RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65680
A Chinese news agency is reporting that Secretary of State John Kerry has offered one of his many “bridging proposals” on the right of return of Palestinian refugees, in his effort to move the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks along. These talks appear to be going nowhere on their own when Palestinians and Israelis are left to deal with each other directly, but also nowhere with Kerry in the middle, as he seems to be regularly, now that his most recent diplomatic “breakthrough,” the Iranian nuclear deal, remains in limbo, near two months on from the much ballyhooed November signing in Geneva.

The six-month interim period established in the Geneva agreement, during which Iran agrees to freeze some of its nuclear activity, and Western nations relax some of their sanctions, has not yet commenced, and no one is quite sure at this point what has been agreed to. In any case, Iran continues to proclaim the things they intend to do during the interim phase, such as advanced centrifuge developmentinsuring that the new centrifuges can be quickly installed and begin spinning if the interim agreement is not extended and talks break down at some point short of a final agreement, as they seem likely to do.

The report on the refugee proposal is significant since this is not a minor issue for the Palestinians. Their narrative of the Palestinian Nakba argues that European imperialists established Israel due to guilt over the Holocaust and made the Palestinians pay the price with their expulsion in large numbers during the 1948 war, thereby creating the refugee situation. Of course, the Zionist movement preceded the Holocaust by decades, and first won European support after World War I. The Palestinian narrative places the Palestinians in their now established role of victims, ignoring the many opportunities they had and rejected over the last 75 years to create a state of their own.

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/congressional-letter-academic-boycott-of-israel-is-thinly-veiled-bigotry/2014/01/10/0/ A congressional letter slams the American Studies Association’s academic boycott of Israel as antithetical to academic freedom and as “thinly veiled bigotry.” UPDATED! PLEASE NOTE UPDATE AT THE END OF THIS ARTICLE Dozens of members of the U.S. House of Representatives are busily circulating a request to their colleagues, asking them to sign on […]

With the “Interim Agreement” finally scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 20, the administration is warning congress not to pass a sanctions bill which would be triggered only if Iran defaults on its commitments. Iran Interim Agreement to Start Two Months After Announcement In November the world was told that the P5+1 countries with […]

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65673
This is looking like another bad year for global warming.
The year began with the news that an Australian “climate researcher” leading a tourist expedition to Antarctica got his ship trapped in the sea ice. Which is embarrassing, because the purpose of his expedition was to study the melting of sea ice supposedly caused by 20th-century global warming. The current expedition was meant to retrace the route Douglas Mawson took in 1912—but they were stopped 70 kilometers short of where Mawson landed. So they needed to have an icebreaker ship sent to rescue them. Then the icebreaker got caught in the ice, and someone had to rescue the rescuers. You can’t make this stuff up.
The award for best headline on this story goes to Andrew Bolt, “Warmists Trapped by Irony.”
(Second prize goes to Mark Steyn for this line: “On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters.”)
More widely, this is yet another embarrassment for the global warming theory as a whole. Melting ice at the poles, and particularly at the South Pole, is necessary to produce the rising sea levels which are supposed to be among the catastrophic consequences of global warming. So if the ice is still so thick they’re getting caught in it, it’s bad PR for their theory.
Even worse PR for global warming is the fact that North America just spent a week getting sucked into a “polar vortex” that brought temperatures down to record lows not seen in decades—precisely the kind of weather the warmthers told us we shouldn’t be having.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The hysterical responses to Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua’s book discussing why some cultures succeed and others fail are revealing. Even though Chua was talking about cultural elements, rather than genetic ones, the accusations of racism are entirely predictable.Chua’s thesis, like most similar arguments, is plausible in some areas and implausible in others. Any explanation […]

There is an orgy of reporting on Governor Christie’s scandal, and the ones enjoying it the most are the folks who fear him as a serious contender against the already anointed Hillary Clinton. Personally, I don’t think that Governor Christie will, or should be the next Republican candidate. But the notion that Hillary Clinton is unbeatable is silly.

After all in 2008 she debated an inexperienced and relatively obscure Illinois Senator. He became Senator after other contenders in the Democratic primaries were sullied by scandal. He had never governed anywhere; he had no legislative history; his biography excluded data and academic history that was critical to his eligibility ; and he proved to be an unqualified President. Nonetheless, he bested her in debates- and that was without a teleprompter.

