RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.

Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The settlement, which resolved claims before an international tribunal in The Hague, also coincided with the formal implementation that same weekend of the landmark nuclear agreement reached between Tehran, the U.S. and other global powers the summer before.

“With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well,” President Barack Obama said at the White House on Jan. 17—without disclosing the $400 million cash payment.

Senior U.S. officials denied any link between the payment and the prisoner exchange. They say the way the various strands came together simultaneously was coincidental, not the result of any quid pro quo.

“As we’ve made clear, the negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim…were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “Not only were the two negotiations separate, they were conducted by different teams on each side, including, in the case of The Hague claims, by technical experts involved in these negotiations for many years.”

But U.S. officials also acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.

Nursing homes do not have a stellar reputation as places to convalesce or be taken care of. Private nursing homes, at least in the U.S., are largely dependent on government benefits accrued by patients, so they can hardly be called “private.” State-run homes are disasters in terms of the “quality” of care (minimal) and the character of their “skilled” staff. Wikipedia notes:

In most countries, there is a degree of government oversight and regulation over the nursing home industry. These regulatory bodies are usually tasked with ensuring patient safety for the residents and improving the standard of care. In the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ensures that every Medicare and Medicaid beneficiary receives seamless, high-quality health care, both within health care settings such as nursing homes, and among health care settings during care transitions.

To ensure that nursing homes meet the necessary legal standards, the authorities conduct inspections of all nursing home facilities. This process plays a critical role in ensuring basic levels of quality and safety by monitoring nursing home compliance with the national legal requirements. Surveyors will conduct on-site surveys of certified nursing homes on average every 12 months to assure basic levels of quality and safety for beneficiaries. The authority might also undertake various initiatives to improve the effectiveness of the annual nursing home surveys, as well as to improve the investigations prompted by complaints from consumers or family members about nursing homes.

Nursing homes offer the most extensive care a person can get outside a hospital. Nursing homes offer help with custodial care—like bathing, getting dressed, and eating—as well as skilled care given by a registered nurse and includes medical monitoring and treatments. Skilled care also includes services provided by specially trained professionals, such as physical, occupational, and respiratory therapists.

In November 1975 a film appeared that ought to have excoriated the whole notion of state-run or state-regulated nursing homes, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel of the same name, and partly on Dale Wasserman’s 1963 Broadway play, an adaptation of the novel.

Kirk Douglas appeared in the Broadway version of the story.

This is not a defense of Trump’s oafish response to the Khans….

I totally understand and empathize with the grief of parents who lose their children in war or sickness or violence. There is, however, something that rankles, when their grief is used for dirty politics. So it was when the mothers of young black men killed by police and the Khans were highlighted at the Democratic convention as shills for Hillary Clinton. Where were the mothers of innocent cops killed in Dallas? Where were the mothers of the soldiers of Fort Hood who died at the hands of an enlisted American Moslem soldier on a jihad? And where is Mr. Khan on the record speaking against jihad against Americans in San Bernardino or Orlando. His gratuitous offer of his copy of the constitution was theater. Who scripted him?

Robert Spencer makes the point exactly in his column listed below:

Khizr Khan, Servant of the Global Umma ​His son died in service of the U.S. military; now his father is using his memory to advance a different cause. Robert Spencer

I recently came across a mewling article in one of Canada’s “progressive” mags, The Walrus, in which theatre critic Erika Thorkelson bemoans “the insidious sexism of the Canadian theatre world” and the comparative paucity of female actors and playwrights. Her theme is “gender imbalance” — the latest buzzword in the feminist war against men — which, of course, is owing to something like an exclusionary male commissariat intent on safeguarding its unjust privileges. That there may be other reasons for the supposed “imbalance” — lack of comparable interest, different distributions of talent — must not be mentioned since that would call her thesis into question. I certainly have not noticed any marked dearth of females on the theatrical, operatic, or cinematic scenes. And in the music world, come to think about it, females abound. No matter. The patriarchy strikes again.

