RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303802104579449571957045910#printMode

Vladimir Putin and his American apologists like to blame NATO’s post-Cold War expansion for his territorial conquests, which ignores that the alliance refused in 2008 to let Georgia and Ukraine even begin the process of joining. Those are the two countries the Russian has since carved up, and the question now is whether Russia’s expansionism will slap Western leaders out of their self-defense slumbers.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen sounded the alarm last week in a visit to Washington. “I see Crimea as an element in a greater pattern” of Russian strategy, he told an audience at the Brookings Institution. Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, he said, is “a wake-up call” that “must be followed by increased European investment in defense.” He might have included the U.S.
The combined GDP of NATO’s 28 member states tops $30 trillion. Yet with few exceptions, most notably Poland, NATO defense expenditures have declined since the end of the Cold War. The nearby table shows the relative defense spending in 2013 for some key NATO countries as a share of GDP. Only four members—the U.S., U.K., Greece and Estonia—spent at least 2% of GDP on defense.

At 1.9%, France last year fell short of the 2% that is supposed to be the technical requirement for membership. Mr. Rasmussen’s Denmark spent 1.4% of its GDP on defense, Angela Merkel’s Germany 1.3%, Italy 1.2%, and Spain 0.9%. This is what a country spends if it thinks its main security threat is Belgium.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304179704579459202661974202?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond&mg=reno64-wsj
Putin’s seizure of Crimea gets an assist from foreign policy realists and postmodern liberals.

Russia is a big country. In case you didn’t know.

A flight from New York to St. Petersburg will cover the same distance as one from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. There are 22 Russians for every Russian square mile, a population density only slightly exceeded by Mali. Exclude all of Russia east of the Urals, and the European portion of the country is still about the size of India and Turkey put together.

This is not exactly a state needing greater Lebensraum.

The point needs making in the face of an undercurrent of Western apology for Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea. It’s an argument that goes roughly as follows:

• Yes, Russia’s seizure of the peninsula was provocative and illegal. But look at it from Moscow’s point of view. “To Russia,” writes Henry Kissinger in the Washington Post, “Ukraine can never be just a foreign country.” Defining events in Russian history—Mr. Kissinger cites the 1709 battle of Poltava—took place on (current) Ukrainian soil, and Ukraine has been independent for just 23 years. Crimea itself is ethnically Russian and only passed into Ukrainian hands through a Soviet bureaucratic maneuver in the mid-1950s.

• As for provocation, how could any Russian leader be indifferent to a Ukraine that sought to join NATO or the European Union, much less sit still as demonstrators in Kiev paralyzed the country and brought about the downfall of its democratically elected leader?

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4231/palestinians-dream-destroying-israel

U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry may be able to force Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, under threats and pressure, to sign a “framework agreement” with Israel. But as this week’s rally of hatred in the Gaza Strip shows, even after the signing of a Palestinian-Israeli “peace” treaty, a large number of Palestinians will not abandon there dream of destroying Israel.

“Jihad in Palestine is not terrorism. Jihad in Palestine is a sacred duty.” — Yusef Rizka, representative of Hamas

A mass rally held in the Gaza Strip on March 23 showed that Hamas continues to enjoy popular support among Palestinians. Tens of thousands of Palestinians took to the streets to attend the rally commemorating the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

Hamas officials claim that nearly one million Palestinians attended the rally in the center of Gaza City.

http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2014/03/22/3545894/clinton-wants-mass-movement-on.html

Hillary Rodham Clinton says young people understand the significant threat of climate change and that she hopes there will be a mass movement that demands political change.

The potential 2016 presidential candidate says at a Clinton Global Initiative University panel that young people are much more committed to doing something to address climate change. Clinton says it isn’t “just some ancillary issue” but will determine the quality of life for many people.

The former secretary of state cited global warming as a major issue that students could face in the future.

She made the comments Saturday during an interview with late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel at Arizona State University. The weekend gathering also features former President Bill Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea.

The media chose to focus the campaign against Ya’alon on his purported irresponsibility and loose lips because they cannot argue with him on substance.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-World-Why-bring-down-Yaalon-346356

The media chose to focus the campaign against Ya’alon on his purported irresponsibility and loose lips because they cannot argue with him on substance.
US Secretary of State Chuck Hagel and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. Photo: Courtesy of Ministry of Defense
If this is a coincidence, it is an extraordinary one. Twice in less than two months, remarks that Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon made in closed forums about key issues on Israel’s national security agenda were leaked to the media. In both cases, the media used the leaked remarks to foment a crisis in relations between Israel and the Obama administration.

