RUTHFULLY YOURS

The truth is, Turkey’s longer-than-half a-century journey to full EU membership offers volumes of thick picture books full of similar smiling faces, most of them no longer alive. But both the club and the applicant know that Turkey has been dragged planets away from the EU in terms of culture and socio-politics. Turkey is sometimes even hostile to Europe.

While the Europeans wasted their time in self-deception – that Turkey’s Islamists were in fact pro-EU, post-Islamist reformers – Turkey was implementing a plan to turn into, not a member of, but a Muslim challenge to what its leaders privately view as a hostile “Christendom.”

Turkey, under Islamist rule, has keenly pretended that it wants EU membership, while in reality deeply disliking “Christian” culture; and the EU leaders have pretended that Turkey would one day join the club, while knowing that it would not.

Judging from fancy, Kodak-moment photos that appeared in the press over the past week as well as related statements from European Union [EU] and Turkish bigwigs, one could be tempted to think that things are coming up roses between Ankara and Brussels. Facts, as often, are quite different from what smiling faces and repeated optimism reveal.

On Dec. 6, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, accompanied by nine Turkish cabinet members, visited his Greek counterpart, Antonis Samaras, in Athens, where the leaders of these traditional Aegean rivals happily glossed over major differences and expressed support for closer relations.

Davutoglu said that Turkey supports the return of the Parthenon marbles to Greece. That was sweet. But no one cares about whether Turkey does or does not support the return of the ancient marbles. And Samaras said he supported Turkey’s quest for EU membership, provided it fulfilled the entry requirements. That was sweet, too, except that Greece has been repeating the same wording and Turkey has been fulfilling the entry requirements since 1987.

We have heard over and over again that America is still the world’s fountain of innovation, the home of fracking and Facebook. The two “F’s” of American innovation are about to become one: The collapse of oil prices portends a collapse of the shale boom. High-yield energy bond yields have soared from 5% to 12% in the past few months, and investors are fighting to get to the door. Most unconventional oil and gas projects are unprofitable at $60 a barrel, and that’s where oil will trade for the next year or two.

Facebook is a clever gimmick, but it doesn’t do much for productivity.

It doesn’t help to crank up the theme from Rocky and chant, “We’re Number One!” We are in trouble, with a stagnating economy and falling incomes, and we are about to be in much, much worse trouble.

What’s left of the U.S. economy net of alternative hydrocarbons doesn’t look impressive. Here are a few facts about American capital investment:

Take out the energy sector, and capital investment by S&P companies remains 8% below the 2008 peak. We never had an investment recovery.

Take out the top six companies in the S&P technology sector (IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Micron), and S&P tech capital expenditures are down by a 40% since 2000 and down by 25% since 2013. The top six account for 75% of all capital expenditures among S&P tech companies (in 2000, it was less than 50%). All but the quasi-monopoly tech giants show an investment depression.

In deflated dollars, nondefense capital goods orders from American manufacturers are 20% below the 2000 peak and 5% below 2008.

The problem with a victim culture is that so many people want to join the ranks of victimhood that eventually you run short of oppressors. As I say in my new book (personally autographed copies of which make a Christmas gift your loved one will cherish forever), Elizabeth Warren is the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out, but a dubious claim to be one 32nd Cherokee was enough to persuade Harvard Law School to promote her as their first “woman of color”. No wonder so many Democrats prefer her to Hillary: The first “woman of color” in the Oval Office! The first Cherokee!

If you’re not fortunate enough to have a great-great-great-grandmother who’s listed as Cherokee in the online transcription of an 1894 marriage application, what do you do? Lena Dunham is an upper-middle-class child of white privilege who’s had a charmed life, but she’s a victim, too. According to her new memoir, she was raped by “Barry”, the token conservative at Oberlin. The real-life Barry the Conservative denies raping her, and Random House has been forced to issue a statement “regretting the confusion” and to cover his legal bills, which he’d been paying for by “crowd-funding”. The publisher couldn’t resist a parting sneer:

We are offering to pay the fees Mr. Minc has billed his client to date. Our offer will allow Mr. Minc and his client to donate all of the crowd-funding raised to not-for-profit organizations assisting survivors of rape and sexual assault.

Because even if Barry the Conservative never raped Lena Dunham, odds are he’s raped someone else, right? As Ann Coulter put it:

How about donating it to organizations that assist survivors of false rape accusations?

