RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/the-tin-drum-progressive-boomers/print/

JUST A MINOR CAVIL….GUNTER GRASS TURNED OUT TO BE A TIN DRUM NAZI SYMPATHIZER…. AND HE ALSO WON A NOBEL PRIZE…..RSK

Like the hero of Gunter Grass’ novel The Tin Drum, America’s progressive Baby Boomers chose not to grow up. Why should they? They decided that their development was complete when they graduated from college. All they needed to do was affirm their magnificent, world-historical identity. No surprise, then, that we are currently afflicted by the juvenile politics of the Democratic Party, the policies of which embody the Boomer creed: we all have a right to eat our entitlement and hedonism cake and have it too––as long as it’s subsidized by the evil rich.

Boomers, of course, had a lot of help in postponing adulthood. The ever-extending length of adolescence partly accounts for this. Post-war affluence made it affordable to prolong further this historically unprecedented time of life between childhood and adulthood. Consumerism took advantage of this new market, one prone to impulse buying and enjoying access to lots of surplus wealth. So they elevated in social importance the transient whims, banal ideas, and foolish desires of a group flush with disposable income. The result was the most pampered, obsessed over, and indulged generation in American history.

As a consequence, the Boomers developed the unearned sense of entitlement and unrealistic expectations more typical of spoiled children. And the culture went right along with them and pandered to their juvenile taste, mainly because there was money to be made. The traditional moral limits on materialism and freely indulging one’s appetites had always gotten in the way of profit. Starting in the 50’s, the old taboos about sex, public vulgarity, and drugs all began to be swept away. “If it feels good, do it” became a new human right as well as a potent source of profit.

Hence the “eerie vulgarity,” to use Nabokov’s phrase, of our popular culture, which has managed to trivialize the “edgy” and “transgressive” into the dullest of clichés, and reduced what was once the sordid practices of rakes and roués into the mass-marketed fashion accessories of pre-teens, and the subject of smutty jokes on prime-time sit-coms. And anyone who tries to stand athwart this locomotive of degradation is dismissed as a fascist square or a religious fanatic who wants to “turn back the clock” to the dark days of sexual oppression and repression.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-obstacle-to-peace-in-the-middle-east?f=puball

In view of the problems in Egypt, the financial problems in Cyprus, the problems in Syria, North Korea, as well as the recent presidential visit to Israel, I am compelled to expand and update the fine article by Khaled Abu Toameh: Are Settlements Really the Major Obstacle to Peace?

President Obama claimed in Cairo in 2008 and reiterated it in Israel in March 2013, that the obstacle to world peace are the ‘settlements’ in that tiny country of Israel!

There were no ‘settlements’ when Israel was born, but five separate attacks by Arab countries shattered the “peace.” Israel defeated them and the only thing they asked in return was public acceptance of Israel’s right to exist and peace. Both were refused. Israel gave away half the country and released thousands of terrorist prisoners over the years in return for a few, not all living Israeli soldiers. Arab or Muslim countries have continuously refused all subsequent efforts despite several well-publicized and important international agreements facilitated by several US Presidents.

In March 2010 the Obama administration publicly attacked Israel to stop “settlement building” in Jerusalem, even though many of the Jewish residents who live there were originally expelled from Muslim countries. Hamas, Hezbollah and radical Islam have refused to sit down to negotiate future peace, attacked Israel violently numerous times, and still train and brainwash adults and children with so much hate that they take pleasure in detonating themselves to kill others.

Is this the reason why the UN and most nations think that stopping to build settlements will actually prevent all wars and bring peace throughout the world?

None of the terrorist activities of the past ten-fifteen years were mentioned by President Obama in Cairo as he promised financial and ‘cultural aid’ to Gaza and all Muslim nations. None of the twenty Arab countries surrounding Israel have the same democracy, women’s rights, religious freedom or the general freedom which we, in the West have and enjoy. Islam broadcasts openly that they want to dominate the world and want to eliminate western civilization. In the US, they aggressively fight in courts to replace or equate our Constitution and our laws with their Shariah. Islam in America is allowed to use our own democratic laws and institutions to achieve their goals, while our heritage, our constitution and our laws have been side stepped or forgotten during the past ten tears. Unfortunately, very few people and very few “constitutional lawyers” have been objecting.

Isn’t it crystal clear now why the real, only obstacle to ‘world peace’ are a few settlements in that tiny country, Israel?

President Obama and the UN have been putting pressure only on Israel.During his March 2013 visit, he said again.

… Israelis must recognize that continued settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace …

but he did not mention the continuing rocket attacks and the UN’s efforts to demonize Israel. Then he said:

Palestinian children cannot grow up in a state of their own living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements, not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day….

and

Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.

