RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last year, Team Obama was wallowing in praise for its election tech strategy. Its strike team of Silicon Valley pros who believed in stock options and Socialism were credited with winning the election by applying the same data tools that had made Facebook and Google so creepy.

And then when it came time to debut Obama’s signature achievement (if you don’t count wrecking the Middle East) the implementation was every bit as disastrous as if the project had been outsourced to someone’s cousin who had once taken a web design course in 1996.

The ObamaCare websites didn’t go down because of high demand. They went down because of bad design. The design on Healthcare.gov was so bad that it was almost as if the website had been designed to fail. Or as one tech expert put it, the website was so cluttered with junk that it was running a denial of service attack against itself.

It’s not too surprising that a government website would be badly designed, but Team Obama’s digital strategy had been built around using them for messaging to bypass even friendly media outlets. The content on government websites blended with the Obama campaign so closely that it was sometimes hard to tell the difference.

But that is where the border between competency and incompetence for Team Obama begins. Team Obama excels at promoting Obama and attacking Republicans. It isn’t actually good at anything else.

The left excels at one thing and only one thing; propaganda. Great products and bad marketing are a familiar business story. But what the left has is a terrible product with great marketing.

Vladimir Putin likes to talk about the importance of national sovereignty, with special emphasis on not meddling in the domestic affairs of other countries. But now he is stretching the long arm of Russian law into Western European capitals. And Stockholm, at least, appears willing to play along.

Four years ago, Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed in prison by his jailers for trying to expose a $230 million fraud. Not satisfied with that outcome, Mr. Putin put Magnitsky posthumously on trial and convicted him, along with his client Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital, of tax evasion. Mr. Browder, who remains very much alive, was expelled from Russia eight years ago, but Moscow apparently isn’t done with him. After his “conviction,” Russia sought an international warrant for his arrest from Interpol, which sensibly refused to become complicit in Mr. Putin’s campaign.

Mr. Browder’s real crime is to have spent the past four years seeking justice for Magnitsky. He pushed for the Magnitsky Act passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law in 2012. The Act imposes financial sanctions and travel bans on Russians guilty of human-rights violations. Last month, federal prosecutors used the act to seize several pieces of Manhattan real estate owned by a Cyprus-based shell company allegedly linked to Magnitsky’s jailers.

Mr. Browder has been pressing countries in Europe to adopt a similar approach, and earlier this year he was invited to testify to the Swedish Parliament about the need for a Swedish Magnitsky Act. As has become his habit, Mr. Browder sought assurance from Stockholm that he would not be arrested and shipped off to Russia.

Martin Valfridsson, State Secretary in the Swedish Ministry of Justice, twice declined the request, claiming that he was not permitted under Swedish law to provide advance notice that any particular person would not be arrested. Mr. Valfridsson’s letters express all the appropriate concerns about Magnitsky’s case and fate, but in the end he seeks refuge in a different set of pieties about the rule of law and Sweden’s international obligations.

The fact that so many still entertain that Israel should give up her inheritance is bad enough, but many think that Israel should divide Jerusalem.

Ponder that for a moment! Would you ask the French to divide Paris? Would you ask the Italians to divide Rome? There are a lot of people who think it outrageous that the British divided Ireland in 1921. We Americans fought to preserve our own unity during the Civil War; and did so even though both the British and French favored the Confederates. We defied world opinion to win.

Yet, somehow, we ask Israel to make territorial concessions that none of our respective countries would tolerate. This is the height of hypocrisy, and doubly so, when it comes to Jerusalem.

Psalm 137:5-6 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

Has the obscenity of 40 years of a divided Berlin been so erased from Germany’s memory? One does not divide cities. Have the Germans who bemoaned their country divided for four decades so quickly forgotten? Now some Germans are taking the Palestinian side. The German government could only muster the courage to abstain from the vote on Palestinian statehood.

The Irish bemoan that the core of its ancient Gaelic civilization, Ulster, is still in British hands. Yet, they fail to understand that Israel might want the center of her ancient Hebrew civilization: Judea and Samaria. Do any of these countries have a sense of history? Even their own?!

Norway is now a hotbed of anti-Israel opinion. Have they forgotten who occupied Norway for 5 years in World War II? Was it Zionists or Nazis?!

The list goes on. Starting with the sadly comical, we can look at Québec, where Huntington mayor and TV commentator, Stéphane Gendron, made outrageous comments about Israel on TV, saying Israel does not deserve to exist. The man is Quebécois, from a people who demand the right to have a French culture and nation, yet somehow cannot understand why Jews might want to have a Jewish culture and nation. If Monsieur Gendron wants to fight apartheid, perhaps he should start dismantling Québec’s Francophonic Language codes. This is a man who bragged about running over kittens in his pickup. Yet, somehow the Québecois consider him a major intellectual force, qualified to comment on Israel.

Then we have the infuriating Roger Waters. With so many tyrannies to choose from, he chooses to attack Israel. Waters is an elderly rocker who somewhere along the line never learned that rockers do not know beans about politics.

