RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some things can’t be fixed. I learned this painful lesson the hard way when I was 4 years old. I had my heart set on a toy steam shovel. A tiny bucket at the end of a string could be reeled in to lift a teaspoon of mud. A little boy could build an interstate highway system with it.

My mother bought it in October for Christmas, putting it in layaway and paying for it with a dime or three nickels and sometimes a quarter at a time. She was as pleased as I was on Christmas morning when she saw my face. I took it out at once to the alley in the back of the house, eager to make it work. After digging a small hole in the ground, I hurried inside to see the rest of Christmas. When I returned to the steam shovel an hour later, it lay in a tiny heap of tin and cotton string, as flat as a pancake. I looked up through my tears to see a large truck disappearing down the alley.

I was not really worried. My mother would fix it. She fixed everything — a missing button, a skinned knee, a broken flashlight. She could fix a broken heart. I carried the remains into the house and handed them over. I couldn’t understand her tears, but she knew she couldn’t fix it, and had no more dimes and nickels for a replacement Christmas. Some things can’t be fixed, not even by a mother.

(If you remember, Dr. Swamy was a popular and well-respected economics professor who taught summer classes at Harvard for many years. While in his native India, he wrote an editorial for an Indian newspaper containing his ideas on fighting Islamic terrorism. Harvard, the recipient of millions of dollars of Saudi largess, promptly fired Professor Swamy). – Janet Levy

Most of our temples and holy spots have already been targeted by these terrorists just because these are sacred to Hindus. What harm did Hindus do to Islam that they should be targeted like this? In the answer to this question lies the concept of the divide or ‘fault lines’ as Huntington calls it.

Harvard’s Samuel Hunting-ton is famous for his thesis on the ‘Clash of Civilisations’. In a simplified formulation it is this: The Cold War of economic and political ideology is no more relevant because of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. And hence, according to Huntington, it will be replaced by a new conflict caused by a civilisational divide induced by religious fundamentalism. Christians, Jews and Hindus will have to band together on one side of the divide, to confront terrorist Islamic ideology. China faces the same problems with Islam, but it has been kept under wraps and away from media glare. China will be for now a passive partner in this divide.

Confrontation, as in the Cold War, will be inevitable. If indeed Christians, Jews and Hindus do forge an active alliance, Islamic terror will be no match in the ensuing context and confrontation. Such an alliance is being facilitated ironically by Osama Bin laden and his ilk against whom it will be directed!! Osama, Zarqawi, Moussauvi, and others Islamic terrorists are already propagating that Christians, Jews and Hindus are enemies of Islam. Hindus are already targeted in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and within our nation, such as in Kashmir and Mau just because they are Hindus. Recently, in Doda, Hindus were first segregated from Muslim residents, and then shot dead mercilessly by Pakistan based Islamic terrorists. Most of our temples and holy spots have already been targeted by these terrorists just because these are sacred to Hindus. What harm did Hindus do to Islam that they should be targeted like this? In the answer to this question lies the concept of the divide or ‘fault lines’ as Huntington calls it.

Posts tagged ‘How would Americans react to this. Would they be asked to make peace and allow Arabs a country right next door?’
No matter how crazed and brain-washed, Could you throw a Firebomb at this little girl?

My personal *Kishinev by Vic Rosenthal
…Do we, civilized people, understand what it means to be in a struggle with barbarians? Do we understand that the choices are victory or the end of our state, death and dispersal? But we seem to care more about Arab rights than our own right to exist. We are at a turning point. We need to choose between victory and destruction. There are no other alternatives.

You probably heard about the 11-year old girl who was critically burned on Thursday when the car she was riding in was struck by a firebomb thrown by an Arab terrorist. And you certainly know about the attack on the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem in which four worshipers and a policeman were brutally murdered. You probably know about the several incidents in which Arabs drove their vehicles into groups of Jews, including one in which a 3-month old baby and a tourist from Ecuador were murdered, and another in which the driver got out and ran back to his not-yet-dead victim and cut her throat.

