RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/

Arianna Huffington, a liberal media prima donna and Internet purveyor of celebrity gossip, offers the silliest advice we have heard so far to the beleaguered people of Greece in today’s New York Times. Her missive sets a new high water mark for liberal stupidity, both for the author, and for the newspaper that chose to print it.

Greece should default on its foreign debt, she avers, like Argentina:

Argentina, which defaulted and restructured beginning in 2001, offers a point of comparison. The austerity crowd warned that Argentina would collapse if it stopped pegging the peso to the dollar and defaulted on its debt. There are many differences between Argentina and Greece. But Argentina’s default was followed by a few short months of economic crisis and then many years of steady economic growth — a dramatically different direction than the one Greece is now taking toward a potentially endless path of contraction that is destroying millions of lives and crippling the indomitable Greek spirit.

The trouble is that Greece is another banana republic without bananas. Argentina is a commodity exporter that won the lottery when commodity prices soared. In 2010 the country exported $68 billion worth of goods, mainly food, oil and metals, and imported $56 billion, with a trade surplus at about 3% of GDP. If you have a trade surplus, you don’t need the international lending market. You can pay cash.

Greece, by contrast, had a trade deficit in 2010 of $22 billion, equal to 7% of GDP. In 2011, both the deficit and GDP shrank, and the deficit remained at 6% of GDP. If Greece defaults, it will be unable to borrow the 6% of GDP it requires to finance this deficit, and it will be reduced to cash-and-carry trade–which means that it will cut imports by the equivalent of 6% of GDP. It appears that arithmetic wasn’t on the syllabus when Mrs. Huffington went up to Cambridge.

Her encomium begins with a sentimental portrait of her self-sacrificing mother, and concludes:

Greece, like my mother, has always been devoted above all else to its children. When the future of those children is diminished, the future — and life — of the country will be diminished, too.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NE15Dj02.html

Zombies remind us that death is social

By Spengler

Paradoxical as it may sound, but the one thing that each us of must do alone – namely die – is the most social of all acts. That is because we construct our lives so that they will have meaning after our death, and we depend on others to sustain that meaning. What we call culture is communication between our ancestors and descendants; what we call tradition is the link to past generations which we transmit to future ones. When we cease to construct our lives this way – when we reject tradition and transgress the culture – we also know that our lives have no meaning beyond our physical existence, and we begin to feel dead.

That explains the improbable popularity of the zombie sub-genre. A search of the International Movie Data Base for productions with the term “zombie” yields just under 1,000 titles, the same number as the search term, “cowboy.” Thankfully, only one title in the IMDB data base combines the two genres.

Zombies are boring by construction, even more boring than cowboys. All zombie films, moreover, have the same plot: some untoward event turns people into zombies, and people killed by zombies also turn into zombies, until no-one is left but a tiny band of human survivors. Of all the formulaic genres, zombie films are most predictable in terms of plot and the least suggestive of new of special effects. The fact that they are especially cheap to produce does not explain why people watch them.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/

Today marks the launch of Andrew McCarthy’s new blog “Ordered Liberty,” at PJMedia.com. The inaugural post is below. also please see the interview by Roger Simon at:

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=174&load=6932

Roger L. Simon talks to former prosecutor, author and PJ Media columnist Andrew C. McCarthy about the illusion of Islamic democracy. McCarthy is an expert on the constitution, law enforcement and homeland security. He is working on a new book about the Arab Spring which he thinks is akin to spring fever. Hear why as McCarthy brings his insights about the Middle East to PJTV viewers.

For Edmund Burke, liberty was the distinguishing feature of the British constitution. He did not, however, mean liberty in some vacuous, hopeychangey sense. “The only liberty I mean,” he wrote, “is a liberty connected with order; and that not only exists with order and virtue, but cannot exist at all without them.”

When we hear the term “ordered liberty” nowadays, it is generally in a legal context. It has become famous — we might better say “infamous” — in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of “incorporation”: the doctrine holding that Bill of Rights protections that restrict the federal government are also validly asserted against the state governments, through the Fourteenth Amendment. The doctrine’s premise is dubious: state sovereignty is the foundation of our form of constitutional governance; if it had been the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment to undo that basic assumption, one might have expected that incorporation would be clearly prescribed — and that it might have taken less than sixty years for the Supreme Court to start enforcing it.

That said, though, the real infamy lies in the doctrine’s inconsistency. It does not apply all of the Bill of Rights against the states; only those rights that the judges, in their wisdom, determined to be “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” as Justice Benjamin Cardozo put it in Palko v. Connecticut (1937). That is to say, there is an arbitrariness to “ordered liberty” as judicially manufactured. Caprice, even if it piously flies under the “rule of law” banner, undermines the very idea of order.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/12/world/meast/iran-ahmadinejad-israel/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

THE MOSQUITO FLEET CAN CAUSE:

Eastern Equine Encephalitis has a 30% – 60% mortality rate once contracted. Severe damage to the central nervous system occurs in those that survive the illness.
West Nile Virus symptoms include fever, headache, nausea, vomiting, and rash, which are mild symptoms to severe symptoms that include neck stiffness, stupor, disorientation, tremor, coma, vision loss, and paralysis. These severe symptoms could last weeks or could be permanent.

The symptoms of yellow fever include fever, chills, headache, backache, nausea, and vomiting; jaundice can also occur. More serious cases may affect the blood, liver, and kidneys. The disease can be fatal.

Symptoms of malaria include fever, chills, headache, muscle ache, and malaise. In its early stages it can resemble the onset of the flu. These symptoms can develop 6-8 days after being bitten by an infected mosquito or as late as several months after the traveler has left the area.

