RUTHFULLY YOURS

I recently took a few road trips longitudinally and latitudinally across California. The state bears little to no resemblance to what I was born into. In a word, it is now a medieval place of lords and peasants—and few in between. Or rather, as I gazed out on the California Aqueduct, the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Luis Reservoir, I realized we are like the hapless, squatter Greeks of the Dark Ages, who could not figure out who those mythical Mycenaean lords were that built huge projects still standing in their midst, long after Lord Ajax and King Odysseus disappeared into exaggeration and myth. Henry Huntington built the entire Big Creek Hydroelectric Project in the time it took our generation to go to three hearings on a proposed dam.

For all practical purposes, there are no more viable 40-acre to 150-acre family farms. You can sense their absence in a variety of subtle ways. Tractors are much bigger, because smaller plots are now combined into latifundia, and rows of trees and vines become longer. Rural houses are now homes to farm managers and renters, not farms families. One never sees families pruning or tying vines together as was common in the 1960s. I haven’t seen an owner of a farm on a tractor in over a decade.

Several developments have accelerated rapid change in the state. The long agricultural depression at the turn of the century—years of unprofitable prices for tree, vine and row crops—gave way about a decade ago to a sudden farm bonanza, especially in nut tree prices. The result was that once unprofitable land that had bankrupted the old agrarian class was absorbed by larger concerns and went through the costly process of transforming into pistachio, walnut, and almond acreages. Land prices in central California suddenly went from $5,000 an acre to $30,000 and up. Sometimes I’d like to remind the ghosts of those who went broke that the land they sold off for nothing is now quite something.

President Obama plans to visit a U.S. mosque for the first time, but the one he’s chosen has hosted at least two major jihadist leaders.

Barack Obama is in the final stretch of his time as President of the United States. It was announced on Sunday that Obama will make his first public appearance at a U.S. mosque to show solidarity with Muslims, whom many blame for all those terrorist attacks they commit.

The White House announced that Obama would be visiting the Islamic Society of Baltimore, which is located in Woodlawn, Maryland, just west of Baltimore. The ISB started in 1969 as a prayer group at Johns Hopkins University, which is located in Baltimore, according to the mosque’s website. A little more than a decade later, the community purchased an eight acre plot of land where the mosque is now located, as well as a school and a multi-purpose hall.

The vision of the ISB is “to be the anchor of a growing Muslim community with diverse backgrounds, democratically governed, relating to one another with inclusiveness and tolerance, and interacting with neighbors in an Islamic exemplary manner.”

Background information about the ISB uncovered a singularly alarming fact: two of the greatest supporters and promoters of a global Islamic caliphate spoke at ISB at least once, according to a “former regular.” This person commented that because it is located near Washington, D.C., “often celebrity guest speakers show up out of the blue. Like Dr. Israr Ahmed, Anwar al-Awlaki and many others.”

Did you know that since a will is considered a court document, anyone, regardless of connection to the deceased, can request a copy of it and for a fee, become privy to that person’s most intimate and final decisions regarding legacy and heirs? An article in the Times of Jan 30th reveals the full names of David Bowie’s beneficiaries including his widow, children, personal assistant, children’s nanny, business manager, lawyer and executor. It includes the exact amounts of these bequests so if any criminals scan the obituary pages for new marks, The Times will have facilitated their search. It further specifies the location of some of the real estate bequeathed to heirs. If the legatees had won the lottery, they would be entitled to withhold their own identities and remain private citizens in matters that concern no one but themselves. But the thoughtful act of responsibly providing for our loved ones before dying comes with the penalty of stripping us of our fundamental right to privacy.

Is this what the law intended? Historically, probating wills through the court goes back to English Common Law and was meant to insure that claimants and creditors would have knowledge of and access to the estate of the deceased. By going thru the courts, wills now become subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Since executors are paid to inform all those who are mentioned in the will, it is creditors who benefit most from its public nature. Why not change the law so that public death notices are mandatory and those who feel they have claims on the deceased should go to court to show cause for getting access to their will. If we object to our phone calls being harvested and monitored even for national security purposes, there are questions we should be asking about our current system of probate.

