RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362260/shocking-number-kevin-d-williamson

“Black Americans did not leave the party of Lincoln for the party of Joe Biden; they left the party of Herbert Hoover for the party of Franklin Roosevelt. Or at least they thought they did. What they got instead was the party of sky-high crime, dangerous and dysfunctional schools, a joblessness rate for black men that is more than twice the rate for white men at 14 percent and rising. Twice the unemployment, twice the high-school dropouts, four times the abortions, four times the HIV, seven times the prison sentences, twelve times the babies born with congenital syphilis, fourteen times the murder victims, and nineteen times the gonorrhea.

All that and $4,955.”

The phrase “waving the bloody shirt” grew popular in the South as a description of Republicans’ alleged exaggeration of the crimes of the Ku Klux Klan, the paramilitary division of the Democratic party. It is an irony of history that waving the bloody shirt has in the Age of Obama become the Democrats’ primary mode of discourse. Oppose the Affordable Care Act? Racism. Like the Second Amendment? Racism. Black Barbie is on sale for half off, but white Barbie is full price? Racism. Black holes sucking the energy out of your quadrant? Why single out the black ones? Racism!

Waving the bloody shirt is not only about making an emotional appeal — it’s a strategy for distraction. It became a bitter joke in the Soviet Union — whether the issue was the crimes of Stalin or the fact that the Lada was a piece of junk, the answer was always the same: A u vas negrov linchuyut. The same principle is at work in today’s Democratic commentariat: As Americans start to notice what a fiasco Obamacare is . . . Oh, look! A Confederate flag! There is really nothing more satisfying to liberals than a Confederate flag sighting, though I wonder what they’d make of the fact that in my corner of Texas it is not unheard-of to see black men wearing Dixie belt buckles or T-shirts. (All of our necks are just different shades of red.) When Brad Paisley sings about the Confederate flag, it’s like Christmas morning for Touré. Yet, despite the daft insistence of Joan Walsh and the Affiliated Suburban Pearl-Clutchers of America, there is no neo-Confederate revanche just around the corner. The idea is, however, a useful distraction. But a distraction from what?

From $4,955.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/10/13/the-ten-worst-purveyors-of-antisemitism-worldwide-8-recep-tayyip-erdogan/?print=1

Check out the previous installments in this ongoing series:

#10: David Irving

#9: Roger Waters

******

Back on June 10, 2005, in New York, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accepted an award from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on behalf of Turkish diplomats who had saved Jews during World War II. Erdoğan had been elected two years earlier as head of the Islamist AKP Party, at a time when the Turkish-Israeli strategic alliance and trade relations were thriving.

Although antisemitism ran deep in the AKP and in the Turkish Islamist camp generally, Erdoğan’s words at the award ceremony sounded reassuring. “Anti-Semitism has no place in Turkey,” he said.

It is alien to our culture.

The Turkish nation has been living for centuries with the Jewish people and will continue its close and friendly relations with them in the future.… Our consistent policy towards anti-Semitic diatribes can be nothing short of zero tolerance.

Erdoğan went so far as to call antisemitism “a criminal disease of mind.”

Just a month earlier Erdoğan had visited Israel with a large group of businessmen, held talks with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, laid a wreath at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and said Iran’s nuclear program was a threat not just to Israel but to the whole world.

Today Erdoğan is still in office, having been reelected twice. And yet, while unofficial trade relations continue, Turkish-Israeli strategic and military ties are in shambles. The small Turkish Jewish community of about 20,000 (some put the figure lower) has been subjected to terror attacks and vilification and largely lives in fear. The same ADL has denounced Erdoğan’s “vitriolic condemnation of Israel and unqualified embrace of Hamas.” Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg has called him “a semi-unhinged bigot.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/10/tying_the_knot_under_obamacare.html The heinous intrusions into our lives as a result of ObamaCare swell each day. Now, in true Marxist form, the ludicrously named “Affordable Care Act” mounts an all-out attack on marriage. In 2010, in a Web Memo, the Heritage Foundation pointed out that Under the bill, couples would face massive financial penalties if they […]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2416030/Christine-Granville-Britains-female-special-agent-paved-way-liberation-France.html

She was the deadly special agent who charged headlong into occupied territory to fight for her country and the Jewish mother who was killed in a concentration camp.

