RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/the-jews-the-vatican-and-the-pope-ruth-king.html

On March 23, 2000, Pope John Paul II spoke the following words at Yad Vashem:

“As Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter, I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place. The Church rejects racism in any form as a denial of the image of the Creator inherent in every human being (cf. Gen 1:26).

“In this place of solemn remembrance, I fervently pray that our sorrow for the tragedy which the Jewish people suffered in the twentieth century will lead to a new relationship between Christians and Jews. Let us build a new future in which there will be no more anti-Jewish feeling among Christians or anti-Christian feeling among Jews, but rather the mutual respect required of those who adore the one Creator and Lord, and look to Abraham as our common father in faith (cf. We Remember, V).”

Six years later, in May 2006, Pope Benedict XVI, a native of Germany who had directly experienced the Nazi years, speaking at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, invoked the memory of John Paul II.

Walking alone, the 79-year-old pontiff, with head bowed said:

“To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man is almost impossible — and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a Pope from Germany.
“By destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.”
He added “Why, Lord did you remain silent?”

But three years later, in 2009, at Yad Vashem, Pope Benedict did not speak of Nazis and the concentration camps, instead issuing vague evocations of the dead. Of the Holocaust he said “Similarly, she [the Church] draws close to all those who today are subjected to persecution on account of race, color, condition of life or religion.”

The uproar was instant and eclipsed the comfort and reconciliation that Jews and Catholics had found in the Pope’s previous message in Auschwitz. The Pope was harshly criticized in an editorial in the German paper Der Spiegel:

“The pope never mentioned the culprits, or the German words engraved into the floor of the Hall of Remembrance at his feet: Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Theresienstadt. He said nothing about the church’s position on the Holocaust, or about its history of anti-Semitism, which made the Shoah possible in the first place. Instead, he confined himself to mentioning the “deep compassion” of the Catholic Church for “the victims.”
Frankly, whatever the intention, there was a hint of inappropriate moral equivalence.

Sitting in a courtroom three years ago, after skipping out on a sizable legal bill, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s youngest brother struck a reassuring tone: Don’t worry, the money is coming.

“I deal through the Clinton Foundation,” Tony Rodham said, according to court transcripts uncovered by the New York Times. He gave his word that Hillary and Bill were setting him up with Haitian-government permits to build a $22 million housing development in the earthquake-stricken country.

“I hound my brother-in-law, because it’s his fund that we’re going to get our money from,” Rodham explained, promising a $1 million check once the Haitian-government paved the way, enough both to cover the outstanding legal fees and take his family to Disney World.

—​ Terry L. Anderson is the William A. Dunn Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Mont., the John and Jean DeNault Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and the co-author of Free Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation.

In a speech last week at the Coast Guard Academy commencement ceremony, President Obama reiterated the assertion that “climate change is real.” He then leapt to the conclusion that “climate change will mean more extreme storms,” before predicting that we would see a “rise in climate-change refugees” caused by droughts, hurricanes, and water shortages.

Scientists, however, caution against making a connection between climate change and severe weather. Responding to a handful of ad hoc correlations between rising temperatures and weather events reported in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 2014, Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann said he was “unconvinced that these special reports properly inform the larger public discourse” and feared that “they create more confusion than clarity.”

Claims such as those made by Obama add to confusion about global warming because they detract from the long-term nature of the problem. The president is correct in saying the earth is warming. A simple trend-line of the Earth’s global land-ocean surface temperature from 1880 to the present shows that temperatures have been rising at a rate of 0.67 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) per century (measured in terms of the deviations of annual mean global temperatures from the 1951–80 average).

As of yesterday afternoon, a nonstop round-trip flight from New York City to Los Angeles on Independence Day weekend cost $484. That the price is so low is an incredible story in itself, one that is more important than most of what our children are taught in their history classes and one that we should not fail to appreciate, but it is a subject for another day. Consider, though, that that $484 is a messy number; it isn’t an even $500 or rounded to $480 or $485. Messy numbers are a sign of real calculation, and they are the opposite of political numbers: the first 100 days in office, the five-year plan, the $15 minimum wage.

That $484 is easily expressed in non-U.S. dollar contexts: €445.08, £ 314.56, ¥ 5,9573.87, 2.0349 Bitcoin. (Damn!) On the commodities market, that’s 745.54 pounds of cotton or 338.5 pounds of coffee. It is 0.00000268888 of a Les Femmes d’Alger, the Pablo Picasso painting that recently set a new auction record at Christie’s.

