RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the shocking allegations of a fraternity party gang rape at the University of Virginia come unraveled, progressives whose cause is to condemn America for a so-called “rape culture” have chosen to double down in defense of the apparent falsehood. The Washington Post even ran an astoundingly un-American piece that suggests we should believe rape accusations, regardless of whether they are true.

Rolling Stone, the music and politics magazine that can stay relevant only by sexualizing everyone (including terrorists – remember its dreamy cover photo of Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?), broke the lurid story only to have it fall apart thanks to unconscionably sloppy journalism. But progressives cannot let the truth get in the way of the agenda, so Zerlina Maxwell rushed to fill the breach with the aforementioned WaPo piece initially entitled “No matter what Jackie said, we should automatically believe rape claims” (“Jackie” is the victim’s pseudonym).

The thrust of Maxwell’s piece is that “the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.” She begins by saying that many people

will be tempted to see [the collapse of the UofV gang-rape allegation] as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.

Exactly – look at what happened to them. But then she goes on to reject that reasonable restraint: “In important ways,” she wrote, “this is wrong. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says” [emphasis added] – after all, false accusations are “exceedingly rare,” she claims. But then she quotes an FBI statistic that 2-8% of allegations are false; that is not “exceedingly rare.”

In any case, it wouldn’t matter if the figure were only 1% – in this country we don’t suspend the presumption of innocence just “to offer our hand of support to survivors.” Maxwell disagrees: “The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor’s narration on the hunt for discrepancies is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists.”

While in most countries immigration moves the electorate to the left, in Israel immigration moved the country to the right. In the United States the left is counting on demographics to make it easier for them to win elections, but in Israel demographic shifts have made it easier for the right to win.

But the biggest problem for the Israeli left is that it’s tethered to its own version of ObamaCare in the form of the Palestinian Authority which won’t make peace, won’t stop funding terrorism and won’t stop playing the victim. As with ObamaCare, the Israeli left teeters between running on the disastrous peace process that everyone hates and pivoting away from it toward economic bread and butter issues.

For Obama and European leaders, Israel is reducible to the peace process. And the Israeli left depends on the support of foreign governments for its network of foreign funded non-profit organizations. The Israeli left can’t let go of its exploding version of ObamaCare because the left is becoming a foreign organization with limited domestic support. Its electorate isn’t in Israel; it’s in Brussels.

The Israeli left is short on ideas, both foreign and domestic, and its last remaining card is Obama.

Escalating a crisis in relations has been the traditional way for US administrations to force Israeli governments out of office. Bill Clinton did it to Netanyahu and as Israeli elections appear on the horizon Obama would love to do it all over again.

There’s only one problem.

The United States is popular in Israel, but Obama isn’t. Obama’s spats with Netanyahu ended up making the Israeli leader more popular. The plan was for Obama to gaslight Israelis by maintaining a positive image in Israel while lashing out at the Jewish State so that the blame would fall on Netanyahu.

That was what Obama’s trip to Israel had been about. While his approval ratings in Israel briefly picked up, they clattered down again over his attitude during the recent Hamas war. Polls show that the majority of Israelis don’t trust him to have their back on Islamic terrorism or Iran. And that’s bad news for him and for an Israeli left that needs to sell the image of a good Obama and a bad Netanyahu.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/m-reed-hopper-and-todd-f-gaziano-watch-out-for-that-puddle-soon-it-could-be-federally-regulated-1417990935?mod=hp_opinion

TO THE WALL ST. JOURNAL…

If you don’t have regulations, people to write them, people to enforce them, people to interpret them and people to punish those who break said regulations, then you will have massive unemployment in the ranks of Democratic supporters.

Unemployed Democrats are ugly. They riot, steal, burn, loot and assault people.

Where else are over educated know nothings going to find work?

You’re not very compassionate, do you really want Democrats to have to find work in physically hard, thinking, uncomfortable environments? What are you thinking?…Burns Matkin

The EPA wants to redefine ‘the waters of the United States’ to mean virtually any wet spot in the country.

Earlier this year the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers proposed a rule redefining the “waters of the United States” that are subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act. The two agencies recently finished collecting public comments on their draft rule and are deciding how to proceed. Their best course is to abandon the rule or anything like it. Here’s why:

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy wrote in Huffington Post in March that the draft rule would clarify the meaning of the relevant terms in the law without expanding federal jurisdiction and promised it would “save us time, keep money in our pockets, cut red tape, [and] give certainty to business.” None of this is true.

The Clean Water Act of 1972 prohibits discharges into “navigable waters” without a federal permit, defining “navigable waters” as “waters of the United States.” Initially the Army Corps and EPA interpreted waters of the U.S. to mean those that could be used as channels of navigation for interstate commerce. This reading is logical and necessary because the Clean Water Act is authorized by Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce—which as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), includes the transport of passengers and goods across state lines but not the commercial or noncommercial activity within a single state.

Within a few years, however, the two agencies claimed regulatory authority over wetlands and other nonnavigable waters that had no significant connection to interstate commerce. The Supreme Court has twice rejected these claims.

