RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/maturity-deferred-the-death-of-the-grown-up?f=puball

This book review was originally written in 2008 for another publication, some time after Diana West’s book debuted. The editor of that publication – who shall remain nameless, as well as the publication itself – had the hubris to edit my original review out of recognition. I withdrew the submission and am belatedly publishing it now.

The trouble with most conservatives who write cultural critiques is that invariably they get it only half right, or just backwards. Diana West’s The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization is not a salutary instance of that failing. West is not your typical “conservative.” She has analytical and observational skills that surpass those of the typical conservative. She is acutely intelligent and a superb writer. Most average “conservatives” I have dubbed “CINOs” – Conservatives in Name Only – because like many political conservatives, they invariably endorse or side with the liberal/left welfare statists, in spite of their religious bent or allegiance to “traditions.”

For example, Speaker of the House John Boehner is a CINO, because other than being well-dressed, and wearing an American flag pin on his lapel, he is a closet liberal. Being well-dressed and flaunting a flag pin are traditions, not principles.

By half right I mean that Boehner, for example, will make a trenchant observation with which one can agree, but then, either explicitly or implicitly, his observation will be grounded on a religious norm or premise, or on tradition, or custom, or just an established and wholly secondary, often arbitrary “social rule,” and not on any rational criterion. In short, on a non-fundamental. Boehner said, about the bill sent to the Senate that would delay implementation of Obamacare for one year:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/dc-dem-mayor-grants-cair-its-wish-proclaims-october-islamic-heritage-month?f=puball
WELL SEPTEMBER WAS ISLAMIC JIHAD MONTH IN AFRICA….RSK
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gary issues proclamation honoring October as America’s Islamic Heritage Month

District of Columbia, October 1, 2013: America’s Islamic Heritage Museum (AIHM) announced, The Mayor of the District of Columbia issuing a Proclamation honoring the month of October as America’s Islamic Heritage month. This year is the eighth annual celebration of October as America’s Islamic Heritage month in the District. This year’s theme is “Connecting People Using Culture and History.”

The Mayor calls upon all the residents of this great City to join him in celebration and recognition of the history and contributions of the Islamic Community.

The Muslim communities throughout our region are encouraged to host open houses and educational events that highlight our diversity, contributions, and history. Our public schools are encouraged to learn about America’s rich Islamic history, to teach tolerance and understanding, and to visit AIHM museum.

H/T: Weasel Zippers

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/honey-they-shrunk-my-job ‘They said this would be a disaster in terms of jobs,” President Obama shouted on Thursday. “There is no widespread evidence that the Affordable Care Act is hurting jobs.” At least 30,377 Americans would beg to differ. During their new, Obamacare-generated non-working hours, they might observe that “no widespread evidence” is hardly a categorical […]

The appeasement policies of the 1930s were wildly popular at the time and for much the same reasons as appeasment of Syria and Iran are popular today. But the outcome was disaster http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4217/iran_and_the_lessons_of_chamberlain_s_appeasement The democratic countries of the world today may be heading towards a recurrence of a policy of appeasement — concessions made to […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4206/increasingly_bizarre_belarusian_dictator_now_bans_schoolchildren_from_clapping

Harvard University recently awarded the dictator of Belarus an alternative Nobel prize for mad dictatorial behaviour. That was before he banned school kids from clapping as a “dissident” activity

Fresh from receiving a Harvard University “idiocy” award, as the beleaguered Belarusian opposition billed it, for extraordinary behaviour, the dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has gone one better, this time in a decree against schoolchildren.

Earlier in September, Harvard gave Lukashenko the so called Ig Nobel Prize for prosecuting a one-armed man for clapping disrespectfully against the regime.

Dissidents and student groups opposed to the regime have taken to using ostensibly legal means to express their dissatisfaction so as to avoid jail. This has included Facebook organised group clapping exercises as well as eating ice cream in public places. Both types of activities have attracted violent reprisals from the secret police, still known in the former Soviet republic as the KGB.

Thus far, this has only applied to adults.

