RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. –Abraham Lincoln

Last evening, we shared a table with a young group of marines en route to SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training in Maine. I woke up this morning feeling especially thankful to those who put themselves in harm’s way to protect our nation and yet I kept thinking about the Gettysburg Address. This is because I worry whether our soldiers (and their families) deployed after 9/11, many injured or in coffins, sacrificed in vain. Did the soldiers who liberated our country from England, as well die in vain? Did the 620,000 casualties of the Civil War die in vain?

At 10 years of age, I became aware of terrorism. I watched it play out during the television broadcast of the 1972 Olympics when a terrorist group, identifying itself as “Black September”, killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. Why were these athletes arbitrarily murdered on a world stage? I truly didn’t understand the catalyst until I was much older. Black September was a movement to avenge Palestinians’ losses in Jordan. This was one battle in a continuum of battles and part of a larger war.

It’s the Maths, Stupid I’ll share 2 of my life-long basic positions:The UK left is where I both belong and feel “safe”. Qualitative analysis is where it’s at, not the hard edged cold world of quant.

We’ll return to these.

My family are socialists. The Labour Party is the natural home of the working classes – which is where I’m from. Ok, I confess. I was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the heady days of Marxism Today. Seems we ended up with political post-modernism so I’m sorry about that. Joined the Labour Party then left it after hearing Ed Balls mention immigration 6 times in the space of 4 minutes.

Half-Jewish and entirely secular on all fronts, I grew up in North West London. At school there were fights in the playground when I was called “Yid” and worse. My name marked me out – it practically yelled it out – as Jewish, even though I was of course only half-Jewish. I pretty much always lost those fights.

Later on I married a Jewish woman and now have a son who is, of course Jewish.

As a politically active student I recall a sense of unease at NUS conference & on campus when groups of keffiyah-wearing students from “other political groups” seemed to be just a bit too interested in the Middle East.

After my student days I joined that group of people who – whilst not politically active day-to-day- knew exactly where right and wrong lived. Whilst we bemoaned the retreats from socialism of the Blair & Brown years, we remembered what it was to live though 18 years of Conservative government. So we never, ever voted anything other than Labour despite some friends moving off to the Greens or seeking other radical homes.

Blaming the West has become the most pervasive method of teaching for many Middle East studies departments, which are becoming the heart of pop-culture academia. Efraim Karsh, a distinguished professor of Middle Eastern studies at Bar-Ilan University and professor emeritus at King’s College London, in his latest book The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East, dispels this myth.

“Britain’s ‘original sin,’ if such was indeed committed, lay not in the breaking up of Middle Eastern unity but in its attempted over-unification.” Overall, the blunders of the great powers were in trying to impose their own wishful thinking instead of obtaining a real understanding of the Middle East.

Unpopular truths abound. Karsh shows that descriptions of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, the secret bargain between London and Paris to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence, “as the epitome of Western perfidy couldn’t be further from the truth.” In fact, rather than being aimed at suppression of the Arabs, the agreement “constituted the first-ever great-power recognition of an Arab right to self-determination.”

Todd Haynes, the director of “Carol,” is a lover of pulp fiction. Past credits include Mildred Pierce and Far From Heaven, two weepy period films about women in familial straits and “Carol,” adapted from an autobiographical novel by Patricia Highsmith, follows in this tradition. Not having read the novel, I can only comment on the plot and characters as presented in this film version set in the 50’s in New York.

Played by Cate Blanchette, Carol is an elegant wealthy socialite who goes Christmas shopping in her mink coat and full maquillage. At the doll counter she meets Terese, a salesgirl played by Rooney Mara wearing a Santa hat and a blank expression that’s either boredom or inexperience. We soon see that Terese lives in what is meant to be a cold-water flat that has no radiator or phone; she lights the oven for heat and receives her calls from the pay phone in the common hallway. Incongruously, the set designer has made this cold-water flat a generously sized 3 room apartment that is fully furnished. This is the first in a string of details that don’t ring true, either to the characters or the period of the 50’s. Terese is a blank slate – we know nothing about where she’s from, whether she has a family or a backstory – only that she has taken a few pictures and might want to pursue that interest at some time in the future. Though she’s a naïve young salesgirl, she is pursued by a wealthy young man who wants to marry her and take her to Europe – two offers that she instinctively spurns though we’re not sure why.

This was an interesting Center for Security Policy briefing on American policy and Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

“Fourteen years after 9/11 we are worse strategically than where we were on 9/11,” stated former Congressman Pete Hoekstra at a November 13 Center for Security Policy (CSP) Washington, DC, briefing. A pleasant view from offices overlooking Washington, DC’s National Mall on a sunny day was perhaps the only bright spot during panelist presentations on a volatile Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region before some 20 CSP affiliates.

Hoekstra began this MENA tour d’horizon with Libya, where Americans “as a country snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory” by overthrowing Muammar Ghaddafi’s dictatorship in 2011. By 2003, American confrontation for over 30 years with had convinced a once dangerous adversary to cooperate with the United States and avoid the fate experienced by Ghaddafi’s peer in Iraq, Saddam Hussein. “When we decided to take him out he was doing everything we had asked him to do and had been doing it for eight or nine years,” stated Hoekstra, who met with Ghaddafi three times between 2003 and 2009.

