RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/kerry-returning-to-israel-for-peace-mirages/

On Thursday Secretary of State John Kerry will be visiting Israel, and presumably also the Palestinian Authority, for the fourth time since accompanying President Obama on his visit here in late March. Four times since late March suggests something like obsession. Indeed, Kerry is reportedly set to unveil a “framework for peace talks” in early June.

The PA, for its part, is making threats about what it will do if the talks don’t start up again. Israel Hayom reports that “The Palestinians have done all the legal work necessary to join 63 U.N. agencies, conventions and treaties [and are] planning to apply as a state to 16 international organizations if peace talks with Israel [do] not resume by June.”

The Palestinians want to make this unilateral-statehood push on the basis of the UN vote last November that gave them the status of a nonmember observer state. The United States (along with Israel, of course) was one of the few countries voting “no” and, at least declaratively, strongly opposed the Palestinian move.

Meanwhile, not for the first time, the Palestinians—both official bodies and civilians—have been engaging in behavior not notably consonant with visions of peace.

Earlier this week it was reported that:

A Palestinian man who was detained by the Palestinian Authority security forces in Hebron has lost the ability to speak as a result of severe torture, according to a report released by the Independent Commission for Human Rights.

Mohamed Abdel Karim Dar of Hebron was hospitalized after being tortured while in detention, the report, which documented 28 cases of torture in PA prisons in the West Bank last month, said.

Dar had been detained by agents belonging to the PA’s Preventive Security Service and held in solitary confinement, the document said.

“He lost the ability to speak and suffered from wounds to his body as a result of banging his head against the wall and tying his hands while being held in solitary confinement,” the report added….

The organization…said that it had received complaints of torture and mistreatment against other branches of the PA security forces in the West Bank—13 against the police, seven against the Preventive Security Service, seven against the General Intelligence Service and one against Military Intelligence.

Earlier this month World Tribune reported that

Britain…has been playing a major role in training and financing Palestinian security forces in the West Bank…. [O]fficials said Britain has been training and advising virtually every major PA security force, often in coordination with the United States.

The report goes on to note that British intelligence “has repeatedly urged PA security commanders to stop torture,” but “acknowledged that torture and abuse continued in PA detention facilities against Hamas suspects and pro-democracy activists.”

When elections are free and fair – broadly speaking US foreign policy and any claim to moral leadership have plummeted under the current U.S. administration – never more so than in the case of Iran http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3598/when_elections_are_free_and_fair_broadly_speaking One of the problems modern public servants face is the tyranny of the PC. When I joined the FCO […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3592/saudi_arabia_beheads_yemenis_displays_corpses_in_public

Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry has reported the beheading and subsequent display of five Yemeni men charged with murder and robbery

Saudi Arabia has today beheaded five Yemenis and displayed their bodies in public.

The men were found to have murdered a Saudi national and formed a gang that committed robberies across several towns in the kingdom, Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry said.

The five were executed in the southwestern town of Jizan, bringing the number of people executed in the kingdom this year to 46, according to a tally kept by the Agence France Presse (AFP).

A witness in Jizan told AFP that the five men were displayed in public near a university.

A picture posted to Twitter shows the five men are hanging from a rope tied to their waists on a horizontal bar between two cranes.

The Al-Akbar website reports that Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry said that Khaled, Adel and Qassem Saraa as well as Saif Ali al-Sahari and Khaled Showie al-Sahari had formed a gang which committed “several crimes in various regions in the kingdom and robbed stores.”

The five had also killed Ahmed Haroubi, a Saudi, by beating him up and strangling him, it said.

Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery, drug trafficking, sorcery and witchcraft are all punishable by death under Saudi Arabia’s strict version of sharia, or Islamic law.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3577/carbon_emissions_hit_400ppm_so_what
Carbon emissions hit 400ppm. So what?
“CO2 is primarily plant food while its other implications for Nature are negligible in comparison.” Maybe we should learn to love our carbon emissions?

If there is one thing we know about Jihad, it is that it is highly attractive to anti-intellectual zealots and propagandists; which brings me to that most pointless of pseudo-religious ideologies, the anti-carbon jihad.

We only have to look at the quality of its advocates, and the hypocrisy that mars their campaigns, to tell us something of the movement. There is the former presidential candidate, a multi-mansion-owning, jet-setting major carbon emitter who sold his TV cable channel to a Big Oil-financed government. There’s the loony-tunes former NASA ‘scientist’ who harasses the Queen of England about the evils of coal on company notepaper.

Then we have the battalion of well-funded medievalist lobbyists wielding the latest technological gadgetry and jetting around international conferences while demanding the rest of us return to a “quaint” way of life – that is, one where life-expectancy was brutally short. And let’s not forget the highly politicized unelected tyranny that masquerades as the ‘United Nations’ and the data-fiddling IPCC panel of ‘climate experts’ – an oxymoron if ever there was one – it spawned.

Oh yes, and we need to give an honourable mention to that most famous of palace-hopping, limo-riding climate experts, Prince Charles.