If you follow these things, you may also know that Jews are afraid to go to the historic Mount of Olives Cemetery in Jerusalem because of continued violent attacks on buses, cars and people. You may also have heard about the daily rock-throwing attacks on the light rail in Jerusalem, against Jewish-driven cars on the roads in Judea and Samaria, the acid thrown on a Jewish family, etc. I could go on. And on.

The horror of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom was a turning point for many Jews, including Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Jew-hatred was finally seen to be implacable and a permanent feature of Diaspora life, and only a complete separation from the haters by the establishment of a Jewish State and the relocation of the Jewish people to it could be a permanent solution.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/oklahoma-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand
James Lankford (R)
Was a U.S Congressman for Oklahoma District 5
http://jameslankford.com/ http://lankford.house.gov/
http://www.ontheissues.org/house/James_Lankford.htm**
Rated -4 by AAI, indicating anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)
HOT BUTTON ISSUES
ENERGY Voted for construction of the KeystoneXL Pipeline. As a nation, we currently spend over $2 billion a day importing over 42 percent of our oil from foreign countries. Some oil exporting nations are unfriendly towards the United States with unstable governments that control the supply and pricing of some of the largest oil reserves in the world. The United States is the top producer of natural gas in the world, and we should have the opportunity to responsibly sell our abundant resources to energy-hungry friendly nations and allies. According to a recently released study by the National Economic Research Associates (NERA), American natural gas production from 2012 to 2040 is predicted to increase overall by 39%. The NERA report concluded that the U.S. increase in GDP for exporting LNG could range from $1.5 billion in 2018 to $36 billion in 2038.
HEALTHCARE Repealing the Government Takeover of Health Care and Replacing with Patient-Oriented Solutions
JOBS AND ECONOMY America is at a crossroads and House Republicans are committed to taking every possible step to spur job creation and get our economy back on track so that Americans can do what they do best: create, innovate and lead.

Coburn, a True Statesman, Steps Down The only problem with the Senate’s “Dr. No” is that he’s retiring.

Dozens of members of Congress will be retiring next month, and some should be missed. But there is only one Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma senator the Christian Science Monitor has dubbed “a rabble-rousing statesman.”

Those two qualities together are rare in politicians, but they found a happy union in the 66-year-old obstetrician who is leaving the Senate early next month to battle prostate cancer. On the one hand, Coburn never retreated on his core values: He is staunchly pro-life, for traditional marriage, and resistant to all manner of fads from climate-change regulation to mindless intervention overseas. As the Senate’s “Dr. No” from 2004 to today, he held up hundreds of special-interest boondoggles and end-runs around common sense. At the same time, he maintained a standard of honest dealing and integrity that many more in Congress should aspire to.

This month, he took to the Senate floor to make his farewell remarks. He reminded his colleagues that they take an oath to “protect the United States of America, its Constitution, and its liberties.” What’s not included in that oath, he warned, is any mention that senators have a duty to provide benefits to their state.

“It’s nice to be able to do things for your state, but that isn’t our charge,” he said. “Our charge is to protect the future of our country by upholding the Constitution and ensuring the liberty that’s guaranteed there is protected and preserved.”

It was that desire that drove Tom Coburn to first run from an Oklahoma House district in 1994 that had never elected a Republican. A physician, he continued to deliver babies while in office and forced the Ethics Committee to back down from its contention that such outside work was against House rules. Although wildly popular back home, Coburn retired in 2000 after three terms because he feared he might succumb to “Potomac Fever” if he stayed longer. He joked that many of his former colleagues are suffering from an addiction. “Power is like morphine,” he wrote in his book Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders into Insiders. “It dulls the senses, impairs judgment, and leads politicians to make choices that damage their own character and the machinery of democracy.”

