RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/is-president-obama-in-touch-with-reality

Critics have suggested that President Obama’s foreign policy is “feckless.” Some have argued the president is insouciant, a relative innocent, incapable of responding to the challenges that confront him. I see it somewhat differently.

In April 2009 in Prague, President Obama promised to lead a crusade to rid the world of nuclear weapons with treaties and the power of America’s moral example. This is a position he has long held. As a Columbia student, he wrote a piece in the Spectator in which he called for unilateral disarmament, noting that the American example would precipitate a dramatic shift to denuclearization. It was a sophomoric article in my judgment lacking any historical context, but then again it was written by a twenty year old with limited experience.

However, the Obama position hasn’t been altered. His belief that documents, assurances, negotiations, speeches can maintain stability is without historic precedent. “Soft power” of the kind he espouses works when military power stands behind it. When assurances are called into question by hostile forces and a military reaction – either threat or deployment – is unavailable, the world is put at risk.

In fact, the president’s denuclearized dream is likely to result in the very proliferation he opposes. Why? If the nuclear umbrella of the United States is unreliable, nations will seek their own nuclear deterrent. It is not surprising that Saudi Arabia has been in discussion with Pakistan for the purchase of nuclear weapons as a direct reaction to the U.S. rapprochement with Iran over its enrichment of uranium and pursuit of its own bomb.

http://news.yahoo.com/second-grader-revenge-against-common-core-math-day-141806961.html

This second grader’s revenge against Common Core math will make your day

The litany of frighteningly stupid Common Core math worksheets never ends. Perhaps now, though, kids are starting to fight back in satisfyingly creative ways.

An alert reader sent The Daily Caller this image of her seven-year-old son’s perfectly reasonable homework answer. The boy attends a public elementary school in San Jose, Calif. He is in the second grade.

The math curriculum used by the school is GO Math! The publisher of GO Math! is produced by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The parent who sent the homework question to TheDC noted that the curriculum aligns with the Common Core math standards.

“If you look closely under the math question, you will be able to see the Common Core standards in a blue-colored print that aligns to that particular question,” she explained.

The constantly burgeoning inventory of sad and hideous Common Core math problems is very long.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade…” Charles Dickens (1812-1870)“Great Expectations” 1861

March is said to enter like a lion and exit like a lamb. Well, it roared in like a lion with ten degree temperatures on the first, with a snow storm the next day. Thirty-one days later, at the New Haven railroad station, it was snowing and the platform was slick with ice. It has been a winter that fits Shakespeare’s description, as one of discontent. Can spring be far behind?

The biggest story of the month was the one in Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula. Without firing a shot, Russia’s army absorbed the Peninsula. Freedom and the rule of law were put to the test, and the people of Crimea lost – at least the first battle. It was not only the hubris shown by Putin, but it was the enfeebled and waspish response of the West that has generated feelings of unease. President Obama, with seemingly no understanding of geo-politics, seemed aghast that a world leader in the 21st Century (even one from a “regional” power) would harbor dreams of regaining a lost 19th Century empire. Institutions may change, but men do not. Weakness is quickly perceived by tyrants and used to their advantage. Mr. Obama’s equivocation in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iran did not go unnoticed, while Europe comes across like Monster Inc.’s “Sulley,” a gentle giant who doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

Despite its regional nature and smaller size, Russia has intimidated the West. The combined GDP numbers for the U.S. and Europe’s four largest countries are thirteen times that of Russia. The combined defense spending is almost ten times that of Russia. In terms of population, we outnumber them four to one. Nevertheless, Putin threatens and the West trembles.

http://www.steynonline.com/6211/twerking-your-way-through-college

Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs has a new academic discipline for America’s scholars:

The course, called The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender and Media, is a 251-level special topics course taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology Carolyn Chernoff. The professor encourages students to look past the colon in her course title and see what the class is really about.

In the photograph at right, it’s actually not that difficult to see past the colon.

Skidmore junior Layla Lakos, a sociology/philosophy major, first heard about the new Miley course on Facebook. Lakos laughed, but was intrigued all the same.

“You can study a lot of things based on Miley,” she said. “She represents how transient wealth and fame can be, and shows how possible it is to change your image.”

One of the easiest ways to understand how transient wealth is is to invest a six-figure sum in Twerk State University. The Atlantic reports on “the least valuable colleges and majors in America”:

The self-reported earnings of art majors from Murray State are so low that after two decades, a typical high school grad will have out-earned them by nearly $200,000.

~Since we’re talking about The Atlantic, a few years ago, back when I was the magazine’s obituarist, a New Hampshire neighbor of mine called me up and said they were considering mortgaging the family homestead because their daughter wanted to go to Columbia Journalism School. Her ambition was to be an editor at The Atlantic and, as I wrote for the magazine, they thought I might have some useful advice for her. I don’t have a degree from Columbia Journalism School or even Murray State University; I don’t have a high-school diploma. Apparently, that’s fine if you want to write a column for the magazine, but to copy-edit the same column, and to correct any Canadian spellings I may have slipped in, your parents need to mortgage the home your family’s lived in for the last two-and-a-quarter centuries.

Where is the Iranian anti-nuclear “fatwa” that Obama is so fond of quoting? asks Iranian analyst
Barack Obama is fond of referring to a “fatwa” against nuclear weapons issued by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to justify his trust in the nuclear deal. Trouble is, no-one has ever seen it and Iranian mullahs quote Obama as the source!

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4843/where_is_the_iranian_anti_nuclear_fatwa_that_obama_is_so_fond_of_quoting_asks_iranian_analyst

President Barack Obama has frequently referred to a religious fatwa against nuclear weapons issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as evidence that his deal with Iran for a peaceful resolution of its alleged plans to acquire the bomb is not rooted in naivety, as the president’s opponents in America and beyond habitually claim.

However, a top Iranian analyst writing in the English edition of Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper has thrown a spanner in the works that could prove highly embarrassing.

“The trouble is that no one has actually seen the fatwa, although many people comment on it. In a bizarre twist, some mullahs even quote Obama as the source that confirms the existence of the fatwa,” analyst, author, and columnist Amir Taheri said, according to MEMRI (The Middle East Media Research Institute) in a recent dispatch.

As evidence of the extraordinary notion that the source of the alleged fatwa may be Obama himself, Taheri quotes Ayatollah Mahmoud Yussefwand as telling the official Iranian news agency IRNA:

“Our Supreme Guide has issued a fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons, as confirmed by the President of the United States.’

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4849/the_anti_israel_campaign_in_germany

Vijeta Uniyal is an Indian-born analyst based in Germany. He is a Contributing Editor to The Commentator and Fellow at the Lawfare Project. He tweets @iUniyal
The boycott campaign against Israel is trying to make inroads in Germany by wooing the political Left and employing underhand tactics such as “Lawfare”. Its practitioners rely on the inaction of the German people who willingly will have no part in this

Omar Barghouti is a busy man, crisscrossing Europe and North America to shore up support for his worldwide campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

While the rest of the Middle East is up in flames, Barghouti and his band of professional agitators are obsessed with what they call the inequities of Israel, the only stable democracy and functional multi-ethnic and multi-religious society in the region.

Barghouti is a darling of the European far-left, but he still has an uphill task when it comes to dealing with wider public opinion in Germany.

A seasoned tactician, he understands the power of imagery. Picketing and obstructing shops that sell Israeli products generates imagery eerily similar to the German Stormtroopers outside Jewish businesses in the run up to the Holocaust.

The German public is still sensitive to such historical analogies.

This concern has not stopped Barghouti’s die-hard agitators from showing up at offices, shopping malls and trade fairs — blockading businesses and harassing shoppers. They were up to such antics recently, putting on a “show” at the international tourism convention ITB Berlin, erecting a fake ‘apartheid’ wall and this time calling for a boycott of Israel as a tourist destination.

With the radical Islamist bloc in Germany standing solidly behind his agenda, Barghouti is busy wooing German academia and the political Left.

He presents himself as the harbinger of the Good News to the “Marx-forsaken” arm-chair revolutionaries of Germany, who haven’t had a serious revolutionary “bash” since the late 60s.

In just one revolutionary package deal he offers the opportunity to fight “corporations”, “capitalism”, “racism”, “militarism”, “Western hegemony” and just about everything else that bothers this perpetually dissatisfied lot in the West.

The fact that these issues have nothing to do with Israel doesn’t dampen the mood of this one big inclusive anti-Israel slug-fest – where radical feminists, Flower-Power pacifists and militant anarchists get to march under the “exotic” flag of Hezbollah.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7911

Corruption comes cheap

In the fall of 2008, I went to see then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to propose a book project. A couple of months earlier, he had announced that he was going to resign his post to fight mounting allegations of corruption against him.

“I will step aside properly in an honorable and responsible way,” he had said in a press conference. “And afterwards I will prove my innocence. I want to make it clear: I am proud to be a citizen of a country where the prime minister can be investigated like a regular citizen. It is the duty of the police to investigate, and the duty of the prosecution to instruct the police. The prime minister is not above the law.”

Other than gossip over the years and a couple of cases against him that closed before they opened, I had no reason to assume he was guilty of any crimes — other than political ones, that is.

