John Kerry giveth and Barack Obama taketh away. After a few days of hearings in U.S. House of Representatives and Senate committees and subcommittees, opponents of the Iran nuclear deal were hoping for an extension of hearings, if for no other reason, than to keep the secretary of state on the hot seat. The more Kerry spoke, the greater were the doubts among wavering Democrats about the agreement. Kerry’s performance combined some of his worst tendencies — a disdain for anyone challenging what he regards as his received wisdom, and an inability to make a case, in this instance for a bad deal that he himself negotiated.
Civilizations normally go through three stages; Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent.
It’s easy to find examples of barbaric and decadent civilizations. We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty’s worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West.
Vigorous is what America used to be when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. Decadent is what it is becoming.
The barbaric civilization is the simplest of all. It runs on kinship. Pre-rational, it operates on explosions of emotion. It has no concept of enduring facts or objective reasoning. It holds life cheaply and kills casually. It loathes outsiders and has no universal laws. It is ruled by hierarchies which gain their position through brutality and trickery.
For the ISIS rapists, for the British and European Muslim rapists, the sex act is not a means to celebrate life, but to celebrate death, and the potency of their evil.
On July 29th Jihad Watch ran an interesting article by Ralph Sidway of the Facing Islam blog, “’The Nightmare’ – Europa and the Incubus.” The Gothic painting illustrating his column, by German-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, depicts an incubus sitting atop the limp and helpless body of Europa. The mythical Europa is more notoriously noted for having been carried off by Zeus in the guise of a bull. Sidway dwells in the metaphor that Europe is instead being conquered and ravished by an ugly ogre or incubus – or by Muslims. It has been abducted, as well, and is daily ravished by Islam. He begins:
Sometimes an image — a metaphor — is much more effective at presenting truth than even the most persuasive argument or laying out of facts. ‘The Nightmare’ is such an image.
In May, President Barack Obama donned a yarmulke and spoke in a Washington, D.C., synagogue. He reminded his audience that Jeffrey Goldberg, a member of the congregation, once called him the “first Jewish president.” He claimed to be flattered by the characterization. And perhaps he was—most Jews, after all, voted for him for president, and many Jews of Obama’s acquaintance have sometimes seemed to care more about the well-being of Planned Parenthood than about the survival of the state of Israel.
But recently Obama seems to have soured on the chosen people. At a press conference on July 16, Obama urged members of Congress to make their decision on the Iran deal based “not on politics. Not on posturing. Not on the fact that this is a deal that I bring to Congress, as opposed to a Republican president. Not based on lobbying.”
In Buenos Aires, Nisman’s case generated conspiracy theories involving spies and foreign governments and conniving politicians.
In the last days of his life, Alberto Nisman could hardly wait to confront his enemies. On January 14th of this year, Nisman, a career prosecutor in Argentina, had made an electrifying accusation against the country’s President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. He charged that she had orchestrated a secret plan to scuttle the investigation of the bloodiest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history: the 1994 suicide bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, the country’s largest Jewish organization, in which eighty-five people were killed and more than three hundred wounded. Nisman, a vain, meticulous fifty-one-year-old with a zest for Buenos Aires’ gaudy night life, had pursued the case for a decade, travelling frequently to the United States to get help from intelligence officials and from aides on Capitol Hill. In 2006, he indicted seven officials from the government of Iran, including its former President and Foreign Minister, whom he accused of planning and directing the attack, along with a senior leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Months later, Nisman secured international arrest warrants for five officials, effectively preventing them from leaving Iran. As the case made him a celebrity, he invested in blue contact lenses and Botox injections. “Whenever he saw a camera, that was it, he would drop everything,” Roman Lejtman, a journalist who covered the investigation, said.
Matthew Pulver Hillary :Clinton Sold out Honduras Lanny Davis, Corporate Cash, and The Real Story About the Death of a Latin American Democracy ****
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/08/exclusive_hillary_clinton_sold_out_honduras_lanny_davis_corporate_cash_and_the_real_story_about_the_death_of_a_latin_america_democracy/
Want to know why Clinton’s State Dept. failed to help an elected leader? Follow the money and stench of Lanny Davis
Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, considered by some to be the only real threat to Hillary Clinton, has joined Sen. Bernie Sanders to be the only two challengers to the former secretary of state. Republicans, whose seemingly limitless field seems poised for a “Hunger Games”-esque cage match, worry that a Clinton cakewalk through the primaries will leave her relatively unscathed in the general election against a beaten and beleaguered GOP nominee whose every foible will have been exposed.
