RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/blog/chinese-power-play/

China’s establishment of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over most of the East China Sea on November 23 erases any doubt about the international community and the U.S.’s long-standing efforts to persuade China to become a “stakeholder” in the international order. These efforts have failed at a major juncture of what constitutes international order: the right of innocent passage through international waters and airspace.

China has been contesting territorial claims of various of its neighbors in the South and East China Seas for years now — with Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan, to name a few. But China’s newly declared ADIZ should not be confused with an attempt to increase security. It is, rather, a power play aimed at establishing the subordination of neighboring states, extending China’s territorial reach in other disputed areas, and the narrowing of legitimate South Korean and Japanese Air Defense Identification Zones which are now intersected by China’s, and about which no previous dispute existed.

The contest with Japan over the Senkaku Islands, located in the East China Sea, is a proximate cause of China’s most recent action. The newly announced Chinese Air Defense Identification Zone is a polygonal shape that extends eastwards from a point north of Shanghai deep into the East China Sea and parallels the Chinese coast at a distance of about 400 miles closing back toward the mainland just north of Taiwan. China will require aircraft that pass through this zone to identify themselves or face what government spokesman Qin Gang said was “an appropriate response according to the different circumstances and the threat level that it might face.” This is a not-so-veiled warning that China may use military force to assert its claim. The Chinese have no legal basis to make this demand of aircraft that transit international waters. It is as though the U.S. were to extend the limit of North American airspace by several hundred miles and demand that aircraft — including commercial aviation — that pass through it identify themselves or risk being forced to land, or more dire consequences.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/grooming_gangs_and_sharia.html Muslims groups around the world are crying Islamophobia and playing the victim card as horrific Islamic-motivated crimes, such as grooming and rape-gangs, rage on with impunity throughout the Western world, especially in Europe. Rape or grooming gangs, which are almost entirely Muslim, are committing a crime that is religiously mandated in Islamic doctrine. Muslim […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/365404/print Bob Fu’s new book, God’s Double Agent, tells of his fight for Christians’ freedom in China. Pondering the plight of the people of China, one’s head can start spinning. The stories of oppression — including imprisonment and executions; citizens simply “disappearing”; dissidents undergoing torture, beatings, and intimidation; and absolute control of just about every aspect of everyday ​life — seem […]

“But Mr. Hannan shouldn’t be faulted for his optimism—particularly given the gravity of his book’s central argument: that the survival of democratic self-governance, individual rights and economic freedom depends largely on the choices made today by the world’s English-speaking cousins.’

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303789604579200063693919116?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecondBucket

I am reading this wonderful book…Daniel Hannan could write about 50 ways of cooking kale and it would be delightful….rsk

Years ago, when I was an American student in Edinburgh, I had a long conversation about British foreign affairs with another student—an Italian—and remember finding it slightly amusing that he kept referring to the British as “your cousins.” I had never thought much about the political and cultural ties binding the U.S. and Great Britain and was at the time more keenly aware of the differences between the two peoples than of their essential sameness. But as Daniel Hannan observes in “Inventing Freedom,” his history of the principles and institutions that have defined English-speaking nations, non-English speakers much oftener think of the U.S. and Britain as a single entity than as two countries. When French political commentators and European Union officials complain about “Anglo-Saxon” values—liberalized labor markets, low taxes—they are coming closer to the truth than Americans and Britons typically realize.

Mr. Hannan’s book is more than intellectual history; it’s also an argument and a plea. The principles of representative democracy, individual liberty and property rights aren’t the products of some general European phenomenon called “capitalism,” he says, and any belief that they are owes more to Karl Marx than to the historical record. These principles originated in pre-Norman England, were realized fully in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and spread as English speakers left the British Isles to colonize the New World, India, East Asia and Australia.

Maybe Eric Schmidt can get Merrill Newman out of Pyongyang. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304854804579236150756070232?mod=Opinion_newsreel_4 Thinking of taking a holiday in forbidden North Korea so that you can one-up your friends who spent two weeks in exotic Bhutan? The best advice: Don’t. That’s a lesson being learned the hard way by Merrill Newman, a retired executive from California who […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303670804579234550517363202?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

If Ronald Reagan was not a conservative, there is no modern American conservatism. But if Yuval Levin’s provocative new book, “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right,” is correct, Reagan was anything but a conservative on what Mr. Levin regards as the most fundamental division between left and right—Burke’s and Paine’s rival conceptions of political change.