North Korea supposedly hacked Sony and exposed hundreds of embarrassing behind-the-scenes e-mails, humiliating the company into giving in to blackmail by delaying for a time the release of its new film Interview. Perhaps the murderous North Korean thugocracy thought that, by revealing the innermost illiberal thoughts of the global corporate elite, it might win adulation commensurate with that accorded the liberal crusader Julian Assange — the heartthrob hacker who exposed U.S. government secrets and the private musings of the ruling American hierarchy.

Kim Jong-un’s hackers were supposedly displeased by the Sony Corporation’s unkind depiction of North Korea’s nightmarish dystopia. For a while at least, Hollywood backed down and acceded to the new reality that a foreign country can dictate the scope of artistic expression to U.S. residents.

Now another nuclear power, Pakistan, is angry at Hollywood. According to Pakistani diplomats, Showtime’s series Homeland failed to note the supposedly liberal, humanitarian, and compassionate nature of the Pakistani government. American filmmakers were faulted for making no effort to highlight the lush greenery and general upbeat atmosphere of underappreciated, tony Islamabad.

Unlike crazy North Korea, Pakistan is not necessarily just blowing smoke. For years, elements of the Pakistani intelligence services have worked hand-in-glove with al-Qaeda–affiliated terrorists to thwart American efforts to build consensual government in neighboring Afghanistan. It was no accident that Osama bin Laden lived with impunity for years right under the noses of Pakistani authorities.

Not to be left out, Egypt’s junta is likewise furious at another new Hollywood film, Exodus. In fact, the junta just banned Exodus from Egypt. Apparently, the censors believe that the movie is an effort by Jewish movie moguls to unduly glorify the ancient Jews and deprecate the pharaohs — as part of a Zionist plot to champion Israel at the expense of its Islamic neighbors. Not long ago, Egypt and other Arab countries banned Noah, on the grounds that its portrayal of Noah, whom Islam considers a prophet, was blasphemous.

Having continually offered reports including eyewitness dispatches about the ever-receding tide of Western civilization, I think I probably owe a little escape – or, better, escapism – to readers, some respite from reality. At least until the end of the holidays.

After sorting through the vaults for some diverting holiday fare, here is a festival’s worth of A-list movies set in some of the great cities of the world – those same places that often serve as a backdrop to the ongoing multi-pronged war on the West that, alas, characterizes our era. But enough of that for now.

Given the gloom, some parameters. First, freshness. While these movies are what you could certainly call Cinema Antique, some of them may well prove to be new discoveries. In other words, no “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Casablanca” here – although “Casablanca” wouldn’t make this particular cut because of my second criterion: total uplift.

There are no world wars brewing in these pictures, no bad cases of rotten luck. And no poignant states of marginal truth.

Let’s kick off this cinematic tour in celluloid New York City with “Easy Living” (1937), an especially carefree A-list romantic comedy written by Preston Sturges about what happens when career girl Jean Arthur crosses paths with a Wall Street millionaire (who never heard of subprime “toxic paper”) played by Edward Arnold. Ray Milland portrays the handsome son. And if you haven’t seen “The Band Wagon” (1953), an all-time best musical with songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz and starring Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Jack Buchanan and Oscar Levant (who built a comedic career on his neurosis), it will lend a high note to any holiday. And speaking of holidays, New York City and escape (at least to Connecticut), “Holiday Inn” (1942) combines all three as Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Virginia Dale and Marjorie Reynolds sort out their tangled stage careers and love lives with help from Irving Berlin songs and comic relief from Astaire’s agent Walter Abel.

Americans are the only people in the world who go to see movies in which they are the villains.

Russians stayed away from Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit with its Slavic villains (though Chinese audiences liked it well enough). And movies with Chinese villains can’t get made because the People’s Republic has more devastating penalties for offending studios than a mere hacking. Instead of leaking private emails, the studios simply aren’t allowed to release their movies in the world’s second biggest film market.

