RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/9346/the-best-of-all-possible-government-ministries

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the Emir of Dubai, is the driving force between government reforms aimed at making the United Arab Emirates the “best country in the world” by 2021, which is certainly faster than, say, the US Congress or Mrs May’s cabinet could pull it off.

So last week His Highness launched a new government ministry, with the inspired name of the Ministry of Possibilities. “The word impossible does not exist in our dictionary,” he declared. He could well be right on that – his dictionary’s in Arabic, after all.

The Ministry of Possibilities will have four subsidiary departments, including the Department of Behavioral Rewards (to be headed by Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Saif) and the Department of Anticipatory Services (to be headed by Ohoud bint Khalfan al Roumi, Minister of State for Happiness and Wellbeing). These are ingenious names of government departments for those of us who come from countries with dreary ministries like treasury and foreign affairs.

Obama should have moved Hillary to the Department of Anticipatory Services (run out of the Clinton Foundation) and Justin Trudeau should have punished Jody Wilson-Raybould by moving her from Justice to the Department of Behavioral Rewards.On the other hand, the Ministry of Anticipatory Behavior would make a grand name for Theresa May’s new Internet thought-crimes apparat.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-5-2-over-in-the-congress-its-the-

If you have read my April 1 “April Fools Day Hoax Roundup” — and maybe even before you had read that piece — it may have started to dawn on you that an absolute majority of what you see in the news media these days is in furtherance of one or another of the current wave of big hoaxes. The hoaxes covered just in that one short piece included the Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax, the Climate Change Hoax, the Hate Crime Hoaxes (multiple examples including Jussie Smollett), and the Poverty Hoax.

For today, forget the news media and let’s take a look at the Congress. Do they even talk about anything over there any more that isn’t a hoax? To all appearances, it seems like they just move back and forth between and among one of the hoaxes and another on a kind of “hoax of the day” rotation. Lately the big ones have been the Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax and the Climate Change Hoax.

Yesterday it was all “Trump/Russia Collusion,” with Senators grilling William Barr about nothing whatsoever. Today, it is the Climate Change Hoax, as the House has just voted on something called the “Climate Action Now Act.” According to Climate Home News, the bill has passed on a party-line vote of 231-190. The bill had 224 Democratic sponsors, but not a single Republican. (It won’t go anywhere in the Senate, of course.) By its terms, this Act would compel the U.S. to meet its “commitments” under the Paris Climate agreement of 2015.

May 1, 2019 was Holocaust Memorial Day, this year–Yom HaShoah.
I’ve attended most commemorations over the years and thus obviously agree that it’s good to have a day set aside for remembering the Holocaust.

Indeed, I’ve worked most of my life trying to see to it that “Never Again” will be a truism forever by defending Israel, its right to thrive–not just survive–in relatively secure, far more defensible, real borders than those imposed upon the reborn Jewish State by the United Nations armistice lines in 1949. Those made Israel smaller in width (9-15 miles) at its strategic waist than the size of some Texas driveways–at least according to President George W. Bush. I’ve also fought for relative justice for all peoples, Jew and non-Jew alike, with my pen, via other media, and additional means of communication and education for over half century now.

This year, however, I did not attend.

In honesty, however, there was another reason, eating away at me for quite some time, for my hesitancy to join once again in this annual public display of sympathy for dead Jews.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273610/use-and-abuse-political-accountability-bruce-thornton

In the aftermath of the Mueller investigation, both parties are calling for accountability. Dems believe that despite Mueller’s findings of the president’s innocence of collusion, Donald Trump obstructed justice and must be held to account by impeachment. Republicans are demanding that the federal perpetrators of the Russian “collusion delusion” be made to answer for their violations of the Constitution and the laws limiting their powers.

Beyond the partisan divide, we are witnessing the uses and abuses of one of the fundamental building-blocks of political freedom––the assertion of the citizenry’s right to call out and punish those politicians and public servants who exceed the legal limits placed on a political power that is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Like free speech, term limits, and regularly elected or appointed offices, accountability reinforces the central premise of political freedom: that power is not the personal possession of individual men or women, but belongs to the community of citizens as a whole. Accountability checks and deters the innate human tendency to abuse power, and thus to weaken political freedom with tyranny: “That arbitrary power,” as Aristotle defined it, “of an individual which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government.”

There is no question that accountability is due for the sorry spectacle of the Russian collusion hoax. It was created and nourished by so-called public servants in the FBI and Department of Justice. Despite their responsibility to honor the Constitution and maintain political neutrality in performing their duties, officials like James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Bruce Ohr, Andre McCabe, and other members of the Obama administration abused their professional ethics in order to weaken one party in a presidential election and to help the other whom they preferred. Then after Trump was elected, they worked to cripple his presidency, engineering the appointment of a special counsel who spent two years investigating a charge that relied on flimsy and dishonest predicates easily debunked by information already public.

https://www.capitolhilloutsider.com/jihad-and-mental-immune-system/

It is safe to say that before the 9/11 attacks; most Americans did not have the slightest knowledge of Islam and why a group of Arabs murdered so many innocent people in the name of their God. Some 18 years has passed since that dreadful day.

I think many of the same people who had no way of knowing of Islamic ideology during the 9/11 tragedy, some eighteen years ago, are still in a state of denial and live in a Utopian world, an ideal world where everything is as good as it can possibly be for everyone. But when reality hits again, they don’t know where to run and hide. This unconscious denial of a thought or an emotion, is referred to by psychologists as “mental block.” A mental block runs through their entire system of belief. This philosophy is clearly demonstrated after numerous horrific terrorist attacks in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11.

