RUTHFULLY YOURS

Critical Studies’ end products will be tribes of dependent, interchangeable, obedient, compliant manqués, ever-ready to do the State’s bidding.

As you leave your Critical Literary Studies class to trudge wearily down the hall to your Critical Legal Studies class, your head may be spinning with a kaleidoscope of disconnected images, feelings, huge swathes of “text,” and memory of the agony of trying to second-guess your instructor about what anything means.

You were particularly confused about why the instructor claimed that there was no question that Nick Carraway’s obsession with Jay Gatsby was actually a disguised and coded homosexual fascination with the millionaire in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Carraway’s affair with Jordan Baker, the female golfer character, was merely a substitute proxy relationship. The air-headed Daisy Buchanan served as a convenient transition point and a “false focal nexus,” as did Myrtle Wilson, the local garage owner’s cuckolding wife. All the signifiers and signifieds in the “text” say so. Your homework assignment is to pinpoint and discuss seven of them in a paper due by the end of the week.

Former President Jimmy Carter has tipped his hat toward Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as the liberal standard-bearer seeking the Democratic nomination — but concedes that “stupid” campaign finance laws will hand victory to Hillary Clinton.

Carter told PBS that “more inherently” Sanders and Elizabeth Warren speak better on the issue of income inequality.

“The senator was in the forefront of saying equality and doing away with discrimination economically, constraining Wall Street, and doing away with the domination that the rich people now have over the political system,” Carter said of the Massachusetts Democrat.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said he was the only Republican that liked Lisa Jackson, President Obama’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, because she “could not tell a lie.”

“You don’t fit in this administration unless you can lie,” Inhofe, chairman of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works, said at the Heritage Foundation.

Inhofe recalled Jackson saying “no” when he asked if the EPA pursuing cap and trade through regulations would lower CO2 emissions worldwide. “Climategate” occurred after their conversation, which stalled widespread federal action on carbon at the time.

Throughout a bombing-and-murder campaign lasting three decades, the BBC never referred to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as the “so-called IRA.” If you flatten ISIS’s military, the strong-horse appeal of ISIS would simply go away. If there is nothing to join, no one can join it.

Cameron’s and Obama’s tactic is to deny something that Muslims and non-Muslims can easily see and find out for themselves: that ISIS has a lot to do with Islam — the worst possible version, obviously, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, but a version of Islam nevertheless.

A few days after the massacre of 30 British subjects on a Tunisian beach, the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, used an interview on the BBC to berate the broadcaster and others for using the term “Islamic State.” Mr. Cameron’s suggestion was that the broadcaster should either refer to the “so-called Islamic State,” use the acronym “ISIL,” or adopt the Arabic term, “Daesh.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is now notorious for his inflammatory comments on Israeli Arabs during the 2015 elections • But a look at his actual policy record on the issue from 2009 until today reveals a different picture, one which belies his media image as a “racist” firebrand • Prof. Robert Cherry shows how what politicians do is often more important than what they say.

If there is one thing liberal pundits in Israel and America seem to agree on, it’s that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu doesn’t like Israeli Arabs and wishes them harm. The outcry over his remarks—ill-judged at the very least and inflammatory at worst—regarding Arab voters being brought in buses to vote against him helped cement this suspicion. But a close look at Netanyahu’s actual record on Israeli Arabs, as opposed to this or that public remark, reveals a very different story.

For a start, affirmative action policies initiated under Ehud Olmert were accelerated during the Netanyahu administration. These prioritized economic development, including allocating funds for joint industrial parks in Arab and Jewish towns. Subsidies helped firms hire Arab labor and expanded transportation infrastructure, which allowed Arabs to reach employment sites. These ventures were so successful that the government began setting up industrial parks and employment offices exclusively in Arab towns. In addition, the Israeli government developed a five-year plan for improving Arab education and established a special unit in the prime minister’s office to promote economic development in the Arab community.

Two Polish farm families gave their lives rather than lead the Germans to the Jews they sheltered.On Dec. 6, 1942, 10 German soldiers marched into Rekówka, a Polish village 90 miles south of Warsaw. They’d received a tip from some locals that two families, the Skoczylas and Kosioróws, were sheltering Jews. When the Germans apprehended the families in their shared house, all but four of its inhabitants were at home. The soldiers spotted a trapdoor in the kitchen, which opened to a small, but empty, hiding place. They demanded that the families reveal the whereabouts of the stowaways, but nobody would talk. The soldiers took them to the barn behind the house, locked them inside and burned them alive. When two of the boys tried to escape, they were shot in the back.

Almost 72 years later, in August 2014, a cultural investigator named Jonny Daniels lifted that trapdoor for the first time since the surviving family members sealed it off years ago. He lowered himself down a ladder into a dark, damp space, with no light source and a floor covered with straw. He didn’t know it at the time, but he had uncovered the only known World War II hiding place for Jews that has remained intact and undisturbed since the end of the war.
On Thursday, after a year of negotiations and research, the space became an official heritage site in Poland, the only one of its kind. The hope is that by featuring the haven, shadows cast over Poland in the wake of the war will be lightened by the humanity of families like the Skoczylas and Kosioróws.

A PBS documentary provides fashionable rationalizations for the looting that erupted during the 1977 New York City blackout.

In a documentary brimming with sociopolitical messaging, this American Experience film goes back to the hot July night of 1977 that saw New York City suddenly go dark, then erupt in a widespread orgy of violence, looting and arson—the most extensive in East Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The film diligently traces the cause of the blackout—a lightning strike in Westchester County, and a resulting chain reaction that ended with total power loss for almost all all of New York City. But it’s clear virtually from the outset of “Blackout” that the power that concerns the filmmakers doesn’t have much to do with electricity.

We had vowed not to write about Donald Trump, but Democrats and the media are so eager to use the political apprentice to define conservatism that we can’t avoid it. He won’t win a GOP caucus or primary, but he is notable as a Democratic weapon against Republicans.

The latest to wield the Sword of Donaldese is Hillary Clinton, who broke her media silence this week to denounce the Clinton Foundation contributor. “I’m very disappointed in those comments” about Mexicans, she said—then the quick political pivot—“and I feel very bad and very disappointed with him and with the Republican Party for not responding immediately and saying, enough, stop it.”

Winston Churchill – May 13, 1940

“We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory; victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

Obama:July 7, 2015 : “In order for us to defeat terrorist groups like ISIL and al-Qaeda, we must discredit their ideology. “….”Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas. We will never be at war with Islam.”

Obama wants to fight ISIS in a battle of wits.

On the anniversary of the Battle of Heliopolis, Barack Hussein Obama stopped by the Pentagon to tell everyone there that their big guns couldn’t beat ISIS because “Ideologies are not defeated with guns”.

This would be news to the American GIs that beat Nazism, not with hashtags, but with bullets. WW2 propaganda, much of it of a crude nature that would make a modern sophisticated progressive turn up his nose, helped boost morale, but it was the firepower that took down Adolf’s armies.