RUTHFULLY YOURS

While engaging in the mundane task of gathering financial statements for a “secure retirement” meeting with my husband’s and my adviser, this Baby Boomer stumbled upon documented proof that our nation does not have the guts to confront one of its most serious economic problems. The realization came when I pulled from my files a document statement innocently titled, “Your Social Security Statement.”

At first glance, the statement did not appear menacing. I was told I could expect to receive a benefit of “about $2,136 a month” upon reaching age 70 — which certainly seems like good news. But immediately I thought of a parallel of President Obama’s infamous Obamacare promise: “If you like your Social Security, you can keep your Social Security.”

Then, as if on cue, I saw an asterisk with the following message:

The law governing benefit amounts may change because, by 2033, the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 77 percent of scheduled benefits.

TestPerfect is a new Silicon Valley start-up with an ambitious mission: to design a standardized college admissions test free of cultural or racial bias, resistant to differential test-prep efforts and accurately predictive of academic performance in postsecondary education.

TestPerfect’s chief executive says that development is far ahead of schedule and that a prototype exam should be available within two years. The forthcoming test promises to revolutionize college admissions by replacing not only the SAT but also traditional admissions-office functions such as evaluating transcripts from thousands of different high schools, parsing the compound adjectives of teacher recommendations and interviewing sweaty-palmed prospective students.

Once TestPerfect goes viral, as it surely will, the college admissions process, formerly the source of so much angst, individual and societal, will be rendered infallible, or close to it.

The College Board has just published a revision of its controversial AP U.S. history framework. The revision is designed to meet the concerns of the 2014 framework’s many critics. As one of those critics, I want to give a preliminary response. This is also the first in what will be a series of posts on the new AP U.S. history framework and related issues.

Based on a preliminary reading of the Thematic Learning Objectives and the first two historical periods, I would say that the revisions do not allay my concerns about the College Board’s approach to AP U.S. history. The College Board has removed some of the framework’s most egregiously biased formulations, yet the basic approach has not changed.

Since the College Board has said that the revised framework will not require modifications to textbooks, there is reason to believe that we are looking at largely cosmetic changes. The textbooks are what students actually see. If the latest revisions won’t change the texts, they can’t mean much. Based on my reading of the first two periods, even if the College Board does call for textbooks to be revised along the lines of the new framework, the changes would be trivial.

Did Mike Huckabee Actually Compare Obama to Hitler?
It’s been a hard time for politicians not named “Trump” to get any attention, but Mike Huckabee managed it. He did it by comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler.

At least that’s what I gathered from headlines like this one from Gawker:

“Mike Huckabee Compares Obama to Hitler”

I don’t put huge amounts of stock in Gawker headlines (or really any headlines on the Internet), but then I saw that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said Huckabee had “essentially likened [Barack Obama] to Adolf Hitler.” National Journal’s Ron Fournier went on a tear on Twitter, insisting that Huckabee apologize for comparing Obama to Hitler. And of course, Hillary Clinton and Obama himself denounced Huckabee for making a Hitler comparison. Clinton even said she was “really offended personally,” as if her feelings are what really matters.

Here is what Huckabee said in full during an interview with Breitbart News:

When Four Corners re-visited the Charlie Hebdo massacre, straight-bat journalism was trumped by propaganda and blatant reportorial bias. Mention the murder of Jewish schoolchildren? Don’t be silly! That might have clouded the message that Muslims, and only Muslims, are the real victims.
Watching Their ABC’s Four Corners last week I was once again impressed by Aunty’s adroit, manipulative touch in the art of a subtle propaganda. Introduced by compere Kerry O’Brien as “provocative and personal”, the show purported to examine the fallout in France from the Charlie Hebdo massacre. An insult to common sense, to balanced reporting and even-handedness, it was an abrogation of journalism’s responsibility to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What I saw instead was a master class in how to gloss over inconvenient facts, air tendentious assertions unchallenged and present the ideological commitment of the story-tellers as the base line from which all further discussion should, and must, proceed.

More than 500 Hamas members of Hamas’s armed wing, Ezaddin al-Qassam, are supervising the military training and religious education in the camps to train future jihadis in the war against Israel. Hamas’s religious education is aimed at teaching the children about Islam and its sharia laws. They are also being taught that making peace with the “infidels” is prohibited under the teachings of Islam.