Our own government here in the USA is the most damaging. We alone seem to have some influence with Israel; and we abuse it to unwise ends. The most recent absurdity is promising $4 billion dollars to bribe the Palestinian Authority to negotiate with Israel. The only thing that will accomplish is to subsidize Swiss banks.

The press briefing at the Foreign Office was a routine affair, a photo-opportunity for the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, to show that the Anglo-American special relationship was not in tatters after all by standing alongside the visiting US Secretary of State, John Kerry. The question to Kerry, from Margaret Brennan of CBS, was one of those journalistic afterthoughts, tacked on to the end of a long-winded demand for a response to yet another Syrian denial of culpability: “And secondly, is there anything at this point that [Assad’s] government could do or offer that would stop an attack?”

“Sure.” John Kerry’s reply was unhesitating. “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that.” Then, a snort of dismissal: the busy statesman was evidently impatient with this line of speculation. “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”

Kerry had misspoken. Did he realise immediately? Everybody else did. What was obvious to him was by no means so to the Russians and their clients in Damascus. Why wouldn’t Assad do it, and why couldn’t it be done? Hey presto — a diplomatic démarche! Before Washington had even woken up, a new Russian peace initiative was on the table, intended to delay any US attack until the Greek Kalends. From the Kremlin came the sound of popping corks; from the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the sound of gnashing of teeth; from the Pentagon, the sound of orders countermanded; from the Sixth Fleet off the Syrian coast, the sound of retreat; from Assad’s bunker, the sound of “Allahu Akhbar!”

And from the White House? Silence — or was that a sigh of relief? President Obama had been looking for weeks for a way out of launching an unpopular punitive action. Congress had supplied a reason for delay, but a congressional veto would make the President look weak. Obama needed another excuse to jaw-jaw rather than war-war. So he was secretly gratified by the Russian initiative — authorship of which was retrospectively claimed by Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, to great applause in Warsaw. Nobody seemed to pay much attention to the victims of the Syrian civil war: the dozens of towns reduced to rubble, the thousands of corpses, the millions of refugees. While the diplomats and inspectors talked, the war would go on.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/10/dizzy-spells/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=f4ce370fe9-Mosaic_2013_10_9&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-f4ce370fe9-41165129   There is something lubriciously intriguing about the biography of a Victorian statesman subtitled “The Two Lives”. Given the current fashion among biographers for closet-rattling in search of hidden skeletons, one might imagine the two lives to be anatomised were a hypocritically virtuous public existence and a sybaritically scandalous private one — a portrait […]

And I don’t mean the “itbach al-Yahud”-chanting crowd.

A friend sent me an article to read which appeared in the October 6th Jerusalem Post. The author, Aaron Magid, is a Masters candidate in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. This brought back some painful memories of my own masters and doctoral studies in this same field decades ago. His essay was titled Feeling Uncomfortable At J Street. Here’s how he opened it…

“Attending the annual J Street Conference for the first time, I wanted to be proven wrong. Supporters of Israel within the Jewish community had ridiculed the newly created lobby group for launching harsh and unfair attacks against Israel. As a supporter of Israel who is also firmly opposed to increased settlement building and in favor of ending the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, I believed J Street would be my perfect home.”

Aaron will likely succeed where I failed. He attended this year’s annual J Street Conference because he sings some of those folks’ same tunes–he’s all for a Judenrein Judea, for example. This goes over nicely with too many running the duplicitous show in the Ivory Tower as well.

I naively expected that the same lenses of academic scrutiny would be applied towards Arabs and others pointing fingers at Jewish nationalism and Israel and paid the price. I was denied a Ph.D. dissertation advisor by the chief honcho, a specialist on Turkey, who, among many other such things, managed to never mention the word “Kurd” once and who liked to speak about “fascist Zionists” and such. I raised the wrong issues and asked the wrong questions.

Nuclear strategy is a “game” that sane and rational decision-makers must play.

In the best of all possible worlds, Iran could still be kept distant from nuclear weapons. In the real world, however, any such operational success is increasingly unlikely. More precisely, the remaining odds of Israel being able to undertake a cost-effective preemption against Iran, an act of “anticipatory self-defense” in the formal language of international law, are incontestably very low.

What next? Almost certainly, Jerusalem/Tel-Aviv will need to make appropriate preparations for long-term co-existence with a new nuclear adversary. As part of any such more-or-less regrettable preparations, Israel will have to continue with its already impressive developments in ballistic missile defense (BMD.) Although Israel’s well-tested Arrow and corollary interceptors could never be adequate for “soft-point” or city defense, these systems could still enhance the Jewish State’s indispensable nuclear deterrent.

By forcing any attacker to constantly recalculate the requirements of “assured destruction,” Israeli BMD could make it unrewarding for any prospective aggressor to strike first. Knowing that its capacity to assuredly destroy Israel’s nuclear retaliatory forces with a first-strike attack could be steadily eroded by incremental deployments of BMD, Iran could decide that such an attack would be more costly than gainful. Of course, any such relatively optimistic conclusion would be premised on the antecedent assumption that Iran’s decisions will always be rational.

