RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/the_dangerous_naivety_of_american_foreign_policy.html

Jonathan Rosenblum, director of Jewish Media Resources, wrote in the Jerusalem Post (April 4, 2014) that the Obama Administration’s foreign policy is tainted by “narcissism and naivety.”

There appears to be an inability to grasp that other nations have a different set of values that are irreconcilable with those of the U.S. and the West. They cannot accept that there are leaders and regimes with completely different political and religious motivations from progressive liberal, or even democratic philosophies.

Obama/Clinton/Kerry have operated as if all they have to do is smile and sing “All we need is love” to persuade ideologies to adapt and embrace a compliant America. It really doesn’t work that way, and now we are being to see the evidence of that. Just look at how they assessed rogue leaders.

Hillary Clinton, during her reign as Secretary of State, called Bashar Assad a “reformer.” Just look at how he is “reforming” Syria. President Obama called Putin his “partner.” How that partnership is working out can be seen in the Crimea and in how Russia is allied with Iran. About the Ukraine, John Kerry’s telling response to Russia’s capture of the Crimea was, “In the 21st century you just don’t behave in 19th century fashion.” Really? Putin just did!

Obama’s “reset” button with Russia seems to have set the world back to the Cold War era. According to the Obama/Clinton, she of the “global village” geopolitics/ Kerry political theory, the world is too “interdependent” for errant behavior that does not comply with an American vision of a better planet. As Rosenblum pointed out, it never occurred to them that interdependence cuts more ways than one. Interdependence means that Ukraine is dependent on Russian oil and gas so that, when Obama says he’s going to loan Kiev a billion dollars Putin raises the price of their energy supplies to the Ukraine and pockets Obama’s dollars. Interdependence means that Europe is also in the pocket of the Russians for their energy needs. It would be fine if Obama had opened up the American oil and gas fields to offer an alternative source but he didn’t, refusing also to sign a deal with Canada for the Keystone pipeline. So much for “reset” and “interdependence.”

Bowing to the Saudi king and apologizing to the Muslim world may have won Obama the Nobel Peace prize, but it didn’t win America any kudos or brownie points with the Islamic world.

http://www.steynonline.com/6244/one-way-discovery-channel

More back-and-forth over Mozilla’s termination with extreme prejudice of its insufficiently gay-affirming CEO. Over at Skeptic Ink, the Prussian quotes a colleague…

What has anything about Eich’s story to do with laws or the constitution? Either Eich chose to resign because of negative PR, or was fired. Both are private actions made freely by people or entities who have the right to do that. What happened was an expression of freedom, not a curtailment.

…and begs to differ:

Imagine the counter-case. You’re broadly supportive of gay marriage and you make a minor donation to a pro-gay marriage cause. Next week, you are hauled up in front of your boss, a conservative Christian, and told, “Sorry, we can’t have chaps who promote degeneracy around here” and promptly sacked.

Sound good? Would you say “Oh, that’s just an expression of his freedom”?

I don’t think analogies like that work with the left any more. As they see it, the difference between firing an anti-gay guy and firing a pro-gay guy is that the anti-gay guy is bad and deserves to be fired whereas the pro-gay guy isn’t and doesn’t. You could complicate it for them – the pro-gay guy is fired by a Muslim. But, until that starts happening on a regular basis, the western left is increasingly comfortable with the notion that core western liberties have to take a back seat to more fashionable rights, like anti-racism or “marriage equality”.

The top-paying job for grads last year: petroleum engineer, at $97,000. Yet most colleges seem oddly uninterested.

How Climate Change Conquered the American Campus

Here is a college quiz. While many parts of the U.S. economy struggle to recover from the Great Recession of 2008-09, one domestic industry is experiencing a technology-driven expansion in which American innovations have led to countless new company startups, a surge in hiring and some of the highest-paying entry-level jobs for graduating college seniors.

How are the nation’s universities responding so students might prepare for a promising career in this growing and intellectually challenging field? By largely ignoring it. Why? Because the industry is oil and gas.

This fact may surprise the casual campus observer, since almost every U.S. college these days seems to have an energy research institute. Most of these energy think-tanks, however, are run by academic advocates of theories about global warming and man-made climate change, most of whom view energy through green-colored lenses. The research focus is more on promoting the clean, sustainable, renewable, non-CO2-emitting energy of the future, as opposed to studying and analyzing the hydrocarbon resources of the here and now.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304640104579487473582984500?mg=reno64-wsj

The Kremlin has an interest in conquest. The White House makes the taking easier.

If I were Vladimir Putin I’d invade eastern Ukraine this week. Strike while the iron is hot.

Never again will the taking be so easy. Never again will the government in Kiev be so helpless. Never again will the administration in Washington be so inept, its threats so hollow. Never again will the powers in Europe be so feeble and dependent. Never again will Western monetary policy do so much to prop up energy prices.

