NO POSTINGS
If the British vote down the Brexit referendum later next week and choose to remain in the European Union, the results will be unfortunate for the United States in many ways. Britain’s continuing membership in the EU threatens not only America’s economic interests, but also its strategic and military interests. If the architects of the European Union realize their ambitions, it will be impossible for the United States and the United Kingdom to maintain a significant bilateral military and strategic partnership for a simple reason: The United Kingdom will increasingly cease to function as a sovereign state capable of determining its own foreign and defense policy. Instead, it will have to subordinate its own interests to the dictates of a common European foreign and defense policy issuing from Brussels.
The legal (and illegal) precedent for such a shift has been accreting by degrees for some time. After the Single European Act in 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty on European Union in 1992, the nature of the “European project,” originally just an economic partnership, began to change. Subsequent treaties — Amsterdam (1999), Nice (2001), and Lisbon (2009) — moved the project more obviously and explicitly toward full political integration. Integral to this objective has been the establishment of a Common Foreign and Security Policy, operating separately from NATO and beyond the control of Europe’s individual nation-states.
The Amsterdam treaty, signed by all European Union member states, included articles envisioning a continent-wide foreign policy. It also established for the first time an EU foreign minister. The failed European Constitution of 2004 included provisions under which the individual members’ defense and foreign policies — the last remaining areas of national sovereignty allowed by previous EU treaties — would have been completely eliminated. The constitution expanded the role of the European foreign minister, giving the occupant of that office the power to set a continent-wide foreign policy. It would have legitimated and expanded the European Defence Agency, which had already begun to operate under a centralized command structure apart from NATO. Thus it jettisoned the last vestiges of intergovernmental cooperation and “shared sovereignty” in favor of a fully sovereign European super-state.
Though French and Dutch voters rejected the constitution in the summer of 2005, the unelected architects of “ever closer union” have used other means to implement its key provisions. In particular, almost the whole of the defeated European Constitution was enacted in the Lisbon treaty in 2009 after the EU Council of Ministers agreed to the treaty without consulting their voters. Indeed, over 90 percent of the wording in the treaty is the same as that in the failed constitution. The only changes made were cosmetic, notably omitting the references to the EU flag and anthem because these were already part of established EU law. Even before the Lisbon treaty, the European Commission and the Council of Ministers had begun using the “spirit” of those earlier treaties to establish covertly and piecemeal much of what they could not get Dutch and French voters to approve.
In 2001 members of a group of Castroite spies in south Florida known as the Wasp Network were convicted of charges ranging from espionage to conspiracy to commit murder (of U.S. citizens). They were sentenced to terms ranging from 15 years to two life sentences. According to the FBI’s affidavit, the charges against these KGB-trained Communist spies included:
• Compiling the names, home addresses, and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers and that of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica Naval Station in Key West.
• Infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command.
This past April, on Obama’s orders, some of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers gave an in-depth tour of the Southern Command’s most vital facilities to some of Cuba’s top Military and Intelligence officials—probably to some of the very ones who earlier got this vital information from their WASP charges via “encrypted software, high-frequency radio transmissions and coded electronic phone messages,” as the FBI affidavit showed.
If this sounds impossible or like the plot for the next Austin Powers Movie, here’s the story from The Miami Herald.
And never mind the convicted Cuban spies, some of whom helped murder four U.S. citizens. They’re all living like celebrities in Cuba now after Obama gifted them back to Castro in December 2014, upon commencing his smoochfest with the terror-sponsoring drug-runner who came closest to nuking the U.S.
It gets better:
Coincidently (perhaps) the vital U.S. defense facilities that Obama invited the eager Communist drug-runners to carefully inspect serve as the U.S. Defense Department’s “command center on the war on drugs.”
Coincidently, (perhaps) on top of serving as a base for terrorist group Hezbollah and probably laundering funds for Al-Qaeda as late as two years ago, the Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate also help facilitate much of world’s cocaine smuggling. The dots are not overly difficult to connect. Let’s have a look:
*The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) attributes half the world’s cocaine supply to the Colombian Terror group FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.)
