RUTHFULLY YOURS

Public backs Kim Jong Un despite frustrations about economy, defectors say

SEOUL—North Koreans who fled the country in recent years said public support for dictator Kim Jong Un appears solid despite citizens’ frustrations about the poor state of the economy, according to a new report.

The report, based on annual surveys, suggests grass-roots capitalism continues to spread in North Korea to substitute for the failed state distribution system and is likely to continue its uncomfortable coexistence with the nation’s repressive regime.

The Seoul National University Institute for Peace and Unification Studies annually surveys more than 100 North Koreans who defected in the previous calendar year. The results provide firsthand insight into developments in the isolated state, though its researchers say they shouldn’t be read as generalized facts due to the small pool of respondents.

The release of the report comes as a military standoff between the Koreas ended Tuesday following a crisis that included artillery strikes and mine blasts.

Mr. Kim, who took power in late 2011 and is in his early 30s, has defied outside concerns about inexperience, ruling with authority and purging several senior officials without signs of instability. But his projects for economic development, including agricultural and economic reforms, have yielded few positive results. Since he came to power, he has tightened border control to curb the defector flow, activists say.

The GOP is panicking. And it should be.

Conservatives are sending an angry unambiguous message to the party. The message can be read not only in the rise of Donald Trump, but also in the rise of Ben Carson. Republican voters are choosing candidates who don’t talk or seem like politicians. They have lost all faith in the Republican Party.

And it’s hard to blame them.

Conservatives poured time, energy and money into a party that promised to counter Obama and take back America. The GOP controls both houses of Congress and conservatives have nothing to show for it.

Support for Trump and Carson really isn’t about the issues. Attacking them for their past liberal positions is a waste of time. This isn’t about what Trump or Carson believe. It’s about what the base believes.

The president’s science czar furiously tries keep secret emails from public view.

The most transparent administration in American history is at it again — dodging sunlight and evading public disclosure.

Joining former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her secret servers, former IRS witch hunt queen Lois Lerner and her secret email accounts, former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and her Internet alter egos, and former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and his non-public email account is White House science czar John Holdren.

President Obama’s top climate change adviser is defending his hide-and-seek game in federal court. Earlier this month, the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute appealed a D.C. district court ruling protecting Holdren’s personal email communications from Freedom of Information Act requests.

“What were your four [Hamas] men doing in Sinai? Haven’t you denied in the past the presence of any Hamas men in Sinai? So where did these men pop up from?” — Dina Ramez, Egyptian journalist.

The incident also proves that Hamas does not hesitate to take advantage of Cairo’s humanitarian gestures to smuggle its men out of the Gaza Strip. Obviously, the four Hamas men were not on their way to receive medical treatment. That they are members of Hamas’s armed wing, Ezaddin al-Qassam, speaks for itself.

The Egyptians are particularly fed up with reports about Hamas’s increased involvement in their internal affairs and links to terror groups in Sinai.

This practice by Hamas is something that the Egyptian authorities have come to understand, which is why they are refusing to reopen the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. The question now is whether the international community will understand Hamas’s true intentions and plans — namely to prepare for another war against Israel.

Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah Sisi has once again proven that he and his country will not tolerate any threats from Hamas or other Palestinians.

In February 2015, Columbia University—currently ranked the fourth most distinguished academic institution in the United States by U.S. News and World Report—announced that all its students, undergraduate and graduate alike, would be obliged to take part in a “Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative.” This “new, required programming,” the Columbia bureaucracy explained, was designed to explore “the relationship between sexual respect and community membershi

Columbia’s students were given a menu of “participation options.” They could watch a minimum of two preselected videos about “rape culture” and gender identity and write a “reflection” about what they had learned. They could attend film screenings about sexual assault and masculinity and engage in a monitored discussion afterwards. They could create a “work of art” about the “relationship between sexual respect and University community membership.” Or, if they “identif[ied] as survivors, co-survivors, allies, or individuals who have experienced forms of secondary trauma,” they could attend workshops on “Finding Keys to Resiliency.”