One of the great scandals in the world of philanthropy is the fact that Mohandas K. Gandhi, the great apostle of nonviolence, was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which instead has gone to such figures as the murdering jihadist maniac Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, who has spent part of his subsequent time in the White House conducting an illegal war in Libya, reinvading Iraq, and assassinating the occasional U.S. citizen.

Timing is everything, of course. The unhappy fact is that Mr. Gandhi was not an especially effective advocate of nonviolence, at home or abroad, and he reached the height of his celebrity at a time when the world was nose-deep in blood from the carnage of the Second World War. During much of that time (1939–43) the Nobel committee had the good taste to forgo offering peace prizes. Mr. Gandhi outlived the peace-price moratorium, but not by much, and a young Hindu radical who didn’t get the nonviolence message assassinated him in 1948 (no peace prize that year, either) in revenge for the violence-plagued partition of India, in which at least a half a million people died.

Sometimes, it just isn’t your year.

The diversity racket — and it is a racket — depends entirely upon keeping prestigious, powerful, and, above all, wealthy institutions in a state of political agitation and moral panic. It’s Hollywood’s turn this time around, and the manufactured controversy is the lack of black nominees for the top honors at the Academy Awards.

Several high-profile black actors, including Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, announced that they would not attend this year’s Academy Awards, absenting themselves in protest. The black host of the ceremony, Chris Rock, will attend, as will the black president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs. Ice Cube, a black rapper and actor who is in the interesting position of having this year produced a well-regarded film about his own career starring his son as himself, scoffed at the controversy, with some appreciation for the fact that being a movie star is a pretty good life, regardless of whether one is celebrated at the very pinnacle of celebrity culture: “It’s like crying about not having enough icing on your cake,” Mr. Cube said. “It’s just ridiculous.”

Delta Flight Attendants Brawl at 37,000 Feet J. Christian Adams

A Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to Minneapolis had to make an unscheduled landing in Utah because two flight female flight attendants got into a fistfight at 37,000 feet.

The Boeing 757 was south of Salt Lake City when the fist fight broke out between Delta employees servicing the flight. The pilot asked air traffic control for a diversion to Salt Lake City because he “wanted to hear from his flight attendants,” according to the Aviation Herald. Delta Air Lines Flight 2598 then diverted to Salt Lake City and safely landed.

The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.

And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) initiated the six-month investigation after several Guatemalan teens were found in a dilapidated trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm. The boys were among more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have surged into the United States since 2011, fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

[Overwhelmed federal officials released immigrant teens to traffickers in 2014]

An ISIS video instructs Muslims to kill infidels wherever they are, all over the world, using any device at hand from can openers to cars. Sheikh Muhammad Salah in the Gaza Strip holds up his knife and exhorts his followers to stab the Jews and cut them into body parts. He extends his fatwa to the Americans, allies of the Jews, infidels of the Great Satan who stand as a rebuke to Allah’s will. Since then, incidents have happened throughout Europe, some thwarted heroically, some ending in tragic massacres. In Israel, the knife intifada has taken the lives of almost thirty people, including too many young women.

In NYC, there have been 286 stabbings or slashings during this first month of 2016, including three in the subway this past week alone. In November, a Muslim engineering student in Santa Clara, Ca stabbed 4 people to death on the campus at U.C. Merced. In Washington D.C., a Muslim man slashed a woman at Union Station. Yet, there has not been one single speculation or comment by the police on a possible connection between this dramatic rise in stabblings and the knife intifada ordered by Islamic Jihadists. The NY police suggested that one of the slashers was high on drugs – that leaves only 285 other local incidents begging for a motive.

The reluctance to even acknowledge the synchronicity of the Islamic commands to kill with the startling rise in local stabbings is an example of how frightened the law is of being charged with Islamophobia, a preposterous charade invented by CAIR and perpetuated by the liberal press and politicians.

More than half (51%) of Muslims in America believe they should “have the choice of being governed according to Sharia.” Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts. Nearly a quarter believed that, “It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.” Nearly one-fifth of Muslim respondents said that the use of violence in the U.S. is justified in order to make Sharia the law of the land in this country. – Poll commissioned by the Center for Security Policy, Washington, D.C.

“Ramadan is a special prayer time, a time for religion. We double-park here every Friday and they [allow it], but today they gave us all tickets, almost 100 cabs. This has never happened before. I can’t help but to think they are being prejudiced. They don’t understand. We have to be here.” – Mohammad Zaman, New York City cab driver.