Hoekstra cited several improvements in Ghaddafi’s behavior, such as reparations payments to victims of his regime’s terrorism like those of the 1989 Pan Am 103 bombing. “His nuke program was crated up, shipped to the United States,” and is “now sitting in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant fromIndiana Jones,” Hoekstra commented comically. Ghaddafi also engaged in critical intelligence cooperation with the United States on the basis of having “been fighting radical jihadists for decades.”

HUNGER GAMES – Mockingjay – Part II

Katniss Everdeen is back, her bow and arrows ever at the ready. Okay, so the books are beloved icons of young adult readers. And the first two/three were [just] tolerable as movie experiences, helped along by the luminescent Jennifer Lawrence, the circus-y emcee Elizabeth Banks, plasticized Stanley Tucci, the guru in nasty-mode Woody Harrelson and the unctuous, evil Donald Sutherland as President Snow. Josh Hutcherson is a mystery: why was he cast, of all the testosterone running wild in LA? He seems always slightly dyspeptic in all the lensers of the franchise.

Panem is still in rebellion mode, one district against the other, with Katniss the reluctant rebel leader. Her task: bring together the factions to fight not each other, but Pres. Snow, hostile-benign dictator.

In this go, the last of the 4-part franchise, the beautiful behind-the-scenes Coin is played by Julianne Moore, and one is momentarily upset by the sight of the now-deceased Philip Seymour Hoffman in his continuing role.

War between the districts is still ongoing, with .Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour plotting to use Everdeen to their ends, feigning support of the rebels, should they succeed.

http://www.wateraid.org/us/get-involved/world-toilet-day?utm_source=GAW&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=WorldToiletDay&utm_campaign=GAW&gclid=Cj0KEQiAg7ayBRD8qqSGt-fj6uYBEiQAucjOwbnirc5qrWYlD0LFP2QMqrunRwZcaABtmJ_NM3sqDbcaAixj8P8HAQ
How fitting…coming from the cesspool of international politics….rsk

There’s a problem no one’s talking about

There’s a problem that affects 2.3 billion people, or 1 in 3 people worldwide. It’s one of the world’s greatest obstacles to public health and environmental sustainability, and it costs the world’s poorest countries 260 billion dollars every year. It’s the lack of a basic human right.

It’s the lack of access to water and toilets.

At WaterAid we love talking about toilets. So we were thrilled when, last year, the UN officially created a day to recognize the importance of sanitation: World Toilet Day. Get ready to help us spread the message that toilets save lives.

Earlier this month, premier Fox newsman Bill O’Reilly became unhinged on live television. A red-faced O’Reilly loudly and repeatedly called his invited guest, Washington Post columnist and fellow conservative Fox News journalist George Will, a “hack” and accused him of lying.

It was a surreal moment, with stunned viewers no doubt muttering to themselves, “Is the jig finally up?”

Will had written a negative review of the fifth of O’Reilly’s co-authored “Killing” books, Killing Reagan. So O’Reilly dared Will to appear on his “No Spin Zone” hot seat.

Will did — and quietly punched some holes in O’Reilly’s strange thesis that President Ronald Reagan had been metaphorically “killed” after a March 30, 1981, assassination attempt. According to Killing Reagan, even years later the president may not have recovered enough to meet the demands of the office.

As I argued in Faithless Execution, the principal constitutional duty of the chief executive is to execute the laws faithfully. President Obama, by contrast, sees his principal task as imposing his post-American “progressive” preferences, regardless of what the laws mandate.

In his latest harangue against Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and other Americans opposed to his insistence on continuing to import thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria and other parts of the jihad-ravaged Middle East, Obama declaimed:

When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.

Really? Under federal law, the executive branch is expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum. Under the provision governing asylum (section 1158 of Title 8, U.S. Code), an alien applying for admission must establish that … religion [among other things] … was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant.

Moreover, to qualify for asylum in the United States, the applicant must be a “refugee” as defined by federal law. That definition (set forth in Section 1101(a)(42)(A) of Title , U.S. Code) also requires the executive branch to take account of the alien’s religion:

When the hacker group Anonymous announced it was launching a campaign against the Islamic State (“These are not the 72 virgins they were expecting,” as one now immortal online quipster put it), something happened that was, in its way, remarkable: Most everybody took them seriously.

Anonymous has taken credit for eliminating some 3,800 pro-ISIS social-media accounts, and it has suggested that, as in its campaign against the rather less significant Ku Klux Klan, it will gather a great deal of real-world information on Islamic State sympathizers and confederates and make it public. In the case of the Klan, that would mean mainly exposure to social opprobrium; in the case of Islamic State groupies and co-conspirators, that could mean a great deal more.

Anonymous is a famously fractious coalition of individuals and factions with internal rivalries and disagreements — a collective front rather than a united front, as Jamie Condliffe put it in Gizmodo — but it is generally regarded as being reasonably good at what it does. Terrorist groups are critically dependent upon electronic communication for everything from recruitment and motivation to actual operations, and there is some reason to suspect that groups such as Anonymous will prove more adept at disrupting that communication than our conventional intelligence and law-enforcement forces have. The Islamic State isn’t really a state, yet; like al-Qaeda, it is a non-state actor, and it is likely that other non-state actors will be enormously important in countering it.