On their say-so the world of anti-carbon jihad turns. Spurred into action, green politicians duly pass green laws and impose green taxes that help impoverish us at a time of genuine economic hardship – all of which do precisely zip to help the environment.

Take the latest ‘big’ CO2 scare story that broke in early May. The level of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, it was claimed, had hit a new ‘symbolic’ 400 parts per million (ppm). The usual suspects were spurred into righteous indignation; Al Gore’s blog post set the tone. Here is an extract:

“Yesterday, for the first time in human history, concentrations of carbon dioxide, the primary global warming pollutant,, hit 400 parts per million in our planet’s atmosphere…We are altering the composition of our atmosphere at an unprecedented rate…Talk to your neighbors, call your legislator, let your voice be heard. We must take immediate action to solve this crisis. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next year. Now.”

The mush-for-brains left-leaning news media, long signed-up to climate alarmism, duly went into over-drive. The New York Times hilariously compared the trace gas CO2 to a “tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom” dramatically concluding that “the fate of the earth hangs in the balance.” The UK’s Guardian newspaper reported that CO2 levels have “never been seen in geological records and some effects of climate change are already being seen”. The UN’s resident climate alarmist-in-chief, Christiana Figueres, announced that the world had entered was a “new danger zone”.

Hundreds of headlines and editorials around the world duly chaneled the same paranoia.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348983/oversight-washington-all-along-eliana-johnson IRS specialists in Washington were closely involved in the Cincinnati office’s scandalous behavior. From the outset, Internal Revenue Service lawyers based in Washington, D.C., provided important guidance on the handling of tea-party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status, according to both IRS sources and the inspector general’s report released in mid May. Officials in the […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349000/toxic-immigration-‘reform’-alex-alexiev Why are Republican luminaries trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Barely into its second term, the Obama administration is reeling from the mounting evidence of its callous disrespect for the rule of law and willingness to lie to the American people, as has been demonstrated in the cases of Benghazi, the […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348982/no-special-counsel-irs-scandal-andrew-c-mccarthy

It would address the symptoms, not the underlying cancer.

It is the Washington way. Egregious misconduct surfaces, showcasing the militantly officious nature of bloated big-government bureaucracy. But the Beltway and the commentariat cry in unison for a special counsel, ensuring that the symptoms — a few corrupt bureaucrats — will get all the attention while the underlying cancer metastasizes.

In the unfolding IRS scandal, we already know President Obama’s conservative political opponents were targeted for the revenue agency’s version of waterboarding. On cue, prominent Republicans and conservatives are starting to call for a special counsel — clearly under the misimpression that a “special counsel” would mean a prosecutor “independent” of the Obama Justice Department. Here at NRO, my friend Larry Kudlow lends his voice to those advising the GOP that a special counsel is the way to go. With due respect, I think it would be a blunder.

The special counsel is a legal anomaly. More important, pushing for one sends entirely the wrong signals. It indicates that criminal culpability takes precedence over political accountability. Worse, it suggests that the evil here is the malfeasance of a few government officials. To the contrary, the problem is a perversely complex regulatory framework that gives the IRS — which should simply collect taxes based on an easily knowable formula — enormous discretionary power to discriminate and intimidate. That makes the IRS an un-American weapon, particularly when it is controlled by an Alinskyite will-to-power administration.

Sure, we can worry about prosecuting the weapon-wielders at some point. The urgent problem here, though, is the weapon itself. Our energy should be devoted to exposing the scandal in the light of day and shaming Washington into dismantling the IRS — which is actually planned to swell markedly, and grow even more intrusively offensive, under Obamacare.

Let’s start with the law. Special-counsel proponents seem to think “special” means “independent.” Larry, for example, contends that “an independent special counsel can investigate any possible White House connections with senior Treasury officials, connections that could lead to the Oval Office” (emphasis in original) — adding in conclusion that “only an independent special counsel could possibly straighten this mess out.” Under our law, however, special counsels are not independent of the administration in power.

A quarter-century ago, Justice Antonin Scalia presciently argued against the independent counsel in his famous Morrison v. Olson dissent. In our constitutional system, all executive power is reposed in the president. The conduct of criminal investigations is, unquestionably, a purely executive power. Consequently, there cannot be any legitimate federal exercise of prosecutorial authority independent of the executive branch.

“Special” counsels may be special in the sense that they are singularly dedicated to a particular investigation. They may even be exempted from the Justice Department’s ordinary prosecutorial structure (in which each case is investigated by the U.S. attorney’s office in the district with jurisdiction over the offenses alleged to have taken place). But special counsels are not independent of the executive branch. They still answer to the attorney general and, ultimately, the president.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The use of the IRS to target conservative groups should be the least surprising development in years. Not only does that sort of thing date back to Clinton and JFK, both of whom unleashed the IRS on their enemies, not to mention Nixon who never managed to pull off the things that JFK grinned, did and got away with, but there was no reason for not to do it.