In SWANCC v. Army Corps of Engineers (2001), the court forbade the Army Corps from regulating “isolated water bodies” that were not connected to traditional navigable waters. Nevertheless, the Army Corps and EPA have largely ignored or circumvented the ruling with new interpretations. They claimed that they could regulate anything with a “hydrological connection” to traditional navigable waters—including normally dry-land features such as arroyos in the desert as well as ditches and culverts hundreds of miles from traditional navigable waters.

The payment system is forcing doctors to sell out to hospitals. The trend, and the law, will be unstoppable without reform.

Dr. Gottlieb, a physician and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a member of the Health IT Policy Committee that advises the Department of Health and Human Services. He also invests in and advises health-care companies.

Here’s a dirty little secret about recent attempts to fix ObamaCare. The “reforms,” approved by Senate and House leaders this summer and set to advance in the next Congress, adopt many of the Medicare payment reforms already in the Affordable Care Act. Both favor the consolidation of previously independent doctors into salaried roles inside larger institutions, usually tied to a central hospital, in effect ending independent medical practices.

Republicans must embrace a different vision to this forced reorganization of how medicine is practiced in America if they want to offer an alternative to ObamaCare. The law’s defenders view this consolidation as a necessary step to enable payment provisions that shift the financial risk of delivering medical care onto providers and away from government programs like Medicare. The law’s architects believe that doctors, to better bear financial risk, need to be part of larger, and presumably better-capitalized institutions. Indeed, the law has already gone a long way in achieving that outcome.

A recent Physicians Foundation survey of some 20,000 U.S. doctors found that 35% described themselves as independent, down from 49% in 2012 and 62% in 2008. Once independent doctors become the exception rather than the rule, the continued advance of the ObamaCare agenda will become virtually unstoppable.

Local competition between providers, who vie to contract with health plans, is largely eliminated by these consolidated health systems. Since all health care is local, the lack of competition will soon make it much harder to implement a market-based alternative to ObamaCare. The resulting medical monopolies will make more regulation the most obvious solution to the inevitable cost and quality problems.

A true legislative alternative to ObamaCare would support physician ownership of independent medical practices, and preserve local competition between doctors and choice for patients.

First, Congress should remove the pervasive biases in ObamaCare that favor hospital ownership of medical practices. Payment reforms that create incentives for the coordinated delivery of medical care (like Accountable Care Organizations and payment “bundles”) all turn on arrangements where a single institution owns the doctors. They’re biased against less centralized engagements where independent doctors enter into contractual relationships among themselves.

“One of the main reasons why anything run by the government is hopelessly cost-ineffective is because the state invariably employs many more people than are necessary for the job.”

[T]he suppression of the minority of exploiters, by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday, is a matter comparatively so easy, simple, and natural that it will cost far less bloodshed… and will cost mankind far less.

Lenin wrote this in The State and Revolution (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

In the end, 66 million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1959: tortured, shot, starved, frozen or worked to death. This figure was calculated by Professor of Statistics I. A. Kurganov and quoted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

Others say that the figure is 45 million, still others 20 million. The lower figures may be due to the fact that they only refer to deaths caused by Stalin, and don’t include the pre-Stalin and post-Stalin periods of the Soviet Union.

None of them includes the tens of millions of deaths of the Second World War.

If 60 million were indeed killed from 1917 to 1959, an average of 2 million were killed during each year of Stalin’s horrendous rule – or 40,000 every week (even during “peacetime”).

If the real number is 20 million, that still means 1,830 deaths every single day.

And they were not just “the minority of exploiters”, as Lenin put it. They were peasants, workers, middle class people.

That eventually was the blood and human cost that Lenin considered “natural” and negligible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzHzxwQBJLU#t=258

Dear friends,

Many of my Israeli lefti friends love to hate Naftali Bennett. I think I know why. I also know that all, if not most of them, never bothered to listen to what he has to say. Had they listened with open minds, many of their views might have changed.

Israel’s Economy Minister Naftali Bennett is participating in the Saban Forum with many leaders of the Israeli left. Saban, a close friend of the Clintons, is a supporter of the Israeli left which advocates “TSS” (Two States Solution) i.e. handing over to the Arabs tangible lands in the heart of Israel in lieu of “peace” promises.

The Forum is organized in DC by the Brookings Institute and hosted by Martin S. Indyk, a controversial former US Ambassador to Israel and adviser to President Obama, who supports TSS and favors Arab positions over Israeli ones. Mr. Indyk was the US envoy to the failed negotiations between the “Palestinians” and Israel, and in part responsible for their failure. He carries a big grudge against the Israeli “right” to which Naftali Bennett belongs.

The following link will take you to an interview with Naftali Bennett, hosted by Martin S. Indyk. This is a riveting discussion between two diametrically opposing views that will shape the future of Israel and may seal its fate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzHzxwQBJLU#t=258

Your Truth Provider,

Yuval.