Yes, but President Obama completely forgot to mention that every time there was an agreement in sight, it was rejected by those same Palestinians. So, why are only settlements in Israel considered the major obstacle to world peace?

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/radical-terrorist-becomes-scholar-and-heroine

If you wait long enough, anything is possible on Broadway or in Hollywood.

Yesterday’s villain can become tomorrow’s hero or in the case of Kathy Boudin, former member of the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground, and convicted murderer, a heroine.

Boudin, sentenced to a life term in New York State for the shooting deaths of two policemen, Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown as well as Brinks security guard Peter Paige was paroled in 2003 after serving twenty two years in prison for the three homicides. The officers were killed in a shootout with members of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army after a failed bank robbery in 1981. Boudin minimized her role in the slayings by simply saying she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet the groups that she was involved with utilized explosives and automatic weapons to destroy property, take lives, and instill fear in ordinary citizens through violence. If that isn’t terrorism, I don’t know what is.

Today we read that Ms. Boudin has been quite active since her parole. She has been working as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work and was recently awarded the Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School. And if being honored as a scholar was not enough, she is to receive accolades as a heroine in Robert Redford’s soon to be released movie, “The Company You Keep” based on the activities on Boudin and her former husband David Gilbert, currently serving three life sentences in Auburn State Prison for his role in the shooting deaths of O’Grady, Brown, and Paige. David has also received some portion of fame with his book, “No Surrender” an unrepentant account of his life as a terrorist. David is also actively involved

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/hack-a-bank-for-muhammad/ Most recent news on hacking has centered on China’s data theft from U.S. companies. The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters have drawn much less attention, even though in late March they temporarily disabled the online banking systems of American Express and Wells Fargo Bank, both major U.S. financial players. The inspiration for the attacks […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/australian-judge-finds-muslim-cultural-differences-valid-excuse-for-rape/print/

Bit by bit, Western nations are adopting Muslim legal standards on blasphemy and on the treatment of women.

The excuses are manifold. Racism, cultural differences, Islamophobia, relativism… but it all ends the same way, with Western writers, artists and thinkers being censored and Western women being subject to Taliban treatment.

This is how it began.

An Afghan refugee would drive from his home in Tullamarine to nightclubs in Frankston late at night searching for drunk, vulnerable young woman to prey on, a court was told today.

He would pick them up in his white 1988 Honda Civic and rape them.

The victim was sitting on the footpath behind the 21st Century Dance Club when Esmatullah Sharifi approached her and offered to give her a lift to the Bay Hotel.

She accepted but became anxious and confused when they had been driving for an hour and she saw a road sign saying Sorrento.

Sharifi then pulled over into a dark side street and raped her in the front passenger seat.

“She began to scream and cry out for help,” Ms Dalziel said.

“The accused put his left hand over her mouth and his right hand around her neck, restricting her breathing. He said to her, ‘I’ll take you home after it, I’ll give you back your phone as well’.

In the rapist’s defense, his lawyer argued that he wasn’t at all clear about this whole “Women are human beings” thing.

Mr Regan said Esmatullah Sharifi was uneducated, illiterate, inexperienced in forming relationships with women, and was confused about the nature of consent. He is in Australia on a permanent protected visa.

The judge didn’t buy it then, but the usual lefty approach is to just keep appealing until you find a bleeding heart judge who accepts the horrible notion being put forward. And that didn’t take very long.

Granting leave to appeal, Court of Appeal Justice Robert Redlich said: “The sentencing judge rejected any suggestion (Esmatullah Sharifi) didn’t have a clear concept of consent in sexual relations.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/344548

IGNORANCE, REMEDIAL IGNORANCE, AND TENURED IGNORANCE….JUST APPALLING!!!!!RSK

What Does Bowdoin Teach? — a report released today by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) — is the most comprehensive assessment of the academic culture, customs, and values of a college conducted to date. It is a devastating appraisal. The study, authored by NAS president and former Boston University professor and administrator Peter Wood, is the product of 18 months of research and is primarily devoted to answering the question it poses.

As Isaiah Berlin might have said, Bowdoin teaches many small things but few big things. Its academic departments and the courses they offer are, for the most part, narrowly specialized. In classes, questions of first principle are routinely settled in advance. As a result, the report finds, students have little chance of receiving a bona fide liberal-arts education or of learning to think critically.

