RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the afternoon of Nov. 13, when news of the horrific Paris attacks began to reach the U.S. and the fear and chaos there began to sink in, many Americans asked one important question: Could a similar attack by jihadists linked to Islamic State occur in a major American city? The answer is yes.

To understand why, it is vital to deconstruct the Paris attack and the factors that enabled it and then see if they can be mapped onto an American urban environment. During my tenure as director of intelligence analysis at the New York Police Department, this is what we did after any major attack around the world to stay ahead of ever-evolving terrorist threats.

While more operational details of the Paris attack will be uncovered, four necessary ingredients have already emerged: First, European citizens willing to kill themselves and their countrymen. Second, material for the attack, including assault weapons and hydrogen peroxide for suicide bombs. Third, the technical and paramilitary skills to make improvised explosive devices and operate assault weapons. And fourth, a “permissive environment” in which the national and local security and intelligence agencies were not able to detect the plot in advance.

The president vowed to “destroy” ISIS: “a bunch of killers with good social media.”

President Obama stressed at a press conference today in Malaysia that “the United States could never be at war with any religion because America is made up of multiple religions.”

He also hit at critics — namely, the Politico headline “Obama’s Asian Distraction?” — who have suggested that his focus on the Asia pivot came at a bad time with new ISIS and al-Qaeda attacks.

“This region is not a distraction from the world’s central challenges, like terrorism. The Asia Pacific is absolutely critical to promoting security, prosperity and human dignity around the world,” he said. “That’s why I’ve devoted so much of my foreign policy to deepening America’s engagement with this region.”

Obama said the American victims over the past several days — Nohemi Gonzalez in Paris and Anita Datar in Mali — “remind me of my daughters, or my mother, who, on the one hand, had their whole life ahead of them, and on the other hand, had devoted their lives to helping other people.”

Here is a list of a few trendy words, overused, politicized, and empty of meaning, that now plague popular communications.

“Intersection” How many times have we read a writer, columnist, pundit, or job applicant self-describe himself with this strange word? Here’s an example: “Joe Blow is a social theorist working at the intersection of class oppression, racial stereotyping, and transgendered emergence.”? Or: “Amanda Lopez writes at the intersection of Latina identity, Foucauldian otherness, and social media.” Most of the time “intersection” exists only in the grandiose mind of the writer. It is a patent though feeble attempt to become a threefer or fourfer on the race/gender/generic victim/revolutionary activist scale. The intersected topics are individually irrelevant — and all the more so when cobbled together. The use of “intersection” is a postmodern way of plastering bumper-sticker narcissisms without writing, “I am an identity-studies person without much knowledge of literature, history, or languages, but am desperately trying to convey expertise of some sort by piling up a bunch of pseudo-disciplines that credential my victimhood activism.”

“Diversity” The noun was rebranded in the 1980s, and does not mean what it by nature should — “a range” or “multiplicity.” No one furthers the goals of “diversity” by ensuring plenty of conservatives, liberals, radicals and reactionaries on campus, or welcoming lots of Christian fundamentalists as well as atheists and Muslims. The word instead is a euphemism for non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-Christian, and non-liberal. It is a relative and entirely political noun. The University of Missouri football team can both be 52% African-American and proof of diversity, even if African-Americans make up less than 12% of the population — in a way that all white and elderly Democratic primary candidates are honorifically diverse by virtue of their homogeneous left-wing politics.

Three other observations: First, racial and ethnic diversity, without assimilation and integration into one culture, and when identity becomes essential rather than incidental to a nation (i.e. a salad bowl society rather than the melting pot), leads to Armageddon, whether in Austria-Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Iraq.

In an alleged hate crime, a Jewish passenger was attacked by a Muslim driver of a yellow New York taxi on Saturday night. The driver was held for questioning by police.
In an interview on Sunday with Israel National News, victim Moshe Indig told reporters about the attack. “I took a cab from Manhattan to Brooklyn Saturday night at 8 PM. I asked the driver to make a phone call. He refused but then relented and put the call on the speaker. When he saw that I was speaking Hebrew, he said: ‘I hate the people and the language you are speaking. If I had known that you were a Jew, I would not have given you the call.’”

The World Government so beloved of American national socialists looms ever closer. Fox News reports:

EXCLUSIVE: The chief United Nations human rights agency, with the Obama administration’s apparent blessing, is creating a new “regional hub” for itself in Washington, to use as a center for organizing against the death penalty, among other things, and for affecting the legal frameworks, policies, and strategies of American counterterrorism.

