Campus Suicides!
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Tips on how to raise beacons of light!
I too believe you raise kids with a degree of " healthy neglect."
Several years ago I wrote a pamphlet on raising a child through Conservative methods to raise money for The Wounded Warrior Program and subsequently learned the organization spent too much money on administrative matters and not enough went to the veterans. (See 1 below.)
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This is re-volting! (See 2 below.)
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Obama said he would be the most open president and run the most open administration. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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This article suggests Obama does not "get" what he actually sought vis a vis Iran. (See 4 below.)
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Those pesky Palestinians. (See 5 below.)
and
The story of the IAF:
Check out “Sample Reel for 'Above and Beyond' - Playmount Productions” by Katahdin Productions on Vimeo.
The video is available for your viewing pleasure at https://vimeo.com/54400569
and finally:
Jonathan Schanzer one of the best analysts regarding The Middle East. (See 5a below.)
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Dick
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1)
How to be a Lighthouse Parent, not a Helicopter Parent
A YouTube star named Kristina Kuzmic had a big week when her blog entitled “I’m not your friend, kid! (Because I love you)” got over a million hits and some strong negative reactions from parents who didn’t like her criticism of their child-rearing philosophy. Kuzmic’s basic point shouldn’t have been controversial. While eating from a tub of ice cream, to which she added chocolate chips and a glass of red wine on the side, she declared that she isn’t trying to get her kids to like her because she isn’t their friend—she’s their parent. “I’m the authority. My child’s well-being is more important than my child’s opinion of me,” she declared.
In a recent piece for the New York Times, Dr. Perri Klass puts it a bit differently but makes essentially the same point. Klass writes that she and her husband are committed to what she calls “lighthouse parenting,” which is when parents serve as loving and supportive authority figures in their children’s lives, offering guidance but not obsessive levels of control. “You should look down at the rocks and make sure they never crash against them, and prepare them to ride the waves,” explains Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, who defined this style of child-rearing in his book, Raising Kids to Thrive.
The point, according to Klass, is to remember that no one thing you do or don’t do is going to “ruin” your kid (so stop agonizing) and to recognize that the most effective parenting happens when mom and dad aren’t trying. “Our child would understand who we were by everything we did and how we lived,” Klass explains, “Our tones, our values, our random eccentricities, not just by what we said parent-to-child, but how we lived in the world.”
Obvious, you say? Well, maybe. But only if the parents have spent time figuring out how they want to build their lighthouse—which values, religious beliefs, and moral truths will guide them as they raise their children. In a culture where everything is a choice, from relationship structure to whether or not to even have children, values often become a “choice” too. It makes it a lot easier to live your values when you and the person with whom you are raising children (and for whom you are modeling these behaviors) have decided on those values ahead of time.
Far more common, unfortunately, are parents who haven’t actually given much thought to these questions and instead outsource value-education to schools or popular culture.
This is regrettable, although understandable, given that as a society, we have done away with most if not all of the traditional venues for inculcating values. Most of us aren’t very religiously observant, and don’t follow a set of religious precepts or laws. Civic participation and affiliation, as noted by Robert Putnam and Charles Murray, have declined to the point where we often don’t share a common culture with our neighbors. And K-12 public education, which used to be a venue for imposing a common set of accepted beliefs and American values, no longer views cultural assimilation as part of its mission.
As Naomi Schaefer Riley described in her book, ’Til Faith Do Us Part: How Intermarriage is Transforming America, even when couples from two obviously different religious cultures marry each other, they often haven’t engaged in a single conversation about how they might want to live as a family once they have children. Not surprisingly, this can cause all sorts of friction in the family.
It’s much harder to exert authority over your children and exemplify your values in your day to day life if you haven’t made the conscious effort to figure out what your own and your spouse’s values are first. Once you have taken your measure as a couple, however, the road to lighthouse parenting—brightly lit and less marked by guilt—becomes much clearer.
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2)Eric test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors...and he writes…
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++3)* For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine.* Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg including the 25 miles it ran on the battery.* So, the range including the 9 gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery is approximately 270 miles.* It will take you 4 1/2 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph.* Then add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip time of 14.5 hours.* In a typical road trip your average speed (including charging time) would be 20 mph.* According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of electricity.* It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery.* The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned so I looked up what I pay for electricity.* I pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kwh.16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery.* 18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery.* Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32 mpg.* $3.19 per gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile.The gasoline powered car costs about $15,000 while the Volt costs $46,000…So the American Government wants proud and loyal Americans not to do the math, but simply pay 3 times as much for a car, that costs more than 7 times as much to run, and takes 3 times longer to drive across the country…Where do I sign ?