“We have no way … to know who these people are … we don’t have databases on these individuals so we can’t properly vet them, to know where they came from, to know what threat they pose.” – Michael McCaul, Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, commenting on the Obama administration plan to resettle Syrian refugees in the U.S.

ISIS is operating training camps just a few miles from El Paso, Texas. – Judicial Watch, citing Mexican law enforcement and intelligence sources.

Officials at Mason High School in Mason, Ohio, canceled “hijab day” after parents expressed opposition. Female students were asked to wear a headscarf, or hijab, for an entire school day, followed by a time for reflection and discussion.

A study by the Population Reference Bureau estimated that 507,000 women and girls in the United States are at risk or have already undergone female genital mutilation (FGM), more than twice the number estimated in 2000.

Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer’s trade association coordinated with the EPA to debunk a federally commissioned study that was critical of the EPA’s impact on the power grid.

Emails between the agency and the Advanced Energy Economy (AEE), a trade association of about 80 companies, show that there was an exchange of ideas on how to handle the critical report and lessen its impact.

Washington Free Beacon:

AEE is one of three politically oriented groups run out of and coordinated by Steyer’s office. While his political and policy efforts garner more press attention, emails obtained by the Energy and Environment (E&E) Legal Institute through Freedom of Information Act requests reveal ways in which his coalition of green energy businesses also affects public policy.

Arvin Ganesan, AEE’s vice president for federal policy, emailed a handful of EPA and White House staffers in January 2015. “Several of us talked last month about rebutting” a November study from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a nonprofit tasked by the federal government with monitoring and developing standards for electricity reliability.

Critics of the EPA’s power plant regulations were already citing NERC’s study, which questioned the impact of EPA power plant regulations on electrical grid reliability and suggested they delay the rule’s implementation.

“NERC’s report underscores the growing reliability concerns with EPA’s unworkable plan,” Rep. Ed Whitfield (R., Ky.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s panel on energy and power, said of the report’s release.

It is less than a month into 2016, and two terrorist plots have occurred, one foiled and the other successful. Additional information has become available regarding a case from December 2015, resulting in another addition to The Heritage Foundation’s list of terrorist plots and attacks. The FBI’s release of more information in December about the shooting at two Chattanooga military facilities in July 2015 also adds to the list, bringing the total number of Islamist-inspired terrorist plots and attacks against the U.S. since 9/11 to 80.
Chattanooga, No. 74

The Heritage Foundation is now adding the July 16, 2015, shooting at two military facilities in Chattanooga that killed four Marines and a sailor to its list of Islamist terrorist plots. While there were news reports pointing to an Islamist motivation, Heritage preferred to wait for the outcome of the FBI’s investigation before making a final determination.

In December 2015, FBI Director James Comey announced that the shooter, Mohammad Abdulazeez, “was inspired, motivated by a foreign terrorist organization’s propaganda.”[1] Comey further claimed that it was difficult “to untangle which particular source,” as there “are lots of competing [terrorist] poisons out there.”[2] The FBI, however, certainly knows the general kind of terrorist poisons to which Abdulazeez was attracted: They were of a violent, Islamist nature.

The FBI’s failure to provide the American people with this information means that other sources need be relied upon. Multiple news organizations reported that Abdulazeez attacked these facilities for Islamist reasons. Counterterrorism sources for ABC reported that Abdulazeez searched the Internet to learn how such violence could remove his sins and found justifications and guidance on violent Islamist websites.[3] Reuters reported that Abdulazeez was inspired by the general propaganda of violent Islamists.[4] Sources for NBC reported that Abdulazeez had downloaded audio recordings of al-Qaeda cleric and propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki.[5] The FBI conclusion, added to varied news reports is enough evidence to add the Chattanooga attack to the list of Islamist-inspired attacks.
Mohamed Elshinawy, No. 77

Over the course of 2015, Mohamed Elshinawy conspired with others to support ISIS. Starting in February 2015, Elshinawy discussed with a co-conspirator the possibility of attacking the U.S., being careful to avoid discussing specific plans because he feared that he was being monitored. Elshinawy and his co-conspirator regularly took precautions to avoid detection by using false names and different phones, lying to authorities, and concealing connections to ISIS and to each other.[6]