Rather than an epidemic of campus rape, there seems to be some sort of psychological inversion of “white flight”, in which untold numbers feel the need to flee their bland middle-class suburbs and pitch up in edgier ghettos. You’ll have noticed the recent uptick in news of the transgendered – indeed, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, author of the now discredited University of Virginia gang-rape story, was previously reporting on the epidemic of trans rape (Ms Erdely appears to be the Rape Correspondent of Rolling Stone). I note there are some three times as many male-to-female transgenders as there are female-to-male. So all that “gender fluidity” is a vast net transfer from the male brutalizer sector to the female victim sector. At some point it would seem likely to become a flood. After all, it’s not so difficult to imagine, a fake gang-rape story or three down the line, elite universities requiring gender reassignment as a condition of continued male admission. In some sense, the swollen ranks of the transgendered seem to have intuited that the jig is up for guys. Might as well check out of the guy business entirely. I’m thinking of pitching Marvel Comics a new superhero group featuring a transwoman, an ambigender, a pangender, an intergender, a bigender and a 2-spirited called Ex-Men.

In the last week or so, we’ve been marking the fifth anniversary of Climategate’s fascinating glimpse into how the science got settled. The subordination of the scientific method to ideological goals is well summed up by the headline of Matt Ridley’s column – “Policy-based evidence making”:

As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith. Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough. What’s worse is the reluctance of scientific leaders to criticise the bad apples. Science as a philosophy is in good health; science as an institution increasingly stinks.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics published a report last week that found evidence of scientists increasingly “employing less rigorous research methods” in response to funding pressures. A 2009 survey found that almost 2 per cent of scientists admitting that they have fabricated results; 14 per cent say that their colleagues have done so.

Lord Ridley gives three recent examples of “poor scientific practice”. Here’s the second:

Last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 — with an error range of one tenth of a degree. True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that.

An inspiring black military hero who deserves the Medal of Honor. Where is the Congressional Black Caucus?
At a time of so much racial strife and discord, we should never lose sight of the fact that our military forces were the first, and remain the best, example of a fully integrated America. Yes there are problems from time to time, but there are few other places in our society where blacks, whites and Hispanics have learned to live and work together with a common mission as in our military. And that is an example that we seldom hear about from our media.

Instead we are treated by our sensationalist media to endless examples of lawlessness in black communities and the vitriol of the race-baiters like Farrakhan, vowing “We’ll tear this go**amn country up!” and unending charges of racism leveled against whites who question the values of black culture. However, we all, black, white, brown and whatever, should keep in mind the reality that we have family members out there serving shoulder to shoulder around this world, with some of them dying in the process.Such is the case of Sergeant First Class Alwyn C. Cashe, who, on October 17, 2005, sacrificed his life to save those of the troops in his care. With his unit under enemy fire, SFC Cashe, his uniform soaked with fuel from a roadside explosion which ruptured the fuel tank of his Bradley Fighting Vehicle and set it afire, repeatedly entered the fiery interior to rescue his men who were trapped inside. Even with his uniform burned away and his flesh ablaze, SFC Cashe managed to pull six soldiers from the flaming interior. Four of them later succumbed to their burn wounds as did, some three weeks later, SFC Cashe.

For his incredibly selfless valor, SFC Cashe was awarded the Silver Star, an award that seems to many of us in the military and veteran communities, insufficient to the events of that terrible day. Colonels have been known to be awarded the Silver Star for monitoring and directing ground combat from the relative comfort of an overhead helicopter. I would wager that among all warriors, soldiers, sailors, aviators, etc., fear of death by burning or being horribly injured and disfigured by fire is greater than any other dread associated with combat. Yet SFC Cashe overcame that fundamental fear and charged directly into the flames repeatedly to save his young soldiers. A Silver Star seems a bit inadequate to reward that level of courage and self-sacrifice.

http://www.southampton.ac.uk/law/news/events/2014/04/09_conference_international_law_and_the_state_of_israel.page

Conference: International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism

17 – 19 April 2015

This conference will be the first of its kind and constitutes a ground-breaking historical event on the road towards justice and enduring peace in historic Palestine. It is unique because it concerns the legitimacy in International Law of the Jewish state of Israel. Rather than focusing on Israeli actions in the 1967 Occupied Territories, the conference will focus on exploring themes of Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism; all of which are posed by Israel’s very nature.

The conference aims to explore the relatedness of the suffering and injustice in Palestine to the foundation and protection of a state of such nature and asks what role International Law should play in the situation.

The conference will take place over a whole weekend and will involve leading thinkers: scholars from law, politics, philosophy, theology, anthropology, cultural studies history and other connected disciplines.

The key speakers and various panels will diagnose the legal position with regard to the nature of Israel thus enabling a much needed platform for scholarly debate and disagreement.

For further information and to register please visit our conference website.

