RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.barenakedislam.com/2014/04/09/ayann-hirsi-ali-hits-back-at-brandeis-university/
Ayaan Hirsi Ali released the following statement in response to Brandeis University’s sudden decision to rescind its offer of an honorary degree.
See Ayaan tonight on The Kelly File on FOX News at 9PM EST

Breitbart “Yesterday Brandeis University decided to withdraw an honorary degree they were to confer upon me next month during their Commencement exercises. I wish to dissociate myself from the university’s statement, which implies that I was in any way consulted about this decision. On the contrary, I was completely shocked when President Frederick Lawrence called me—just a few hours before issuing a public statement—to say that such a decision had been made.

“When Brandeis approached me with the offer of an honorary degree, I accepted partly because of the institution’s distinguished history; it was founded in 1948, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, as a co-educational, nonsectarian university at a time when many American universities still imposed rigid admission quotas on Jewish students. I assumed that Brandeis intended to honor me for my work as a defender of the rights of women against abuses that are often religious in origin. For over a decade, I have spoken out against such practices as female genital mutilation, so-called ‘honor killings,’ and applications of Sharia Law that justify such forms of domestic abuse as wife beating or child beating. Part of my work has been to question the role of Islam in legitimizing such abhorrent practices. So I was not surprised when my usual critics, notably the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), protested against my being honored in this way.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/seeking-nuclear-roadmaps?f=puball

For more than the past two decades, the United States has adopted a conventional wisdom that our nuclear deterrent enterprise was not as important as it was during the Cold War. As USAF General Garret Harencak has correctly argued, we went on both a procurement and philosophical holiday after the breakup of the Soviet Union. We failed to replace and sustain key elements in our nuclear deterrent force, and we neglected to put together a coherent and well thought out framework for going forward with our nuclear deterrent in a different but still challenging world.

Some former high ranking defense officials argued nuclear deterrence no longer mattered. Others said we could substitute conventional weaponry for our nuclear deterrent, while others argued to slash spending for our deterrent way below levels needed to sustain even minimum force levels. We did what Washington excels at-we kicked the can down the road year after year.

Particularly troubling has been the problems facing the National Nuclear Security Administration which handles the nation’s nuclear labs, our warhead and nuclear material production facilities and the dismantlement of weapons and their storage and safety.

Although nominated in September 2013, the chosen new Director of NNSA, Lt Gen Frank Klotz (Ret) has not been approved by the full Senate and thus NNSA does not have the long term leadership it needs to get its work done correctly. NNSA has been left without its top two administrators for far too long. In addition, retirements are growing (warned about since at least the Chiles Commission report) yet no serious recruiting has been undertaken at the lower ranks. At some point this becomes unsustainable.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/04/enemies-create/
The shrieking, howling, shout-you-down left likes to present itself as motivated only by the yearning to right injustice and make life more fair for all. ‘Fair’, especially, for second-raters whose instinct is to smash what they could never build themselves

Being on the left is in part a fashion statement for our elites so it’s interesting to see how this is coming back to bite amongst the techno geeks in San Francisco. This really is a story about the cultural mayhem overtaking the US where once upon a time achievement was actually admired. Kevin Rose has been a successful funder of start-ups so now he finds that anti-tech protesters are telling Kevin Rose’s neighbors that he’s A “parasite”. Here’s the leaflet being distributed outside his home:

ape letter

Kevin is, of course, amongst the one percent — the point-one percent — but that is the nature of achievement. It brings its rewards, and if he is going to be drinking coffee someone else will have to serve it to him. What Kevin Rose does is demonstrate most definitively that some people are actually better at things, smarter, more gifted, harder-working. Others are less so of each, and possibly all of these, and therefore do not receive the material and social rewards that seem to accrue to Kevin.

Envy, resentment, dissatisfaction all accrue instead, and those sentiments represent the majority of Obama’s constituency. You can tell those people all you like that their own good fortune relative to every past civilisation is a result of the efforts of Kevin Rose and those like him but they could not care less. They wish only to destroy not what they cannot have themselves, but what they cannot be themselves. It is an existential recognition that others are better than them and, therefore, the promise of fairness and equality is exposed, so far as they are concerned, in all its emptiness. These are people of the deepest hatreds. Nothing can be done to make those hatreds go away.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2014/04/climate-catastrophism-kiddies/

Get ’em young and fill their heads with warmist propaganda — that seems to the unofficial motto of Britain’s education establishment, which has just been warned by the Home Secretary that peddling propaganda as fact is a punishable offence

Alarming climate and eco-activist messages are saturating the British school system, according to a report by noted UK bloggers Andrew Montford and John Shade. On the same day of the report’s publication, April 8, the response of UK Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove was to warn teachers they are breaking the law if they fail to provide balanced coverage of climate change and similar issues.