No, I have not seen it yet and this is not a review, but coming to a theater near me in a few days is Director Ridley Scott’s new (and improved?) story of the Biblical Exodus, titled, well, “Exodus,” with this subtitle: “Gods and Kings.” Nice touch. Am I worried? Of course. Hollywood never gets it right.

First question: In this telling, will Moses be Jewish?

Next question: What took so long? With all this newfangled hi-tech gadgetry, the temptation must have been overwhelming to out-do Cecil. B. DeMille and even to surpass The Almighty Himself for “special effects.” This new rendering, from the preview that I saw, is bigger and louder than anything that came before; digital enhancement at its most ferocious.

But is it better? DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” made many mistakes, but the 1956 spectacular was clear about Moses and Pharaoh. Moses was Jewish and so were the rest of us who followed him (along with the mixed multitudes). Pharaoh was Egyptian, and we could easily tell the good guys from the bad guys. DeMille, to his credit, did not fool around with this.

But times have changed and nothing goes without “the other side of the story” – moral equivalency.

Living in a world where evil and good are merely a toss of the dice, where does that leave those of us who choose sides – the side of Moses?
A few years ago, 2006, ABC-TV produced its own “Ten Commandments,” a two-part extravaganza sanitized to hurt nobody’s feelings. So Moses and Pharaoh were matched as ethically equal, and traces of religion were politically scrubbed. So Moses could have been anybody, and the Hebrew slaves? Throughout, they were called “the people.”

Reality vs. Virtual Reality.

In the mid-1960s, I quit taking photographs for publication for my employer, US News & World Report, in addition to my writing. With my trusty little 35mm Leica body and Nikor lenses, I had blossomed from a rank amateur to become quite proficient. There were even battlefield pictures although I was not, as we said then, a “bang-bang reporter”. I was doing more overall reporting and analysis of a complicated political as well as military war in Vietnam and still nominally “covering” the rest of South and Southeast Asia.

I quit for several reasons. I found that I was beginning to look at everything around me through an imaginary camera rangefinder, even before I put it to my eye. Just as I early in my reporting career had decided that voluminous notes were an impediment to writing a good story – important elements of “the story” would go in one ear and into my writing fingers and forgotten not to be adequately reconstructed from what was supposed to be a record. But if I listened carefully [and took down figures], I was more apt to get the essential significance and even the most important of the details of the story I was trying to follow and to write. That now seemed to be what was happening with my camera: I was losing the overall perspective on the scene I was observing with my attention drawn to how to record it with the camera..

There was another reason, as well. I found that nothing lied as much as a photograph, even perhaps more than words. Photographs are, after all, a minisecond of history of the scene presented. [It’s why I have always wondered if photography really is an art form; isn’t most of the best of photography accidental? When the new machine driven lenses with rapid shutter speeds came into mode, we joked that now Margaret Bourke White would bankrupt Time, Inc., with her film costs. She had already been noted as pointing her camera in a direction and taking photographs as fast as possible, eventually selecting one she thought better represented the scene.]

An iconic Madonna-like photo I took of a tribal mother in Laos with her child and the mist floating in behind her head was magnificent. [It was later included in a photographic insert in my book, A Sense of Asia, Chas. Scribner & Sons, 1969]. In fact, what the photograph camouflaged was the deplorable situation in that village including my Madonna figure’s surroundings – its lack of sanitation and food, the high prevalence of tuberculosis and other diseases, and frequent murderous attacks by the Vietnamese Communists.

Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the Chief Political/Intelligence Officer of the British Mandate in Palestine, inspired the late Senator Daniel Inouye, who laid the foundation for the landmark US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014, which was overwhelmingly supported by Congress. The Act reflects Israel’s increasing and unique strategic contribution to vital US defense and commercial interests, and the mutually beneficial, two-way-street nature of the US-Israel relationship.

Col. Meinertzhagen’s Middle East Diary 1917-1956 is as relevant today, for the USA, as it was 80-100 years ago, for Britain, maintaining that a Jewish State would be the most reliable and effective beachhead of Western democracies in an area, which is vital to their critical economic and national security interests.

In 1923, Col. Meinertzhagen stated: “Britain will not be able to sustain its control of the Suez Canal [1882-1956] endlessly…. [Therefore], I’ve always considered the Land of Israel to be the key to the defense of the Middle East…. When a Jewish state will be established, Britain shall benefit from air force, naval and land bases… as well as Jewish fighting capabilities…. which will secure its long-term regional interests…. Unlike the Arabs, Jews are reliable and do comply with agreements…. Zionism is the hope for the reconstructed Jewish homeland; it is also a clear strategic benefit to the British Empire…. The British policy in the Middle East bets on the wrong horse, when appeasing the Arabs….”

In 1920, he wrote: “I firmly believe that a sovereign Jewish State shall be established in 20-30 years, militarily assaulted by all its Arab neighbors.” In 1919, he assessed that a long-term, and possibly insoluble, clash between Jewish and Arab nationalism was inevitable. He expected the Jews to prevail due to their impressive military track record in ancient times. Jewish quality would overcome the Arab quantity.