In his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine famously proclaimed that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Burke, whom Mr. Levin regards as the progenitor of conservatism, saw the future as inextricably linked to the past and present. Abrupt or revolutionary change begins with social destruction and ends in self-destruction. Change that improves the world is rooted in respect for the tacit wisdom of the present. A true patriot and wise politician, Burke wrote, “always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country,” a thought that Mr. Levin summarizes as “we do not have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

This brings us to Ronald Reagan, whose attitude toward change was more like Paine’s than Burke’s. Reagan often quoted Paine’s “we have it in our power” affirmation and did so in one of the most systematic statements of his creed—his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican convention.

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/dec/3/obamacare-lotteryand-you-lose-sucker/ It is becoming increasingly obvious that some Americans will benefit from Obamacare, but most of us will lose our doctors, our hospitals, in fact our entire heath care plans because, in horseplayer parlance, there’s a sucker born every minute, and suckers are us! We gambled on the wrong man. The wrong man came up […]

http://www.timesofisrael.com/sound-and-fury-masking-true-debate-over-bedouin-resettlement/ The fiery rhetoric surrounding the Prawer-Begin resettlement plan is hiding the real needs and complicated reality of Bedouin modernization. There is nothing new in the intense interest foreigners take in the Israeli-Arab conflict. But the concentrated flurry of discussion and activism abroad over the government’s so-called Prawer-Begin plan to resettle some of the Bedouin […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

When Obama decided to turn his campaign into a permanent Super PAC; he was stabbing the Democratic Party in the back. But he was doing it to them, before they did it to him.

Organizing for America gave him an independent source of power and influence at the expense of the Democratic Party. Obama was carelessly draining money and energy out of his own party because whatever common interests he had with a political party, that for all its leftward swing was still too conservative for his taste, were about to be fractured during his second term.

The Democratic Party might have been satisfied if he had retained his 2008 halo in 2015. But that was never going to happen. No matter how much the media slobbers over a politician, the voting public, at least those parts of it that don’t have Hope posters and Obama holograms hanging on their walls, eventually needs a break and someone to blame.

Even vice presidents tend to turn on their own presidents once they begin running for office. George H.W. Bush did it to Reagan and Gore did it to Clinton. It may be hard to remember now in this wave of nostalgia for the 90s when there was actually an economy instead of a shrunken shell of one, but the Democratic Party and the American people had grown sick of Clinton and his scandals.

Gore was running as the antithesis of Bill Clinton. Boring and serious-minded where Bill was the life of the party. An ethical man, aside from all those scandals due to the lack of a controlling authority, who really understood the new internet technology, and wasn’t going to be caught with an intern; unless she was working at a massage parlor.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/iran-quran-has-marked-israelis-as-rabid-dogs-and-pigs?f=puball

In the wake of news that Israel will send a delegation to Washington, D.C. to influence the Obama administration’s international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, the Islamic Republic is stepping up its attacks on the Jewish state.

“This vicious temperament of dogs and pigs is you (Israel),” said Ayatollah Mohammad Imami Kashani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body that appoints the supreme leader, at Tehran’s interim Friday prayer. “The Quran has marked on your foreheads that you will be humiliated. The Zionist officials are like animals, and truly as rogue thugs they do whatever they want, killing people, creating bloodshed and destroying whatever they want.”

Kashani said at this week’s Friday prayers sermon in Tehran that whenever Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears on television, “all of the world hates you. You are hated, humiliated and despicable and,” the ayatollah added in a putrid insult to make to a Jew, “have been immersed in the flesh of rabid dogs and pigs.”

Kashani also had harsh words for the Obama administration: “Nations of the world are the enemies of the Zionists and (America’s support of Israel) will have you share the misery of the Zionists.”

Kashani stated that uranium enrichment is Iran’s right and that America, Britain and Israel lie when they say Iran wants the nuclear bomb.

Last Sunday, Iran and the 5+1 world powers – the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany – reached agreement in Geneva over Iran’s illicit nuclear program.