RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/03/hollywood-sharia-compliant.html

Hollywood has rarely produced a trustworthy depiction of historical events. My own philosophy of historical fiction is that historic events should serve as background to the conflicts, aspirations, ambitions, betrayals and destiny of the principal characters in the story.

Further, the plot in which these characters move – or, even better, when these characters move the plot itself – should not conflict with the historic events, but be in sync with those events. The principal conflicts should be between the characters, not between the story and history. I obeyed this rule while writing the Sparrowhawk series, and also my period detective novels.

Hollywood does not adhere to such rules. I don’t think it has even formulated them.

Thus we have such examples as the 1936 Charge of the Light Brigade, in which the sequence of events of the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean War was reversed (the war, 1853-1856; the mutiny, 1857). Otherwise it would have required Errol Flynn to survive the Charge and travel to India to rescue Olivia de Havilland from Surat Khan’s filthy clutches. History was tweaked, but not by much, to accommodate the plot. The lavish 1968 Tony Richardson version, however, was a plotless anti-war statement, complete with animated period political cartoons and caricatured Victorian figures. And, because it was an anti-war statement, it was gorier than its predecessor.

There are innumerable films and TV series grounded in history. I could write a book about the subject. I might do that, some day. What looms largest in my mind, however, and at the moment, is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). At the age of 17, when I first saw it shortly after its release, I was literally smitten by it. It got me to read up on World War One. Although I entertained doubts about its accuracy, it was a grand scale film, one of the last. My positive appraisal of it gradually diminished over the years, the more I learned about how and why the Allied campaign in the Middle East was conducted.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/war-over-wilders-2/print/

On March 19, addressing supporters in The Hague after a local election, Geert Wilders, head of the Freedom Party (PVV), asked if they wanted more or less of the European Union. “Less!” they shouted. Did they want more or less of the Labor Party? “Less!” they repeated. Then he asked, “Do you want, in this city and in the Netherlands, more or fewer Moroccans?”

That last line caused a firestorm. Major politicians compared Wilders to Hitler. Prime Minister Mark Rutte demanded he apologize. The Freedom Party’s leader in the European Parliament, Laurence Stassen, quit the party, as did many local and regional officials. (Commentator Tom-Jan Meeus maintained in NRC Handelsblad that Wilders “has lost his closest allies, his best member of parliament and his European assembly member.”) The Labor Party announced that it wouldn’t support any Freedom Party motion in Parliament. Hundreds of police complaints were reportedly filed against Wilders, and police, according to Soeren Kern, made it easier to file them “by providing pre-filled ‘Wilders forms’ and offering to come to people’s homes if they intend to press criminal charges, rather than having them come to the police station, as is the normal procedure.” A Facebook page for people filing police complaints against Wilders gathered nearly 100,000 “likes.” The new U.S. ambassador, Timothy Broas, stated that Wilders’s remarks were at odds with Dutch and American values. The Freedom Party fell in the polls from the largest to the third largest Dutch party. “Schools,” wrote Kern, “began to issue guidelines to instruct pupils on how to deal with Wilders.” In Amsterdam, 5,000 people demonstrated against Wilders and the mayor led a chant of “We are all Moroccans!” Dutch TV aired “a church service against Wilders.” An actor named Thijs Römer, in a reference to the murderer of Fortuyn, Volkert van der Graaf, tweeted: “Volkert, where are you when your country needs you?”

http://pjmedia.com/davidsteinberg/nc-02-challenger-frank-roche-moderate-republicanism-is-where-18t-in-debt-lives/?print=1

(Author’s note: In looking to cover House primaries involving moderate Republican incumbents — particularly those enjoying the approval of current GOP House leadership — now receiving a strong challenge from the right, I was introduced to the candidacy of Frank Roche in North Carolina’s Second District.

It’s a fascinating race. In the past month, Roche’s campaign to unseat Rep. Renee Ellmers has evolved into a case study of Tea Party/conservative gripes with national GOP leadership, a representative example of the current party rift. Each recent development received national attention; some of the developments were broken here.

Please do look back and examine the recent campaign coverage. The key theme I hope you take away from it — and be sure to apply this lens as you absorb similar news regarding national GOP leadership: A curious voter will soon know exactly what policies Roche supports, and how he intends to govern. Objectively, the same cannot be said of Ellmers.

Just this morning, Ellmers — who two weeks ago claimed she had the same immigration stance of Tea Party stalwarts Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, and of libertarian Rand Paul — published a half-page op-ed in the left-leaning Sanford Herald, a local paper generally supportive of Democrats.