The two reasons not to sic the IRS on your enemies are decency and the law. Is there anything in Obama’s career, including his treatment of fellow Democrats, to suggest that he cares for either one?

The man in the White House clawed his way to power by stabbing his mentor in the back, leaking the divorce records of his political opponents and throwing out the votes of Democrats in Florida and Michigan to claim the nomination.

And he was just getting started.

In the last election, Obama urged voters to punish our “enemies”. It was a window into the mindset of a man who moans and groans about partisan politics, but talks like Huey Long when he gets in front of the right audience.

But these days the description is fairly apt. Who was the last president that both sides could agree was an okay sort of guy or something less than the devil incarnate? The answer might be George H. W. Bush, who was pilloried for being an out of touch rich guy, but really not all that bad when you think about it. And that means we have to go back two decades to find a president that the other side didn’t think should be put on an ice floe and pushed out to sea.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/05/20/avant-garde-institutionalized-meet-millie-brown-lady-gagas-favorite-vomit-artist/?print=1

What is it about the word “art”? Pronounce it, and the IQ of susceptible folk is instantly halved. (I’ve seen cases where it is diminished by 87 percent.) Normally sensible people who do not, as a rule, appreciate being being made fools of stand idly by as someone tells them that a video of some charlatan climbing naked up a scaffolding while applying vaseline to sensitive parts of his body is “the most important American artist of his generation.” Instead of throwing something soft and rotting at such mountebanks, they nod solemnly and reach for their wallets. They are only too eager, when a stiffy arrives from the Museum of Modern Art or some similar establishment, to don the soup and fish and buzz round to the super exclusive evening event where scores of beautiful people line up to sip the shampoo and admire a tank full of formaldehyde and a dead tiger shark.

What is it about the word “art” that endows it with this mind-and-character-wrecking property? Why does it induce incontinent gibbering, not to mention mind-boggling extravagance, among normally hard-headed souls? A full answer would take us deep into the pathology of our time. It has something to do with what I’ve called elsewhere the institutionalization of the avant-garde, the contradictory project whereby the tics and outré attitudes of the avant-garde go mainstream. The half-comic, half-contemptible result is that ordinary bourgeois adults find themselves in the embarrassing position of celebrating the juvenile, anti-bourgeois antics of people who detest them.

Our misuse of the word “art” also has something to do with our age’s tendency to look to art for spiritual satisfactions traditionally afforded by religion. “In the absence of a belief in God,” Wallace Stevens observed, “poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/dewey_stalins_propagandist_the_worlds_teacher.html

Joseph Stalin had been General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party for six years in 1928, when John Dewey, “the father of modern education,” toured Russia with a group of educators. Later that year, The New Republic published Dewey’s Impressions of Soviet Russia and the revolutionary world. This polemic stands as a remarkable testament to progressivism’s disdain for mankind, reason, and truth. It is also Dewey’s most honest and concise primer on the principles of his progressive education method. Anyone prepared to defend the idea of government-controlled schooling after reading this work is perhaps beyond reach of rational argument.

Dewey’s general assessment of the Stalinist Russia he claims to have encountered is unabashedly positive, not to say romantic. Here is a very typical example:

But since the clamor of economic emphasis, coming… from both defenders and enemies of the Bolshevik scheme, may have confused others as it certainly confused me, I can hardly do better than record the impression, as overwhelming as it was unexpected, that the outstanding fact in Russia is a revolution, involving the release of human powers on such an unprecedented scale that it is of incalculable significance not only for that country, but for the world. [p. 15]

Note the peculiar effect of combining the most understated, non-judgmental language to describe a murderous dictatorship (“the Bolshevik scheme”) with the most unobjective hyperbole (“overwhelming,” “unprecedented,” “incalculable”) to describe something as abstract and speculative as “the release of human powers” under communism. This passage, and indeed the entire document, written by a sixty-nine year old eminent intellectual, reads like the silly postcard effusions of a ten-year-old girl on her first trip to Disneyland.

Furthermore, notice Dewey’s expression of surprise at the disparity between the Russia he claims to have encountered and the one he supposedly expected to find. Knowing that he is writing for American readers inclined to disapprove of the Soviet dictatorship, Dewey carefully peppers his reminiscences with expressions of shock. The pretense that he never expected to find Russia so wonderfully transformed by communism is this lifelong leftist’s cynical reversal of Socratic irony — his feigned wide-eyed innocence is intended to entrap the unsuspecting reader in naïve acquiescence to irrationalism. The technique is used frequently to punctuate his most outrageous declarations of admiration for Soviet tyranny. Two more examples:

If I learned nothing else, I learned to be immensely suspicious of all generalized views about Russia; even if they accord with the state of affairs in 1922 or 1925, they may have little relevancy to 1928, and perhaps be of only antiquarian meaning by 1933. [22]

I am only too conscious, as I write, how strangely fantastic the idea of hope and creation in connection with Bolshevist Russia must appear to those whose beliefs about it were fixed, not to be changed, some seven or eight years ago. I certainly was not prepared for what I saw; it came as a shock. [40]