NOBODY TELLS IT BETTER….RSK

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Yoram Ettinger, Jerusalem, “Second Thought: US-Israel Initiative”

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Israelis wake up, your land is not a piece of real estate as Isaac Herzog, Zippee Livni, Yair Lapid, Eitan Cabel and the like of them, and to an extent, even Benjamin Netanyahu see it to be.

Israelis have learned that the Arabs dig tunnels in “their territory” that extend beyond the ambiguous border line they have with the state of Israel into the sovereign land of Israel. These tunnels are to serve as terror tool from which Israel’s enemies can infiltrate her land, abduct, terrorize and cause harm to civilians.

Now Israelis are experiencing political tunnels dug under each politician’s chair to try unseat their political opponent while the political tunnel is serving their ego and self-grandeur and while they are weakening Israel’s democracy and look the fools they are in the eyes of the entire world and more so Israel’s enemies. Yes, the enemies of Israel are watching the political charade or circus, you choose.

Leading this political rebellion are Zippee Livni-Isaac Herzog who formed a marriage for the purpose to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu. I call her “Zippee” because one must zip her mouth. This woman has proven to be unfit to serve in a government already then when she served as Israel’s foreign minister. She however created a new term in the political arena; she is a political harlot who switched 4 parties and four ideologies in only nine years. Who, in his or her clean sane mind can trust such a person?

Right now Netanyahu is the best Israel has to offer to lead the country and that attests to the available poor political menu. But Netanyahu is better than all other items on the menu.

Livni and her like on the Left regularly travel to Europe to meet their European counterparts who, I will not hesitate to say, allocate to their Israeli spokespeople financial support, and together they scheme how to pressure, subvert, undermine and delegitimize Israel’s stance in the world.

My Own “Enemies List”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Not necessarily. Remember what happened when FDR allied himself with Josef Stalin to defeat Nazi Germany. At war’s end, Stalin gobbled up half of Europe with FDR’s leave. The U.S. was saddled with a costly “cold war” with our former “friend” Soviet Russia for nearly half a century. See Diana West’s path-breaking book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, for details, or here, about how “mainstream” historians deny the truth of West’s thesis. The USSR was never a friend of America.

The proverb suggests that two opposing parties can or should work together against a common enemy. Although it is often described as an Arabic proverb, there is no evidence of such an origin.

But now I can say that the friends of my enemies are without question or a shade of doubt my enemies, as well.

To begin with, every one of them is a liar.

Daniel Greenfield, in his December 12th FrontPage column, “Lying in Post-Truth America,” prefaced his comments with a reprise of Bill Clinton’s lies about Monica Lewinsky, then remarked:

Clinton’s antics set the stage for a current administration which can never be caught in a lie because it’s lying all the time. Obama and his people don’t just lie, they lie about the lies and then they lie about those lies. Bringing them in to testify just clogs the filters with an extra layer of lies.

Invite [Jonathan] Gruber to testify about the time that he admitted that the administration had been lying and the only thing that will happen is more lies being told by a man who is there only because he lied….

Journalists repeatedly dismissed ObamaCare scandals by arguing that no one could have taken Obama’s claims at face value anyway. When Obama promised Americans that they could keep their doctors, the housewife in Topeka, the freelance programmer in San Francisco and the geologist in Tulsa were supposed to be as knowing as the Washington press corps and realize that he didn’t mean it….

SLALOM OR SHALOM? RSK
“I laminate the siddurim,” says Rabbi Robbi of the prayer books she carries in a backpack on the slopes. “Otherwise, the pages get too wet.”

Picture this prayer service.

The temperature is -11ºC, the surrounding peaks reach 3,700 meters. Below is a sea of dramatic peaks and valleys blanketed in snow. The rabbi is leading the congregation in the singing of Mi Kamocha, “Who is like You, Lord among the mighty? Who is like You, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, doing wonders?” This is Crested Butte, Colorado, a home rule community in the American Rockies. Home rule means you can make your own, and Rabbi Robbi Sherwin does.

I met her this week because she came to Hadassah University Medical Center, clad in cowboy boots and a brown rodeo skirt with a guitar over her shoulder, using her vacation time to sing to terror survivors. But when she’s leading prayers at 3,000 meters up, both she and the congregants are on skis.

A stickler for punctilious prayer, I’m trying to work out the choreography: stepping forward and back, bowing, rising on tiptoes. Then I think of the exhilaration of communicating with the Creator so close to the heavenly domain, experiencing the surprisingly pleasant and theologically appropriate sensation of being tiny in relation to God’s overwhelming universe.

Among those praying are the regular members of B’nai Butte congregation, and tourists who have come to ski and snowboard in Colorado. Many would never walk into a synagogue – but this mountaintop synagogue doesn’t require walking into.