Let’s not blame the people, but instead, briefly try to decipher this phenomenon of the human mind.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/04/america-v-russia-who-won-the-cold-war/

“President Obama, as Mark Steyn unkindly explained in After America (2011), was trapped in an “elderly arrested adolescence”, his narcissism and naivety passed off as “nobility of spirit”. President Trump, vainglorious and glib, may not have read Huntington, or even heard of him, and yet he instinctively understands how the world turns. ”

The end of the Cold War did not harbinger a golden age of peace, love and understanding between Washington and Moscow. There was talk, once upon a time, of the Russian Federation joining NATO, but it was never a serious option. NATO had been founded in 1949 to prevent Moscow annexing Western Europe. It exists today to prevent Moscow annexing Eastern Europe. We might spot a pattern here. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro are never again going to countenance Russia being in a position to offer them “fraternal assistance” (à la East Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Prague 1968). For those nations, at least, the idea of Moscow assuming the role of key strategic power on NATO’s eastern flank must have sounded like the old Latin proverb Ovem lupo commitere—“To set a wolf to guard sheep”. None of this, however, is to suggest that configuring Russia as our implacable foe in any way serves the interests of the West.

Russia, even in its darkest moments during the 1990s, had little desire to be absorbed into an American-orchestrated New World Order. The West, then, did not lose Russia, because Russia has never been ours to squander. Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilisations?” thesis, which first appeared in a 1993 edition of Foreign Affairs, provides some of the reasons why. Huntington divided the world into nine major civilisational entities. He did not include Russia as part of “Western civilisation” but, rather, categorised it as a major part of “Orthodox civilisation”. Russia, despite its apparent similarities with the West, had been on a different civilisational journey—eschewing the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, parliamentary democracy, and so on—and had arrived at a very different destination. The end of the Soviet Union could never guarantee entirely harmonious relations between Russia and America, since each has its own geopolitical interests to pursue. George Kennan said something similar in his famous commentaries at the commencement of the Cold War: the demise of communist rule would not eliminate all civilisational frictions.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/immigration-western-civilization-leftist-complaints/

T he harshest critics of the West in general and the United States in particular are the best arguments for it. Take the latest iconic critic, 29-year-old Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. She has a predictable list of complaints against America, past and present.

Yet fortunately for her, her paternal grandparents and mother had experienced firsthand the antitheses of mainland America. And thus they were obsessed with what was right, not wrong, with the continental United States — and with getting there as quickly as possible. If they had once been critics of America, such animus was seemingly not great enough to prevent them moving to a place with a different language, ethnic majority, and traditions from those of their home, itself a territory of the U.S.

They apparently assumed that a free-market economy and transparent government gave them economic opportunities unknown in Puerto Rico, an otherwise naturally rich landscape. They wisely stayed in North America, apparently because they felt as supposed minorities that they would have far more cultural, social, political, and economic opportunities than they would as part of the majority in Puerto Rico. The fact that her father was a second-generation immigrant and architect, that AOC herself grew up in affluent Westchester County, that she received scholarships to attend pricey Boston University, and that she was elected to Congress bore out her parents’ correct assumptions of a meritocracy, not a caste state.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-peculiar-progressive-islamist-alliance/

After Congresswomen Ilham Omar’s and Rashida Tlaib’s incendiary anti-Semitic rants directed at Jewish Americans and American ally Israel, the Democrat House “progressive caucus,” led by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, rallied around to protect and support them. The progressive media chimed in, supporting the Islamist congresswomen. Even after Rep. Omar dismissed the 9/11 attacks as “someone did something,” Democrat progressives defended her, accusing the president of religious bigotry when he objected.

Not to be outdone, the ever more progressive and pro-Islamist New York Times published a political cartoon that even they admit is anti-Semitic, as well as an article claiming that Jesus was a Palestinian, which was applauded by Ilhan Omar! The anti-Semitic congresswomen and media were right in tune with the powerful “Women’s March” leaders, who allied with notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, calling him “The greatest of all times.”

Progressive leftists, who wish to bring socialism to America, and Islamists, who wish to bring Sharia law to America, are strange bedfellows indeed. Despite opposite political philosophies, they have found common cause in anti-Semitism.

https://thejewishvoiceandopinion.com/the-unrelenting-nature-of-antisemitism/

Antisemitism, sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred, has existed in one form or another throughout much of human history. The current increase in antisemitism throughout the world is a warning of the threats ahead if a vigorous response is not mounted.

If reasonable people are to act against the current surge of antisemitism not only on the streets in the United States and Western Europe but also in the halls of Congress and other government institutions, it may be helpful to examine some historical examples of this particular strain of hatred and review the pernicious libels used to incite hatred and violence against the Jewish people.

Some illustrations are well known. In the Biblical Book of Esther, the villainous Haman tells the King of Persia: “There are a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your realm. Their laws are different from those of every other people’s, and they do not observe the king’s laws; therefore it is not befitting the king to tolerate them.”

In the second century CE, Tacitus writes in his Histories Book V: “Among themselves, they [the Jews] are inflexibly honest and ever ready to shew compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/28/obamagate-no-misdemeanors-only-high-crimes/

Do you sometimes feel like you are living in a Tim Burton movie? Or an episode of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”?
It’s hard not to.

When an evening TV show host starts to tear up live on camera after she is forced admit that the Mueller report confirms that the president is not an agent of a foreign adversary, you have to ask: what is going on in America?

All the more so after a private Twitter user, who posted a video of the teary-eyed Rachel Maddow, was suspended by the social media platform. Why? Because she posted the close-up that clearly demonstrated that Maddow was overwrought. Suspended for posting the truth.

Or look instead at Anderson Cooper, CNN’s putative doyen, who can’t even garner 0.3 percent of the population as viewers for his “flagship” program, and who recently accused Jared Kushner of “gaslighting” the nation over Russia; in other words of making statements aimed at convincing the listeners that they are insane.