The affair suggests a similar independent inquiry into “climate teaching” in Australian schools would be worthwhile. Anecdotal accounts of brainwashing by activists masquerading as teachers in our primary and secondary schools are legion.

Montford runs the Bishop Hill climate blog and authored the earlier forensic study, The Hockey Stick Illusion. Shade is a retired statistician and physicist who focuses on climate indoctrination in schools worldwide. The report was sponsored by The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Gove’s spokesman said, “The Secretary of State read this report with concern. Ministers are clear that the new national curriculum must equip young people with the core knowledge they need to understand the weather, climate, the earth’s atmosphere, physical geography and the interaction between nature and the environment.

“That means in both science and geography, pupils must learn the facts and processes which underpin public discussion of climate change. They must be equipped with the scientific knowledge to make their own judgments about political responses. They must not be directed towards a particular campaigning agenda.

“Schools should not teach that a particular political or ideological point of view is right – indeed it is against the law for them to do so. Great care should be exercised to make sure information provided to students is scientifically rigorous. It is important that any material used in the classroom is rooted in science, not driven by the aims of a campaign.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/gender-gap-fraud-backfires-on-obama/print/

Yesterday, a president apparently oblivious to his own hypocrisy teamed up with a Democratic Party eager to push the lie repeated often enough it becomes the truth.

On the progressive-labeled ”National Equal Pay Day,” that ostensibly represents the additional time it takes women to earn the same amount of money men made the previous year, Obama signed an executive order mandating that federal contractors publish wage data by gender and race to ensure they are in compliance with already existing equal pay laws. The order also prohibits employers from retaliating against workers who divulge their salaries to their fellow workers.

Senior White House advisor Valerie Jarrett inadvertently revealed what this order was really all about in an appearance on MSNBC. “Employers also should welcome these new tools that they’ll have available so they can avoid lawsuits, because they’ll have the statistics to be able to correct pay discrepancies before it ever gets to litigation,” Jarrett said.

One is left to wonder how many man-hours employers will be forced to waste compiling data to serve their government masters, despite the reality wage discrimination has been banned by law since 1963, and the so-called wage gap that engendered the order has been thoroughly debunked.

Nonetheless, in keeping with his fellow Democrats, Obama was more than willing to promote the same lie he did during his State of the Union address. “Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns,” he declared. “For African American women, Latinas, it’s even less. And in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-rise-of-fakectivism/print/

What do the forced departure of Brendan Eich from Mozilla and #CancelColbert have in common? They are both examples of Fakectivism.

Fakectivism is social media activism by small numbers of people that is integrated into the news cycle because it matches the media’s political agenda.

Every Tea Party member knows that media coverage of actual protests is unequal. Twenty students, most of them volunteers at an environmental non-profit, protesting Keystone will get media coverage that a thousand Tea Party members protesting ObamaCare won’t receive.

The same is true of online protests.

Many of the real life protests covered by the media are fake. For example, unions hire non-union protesters to protest on their behalf, a fact that the media organizations covering the protests rarely point out. (That same privilege wouldn’t be extended to Tea Party members who hired professional protesters to yell at the cameras for them.) Other protests pretend to be grass roots when they actually consist of members or even paid employees of a single organization.

Fakectivism online multiplies the problems with media coverage of left-wing activism by completely distorting the number of people participating in a protest and their credibility in representing anyone except themselves.

In real life protests, the media routinely reported higher turnout for left-wing protests and lower turnout for conservative protests. Online, Fakectivism dispenses with head counts. If it’s a trending topic, then it’s news. And sometimes it’s news, even if it isn’t.

Fakectivism begins with left-wing agitprop sites selectively collecting tweets in support or against something. The handful of tweets are described in collective terms as “The Internet” being outraged about something. The use of the collective “Internet” is a staple of Fakectivism because it conflates a manufactured story with the opinions of billions of people.

Successful Fakectivism moves up the ladder to higher end left-wing websites searching for teachable controversies. These websites have enough status that they are monitored by producers and editors from the mainstream media looking for stories.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304441304579481402813331782?mod=Opinion_newsreel_7

In something of an irony, the patent system, designed specifically to promote and protect innovation, has never been particularly adept in dealing with new technologies. The federal courts are now awash in patent-infringement suits that they seem to have little real notion of how to resolve, and the Supreme Court is grappling with an appeal that may or may not define the extent to which a patent can protect software.

It might be instructive, then, to see how the patent system functioned with regard to a previous watershed moment in technological innovation: flight.

On Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully flew an airplane over the windswept dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C., but few people realize that for the next four years the Wright brothers refused to publicly demonstrate their miraculous machine. Before sharing their invention with the world, they wanted to be certain that they had secured a patent that would cover the very notion of controlled flight itself. Their intention—about which they were utterly candid—was to collect royalties on every airplane produced.