A social anthropologist by training, Wood refers to his study as a “full-fledged ethnography.” Bowdoin is, he suspects, a representative example of the education on offer at liberal-arts colleges across the country. The report documents an increasingly fractured academy that has no common curriculum and in which so-called identity studies take priority over a study of the West. It highlights, for example, the 36 freshmen seminars offered at Bowdoin in the fall of 2012. They are designed to teach writing and critical-thinking skills and to introduce students to the various academic departments. Some of the subjects are unsurprising: The Korean War, Great Issues in Science, Political Leadership. Others seem less conducive to critical thinking and fruitful classroom discussion: Queer Gardens, Beyond Pocahontas: Native American Stereotypes; Sexual Life of Colonialism; Modern Western Prostitutes.

Queer Gardens, an exploration of the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and of “the link between gardens and transgression,” simply “does not teach critical thinking as well as Plato’s Republic,” the report notes; nor does any subject that has “no canon of works that embody exemplary achievement in the difficult dialogic task of critical thinking.”

The freshmen seminars, and Queer Gardens in particular, illustrate the increasing specialization of academia, which Wood documents statistically. Bowdoin today teaches far fewer survey courses than it did in the 1964–65 academic year, used for the purposes of comparison. As a result, students wind up in courses that presume they have obtained general knowledge in the subject area and mastered basic ideas. The school does not offer a single course in American military, political, diplomatic, or intellectual history.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/344646 Senator Marco Rubio is the man of the hour. He has deftly positioned himself as the indispensable figure in this year’s immigration debate. His participation has given the Gang of Eight approach to amnesty some insulation from grassroots conservative criticism, at least for a time. Liberals in Congress understand that his imprimatur is essential […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/your-money-redfords-glorified-murderers-or-hero-who-stopped-them/?print=1 Bill Ayers, cofounder of the terrorist group Weatherman, was hosted by Minnesota State University as a “scholar-in-residence” last month. (I reported [1] on this, as well as on his appearance at the Association for Teacher Educators conference at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Atlanta.) For an ex-terrorist, Bill Ayers has had a comfortable […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/larry-grathwohl-hero/ “Two, four, six, eight — now it’s time to smash the state!” chanted the mob. One protestor climbed up a flagpole in front of the Justice Department. To the cheers and delight of the crowd, he cut down Old Glory and in its place raised a Viet Cong flag. Police fired tear gas. The […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324685104578389251299266168.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLEThird

PETE DU PONT WAS THE VERY SUCCESSFUL REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR OF DELAWARE (1977-1985)….AND ONE OF THE FINEST AND SMARTEST POLITICIANS IN AMERICA….RSK

The domestic policies of the Obama administration evince a lack of understanding and experience in how an economy functions and grows. Things are not quite so clear with the administration’s foreign policies, where we see both encouraging and discouraging indications.

Those who think one of the federal government’s primary responsibilities is providing a strong national defense should be heartened by President Obama’s increased authorization of drone strikes against terrorists on foreign soil. Likewise the administration’s continued use of the Guantanamo Bay detention center and many of the Bush-era security tools.

Unfortunately, there is much the president and his team get wrong on foreign policy. At times it seems that politics stand in the way of good policy. At least in the first term, the team suffers from an apparent naiveté in thinking the mere presence of Barack Obama in the Oval Office would make their “reset” with Russia productive or cause terrorists and the rogues leading Iran, North Korea and other troublesome countries to like the United States all of a sudden.

One of the administration’s most significant failings is its missile defense policy. It was 30 years ago last week that President Reagan spoke to the American people from the Oval Office and pushed the idea of a strategic defense initiative. SDI was derided by those on the left as “star wars” and considered fanciful by many of all political stripes due to the state of the available technology at that time.

Still, who could dispute Reagan’s goal—a world in which an intentional or accidental nuclear launch could end in something other than mutually assured destruction? Reagan said SDI would “offer a new hope for our children in the 21st century,” adding his basic duties as president included “the duty to protect and strengthen the peace.”

Critics were correct that the technology to develop, deploy and (most important) rely on such a system did not exist in 1983. There was much to do and many dollars to spend before something along these lines could be accomplished. But what a worthwhile effort it would be, and if pursued fully, it could have been this generation’s space program. Progress was made over the years, as technology was tested, refined and deployed. Sitting here in the 21st century, we are not yet able to fully deliver the “new hope for our children” of which Reagan spoke, but we do have functioning theater-based systems.

Mr. Obama seems not to like the idea of missile defense very much. As national security writer Clifford May noted recently: “In 2001, Barack Obama, then a state senator, said flatly: ‘I don’t agree with a missile-defense system.’ Seven years later, during his first presidential campaign, then-senator Obama pledged to slash $10 billion from the Pentagon’s missile-defense budget—about $1 billion more than the U.S. was actually spending on missile defense at the time.”