RUTHFULLY YOURS

When we celebrate Thanksgiving, after being thankful for family and friends, for health and comfort, for food and shelter; we shouldn’t forget to be thankful for the left.

There is no light without darkness and without evil, the good often fails to find their own voice. It is in the presence of slavery that we remember the worth of freedom. Men and nations are forged in war; not only the war of shell and shot, but the war of ideas. War teaches us to fight for what we have. Wars of ideas teach us to stand up for what we believe.

It is because conservatives are basically hopeful and confident that we are also prone to extremes of despair. Too many us were shocked at the decline of our society because of our great confidence in it. The faith that conservatives have in America makes them vulnerable to being crushed by the latest victory of the left.

I have seen far too much despair and defeatism, too many comments that suggest there is no hope for America and the only thing left to do is pour a glass of wine and watch the sun go down. But those comments testify to how sheltered Americans are from the struggles against tyranny around the world.

Eight years of Obama is bad, but try sixty-nine years of Communism on for size. That’s what generations of Russians had to live through. Ask some of the conservative activists in Europe who have never had any of the freedoms that we still take for granted whether they’ve given up hope. Ask people from countries where criticism of Islam can mean death, whether they’ve given up hope.

There are countless tales of courage over the last century of men and women who did not stop fighting, who did not stop teaching their children so that they would not stop resisting. And those stories have not ended. They continue today in Europe, Asia and South America. And those people would envy the conditions under which we fight, where we can protest without being shot or sent to prison, where we can have a shot at winning elections if we try hard enough.

Where we are, compared to 100 percent of the rest of the world, still free.

We face a hard fight, not only for our freedom, but the freedom of the world. The international left has made America its special project. It knows that if it can extinguish the hope of liberty in this land then it will drive the rest of those who hope for freedom across the ocean deeper into despair. And it wants your despair. It wants you to give up so that the rest of the world gives up too and bows under its chains.

And yet this fight is a glorious one. This fight is our birthright. And we should be thankful for the fight.

In France: The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 – 28 July 1794)

In America: May 25 to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a Constitutional Convention to address governing the United States of America.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393580/those-ungovernable-colonists-kevin-d-williamson Those Ungovernable Colonists
Our founding fathers knew when to build, and when to fight — and what to build, and what to fight.

The American colonies must have been an unruly place, full as they were of religious fanatics and slave traders, second sons and fortune hunters, criminals and former political prisoners, and all manner of people in between. The first settlements hugged the coast, where one set of adventurers looked seaward while another looked to the interior wilderness. It was, in retrospect, almost inevitable that North America would quickly become the wealthiest place in the world by the 17th century.

Why? Because those seditionists, fanatics, and gamblers were impossible to rule. While we are counting our blessings this Thanksgiving, let’s not forget to count that one: Our ancestors did not much like being told what to do, and we — and the world — are immeasurably richer and happier for that.
Edmund Burke called the Crown’s attitude toward the colonies “wise and salutary neglect,” but it was as much pragmatism as it was policy. There were many colonies and colonists, they were not of a uniformly obedient type, they were far away — and, most important, they were extraordinarily productive. By the latter half of the 18th century, there were more iron forges in the American colonies than in Britain, the colonies were exporting millions of barrels of flour and tons of other agriculture products, and one out of three ships in the British merchant fleet was American-built. The economy was booming, and most of the population still lived in rural or semi-rural areas, far from the amusements of urban life, which may explain why the ratio of colonists to subjects back in England went from 1:20 to 1:3 in the course of just a few decades.

One of the reasons why the Industrial Revolution — which is to say, modern civilization — first rumbled to life in Britain rather than in Spain or Germany was the secret unruliness of the English, seemingly one of the world’s ruliest peoples. A combination of happy historical accidents and cultural predisposition meant that Englishmen were relatively free to pursue their own economic ends; even in the late medieval period, England did not have anything so strict as the German guild system or serfdom as intensely enforced as French villeinage. The American colonists regularly flouted laws purporting to regulate trade and manufacturing, and the Crown wisely looked the other way. (Until it didn’t, at which point it got a fight and lost.)

http://pjmedia.com/blog/not-just-hagel-navy-captain-fired-for-questioning-obama-foreign-policy/?print=1 Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s resignation under pressure from the White House is a drama largely written of Navy Captain James Fanell’s firing early in November. Hagel told interviewer Charlie Rose in the third week of November that budget cuts are threatening American military capability. In August, Hagel said publicly that ISIL is “beyond a […]

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/11/26/how-far-down-do-you-define-deviancy-in-ferguson/?print=1 The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s celebrated phrase “defining deviancy down” first appeared in a 1993 essay in The American Scholar. “I proffer the thesis,” wrote Moynihan, “that, over the past generation…the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize’ and that, accordingly, we have […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/5373/obama_helping_terror_go_nuclear Obama helping terror go nuclear.Iran is already the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, How much more dangerous will Iran become when it gets nukes? But Obama seems far more concerned by Israeli construction of apartments in Jerusalem than a nuclear Iran Earlier this month, a terror attack on a Jerusalem synagogue killed five […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/5375/labour_has_lost_me_as_it_has_lost_the_plot_over_israel
OH PULEEZ WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG? YOU SOUND LIKE ALL THOSE BUYER’S REGRET JEWS WHO VOTED FOR OBAMA….RSK

Labour has lost me, as it has lost the plot over Israel

Actress Maureen Lipman has been a life-long Labour supporter. But the party’s breathtaking hypocrisy and generally shameful behaviour regarding Israel means she won’t be voting Labour at the 2015 elections

For the first time in five decades, I shall not be voting Labour. I have always been a socialist and I believe in the principles of socialism. I have stood on the hustings beside Neil Kinnock and canvassed for my Aunt Rita in her constituency in Hull. I was, somewhat blurrily, a Blair luvvie and I used my dislike of Mrs Thatcher to fuel some deadly impersonations of her.