Indeed, Olmert’s ideological shift to the Left was not to my liking one bit. Nor did I make a secret, in person or in print, of my aversion to his ideas about how to achieve peace with the Palestinians.

But I had always found Olmert to be both intelligent and personable. This is in spite of an altercation we had had over an interview in The Jerusalem Post. During the interview, which I conducted jointly with political affairs correspondent Gil Hoffman a few weeks before the disengagement from Gaza in 2005, then-Vice Prime Minister Olmert called settlers “stupid” for fearing that a withdrawal from Gaza would lead to a concession of Israeli sovereignty over east Jerusalem, as well.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

War is what Obama does best.

The War on Women. War on Poverty. Class War. Race War.

Walk up to a union member snoozing on a bus, a Latino man crossing the street, a gay cowboy poet earning minimum wage, and community organize him along with a few hundred thousand others into the latest battle in the social justice war that never ends.

“Fight for card check, for birth control, for gay marriage and illegal alien amnesty.” Every time a battle is won and an election ends, a new source of social conflict is dug up and deployed for war.

As a domestic radical, divisiveness is his natural weapon. Obama isn’t out to unite Americans. He isn’t even out for tolerance. His game is divide and conquer, playing on fragmented identities, assembling coalitions to wage war against some phantom white heteronormative patriarchy consisting of a middle class barely able to pay its bills.

It’s governing by terrorism. The bombs are ideological. The objective is a constant state of war.

The war that never ends has been good to Obama. Its various clashes have given him two terms and very little media scrutiny. They have given him a post-American army of identity groups with few mutual interests except radical politics and government dependency.

While Obama profits from stirring up conflicts at home, making it easy for him to light some fuses and walk away, he loses from conflicts abroad.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374672/print

As I have often noted, the most dynamic and influential religion of the past hundred years has not been Christianity, let alone Judaism, the two religions that created the Western world. Nor has it been Islam. It has been Leftism.

Leftism has influenced the literary, academic, media, and, therefore, the political elite far more than any other religion has. It has taken over Western schools from elementary through graduate.

For most of that time, various incarnations of Marxism have been the dominant expressions, and motivators, of Leftism: specifically, income redistribution, material equality, and socialism. They are still powerful aspects of the Left, but with the downfall of most Communist regimes, other left-wing expressions have generated even more passion: first feminism and then environmentalism.

Nothing comes close to environmentalism in generating left-wing enthusiasm. It is the religion of our time. For the Left, the earth has supplanted patriotism. This was largely inevitable in Europe, given its contempt for nationalism since the end of World War I and even more so since World War II. But it is now true for the elites (almost all of whose members are leftists) in America as well.

This was most graphically displayed by the infamous Time magazine cover of April 21, 2008, which altered the most iconic photograph in American history — Joe Rosenthal’s picture of the Marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima. Instead of the American flag, the Time cover depicted the Marines planting a tree. The caption on the cover read, “How to Win the War on Global Warming.” In other words, just as German and Japanese Fascism was the enemy in World War II, global warming is the enemy today. And instead of allegiance to the nation’s flag, now our allegiance must be to nature.

This is the antithesis of the Judeo-Christian view of the world that has dominated Western civilization for all of the West’s history. The Judeo-Christian worldview is that man is at the center of the universe; nature was therefore created for man. Nature has no intrinsic worth other than man’s appreciation and moral use of it.

Worship of nature was the pagan worldview, a worship that the Hebrew Bible was meant to destroy. The messages of the Creation story in Genesis were that:

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374665/print

President Obama talks about Vladimir Putin as if he were a Pennsylvania “clinger” who operates on outdated principles, who is driven by fear, and whom unfortunately the post-Enlightenment mind of even Barack Obama cannot always reach. Deconstruct a recent CBS News interview with President Obama, and the limitations of his now-routine psychoanalyses are all too clear. Consider the following presidential assertions:

Obama said in the CBS interview that Vladimir Putin was “willing to show a deeply held grievance about what he considers to be the loss of the Soviet Union.”

Is that any surprise? Why would Putin not “show a deeply held grievance” — given that Russians enjoyed far more pride and influence when they had far more territory and power than they do now? Just because elites in the West might consider Denmark and Luxembourg model societies, given their per capita incomes, ample social services, high-speed mass transit, and climate-change sensitivities, does not necessarily mean that the grandchildren of Stalingrad and Leningrad would agree.

What exactly does Obama mean when he says, of Putin, “what he considers to be the loss of the Soviet Union”?

“Considers”? Did we miss something here?

Did not the Soviet Union disappear from the map? Did not it leave in its ruin a much smaller Russian Federation — one perhaps far less dangerous and with more potential to get along with the West, but with far less likelihood of regaining the glory and influence that many Russians had come to appreciate?