In the spring of 2013 Barack Obama delivered the defining speech of his presidency on the subject of terrorism. Its premise was wrong, as was its thesis, as were its predictions and recommendations. We are now paying the price for this cascade of folly.
“Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants,” the president boasted at the National Defense University, in Washington, D.C. “There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.” The “future of terrorism,” he explained, consisted of “less capable” al Qaeda affiliates, “localized threats” against Westerners in faraway places such as Algeria, and homegrown killers like the Boston Marathon bombers.
All of this suggested that it was time to call it quits on what Mr. Obama derided as “a boundless ‘global war on terror.’ ” That meant sharply curtailing drone strikes, completing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and closing Guantanamo prison. It meant renewing efforts “to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians” and seeking “transitions to democracy” in Libya and Egypt. And it meant working with Congress to repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al Qaeda.
“This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”
King Canute of legend stood on an English shoreline and ordered the tide to recede. President Canute stood before a Beltway audience and ordered the war to end. Neither tide nor war obeyed.
In 2010, al Qaeda in Iraq—Islamic State’s predecessor—was “dead on its feet,” as terrorism expert Michael Knights told Congress. World-wide, the U.S. government estimated al Qaeda’s total strength at no more than 4,000 fighters. That was the result of George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq, of Mr. Obama’s own surge in Afghanistan, and of the aggressive campaign of drone killings in Pakistan and Yemen.
But then the Obama Doctrine kicked in. Between 2010 and 2013 the number of jihadists world-wide doubled, to 100,000, while the number of jihadist groups rose by 58%, according to a Rand Corp. study. That was before ISIS declared its caliphate. CONTINUE AT SITE
In an era of resurgent collectivism, Religious Freedom Coalition founder William J. Murray “stands athwart history yelling ‘stop’” with his new book Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning. Therein he provides a valuable primer into mankind’s rogue gallery of radicals who have ravaged humanity from antiquity to the present with interrelated utopian delusions both authoritarian and hedonistic in nature.
The born-again Christian conservative Murray brings unique personal perspective to his intellectual subject matter as a self-professed “‘Red diaper’ baby.” His family attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1960 and as a teenager he met Communist Party USA chairman Gus Hall, among other leftist luminaries. Murray has thus “served nearly equal periods of my life on opposing sides of reality.”
Murray surveys the collectivist thought of intellectuals from Plato, born in 429 B.C. in Athens, to Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 socialist paean Looking Backward, and President Woodrow Wilsonadvisor Edward Mandell House. “If Plato had lived in the early nineteenth century, he would likely have become a dedicated Marxist,” Murray interestingly reveals. Plato’s Republic, for example, envisioned a society that denied medical care to the chronically ill who had no value to the state.
Likewise English statesman Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia described a totalitarian government that offered free medical care but urged gravely ill persons to commit suicide. Utopianism’s namesake fictional writing “had great influence on the collectivist leaders of the twentieth century,” Murray notes. Vladimir Lenin “championed More’s Utopia as worthy of honor in his newly created worker’s paradise of the Soviet Union.”
Statistics cited by Murray attributing almost 100 million deaths to Communist regimes bear witness to Marxism’s harsh reality. “This is the legacy of utopian thinking: people die by the millions,” he writes, and quotes William Bradford’s seminal 1623 recounting of the Pilgrims’ experiment with collective agriculture. Struggling for survival in a harsh, infant New England colony removed from intellectual thought experiments, the Plymouth governor noted that the Pilgrims experienced the
emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall (28 September 1868 – 13 April 1956) was an English writer who used the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre. She is best known for her biographies of Voltaire.
In” The Friends of Voltaire”, Hall wrote the phrase: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it “-which is often incorrectly attributed to Voltaire. It is often quoted in praising free speech.
