RUTHFULLY YOURS

In an interview for the German news magazine Zuerst! (April 2015) Srdja Trifkovic considers the significance of Otto von Bismarck’s legacy, 200 years after his birth.

Dr. Trifkovic, how would Bismarck react if he could see today’s map of Europe?
Trifkovic: He would be initially shocked that the German eastern border now runs along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Otto von Bismarck was a true Prussian. In his view, cities such as Königsberg, Danzig or Breslau were more properly “German” than those in the Rhineland. His first impression therefore would be that Germany has “shifted” to the West, and that an important social and cultural aspect of his Germany has been lost. Once he’d overcome this initial shock, he would look at the map of Europe again in more detail. The considerable distance between Germany and Russia would probably amaze him. What in Bismarck’s time was the border between Germany and Russia is now a “Greater Poland” which did not exist at his time. And former provinces of the Russian Empire are now independent states: the three Baltic republics, Belarus and Ukraine. Bismarck would probably see this as an unwelcome “buffer zone” between Germany and Russia. He had always placed a great emphasis on a strong German-Russian alliance and would no doubt wonder how all this could happen. He would probably consider how to bring back to life such a continental partnership today. That would be a diplomatic challenge worthy of him: how to forge an alliance between Berlin and Moscow without the agitated smaller states in-between throwing their spanners into the works.

PayPal’s reported purchase of Israeli cybersecurity firm CyActive is the latest example of the growing influence of the Israeli cyber market on the U.S.

According to multiple Israeli media outlets, the secure online payment service is dropping $60 million to purchase CyActive, which predicts what malware hackers are going to invent next.

The Israeli cyber market has exploded in recent years, analysts explained to The Hill.
“I wouldn’t be lying if I said I saw two new cybersecurity startups a week,” said Israeli-based venture capitalist Adam Fisher of Bessemer Venture Partners.

Israel’s Unit 8200 within the Israel Defense Forces has trained world-class hackers that are starting to enter the private sector after finishing their required military service.

“In Israel the best and the brightest are going through the intelligence services and then looking for ways to build something commercial afterward,” said David Cowan, also a venture capitalist with Bessemer, who has been travelling to Israel searching for cyber talent since 1995.

While Silicon Valley is throwing money at former National Security Agency (NSA) employees, many NSA cyber staffers are career government workers.

The Obama administration may not have much use for federal law or for Congress’s constitutional role in providing advice on, determining whether to consent to, and enacting any legislation necessary to implement international agreements. But it exhibits cloying reverence for a fatwa — a sharia law edict — issued by a jurist who runs a regime that is the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terror.

Even when the fatwa is a patent hoax.

Secretary of State Kerry, like his predecessor Hillary Clinton and his boss President Obama, took time out from his tirades against Senate Republicans’ exposition of the Constitution to praise the fatwa the administration claims that Iran’s top mullah, Ayatollah Khamenei, issued against nuclear weapons. As the Weekly Standard’s Jeryl Bier reports, Kerry, in the course of addressing the administration’s negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, told the press during a visit to Egypt:

As you all know, Iran says it doesn’t want a nuclear weapon, and that is a very welcome statement that the Supreme Leader has, in fact, incorporated into a fatwa. And we have great respect — great respect — for the religious importance of a fatwa.

Each for its own reasons, the world’s major powers have decided to accept Iran as a regional hegemon, I wrote March 4 in Asia Times, leaving Israel and the Sunni Arabs in isolated opposition. The global consensus on behalf of Iranian hegemony is now coming clearly into focus. Although the motivations of different players are highly diverse, there is a unifying factor driving the consensus: the Obama administration’s determination to achieve a strategic rapprochement with Tehran at any cost. America’s competitors are constrained to upgrade their relations with Iran in order to compete with Washington.

The Obama administration’s assessment of Iran’s intentions is to positive that Iranian official sources quote in their own propaganda. As Jeryl Bier observed at the Weekly Standard, the just-released Threat Assessment Report of the Director of National Intelligence makes no mention of Iran’s support for terrorism, in stark contrast to the explicit citation of Iranian terrorism in the three prior annual reports. The omission of Iran’s terrorist activities is noteworthy. What the report actually says is even more disturbing. It praises Iran with faint damn:

Despite Iran’s intentions to dampen sectarianism, build responsive partners, and deescalate tensions with Saudi Arabia, Iranian leaders—particularly within the security services—are pursuing policies with negative secondary consequences for regional stability and potentially for Iran. Iran’s actions to protect and empower Shia communities are fueling growing fears and sectarian responses.

The government paid out $124.7 billion in potentially bogus payments last year, the government’s chief watchdog said Monday, blaming a controversial tax credit for the poor as well as increased bad payments in Medicare and Medicaid.

One major problem is tracking when Americans die — the Social Security Administration admitted last week that its rolls are filled with names of more than 6 million folks who are listed as 112 years of age or older.

The Government Accountability Office said Social Security has trouble maintaining the Death Master File, and other agencies have difficulties in getting the information to update their own files and halt payments to those no longer alive to collect benefits.

“I am predisposed to believe that there is no great future for the Jews in Europe, because evidence to support this belief is accumulating so quickly. But I am also predisposed to think this because I am an American Jew—which is to say, a person who exists because his ancestors made a run for it when they could.”

For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews. Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice.

“All comes from the Jew; all returns to the Jew.”

— Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France

I. The Scourge of Our Time

The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Holocaust survivors, is an accomplished, even gifted, pessimist. To his disciples, he is a Jewish Zola, accusing France’s bien-pensant intellectual class of complicity in its own suicide. To his foes, he is a reactionary whose nostalgia for a fairy-tale French past is induced by an irrational fear of Muslims. Finkielkraut’s cast of mind is generally dark, but when we met in Paris in early January, two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he was positively grim.

“My French identity is reinforced by the very large number of people who openly declare, often now with violence, their hostility to French values and culture,” he said. “I live in a strange place. There is so much guilt and so much worry.” We were seated at a table in his apartment, near the Luxembourg Gardens. I had come to discuss with him the precarious future of French Jewry, but, as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo killers seemed to be reaching its conclusion, we had become fixated on the television.

Perhaps it was because Jodi Rudoren had the day off on Monday that Paul Krugman took up her usual cudgel and declared that “Israel does less to lift people out of poverty than any other advanced country – yes, even less than the U.S.” (Israel’s Gilded Cage, NYT, 3/16). Here are some facts to consider before you accept Mr. Krugman’s biased tirade, designed to take a final jab at Prime Minister Netanyahu right before the election. According to the UN”s Human Development Index, Israel ranks 19th among 187 world nations – just shy of the top 10% – for standard of living, with one of the highest life expectancies at birth. Israel provides compulsory health care that is competitive with the best of first world countries and is one of the leading innovators in the fields of medicine, bio-technology and scientific research. In the 67 years since its establishment as a state by the United Nations, Israel has absorbed and assimilated over 3 million immigrants from 90 different countries spanning the globe and has managed to achieve a literacy rate of 97%. Military service is mandatory for all immigrants of the appropriate age – another guarantee that they will learn the language and achieve fluency in it.

The Truth About the Cuban ‘Embargo’ — on The Glazov Gang​

Humberto Fontova​ exposes Obama’s rescue of a fascist tyranny.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/the-truth-about-the-cuban-embargo-on-the-glazov-gang/

I wll be on vacation and unable to post daily Ruthfully Yours.

A lady struts and worries and sleepwalks and shakes her cell phone……

Out, damn’d E-mail! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky.—What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
power to account?—