Secret Laws Passed In The U.S. Skyrocket Under The Obama Regime
By Kevin Collier
The U.S. Congress is passing fewer laws than ever — but secret laws are on the rise.
A new survey shows that for the past 30 years, Congress has steadily passed an increasing number of “secret laws” — provisions that are kept from the public eye.
That’s according to an exhaustive study by Dakota Rudesill, an Ohio State professor of law. A former senior national security analyst for the Senate Budget Committee who also worked for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Rudesill notes that more and more bills passed by Congress include provisions that allow for secret elements—which become law without the American people knowing what they contain.
Secret laws often come about because of three enormous budget bills that get renewed every year, which fund some of the government’s most secretive programs and agencies: the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, the Intelligence Authorization Act, and the National Defense Authorization Act. Portions of those bills, which fund classified programs include provisions that “can reasonably be read to give a classified addendum” to U.S. law,as Rudesill found.
The study refers only to changes to U.S. law that come through acts of Congress. A president’s executive order can also shape U.S. law, as can the classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which secretly approves, among other things, warrants for NSA spying activities. FISA Court rulings can set hidden legal precedent, as with the post-9/11 “raw take” order, which allowed agents at the NSA, FBI, and CIA to share raw intelligence on Americans with fewer restrictions.
Congress, increasingly deadlocked in recent years, has enacted fewer and fewer laws since 1978, the earliest evidence of secret law Rudesill found. But even as total laws passed have decreased, provisions within them that “can reasonably be read” to make a classified change to U.S. law, have steadily risen. As the below chart shows, secret laws have especially spiked twice: In the middle of the Iraq war, under President George W. Bush, and since the second half of President Obama’s first term.
As for what these “secret laws” actually say, we don’t know, exactly—they’re secret. “It’s kind of remarkable in this age when everything leaks,” Rudesill told Vocativ, “but there’s not one single one of these addenda that’s surfaced in 36 years, so we don’t actually know what’s in it.”
We do have some idea of examples, however. In the early years of the Iraq war, DARPA ran a massive data-mining program, based on the idea of predictive policing, called Total Information Awareness. Intended to use data to predict who might be a potential criminal threat, the program sought to comb through a number of data categories, ranging from online purchases to medical histories. Once picked up by the press, the program became massively unpopular—and stayed that way after being renamed Terrorism Information Awareness—and particularly criticized for not explicitly ruling out Americans as possible suspects, which critics argued violated the Fourth Amendment. The next year’s Defense Appropriations Act suspended the program.
But the story didn’t end there. “In the statutory text, right after they terminate TIA, they also create a new counter foreign intelligence program,” Rudesill said. A few lines down, that same appropriations bill made reference to an entirely new program, seemingly similar to the TIA—this time, with some very basic privacy provisions built in. The bill states that while no funding is allocated to TIA, funds are available to a “program hereby authorized for processing, analysis, and collaboration tools for counter terrorism foreign intelligence, as described in the Classified Annex accompanying the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2004.”
The full description of the program is classified. However, this program doesn’t appear to be exactly the same as TIA, because it had some explicit restrictions written into it. “If you read those restrictions, it sounds like what they’re basically trying to say is this counter foreign intelligence program is supposed to be targeted mainly overseas and on non-U.S. citizens,” said Rudesill.
The existence of law kept hidden from the public doesn’t necessarily have to be completely Orwellian, however. Rudesill has a proposal for a more palatable system: a “bell ringer.”
“If we as a country decide that some amount of secret law is inevitable, it seems to me that one principle of secret law is that when it’s created, there’s some sort of notice provided to the public,” he said. “It could just be a very brief notice in the Federal Register. Just say ‘on this date, the Department of Justice issued a memo on surveillance,'” along with a date, Rudesill said.
3a) Obama Has Issued 19 Secret Directives
By Gregory Korte
A one-digit correction to President Obama's directive on hostage policy Wednesday had the effect of disclosing the existence of a previously unknown — and still-secret — Obama order on national security.
The hostage policy was originally released Wednesday as a presidential policy directive numbered PPD-29. When the White House corrected that number to PPD-30, it meant Obama had issued a secret directive as PPD-29 sometime in the past 17 months.
Obama signed PPD-28, an order on electronic eavesdropping in the wake of revelations by Edward Snowden, in January 2014.
So what is PPD-29? No one's talking. A spokesman for the National Security Council declined to comment of the existence of classified PPDs Wednesday.