Options in the “Finding Keys to Resiliency” module included a “mindfulness workshop” on “cultivating nonjudgmental awareness and being more present for their experience.” If attending the book launch for SLUT: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism got one too agitated about female oppression, one could unwind at a “Yoga class for women” or a “knitting circle.”

One by one, U.S. Senate Democrats are announcing that after much deliberation ‎‎(translated as arm twisting by President Barack Obama), they have decided to support the ‎Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, despite serious misgivings. Each of the senators wants you to ‎know that they were personally wrestling with this decision for weeks, talking to ‎experts (provided by the Obama administration for the most part), reading the ‎agreement carefully, weighing and balancing risk versus reward. Each Senate ‎Democrat joining the charade of moving from indecision to decision, whether ‎Claire McCaskill of Missouri or Kirsten Gillibrand of New York or Harry Reid of ‎Nevada, makes sure to add that they want to do everything to protect our ally ‎Israel, and will support other steps as necessary to remain vigilant on that front. ‎Some of the deal supporters call for more military aid in the future for Israel, ‎others for selling bunker buster bombs to Israel in case Iran violates the ‎agreement in obvious ways that even the Obama administration can not hide.

Donald Trump, who has repeatedly accused China of stealing manufacturing jobs from the U.S., acknowledged today that an array of Trump-branded clothes, accessories and other products are made in China.The real estate and casino mogul, who is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination, blamed China for the fact that Trump ties, Trump cufflinks and even Trump teddy bears come with a “Made in China” label.

“The answer is very simple: Because of the fact that China so manipulates their currency it makes it almost impossible for American companies to compete,” Trump told ABC News.

“You see it with all of the items you are talking about. You also see it with building products. If it continues this way, America won’t have any jobs, except for taking care of the elderly.”

Asked if he ever looked at having his Trump products manufactured in the U.S., Trump said, “Always do. There are very few companies that do it because they can’t compete with the manipulation.”

A school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a UN agency that deals exclusively with Palestinians, has published cartoons encouraging students and others to kill Jews by running them over. One of the cartoons is above. A spate of car attacks in recent months by Palestinians has left four Israelis dead and over 30 injured.
Former BBC foreign news producer Chris Gunness, who is chief spokesperson for UNRWA, has long been criticized for covering up for UNRWA’s unchecked extremists. Just two days ago, on August 23, Gunness (who is British but lives in Tel Aviv) tweeted: “An @UNRWA education is a passport to dignity amid rising extremism in the #MiddleEast.” Gunness posted a further comment that the education provided by UNRWA is “essential”.
(The cartoon story was unearthed by the intrepid anonymous blogger “Elder of Ziyon” who has exposed a series of scandals at UNRWA.)

Certainly you read about the six-year-old from Colorado Springs who got suspended from school for sexual harassment, specifically for kissing his little classmate on the hand. It was his second suspension, the first for kissing the same little girl on the cheek when he was five.

Think of what “the authorities” would have done to this menace if he had told his teacher he hated her, or worse, that he wished she were dead. Permanent exile? Reform school? Mandatory psychotherapy? Banishment to Siberia?

The point is that this child’s totally benign, even sweet, behavior was taken with dead seriousness by the [idiotic] powers-that-be, and if he had verbalized any angry feelings, you know the punishment would have been even more draconian.

Contrast this with the behavior of the man who occupies the Oval Office when listening over the past decades to the bellicose chants of the mad mullahs in Iran––“Death to America, Death to Israel”––with the man who apparently thinks it’s okay for Israel’s enemies today to chant: “Israel must be obliterated!”

Anwar Eshki, a retired major general in the Saudi armed forces, has made it his personal goal to strike peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

A former top adviser to the Saudi government, Eshki raised eyebrows in June when he appeared alongside Israeli Foreign Ministry Director-General and longtime confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Dore Gold at a conference held by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC, espousing desires to build a Saudi-Israel peace, especially to counter the regionally destabilizing expansion of Iran.

“The main project between me and Dore Gold is to bring peace between Arab countries and Israel,” said Eshki.

The former general noted that while the initiative is “personal,” Riyadh “knows about the project” and “isn’t against it, because we need peace.”