RUTHFULLY YOURS

A funny thing is happening on the way to the 2016 election. Youth, excitement and new ideas increasingly seem to be the province of Republicans. For decades – at least since Jack Kennedy – the Democrat Party has been the one associated with youth, vitality and concern for the needs of real people. However, with the long years they have spent in Washington, Democrats have morphed into a cynical, sanctimonious group of aging professional politicians. The smug Jonathon Gruber, now dismissed by Democrats for telling the truth, perfectly captured their Pecksniffian ways when he spoke of the “stupidity” of the average voter, of his and her inability to understand the magnanimity of what the Left was doing for the good of the common man. Process, despite being elemental to democracy, is irrelevant to these people. The end is all.

Democrats are driven by semi-contrived, elitist issues, like global warming (now called climate change since temperatures haven’t changed much in a decade and a half) and environmental issues, where they advocate products like electric cars and solar panels that only the elite can afford. They want wind farms, except not where they might interfere with their windsurfing on Nantucket Sound. They express concern regarding inequality, but not if it interferes with their remaining first among equals. They claim to want the best education (including free pre-K), as long as it doesn’t upset the teacher’s unions, or it doesn’t involve vouchers that might send the unwashed to the private schools where their own children are tucked safely away.

They have created victims where none existed. For example, not only is equality demanded in terms of scholastic outcomes, the federal government now requires public schools in Minneapolis to have equality in terms of punishment. In other words, on a pro rata basis African-American boys cannot be disciplined more than Asian girls, regardless of the natural inclination of the former to misbehave more than the latter. Democrats have re-lit the divisive fuse of racism, as a means of ensuring they keep the African-American vote.

Their every word and deed revealed an ancient civilization and traditions filtered through the centuries. Their bodies were turned into fountains of blood by the delirium of Islamist murderers who shouted “Allahu Akbar”. But to see them alive, shadows swaying, was to realize that those four learned men transmitted the plastic image of scenes from the Old Testament.

They each wanted to aspire to be a “talmid khakham”, students of rabbis who preceded them, in the tradition of those pious scholars who founded a democratic theocracy and rebelled against the most formidable autocratic monarchy of the time, Egypt.

The four Israeli rabbis killed with a machete in the synagogue in Har Nof, Jerusalem, lived with an acute sense of the Jewish tragedy. The destruction of the Temple, the mass pogroms of Chmielnicki and the Holocaust were physically present in their lives.

They spoke of “mesirut nefesh”, Hebrew for self-sacrifice. “The Lord chooses his children, we have to respect his wishes.” This infinite compassion was the greatness of Rabbis Moshe Twersky, Aryeh Kupinsky, Kalman Levine and Avraham Shmuel Goldberg. They had a pale and elusive beauty, intensified by a spiritual contempt for fear. They wore long white beards and blue eyes bursting with curiosity.
Twersky was heir to two of the families who have contributed volumes to the glory of Orthodox Judaism. A life of study and prayer. His maternal grandfather, the great Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Jewish philosopher and rabbinic head of Yeshiva University, known simply as “the Rav”, pressed Pope Paul VI to reinstate the condemnation of the charge of deicide during the writing of the Vatican encyclical on Judaism Nostra Aetate, which had disappeared from the draft under the pressure of the Arab eastern churches. The other grandfather, Rabbi Isadore Twersky, famous for his works on Maimonides, founded the Center of Jewish studies at Harvard.

Kenya has been a frequent target of Jihadists:
In 1980, the Jewish-owned Norfolk hotel was attacked by the PLO. In 1998, the US embassy in Nairobi was bombed. In 2013, the militant group Al-Shabaab killed over 80 people at Nairobi’s Westgate Shopping Mall.
In 2002 terrorists attacked an Israeli-owned hotel and a plane belonging to an Israeli airline in Mombasa, Kenya. An SUV crashed through a barrier outside the Paradise Hotel and blew up, killing 13 and injuring 80. At the same time two surface-to-air missiles were fired at an Israeli charter plane. The Israeli air-force escorted the plane home. In June 2014 48 people were killed when Moslems attacked a Kenyan coastal town overnight, targeting a police station and two hotels.