Just try to tell a liberal that you are voting for Trump and you will get insult, opprobrium, accusations of racism and stupidity, lack of morals, and more of “I disapprove of what you say and you have no right to say it.” rsk
Let’s start with the misguided decision to have famed editor Maxwell Perkins wear a hat indoors in every scene of this film. Undoubtedly it was stimulated by the biography on which this movie is based, but for viewers who haven’t read that book, it becomes a joke to see a cultured intellectual sit at a dinner table with his elegant wife and daughters wearing the hat that he wore with his winter coat when he walked through the front door of his elegant home. You just know that any wife played by Laura Linney would have glared at him and not allowed the meal to commence before the hat was removed. Since the movie never rises to that level of emotional truth, it won’t be a spoiler to reveal that its ultimate removal is meant to signify a larger than life sentiment.
But this movie falters in so many directions at once that you’ll be looking at your watch way before you reach that point. There is Jude Law playing Thomas Wolfe as an overgrown adolescent whose talent is hidden beneath a mountain of excess verbiage – a man so in love with his own logorrhea that he actually brings assorted bundles of handwritten paper totaling 5,000 pages to his editor whose equanimity belies any recognizable reaction by a normal professional in the book trade. There is Colin Firth’s performance as Perkins – a character better suited to a book than a motion picture which implies occasional changes of expression to fit that definition. And there is Nicole Kidman playing Aline Bernstein, a married middle-aged set designer besotted with the youthful Harvard graduate and willing to overlook his alcoholic boorishness and over-arching narcissism because she too recognizes his talent. The viewer yearns for Mrs. Robinson, a more direct and breezy version of this caricature.
“Look Homeward Angel” was once a staple of college courses in 20th century American Lit – the movie suggests that it was a runaway best seller that had young women swooning for its author a la Frank Sinatra bobby-soxers. If “Genius” had not been such a turn-off, I might have been tempted to check the veracity of that depiction. But it hardly makes a difference. Nobody reads “Look Homeward Angel” anymore and very few people will see this film. Those who do should think of it as marginally better than a 1 hour and twenty minute dental appointment. I omit the names of the writer and director out of kindness.
The world was anti-Semitic in 1944, when Ben Hecht wrote A Guide for the Bedevilled. The majority of educated, civilized, and rational people believed that the Jews in some fashion had brought their own problems upon themselves. Hecht began fighting anti-Semitism after an unsettling exchange with a New York hostess, who explained to him that Jews had to acknowledge their own responsibility in the matter of their persecution. This polite Gentile lady explained:
The Jews complain. They suffer dreadfully, and they accuse. But they never stop to explain or to reason or to figure the thing out and tell the world what they, and only they, know…They are–how shall I put it–collaborative victims, a thing they refuse to see…The Germans are not a race of killers, fiends, of a special and different sort of sub-humans.
Not that she approved of Nazi genocide, to be sure; she may not have known the extent of the butchery, but she knew that dreadful things were happening to Europe’s Jews. But she thought that the Germans must have had some kind of provocation to hate the Jews so deeply. Why else would the Germans hate Jews so much?
When did the old anti-Semitism return? For half a century the horror of a million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis stopped the mouths of the anti-Semites, but that memory has worn off. What Hecht’s interlocutor believed in 1944, most liberals believe today, not to mention the vast majority of Europeans. Yes, the Arabs hate Jews, and express this hatred in a barbaric way, they will allow, but that is because Israel has provoked the hatred.
Tripwires that once seemed taboo are being crossed every day. One was triggered in the new action film “Triple 9,” which portrays a gang of ruthless Russian mafia killers operating under the cover of a kosher meat business. There are some violent Jewish criminals, but I have not been able to find a single example of an observant Jew among them. The filmmakers have invented a stereotype that has no instantiation in the real world.
As Jews the world over prepare to celebrate Shavuot, the anniversary of the giving of the Law, few biblical scenes are more appropriate to contemplate than the spectacle of Moses bringing the tablets of the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. And, incongruous though this may seem to many Jews, no more appropriate image of the scene exists than Rembrandt van Rijn’s depiction of the prophet holding aloft the two tablets bearing their Hebrew inscriptions (1659). Not only strikingly beautiful, the painting also happens to be one of the most authentically Jewish works of art ever created. http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/06/rembrandts-great-jewish-painting/
How so?
