RUTHFULLY YOURS

When I was a poor boy in Brooklyn, I read as many biographies of great people as I could, in order to learn what character traits led to their accomplishments so I could learn how to raise myself in the world. Now, many decades later, I live content that I have lived my dreams and fantasies and along the way have marked up a few signal accomplishments that made a real difference. There was a character trait that I don’t recall showing up in the bios I devoured, one which has given me satisfaction, being content with living on one’s own terms, regardless the prices. That is the character trait that you, the reader will see in the memoir written by one of my oldest friends, Sol Sanders, PEOPLE!: Vignettes gathered along the way through a long life.

On his 89th birthday. Sol’s life and anecdotes are a testament to full tilt living a “Forrest Gump” existence as an
international journalist. I and everyone who knows him delight in his behind the curtain tales of history being made or bungled, of personal insights into the mighty and often their salacious private lives. For years, I nudged Sol to get it down in a book. There are so very few such very revealing autobiographies. Sol includes me in his dedications, writing that I “made the original suggestion for this memoir but who bears no responsibility for its metamorphosis.” That’s right, because Sol has crafted a unique memoir beyond what I had in mind as a standard chronology that emphasized the magnitude of the events he witnessed and the inside stories of the events and those who made the history of the latter half of the 20th century.

While New York Senator Chuck Schumer came under withering, anti-Semitic attack as soon as he informed President Barack Obama that he would vote to reject the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, his New York colleague, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, has been largely immune from criticism of any kind.

Gillibrand announced her support for Obama’s deal on August 6, the same day Schumer announced his opposition.

Her decision has been a critical asset for the administration’s campaign to secure the support of other Democratic lawmakers torn between their duty to their constituents and their loyalty to Obama.

Gillibrand is a young senator who reportedly harbors aspirations for higher office. So her explanation for her support as well as her apparent determination that her interests are best served by facilitating the deal’s passage are important to consider.

In her online statement defending her decision, Gillibrand explained that while Iran’s support for terrorism and its regional aggression are serious threats to the US and its interests, “No issue matters more than ensuring that the Iranian regime does not have a nuclear weapon at its disposal.”

Parroting the administration’s talking points, Gillibrand argued that the deal, while imperfect, is the only means, short of war, for preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

It would accomplish this task first by curtailing Iran’s nuclear activities.

Perhaps we should thank Spain’s Rotodom Sunsplash reggae festival organizers. They just provided us with a textbook case both of the nature of today’s anti-Semitism and of how to defeat it.
Last weekend, the festival organizers canceled their invitation to Matisyahu, the American-Jewish reggae artist, because he refused to bow to the organizers’ demand that he publicly support “Palestine.”

Matisyahu was the only known Jew in the festival line-up and the only performer asked to produce such a statement.

Rather than take this lying down, on Monday Matisyahu recounted the episode on his Facebook page, writing, “It was appalling and offensive that as the one publicly Jewish-American artist scheduled for the festival they were trying to coerce me into political statements.”

Matisyahu’s disinvitation prompted a worldwide Jewish outcry. The Foreign Ministry registered a complaint with the Spanish government.

Every major American Jewish organization and several European Jewish organizations condemned the blatant discrimination against Matisyahu.

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/150821 President Obama made a false statement among many when he claimed that the only choice is to accept his Iran deal or face war. The opposite is true. The deal dramatically increases the very prospects of war. Iran immediately receives $150 billion dollars, which will bolster its support for terrorism and regional conflicts, requiring […]

Analysis of the nuclear deal with the Ayatollahs
Senator Menendez (NJ-DEM), opposed the Iraq War and supported President Obama 98% of Capitol Hill votes
Seton Hall University, Aug. 18, 2015, http://bit.ly/1MBXnNn (excerpts)

MILITARY OR PEACEFUL NUCLEAR

. “Why does Iran – which has the world’s 4th largest proven oil reserves and the world’s 2nd largest proven natural gas reserves – need nuclear power for domestic energy?…. if Iran is to acquire a nuclear bomb, it will not have my name on it….

FROM “ROLL-BACK” TO “ROLL-ON”

2. “We thought the agreement would be rollback-for-rollback: you rollback your infrastructure and we’ll rollback our sanctions…. At the end of the day, what we appear to have is a rollback of sanctions and Iran only limiting its capability, not dismantling it or rolling it back…. We have now abandoned our long-held policy of preventing nuclear proliferation and are now embarked – not on preventing nuclear proliferation – but on managing or containing it…. This deal grants Iran permanent sanctions relief in exchange for only temporary limitations on its program, not a rolling-back, not dismantlement…. The stated purpose of our negotiations with Iran was to dismantle Iran’s illicit nuclear infrastructure… to ensure that it would not have nuclear weapons capability at any time. Not shrink its infrastructure. Not limit it, but fully dismantle Iran’s nuclear weapons capability….