Hillary Clinton has a serious history of prevarication : making false claims about a difficult corkscrew landing in Bosnia; “finding” missing documents in an ante-room in the white House; ordering the sanitizing of Vince Foster’s office after his suicide; lying and finger wagging that the Lewinsky story was a right wing conspiracy; and the whole sordid story of Benghazi and blaming it on a video critical of Islam. As Secretary of State she has accomplished nothing other than record setting flight hours and shaking hands with tyrants around the globe.

She is not worthy of the office and she is not “unbeatable.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/368137/print I don’t know how long this G-File will be as I am on a plane from Tampa with a low battery. Every percentage point it drops rings in my ears like the countdown from 24. The pressure is making me sweat like Chris Christie reading the Bergen County Record. The Christie scandal is an […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368174/mysterious-dashiell-hammett-ron-capshaw

HAMMETT WAS A COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZER, AND AN APOLOGIST FOR STALIN AND TYRANNY- THE IRONY IS THAT DUE TO HELLMAN’S PRESSURE HE IS BURIED IN ARLINGTON CEMETERY AMONG AMERICA’S GREAT HEROES…..RSK

On January 11, 1961, mystery writer Dashiell Hammett died. Fifty-three years later, he still fascinates. This has less to do with his writings (whose style and subject matter have been endlessly borrowed) than with the mysteries he left behind. Two of the most enduring are why such an independent and intelligent man robotically supported Josef Stalin, and why, after 1934, he never wrote another word as long as he lived.

Those seeking answers to these questions were for a time stymied by the woman with whom he had a 30-year affair, the lawsuit-happy control-freak Lillian Hellman. She owned the copyright of his works and had many of his letters in her iron grip. When she finally died in 1984, her Berlin Wall crumbled and she stood revealed as a self-serving myth-maker. We learned that, far from being the ideal lover, devoted to his glamorous and witty partner, Hammett had beat her on a number of occasions and forced her to engage in lesbian sex for his voyeuristic enjoyment.

After Hellman’s death, Hammett’s relatives came forward, perhaps because they no longer feared her wrath. (Hammett’s wife and daughters could not have had a happy relationship with Lillian Hellman while she was alive, given that Hellman had managed to cut them out of his will.)

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001422.html * Tom Gross: Sharon’s long and controversial career – as Israeli general, politician, and builder and then dismantler of settlements (in Sinai, Gaza, and four in the West Bank) – has inspired so much vituperation and calumny that it has often been difficult to separate fact from fiction. * Time magazine was one of […]

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/01/lawrence-of-arabia-reappraisal.html
Actor Peter O’Toole’s death in December has sparked a reappraisal of “Lawrence of Arabia,” the movie and the man. Just how much did the enigmatic figure of Lawrence contribute to today’s Islamic woes?

When you move through the years and acquire knowledge of things you liked and the wisdom to dislike them when they show their true colors, it is time to put some distance between you and the objects of that youthful admiration.

For me, at least, this is true of that great 1962 epic, “Lawrence of Arabia.” I first saw it in my senior year of high school, in 1963. It knocked me flat, psychologically speaking. I had a free pass to the movie theater in which it was showing; I must have seen it a dozen times. Today, in retrospect, I cannot say anything against the direction, cinematography, cast, Robert Bolt’s screenplay, and grand scale theme of the picture. They all met the criteria of what a movie should meet when a director intends it to be a defining epic. I did not care much for director David Lean’s later pictures. Yet, “Lawrence of Arabia” in no small way influenced my desire to become a novelist.

The occasion of actor Peter O’Toole’s death on December 14th apparently prompted Israeli writer and TV commentator Reuven Berko to pen a column “The Final Death of Lawrence of Arabia.” O’Toole made a spectacular screen debut playing T.E. Lawrence. It won several Oscars, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and was even nominated for a Saturn Award by the Academy of Science Fiction, and Horror Films. In his article, Berko does what I had wanted to do for years, but had other writing commitments to meet: call director David Lean’s bluff.