http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/iran-answers-appeasement-with-warships/print/ Despite the alleged “good faith” negotiations taking place between Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Secretary of State John Kerry, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror is now testing the United States’ mettle. Iranian warships initially sent on their first trip to the Atlantic Ocean in January will now travel close to U.S. maritime borders. The move was revealed Saturday […]
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/02/09/the-ten-worst-u-s-purveyors-of-antisemitism-1-louis-farrakhan/?print=1
Louis Farrakhan, born in New York City in 1933, started out in life as a talented musician. Training intensively on the violin from the age of six, he played with the Boston College orchestra and the Boston Civic Symphony, appeared and won an award on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, and won national competitions as a teenager. In the 1950s Farrakhan—or Louis Wolcott as he was then known—took a different musical tack as a calypso performer. He recorded albums, toured, and in 1955 headlined a show in Chicago called “Calypso Follies.” In other words, Louis Wolcott could have gone on contributing something positive to society as a musician and entertainer.
But that year, 1955, in Chicago, he embarked on a different path. Through a friend, Wolcott came into contact with the Nation of Islam, an antiwhite, antisemitic, African-American organization founded in the 1930s. Wolcott joined, converted to Islam, renounced music, and—in a profound sense—was no more, having morphed into Louis Farrakhan. And Farrakhan quickly rose through the Nation of Islam’s ranks, becoming its leading figure by the early 1980s. He has also been, for decades, America’s most vicious antisemitic rabble-rouser, poisoning thousands of minds or exacerbating poison that was already there. As Discover the Networks notes:
For many years, Farrakhan has ranked among the most influential black figures in America. He draws enormous, standing-room-only crowds of listeners wherever he speaks. An October 1992 lecture he gave in Atlanta actually outdrew a World Series game played there that same night….
Farrakhan’s October 16, 1995 “Million Man March” [in Washington] drew several hundred thousand attendees….
http://swtotd.blogspot.com/
We spend hours in trivial pursuit and too little time on meaningful issues. At a time when 47 million Americans are on food stamps, 10.4 million people are unemployed, our nation’s debt has been growing exponentially and stateless terrorists are stalking people around the globe, we are fixated on ensuring that the Little Sisters of the Poor can receive morning after pills, folks in Colorado can smoke marijuana and those in New York cannot sip 20 ounce soft drinks. We worry about issues over which we have little control, like spotted owls and polar icecaps, while ignoring complex issues like understanding what it means, in a civil society, to live freely, under the rule of law. We want to please everyone and, consequently, too often please no one. Leaders in politics and the media concentrate on issues that divide us, rather than on those that unite us.
At the same time, we forget how insignificant we are and how large the world is. And we pay too little attention to the remarkable chain of events that had to occur in order that we might be here. The mathematical odds against any one of us being born are overwhelming. We are lucky to live in this age and even more fortunate to live in a free country.
Every person is unique, yet we all come from the same place – out of Africa. While no one knows how many left Africa and over what time periods, the consensus believes our ancestors left in waves, beginning more than 60,000 years ago. From those common ancestors was born the human race, as we know it. Given an average life span of eighty or so years, 60,000 years is a long time, but for an earth that is 4.5 billion years old, 60,000 years barely registers.
Ancestry is fascinating and history is more meaningful when we associate it with a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent. For example, President William Howard Taft is not widely remembered, but was President when my father was born in 1910. Ulysses Grant was President in 1873 when my paternal grandfather was born and Martin Van Buren was President at his father’s birth, in 1837, just over a hundred years before my own birth.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370634/print
When anyone says it’s a “do-nothing Congress,” they are only half right. It’s actually a do-nothing Senate.
In this Congress, the House has passed and sent over to the Senate 253 bills. In stark contrast, the Senate has sent to the House 63 bills. The Senate produces only one quarter of what the House does.
I am not saying that passing bills is in and of itself an unalloyed good. (See the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.) But if you want to determine who is doing the actual work of legislating, counting bills is where you start.
From the House Natural Resources Committee, on which I serve, we have passed six bills opening up American energy that would create over 1 million new jobs, lower gasoline and electricity prices, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and help lower our national debt by generating over one billion dollars in new revenue. These bills are now stalled in the Senate.
