RUTHFULLY YOURS

Wrangel Island is a godforsaken patch of land several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle between the Chukchi and East Siberian seas. The closest mainland is Northern Siberia.

While a number of people visited the island over the years, including native Chukchis, Russian fur traders, and German seafarers, nobody ever bothered to put in a claim for the place until an 1881 expedition by the Corwin claimed it for the U.S. An expedition by the Rodgers later that year that included renowned naturalist John Muir conducted a thorough survey.

In 1916 the island was seized by Imperial Russia with no protest from the U.S. – it’s likely nobody recalled that it was American. The Russians renamed it Ostrov Vrangelya.

In the 20s, a Canadian group attempted to claim the island out of the blue, oddly enough utilizing several American citizens to do it. The brief diplomatic squabble that ensued was the last anyone heard of Wrangel for half a century.

Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah; and those with him are forceful against the disbelievers, merciful among themselves. Quran 48:29

America’s greatest threat is climate change. Obama, 2015

Do not let Obama or Islamists deceive you: the Qur’an is very clear about the double standards and the discriminative theology of Islam.

Can we all agree on one thing: that it is never acceptable to put an individual to death over an insult? Would it be fair to say that exercising such restraint is a foundation of modernity? Among civilized societies, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

However, the belief that insulting the Prophet of Islam is a capital offense is nearly ubiquitous among Muslims, whether Shiite or Sunni. The only real point of contention isn’t whether the offender should die, but rather what gyrations must take place before their throat is opened to the afternoon air.

Many Imams and Muslim commentators who decried the attack on Charlie Hebdo did so not because they believed the murder was wrong, but instead that the miscreants should have been arrested, tried in an Islamic court and then killed, which of course is so totally different.

WHAT A NAME…”EARTH JUSTICE”…THESE PHONY ENVIRONMENTALISTS SPRING UP EVERYWHERE LIKE SOUTHERN KUDZU WEED…..RSK

Calls on Congress to put this special place off-limits to oil and gas development…

Washington, D.C. — The following is a statement from Earthjustice President Trip Van Noppen:
“We applaud and thank President Obama for adopting a conservation plan that for the first time proposes to designate a large portion of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness to protect it from exploitation and development. We call on Congress to follow the President’s lead.

“Known as ‘The Sacred Place Where Life Begins’ to Alaska Native communities and teeming with rare wildlife, this is a place of incalculable beauty and value, to be protected like Yellowstone and Yosemite, not turned into another polluted oil patch.”

Looks like the environmental movement should come with a “Made in Moscow” label. And considering that the Center for American Progress is the group with the single biggest policy influence on Obama and is now on board with Ready for Hillary, Russian money going into it should be worrying as Free Beacon’s Lachlan Markay reports.

A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.

Rep. Trey Gowdy is Chairman of the Benghazi Select Committee and for the record isRated -3 by AAI, indicating anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012) …rsk

Rep. Trey Gowdy came out swinging at Tuesday’s hearing of his Select Committee, laying into Democrats for playing political games and blasting the State Department for refusing to produce documents and for preventing witnesses from testifying before the committee.

As the hearing began, Gowdy had to cut off his microphone to conduct a private conversation with ranking Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who has been carrying the administration’s water consistently.

While the two men remained personally cordial to each other, the “comity” of earlier hearings was gone.

On Monday, Gowdy released a scathing letter to Cummings that set the table for Tuesday’s hearing.

Over Christmas I finally got around to reading Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth. I cannot recommend this book – newly translated from the German – highly enough. It challenges and indeed changes nearly all received wisdom about the leading figure behind the genocide of European Jews during World War II.

The title of course refers to Hannah Arendt’s omnipresent and over-praised account of Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. I would say that Stangneth’s book not merely surpasses but actually buries Arendt’s account. Not least in showing how Arendt was fooled by Eichmann’s role-play in the dock in Jerusalem. For whereas Arendt famously portrayed the man in the glass booth as a type of bureaucrat, Stangneth shows not only that Eichmann was not the man Arendt took him to be, but that she fell for a very carefully curated and prepared performance. Putting together a whole library of scattered documents from Eichmann’s exile in Argentina in the 1950s, Stangneth puts the actual, unrepentant Eichmann back centre stage.

Is the tech term, as in computer hacker, connected with the verb hakn, meaning to chop?

Mosaic reader Max J. Katz writes:

I am interested in the etymology of “hacker” as it is used in computer technology to mean variously an expert, gamester, or someone who maliciously intrudes upon someone else’s computer to change or manipulate it. In particular, I wonder whether there is a connection with the Yiddish verb hakn, meaning to chop.

There is an extensive literature on the history of “hacker”—and also extensive disagreement. One thing there is no argument about is that the term was first used for computer buffs in the early 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Originally, it seems, a hacker at MIT was not specifically a lover of computers and their programs; rather, he was anyone who was more passionate about an extra-curricular hobby than about his academic studies. The earliest documentation of the word denoting such students dates to the late 1950s, when members of an MIT model-railroad club used it for themselves.

From this point on, the questions take over. Were the first program hackers out from the start to gain control of other people’s computers for nefarious purposes, or were they simply digital fun-lovers whose pranks meant no harm? If the latter, should the meaning of “hacker” be revised to rid it of the negative connotations that have colored it strongly since the 1980s, so that it once again refers to all programming enthusiasts and not just the criminally minded? And if so, what should criminal hackers be called? (Among the terms suggested have been “computer vandals,” “crackers,” and “white-hat hackers” as opposed to “black-hat hackers.”)

Deception, agenda and folly drive latest Obama EPA anti-hydrocarbon rules. Are farmers next?

First they came for the coal mining and power plant industry, and most people did not speak out because they didn’t rely on coal, accepted Environmental Protection Agency justifications at face value, or thought EPA’s war on coal would benefit them.

In fact, Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon gave the Sierra Club $26 million, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave the Club $50 million, to help it wage a Beyond Coal campaign. The Sierra Club later claimed its efforts forced 142 U.S. coal-fired power plants to close, raising electricity rates, threatening grid reliability, and costing thousands of jobs in dozens of states.

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Nonie Darwish, author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

Nonie came on the show to discuss The West’s Non-Strategy Toward Jihad, analyzing a civilization’s willful blindness about an ideology that condemns it. She also focused on Obama and the Koran, unveiling the curious relationship between the president and Islam’s “holy book.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/the-wests-non-strategy-toward-jihad-on-the-glazov-gang/

By the time you read this, director Clint Eastwood’s blockbuster about the late warrior Chris Kyle will have become the top-grossing war-themed film of all time in North America. And that box office success has exposed the stark contrast between an American audience starved for patriotic Hollywood fare on the one hand, and a radical left viciously trying to maintain control of their narrative on the other.

I wrote recently for FrontPage Mag about American Sniper and its leftist film critics, who don’t dispute the film’s artistic merits but are frustrated by this apolitical movie’s refusal to condemn both George Bush’s war and Chris Kyle’s role in it. As the film breaks box office records and shows little sign of slowing down (attendance dropped a mere 27% in the second weekend; it drops off at least twice that for most films), the left is ratcheting up its disgusting attacks, and a Muslim civil rights organization is joining in.