At around the same time that I stumbled on this silly piece of special pleading and culturally ratified paranoia, I learned that the husband of a friend, a self-taught biblical scholar and an expert on the Gospel of John, is now serving time after having been accused by his disaffected stepdaughter of sexual assault, although the evidence is sketchy at best, the stepdaughter is psychologically disturbed, and his wife and his other children have testified on his behalf. The judge nevertheless found the daughter’s rather improbable story credible and the man was sentenced to a seven-year prison term. To compound the judicial felony committed against him, he was remanded to maximum security after his preference not to be housed with Muslims was discovered — he had good reason, having been stabbed by a Muslim for wearing a t-shirt stenciled with the legend “I Am an Infidel.” The fact that he was a believing Christian clearly did not help his case. In any event, this was another tainted victory for the feminist cause.

Like our literary community and our judiciary, our schools are equally engaged in promoting the feminist agenda to the disadvantage of deserving — indeed, of all — male students. A typical instance occurred at a high school in a neighboring town, as a friend whose son has just graduated and who attended the graduation ceremony informed me. My friend reports that approximately 90 per cent of the innumerable awards were distributed to female students for various obscure achievements such as offering encouragement to classmates, displaying enthusiasm for the subject, showing aptitude for commitment or evincing general improvement, in short, for enriching the parietal atmosphere by their very presence. Many of these awards came with the caveat “in the opinion of the teachers.” Two girls, the school was proud to announce on its Twitter feed, excelled in the technologies — “Times Are Changin’” reads the accompanying comment. But the vast majority of these female laureates demonstrated their accomplishment in the mainly “soft” subjects — the Humanities, social sciences, dance classes, and the like, where marking typically involves a high degree of subjectivity and teacher preference often plays a role. Only a comparative handful of male students were honored, all of whom majored in the “hard” disciplines where objectivity rules — science, math — and received top grades. The valedictorian, obviously, was a girl, with a high composite average enhanced, it would appear, by easy marks in the less demanding areas — and, I strongly suspect, likely with the help of grade inflation, since the principal is female, the vice principal is female, most of the teachers are females, and the school focuses in its Twitter feed, replete with the most cloying and vapid bulletins imaginable, primarily on girls. The high school is toxic for boys, who prudently kept out of full participation in most school groups and activities. Male students cannot but react with a mixture of bemusement and resentment — going MGTOW, going Galt — at the cost of our society’s scientific, literary and intellectual health, already in precipitous decline.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy has always been defined by ticking the boxes the far Left long wanted ticked.

Now he’s contemplating one more, by far the most dangerous of all: unilateral nuclear disarmament, or at least a rough approximation thereof. After reducing the size of our nuclear arsenal to dangerous levels, the Washington Post reports that Obama is considering a “no first use” policy with regard to nukes.

Peaceniks around the world will cheer; the rest of us will shudder. No First Use (NFU) was first raised as a strategic doctrine by JFK in a March 1961 speech. (Truman and Eisenhower knew better.) But Kennedy quickly dropped the idea after the Cuban missile crisis proved that proclaiming, “We will never strike first in any conflict,” had only encouraged Khrushchev to act more boldly. It was also true that NFU encouraged the Russians to think that they could win an all-out war in Europe. If, for example, a conventional Russian invasion through the Fulda gap into West Germany was so massive that NATO forces couldn’t respond in time or with enough impact, the Russians would be assured of victory with the threat of American nukes off the table.

Other presidents agreed with Kennedy’s abandonment of NFU, and the doctrine lay dormant for the rest of the Cold War. Today, the arguments against it may be even more urgent. As American and NATO troop levels stagnate and Vladimir Putin assumes a more aggressive posture while refurbishing the Russian military, the threat of a nuclear strike may be one of the few ways left to keep Russia in check. After all, Putin himself talks about using nuclear weapons to hold onto Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and his generals, meeting with American officials in March 2015, threatened to use nukes if NATO dared to reinforce the defenses of the Baltic states.

As General Sir Richard Shirreff, NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander from 2011 to 2014, said in a BBC Radio 4 interview, Russia has hardwired “nuclear thinking and capability to every aspect of their defense capability.” Renouncing first-use will only encourage Russia or another aggressor with nukes to strike first at what is perceived to be an opponent with one arm deliberately tied behind its back — and to target our nuclear assets so they can’t be used in retaliation. Far from diminishing the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation, then, it could actually trigger one.