The U.S. Senate has become a productivity graveyard. President Obama signed only 16 Senate bills into law in 2013. Since summer, while House Republicans have allowed minority Democrats to offer 71 recorded amendments, Senate Democrats have allowed Republicans only four.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370702/print Vegas, Baby — “Eggs are expensive, sperm are cheap.” That’s a plain-English approximation of Bateman’s principle, which holds that in a species with two sexes, the members of the sex that invests less biologically in reproduction will end up competing, sometimes ferociously, over the members of the sex that invests more. Because healthy men can […]
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304181204579369012564233246?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond Chain-link fencing is all that protects the U.S. from a major disaster. Tens of thousands of cyber attacks on the power grid are troubling, though so far they have rarely caused damage. More alarming is news of an old-fashioned armed attack on a physical location that proved the vulnerability of the grid. Last April, […]
A high-profile sex-abuse report is an attempt to bully the church into bowing before the altar of Turtle Bay. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303650204579372622361332560?mod=Opinion_newsreel_1 In the name of protecting children,the United Nations is now preaching to the Vatican. A report on the Holy See—released by a U.N. committee last week to much media fanfare—alleged that tens of thousands of […]
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304104504579372971308988130?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
It’s impossible to read Woody Allen’s reply to charges that in 1992 he molested his and Mia Farrow’s 7-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan, without being struck by its haunting echoes of the words of countless people accused of such crimes. He had thought that the charges were so ludicrous he didn’t think of hiring a lawyer, he reported in an op-ed for the New York Times on Sunday. He had believed that “common sense would prevail.” He had “naïvely thought the accusation would be dismissed out of hand.”
It was a kind of naïveté evident in virtually every person known to me who had been falsely charged in the high-profile sex-abuse cases that had swept the country in the 1980s and early 1990s—people convicted and sentenced to long prison terms on the basis of testimony from children coaxed into making accusations. Accusations made, at ages 5, 6 or 7, that many of them would continue to believe fervently were true, into adulthood.
Though dazed when confronted with such accusations in 1984, the Amirault family of Massachusetts, owners of the Fells Acres nursery school, never doubted even when they were arrested that everything would soon be cleared up. Violet Amirault, school head, marveled that at age 60 she was suddenly supposed to have turned into a sexual molester of children.
It was said of Kelly Michaels, a young New Jersey schoolteacher convicted in 1987 of molesting 20 children, that it had done her no good with jurors that she had seemed calm, and lacking in urgency, as she answered questions, as though she were an onlooker at the proceedings. But what the jurors had seen—and some resented—was typical of the falsely accused, who had all led normal law-abiding lives. Many were unable to absorb the reality that they were suddenly accused of frightful crimes they could never have imagined committing.
For a visionary rabbi in London, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 signified nothing less than the advent of the messianic era.
http://mosaicmagazine.com/tesserae/2014/02/abraham-isaac-kook-receives-the-call/?mode=print
On November 2, 1917, Britain endorsed the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. The news, contained in the document thereafter known as the Balfour Declaration, hit Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook like a thunderbolt.
A committed if decidedly unconventional Zionist, Rav Kook was then living in London, serving as the rabbi of an immigrant Orthodox community, continuing to elaborate the complex and dazzlingly original ideas that would fill volumes of philosophical, theological, and mystical writing, and building the reputation that would in time propel him to the position of founding chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine and one of the most enduringly influential shapers of modern Zionism and Jewish thought.
Born in Russia in 1865, Kook had begun life as a child prodigy, educated almost from infancy to scholarship and religious leadership. As a young man, in addition to mastering Talmud at the famed Lithuanian yeshiva of Volozhin and elsewhere, he studied secular philosophy and Hebrew with adherents of the Jewish “Enlightenment.” Broad as his interests were, however, and voracious as was his appetite for revolutionary ideas, Kook had taken almost no part in the early stirrings of Jewish nationalism. It was not until the early years of the 20th century that he emerged as a supporter of Zionism, and even then with reservations. In particular, he was skeptical of the secular brand of political Zionism promoted by Theodor Herzl, contending that a Zionism divorced from religion, and from a sacred reading of Jewish history, was destined for failure.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/misleading-cold-war-analogy_778816.html Jerusalem The Israeli debate over Iran’s nuclear program is, perhaps oddly, not yet heated. For now, the action is with the Americans: Israelis watch the negotiations nervously and without confidence, but there is little sense of impending doom—or impending war. Opinion polls show that Israelis think Iran is building toward a weapon, not toward […]