In both cases, the Obama administration has used the opportunities created by the Israeli media to bash Ya’alon and pressure Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to fire him.

In January, Yediot Aharonot leaked Ya’alon’s private remarks about US Secretary of State John Kerry’s irrational focus on the mordant peace process between Israel and the Palestinians at a time when there is both relative peace in Israel, and Israel’s neighbors are undergoing political upheavals and civil war. Together with the other two musketeers of Israel’s far-left media – Haaretz and Channel 2, Yediot used the story to provoke a fight between the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration. Acting on cue, the White House and State Department demanded that Ya’alon apologize for remarks that were made in private. Ya’alon sufficed with a terse statement that he was sorry if anyone took offense from his private remarks.

And now, two months later, Ya’alon’s remarks have been leaked again.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/climate-change-malaysia-airlines-370-search
One Reason It May Be Harder to Find Flight 370: We Messed Up the Currents
How climate change factors into the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.

UPDATE: 10:15am, March 24, 2014: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has announced to a late-night press conference that according to a new data analysis performed by British specialists, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 ended in the Southern Indian Ocean. Malaysia Airlines confirmed the plane’s fate in text messages sent to relatives of Chinese passengers: “Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived… we must now accept all evidence suggests the plane went down in the Southern Indian Ocean.”

“Scientists say man-made climate change has fundamentally altered the currents of the vast, deep oceans where investigators are currently scouring for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight, setting a complex stage for the ongoing search for MH370. If the Boeing 777 did plunge into the ocean somewhere in the vicinity of where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean, the location where its debris finally ends up, if found at all, may be vastly different from where investigators could have anticipated 30 years ago.

The search of 8,880 square miles of ocean has yet to turn up signs of the missing flight.

Even if the fragments captured in satellite images are identified as being part of the jet, which Malaysian officials say deliberately flew off course on March 8, investigators coordinated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority will still have an enormous task to locate remaining parts of the plane and its flight recorders. Among the assets deployed in the search—including a multinational array of military and civil naval resources—are data modelers, whose task will be reconciling regional air and water currents with local weather patterns to produce a possible debris field. “Data marker buoys” are being dropped into the ocean to assist in providing “information about water movement to assist in drift modeling,” John Young from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority told a press conference in Canberra on Thursday.

While longer-term climate shifts are unlikely to play into day-to-day search and rescue efforts, these large climate-affected currents—among them the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world’s most powerful ocean system—are an essential factor in oceanographers’ understanding of the literal undercurrents of search operations.

Now about those 90 rockets. A Palestinian state in Judea-Samaria would mean that the border with Palestine would reach the outskirts of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/90-reasons-not-to-create-a-Palestinian-state-34626

The 90 rockets fired at Israel by Palestinian Arab terrorists in Gaza on Wednesday are not just another round of the same old Middle East turmoil to which the world is unfortunately accustomed. Coming just as US Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to conclude a deal to create a Palestinian state, the rockets offer 90 vivid demonstrations of why such a state must not be created.

For years, the international community badgered Israel to withdraw from Gaza. Israelis were told that if only the occupation ended, the Palestinians would embrace peace. That the presence of Israeli soldiers and the Jewish communities in Gaza were the obstacles to peace. That once Israel withdrew, the Gaza Palestinians would no longer have a reason to attack Israel. And that “if even a single missile were fired into Israel from Gaza,” the IDF would be justified in re-occupying the area.

At the time, Israeli military experts warned that withdrawal was dangerous.

That Gaza was a vital security belt for Israel’s southwestern frontier, and a buffer between Israel and unstable Egypt. That Gaza under Palestinian control would become a breeding ground for terrorists and one huge storage depot for weapons to be used against Israel.

But eventually, the international pressure became unbearable. The constant hectoring by State Department officials and New York Times columnists and European Union envoys wore down Israel’s leaders. They decided to gamble. In 2005, with no demands or preconditions, Israel withdrew all its soldiers from Gaza and forcibly evicted the area’s 10,000 Jewish residents.

http://spectator.org/articles/58493/putin-keeps-us-guessing

If Henry Kissinger were dead, he’d be spinning in his grave. The fact that he is very much alive is a good thing that may make us dream of the day when someone with the essential education, skills, and training will again be in charge of our foreign policy.