Deterrence in war always depended on a degree of vagueness and uncertainty. It’s not so much what you will do in retaliation but what you might do that makes the would-be aggressor think twice — especially if he thinks you are ready and willing to do things that precipitate the all-out conflict both sides want to avoid.

Of all the great American captains of World War II, none remains more controversial than General Douglas MacArthur, whose genius and folly have taken on mythic proportions. MacArthur alone among them fought in all of America’s major 20th-century wars as a general — World War I, World War II, and Korea — and he was the most versatile military figure since Ulysses S. Grant, as a combined tactician, strategist, geostrategist, diplomat, and politician.

Yet history has not with the same zeal sought to balance the strengths and weaknesses of the often hard-to-like MacArthur as it has with, for example, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was a brilliant organizer but often strategically obtuse; George S. Patton, who was a dazzling field general but mercurial; and Omar Bradley, who was a media favorite but often plodding.

There are a number of writs against MacArthur, but perhaps three stand out. First, there is no doubt that his narcissism could reach obnoxious proportions. His ego was more than just superficial vanity that characteristically led him to stare endlessly in the mirror, pepper his speech liberally with first-person pronouns, and choreograph his public image with corncob pipe, shiny khakis, gold-braided cap, aviator sunglasses, and leather coat. At times his sense of self led to hubris — and nemesis often followed. He certainly proved personally reckless in a way at odds with his public persona of a ramrod-straight devout Christian. In 1930, the 50-year-old, divorced MacArthur had an affair with the underage 16-year-old Isabel Rosario Cooper and brought the young Filipina mistress back with him to Washington — only to be both blackmailed by columnist Drew Pearson into dropping his libel suit concerning Pearson’s allegations about the 1932 Bonus March and eventually leveraged into paying Cooper $15,000 to go away.

The more experienced MacArthur saw himself as intellectually superior to younger presidents and so talked down to both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. He thought the wisdom of his strategy of island hopping through the Philippines should be judged by all as his personal redemption for his earlier loss of the archipelago. And by 1943, his “I shall return” press releases seemed to conflate his huge land, air, and naval forces with his own person, in a manner that had already irked Eisenhower, worried George Marshall, and frightened Roosevelt. Early on, MacArthur saw himself as a figure uniquely favored by God. In World War I, all on his small patrol near the Côte de Châtillon were killed by a surprise artillery barrage — a disaster known only by MacArthur’s own testimony, which would later be questioned. MacArthur remarked of his amazing survival: “It was God, He led me by the hand, the way He led Joshua.”

Second, MacArthur’s most brilliant victories — the Operation Cartwheel reconquest of much of the Japanese-held South Pacific and the brilliant Inchon landings near the Korean DMZ — were bookended by equally disastrous failures. He was ultimately responsible for, despite warnings, allowing his newly supplied air forces on Luzon to be caught by surprise hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. His incautious approach to the Chinese border in November 1950 — albeit approved by almost everyone in Washington — downplayed growing warnings about the bitter cold, the difficult terrain, and the likelihood of the entrance of the huge Chinese Red Army across the Yalu River. MacArthur for the most part claimed the strategic breakthroughs as his own virtuoso performances but fobbed off the disasters on subordinates and politicians.

I attended a private function on Tuesday July 26,2016 to hear Geert Wilders the head of Holland’s Freedom Party and and author of the prophetic book:

Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me

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AFSI’s Helen Freedman, also attended the event and wrote the following:

“People may remember his film FITNA, exposing the Islamic reign of terror brought on by quotes from the Koran. Wilders was put on trial for making the film, but was acquitted. He is now on trial again in the Netherlands and in Austria for hate speech, and has been on a death list for over a decade. This courageous Dutchman’s message is that Europe is collapsing – surrendering to the results of an open door policy without the demands of assimilation. Islam, which means submission, incorporates sharia law. Wilders explained that Islam comes to dominate, NOT to integrate. He declared that WAR has been declared in Europe, but the leaders are all Chamberlains. He spoke about France, Germany, England, and Sweden where honor killings, genital mutilation, rapes, and rampant terror are everyday occurrences. He believes the populace is ready to identify the threat, but NOT the leaders. Instead of a First Amendment guaranteeing free speech, there are hate speech laws; Islamic lawfare is used against anyone who speaks out against Islam. However, Wilders declares that we must NEVER BE SILENT, that free speech is the breath of democracy.
Wilders seemed to echo the American popular message when he declared that the people are tired of the ruling elite. They want the borders closed, criminals expelled, and detention for suspected terrorists. They want to regain their national sovereignty. The political correctness that has infected America is rampant in Europe and Wilders calls it the biggest disease. If his party succeeds in the next election, his goal will be to make it unattractive for Moslems to live in Europe – whether they be from Syria, Morocco, or Africa. He concluded with the statement that Bat Ye’or’s prediction about Europe becoming Eurabia has come true, but he must remain hopeful for the future. If the people prevail over the corrupt leadership, Europe will survive.”
Geert Wilders faces astronomic legal fees as he must defend himself against the charges of “hate speech” in Holland and Austria. I will forward the information on a tax deductible contribution to help defray his legal expenses. rsk

The Obama administration’s response to the church attack in Normandy, France, framed it as a religious liberty issue without mention of ISIS.

During morning Mass today in the town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, two armed men took five people hostage: two nuns, two parishioners and a priest. They slit the throat of the priest, Rev. Jacques Hamel, 86. One of the hostages was critically injured.

The two terrorists, one who tried to go fight in Syria after the Charlie Hebdo attack but was stopped and briefly imprisoned, were shot dead by police. Another man suspected to have a connection to the attack was arrested.

ISIS’ Amaq news agency quickly claimed responsibility for the attack: “The two executors of the attack on a church in Normandy, France, were soldiers of the Islamic State. They executed the operations in response to calls to target countries belonging to the crusader coalition.”

French President Francois Hollande sent out a tweet “to the families of the victims and to all the Catholics of France” with “the solidarity and compassion of the nation.”

“Daesh has declared war on us,” Hollande told reporters, using the pejorative Arabic acronym for ISIS. “We have to win that war.”

“Terrorists will not give up on anything until we stop them,” the French leader added.

One of the nuns, identified as Sister Danielle, told France’s BFM TV of Father Hamel’s murder: “They forced him to his knees. He wanted to defend himself. And that’s when the tragedy happened. They recorded themselves. They did a sort of sermon around the altar, in Arabic. It’s a horror.”

An Italian politician called on Pope Francis to “immediately proclaim him St. Jacques” as a “martyr of the faith.”

Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said in a statement, “We are particularly shocked because this horrible violence took place in a Church, in which God’s love is announced, with the barbarous killing of a priest and the involvement of the faithful.”

The White House reaction, issued after the ISIS claim of responsibility, came from National Security Council spokesman Ned Price.

“The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the horrific terrorist attack today at a Catholic church in Normandy, France. We offer our condolences to the family and friends of the murdered priest, Father Jacques Hamel. Our thoughts and prayers are with the other victims of the attack as well as the parishioners and community members of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray,” Price said.

“France and the United States share a commitment to protecting religious liberty for those of all faiths, and today’s violence will not shake that commitment,” he added. “We commend French law enforcement for their quick and decisive response and stand ready to assist the French authorities in their investigation going forward.”

An ISIS-linked Telegram account posted in French after the attack that “Hitler took 10 years to shake the French… but our state shook France in a hour north to south. Allah bless you o Soldiers of the Caliphate.”

ISIS has had a special target on the Vatican since the inception of their caliphate, detailing in an ebook how critical the sacking of Rome is in their plans for apocalyptic conquest.

The 2015 book predicted “recruits” sympathetic to their cause “will give intelligence, share weapons and do undercover work for the Muslims to pave the way for the conquest of Rome.”

They’re also counting on ethnic minority soldiers defecting from European armies and passing their skills on to others as they raid weapons caches, while “lone wolves from within the community will rise” including “especially ex-gang members who also have access to weapons.” CONTINUE AT SITE