Hollywood’s titans take a break from patting themselves on the back for their commitment to freedom of expression and eagerly rush to work with the censors of the Chinese Communist Party to make their movies acceptable to China.

Muslim villains can’t appear in movies at all since September 11. The last time a movie had a villain named Mohammed, the filmmaker ended up hauled out of his home and tossed into jail. Hillary Clinton, Hollywood’s choice, had assured grieving Benghazi family members that instead of punishing their son’s killers, she would “have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”

With script control like that, it’s no wonder that you don’t see many Muslim movie villains. Not when Hillary is planning her presidential victory tour.

What does all that leave Hollywood scriptwriters with? Aliens, comic book villains and North Korea.

North Korea is a perfect villain because it isn’t a film market. Even possession of an American film can mean death. You can’t release the next weepy melodrama or comic book movie there which makes it fair game. And so a small nasty country with no sense of humor became the favorite movie villain of a gutless entertainment industry.

James Bond took on North Koreans in Die Another Day, the North Koreans invaded the White House in Olympus Has Fallen (or rather a radical faction of North Koreans, even before the Sony hack Hollywood was staking out a cautious position) and took over America in the Red Dawn remake.

After cop-hating lynch mobs got what they were chanting for – the execution of two New York police officers – there was widespread disgust and anger among decent, sane Americans. Among others, there was indifference, amusement, and even celebration.

Brandeis University student Khadijah Lynch, for example, an undergraduate representative for the Department of African and Afro-American Studies, took to Twitter to express that she found the murders of NYPD officers Rafael Ramos, a Latino father of two, and Wenjian Liu, an Asian-American newlywed, to be hilarious: “lmao, all i just really dont have sympathy for the cops who were shot. i hate this racist f**king country,” read the junior’s illiterate tweet.

Fellow Brandeis student Daniel Mael, a Horowitz Freedom Center student leader and TruthRevolt reporter, took to TruthRevolt.com to publicize Lynch’s tweet and others of hers like it, such as these:

“i have no sympathy for the nypd officers who were murdered today”
“what the f**k even IS ‘non-violence’”
“ya’ll out here waiting for a white messiah, im waiting for Malcolm X to return.”
“the fact that black people have not burned this country down is beyond me”
“I am in riot mode. F**k this f**king country”
“I need to get my gun license. asap.”

My compatriots Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have inflicted more damage on the reputation of Michael E Mann’s global-warming hockey stick than anybody else on the planet. So, when one finds oneself being sued by the litigious Dr Mann, a prudent person pays close attention to anything the Messrs Mac have to say about the case. Steve McIntyre listened to the oral arguments in the DC Court of Appeals a month ago, and was not happy with what he heard. He has now written an extensive post on the subject, which I highly recommend, except for the first sentence:

I have an audio copy of the oral argument in Mann v Steyn…

Not to be pedantic but in fact it was Mann vs Everybody But Steyn. A year ago, my co-defendants National Review, Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute decided to appeal Judge Weisberg’s me-too of the previous judge Combs Greene’s denial of their anti-SLAPP order. I declined to join them on the grounds that, as the previous impenetrable sentence suggests, the DC court system had made such a procedural train wreck of the case that we might as well get on with the trial the fraudulent Mann claimed to want, and be done with it. The District of Columbia’s new anti-SLAPP law had clearly failed on its first significant outing, but, given that once this case is over I intend never again to set foot in that hellish metropolis, that’s hardly my problem.

So my three co-defendants went ahead without me, and at the end of November the troika of DC judges finally got around to hearing oral arguments on the matter. Steve McIntyre was not impressed:

One of the things often under-estimated by those readers (especially at WUWT) who are bloodthirsty for litigation as a means of settling scores is that it’s not easy for litigation lawyers to fully assimilate a complicated history. In the oral argument of the anti-SLAPP motion, both the lawyers and judges seem too often to be playing blind man’s bluff with the facts, making a decision both unpredictable and probably somewhat random.