In June 2014 48 people were killed when Muslims attacked a Kenyan coastal town overnight, targeting a police station and two hotels. No comments from Obama about the terror in his paternal homeland…..rsk

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Kenya’s deputy president Sunday denounced the killing of 28 bus passengers by Islamic extremists and said the nation’s military responded by killing more than 100 militants in Somalia.

William Ruto, speaking on a national broadcast, said Kenya is a target of international terrorist groups, including Somalia’s al-Shabab, which is linked to al-Qaida. He said Kenya’s security forces will protect citizens, including by raiding mosques.

In response to the bus attack, Kenyan security forces struck the al-Shabab camp in Somalia where the bus attack was planned, said Ruto.

“Our message to them is clear; you may sneak and attack innocent civilians. But for any attack on Kenya and its people, we shall pursue you wherever you go,” Ruto said.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta is in Abu Dhabi on an official visit.

Al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the bus attack, in which non-Muslims were singled out and killed Saturday. The Somali rebels said the attack was in retaliation for the closure of four mosques on the Kenyan coast by Kenyan authorities last week.

The president’s operating principle appears to be that democracy is what you can get away with.

My mother was, in her modest way, an Ayn Rand villain, someone who lived by the moral principle that John Galt mockingly summarized: “It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards.” She believed that being poor gave one a warrant to exploit any situation to one’s own material benefit. The results of this were generally comical, if cringe-inducing: On the few occasions upon which we found ourselves staying in motels, she and her husband would steal practically everything that was not nailed down: towels, bathrobes, ashtrays — this was in the pre-Enlightenment era, when hotel rooms still had ashtrays and Gideon Bibles. Come to think of it, there were a couple of Gideon Bibles in our house, too, the provenance of which was suspicious. This belief was not limited to economic concerns: She was an enthusiastic partisan of the intentional, strategic foul in football, and of the proposition that athletes should attempt, when possible, to inflict disabling injuries on their opponents. Having been initiated into the ancient mystery cult that is West Texas high-school football, I knew these beliefs to be barbarous, heretical. The Lubbock High School Westerners had a fine long tradition of losing with honor.

I have seen a high-school football coach refuse to shake the hand of his opposite number after a football game in response to perceived affronts to sportsmanship, and that’s a serious thing. (They take it seriously in that other kind of football, too.) It’s basically Sampson biting his thumb at Abraham in the opening of Romeo and Juliet. “When good manners shall lie all in one or two men’s hands, and they unwashed, too, ’tis a foul thing.” You don’t shake hands with somebody who has behaved dishonorably.

I do not think I would shake hands with Barack Obama.

http://twitchy.com/2014/11/23/theyre-going-to-want-that-new-car-smell-obama-makes-case-against-hillary-dems-in-2016/

Here’s his full quote:

“I think the American people, you know, they’re going to want — you know, that new car smell. You know, their own — they want to drive something off the lot that doesn’t have as much mileage as me,”

Now who could he possibly be talking about?

Lost in the hoopla of President Obama’s enormous administrative amnesty affecting mostly Mexican and Central American illegal immigrants is that he also implemented a special protective order allowing people from Ebola nations to stay in the United States.

It’s amnesty on steroids! The special Ebola reprieve was issued separately-and quietly-via a Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a humanitarian program that’s supposed to be short-term. Instead, we’ve seen the provisional benefit grow into a continual U.S. residency plan for illegal aliens under both Republican and Democratic presidents. Besides those who have entered the U.S. illegally, TPS has also helped foreigners who have overstayed their visa permanently evade deportation. That makes the phrase “temporary” deceiving and somewhat of a joke.

It also means that we might as well add the African Ebola folks to the official amnesty bandwagon. For now, the administration is designating Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone for TPS for 18 months. That’s how it always starts-for a short period of time then it grows into years. Before you know it, illegal aliens who benefitted from TPS for humanitarian reasons are legal residents enjoying all the generous perks-free education, food stamps, medical care etc.-that Uncle Sam has to offer.