In a management plan covering its activities through 2017, the agency, known as the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, or OHCHR, puts the U.S. in the same category for that counterterrorism “alignment” effort as countries like Iraq and Uganda.

The fast-tracked human rights “hub” also has a number of more nebulous “thematic” objectives for the U.S., which include, according to an OHCHR information document, “the establishment of national participatory bodies for reporting and implementing recommendations of human rights mechanisms” and the aim of “widening the democratic space” with the aid of undefined “National Human Rights Institutions.”

Would you spend money to find out what people in Spain think about their medical insurance or what people in Austria think about their government? That’s exactly what the federal government has been doing, using millions of Americans’ tax dollars.

Since 2007 the U.S. State Department has spent over $36.5 million to survey citizens in foreign countries on a wide range of topics, including general public opinion polling on how their own governments — many of them U.S. allies — are performing. And the biggest spike in that spending occurred on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s watch as secretary of state.

The polls included such topics as a “survey of medical insurance in Spain” costing $24,727, an “Elite Survey in Russia” that cost $117,000 and a “Public Opinion Poll Survey to Address Public Attitudes Toward Domestic and International Affairs in Austria,” costing $50,728.

The examples were compiled by federal spending watchdog OpenTheBooks.com in a larger oversight report on federal public opinion polling to be published after Thanksgiving.

Spending watchdogs say these polls, while informative, should be conducted and funded by private research organizations, not the U.S. taxpayer.

http://www.openthebooks.com/
Showcased in today’s Washington Times, the State Department is awarded the “Golden Hammer Award” for the most egregious weekly example of waste, fraud, corruption and abuse in the nation.

The State Department spent $36.5 million polling the opinions of foreigners — even our allies, i.e. England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Japan, etc.

Read the Golden Hammer Award at Washington Times, click here

Where did tens of millions of ‘foreign polling expenditures’ flow?
Learn how the State Department hid $34 million in survey and polling under a category of ‘miscellaneous foreign vendors.’

What would Hilary do? Did Secretary of State Hilary Clinton increase or decrease expenditures on foreign polling? Did Clinton increase the transparency of State Dept spending?

Why was State polling countries like Suriname?

“But on cross-examination, a lawyer for Car-Freshner, Jonathan Z. King, caught Mr. Elassir in an inconsistency.He recounted a deposition in which Mr. Elassir said he changed the freshener header card to more closely resemble his company’s canned fresheners, which are a bigger seller. Then he showed a photo showing that the color schemes were actually different.“Your canned products, which you say were the inspiration for your paper products, they don’t look anything like them, do they?”“No,” Mr. Elassir eventually conceded. A few minutes later, Mr. King ran through the similarities between Exotica’s packaging and Little Trees’ and asked Mr. Elassir, “Is your testimony under oath that that’s all just a coincidence?”

Little Trees, the giant in the forest of tree-shaped automotive air fresheners, trounced a small rival in a trademark suit in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday.

A jury found that the other company, Exotica Fresheners Company, had infringed on Little Trees’ trademark with the look of its product. In addition to changing its packaging, Exotica will have to pay the Car-Freshner Corporation, maker of Little Trees, $52,000.

Car-Freshner sued Exotica after Exotica changed the card at the top of its packaging, known as a header card, to include a green tree logo, upward-slanting text and a yellow background, all of which had been used by Little Trees for decades.

The case turned on whether some consumers were likely to be confused by the overall look of the product, known as its “trade dress.”

President Barack Obama has seen the enemy, and it is the refusal to accept more Syrian refugees.

From the tone of his post-Paris remarks, you’d think that a sophisticated terrorist assault on a major Western city is a setback; sentiment in the U.S. against taking more Syrian refugees is an atrocity.

Obama warned this week against “that dark impulse inside of us,” as if we were debating whether Syrian refugees should be drawn and quartered. He said that “slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values.” He was joined by liberal commentators who scoffed and guffawed at worries over Syrian refugees after — ho-hum, nothing to see here — one of the Paris terrorists apparently posed as a refugee.

It’s remarkable that the president feels justified in lecturing anyone on humanitarianism. He has stood by while Syria has descended into a hellish chaos, and hasn’t betrayed any guilty conscience. There are roughly 10 million Syrians who are refugees (4.2 million) or internally displaced (6.5 million). At 10,000 over the next year, we are offering to take .1 percent of them.

One wonders when Obama begin caring so much about Syrians. If you put those 10,000 Syrian refugees back in their native country and let them get gassed, barrel-bombed, shelled, or shot, would he bat an eye, or would they just be part of the ever-growing casualty count?