Her topic? Supporting “public-private partnerships.”)

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/ideologies-without-consequences/?print=1

If only people had to live in the world that they dreamed of for others.

Endangered species everywhere are supposed to be at risk — except birds of prey shredded by wind turbine farms [1], or reptilian habitats harmed by massive solar farms [2]. High-speed rail [3] is great for utopian visionaries — except don’t dare start it in the Bay Area, when there are yokels aplenty down in Hanford to experiment on. Let’s raise power bills to the highest levels in the country with all sorts of green mandates — given that we live in 70-degree year-round temperatures, while “they” who are stupid enough to dwell in 105-degree Bakersfield deserve the resulting high power bills. We need cheap labor, open borders, multiculturalism, and identity politics, but not too near my kids’ Santa Monica or Atherton [4] prep schools. I like my beamer in La Jolla and my Mercedes in Menlo Park, but not the fracking that might provide cheaper gas for Juan and Jose who drive a used 10-year-old Yukon 40 miles to work in Mendota.

Appreciate these contradictions of the liberal elite mind and the current California drought is logical rather than aberrant.

In this third year of California drought, perhaps 500,000 acres of farmland will lie idle for lack of water. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be sunk into lowering wells, as the aquifer dives, when too many straws compete for too little water at the bottom of the glass. There are reasons why a drought threatens existential ruin in the billions of dollars rather than mere hardship. Our forefathers 50 years ago knew well the ancient California equation: a) California’s population always grows; b) 80% of the state wishes to live where 20% of the rain falls; c) therefore, to ensure that the normal cycles of drought do not prove fatal to commerce and agriculture, man must transfer water from the north to the south of the state.

Unlike 1976-77, there are no longer just 23 million Californians, but 40 million. But unlike the past, Californians in the 1970s gave up on completing the state California Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project that had supplemented the earlier Colorado River, Big Creek, and Hetch Hetchy water storage and transference efforts.

At some fateful moment in the 1970s, the other California on the coast, drunk with the globalized wealth that poured into Napa Valley, the Silicon Valley, the great coastal university nexuses at Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA and Caltech, the entertainment industry, the defense industry, and the financial industry decided that they had transcended the old warnings of more Californians needing far more water to survive more droughts. When you are rich, you can afford for the first time in your life to favor a newt with spots on his toes over someone else that lacks your money, clout, and sensitivities.

The once envisioned reservoirs on the Klamath were cancelled. The supplemental lakes on the Sacramento and American were as well. There was to be no twin wet-year storage lake south of the San Luis Reservoir. No Temperance Flat was to augment Millerton Lake. Such construction was considered far too 19th century in it unnatural building and damming and canaling.

Of course, it was. But so was the most unnatural project of them all, Hetch Hetchy, the engineering marvel that brought the purest water in America by the force of gravity over 160 miles into the Bay Area, making the dense corridor of San Francisco to Silicon Valley what it is today.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374580/print

BLESS THE KOCH BROTHERS AND THEIR CAMPAIGN….OBAMACARE IS THE BIGGEST HOT BUTTON ISSUE IN THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS….IN EVERY SINGLE STATE…..RSK

In one of the ads Americans for Prosperity (AFP) has put on the air this year, a thirtysomething actress stands against a white backdrop and looks into the camera. “People don’t like political ads,” she says plaintively. “I don’t like them either. But health care isn’t about politics, it’s about people, and millions of people have lost their health insurance, millions of people can’t see their own doctors, and millions are paying more and getting less.” At the close, a narrator urges viewers to “tell Mary Landrieu to stop thinking about politics and start thinking about people.” Such ads have also run against Mark Pryor in Arkansas, Mark Udall in Colorado, and incumbent Democratic House members in Arizona, Florida, and New Hampshire.

Ads like the “white ad,” as it has become known, are not new to 2014. They are part of a sustained assault against Obamacare mounted with the help of the donor network organized by Charles and David Koch and the array of social-welfare groups it funds.

The ads themselves, which have inflamed Democrats this election season, represent five years of knowledge, accumulated through polls and focus groups, about how to use the health-care issue to pull Americans into the GOP camp. With AFP having spent over $30 million so far this year to bring down sitting Democratic senators, the ads also symbolize the changing nature of American politics. Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, unlimited outside spending by 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups has finally allowed Republicans to match the political muscle of labor unions, whose spending was also blown open by the decision, but which have long poured money into Democratic coffers.