This scenario has been repeated over the years. In fact, just a few weeks ago the administration extended TPS for tens of thousands of Hondurans andNicaraguans. The order was originally issued more than a decade and a half ago after a hurricane (Mitch) hit the Central American countries and has been renewed over and over again, illustrating that there’s nothing temporary about these reprieves. “There continues to be a substantial, but temporary, disruption of living conditions in Honduras (replace the word with Nicaragua) resulting from Hurricane Mitch, and Honduras remains unable, temporarily, to handle adequately the return of its nationals,” according to the government announcement posted to the federal register in mid-October.

The overriding, terrible theme of the 21st century is the suicide of cultures. Small civilizations die for any number of reasons; great civilizations die because they want to. My book on the subject was reasonably well received in the U.S. but made no real impact on the public debate, although it seems to have had some influence in Hebrew translation.

The suicide of cultures is incomprehensible to liberalism, which places the human condition in a Petrie dish for the edification of social scientists. It is also incomprehensible to the main currents in American conservativism, that is, the Straussian and Catholic versions of natural right and natural law. We flounder in the face of suicidal cultures because we lack the intellectual tools to confront them. Men do not always seek the good, as Aristotle opines in at the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics: often they seek nothingness. When in history have so many volunteered to commit suicide to murder civilians, as the jihadists now do? When in history has a combatant tried to maximize the number of casualties among its own civilians, as does Hamas? The liberal mind reels with horror at the phenomenon of mass suicide.

We learn how to grapple with cultural suicide from Ecclesiastes, from Augustine’s reflections on Ecclesiastes, and from Goethe’s reflections on Ecclesiastes in Faust, which take us to Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig and Heidegger. The latter’s embrace of “Non-Being,” as Michael Wyschogrod observed in his masterwork The Body of Faith, is consistent with his support for Hitler. Our highbrow culture averts its gaze from the philosophical inquiry into Non-Being; our popular culture cannot take its eyes off the personification of self-destruction in the form of zombies and vampires. Our popular culture is infested by existential horrors which our intellectual culture refuses to acknowledge.

The Muslim Brotherhood (and its Palestine chapter, Hamas) and ISIS are the Arabic-language branches of the NSDAP, and they employ the same theater of horror to demoralize their enemies. Mere rationalism quails before such horrors. We require a phenomenology of the irrational to address it.

Among the many lies and failures of Barack Obama, ultimately the most dangerous, the most lethal for humanity, is his meretricious and pathetic pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran. In negotiation, Obama and his minions have been treating the mullahs as if they were the leaders of Denmark, even to the point of sending fawning multiple mailings to Ayatollah Khamenei, as absurd an approach as it is asinine.

If Obama really wanted a deal, he would have gone about it in a very different manner, strengthening sanctions rather than weakening them, treating the mullahs as the autocratic religious fanatics that they are. What Obama seems to want instead is the appearance that he seeks to deprive Iran of the bomb, not the actual result. (He may even want the reverse, unconsciously or even semi-consciously. That would be more in line with his anti-imperialist views.)

Sunday evening, a day in advance of the conclusion of this round of talks, the AP [1] is already reporting the “shocking” news that U.S. negotiators are floating yet another extension to the Iranians. The Wall Street Journal similarly posted “No Iran Deal Seen by Monday” [2] later in the evening. This is such a predictable end to the hapless negotiations I imagine London bookmakers wouldn’t even have offered a hundred-to-one against it, maybe not a thousand to one. Betting on the West would have been like betting on a horse with two broken legs and heart condition. It is clear the Iranian leadership is getting precisely what they wanted yet again — more time to build a bomb and improve their nuclear delivery capabilities, including ICBMs, which have no other use other than for nuclear attack. (Note for those who still think this is all about Israel. The Iranians do not need ICBMs to reach Israel. They would be for other purposes.) Meanwhile, the Iranians continue their work on the plutonium-producing Arak facility and on stockpiling low-enriched uranium in oxide form. Undoubtedly, they are up to a whole lot more than that we don’t know about. They allow the IAEA to see exactly what they permit and nothing more. Everything is under their control — or at least the ayatollah’s control.