Christine Granville – the favourite spy of Winston Churchill – worked for years undermining the Nazi regime despite having a short life expectancy in the field.She famously always kept a knife strapped to her thigh, so that she was ready for action at any time.

Christine, a native of Poland who was born Krystyna Skarbek, volunteered in 1939 after her homeland fell to the Nazis.

She was enrolled in what was then known as ‘Section D’ – short for destruction – which would later become the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which undertook espionage, reconnaissance and sabotage missions in occupied territory.

The fledgling spy was given the cover name Christine Granville, which she adopted permanently after the war.

She was sent first on missions between Hungary – then neutral – and occupied Poland, where she proved her mettle as an intelligence courier, skiing by night to dodge border patrols in temperatures of -30 Celsius.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4282/obama_starts_to_cave_on_iran_sanctions_as_yet_another_dictatorship_plays_him_like_a_violin The call from Washington to pause implementation of new sanctions against Iran is another terrible miscalculation by the most naive and clueless US administration since WWII Talk about “clueless”. Oh, yes. That’s right, this is the Obama administration and its foreign policy, so we’ve talked about “clueless” before, haven’t we. Here’s the latest. Right […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/grover-norquist-who-has-ties-to-actual-terrorists-calls-tea-party-terrorists/print/

It’s funny how Grover Norquist and his employees and the left are on the same page despite their supposed commitment to tax reform.

In an email reviewed by The Daily Beast and dated October 17, Ryan Ellis, the director of tax policy for Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, declared, “the Repeal Coalition was hijacked by Defund terrorists. They flew the plane in a new direction and assured us that x, y, and z would follow. Not only did they not follow, but in fact a, b, and c happened.”

When more liberal voices, such as Chris Matthews and Al Gore, have compared Cruz and his cohorts to terrorists, they’ve come under attack from conservatives.

Speaking of terrorists, there’s Grover Norquist. Who is in bed with actual terrorists, not metaphorical terrorists.

In 1998, Abdurahman Alamoudi, a self-described “supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah,” took an interest in Norquist, whom he knew to be one of the Republican Party’s most influential networkers.

The Treasury Department later identified Alamoudi as one of Al-Qaeda’s top North American fundraisers.

One of the organizations that Alamoudi funded was Norquist’s Islamic Free Market Institute, which was also funded by the Saudis and the governments of Qatar and Kuwait.

http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2008/12/the-story-of-the-schechter-brothers.html

In preparation for my spring senior seminar on the Great Depression, I’m currently reading Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man. The book is a wonderful history of the Great Depression, written by a journalist who knows enough good economics to tell the story well. In reading it last night, I had the wonderful experience of learning something new that made me think about a whole bunch of interesting questions I hadn’t considered before. As a scholar, there really isn’t a better feeling and it’s one I wish I could convey better to students so they would see that what appears to be the dorkiness of their professors is really our desire to share one of life’s most profound joys. What I learned was the story of the Schechter brothers of Brooklyn, NY.

The Schechters ran two kosher butcher shops, poultry specifically, in Brooklyn. They were Jewish immigrants in the 1930s. Running a kosher butcher shop is a complicated affair, as the Laws of Kashrut are far more than a “dietary” code. Normally, keeping Kosher is thought of as just a set of rules about what food observant Jews cannot eat (e.g., pork, shellfish, scavengers, etc and no mixing milk with meat), but it is at least as much an ethical code. And that ethical code involves both how humans are to treat the animals they kill (humanely, as kosher butchers must follow specific rules about how animals are killed) as well as how they must treat their customers. For observant Jews such as the Schechters, the Laws of Kashrut were both a matter of religious observance and good business.

Enter FDR and the NRA. The National Recovery Administration was part of the early New Deal and was Roosevelt’s attempt to cartelize American industry to prevent it from suffering the consequences of too much competition. The thinking was that too much competition was keeping prices too low, which was undermining incomes and purchasing power, and dragging the economy down. Matched with Hoover’s and FDR’s attempts to keep wages up, the NRA’s similar attempt with prices made for a highly misguided combination that contributed to the length and depth of the Great Depresssion. As part of its legislation, the NRA had all kinds of detailed codes for individual industries, describing to the letter how firms must do their business. The Schechters fell under the “Code of Fair Competition for the Live Poultry Industry of the Metropolitan Area in and About the City of New York” (and you thought Atlas Shrugged was fiction….). Among the things the code prohibited was “straight killing” which meant that customers could buy a whole or half coop of chickens, but did not have the right to make any selection of particular birds (such individual selecction was “straight killing”).

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304069604579153180784447714 Israel’s Big Tech Sector Looks to Produce Bigger Companies TEL AVIV—Try as you might, it is extremely hard not to be a bit star-struck by the Israeli technology scene. Just when you think you have seen everything, along comes something even more impressive, such as a startup with a nanotechnology that has the potential […]

http://www.jewishledger.com/2013/09/destination-jewish-barbados-a-family-celebration-with-the-oldest-jewish-congregation-in-the-western-hemisphere/
THE LOVELY AND HOSPITABLE PEOPLE OF BARBADOS CALL THEMSELVES “BAJIANS”….AND THE CONNECTICUT JEWISH LEDGER HAS GREAT COLUMNS ABOUT “BAJEWS”…. READ THEM ALL BY CINDY MINDELL
Destination: Jewish Barbados A family celebration with the oldest Jewish congregation in the Western Hemisphere
P by StaceyDresner
2 Votes

By Cindy Mindell

BRIDGETOWN – In 2014, Congregation Nidhe Israel in Barbados will turn 360, making it the oldest Jewish community in the Western Hemisphere.

The story of Jewish Barbados is one of escape, freedom, piracy, trade, secret identities, sugarcane, intermarriage, assimilation, windmills, conversion, slavery, emigration, restoration.

It is a story of mysteries and remnants.

It is one that Robin Walcott knows well. A descendant of one of the first English families to arrive on the island, Walcott has spent his life exploring the various cultures and historical threads that weave through his homeland.

As a veteran of the hospitality business, he has shared his pride and knowledge with countless visitors to the island. After managing several successful restaurants along the west coast, Walcott opened Beach View, a popular family resort in Paynes Bay, which he manages together with his younger daughter, Carrie.

In conversation with friend and local historian Karl Watson, Robin realized that the Bridgetown synagogue was about to mark a significant milestone. And he had an idea: bring Jews back to Barbados to celebrate the island’s unique Jewish history. With Beach View as a home base, families can celebrate b’nai mitzvah and traditional Jewish weddings in one of the oldest synagogues in the world, and follow a nearly 400-year-old trail of Jewish heritage.

http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000885898

162 Israeli start-ups raised $660 million from local and foreign investors in the third quarter of 2013, the highest quarterly amount since 2000, IVC announced today. Investment was up 34% from the $493 million raised in the preceding quarter and $35% from the $488 million raised in the corresponding quarter of 2012. Investment in start-ups rose 12% to $1.63 billion, raised by 474 companies, in January-September from the $1.45 billion raised by 413 companies in the corresponding period last year.

During the third quarter, five companies each raised more than $20 million, accounting for 25% of the total amount, and nine companies each raised $10-20 million each. The average financing round rose to $4.07 million in the third quarter from $3.45 million in the preceding quarter.

“There has been a continuing rise in the number of seed and first round financing transactions in recent years, resulting in a dramatic increase in the overall number of VC-backed high-tech companies in Israel. We see this trend continuing, leading to record number of deals in 2013 at both stages,” said KPMG Somekh Chaikin’s Technology Group partner Ofer Sela. “Another encouraging trend reflected in year-to-date results is the growing number of mature companies that are already generating substantial revenue and are focusing their efforts on global expansion through building sales and marketing infrastructure. This trend is going to continue to increase the size and volume of M&As in the Israeli market, as we have recently seen. We are likewise hopeful that some of these firms will continue to expand independently, raising capital through the IPO route.”

Israeli venture capital funds invested $151 million in start-ups in the third quarter, 23% of the total, the lowest proportion in ten years. Although Israeli funds’ investment rose from $130 million in the corresponding quarter, their proportion of total investment fell from 27%.