But what if such a promising assumption should not actually be warranted? Moreover, irrationality is not the same as madness. Unlike a “crazy” or “mad” adversary, which would have no discernible order of preferences, an irrational Iranian leadership might still maintain a distinct and consistent hierarchy of wants.

Such an Iranian leadership might not be successfully deterred by more traditional threats of military destruction. This is because a canonical Shiite eschatology could authentically welcome certain “end times” confrontations with “unbelievers.” Nonetheless, this leadership might still refrain from any attacks that would expectedly harm its principal and overriding religious values or institutions. Preventing an attack upon the “holy city” of Qom, could be a glaringly good example.\

It is also reasonable to expect that even an irrational Iranian leadership would esteem certain of its primary military institutions. This leadership might still be subject to deterrence by various compelling threats to these institutions. A pertinent example would be the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a core power behind the Iranian dictatorship, a principal foe of the Iranian people, and the current leadership’s generally preferred instrument of terror and repression.

President Obama’s second cousin is a Tea Party guy from Kansas and it is now official: The Brody File has leaned that he’s running to be a U.S. Senator. He is going to take on sitting Senator Pat Roberts, who is 77 years old and has been in the Upper Chamber for more than 15 years. The official announcement will be later today.

Milton Wolf is President Barack Obama’s second cousin because his mother’s cousin was also Obama’s grandmother. Wolf is a Kansas radiologist who is also a columnist for The Washington Times. He wants to stop liberals like his cousin Barack from turning America into a “second-rate, European-style social welfare state.”

Here are some of Wolf’s past quotes:

“The reality is that whenever the Democrats have needed Republican votes to pass their agenda of growing government, they know that they have been able to count on Pat Roberts.”

“Tax increases, debt ceiling increases, expanding government healthcare. There are some people in this world who are stuck playing checkers when everyone else has moved on to chess. America is in trouble; we have moved on to three-dimensional chess and we are still looking at somebody who is voting for tax increases, voting for debt ceiling increases, voting for increased food-stamp spending, for increased regulations. I don’t know that America can survive that much longer.”

“My first goal is to save the Republican party from itself. My second goal is to save America from the Democrats. I love my party and have been loyal to it and it’s more difficult when my party is no longer to the ideals it proclaims. I oppose Obamacare not just because it is an economic disaster – it is an economic disaster – I oppose Obamacare because it is immoral. It is immoral for a government to get in between a doctor and a patient. It is immoral for a government to even know about a doctor-patient relationship. It is immoral for a government to decide who shall live and who shall die. And that’s what government health care does.”

Move over Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. If Milton Wolf can pull off the upset, you’ll have another Tea Party member up on the Hill.

The IPCC’s call to phase out fossil fuels is economic nonsense and ‘morally outrageous’ for the developing world

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which published on Friday the first instalment of its latest report, is a deeply discredited organisation. Presenting itself as the voice of science on this important issue, it is a politically motivated pressure group that brings the good name of science into disrepute.

Its previous report, in 2007, was so grotesquely flawed that the leading scientific body in the United States, the InterAcademy Council, decided that an investigation was warranted. The IAC duly reported in 2010, and concluded that there were “significant shortcomings in each major step of [the] IPCC’s assessment process”, and that “significant improvements” were needed. It also chastised the IPCC for claiming to have “high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence”.

Since then, little seems to have changed, and the latest report is flawed like its predecessor.

Perhaps this is not so surprising. A detailed examination of the 2007 report found that two thirds of its chapters included among its authors people with links to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and there were many others with links to other ‘green’ activist groups, such as Greenpeace.

In passing, it is worth observing that what these so-called green groups, and far too many of the commentators who follow them, wrongly describe as ‘pollution’ is, in fact, the ultimate in green: namely, carbon dioxide – a colourless and odourless gas, which promotes plant life and vegetation of all kinds; indeed, they could not survive without it. It is an established scientific fact that, over the past 20 years, the earth has become greener, largely thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Be that as it may, as long ago as 2009, the IPCC chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri – who is a railway engineer and economist by training, not a scientist, let alone a climate scientist – predicted that “when the IPCC’s fifth assessment comes out in 2013 or 2014, there will be a major revival of interest in action that has to be taken. People are going to say: ‘My God, we are going to have to take action much faster than we had planned.’” This was well before the scientific investigation on which the latest report is allegedly based had even begun. So much for the scientific method.

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/historic-visit-italian-minister-culture-and-tourism-hebron-david-wilder

Italian Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mr. Massimo Bray, hosted by Tiph in Hebron, walked near Beit Hadassah, where he was met and greeted by David Wilder, spokesman for Hebron’s Jewish Community. Following brief introductions, the minister toured the Hebron Heritage Museum and visited the community’s dav-care center. The visit was very positive. It was suggested that perhaps an Italian-sponsored project, spearheaded by the minister, could try and bridge the gap between Arabs and Jews in Hebron. The project could deal with common culture between both Arabs and Jews.

Hebron’s Jewish community welcomes such visits and hopes that other international leaders, particularly those from the EU, will follow in Minister Bray’s footsteps, following his example, and meet with Hebron community leaders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsDeaNjkWl8&feature=player_embedded#t=0