For one thing, the great Dutch master corrected the exegetical and sculptural error committed by Michelangelo in the most famous depiction of Moses in the history of art. The book of Exodus describes how, descending from Sinai, Moses was unaware ki karan or panav. Through a mistaken analogy to the word keren, “horn,” Christian Bible commentators took the word karan to mean “horned,” leading to the “horns of light” seen on the head not only of Michelangelo’s Moses at the tomb of Pope Julius II but of other artistic renderings of the prophet throughout the centuries. Not, however, Rembrandt—who clearly understood that the most accurate translation of the biblical phrase has Moses unaware that his face “shone,” just as it shines in this painting. As the historian Simon Schama has written, the very darkness of the painting’s surrounding scene “only makes such light as there is shine with greater intensity.”
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Schama also notes a further corrective of the common misunderstanding, namely, Rembrandt’s transformation of the horns, a widespread feature in contemporary European prints of the scene, into “tufts of hair in the center of [Moses’] pate.” Rembrandt’s Moses is not an especially handsome individual, but neither is he in any way ugly. He is a normal human being, whose face, unbeknownst to him, has become bathed in a divine luminance.
And that makes those winsome tufts of hair, nothing but a few small dabs of paint, significant in another way as well: as an example of Dutch art’s “normalization” of the Jews. In Rembrandt’s Jews, Steven Nadler reminds us that in much medieval and Renaissance art, “the Jew is not merely morally degenerate, but of a sinisterly different nature altogether.” With “bulging, heavy-lidded eyes, hooked nose, dark skin, large open mouth, and thick, fleshy lips,” Jews are made to look “more like cartoon characters than natural human beings.” And then suddenly, Nadler writes,
we come to 17th-century Dutch art, where we find . . . nothing; utter plainness. . . . . Ugliness and deformity are there, but they represent the common sins and foibles of all of humankind. . . . More than a century after their political emancipation in the Netherlands, the Jews experienced there an unprecedented aesthetic liberation.
Moses’ face and foreheadexhaust Rembrandt’s deep sympathy with Jews and Jewish tradition as exhibited in this artwork. Let’s take a closer look at the tablets themselves. True, they are rounded, whereas rabbinic tradition insists they had squared edges. But many synagogues nevertheless depicted the tablets as round, among them the Bevis Marks synagogue, opened in 1701 and the oldest in Britain.
In any case, the real Jewishness of Rembrandt’s tablets lies not in their shape but in their lettering. For an artist who did not read Hebrew, Rembrandt’s calligraphy is both exquisite and exquisitely faithful, and the spelling almost perfect. Even among his Dutch contemporaries, this was unusual; often in their work, Hebrew script is rendered in caricature. But here, too, Nadler writes, Rembrandt “was different”: indeed, “no other non-Jewish painter in history . . . equaled his ability to make the Hebrew—real Hebrew—an integral element of the work.” Most noteworthy in this painting is the letter bet in the eighth commandment, lo tignov (“Thou shalt not steal”); in order to keep the line even with those above it, the horizontal ends of the letter are elongated exactly as a sofer, a Torah scribe, would do.
Harry Truman is now rated as a great president by both parties.
In the book Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910-1959 reveals how much classified material the President revealed to his beloved wife.
From Berlin, at the Potsdam Conference on July31, 1945:
He opines ……after adding “Kiss my baby. Lots and lots of love,” he ends with “I’ve got to lunch with the Limey king when I get to Plymouth”
When President Harry Truman picked up his “Washington Post” early on December 6, 1950, to read a review of his daughter Margaret Truman’s singing performance, he was livid. Though conceding that Miss Truman was “extremely attractive,” Paul Hume, the “Post’s” music critic, stated bluntly that “Miss Truman cannot sing very well” and “has not improved” over the years. The president wrote the following letter to the 34-year old Hume, whom he compared to the columnist Westbrook Pegler (“a rat,” in Truman’s view).
Harry S. Truman to Music Critic Paul Hume
Mr Hume:
I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.” It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you’re off the beam and at least four of your ulcers are at work.
Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!
Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry.
Harry S. Truman