“The only reason we know about it is the sequential numbering of the directives, and realizing they skipped a few,” said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks the directives.
PPD-29 isn't the first to be tacitly acknowledged only by a missing number. Of the 30 PPDs issued by Obama, 19 have not been released. And for 11 of those, the White House has not disclosed even the subject of the order.
“It's not only the public that doesn't have copies. It's also Congress that doesn't have copies,” After good said. “It's a domain of largely unchecked presidential authority. It doesn't mean it's bad, but it's lacking in independent oversight.”
But they have the same legal force as an executive order, forming a body of largely secret law, said Harold Relyea, a political scientist who advised Congress on national security directives before retiring from the Congressional Research Service.
“The difference is that while executive orders are public by law — they must be published in the Federal Register to be effective —- PPDs are not,” he said. “It is a kind of secret law. People have to obey it. But it's a directive that can allocate money, direct people or take a course of action.”
What Obama calls PPDs have gone by different names by different presidents back to the Truman Administration. President George W. Bush called them National Security Presidential Directives (NPSDs). President Clinton called them Presidential Decision Directives (PDDs). President Nixon called them National Security Decision Memoranda.
Whatever they're called, Obama has been less prolific than his predecessors. George W. Bush issued 66 such orders, plus 25 more Homeland Security Presidential Directives. President Reagan issued at least 325.
Some, going back as far as the Lyndon Johnson administration, remain classified. They can involve subjects including the use of nuclear weapons, ballistic missile defenses, space policy, cybersecurity and even continuity plans for the federal government in the case of a large-scale disaster.
The secrecy makes it difficult to know entirely what changes Obama has made in the hostage policy. The directive issued Wednesday revoked a prior directive by President George W. Bush in 2002. But that directive, known as NSPD-12, remains secret.
“You would think that if there's a new policy it would be a simple matter to explain what the old policy was,” Aftergood said.
And even though Obama released his directive, it incorporates a classified annex with additional instructions to executive branch agencies.
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4) What Washington Doesn't Get about Iran
By Lincoln Boomfield
Obscured by the drama of America’s presidential campaign, one major foreign policy issue — the future direction of the U.S. approach to Iran — is at a crossroads.
President Obama stood before world leaders at the UN General Assembly in September 2013 and stated, “If we can resolve the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, that can serve as a major step down a long road towards a different relationship, one based on mutual interests and mutual respect.”
Yet in the aftermath of the July 2015 nuclear accord, statements by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Iranian actions have provided little indication that U.S.- Iran relations are moving in a direction more respectful of American interests.
“It is now clear,” writes UAE Ambassador to the United States Yousef al-Otaiba, “that one year since the framework for the deal was agreed upon, Iran sees it as an opportunity to increase hostilities in the region.” Internally, executions of prisoners is at a twenty-year high. Still, the occasion of national elections in February for Iran’s parliament and Assembly of Experts, like the June 2013 election of President Hassan Rouhani, generated widespread commentary by policy experts in the United States that a process of meaningful change was at hand, as “reform” candidates outpolled their hard-line opponents in Tehran.
Testifying before the Senate on April 5, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon asserted that “the extent to which reformers. . . swept the board” in polling for parliamentary seats in Tehran “highlights the fact that President Rouhani, and his intent on opening Iran to the world and addressing the fundamental stumbling blocks, has resonated in a positive way.”
Under Secretary Shannon cited the difficulty in determining the impact of these electoral results on “how Iran behaves strategically” because, as he explained, Iran is “a mix of conflicting entities and groups, with hard-liners aligning themselves both with religious. . . and security leadership to prevent reformists from moving too fast, too far.” Part of the supreme leader’s work, said Mr. Shannon, “is to balance forces inside of Iran.”
Factionalism and jockeying for influence and position occur quite naturally in leadership ranks of democracies and dictatorships alike, including Iran. The key question Under Secretary Shannon could not answer definitively is whether regime politics would ever allow for real change in Iran’s “strategic” behavior. His remarks, however, reflected a long-standing belief by policymakers and advisors that the clerical circle in power since the 1979 revolution is capable of empowering political stewards who are inclined to reform Iran and fulfill President Obama’s hopeful vision, reciprocating his administration’s solicitude and forbearance toward Tehran.
Decades of Chasing the Elusive Promise of Reform
U.S. policymakers have experienced cycles of hope and disappointment with Tehran. After being singed by scandal in the mid-1980s, when President Reagan’s arms-for-hostages dealings were exposed, U.S. officials anticipated positive change in Iran when Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani gained the presidency in 1990 with the promise of rebuilding an economy weakened after eight years of war with Iraq. However, terror attacks in Germany and Argentina ensued, along with assassinations of exiled regime opponents, tied directly to Rafsanjani and Khamenei. The June 25, 1996, bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia killed nineteen U.S. airmen, as the Clinton administration maintained a “dual containment” approach toward both Iran and Iraq, backed by mounting sanctions.
When Mohammad Khatami took office as president in 1997 and proposed a “Dialogue of Civilizations,” again Washington judged that he was a reasonable interlocutor signaling a departure from Iran’s pattern of repression at home and terrorism abroad. The wave of domestic oppression that followed, including what came to be known as the “chain murders” of dissidents by Iran’s intelligence ministry, appeared to many as a hard-line reaction to Khatami’s agenda; nevertheless, for the Iranian people, hopes for reform under Khatami gave way to “fears of darker times ahead.”
Not even the fact that Iran’s nuclear program advanced dramatically in secret under President Khatami would shake Washington’s durable conviction that progressive elements within the Tehran ruling elite might one day ascend to power, as keen to see Iran adhere to international norms and uphold universal rights as are Western governments and citizens.
Listening to most Iran analysts at policy gatherings in Washington, two themes will be apparent. First, any mention of Iran’s status as the leading state sponsor of terrorism, its domestic human rights abuses or the destructive activities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including its elite Quds Force, will be at once acknowledged and dismissed with a figurative hand-wave. This is old news; Iran has for years been sanctioned over it. Since there is no new story here, only unenlightened warmongers would harp on these aspects of Iranian affairs which, while condemnable, only stifle consideration of the possibilities for U.S. policy with Iran looking forward.
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5) Like Mother, Like Son
By Stephen M. Flatow
The details of last month's stabbing of two elderly Israeli women have finally been released, and they include several troubling revelations.
On May 11, the two women, ages 82 and 86, were stabbed by two Palestinian terrorists on the popular Haas Promenade in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv neighborhood. We already knew, from one of the victims' friends, that Arab workers standing nearby refused her pleas to call an ambulance.
But now we also know-from the details that the Israeli police recently released-that the attackers discussed their plans for the attack on their Facebook pages, and that after the attack, they also communicated via WhatsApp. Remember when we used to think that economic advancement, and the availability of modern technology, would lead the Palestinians to become more moderate? Remember the idea that if the Arabs personally experienced the benefits of the modern world, they would not risk losing it by resorting to terrorism? Instead of Facebook and WhatsApp leading to moderation, young Arabs are using them in the service of extremism and violence.
The most disturbing revelation about the May 11 attack is that the two attackers were only 16 and 17 years old, and the mother of one of them was herself recently arrested for attempting to stab Jews near Jerusalem.
A 16-year-old should be going to the movies with friends, worrying about his first date, and learning how to drive. What could possess him to instead savagely stab two elderly women who no doubt closely resemble his own grandmother?
No Palestinian child is born a terrorist. They are raised to be that way. These two teenage stabbers were educated in Palestinian Authority (PA) schools where the children are taught to believe that Jews are evil and that murdering Jews is not only justified but obligatory. They attended mosques where imams preached hatred. They watched PA television and radio, where terrorists are hailed as"martyrs"and "heroes."
And the fact that the mother of one of the stabbers was herself a terrorist gives us a pretty good idea of the kinds of ideas that were communicated around the dinner table in their home.
Earlier this year, I wrote about the father of 16-year-old Murad Adais, who broke into the home of a young Israeli Jewish mother of six and brutally stabbed her to death. "I am proud of my son,"the father announced.
Not long after that, the official Facebook page of the Fatah movement (which is headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas) posted a large photo of the mother of the late Muhammed Shamasneh, a Palestinian terrorist who stabbed three Jews near the Jerusalem central bus station. His mother was smiling broadly and making a "V" sign with her right hand. The caption under the photo read, "How great you are, O mother of the Martyr."
The website of Palestinian Media Watch (www.palwatch.org) overflows with similar examples of pro-terrorism statements by parents of Palestinian terrorists.
Supporters of the Palestinian cause are always telling us that ordinary Palestinians are just like ordinary folks everywhere. They claim that Palestinian moms and dads have the same concerns as moms and dads in America, Israel, and anyplace else.
But when we see what it is that many Palestinian moms and dads actually say and do, we have to rethink those kinds of assumptions. Back in 1996, then-first lady Hillary Clinton authored a children's book titled "It Takes a Village." Her argument was that a child is shaped in part by the various people who live in his or her village and the cultural influences to which the child is subjected.
The typical Palestinian village is saturated with glorification of violence and hatred of Jews. The schools teach it, the imams preach it, and the government-sponsored news media promote it. But the Palestinian culture of hatred and violence begins with parents who praise the violence, who encourage their children to admire it, and who themselves sometimes practice it.
5a)
Putting Hezbollah ‘out of business’
Banking sanctions won’t stop armaments from Iran
“After many years of sanctions targeting Hezbollah, today the group is in its worst financial shape in decades,” stated Adam Szubin, the acting Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence before a congressional hearing last week. “And I can assure you that, alongside our international partners, we are working hard to put them out of business.”
Mr. Szubin may be correct that sanctions are taking a bite out of Hezbollah’s finances. Congress enacted legislation in 2015 — the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act — which hammers banks that knowingly do business with Hezbollah. This has led to a purge in Lebanon’s banking system; banks are dumping Hezbollah accounts. At least, those that wish to remain plugged into the international financial system are doing so. One reports suggests that as many as 10,000 accounts have been closed.
And now Mr. Szubin’s lieutenant, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Danny Glaser, is pressing further. He was in Lebanon last week, where he gave a list of nearly 100 names of Hezbollah financial targets to the Central Bank governor, who vowed to take action against them. The targets range from Hezbollah media outlets to political figures and fighters.
Hezbollah’s heavy reliance on Lebanon’s banks presents a hugely important opportunity to weaken the group’s finances. But nobody is putting Hezbollah “out of business” anytime soon. Hezbollah is a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran. And Iran just negotiated a massive windfall of $100 billion pursuant to last summer’s nuclear deal. For Iran, Hezbollah is too big to fail.
Even the Lebanese government is prepared to keep Hezbollah’s politicians in the black. Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the Lebanese Treasury started paying the salaries of government ministers belonging to Hezbollah in cash in order to evade U.S. sanctions.
But money aside, let’s not forget that even though Hezbollah maintains a vast illicit financial empire, its business is terrorism. And right now, even as the group’s military capabilities have never been stronger.
One senior Israeli official recently told me that his country’s intelligence estimates assess that Hezbollah’s war machine is more powerful than 90 percent of the world’s militaries. The group has a massive rocket arsenal of 150,000, including many with greater accuracy and payload than in the past. One senior Israeli military official privately admitted to me that the sheer number of Hezbollah’s rockets has forced Israel’s military establishment to reconsider the way it calculates its longstanding policy of maintaining its “military edge.”
Open source reporting compiled by Foundation for Defense of Democracies suggests that Hezbollah also has shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, drones, anti-tank missiles, anti-ship missiles and other advanced military equipment. These are all upgrades to the Hezbollah arsenal. Hezbollah has worked with Iran to smuggle much of this weaponry to its base of operation in Lebanon amid the chaos of the Syrian war, where Hezbollah is fighting on the front lines to protect the Assad regime. And although the group has suffered high casualties (as many as 1,300) in that war, Hezbollah has gained valuable war-fighting experience that it will make it that much more formidable in future conflicts.
Naim Qassem, a top Hezbollah official, recently announced that his organization was not seeking conflict with Israel this summer. But this is little consolation to Israeli war planners who warn that whenever the next conflict erupts between these two players, the fighting will be brutal. Indeed, Hezbollah’s arsenal is now too vast and too lethal to expect limited skirmishes as seen in the past.
And it’s not only Israel sounding the alarm. Outgoing United Nations Under Secretary-General Terje Rod-Larsen recently warned in the Arabic media that Hezbollah’s involvement in the Syrian war, not to mention other parts of the Middle East, risks a spillover of sectarian tensions into Lebanon and beyond. He called on the international community to disarm Hezbollah pursuant to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, which was passed in 2004 but was never enforced.
In other words, a robust strategy to hit Hezbollah in the purse strings by itself is insufficient. In fact, financial isolation without a credible means to weaken the group militarily might inadvertently push Hezbollah onto the battlefield. Indeed, when the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas (also an Iran proxy) waged a war against Israel in 2014, it did so to negotiate a way out of its financial isolation. The end result was a 50-day war.
Treasury’s Hezbollah sanctions are undeniably making an impact. But it’s too soon to take a victory lap. Without a broader strategy to tackle Hezbollah’s foreboding forces, even the most valiant efforts to squeeze its finances will fall short.
Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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