One of the more interesting passages of the WSJ report is as follows:

U.S., European and Iranian officials said they have made progress over the past year in negotiations that have crisscrossed the world from Oman to New York. But Obama administration officials increasingly are questioning whether Iran’s most powerful political player, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has empowered Mr. Zarif and other negotiators to make the necessary concessions for a deal. Mr. Zarif has repeatedly said he’s empowered to negotiate but that Mr. Khamenei is the ultimate decision maker.

Just now they are questioning this? It would have seemed elementary from the outset to anyone paying the slightest attention to how the Islamic Republic of Iran works and always has since 1979 without interruption. Only a narcissist like Obama could think otherwise, think that his force of personality could overcome Khomeinist Shiite ideology.

It’s a good thing Najibullah Zazi didn’t have access to a modern iPhone or Android device a few years ago when he plotted to blow up New York City subway stations. He was caught because his email was tapped by intelligence agencies—a practice that Silicon Valley firms recently decided the U.S. government is no longer permitted.

Apple , Google, Facebook and others are playing with fire, or in the case of Zazi with a plot to blow up subway stations under Grand Central and Times Square on Sept. 11, 2009. An Afghanistan native living in the U.S., Zazi became a suspect when he used his unencrypted Yahoo email account to double-check with his al Qaeda handler in Pakistan about the precise chemical mix to complete his bombs. Zazi and his collaborators, identified through phone records, were arrested shortly after he sent an email announcing the imminent attacks: “The marriage is ready.”

The Zazi example (he pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and awaits sentencing) highlights the risks that Silicon Valley firms are taking with their reputations by making it impossible for intelligence agencies or law enforcement to gain access to these communications. In September, marketers from Apple bragged of changes to its operating system so that it will not comply with judicial orders in national-security or criminal investigations.

“Unlike our competitors,” Apple announced, “it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants.” This encryption was quickly matched by Google and the WhatsApp messaging service owned by Facebook.

In a private meeting last month, Deputy Attorney General James Cole asked the general counsel of Apple why the company would want to market to criminals. As the Journal reported last week, Mr. Cole gave the hypothetical of the police announcing that they would have been able to rescue a murdered child if only they could have had access to the killer’s mobile device. Apple’s response was that the U.S. can always pass a law requiring companies to provide a way to gain access to communications under court orders.

Since then, U.S. and British officials have made numerous trips to Silicon Valley to explain the dangers. FBI Director James Comey gave a speech citing the case of a sex offender who lured a 12-year-old boy in Louisiana in 2010 using text messages, which were later obtained to get a murder conviction. “There should be no one in the U.S. above the law,” Mr. Comey said, “and also no places within the U.S. that are beyond the law.”

Robert Hannigan, the head of Britain’s electronic-intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters, warned in a Financial Times op-ed earlier this month: “However much they may dislike it,” Silicon Valley firms “have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals.”

Regular readers of this column will remember that in July the U.S. asked local officials here to arrest Venezuelan Gen. Hugo Carvajal and to extradite him on suspicion of drug trafficking with Colombian guerrillas. He was detained but the Netherlands stepped in, refused the extradition request and let him go.

The general had been sent here to become Venezuelan consul and spread Bolivarian propaganda. He would have been an important intelligence grab for the U.S. So it wasn’t too surprising that Venezuelan foreign minister Elias Jaua and Cilia Flores, the wife of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, celebrated the Dutch decision by meeting his plane when he returned to Caracas.

The third person in the high-level greeting party at the airport—the governor of the state of Aragua, Tareck Zaidan El Aissami Maddah—seemed out of place because he is not in the national government. That is until you consider his résumé: One part master of Middle-Eastern networking, one part honorary Cuban revolutionary, and one part highly ambitious chavista, Mr. El Aissami is a dream come true for Tehran and Havana. That makes him a powerful man in Venezuela.