RUTHFULLY YOURS

A remarkable four minutes of video has emerged from Secretary of State Kerry’s testimony before the Senate. It shows the Secretary squirming under the questioning of Senator Cotton on what the agile Arkansan calls the “two secret side deals” between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran. They are related to inspections of the Iranian regime. The video shows the two leaders of the American negotiating team — Mr. Kerry and Secretary Moniz of the energy department — stating that they don’t know who, if anyone, has read these two secret agreements.

This is a choice moment for those who remember the first of President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.” Those were the Fourteen Points for ending World War One. The Fourteenth was the infamous League of Nations, the idea of a world government. But the First Point, the number one point of principle on which all foreign policy in the age of democracy was going to rest, the opening article in the drive that was eventually to spawn the United Nations, this number one article was “open covenants.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu learned that U.S. Secretary of State will be making a trip to the Middle East to sell the Iran deal, but is skipping Israel.

Kerry will be visiting Egypt and Qatar and other Gulf State representatives, but won’t stop in the Jewish State, which until recently was considered America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

The Prime Minister’s response to the snub was, “Really, Kerry has no reason to come here.”

Expanding upon that response, Netanyahu said of the Iran deal, “This deal has nothing to do with us. We are not influenced by this deal at all. We aren’t partners at the table, we are a meal on the menu.”

Dictators who receive help from America are getting away without any pressure to reform.

Forty years ago this week the Helsinki Final Act, a diplomatic masterpiece, showed how it could be done. It helped to defuse the Cold War, appeared to give the Soviet bloc the security it craved but, by setting up a mechanism to scrutinise human rights, gave legitimacy to dissident groups who started to subvert communism from within. “If you open that Pandora’s Box, you never know what Trojan’ horses will jump out,” as the former foreign secretary Ernie Bevin once had it.

Phoenix, the name of a cabaret in post-war Berlin, serves additional duty as a metaphor for the protagonist’s rebirth and for the beginning of Germany’s national resurgence. Nina Hoss plays Nelly, a Jewish concentration camp survivor whose face was shot and shattered and whose post-war plastic surgery has rendered her difficult to recognize. This is a plot point that pivots the movie’s action and character revelations and unfortunately, it’s too unbelievable to sustain the set-up. Nelly reconnects with her husband who, believing her dead, doesn’t recognize her, even though her face shows all the surgical bruises and scars that suggest exactly what has happened to her. He hatches a scheme to dress and style her as if she were the “real” Nelly so that the two of them can claim the money owed her by the German government. During this crash coaching, it becomes clear that this woman has not only uncannily mastered Nelly’s handwriting but miraculously, fits into Nelly’s shoes. This last Cinderella factor is too over the top for us to continue suspending credulity in the husband’s failure to see the obvious. Imagine the prince, upon seeing Cinderella’s foot glide effortlessly into the glass slipper, simply scratching his head and saying “that’s strange.” It takes the most obvious symbol of the camps for the husband to have his “aha” moment which comes at the movie’s end.

It “fails to recognize South America.”
According to a “Bias-Free Language Guide” used by the University of New Hampshire, the word “American” is “problematic” and therefore should not be used.

“North Americans often use ‘American’ which usually, depending on the contexts, fails to recognize South America,” the guide explains.

“[It] assumes the U.S. is the only country inside these two continents,” it adds.

It recommends using “Resident of the U.S.” or “U.S. citizen” instead.

According to the guide, other “problematic” terms include “opposite sex” (it recommends using “other sex,”) “senior citizen” (it recommends “old people” or “people of advanced age”) and “obese” (it recommends using “people of size.”)

How campaign donations, political pull and America’s celebrity culture created the guest list for Trump’s third wedding.

Bo Dietl went to Donald Trump’s third wedding in January 2005 in Palm Beach, Florida, he said the other day, because he’s good friends with Trump and the wedding was “the wedding of weddings” and anybody who got an invitation and didn’t go had to have been “on crack.” So there was the ex-New York City homicide detective and Fox News contributor, in the gardenias-scented Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea, when up walked Hillary Clinton.

“Hillary came running over,” Dietl said. “She was very nice. ‘Bo, how ya doin’?’ ‘Bo, I love you.’”

This, he thought, was strange, seeing as how they’re politically so at odds, a fact he has made public and plain. Voters now may feel a similar sense of befuddlement at the notion that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were once friendly enough that she attended his joyful nuptials.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – Four more years?

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he’s confident he could win a third term, if only the Constitution would let him run. “I actually think I’m a pretty good president. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can’t,” he said.

Obama said that though he’s looking forward to being out of office for the freedom outside of the security bubble it’ll give him and for being able to make more visits to Africa, there is more work he’d like to do in office.

But, he said, “the law’s the law.”

In discussing the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan said his strategy is simple, “We (U.S.) win and they (Russia) lose.” On the basis on the current comprehensive plan with Iran, that statement seems like ancient history. Iranian President Rohani in addressing the agreement said, all of the goals we aspired to in these negotiations have been achieved. In effect he is suggesting, “We win and we lose.”;

Iran had four goals and each, in turn, has been achieved.

As Rohani noted, “the first was to continue nuclear capabilities, the nuclear technology and even nuclear activity.” In the beginning of negotiation the P5+1 said Iran could have 100 centrifuges; after many deliberations, they arrived at a mutually agreed level of over 6000 centrifuges, over 5000 of which will be in Natanz and over 1000 in Fordo. All centrifuges at Natanz will continue to enrich uranium.

We noted last year the emergence of a new global health crisis:

Climate Depression Is For Real. Just Ask A Scientist.

Since then, alas, the legions of depressed climatologists have multiplied exponentially, leading some virologists to speculate whether the disease is now airborne and you can catch it just from reading a Michael E Mann #KochMachineDenier Tweet. This month’s Esquire contains a massive peer-reviewed story on pre-traumatic planetary-stress disorder:

Among climate activists, gloom is building. Jim Driscoll of the National Institute for Peer Support just finished a study of a group of longtime activists whose most frequently reported feeling was sadness, followed by fear and anger. Dr. Lise Van Susteren, a practicing psychiatrist and graduate of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth slide-show training, calls this “pretraumatic” stress. “So many of us are exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of posttraumatic disorder—the anger, the panic, the obsessive intrusive thoughts.” Leading activist Gillian Caldwell went public with her “climate trauma,” as she called it.

If you’re having trouble keeping score, the old post-traumatic stress disorder is what you get if you’re just some nancy wuss pantywaist who goes to Iraq and gets blown up by an IED. But the far more serious pre-traumatic stress disorder is what you get if you sit around on government grants all day worrying about sea levels in the Maldives in the early 22nd century.

President Obama has wrapped up his tour of Africa. It was notable, insofar as that word can be applied to the trip, for his somewhat condescending and neo-colonial lecture to his hosts on the need to ease up on the old homophobia.

Certainly, Africa is not terribly gay-friendly. But nor are other parts of the planet. In his ardent wooing of Iran, for example, he doesn’t seem to have been perturbed in the least by his new best friends’ executions of homosexuals, anymore than he is by the brutalization of gays elsewhere in the Muslim world. You might deduce in his highly selective criticism a certain cowardice. I’ll bet the mullahs do.

If you’ve read The [Un]documented Mark Steyn (and if you haven’t, you really should, especially when you can get it personally autographed to you at no extra charge), you’ll also know that Obama, in reprimanding Africa for its homophobia, is at odds with The Guardian, whose position is that black homophobia is all our fault. As I write in the book: