RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the hard-bitten culture of the U.S. Army, praying soldiers were shunned and professionally unrewarded.

When she heard that “Stonewall” Jackson had died in Virginia at the midpoint of the Civil War, Martha Ann Haskins wrote in her diary: “I felt as miserable as if I could shut myself in some dark place where I could see no one and there cry, weep, mourn until the war was over.” At the time, Haskins was a 16-year-old schoolgirl far away in Tennessee, but her wail of mourning was anything but solitary. Jackson’s death occasioned an outpouring of grief throughout the South.

Little wonder, given Jackson’s legendary feats on the battlefield. But the man who occasioned such grief was a bundle of contradictions, and some of his most striking qualities were far from flattering. By all accounts he was a very unsocial man, who (according to his staffer Henry Kyd Douglas ) “kept himself always very much apart.” At the dinner table, he was “as grave as a signpost” and any staffer who ventured to tell “some little jokes” had to be sure they were “very plain ones for him to see them.”

Though Jackson’s soldiers were in awe of him, he was a camp-and-battlefield tyrant who arrested and court-martialed subordinates for the slightest disappointment of his expectations. J. William Jones, an army chaplain and biographer of Robert E. Lee, believed that Jackson “probably put more officers under arrest than all others of our generals combined.” In August 1862, Jackson put a brigadier-general and five regimental commanders under arrest after discovering that some of their men had purloined, for firewood, a few rails from “a certain worm-fence at a little distance.”
But Jackson was also, for all his maniacal furies, a man of unusually intense Christian piety. James Power Smith, a member of Jackson’s staff, recalled that he “was that rare man . . . to whom religion was everything.” Beverley Tucker Lacy, a Presbyterian minister who served as a chaplain-at-large for Jackson’s troops, remembered that Jackson thought “every act of man’s life should be a religious act,” even “washing, clothing, eating.” Religion opened up in Jackson what amounted to a different personality. His prayers were “unlike his common quick & stern emphasis,” Lacy recorded. They were “tender, soft, pleading” and full of “confession of unworthiness.” He prayed with a self-effacement that carried “the doctrine of predestination to the borders of positive fatalism.”

This piety made an odd man odder still, since the profession Jackson had chosen for himself did not, at the time, look favorably on soldiers fiddling with religion. Jackson was a West Point graduate (Class of 1846) and fought with well-noticed valor as a junior officer in the Mexican War. But in the hard-bitten atmosphere of the Army, praying soldiers were often socially shunned and professionally unrewarded. Jackson, though, rose to a generalship: From the time he was given independent command of a minor Confederate field army in July 1861 until his death in May 1863, he managed to execute some of the most extraordinary military operations in American hist

This is the outcome of charlatans who flood the internet with false information about vaccines, statins, medications and so called “natural supplements” which often interfere with certain critical medicines….to an uninformed and gullible public…..rsk
Whooping cough, mumps and measles are making an alarming comeback, thanks to seriously misguided parents.

Almost 8,000 cases of pertussis, better known as whooping cough, have been reported to California’s Public Health Department so far this year. More than 250 patients have been hospitalized, nearly all of them infants and young children, and 58 have required intensive care. Why is this preventable respiratory infection making a comeback? In no small part thanks to low vaccination rates, as a story earlier this month in the Hollywood Reporter pointed out.

The conversation about vaccination has changed. In the 1990s, when new vaccines were introduced, the news media were obsessed with the notion that vaccines might be doing more harm than good. The measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism, we were told. Thimerosal, an ethyl-mercury containing preservative in some vaccines, might cause developmental delays. Too many vaccines given too soon, the stories went, might overwhelm a child’s immune system.

Then those stories disappeared. One reason was that study after study showed that these concerns were ill-founded. Another was that the famous 1998 report claiming to show a link between vaccinations and autism was retracted by The Lancet, the medical journal that had published it. The study was not only spectacularly wrong, as more than a dozen studies have shown, but also fraudulent. The author, British surgeon Andrew Wakefield, has since been stripped of his medical license.

But the damage was done. Countless parents became afraid of vaccines. As a consequence, many parents now choose to delay, withhold, separate or space out vaccines. Some don’t vaccinate their children at all. A 2006 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that between 1991 and 2004, the percentage of children whose parents had chosen to opt out of vaccines increased by 6% a year, resulting in a more than twofold increase.

Today the media are covering the next part of this story, the inevitable outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, mostly among children who have not been vaccinated. Some of the parents who chose not to vaccinate were influenced by the original, inaccurate media coverage.

Al-Qaeda will once again become legal in Switzerland in 2015 because a further extension of the ban of the group is not possible under Swiss Law.

“[It is] debatable whether Switzerland possesses an adequate legal framework to mitigate this [jihadist] threat.” Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point.

Another factor obstructing an official ban appears to be bureaucratic confusion. Swiss authorities are impeding progress by “blocking” each other. Berner Zeitung

If the NDB’s estimates are correct, they would imply that—in terms of percentage—there are now more Swiss jihadists in Syria than French jihadists, even though France has the largest Muslim population in Europe.

“IS shows us that modern terror threats can only be combatted through prevention.” Thomas Hurter, President of the National Security Commission.

Swiss lawmakers have filed a motion calling on the Swiss Parliament formally to ban the jihadist group Islamic State [IS] from operating in Switzerland.

The measure—signed by more than 40 politicians from across the political spectrum—is in response to new revelations that the IS has established a network of cells inside Switzerland to raise money and recruit fighters for the jihad in Syria and Iraq.

The jihadist cells are primarily focused on providing financial, logistical and propaganda support to help the IS establish an Islamic theocracy in the Middle East, according to a report published by the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) on September 21.

But terrorism analysts are warning that the cells could easily be used to perpetrate terror attacks inside Switzerland.

According to the NZZ, Swiss authorities are investigating at least three Iraqi nationals who are the alleged ringleaders of IS activities in Switzerland.

In response to the report, the Swiss public prosecutor’s office confirmed that it is currently investigating at least 20 separate cases involving jihadist operations in Switzerland, including at least four directly related to the jihad in Syria.

Many leaders have been stating that the Islamic State’s actions are ‘unprecedented’, ‘extreme’, ‘unique’, or even ‘eccentric’. Western leaders who are intervening in the Syria-Iraq conflict justify their actions by declaring the Islamic State to be uniquely evil. In announcing military action and increased security measures, Australian Prime Ministry Tony Abbott said of the Islamic State that “To do such evil — and to revel in doing such evil — is simply unprecedented”. David Cameron stated that “ISIL is a terrorist organisation unlike those we have dealt with before.” Osama Obama claimed “these terrorists are unique in their brutality.”

The actions of Islamic State’s adherents are morally repugnant in the extreme, but only by applying historical amnesia and selective vision could one claim that their evil is unique or unprecedented.

In recent decades, not dissimilar horrors have regularly been reported from around the world, for example the abuses of the ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’, or the genocide currently being pursued by the government of Sudan against Nubian Christians.

The Islamic State’s actions are also not unique in history. Quite apart from the horrors of Nazism and Communism, Andrew Bostom has rightly pointed out that the atrocities of the Ottoman Caliphate in exterminating Christians under their rule were greater in magnitude than what is currently being experienced in Syria and Iraq. He writes:

“Notwithstanding the recent horrific spate of atrocities committed against the Christian communities of northernIraq by the Islamic State (IS/IL) jihadists, the Ottoman jihad ravages were equally barbaric, depraved, and far more extensive. Occurring, primarily between 1915-16 (although continuing through at least 1919), some one million Armenian, and 250,000 Assyro-Chaldean and Syrian Orthodox Christians were brutally slaughtered, or starved to death during forced deportations through desert wastelands. The identical gruesome means used by IS/IL to humiliate and massacre its hapless Christian victims, were employed on a scale that was an order of magnitude greater by the Ottoman Muslim Turks, often abetted by local Muslim collaborators (the latter being another phenomenon which also happened during the IS/IL jihad campaign against Iraq’s Christians).”

Bostom also points out that the Yazidi’s recent sufferings at the hands of the IS are nothing new, but are consistent with a a pattern of genocidal assaults against them which stretches back to Ottoman times.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has a growing list of enemies. “Among his targets” at a recent address to a Turkish business group “were The New York Times, the Gezi events of 2013, credit rating agencies, the Hizmet movement, the Koc family and high interest rates,” Zamanreported September 18. Erdoğan earlier had threatened to expel rating agencies Moody’s and Fitch from Turkey if they persisted in making negative comments about Turkey’s credit.

Turkey’s financial position is one of the world’s great financial mysteries, in fact, a uniquely opaque puzzle: the country has by far the biggest foreign financing requirement relative to GDP among all the world’s large economies, yet the sources of its financing are impossible to trace.

Source: Bloomberg

Source: Central Bank of Turkey

I have analyzed sovereign debt risk for three decades – including stints as head of credit strategy at Credit Suisse and head of debt research at Bank of America – and have never seen anything quite like this.

At around 8% of GDP, Turkey’s current account deficit is a standout among emerging markets. It is at the level of Greece before its near-bankruptcy in 2011. Where is the money coming from to cover it?

A great deal of it is financed by short-term debt, mainly through borrowings by banks.

Little of this appears on the Bank for International Settlements tables of Western banks’ short-term lending to other banks, which means that the source of the bank loans lies elsewhere than in the developed world. Gulf State banks are almost certainly the lenders, by process of elimination.

Recently, as the above chart shows, the rate of growth of bank borrowing has tapered off. What has replaced bank loans?

When I first reported on the racially motivated law enforcement of Holder’s Justice Department, it seemed fanciful to some. But after six years of Holder hugging Al Sharpton, stoking racial division in places like Florida and Ferguson, after suing police and fire departments to impose racial hiring requirements, after refusing to enforce election laws that protect white victims or require voter rolls to be cleaned, after launching harassing litigation against peaceful pro-life protesters, after incident after incident of dishonesty and contempt before Congress — after all this, it was clear to anyone with any intellectual honesty that this man had a vision of the law at odds with the nation’s traditions.

Why would it surprise anyone he behaved as he did? As I made clear in my book Injustice, he carried around a quote in his wallet for 40 years about race that, he explained to the Washington Post, indicated that he had common cause with the black criminal. That’s a fact. That’s who he is.

And few in the House knew how to hold him accountable. Some who did are Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), Rep Frank Wolf (R-Va), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Rep. Daryl Issa (R-CA). Unfortunately, too many others failed to understand what they were up against.

Eric Holder was a radical progressive who used the power of the federal government to impose his progressivism on the United States. He loved big interventionist government that took sides based on your politics and your race. He was a menace to the rule of law.

So he exits. But instead of being shamed into obscurity as he ought to be, he will cash in. He’ll abandon the tools of dividing Americans between black and white and worry about a new color: gold. When Holder lands at a big and shameless lawfirm in Washington, D.C., it will say as much about the country in 2014 as Holder’s rancid tenure said about the modern Democratic Party.

That someone like Eric Holder can find a lucrative career in this town, and be feted at all the right cocktail parties, says a great deal about what we have lost as a nation. In another era, a man like Holder, unmoored from the law and the truth would not have a future. Instead, I suspect Holder has a very bright one.

Those of you clamoring for “indictments” or “prosecution” of the man can give up. It isn’t going to happen. Nothing is going to happen to him, except that he will move on to a job that even most “1 percenters” wouldn’t recognize.

A Chilling Conversation With an Islamic State Terrorist: We Will ‘Make Some Attacks in New York Soon’

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/detail/a-chilling-conversation-with-an-islamic-state-terrorist-we-will-make-some-attacks-in-new-york-soon#ixzz3EQLwcJ5L

President Obama’s decision to reference the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., during a United Nations speech on foreign affairs Wednesday raised eyebrows, and not just because the investigation is ongoing.

After spending the bulk of his remarks discussing the ethnic and religious disputes that fuel so much of the world’s terrorism, the president mentioned the Ferguson shooting and then added, “So, yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions” and “like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear.”

Politico reported that it was “unusual” for the president to reference “domestic U.S. shortcomings during a speech devoted to international issues.” Asked for an explanation, a White House official said the president wanted to acknowledge that the U.S. is “not perfect.”

Well, neither is Mr. Obama’s analogy.

Tensions between the police and low-income black communities are not based on race or ethnicity. They are based on the fact that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime in America—almost all of it directed at other blacks. Police don’t go into these communities to shoot blacks; they are there, by and large, to stop blacks from shooting each other. They are there because that is where the 911 calls originate. And for their troubles they now have the president of the United States all but comparing them to terrorist groups.

This is the latest example of the president exploiting Ferguson to rile up black voters, whom Democrats fear will stay home in November. It is of a piece with the multiple, redundant federal investigations into the shooting. The Obama administration knows full well that Bull Connor doesn’t run the Ferguson police department, but it will to pretend that’s the case to score political points with the president’s base.

This week’s United Nations anticarbon summit featured more than the usual share of political fun like drum troupes and a Wall Street rally with the official slogan of “Stop Capitalism.” But the most amusing gesture may have been Mayor Bill de Blasio’s pledge to chop New York City emissions by 80% by 2050.

“We know humanity is facing an existential threat,” Mr. de Blasio said at the Turtle Bay event, giving even Al Gore competition for climate calamity. “No one is spared. And our mutual need to survive should instill in us a kind of unity we so rarely experience.”

The city will no doubt need unity, not to mention a few spare trillion dollars of capital spending. Most of greater New York’s emissions are the result of energy consumption by the city’s office and residential buildings. Mr. de Blasio plans to get started by retrofitting city-owned property such as public housing to be more energy efficient, such as installing better insulation and solar panels on the roof. Private real-estate owners are merely encouraged to go green for now, but the Mayor promised at a press conference that “if we don’t see progress, we will certainly move to mandate.”

The carbon levels Mr. de Blasio favors were probably last seen in New York around the time of the Civil War or before, given that the region was until recently home to so much 20th-century heavy industry. On present trend, metro emissions will reach 55.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent by 2050. Mr. de Blasio favors 10.2 million tons, which in today’s world is equal to the annual energy use of about 3.4 million average homes. Barring a technology miracle, the mayor will have to stop not merely capitalism but the laws of thermodynamics.

Such antirealism is the hallmark of the climate lobby, but the irony is particularly thick in the case of Mr. de Blasio, whose main theme is income inequality and New York’s “two cities.” Who does he think is going to pay for his green utopia? It won’t be the Manhattan rich but the poor and middle class.

For logic-minded Americans still genuinely puzzled as to how it could be that our presidents and secretaries of state and generals and pundits keep hammering home the big lie that Islam has nothing to do with jihad, that the religion of conquest is a “religion of peace,” I have a special warning. Such widespread, politics- and mass-media-driven brainwashing is nothing new.

Just as today’s opinion-makers seek to divorce Islam from its impact — for example, brutal conquest, forced conversion, religiously sanctioned sex slavery, beheadings — past opinion-makers worked equally hard to divorce communism from its impact — for example, brutal conquest, forced collectivization, concentration camps (Gulags), mass murder.

It worked. Unlike Nazism, communism has never been judged guilty or even held responsible for the carnage and suffering it has caused. On the contrary, it remains a source of “liberal” statist ideas such as Obamacare. My book “American Betrayal” delves deeply into this dangerous double standard. In short, it not only enables collectivist policies to strangle our remnant republic, but also explains why American students can find a drink called Leninade, emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, for sale on a college campus. It is also why silkscreens of Warhol’s Chairman Mao, history’s top mass murderer, are sought-after items for the homes of the wealthy.

There are no such trendy portraits of Hitler, and who would want them? Who would want to swig a bottle of Hitlerpop, decorated with a swastika? So, why Leninade? Not only does the stench of death not follow the Communist murder-cult, the brand lives.

Barring a groundswell of common sense, I predict that Islam, the brand, will most likely remain separate in the public mind from the violence and repression it causes and has caused for more than a millennium. That’s certainly the direction leaders from both political parties have been relentlessly herding us in for over a decade, insisting against all reason — against all sacred Islamic texts — that “Islam is peace.”

This means that not only must we contend with this cycle of expansionist jihad — a recurrence that should be familiar from Islamic history were it, too, not subject to whitewash — we must simultaneously withstand a campaign of lies designed to subvert our understanding of how Islam, in fact, has everything to do with beheadings and other violence both in the Islamic world and in the West.