violate the U.S. Constitution….

He cited the limited powers granted to the federal government, noting the bureau has no “right to assume preemptory police powers, that role being reserved to the States,” and explained “many federal laws require the federal government to seek assistance from local law enforcement whenever the use of force may become necessary.”
The letter included a section of the U.S. Code — 43 U.S.C. Section 1733, Subsection C — stating exactly that point. [Emphasis Stockman’s]
“When the Secretary determines that assistance is necessary in enforcing Federal laws and regulations relating to the public lands or their resources he shall offer a contract to appropriate local officials having law enforcement authority within their respective jurisdictions with the view of achieving maximum feasible reliance upon local law enforcement officials in enforcing such laws and regulations.”

The local law enforcement authority in this instance is the Sheriff of Clark County, Nevada, Douglas C. Gillespie, who, apparently intimidated by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) as the protesters were not, refused to intervene and demand that the illegal BLM vigilantes leave.
Gillespie, however, conspicuously took a back seat to BLM forces during the standoff.

All historical analogies are odious, some dead white man – probably a Frenchman – has said. Obviously, he meant that times change, the cast changes, the nuances change, the world moves on, and no geopolitical situation really replicates an earlier one. Some historiographers go even further; they say that for all these reasons there are not, indeed, any “lessons” from history, George Santayana notwithstanding. Still …

It’s good intellectual fun to make comparisons and sometimes we learn a little by playing a game in which we compare those former events with the contemporary happening. Of course, one problem is that our reconstruction of earlier events is often skewed if not downright wrong. For, obviously, if for no other reason, we view them in the context of the present. Again, still…

That’s the case now examining Vladimir Putin’s blatant aggression and attempted subversion of Ukraine as a sovereign state. It has become the cliché of clichés to see his program of violating internally accepted borders as the same route to war the totalitarian dictatorships took before World War II. But Putin is no Adolph Hitler, nor certainly no Josef Stalin. He has neither their talent for villainy and he heads an even more fragile economy, and indeed a political union coming apart at the seams. Yet his use of stratagems those 20th Century international outlaws used is all too obvious. One even is tempted to go along with the Polish official who said it was hard to believe Putin’s speechwriters hadn’t actually plagiarized an earlier Hitler model.

So that begs the question are we on the eve of a general war such as broke out in 1939?

The year 1938 was more than usually momentous for European history, and indeed for the whole world so Euro-oriented as it was in the last century. Among the many events were two dramatic crises that captured the headlines:

Trying to head off another catastrophe like The Great War from which the Europeans have never fully recovered because of the enormous loss of life, a deal was made at a conference in Munich between the Western allies and Hitler. War was temporarily averted.

Daniel Mael on “Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis and Double Standards” — on The Glazov Gang
A TruthRevolt warrior confronts the leftist Gestapo on his campus.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/daniel-mael-on-ayaan-hirsi-ali-brandeis-and-double-standards-on-the-glazov-gang/

Obama Praises Muslims in Easter Message It just wouldn’t be Easter… without Muslims.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-praises-muslims-in-easter-message/print/
Obama said this time of year is a good time to remember the “common thread of humanity that connects us all – not just Christians and Jews, but Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs – is our shared commitment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.”
Nope. Sorry.
Here’s what the Koran has to say about loving your neighbor.

Qur’an (5:51) – “O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.”
So yes, Muslims believe in loving their neighbors, as long as the neighbors are Muslims. And the right kind of Muslims.
Don’t go expecting Sunni Muslims to love Shiite Muslims or vice versa. Also don’t expect Salafis to love Sunnis who are insufficiently lacking in dedication to terrorism.
So much for that “common thread of humanity.”

http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Sweating-the-small-stuff-349959

While facing monumental challenges with heroism and humor, we always sweat the small stuff as though our survival depended on it.
Checking to make sure I was in a legal spot, I put the gear in park, pulled the emergency brake and turned off the engine. In spite of having spent nearly two hours in the car with the air-conditioner blowing in my face, I was sweating.

This was not due to the weather, however. Though the country was in its sharp, post-Passover leap into summer, the day had a spring feel, its crispness barely marred by the shift from dry to humid that is normal when going from Jerusalem to the coast.

No, the perspiration on my upper lip derived from the anxiety I had been experiencing since preparing for the drive to Netanya.

Nor was the purpose of the trip – to deliver a lecture on Israeli culture and current events – the source of my nerves. I don’t suffer from stage-fright.

But I am terrified of getting lost on the way to a gig.

I also hate being late. This means leaving lots of extra time to take the wrong exit off the highway or maneuver necessary U-turns. As a result, I always arrive early. The day in question was no exception.

I got out of the car and looked around the mostly residential street – more than half an hour to kill and not a shop or café in sight. I decided to walk towards the sea and look around.

Within a minute, I found myself at the entrance to the Park Hotel.

It was here, in 2002, that the Passover massacre took place. During the hotel’s annual Seder, a suicide bomber from Tulkarm (just over an hour away), walked into the hotel disguised as a woman and blew himself up in the dining room.

Blood and body parts covered the matza-laden tables. It was carnage that the Israeli public, already in a trauma- induced haze from daily terrorist attacks against innocent civilians on buses and in restaurants, could barely fathom, let alone stomach.

Thirty people were killed that night and 140 wounded, most of them elderly.

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/bundys-rebellion/88675/

Bundy’s Rebellion

The thing that needs to be said in respect of the rebellion that has gathered at the ranch of Cliven Bundy is that it is as American as apple pie. At the rate things are going the Nevada ranchers are going to write themselves into American history right alongside Daniel Shays and the Pennsylvania backwoodsmen who confronted the federal government over taxes on whiskey. The echoes are uncanny — complete with the sanctimonious lectures from the federal government over the law and the righteousness of the anger of the rebels.

Click Image to Enlargehttp://www.nysun.com/pics/9296.jpg

Wikipedia

SIX STAR GENERAL: Washington became in the Whiskey Rebellion the only president in history to appear in arms in battle. The rebels made their point.

Shays mounted his rebellion in western Massachusetts even before we had the Constitution. His aim was to close the courts trying to collect for Massachusetts taxes to cover its costs in the Revolution. Tempers were exacerbated by a depression, like they are today by the Great Recession. Things came to a head in 1786, and the fighting grew serious in 1787. Before it was over, five rebels — and one person on the government side — were killed. In other words, it was worse by far than anything we’ve seen yet in Nevada….READ IT ALL AT THE SITE