And yet for some reason, GOP candidates lob tired Benghazi charges at the presumptive Democratic nominee during the short breaks in infighting. The issue only really excites the GOP base, and it’s highly unlikely that after almost three years of pounding the issue the tactic will work. Plus, House Republicans’ own two-year investigation into the attack absolved Clinton’s State Department of the worst GOP allegations, giving her something of her own “please proceed, Governor” arrow in the quiver if she is attacked from that angle.
It’s the SCUD missile of political attacks when there are laser-guided Tomahawks in the arsenal.
Want to know why Clinton’s State Dept. failed to help an elected leader? Follow the money and stench of Lanny Davis
Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, considered by some to be the only real threat to Hillary Clinton, has joined Sen. Bernie Sanders to be the only two challengers to the former secretary of state. Republicans, whose seemingly limitless field seems poised for a “Hunger Games”-esque cage match, worry that a Clinton cakewalk through the primaries will leave her relatively unscathed in the general election against a beaten and beleaguered GOP nominee whose every foible will have been exposed.
And yet for some reason, GOP candidates lob tired Benghazi charges at the presumptive Democratic nominee during the short breaks in infighting. The issue only really excites the GOP base, and it’s highly unlikely that after almost three years of pounding the issue the tactic will work. Plus, House Republicans’ own two-year investigation into the attack absolved Clinton’s State Department of the worst GOP allegations, giving her something of her own “please proceed, Governor” arrow in the quiver if she is attacked from that angle.
It’s the SCUD missile of political attacks when there are laser-guided Tomahawks in the arsenal.
Mrs. Clinton called for an end to the U.S. embargo yesterday.
Some will say that she is supporting President Obama’s foreign policy. However, this has more to do with the American left than anything else. Mrs. Clinton is desperately trying to go left, or sadly where the Democratic Party is.
Lifting the embargo will not do a darned thing to help the people stuck in the Castro regime.
I agree with The Miami Herald:
Despite months of talks between the two countries that began in December with President Obama’s announcement that relations would be normalized, we have yet to see any significant actions by the Castro regime that will benefit the United States or enhance the civil liberties and freedoms of the Cuban people.
My inbox is full of emails touting Donald Trump’s “Time to Get Tough” book, now with Rush Limbaugh’s endorsement. He blames most of America’s problems on a “tidal wave” of illegal Hispanic immigrants and unfair Chinese trade practices. He reminds me of H.L. Mencken’s classic one-liner: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” One might add, “dangerous,” because Trump appeals to our desire to blame someone else for problems we created. If you want something to worry about, have a look at the math questions that Chinese high school students have to answer to qualify for college admission.
Let’s review the facts.
Immigration from Mexico actually fell after the 2008 crash, mainly because construction jobs disappeared.
The best data we have suggest that net immigration from Mexico was negative between 2005 and 2010–that is, more Mexicans left the U.S. than arrived. Hispanics, to be sure, are more visible in the workforce–their share of total employment has risen from about 14% 10 years ago to to 17% today–but that is due to the natural increase in the Hispanic population. In 1990, non-Hispanic whites had a fertility rate of 1.7 children per female, vs. 2.9 children for Hispanics. This bumper crop of Hispanic children has been entering the workforce for the past several years. But that has nothing to do with recent trends in immigration.
Bruce Hoffman’s Anonymous Soldiers is a deftly written account of the Jewish revolt against the British in 1940s Palestine. Despite its scholarship—it draws heavily on recently declassified British documents—and its significant bulk, it is a page-turner that leaves the reader feeling sorry once the book is finished.
Unlike most accounts of the Jewish underground, this one tells the story from the British point of view, though without taking Britain’s side. It leaves the reader with no doubt that it was the Irgun, and to a lesser extent the much smaller Lehi, that drove the British from Palestine, and not, as the longtime mythology of Israel’s Laborites would have it, David Ben-Gurion’s skillful politicking.
It was Lehi that began the terror war against the British in 1940. Its members were completely isolated at first, perceived by the Yishuv—a term for Palestine’s Jewish community—as a criminal gang. Lehi was led by Avraham (Yair) Stern, whom Hoffman describes as a man “of grandiose dreams and half-baked plans,” an outstanding classics student at Hebrew University, and a poet. The title of Hoffman’s book comes from a poem written by Stern, which would become Lehi’s anthem. Stern was killed by the British in 1941, and the group’s remaining members killed or captured. The group was revived in 1943 under the leadership of Yitzhak Shamir, decades later to become Israel’s prime minister.