It is disturbing to see how international and Palestinian human rights organizations, especially those claiming to defend children’s rights, are turning a blind eye to this large-scale child abuse by Hamas. These organizations only care about children’s rights when there is a way to throw all the blame on Israel.

The Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, are also poisoning the hearts and minds of their people by constantly inciting them against Israel. These children will never accept the two-state solution that Abbas is talking about. Nor will they ever recognize Israel’s right to exist in this part of the world.

“Teach your children how to play, how to smile… Build for them an institution…on the love of Palestine and not how to get themselves killed.” — Palestinian activist Eyad al-Atal, criticizing Hamas for “depriving an entire generation of Palestinians of their childhood.”

Rather than a Folie à Deux, call it a Folie à 5+1: a mutually reinforcing delusion involving Iran, the United States, Russia, China and the Europeans. What makes the outcome of the Iran nuclear deal so dangerous is that none of the parties to the agreement has thought through the consequences of its actions, least of all Iran itself. They are not so much sleepwalkers, as historian Christopher Clark characterized the combatants who stumbled into World War I, as waking fantasists.

There is one state of the world in which things go right, namely, Iran’s passive acceptance of national decline. There are innumerable ways in which everything can go terribly wrong. Game theorists who try to construct a decision tree from these criteria would assign a very low probability to a good outcome and a very high probably to a bad one.

Iran believes that it will lead the Shi’ite Muslims of the region to restored power; America believes that Iran’s enhanced status will foster a beneficial balance of power; China believes that the balance of military power between the Sunni and Shi’ite states (and between Iran and Israel) will prevent war; Russia believes that Iran will serve as a counterweight to the Sunni jihadist that threaten its southern flank; and the Europeans as usual close their eyes and hope for the best.

A near-indecipherable tattoo on a woman’s leg helps unravel a mystery surrounding the 1943 anthem of the Jewish resistance.

The photograph of a tattooed pair of women’s legs appearing atop this column was e-mailed to me by a friend after having been sent to him by an acquaintance who’d taken it in New York. The legs—belonging, apparently, to a feministically inclined Jewish patriot—bear three inscriptions. On the left calf are “Never Again” and a barbed-wire Star of David. The left ankle (not pictured here) has two words in Hebrew or Yiddish that I can’t make out. On the right calf are the faces of two young women wearing military-style berets and lettering that, though a bit difficult to decipher, spells the Yiddish words dos lid geshribn iz mit blut, “the song is written with blood,” above the faces, and un nit blay, “and not lead,” beneath them. Or is it, on the contrary, un mit blay, “and with lead”? It’s hard to tell—and thereby hangs a tale.

The words of this tattoo come from the well-known song Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letztn veg, “Never say the road you’re on will be your last,” also known as the Partisans’ Song. Written in the Vilna ghetto in May 1943, it quickly became the anthem of anti-German Jewish partisan units all over Eastern Europe. After the war it was widely performed and recorded, and it continues to be sung in various languages at Holocaust commemorations and other events to this day. In its accepted version, the fourth of its five stanzas goes:

Obama’s first hope was to reach a deal with his Iranian friends that would leave the Assad regime in place. But the Iranians blew him off.While Israel and much of official Washington remain focused on the deal President Barack Obama just cut with the ayatollahs that gives them $150 billion and a guaranteed nuclear arsenal within a decade, Obama has already moved on – to Syria.

Obama’s first hope was to reach a deal with his Iranian friends that would leave the Assad regime in place. But the Iranians blew him off.

The Clintons rarely feel obliged to obey the normal rules, whether for email security, the Lincoln Bedroom, or even the expectation that potential Presidents will comment on the issues of the day so people know what they believe and how they would act in office. Try to parse Hillary Clinton’s blanket refusal to take a position on the Keystone XL pipeline, as if it is ridiculous for anyone to ask.

“If it’s undecided when I become President, I will answer your question,” Mrs. Clinton advised a voter on Tuesday in Nashua, New Hampshire. That seems likely given that the oil project that may one day connect Canada to the Gulf Coast has been waiting for a State Department permit since 2008, and President Obama—who vetoed a bipartisan approval bill in February—has extended regulatory review to infinity to appease the green lobby.