FROM ELIMINATION TO COMPLICITY

3. “This agreement leaves Iran with the core element of a robust nuclear infrastructure…. It failed to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state at a time of its choosing. In fact, it authorizes and supports the very road map Iran will need to arrive at its target….

4. “This deal does not require Iran to destroy, or fully decommission, a single uranium enrichment centrifuge. In fact, over half of Iran’s currently operation centrifuges will continue to spin at its Natanz facility. The remainder, including more than 5,000 operating centrifuges and nearly 10,000 not yet functioning , will merely be disconnected and transferred to another hall at Natanz, where they could be quickly reinstalled to enrich uranium…. Iran will be allowed to continue R&D activity on a range of centrifuges, allowing them to improve their effectiveness over the course of the agreement….

TIME OUT

CONTENTS
1. Norwegian festival refuses to show film on disabled children because they are Israeli
2. A “unique desk accessory” for British and Irish children
3. After wiping Israel off the map, Air France succumbs to pressure and reinstates it
4. Paris mayor refuses to bow to pressure and dismantle “Tel Aviv” section of beach
5. American Jewish rapper banned in Spain for refusing to condemn Israel
6. “The Palestinian case against BDS” (By Bassem Eid, Fikra Forum)
7. “How the boycott hurts Palestinians” (By Brett Kline, Haaretz)
8. “Dilemma for Israel boycotters as scientists make HIV breakthrough” (By Sarkis Zeronian, Breitbart)
9. “The New Racists: Jew Hate” (By Douglas Murray, Gatestone Institute)
10. Israel: it’s not what the Arab and international media told us (By Haisam Hassanein)

On August 5, an Environmental Restoration company crew, supervised by US Environmental Protection Agency officials, used an excavator to dig away tons of rock and debris that were blocking the entrance portal of Colorado’s Gold King Mine, which had been largely abandoned since 1923. Water had been seeping into the mine and out of its portal for decades, and the officials knew (or could and should have known) the water was acidic (pH 4.0-4.5), backed up far into the mine, and laced with heavy metals.
But they kept digging – until the greatly weakened dam burst open, unleashing a 3-million-gallon (or more) toxic flood that soon contaminated the Animas and San Juan Rivers, all the way to Lake Powell in Utah. To compound the disaster, EPA then waited an entire day before notifying downstream mayors, health officials, families, farmers, ranchers, fishermen and kayakers that the water they were drinking, using for crops and livestock, or paddling in was contaminated by lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic.
Three million gallons of turmeric-orange poisonous water and sludge is enough to fill a pool the size of a football field (360×160 feet) seven feet deep. Backed up hundreds of feet above the portal into mine adits, stopes, rooms and other passageways that begin at 11,458 feet above sea level, the flash-flooding water had enough power to rip out a road and propel its toxic muck hundreds of miles downstream. (You can review EPA’s incompetence and gross negligence in these project photos* and post-disaster images.)

According to Naomi Klein, this is “clear.”

According to social activist and best-selling author Naomi Klein, climate change isn’t just destroying our planet — it’s making racism worse, too.

“You see that in Australia where the treatment of migrants is a profound moral crisis,” she said, according to a piece published in The Guardian.

“It’s clear that as sea levels rise that this mean streak and open racism is going to become more extreme – climate change is an accelerant to all those other issues,” she continued.

Yes — “clear.” The idea that racism rises with the sea is just so “clear” that no further evidence or explanation is needed. Climate change is making people more mean, and that is just a fact.

If you’re dying to know more, you’re in luck: Klein has written plenty of books about climate change, including This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which MSNBC host Rachel Maddow praised as “the only book of the last few years in American publishing that I would describe as a mandatory must-read.”

That’s a compelling endorsement, but I still don’t think I’ll read it — after all, the fact that Klein is totally right is already so “clear.”

From Thucydides’s Athens to 21st-century America, appeasement is not a winner.

The common bond among the various elements of the failed Obama foreign policy — from reset with Putin to concessions to the Iranians — is a misreading of human nature. The so-called Enlightened mind claims that the more rationally and deferentially one treats someone pathological, the more likely it is that he will respond and reform — or at least behave. The medieval mind, within us all, claims the opposite is more likely to be true.

Read Gerhard Weinberg’s A World at Arms or Richard Overy’s 1939, for an account of the negotiations preceding World War II, and you will find that an underappreciated theme emerges: the autocratic accentuation of the human tendency to interpret concession and empathy not as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but rather as weakness to be exploited or as a confession of culpability worthy of contempt.