RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/money-down-a-rathole-college-healthcare-housing?f=puball

Households are dumping trillions in hard-earned income down ratholes with marginal returns: costly higher education, healthcare and housing.

What happens when households dump huge percentages of their stagnant incomes down marginal-return ratholes? They get less wealthy, which is exactly what we’re seeing. The average American household has been persuaded that pouring money into costly higher education, healthcare and housing are all “investments” that offer high yields.

Sadly, the opposite is true: the returns on these stupendously costly investments is marginal or negative. Let’s start with higher education, a topic I have discussed at length numerous times.

In essence, a college degree has lost its scarcity value, and in an era of labor arbitrage (a.k.a. offshoring and international competition), automation and relentless pressure to lower costs, even advanced degrees in law, science and business management that once were perceived as guarantees of secure high-paying employment no longer have scarcity value: the number of people with advanced degrees far exceeds the number of open positions.

Meanwhile, the education cartel has raised prices at a rate that is three times the rate of inflation. The credulous “buyers” of expensive higher education continue to pay absurdly inflated prices for degrees that have marginal value in the real-world marketplace.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/for-the-marxists-ye-have-with-you-always?f=must_reads

I was involved in a revealing exchange yesterday. Something I had Tweeted – a diffident question about whether pushing more and more people into university was necessarily desirable – prompted a series of responses along the lines of ‘Typical: like all capitalists, you don’t like poor people’.

The criticism came in such a blizzard that I felt some sort of reply was in order, so I took to the keyboard again: ‘I love all these “capitalists don’t like poor people” Tweets. It’s true: we want to turn them into rich people. It’s socialists who need their client groups.’

What happened next got me thinking. One after another, the Lefties on Twitter lined up to argue that capitalism couldn’t survive without poverty, that its essence was the widening of inequality, that it concentrated more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer plutocrats, that its days were numbered. I won’t bore you by quoting them all. One – from the prolific Labour blogger Sunny Hundal – might stand for many: ‘In fact capitalism (by definition) needs more poor people and prefers poor bargaining rights and gross inequality’.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/can-you-guess-the-october-surprise

One should never underestimate the audacity of President Obama to do anything to hold onto his presidency. It is safe to assume that, should his currently close but favorable poll numbers drop significantly, he has some critical “October Surprise” hidden away in his back pocket. Election fraud aside, some postulate that some form of pre-election adoption of (or, at least, nod to) some or all of the Simpson-Bowles Commission recommendations remains available. These same believers question why Romney does not do something similar as well.

More likely, however, the October (or September) maneuver will lie abroad; foreign policy is the natural playground for an incumbent commander in chief to manipulate. International crises tend to bring our nation together in support of the president while making it difficult for a challenger such as Mitt Romney to attack. After all, we can’t change leaders in the middle of a crisis. Furthermore, while the choice of Paul Ryan as candidate for Vice-President doubles up on fiscal issue strength, it adds little toward foreign policy expertise. Obama will likely press the issue to both distract from the economy while stressing the advantage of being in the White House. And just as Romney was careful to not criticize Obama when he traveled on foreign soil, he will be pressured from many fronts to quell campaign attacks should the country find itself in some form of actual battle.

While Obama rode the wave of anti-pre-emptive war fervor in 2008, the most critical last minute ploy, however, may be to stage some aggressive use of force against either Iran or Syria in order to further what has been a successful theme of “Obama as warrior.” The Obama campaign has been able to sell the narrative that Obama is “gutsy” and uninhibited when it comes to national security interests. The killing of Bin Laden, originally staged to occur and be announced immediately preceding a media packed White House Correspondent’s Dinner, was sold to the public as an “agonizing” decision by a uniquely gifted executive. One need only ask how the supposed “spontaneous” flash mobs of college kids that so quickly assembled to celebrate obtained that many American flags to see the fine hand of a David Axelrod storyline being sold to America.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

After serving a few years in prison for his role in the Munich Massacre, Willi Pohl moved to Beirut. The brief sentence was a slap in the wrist, but Pohl had still served more time in prison than the Muslim gunmen who had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Mohammed Safady and the Al-Gashey cousins were released after a few months by the German authorities. They went back to Lebanon and so did he.
A decade after the attack, Willi Pohl had begun making a name for himself as a crime novelist. His first novel, written as Willi Woss, was Tränen Schützen Nicht vor Mord or Tears Do Not Protect Against Murder.