That newfound equity is one reason why the AFP ads have sent Democrats into a tailspin and led them to make the ads, and two of the people funding them, a major campaign issue of 2014. Senate majority leader Harry Reid devoted much of a news conference and an entire speech on the Senate floor to attacking the Koch brothers, calling their efforts “un-American” and accusing them of trying to rig the political system in their favor. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has launched a digital campaign around the rallying cry “The GOP is addicted to Koch!”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/30/opinion/30kristof-quiz.html A Quiz: Do You Speak Dictator? By NICHOLAS KRISTOF With President Vladimir V. Putin thuggishly stealing Crimea from Ukraine, and serious concern about whether he will also invade eastern Ukraine, a debate is unfolding about whether President Obama is doing enough to stand up to tyranny. That leads me to offer a quiz, so […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303779504579465751189702072?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond&mg=reno64-wsj

The midterm elections are just over seven months away and the left has unleashed its usual rhetoric about the Republican “war on women.” It’s baseless political pandering of the worst kind, but not something the Republicans can ignore, as it will no doubt be furthered by a mainstream media that is biased, gullible or both.

While Republicans are debunking this trope, they would do well to highlight some of the left’s “wars.”

First is the war on children, waged by Democrats and their allies in the teachers unions. The tools of the school choice movement—vouchers, scholarships and charter schools—are simply about giving a reprieve to low-income children sentenced to failing schools. Many public schools provide excellent environments for learning, but not all do.

Giving all families the ability to pursue a better education for their children—the same ability the president, members of Congress, and wealthy liberals have—is American to the core. A “good for thee but not for me” approach, evidenced in administration attacks on choice programs in the District of Columbia and Louisiana, seems the ultimate in hypocrisy.

The Democrats’ loyalty to the teachers unions is understandable since the union money, votes and volunteers are so important to their electoral prospects. But that does not make the damage any less significant for the children stuck in failed schools.

Republicans should also stress the Democratic Party’s war on young adults. ObamaCare penalizes young adults by coercing them to purchase and pay more than they should for health insurance at levels they often don’t need. Republicans can point to the unemployment rate among young adults, which is higher than that for other age groups, and is at least partially caused by the left’s economy-shrinking policies—not just Obamacare, but also excessive regulation and government control or meddling in all parts of the economy.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579471440531629198?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion&mg=reno64-wsj

From Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 Nobel lecture, accepting the prize in literature:

The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not merely a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich prevails in the 20th century. The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people—and there are many in today’s world—elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today—and tomorrow, you’ll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.)

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304418404579469913566128356?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop&mg=reno64-wsj

Jeremiah Denton never blinked.

He did not blink while leading bombing runs over North Vietnam as commander of a squadron of A-6 Intruders. He did not blink after he was shot down and taken prisoner on July 18, 1965, three days after his 41st birthday.

And he did not blink when, 10 months later, he was hauled before a Japanese film crew to deliver what Hanoi expected would be a propaganda statement denouncing the American war effort and praising his captors for humane treatment. “Whatever the position of my government, I believe in it, yes, sir,” he said. “I am a member of that government, and it is my job to support it, and I will as long as I live.”
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U.S. Navy Comdr. Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr., who was shot down while leading an air attack on a military installation in North Vietnam is shown in still frames from televised interview of Denton on May 2, 1966. Reuters

All the while, he used his eyelids to bat out the word T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse Code. It was the first confirmation of the true nature of the treatment being meted to American POWs. Thanks to YouTube, you can watch the tape of Denton’s eyelid Morse communication, in what was an astonishing act of bravery and fidelity to duty. His captors soon realized what he had done, and he was beaten and tortured some more. Of his nearly eight years in captivity, four were spent in solitary, often in boxes the size of a coffin.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/hobby-lobby-a-case-of-religious-freedom-not-womens-rights?f=puball

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees that if you like your God, you can keep your God. Meaning you can freely exercise your religion without government interference.

But the Obama administration insists that all health plans, including those provided by religious employers, cover contraception, sterilization and morning-after pills.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a case that the Democratic Party is falsely calling a test for women’s rights.

Nineteen U.S. senators and 91 members of the House, all Democrats, filed briefs supporting Obama’s legal war against Hobby Lobby, a family-owned chain of craft stores providing health insurance to all employees but refusing for religious reasons to cover morning-after pills, such as Plan B and Ella.

Sen. Patty Murray claims, “What’s at stake in this case before the Supreme Court is whether a CEO’s personal beliefs can trump a woman’s right to access free or low-cost contraception under the Affordable Care Act.”

Nonsense. Not one word in the Affordable Care Act guarantees health plans will cover birth-control products. There is no such “right.”