Then as now, the patent system the Wrights encountered was a bureaucratic labyrinth. In 1898, the Supreme Court profoundly changed the law by introducing a special category called the “pioneer patent.” In Westinghouse v. Boyden Power Brake Co., Justice Henry Billings Brown —the author of the “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896—wrote that “a patent covering a function never before performed, a wholly novel device, or one of such novelty and importance as to mark a distinct step in the progress of the art . . . is entitled to a broad range of equivalents.” It was under that open-door interpretation that the Wrights filed for their patent.

It wasn’t long before other inventors, most notably Glenn Curtiss, developed a means for controlling an airplane that was superior to the Wrights’ pulley-and-cable system of “wing warping.” Wilbur and Orville, who had the backing of a potent consortium of investors, including Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont and Howard Gould, brought suit in 1909 against Curtiss and numerous other airplane designers for patent infringement.

Curtiss laughed off the suit, insisting that his lever-based means of control—ailerons—was removed from and superior to the Wrights’ method. Curtiss continued to produce airplanes, incorporating a dizzying series of innovations, including wheeled landing gear, steering wheels and a way for airplanes to take off and land on the decks of ships.

Moscow’s flouting of treaties, international law and the Geneva Conventions is raising world-wide dangers.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304640104579485331656203834?mod=Opinion_newsreel_1

President Obama has repeatedly described Russia’s annexation of Crimea as illegal and illegitimate, but he also has sought to minimize the strategic significance of Vladimir Putin’s land grab. In fact, Moscow’s actions—including threatening “civil war” if Ukraine resists the orchestrated seizures of government buildings and uprisings in eastern Ukraine by ethnic Russian separatists this week—are more than isolated instances of law breaking. Russia’s behavior, and its legal and institutional justifications, are dangerously destabilizing the existing international system. What is the likely result? The use of force around the world will be encouraged, and the incentive to acquire nuclear weapons magnified.

The three basic principles of international law, reflected in the United Nations Charter and long-standing custom, are the equality of all states, the sanctity of their territorial integrity, and noninterference by outsiders in their internal affairs. Yet Moscow now insists that it has unique rights and privileges to protect the interests of Russian-speaking populations outside its borders and has special prerogatives regarding “historically Russian” territories that were not included in the Russian Federation upon the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304640104579489693250973928?mg=reno64-wsj

John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday that “Russian provocateurs” had infiltrated eastern Ukraine in order to foment “an illegal and illegitimate effort to destabilize a sovereign state and create a contrived crisis.” Also on Tuesday, the Pentagon announced steep cuts to U.S. nuclear forces, four years ahead of schedule, in accordance with the 2010 New Start treaty with Russia.

At this point in Barack Obama’s Presidency we should be used to the mental whiplash. But we still feel concussed.

So let’s slow down and follow the thread. Russia has seized Crimea and has 50,000 troops as a potential invasion force on the border with eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin is also abrogating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Kiev agreed to give up its nuclear arsenal—at the time the third largest in the world—in exchange for guarantees of its territorial integrity from Russia, the U.S. and U.K. That memorandum has now proved to be as much of a scrap of paper to the Kremlin as Belgium’s neutrality was to Berlin in the summer of 1914.

The Kremlin is also violating the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which bans the testing, production and possession of nuclear missiles with a range between 310 and 3,400 miles. Russia has tested at least three missiles—the R-500 cruise missile, the RS-26 ballistic missile and the Iskander-M semi-ballistic missile—that run afoul of the proscribed range limits.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375369/print

Imagine a situation in which an earthquake destroys a suspension bridge over a deep canyon.

A passenger train is speeding toward the location, and those in charge realize there is a potential problem ahead but choose instead to argue about the ambient temperature in the passenger cars, the food service, and whether they will reach their final destination on time. A few people are quite disturbed when they learn of the tragedy about to unfold if the train isn’t halted, but they are labeled as “alarmists” who really are not sophisticated enough to understand the situation.

Obviously, I am referring to our nation and the impending disaster that awaits us if we continue on a course of ever-expanding government control of our lives, fiscal irresponsibility, unwise energy policies, and a laissez-faire attitude regarding our world leadership responsibilities.

Conservatives and other thinking individuals must recognize that we are in dire straits. They must adopt a sense of urgency in order to prevent irreparable damage to the concept of a nation where people are free to pursue their dreams without interference — as long as they are not harming others.

They should not be arguing among themselves over petty differences and refusing to support individuals who largely agree with them about the direction of the country but perhaps have some disagreements about issues that easily could be resolved after the disaster has been averted.