Unfortunately, no such person is and one of the men most observant of our sad condition is in a position to take advantage of it. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s often bare-chested strongman, has managed with very little effort and hardly a shot fired not only to destabilize Europe but to do so in a way that makes the European governments and our president believe that it is too hard, too expensive, and too dangerous to do anything about it. Putin’s managed to bring back the atmosphere of the Cold War — the intimidation that the Soviets brought about — so easily it’s almost admirable.

Putin’s swallowing of the Crimea has everyone gushing with guesses and running for cover. Where will he strike next? Is it Georgia, which he nearly took over in 2008 in an invasion of South Ossetia (which he’s kept)? Will it be the rest of Ukraine? NATO’s top military commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, told a conference the other day that “The (Russian) force that is at the Ukrainian border now to the east is very, very sizeable and very, very ready.” Will Putin strike somewhere else or not at all? How long will he wait before he tries something else?

Putin, who must be a superb poker player, has no reason to tell us. Why end the suspense when you’re positioning yourself to retake more of what used to parts of the Soviet Union without any real interference? Keeping everyone off balance is so easy, why end the fun?

http://politicalmavens.com/

If you thought that the Board of Eduation in NYC was largely responsible for a malfunctioning school system, here’s an incident showing the improbable actions of our justice system in reversing a ruling that reflected rare common sense and discipline. Two female teachers in their thirties were found on the floor in a classroom at Madison High School in Brooklyn; they were topless and the room was dark on an evening when a student performance was taking place in the auditorium. Witnesses reported seeing the women undressed – one of them described seeing one of the teachers kneeling between the legs of the other one. The teachers were both fired.

Let’s assume that witnesses sometimes get facts wrong and let’s accept the highly creative defense argument that one woman was administering insulin to her colleague who suffers from diabetes. Possibly some of the judges who reversed the firing may suffer from this disease as well and might have asked themselves whether they remembered to remove their shirts and bras in order to get an insulin shot. They might also search their minds to think of any other systemic disease that requires injections into the breast as opposed to arm or buttock. George Costanza, the compulsive neurotic on “Seinfeld” took off his shirt before sitting on the bathroom commode – the writers understood that this would get a huge laugh precisely because it was so ridiculous. Do appellate judges lack a sense of humor?

Like Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado, the justices felt that this punishment didn’t fit the crime because there was no crime. The behavior occurred between consenting adults. So let’s pretend that what’s obvious isn’t, and that school principals aren’t capable of recognizing behavior, character and judgement unsuitable for those who are role models for our students. The judges felt that no students had witnessed this event – but they all certainly heard about it faster than anyone could say: “check out the NY Post, the Daily News, the local news on tv and the internet.” Does using the classroom for a tryst – oops, an emergency room for topless medical care – have to be a crime in order for employers to decide that people who do this shouldn’t be teaching teenaged kids? How long would an employer keep two nurses who were undressed and using a hospital room for their relaxation or medicinal needs? How long would you keep a nanny found undressed with another person in her room while the children were asleep? Shouldn’t a school be treated with greater consideration than most workplaces precisely because young people are meant to look up to and respect their teachers as part of society’s attempt to mold character?

Saudi Arabia denied a visa to a White House press corps reporter from the Jerusalem Post. The reporter is Jewish, but is not an Israeli. Plain old anti-Semitism.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/saudi-arabia-refuses-visa-to-american-jewish-journalist/2014/03/25/

Michael Wilner is the Jerusalem Post‘s reporter based in Washington, and its White House correspondent. He is an American Jew who does not have Israeli citizenship and has never lived in Israel.

About midday on Monday, March 24, Wilner tweeted, “Saudi Arabia has denied me a visa to cover Obama’s trip this week.”

Wilner is the only journalist in the press corps who was denied entry by Saudi Arabia.

The White House declined to comment publicly, but the Jerusalem Post reported that U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice specifically requested that the visa be granted. Tony Blinken, a special assistant to President Obama, was also reported to have issued a request to Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S.

In another Twitter exchange, Wilner answered a reporter from AL Monitor who queried, “Any idea why?” [he was denied the visa.] “not the faintest idea” Wilner tweeted back.