(CNN) — Ahead of upcoming nuclear talks, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad downplayed the threat Israel poses to Iran, comparing it to an annoying bug.

“Israel is nothing more than a mosquito which cannot see the broad horizon of the Iranian nation,” he said Saturday in northeastern Iran’s Khorassan province, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

Ahmadinejad said “regional states” were being duped into buying billions in arms from “arrogant and imperial powers,” driven in part by all the talk surrounding a potential war involving Iran and Israel, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported. Such military purchases, he said, are unnecessary because there is no war on the horizon between those two nations.

The Iranian president alluded to “rulers” who sold “their petrol” for $60 billion worth in arms, though he did not mention by name either the purchasing or selling country. Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a 20-year, $60 billion arms deal with the United States, including nearly $30 billion for F-15 fighter jets announced late last year.

Ahmadinejad has long questioned the existence of the Holocaust and, months after taking office in October 2005, he participated in a lengthy protest called “World Without Zionism” and has repeatedly derided Israel.

“With the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism,” he said then, according to another IRNA report.

On Saturday, while seemingly backing away from the potential for an armed conflict, Ahmadinejad hardly signaled that Iranians should or will embrace Israel.

He predicted Israel could fall if regional powers cut ties — particularly by refusing to sell oil to Israelis.

Tensions have ramped up in recent years over Iran’s controversial nuclear program. Iran claims it is being developed for peaceful means, while Western powers and Israel say they think Iran is evading international inspections and intent on developing nuclear weapons.

This sentiment has led to sweeping sanctions targeting Iran’s economy, government and its leaders.

http://hnn.us/articles/why-did-jewish-daily-forward-interview-hamas-spokesman The recent interview accorded to Hamas’s Mousa Abu Marzook by the Jewish Daily Forward underscores an all-too-frequent and serious failure of perception when dealing with totalitarian movements and those who speak for them. The problem is not the totalitarian addiction to falsehood. One need not be a totalitarian thug in order to lie. Rather, […]

Obama’s Gay Marriage Flip-Flop — on The Glazov Gang
by Jamie Glazov
Leftist film producer Tommi Trudeau joins Evan Sayet and Rob Nelson and the heated battle ensues.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/14/obamas-gay-marriage-flip-flop-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/14/the-left-wing-movement-to-hijack-kosher-food/print/ Orthodox Jews, as well as vegans and allergy sufferers, know that a Kosher certification label on food means that it complies with religious dietary laws. For example a Kosher product marked as “dairy” will not have meat ingredients in it. But to the left, Kosher food represents an untapped opportunity to use as a […]

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4228025,00.html Op-ed: Will Jews, Christians finally join forces in battle against genocidal Islamic hatred? The Coliseum, where thousands upon thousands of “Judaeis” have been massacred by the Roman emperors, became for one night an arena for alliance between Christians and Jews against “odium fidei,” or religious hatred. Last Wednesday in Rome, Jewish leaders for the […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=187 If you come across the byline of Giulio Meotti, stop and read what he has to say. Like Italian MP Fiamma Nirenstein — a fearless warrior in the battlefield of ideas — Meotti is among the small number of European intellectuals who have not been carried out to sea by the tide of cowardice […]

Who Will Suffer As A Result of Euro Policies? The Jews. Peter Martino

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3060/euro-policies

It is as if the U.S. were to renounce the dollar for the “amro,” a common currency with countries as different as Mexico. Colombia, Brazil and Argentina. A documentary on German television last week revealed that the political class in Europe knew that the Greeks were cooking the books, but did not care. Extremist parties of the Left and the Right (all of them anti-Semitic) are rapidly gaining electoral support at the expense of mainstream parties….

The European Union, and especially its common currency, the euro, is on the brink of collapse. The Greeks, unable to form a government after the May 6 elections, will have to go to the polls again next month. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel is rapidly losing support. If she cares about her reelection next year, she had better push Greece out of the eurozone rather than keep that country afloat with German taxpayers’ money. If Greece leaves, the whole euro edifice might come down – a better outcome than the present situation, in which extremist parties on the Left and the Right (all of them anti-Semitic) are rapidly gaining electoral support at the expense of mainstream parties which keep clinging to the failed project of the common European currency……read more
Our Intelligence Community: What Are We Getting for Our $80 Billion? Peter Huessy

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3059/intelligence-budget

The briefers knew less than the Commission members they were briefing. What the intelligence community failed to do was see weapons of mass destruction and missiles as “instruments of state power,” rather than as “contraband traded contrary to traditional norms.”

Americans are justifiably concerned that our national leaders do not seem to anticipate looming threats. They quite correctly ask, “What are we getting for the $80 billion a year we pay to gather intelligence?”

“Don’t worry” says the former deputy director of its Counterterrorist Center: it is not the fault of the intelligence community: “They screw things up all by themselves” he states. “On major foreign policy decisions, intelligence is not the decisive factor”.

Is the intelligence community really that innocent?

Now retired, this same 28-year CIA veteran had a hand in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. The report was a bombshell: its summary dismissed Iran as a threat to US, effectively taking it out of the mix of national security issues in the 2008 Presidential campaign.

This was apparently accomplished by a sleight of hand. In a footnote, the NIE report clarified that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that the report was referring only to the warhead design and not the harder part, the enrichment of uranium and the production of nuclear weapons fuel.

In this instance, US policy on Iran was being guided by an intelligence community as an accomplice in dumbing-down our security assessments to make the “Iranian problem go away.” The former Secretary of Defense, the late Les Aspin, had a phrase for such work: “They cooked the books.”….READ MORE