While Mr. Putin is at it, he might consider invading one of the Baltic states. Barack Obama isn’t about to ask Americans to die for Estonia, where a quarter of the population is ethnically Russian. The U.S. president wants “nation-building at home,” after all. Let him have at it.

Even now, the West misses the point. We have convinced ourselves that Russia is inherently weak; that its economy would collapse if the price of oil were to fall; that human and financial capital are in flight; that its population is shrinking (and frequently drunk); that the regime has lost the support of an urban middle class disgusted by endemic corruption. And so on.

http://spectator.org/articles/58642/testing-and-detesting-sgo

With former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell’s congressional testimony, a new Iranian ambassador to the UN, and a great UN report on global warming, there’s a lot in one week SGO to catalogue and remember. And to do justice to the week, we have to go at it in reverse order

(For those just joining us, “SGO” is the comprehensively useful acronym for “s*** goin’ on” created by my pal and former SEAL Al Clark.)

At week’s end, retiring Cong. Jim Moran (D-of course, VA-unfortunately) told Roll Call that Congress was underpaid. Before we could see clearly through our laughter-teared eyes, he added that “I understand that it’s widely felt that they underperform, but the fact is that this is the board of directors for the largest economic entity in the world.” And he said all that with a straight face.

Someone who is certainly not underperforming and probably isn’t underpaid is Iranian prez Hassan Rouhani. Liberals were so heartened by his election that they proclaimed — or was it President Obama who personally proclaimed? — that the decades of enmity between Iran and America were over. Before Moran’s moronic remarks, the UN and hangers-on including Amnesty International reported that under the Teflon Ayatollah there has been an inexplicable (to them at least) surge in torture, executions, and other such conduct by the keepers of the flame of the Iranian Revolution. Even before that, Rouhani, or some stand-in, appointed a new Iranian ambassador to the United Nations by the name of Hamid Aboutalebi.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=8003

Another round of talks in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France and Germany) is taking place this week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, negotiations to reach a final deal by July 20 will pick up where the “expert-level” meetings that ended Saturday night left off.

As tiresome as it has become to restate the obvious, no good can come of these or any other discussions with representatives of the Islamic republic. But this isn’t stopping the West from engaging in the ongoing charade, whose only purpose is to be persuaded by Tehran that its nuclear program is peaceful in nature.

Never mind that all evidence points to the opposite conclusion. Keeping the momentum going has turned “dialogue” into the goal. This makes sense, from the point of view of countries whose leaders bow down to the god of diplomacy. With veiled threats of “all options are on the table” in the air, acknowledging that Iran’s centrifuges are spinning in order to subjugate the world’s “infidels” would mean having to do something about it.

Indeed, this is how sanctions came into being. The idea behind them was to crush the Iranian economy, and make it impossible for the Islamic republic to achieve its hegemonic ambitions through the acquisition of an A-bomb.

But President Barack Obama entered the White House with a different concept of how to combat Iranian hostility — through American appeasement and courtship. It didn’t take a rocket scientist (Iranian or other) to grasp that such a policy would guarantee an increase in anti-Americanism and in incentive to produce weapons of mass destruction. Radical Shiites are funny that way.

AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW FROM DOWN UNDER –

http://www.aitse.org/global-warming-anthropogenic-or-not/

Katharine Hayhoe, PhD, who wrote the December AITSE piece “Climate Change: Anthropogenic or Not?”, is an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is senior author of the book “A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions”. I am a senior research geologist who has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers on palaeo-environmental and palaeo-climatic topics and also author of the book, “Climate: the Counter Consensus”. Quite clearly, Dr. Hayhoe and I are both credible professional scientists. Given our training and research specializations, we are therefore competent to assess the evidence regarding the dangerous global warming that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) alleges is being caused by industrial carbon dioxide emissions.

Yet at the end of her article Dr. Hayhoe recommends for further reading the websites RealClimate.org and SkepticalScience.com, whereas here at the outset of writing my own article I recommend the websites wattsupwiththat.com and www.thegwpf.org (Global Warming Policy Foundation). To knowledgeable readers, this immediately signals that Dr. Hayhoe and I have diametrically opposing views on the global warming issue.

The general public finds it very hard to understand how such strong disagreement can exist between two equally qualified persons on a scientific topic, a disagreement that is manifest also on the wider scene by the existence of equivalent groups of scientists who either support or oppose the views of the IPCC about dangerous anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (DAGW).

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14806#.U0PTF1eCUtU

Almost from the beginning, Israel’s physical survival as a state has depended upon its nuclear weapons. Although still ambiguous and undisclosed, this “bomb in the basement” has kept a substantial number of sworn enemies at bay.

Today, with Iran rapidly approaching full and unobstructed membership in the Nuclear Club, this equalizing element of national power has become indispensable.

“Mass counts,” wrote the classic Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), and only Israel’s enemies have mass. Nonetheless, each year, these enemies call disingenuously for a Nuclear-Weapons Free-Zone in the Middle East.

In Washington, as well as in Jerusalem, it is time to acknowledge that nuclear weapons are never evil in themselves, and that in certain circumstances, they can be utterly vital to self-defense and survival.

In principle, at least, President Obama still seeks “a world free of nuclear weapons.” But once an enemy state and its allies believed that Israel had been bent sufficiently to “nonproliferation” demands, adversarial military strategies – either singly, or in calculated collaboration – could begin to embrace extermination warfare. Significantly, this could happen even if all of Israel’s national adversaries were to remain determinedly non-nuclear themselves.

Any Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone for the Middle East, even if seemingly well-intentioned, would render Israel existentially vulnerable. Although such vulnerability might be prevented by instituting certain parallel forms of chemical/biological weapons disarmament among these adversaries, such measures could never actually be implemented.

After all, as Israel’s enemies cheerfully recognize, any verification of compliance would be effectively impossible.

President Obama still misunderstands. Nuclear weapons are not the problem per se. If they were, his country might have abandoned its own nuclear arsenal and associated strategies back in August, 1945

In the Middle East, the core problem has absolutely nothing to do with Israel’s nuclear weapons and posture, assets which have never been used to threaten or even to intimidate recalcitrant enemies. Rather, this peril remains a persisting and unreconstructed Jihadist commitment to “excise the Jewish cancer.” This openly annihilatory commitment is more-or-less common to both Sunni Arab foes, and to Shiite Iran.

Although apparently counter-intuitive, Israel’s nuclear weapons actually represent a critical impediment to the military use of nuclear weapons, and to the commencement of a regional nuclear war. They must, therefore, remain at the vital center of Israel’s security policy, and must also be guided by a continuously updated and refined strategic doctrine.

Essential elements of any such doctrine should include a carefully calibrated end to “deliberate ambiguity,” more recognizable emphases on “counter value” or counter-city targeting, and expanding evidence of secure “triad” nuclear forces. Such forces would also have to be presumed capable of penetrating any foreseeable aggressor’s active defenses.

By Kenneth Levin, a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/the_european_union_africa_and_the_jews.html

“Sepulcher city”; so Joseph Conrad’s narrator, Marlowe, labels Brussels inThe Heart of Darkness. “… a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulcher.” The terms derive from the Gospel of Matthew and refer to people and institutions that seek to project an appearance of virtue but are corrupt and rotted within. Marlowe is responding to what he has witnessed of the Brussels-directed pillaging of the Congo, the wholesale murder and other horrors committed there by the agents of the “Council in Europe,” and particularly by its most successful agent, Kurtz, in a merciless quest for ivory. This even as Kurtz and his sponsors and associates choose to project an image of the entire business as a virtuous undertaking and of Kurtz himself as a brilliant, sensitive genius — musician, painter, essayist, poet — embarked on a saintly mission, “an emissary of pity and science and progress.”

How fitting then that Brussels should be the headquarters of the European Union.

The EU, like Conrad’s “Council in Europe,” continues to perpetrate abuses in Africa under the guise of humanitarian good will.

Behind claims of, for example, helping to foster sustainable economic growth in Africa, the EU exploits African resources to the profit of EU member states and to the detriment of Africans. One notable instance is EU fisheries policy in West Africa, which ostensibly seeks to promote long-term sustainability but has instead led to high-tech European fishing fleets — subsidized by EU governments — depleting local stocks. Poor West African nations such as Senegal, Ghana, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and others, while being promised development assistance by the EU, have been subjected to decimation of their local fisheries. A significant portion of the population in the affected nations are critically dependent on local fish yields for their dietary well-being, and EU destruction of fisheries and dramatic depletion of potential catches by local fishermen have health ramifications for these nations that are devastating.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=16717

Have the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks reached a dead end? Barney Breen-Portnoy, Steve Ganot and Ruthie Blum discuss the crisis in the negotiations, as well as the prisoner release issue and the fate of imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.

With once-optimistic U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry expressing frustration over what seems to be the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, is there any hope left for the talks?

Columnist Ruthie Blum and Israel Hayom editors Barney Breen-Portnoy and Steve Ganot discuss the ramifications that may follow the failure of the talks, including the possibility of blame being placed on Israel and the chances of another U.S. peace effort being made.

If negotiations do go forward, what place does the prisoner release, specifically the release of Israeli Arabs, have in a future peace deal? Is releasing prisoners a slippery slope to a precedent that Israel should avoid, or is it simply a necessary part of negotiations?

Finally, is the offer to release imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard a sign of American desperation to save the peace talks?