While Pohl was penning crime novels, Israeli operatives had already absorbed the lessons of his first title. Tears, whether in 1939 or 1972, had not done anything to prevent the murder of Jews. Bullets were another matter.

The head of Black September in Rome was the first to die, followed by a string of PLO leaders across Europe. Those attacks were followed by raids on the mansions and apartments of top Fatah officials in the same city where Pohl had found temporary refuge. By the time his first book was published, hundreds of PLO terrorists and many of its top officials were dead.

Western law enforcement had failed to hold responsible even the actual perpetrators of the Munich Massacre, never mind the representatives of the PLO who openly mingled with red radicals in Europe’s capitals. Israeli operatives did what the German judicial system had failed to do, putting down Safady and one of the Al-Gasheys, while the other one hid out as a frightened guest of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

The Israeli raid on the PLO terrorists in Beirut’s Muslim Quarter missed one important target. Arafat. And so, on another September day, some 19 years later, September 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin shook hands with Arafat and proclaimed, “Enough of blood and tears! Enough!” But the blood and tears had only begun, as a PLO on its last legs was revived by that handshake and built its terrorist infrastructure inside Israel’s borders.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
PLEASE SEE:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Exploration_Fund

The witness I call, British Major-General Sir Charles Wilson (1836-1905), was chairman of the Palestine Exploration Fund (its website is here), with which he had been long involved, for the last few years of his life.

In July 1899, as reported in the Jewish Chronicle (14 July 1899), he addressed the Fund’s Annual General Meeting in London, regarding his recent travels in the Holy Land:

“The lecturer said that the face of Palestine was changing very rapidly, and the change was due to various causes. The tomb-hunter, who had done such infinite harm in Egypt, was abroad in Palestine and destroying its antiquities. Another change was brought about by a revival of medievalism, which showed itself in a scrambling for holy places. The amount of building of monasteries which had gone on in the Holy Land during the past twenty years was extraordinary. There was scarcely an eminence which was not occupied. Great harm had also been done to the antiquities of the country in this way. Thus the foundations of a synagogue which he had disclosed at Tel Hum [Capernaum], in 1865, had been covered up again. A great change had also been brought about in the landscape of the country, which was due to the Jewish colonies. He was quite unprepared for the extraordinary improvement that the Jewish colonies had effected, turning deserts into gardens and waste places into cultivated fields. Ekron, especially, furnished a fine example of what was done by proper cultivation. [Emphasis added.] As colonists, the Jews showed themselves to be the equal of any people in the world (loud applause).

His visit to Moab and Edom had been a short one, but it enabled him to realise the main features of the country and its description in the Bible. He ascended Mount Pisgah, but, unfortunately, it had been raining, and the valley of the Jordan had been filled with steam, which obscured the view. The river Arnon, the northrn boundary of Moab, was the modern Wady-el-Mojib, which empties itself into the Dead Sea, about twenty-five miles south of Jericho. A journey along the high plateau brought them after a time to a plain, which must be “The Field of Moab,” mentioned in the Bible. One of the most interesting places in Moab was Kerak, where he came across an instance of the little care that the people of those parts evince for their dead. They let them lie about in the open to putrefy and be eaten by jackals. The Tomb of Noah, close to Kerak, was a place of pilgrimage much esteemed in the south of Palestine. Coming to the Biblical Tophel, the view of the Dead [Sea] from there was very beautiful. From the edge of the plateau they got an extraordinarily fine view of Mount Hor,in Edom. They entered Petra through the celebrated defile known as the Sik. They lodged in the Khasneh Phar’aun, the famous structure in which travellers sleep. From Petra they visited Mount Hor. Sir Charles exhibited on the screen a view of the interior of Aaron’s Tomb, this being the first photograph of the tomb that had ever been taken. They found a fragment of a Greek inscription in this tomb. The Turkish Pacha [sic] had mended the road all the way up to Mount Hor.”

On 14 December1899, Sir Charles spoke on the topic “Palestine of Today” to members of London’s Camera Club at their premises in Charing Cross Road.

http://chqdaily.com/author/chqdaily/

WHAT IS GOING ON AT THE PRESTIGIOUS INSTITUTION….HAVE THEY BECOME AN ISLAMIC PUBLIC RELATIONS AGENCY? SMOOTH TALK BELIES AN ORGANIZATION THAT PROMOTES SHARIA….IF YOU CHOOSE SEND A RESPONSE TO THE EDITOR…..RSK

daily@ciweb.org

A few years ago, Sayyid M. Syeed, the national director of the Islamic Society of North America, was on his way to an interfaith meeting in Michigan during the holy month of Ramadan. While on the plane, Syeed began to consider how uncomfortable he would make his non-Muslim colleagues feel if he didn’t eat or drink with them. He then recalled that in the Quran, it says that a person may be exempt from fasting if they are traveling.

“I said to myself, I don’t have to fast, because I’m going from Washington to Michigan, and I will sit there, and I will also drink and eat, because Quran tells me,” he said.

When he arrived at the meeting, he had almost forgotten about his decision to partake in the meal.

“I didn’t see any water there, no coffee, no tea and even no lunch, then I realized what was happening,” Syeed said. “They were fasting in solidarity with me; and I didn’t have to fast.”

Syeed then decided that he would fast, in solidarity with the Christian leaders sitting around him.

“This is the kind of faith environment that we are building in America,” Syeed said.

http://www.joshuarubenstein.com/stalinsecret/intro.html

THESE WERE THE WAGES OF COMMUNISM WHICH THE AMERICAN LEFT DEFENDED TO THEIR ETERNAL SHAME….RSK

Yiddish culture has not entirely disappeared, but it was sentenced to death twice, and each time the sentence was carried out. On the eve of World War II, millions of Yiddish speakers inhabited Jewish communities from Holland through Germany and Poland into the heart of the Soviet Union. Hitler did his best to annihilate every Jew his armies controlled. Individual Jews survived his onslaught, but their communities and unique culture were destroyed. Ironically, the country that saved millions of Jews and not so incidentally played the decisive role in stopping Hitler was the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union had its own solution to the Jewish problem.

Stalin, like Lenin, expected that Soviet Jews would gradually disappear as the regime offered the carrot of modernization with the stick of forced assimilation. But by the end of his life Stalin could no longer constrain his murderous anti-Semitism and began a systematic assault on the leaders of Yiddish culture who were the primary vehicle for Jewish identity in the country. This campaign culminated on August 12, 1952 with multiple executions in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison.

Jewish communities across America have increasingly marked this event on August 12 of each year as the “Night of the Murdered Poets.” Convicted at a secret trial in the summer, all the defendants, except for the biologist Lina Shtern, were executed on a single night – twenty-four writers and poets (so it was believed), all men (so it was said) cut down by Stalin’s executioners in the basement of the notorious Lubyanka prison.

But because their trial was held in secret and the regime refused to confirm what actually happened for many years, myriad rumors obscured the nature of the case and the identity and number of the defendants. Today, years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the availability of previously closed archival material – including the trial transcript (which was published in Moscow in 1994) and the tireless research of several Russian and Israeli scholars who have discovered and published hundreds of documents relating to the case and even examined forty-two volumes of investigation records – the details of Stalin’s anti-Semitic star-chamber can be plainly and accurately described.

The trial did not involve twenty-five defendants. There were, in fact, fifteen defendants, all falsely charged with a range of capital offenses, from treason and espionage to bourgeois nationalism. While five prominent literary figures were among those indicted – the Yiddish poets Peretz Markish, David Hofshtein, and Itzik Fefer; the writer Leib Kvitko, who was known throughout the country for his children’s verse; and the distinguished novelist David Bergelson – the remaining ten defendants were not writers at all but connected in various ways to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443404004577579490354672410.html
Crime in New York City has dropped 80% since the early 1990s, a decline unmatched anywhere in the country. The change has yielded an explosion of commerce in once forlorn neighborhoods, a boom in tourism, and a sharp rise in property values. Nowhere were the effects more dramatic than in the city’s poorest areas.
When the bullets stopped flying, entrepreneurs snapped up the vacant lots that had served as breeding grounds of crime. Senior citizens were able to visit friends without fear of getting mugged. Children could sleep in their own beds rather than in bathtubs, no longer needing shelter from stray gunfire. Target, Home Depot and other national chains moved into thoroughfares long ruled by drug gangs, providing jobs for local workers and giving residents retail choices taken for granted in middle-class neighborhoods.