For a time, reset, concessions, and appeasement work to delay wars. But finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm, and face down enemies.

That gets dangerous. The shocked aggressors cannot quite believe that their targets are suddenly serious and willing to punch back. Usually, the bullies foolishly press aggression, and war breaks out.

It was insane of Nazi Germany and its Axis partners to even imagine that they could defeat the Allied trio of Imperial Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

But why not try?

When asked how he planned to finance his retirement, a wag once responded he would rely on three sources – Social Security, law suits and the lottery. His answer was an expression of hope over experience. While it was bittersweet, his answer also reflected a cultural shift – a growing dependency and a belief that riches can come with no effort. Social Security, unless changes are made, will be technically defunct in 2033. Frivolous lawsuits are a growing problem. In 2013, about 15 million such suits were filed in the United States, an increase on a population-adjusted basis of 150 times from 1967. Americans spent $78 billion playing lotteries last year, a form of tax that did not exist before New Hampshire introduced the first lottery in 1964.

On Tuesday night, Fox News’s Megyn Kelly conducted an incisive interview with Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) about his opposition to the National Security Agency’s metadata-collection program under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act (the business-records provision). The abbreviated version of the interview as aired is on the Kelly File website, here; the full interview (which runs about 13 minutes and also features Kelly Paul, the senator’s wife) has been posted on Fox News’s blog, here.

I have been making the argument that, while there is a serious question about whether the metadata program violates the statutory limitations spelled out in Section 215, Senator Paul’s claim that it flouts the Constitution is frivolous. It was on this point that Ms. Kelly pressed him Tuesday night. I will address two of the senator’s constitutional claims: the “general warrant” objection and the notion that the Fourth Amendment protects private confidentiality arrangements. I will then add some closing thoughts on other misleading and misguided elements of Paul’s argument.

General Warrant

The senator contends that a court order directing a telecommunications company to turn over the records of usage by its customers is a “general warrant,” an evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. He evidently does not understand the concept he is invoking.

Eleven inches of rain drenched Houston on Memorial Day. The Texas metropolis is among the areas hardest-hit by a storm system that has soaked much of Texas, Oklahoma, and northern Mexico since the weekend, resulting in more than 30 deaths and a dozen missing persons. Naturally, Bill Nye the Science Guy had an explanation:

“The severe flooding, following as it does a years-long drought in the Lone Star State, has seemed to many an obvious demonstration of the dangerous consequences of climate change: “A steadily escalating whipsaw between drought and flood is one of the most confident predictions of an atmosphere with enhanced evaporation rates — meaning, global warming,” writes meteorologist Eric Holthaus at Slate. “Texas’s quick transition from drought hellscape to underwater theme park was egged on by both El Niño and climate change.”

It seems that relations between Alison Weir, of the vicious US Israel-demonising campaign group If Americans Knew, and the vicious US Israel-demonising campaign group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), have ruptured.
Apparently, some of Weir’s shenanegans have proved too hard to take, even for JVP.

What’s upset them, exactly? Her constant harping on the USS Liberty conspiracy theory? Her allegations of racism directed at the late Lubavitcher Rebbe? Her promotion of that infamous set of mendacious maps? And how do her obsessions differ from theirs? Blowed if I can work it out, but there are clues below.

That they’re broiges with her is no inevitable outcome, one would have thought, given the scumbags with which JVP is riddled, of the kind who deny all suggestions that anti-Israel activity and calls for BDS is antisemitic. See here, ar right,for instance, how JVP so facilely links to propaganda by notorious British anti-Israel activist Ben White, who as I remarked in a very recent post is on record as saying that he can understand why antisemitism exists.

Oh, and here’s the JVP trying to look all spick and span. The carbolic soap’s been cleared away here, and the warts are obvious.

On social media, Ms Weir has issued a long screed, of which I quote part:

The arrest of two southern California men last week who were planning to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State brings the number of U.S.-based individuals involved in international terror-related cases this year to 40. (UPDATE: with the arrest of Houston-area Asher Abid Khan late Monday for supporting ISIS, the tally is now 41.)

This number highlights the metastasizing Islamic terror threat in the American homeland. At the current pace, by the end of June — halfway through 2015 — the number of cases will exceed the number from the past two years combined (48).

The Islamic State, as well as al-Qaeda affiliates and other Islamic terror groups, have repeatedly called for supporters to conduct attacks inside the American homeland: