RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-230413.html

Turkey’s economy came to a dead stop during the first quarter, but the country’s credit bubble continues to grow.

Under the headline “Ankara’s Economic Miracle Collapses”, I argued a year ago in the Middle East Quarterly that Turkey’s economic prowess had more hype than substance. The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had financed a consumer bubble with a huge trade deficit financed by short-term interbank loans. The consumer boom is gone, but the credit bubble continues, with bank lending still expanding by 30% a year despite the stalled economy.

Turkey’s current account deficit remains in the red-alert region of nearly 10% of GDP, and it continues to finance the deficit with short-term interbank borrowings. Bubbles like this eventually blow up.
Turkey cannot blame global economic conditions, because emerging market economies are growing at 5.5% this year in the International Monetary Fund’s estimate while Turkey is not growing at all. Turkey’s government debt remains quite low at just 36% of GDP, but private-sector debt – especially short-term foreign debt – has tripled in the past four years.

Most of the US$80 billion in short-term money that Turkey has borrowed since 2010 probably came from the Gulf states, which have a strategic interest in preserving a Sunni power with an army larger than Iran’s. This largesse cannot continue indefinitely, though. Turkey’s central bank promised to reduce its foreign deficit by reducing growth. Now the growth is gone, but not the deficit. The galloping increase in bank debt indicates that Turkish banks are lending their customers just enough to pay the interest on past loans.

This puts Erdogan’s political future in question. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the past two national elections on the strength of its economic record. Many Turks are caught in a consumer debt spiral, borrowing to pay a 32% interest rate on credit card obligations. Consumer spending has already started to fall. A few months more of this and Erdogan’s mandate will start to crumble.

The numbers tell the story.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/21/diaper-free-babies-elimination-communication_n_3125617.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl34%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D302354

Elimination Communication: Diaper-Free Trend Gets First Ever Week-Long Celebration (POLL)

The first annual Go Diaper Free! Week starts today. Spearheaded by Andrea Olson, author of EC Simplified: Infant Potty Training Made Easy, the event is an effort to raise awareness of EC or Elimination Communication, DNAInfo reports.With coverage on the local New York City news site and in The New York Times this weekend, parents online certainly have potty training top of mind.

According to the Times, Elimination Communication, which the newspaper first reported on in 2005, is now “finding an audience in the hipper precincts of New York City.” Specifically, both The Times and DNAInfo point to a store in the hipster mecca of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where growing numbers of new parents are attending Diaper Free in NY meetups. These gatherings include information sessions and are B.Y.O.P. (bring your own potty) — but there is a restroom.

So, what is Elimination Communication and why are parents doing it? EC is “NOT potty training,” the homepage of Diaper Free Baby states clearly. “It is a gentle, natural, non-coercive process by which a baby, preferably beginning in early infancy, learns with the loving assistance of parents and caregivers to communicate about and address his or her elimination needs.” In other words — no diapers, some mess and lots of holding baby over the potty, bowls or containers and even the street, as needed. It is, along with breastfeeding, co-sleeping and babywearing, sometimes considered an integral part of attachment parenting.

As Olson details on her website, the goals of EC range from being environmentally friendly — Go Diaper Free! Week is timed to coincide with all things green that have grown out of Earth Day festivities — to fostering a stronger connection between parent and baby. “I love that I can tell when he needs to go,” Kaitlin McGreyes, a special education teacher from Queens, New York, who started her son Cesar with EC as a newborn, told DNAInfo. “And [I] have an idea of what might be bothering him.”

Proponents of EC, like Olson, point to other cultures around the world that don’t wait until age 3 to potty train. And, while it may be a messy endeavor, especially for parents and babies on-the-go in New York City, The Times says that a spokeswoman for the city’s health department didn’t call EC a health hazard — just a “general sanitation issue.” Over at Mommyish, blogger Maria Guido takes that sentiment a beat further:

“I’ve often thought about how much it must suck to be sitting in a dirty diaper – so I can understand where these parents are coming from. I’m not knocking ‘elimination communication’ as a practice. I just think it’s totally gross to have your child urinating in the street. Is that wrong of me?”