My late husband, Jack Rosenthal, canvassed for Sydney Silverman in the 1945 General Election. “In them days,” said the father in his seminal television play Bar Mitzvah Boy, “they handed you your Labour Party membership just after your circumcision. They gave with one hand and took away with the other.”

I still believe that, until the Iraq debacle, Tony Blair did great work to restore the party’s fortunes. I still thumb through Tony Benn’s diaries with a fond smile and I am Alan Johnson’s number one fan as a politician, a writer and a humane human being. I have all the time in the world for Margaret Beckett and still admire Frank Field.

I rather liked David Miliband and have a sneaking suspicion he may return strengthened by his time out in the real world. But this lot? The Chuka Harman Burnham Hunt Balls brigade? I can’t, in all seriousness, go into a booth and put my mark on any one of them.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/11/the_pigheaded_bds_movement.html
The incident that got BDS banned from demonstrating at Woolworths stores in South Africa was when members of a political party in support of BDS trespassed into one of the stores and placed pigs heads in what they thought was the kosher foods section.

What kosher food has to do with a cynical anti-Israel provocation was clear to everyone. Kosher means Jewish. Jewish means Israel. BDS is anti-Semitic.

BDS in South Africa has a number of Muslims among its hierarchy. They recruit support from thousands of Muslims there that despise the Jewish State of Israel, which they view as an abomination against the Islamic will.

It was against this backdrop that the porky protest flopped — badly.

The ignorant demonstrators thought they had placed the pig’s heads in the kosher section. They photographed themselves holding the heads in triumph, grinningly exposing themselves to publicity. But they had made a huge mistake. Instead of being in the kosher food section they were in the halal section, where they had unkoshered the Muslim food shelves with pigs.

The Muslim community had broadly supported this act only to be horrified to learn that their food supply had been defiled.

Ah well. That’s what you get when you are pigheaded.

Barry Shaw is the author of ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative.’ www.israelnarrative.com

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/11/gruber_thinks_youre_stupid_zeke_wishes_for_death____they_wrote_obamacare.html

Consider two immensely influential individuals in healthcare. Dr. Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist, and Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, oncologist, NIH ethicist, Penn Professor, and brother of Rahm. Their common link, both were key architects of the widely unpopular Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The concern we should all share, within the last two months certain admissions by these healthcare heavyweights about ObamaCare surfaced that should make even the most ardent ObamaCare supporter stop and ponder.

The Gruber tapes have been all over the news. The American voter is stupid, the taxation was “hidden,” and transparency was absent in the process leading up to the vote on the law. Gruber has expressed these troublesome sentiments in various forums, including in front of a camera. The gist of it all, Gruber knows more about what is best for us Americans when it comes to healthcare than we do. It appears that this supremacy complex seemingly justified the deception of the people and the morass of text in the massive bill that worked to hide the truth about the real intent of the law, considering Gruber’s reasoning. But what more is hidden, besides the taxes? That leads us to Zeke’s viewpoints.

“Why I Hope to Die at 75,” is the title of Dr. Emanuel’s manifesto published last month by The Atlantic. In the essay, Zeke tells us why he plans to pursue no care whatsoever once he reaches age 75, not so much as a flu shot. And while Zeke’s words convey his personal wishes as to his own care, one cannot help but wonder, allegorically, if this influential physician feels that he, too, knows better than us when it comes to our healthcare, just as Gruber does. Even more frightening, Dr. Emanuel doesn’t consider the health status of the individual at age 75, the quality of that person’s life, of even the company he or she provides to loved ones but, in a stoic and scientific manner, Emanuel cites the average age of significant accomplishments of Nobel laureates (for physicists, age 48 at the time of discovery) and gauges a human being’s worth by their level of productivity. Wow! Zeke helped write the law, Zeke gauges human worth by productivity and not familial ties or quality of life, and himself a highly accomplished individual in academia (just like Gruber) Zeke sets the bar pretty high by citing the age of Nobel prize winners as a measuring stick of the age of peak human productivity as he correlates it to the collective worth, and worthiness, of the person.

http://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/my-year-of-living-israelly/the-foul-stench-of-the-ferguson-fallout/2014/11/26/0/

How can the response to racism simply be to condone racism against a different group?

Although this blog is about my year living in Israel, this entry is focused on what has been going on in Ferguson, Missouri. They are related. They are related because the outrage in Ferguson is allegedly about racist violence. So why is the response…racist violence? And why are people who should know better trying to prove their own bona fides by justifying the racist violent response? Or even any violent response?

It is very much like those who denounce Israel for being an “Apartheid State” insisting that peace will only be achieved by creating a Palestinian State where no Jews can work, live or breathe.

I feel like I am watching the same awful and absurd movie in a different language. What’s worse, most others watching the same movies don’t or won’t recognize either their absurdity or their awfulness.

When I was in law school, back in the mid-to late 1980s, we had a workshop one day entitled “‘Isms’ in the Classroom.”

Yes, we were already (or still? Or maybe just again) into sessions about feelings, even at august U.S. law schools.

The workshops were intended to address different sorts of negative attitudes and how to deal with them, given the disparity in power between the professors and the students, as well as between the majority and the minorities.

The title of one of the workshops I attended: Racism in the Classroom.

I’ve never forgotten something that happened during that workshop. I recall the incident very clearly, almost as if I am watching a close-up scene in a movie, the kind where the camera pans over a large room filled with people, then slowly focuses in on just a few, while every one else goes out of focus.