However, according to the semi-independent news agency Belapan and opposition sources, last Friday schoolchildren in the town of Zhlobin were given strict instructions, against the threat of arrest, by the KGB not to clap during an end of Harvest Festival parade, for fear of offending Lukashenko who was due to visit the town the next day.

Belapan reported that KGB agents and riot police had taken up residence ahead of the event in classrooms which had been cleared of children. The children were allowed to wave Belarusian flags and the event passed off without incident.

Lukashenko, long decribed as Europe’s last dictator, has murdered numerous political opponents and imprisoned thousands more.

Harvard’s Ig Nobel Prizes are parodies of the originals, with Ig standing for “ignoble.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/10/putin_vs_the_arctic_sunrise.html Following the pattern established by the USSR, the despotic regime of proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin has declared war on every aspect of society that does not conform to Putin’s bland, homogenized orthodoxy. Homosexuals, artists, opposition political leaders, and environmentalists have all been jailed following disgraceful neo-Soviet show trials designed to purge Russia of […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/serving-our-government-masters/print/ There was a time when even the highest government officials lived simpler lives. President George Washington made do with Tobias Lear, who not only served as his secretary, but also doubled as a diplomat and even measured his body for burial. President Thomas Jefferson made do with Meriwether Lewis as his personal secretary and […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/netanyahu-at-un-stop-iran-or-we-will/

In his speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu provided a dose of much-needed realism and clarity on the Iranian nuclear issue.

After some rhetorical flourishes about Jewish history, Netanyahu began with the “charmer,” Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. Why a poker-faced Holocaust denier was found charming by so many people is a good question, but charming they found him, and there probably wasn’t a single mainstream news outlet that didn’t call President Obama’s brief phone chat with him “historic.”

So Netanyahu reviewed some hard facts about Rouhani that reality-oriented commentators have been noting for a few months now. In the past he was a sinister terror chief, head of Iran’s National Security Council in the years of the Buenos Aires bombing and the Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 85 mostly Jewish civilians and 19 American servicemen, respectively.

He’s also a seasoned con man, proud of having duped the West in the past on Iran’s nuclear program. “While we were talking to the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in Isfahan,” Rouhani wrote in 2011 about his 2003-2005 stint as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator—Isfahan, as Netanyahu clarified, being the facility where Iran turns uranium ore into uranium for the bombs it will soon be producing en masse unless something is done about it.

Still more material on Rouhani has surfaced in an overview by Steven Ditto of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It turns out, for instance, that Rouhani blamed 9/11 on the “wrongs and mistakes of American policies,” and said Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was “shot down by the U.S. Air Force.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303464504579109282164806374.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Some 14 million Chinese died in World War II, a conflict that was never strictly one between totalitarianism and freedom.

‘Who lost China?” is a question that echoes quaintly down from another age. It refers to the victory of the Communists in the Chinese Civil War that followed on the heels of World War II and set the Middle Kingdom up as an adversary of the West in the decades ahead.

The question has always been preposterous on one level: China was never realistically anyone’s to lose in the first place. Indeed, the thrust of several decades of Chinese history before the outbreak of war between Nationalists and Communists in 1927 was a struggle to free the country from domination by outside powers, the U.S. included.

Rana Mitter’s “Forgotten Ally” is an important and compelling history of China’s World War II experience. It makes the who-lost-China question fresh again by closely examining Beijing’s role in the Allied war effort, the heavy and often thankless price paid by the Chinese in their fight against Japan, and the impact of China’s wartime traumas on the country’s postwar development.

“For decades, our understanding of that global conflict has failed to give a proper account of the role of China,” the author writes early on. “If China was considered at all, it was as a minor player, a bit-part actor in a war where the United States, Soviet Union, and Britain played much more significant roles.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303918804579107913080987666.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion From an op-ed by political scientist Daniel Disalvo in the New York Daily News, Sept. 29: All of the city’s unions are working under contracts that have expired. They have been waiting out [Mayor Mike] Bloomberg in hopes that a Democrat will end up at City Hall. The next mayor will therefore have to […]