Some pediatricians criticize EC for other reasons. The Times spoke to one doctor who is “skeptical” of an infant being able to learn when he or she has to go to the bathroom. And in response to a story about 6-month-old Izabella Oniciuc, whose parents said she was completely toilet trained, pediatric urologist Dr. Steve Hodges wrote in his Huffington Post blog that the practice results in “damaging habits” for baby, namely “chronic holding … the root cause of virtually all toileting problems, including daytime pee and poop accidents, bedwetting, urinary frequency and urinary tract infections.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3681/muslim-family-next-door

Where are the articles by moderate Muslims condemning the prominent Muslims who beg Allah to strike infidels with cancer and disease? No practicing Muslim has openly condemned such prayers, or named the sheikhs who urge these brutalities.

The neighbors of the Chechnyan Muslim family whose sons were responsible for the Boston Marathon terror attack said they were stunned by the news and that this nice Muslim family was known for its generosity and kindness. Many Americans often ask, “What about the Muslim family next door? They are really nice people.”

Some of the nicest people I know are Muslims, but that must never blind us from understanding the risk we are taking when we allow the building of hundreds of mosques financed by Saudi Arabia, as well as millions of Muslims to migrate into America at a time of a fierce, if sophisticated, desire by Islamist groups to spread Islam throughout the world, and to radicalize impressionable youths by stoking anger against the Western nations, people and values.

The existence of nice, educated Muslims should also never blind us from seeing the deep problems within the ideology of Islam and its jihadist goals. Muslims themselves admit that Islam is more than a religion – that it is, in fact, a state, legal system and a military institution—with the goal, as one’s holy duty, of bringing Islam to the rest of the world, a desire often enshrined deep in the hearts of Muslims.

Even though our visible problem is with the Muslim jihadists, the so-called “moderate” Muslims have often been silent enablers and defenders, perhaps from inertia, misinformation or fear of reprisals against them, including death threats to them and members of their family should they speak out.

Terrorists could never be as powerful as they are without the prayers, and especially the material support, of Islamic nations, governments and people. A Muslim Egyptian friend — one of the nicest people you will ever meet — visiting in 1994, was crying in front of the television while praying for the people of Chechnya to declare independence from Russia and declare their country an Islamic State ruled by Sharia law.

The critiques of Islam by this author are never written for the purpose of condemning people; naturally, there are good and bad people in every culture. My deep concern springs from the ideology of Islam: it has had such dark implications on Islamic society, forcing many, otherwise perfectly fine people, to enact unthinkable terror, as others stand silently by. Islam is the only religion that requires its followers to kill those who do not believe in Allah, and to take revenge in the name of Allah. In the Quran, holy vengeance and retaliation are commanded for Muslims: “O ye who believe! Retaliation is prescribed for you. He who transgresseth after this will have a painful doom.”
 [Koran 2:178]. Or: “We shall take vengeance (Muntaquimun) upon the sinners.” [32:22] The translation of the Arabic word “Muntaquimun” meaning vengeance is often watered down in translation by using the word punishment or retribution instead.

http://bit.ly/ZEJlSX While most of the world is afflicted by an economic meltdown, Israel demonstrates fiscal responsibility, sustained economic growth with no stimulus package and a conservative, well-regulated banking system with no banking or real estate bubble. At 65, Israel’s credit rating is sustained by the three leading global credit rating companies: Standard and Poor’s (S&P), […]

The “Mysterious Motive” Cover-Up on the Boston Attack Begins

http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-mysterious-motive-cover-up-on.html

Now that the two (main at least) terrorists from the Boston Marathon attack have been killed or captured we enter a new phase, the phase in which the dominant Politically Correct (but Factually Incorrect) forces try to explain away the attack.

Can this be done? Will they really try? Well, yes. True, as one of my correspondents remarked it is much easier to obfuscate far distant Benghazi than the total shutdown and horror in the middle of a major American city. Yet the spin-masters are already at work.

The first step must be, in part, a stalling technique but it sets the pattern for what is to come. As, in the words of a Reuters story, the “Boston Marathon bombing investigation turns to motive,” the motive must be obfuscated.The Reuters piece is a good start. The article spends seven paragraphs discussing the parents claim that the two brothers were framed. This suggests that the mass media and politicians will not shrink from suggesting—perhaps I should say, gives fair hearing—to bizarre conspiracy theories and doubts.

People shouldn’t believe these completely, is the theme, but you just can’t be too sure that two young Muslims would have any reason to harm Americans.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/saudi-students-in-us-up-more-than-500-since-sept-11-2001?f=must_reads

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/saudi-students-us-more-500-sept-11-2001

(CNSNews.com) – The number of Saudi Arabian students in the United States has increased by more than 500 percent since Sept. 11, 2001–when Hani Hanjour, a Saudi national who came here on a student visa flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 189 people.According to the Institute of International Education–whose numbers on foreign students in the United States are used in official reports published by the U.S. Department of Education–there were 5,579 Saudi nationals enrolled in U.S. institutions of higher education in the 2001-2002 school year. The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks took place near the beginning of that school year.

In the 2011-2012 school year, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 34,139 Saudi nationals enrolled in institutions of higher education in the United States.

The 34,139 Saudi Arabian students in the United States for the 2011-2012 school year was more than the total of 30,256 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the University of Connecticut this school year.

From the 2001-2002 school year to the 2011-2012 school year, the number of Saudi nationals enrolled in U.S. institutions of higher education increased by 28,560.

That is an increase of more than 500 percent.

http://m.forward.com/articles/175264/slain-boston-bomb-suspect-tamerlan-tsarnaev-eyed-i

Slain Boston Bomb Suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev Eyed in Jewish Triple Murder
Best Friend Killed Along With Brandeis Grad and Devout Jew

Police in a Boston suburb are investigating whether slain Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was involved in the unsolved murders of his close friend and two other men, one of whom was a Brandeis University graduate and the other a devout Jew.Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with police, was a close friend of Brendan Mess, who was found murdered in an apartment in Waltham, Mass. on Sept. 12, 2011, along with Erik Weissman and Raphael Teken.

Weissman was a devoted member of his synagogue, according to WCVB in Boston and Teken had majored in history at predominantly Jewish Brandeis.

The triple murder was originally considered to be drug related because the men’s bodies were found covered with marijuana. The crime was particularly brutal and all three victims’ thoats were slashed.

A Boston Globe profile of the Tsarnaev brothers first made the possible connection to the triple murder.

BuzzFeed spoke with a man named Ray, who now believes that Tsarnaev could have played a role in the unsolved crime.

“Tam wasn’t there at the memorial service, he wasn’t at the funeral, he wasn’t around at all,” Ray told BuzzFeed. “And he was really close with Brendan. That’s why it’s so weird when he said, ‘I don’t have any American friends.’”

At the time of the murders, police said attacks were not random and there were possibly two suspects, the Boston Herald reported. The Globe reported an anonymous officer who said that drugs were believed to be a factor.

A week before his murder, Mess had been in an altercation with his girlfriend where she reportedly threw knives and beer bottles at him. She was out of state at the time of the murders though, the paper said.

According to police reports, Weissman was arrested in 2008 charge of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. Larry Aaronson, who taught Weissman at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, told the Globe after the murders that Weissman had an unusually diverse group of friends.

www.HumanRightsVoices.org.

UN Human Rights Official Says Boston Got What It Deserved

This article by Anne Bayefsky originally appeared today on Breitbart.com.

UN Human Rights Council “expert” Richard Falk has published a statement saying Bostonians got what they deserved in last week’s terror attack. He quotes W.H. Auden to make his point: “to whom evil is done/do evil in return.”

Richard Falk is the UN’s “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” He has held the post since 2008, despite exposure as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.

In his latest rant, published online on April 21, 2013 by foreignpolicyjournal.com. Falk repeats the libel that prior to 9/11 President George W. Bush was seeking a “pretext” for war, and that anything Israel is the opposite of “justice and peace.”

And then he attacks Bostonians head-on. The police action in Boston was a “hysterical dragnet.” Boston’s dead were “canaries” that “have to die” because of America’s “fantasy of global domination.”

Falk explains the attacks as justifiable “resistance.” In his words: “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.”

Outrage in Jordan The very fact that 110 members of Jordan’s parliament (out of a total of 150) signed a petition for the release of the murderer from Naharayim speaks volumes about what parades as morality and coexistence next door to us. Jordan, it needs to be stressed, is formally at peace with Israel. Hence […]

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2013/04/22/connecting-the-dots-101/ The dramatic events in Boston last week have given rise to what President Obama would call a “teachable moment.”  The question is, will we “connect the dots”?  And, more to the point, will our leaders, the media and the rest of us have the intellectual integrity and courage to learn the evident lessons? The […]