Most significant, more than 10,000 black and Hispanic males avoided the premature death that would have been their fate had New York’s homicide rate remained at its early-1990s apex. Blacks and Hispanics have made up 79% of the decline in homicide victims since 1993.

New York’s previously unimaginable status as America’s safest big city is now in jeopardy thanks to a rising campaign against its proactive style of policing. In 1994 the New York Police Department, led then by Commissioner William Bratton, embraced the revolutionary concept that the police could actually prevent crime, not just respond to it after the fact.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=280989 Egyptian forces will be brutal on terrorists that attack them, but will not interfere with Hamas and other forces bringing weaponry into Gaza. Last week’s failed attack from the Sinai peninsula, in which terrorists killed Egyptian soldiers, was extraordinary. Terrorists operating out of Gaza do not usually attack Egyptians. They can obtain arms and […]

Articles: A Mosque Is Not Like a Church or a Synagogue#.UCfZMdqG5Ps.twitter

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/a_mosque_is_not_like_a_church_or_a_synagogue.html
The marked proliferation of mosques in the U.S. since 9/11 should raise a red flag for Americans. Recent controversies surrounding mega-mosque construction projects countrywide — many in locations with almost no Muslims to speak of — have grave implications for the future of these targeted communities and areas beyond.

Accelerated mosque-building — in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Ground Zero, New York; and Santa Clara and Temecula, California, to name a few — carries significance beyond the mere construction of a collection of Muslim houses of worship. It represents yet another orchestrated effort to oust traditional American values and replace them with Islamic practices, laws, and beliefs.

Although most U.S. mosques heretofore have been built without resistance, the newly attendant controversies present speciously polarized views between, on the one hand, ostensibly welcoming, tolerant, multi-culti progressives who deny any possible radical agenda despite substantial evidence to the contrary in existing mosques and, on the other hand, so-called fearful, Islamophobic, ignorant bigots unwilling to embrace diversity. Mainstream media’s predominant point of view is that any opposition to mosque-building represents a blatant unwillingness to integrate Muslims into American communities. This view disallows the possibility that such objections represent appropriate, reasoned responses to an attempt to destroy America from within and supplant its culture with a supremacist, totalitarian, and misogynistic ideology.

Islamic terrorism expert Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project for Terrorism, attributes the spate of mosque-building and land acquisition to the Muslim American Society (MAS), an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Emerson contends that the MAS has been actively buying up property and establishing mosques to control the appointment of imams who “distribute the message they believe is necessary to spread Islam around the world.”

It should be noted that a mosque is totally unlike a church or a synagogue, entities that serve their communities under the law of the land and are both empowered and restrained under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Under the Establishment Clause of that amendment, the government is prohibited from establishing a state religion or conferring preferential treatment on one religion over another. Although the government may not interfere with religious beliefs and opinions, the proscription of religious practices is permissible, as in the examples of polygamy and human sacrifice.

In the U.S. and in other Western countries, Christians and Jews freely and critically choose their brand of theology from a multitude of ecclesiastic offerings and determine their individual levels of religious observance or none at all. The exercise of faith and the observance of faith-related practices occur across a broad spectrum of individual behaviors based solely on personal choice.

In Muslim countries, no separation exists between mosque and state. Islamic doctrine or sharia controls all aspects of a person’s existence, from the correct way to use the toilet to permissible forms of lying, or taquiya. For Muslims, Mohammed is the perfect man, whose every example must be emulated, even though by Western Judeo-Christian standards he was a mass murderer, pedophile, rapist, torturer, and looter. Furthermore, Islamic doctrine is immutable, and any criticism of the traditions and practices of Mohammed is considered apostasy, which is punishable by death.

No free individual will exists or is allowed when it comes to practices and observances. Sharia must be strictly followed. A mosque is a symbol of this ultimate authority and serves the function of organizing every aspect of life in a Muslim community.