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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

No, the United States Doesn’t Lead the World in Mass Shootings By Matt Margolis

By on August 5th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/no-the-united-states-doesnt-lead-the-world-in-mass-shootings/

As expected, Democrats immediately began politicizing the shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. Quite a few of them even blamed Trump. Like clockwork, calls for more gun control have commenced. Democrats are even trying to pressure Mitch McConnell to cancel the Senate recess so they can vote on gun control.

A common myth you can expect to hear a lot in the coming days and weeks is that the United States “leads the world in mass shootings” and therefore we must pass some law that will do nothing to stop future mass shootings, but will infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

What you might not hear is that this claim is completely bogus.

Sure, if you following conservative media, you’re probably aware of this. Townhall, The Daily Signal, Bearing Arms, FEE, The Washington Examiner, and others have all previously reported on how the myth that the United States leads the world in mass shootings is based on a deeply flawed study, which has been debunked by the Crime Prevention Research Center.

Yet, the myth remains alive and is sure to be regurgitated endlessly again.

The following video from John Stossel explains how the myth got started and why it’s bogus:

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mental Illness and Mass Murder The FBI found 70% of shooters had ‘stressors’ or ‘concerning behaviors’ prior to the attack. By E. Fuller Torrey

By on August 5th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mental-illness-and-mass-murder-11564955203

Dr. Torrey is founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center and author of “American Psychosis.”

Based on the increase in the U.S. population, there are now some one million people with serious mental illness living among the general population who, 60 years ago, would have been treated in state mental hospitals. Multiple studies have reported that, at any given time, between 40% and 50% of them are receiving no treatment for their mental illness. With the best of intentions and the worst of planning, America has emptied out its public psychiatric hospitals without ensuring that the released patients would receive the necessary treatment to control their symptoms. What did we think would happen?

Now we have two more mass shootings, committed over a 13-hour period. In El Paso, Texas, 20 people were killed in what authorities have called a hate crime, while in Dayton, Ohio, the death toll is nine. One database claims these were the 21st and 22nd mass killings in the U.S. in 2019. Such databases vary depending on the number of dead required to meet the definition.

They also vary according to other factors. If, for example, they only count gun deaths, then they don’t include Adacia Chambers, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, who in 2015 killed four and injured 48 by driving her car into a parade crowd in Stillwater, Okla. What is clear from all the databases is that these mass killings are increasing in frequency and have been since the 1980s. Not coincidentally, that was when the emptying out of state mental hospitals was at its peak.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Seizes Vessel in Persian Gulf Accused of Smuggling Fuel Tehran claims ship that was detained on Wednesday was carrying 700,000 liters of fuel

By on August 5th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-seizes-vessel-in-persian-gulf-accused-of-smuggling-fuel-11564916008

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has seized a vessel accused of smuggling fuel and detained its crew, Iranian state television reported, in another case of Tehran interdicting ships in the volatile Persian Gulf.

The report on Sunday said the Guard’s Navy patrol forces seized the vessel, along with 700,000 liters of smuggled fuel and, in coordination with Iranian judicial authorities, impounded it near Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf.

Iranian state news agency IRNA reported that a video of the moment the vessel was interdicted showed it was Iraqi. Maritime confrontations between Iran and Iraq are considered rare. The Iraqi ship’s seizure would follow July’s visit to Tehran by Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who has sought to ease tensions between the U.S. and Iran, both close allies of Iraq.

The Iraqi Oil Ministry said it had no relation to the detained vessel. Spokesman Assem Jihad said the ministry was gathering information on the vessel, describing it as smaller than those that officially market its oil and products.

Gen. Ramezan Zirahi, a navy forces commander in the Guard, was quoted by Iran’s Fars News Agency as saying the fuel had been transferred to the vessel from another ship, and was bound for Arab countries in the region when it was stopped. The seven detained crew members were foreign, he said, without naming their nationality or that of the vessel.

The ship’s seizure took place last on Wednesday, Sepah News, the Revolutionary Guard’s official news service, reported, a day after United Arab Emirates officials traveled to Iran to discuss maritime border cooperation and the flow of shipping traffic, including illegal movements.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING 2020

By on August 4th, 2019

On February 3,  the Iowa Caucus starts campaign season, followed by a primary in New Hampshire on the 11th, Nevada caucuses on the 22nd (D) and 25th (R), and the South Carolina primary (D) on the the 29th.

The March 3 primaries will determine which Democrat wins the presidential nomination and which legislators are running in the following states in both parties.

Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia and Democrats Abroad(D)

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Don’t Buy the Myth of the ‘Moderate’ Democrat Bob Maistros

By on August 4th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/03/dont-buy-the-myth-of-the-moderate-democrat/

Watching a passel of Democrats in the Motor City struggle to differentiate themselves recalled my move years ago from politics to New York PR.

I was a bit confused about nomenclature in my new profession and turned to a grizzled veteran. What, I asked him, is the difference among public relations, marketing communications, advertising and the then-hot new concept of strategic communications?

“Not a (expletive deleted) thing,” he grunted. “It’s all selling soap.”

Putting aside the theatrics of Biden Bashfest II Wednesday, the faux showdowns on the first night opened a new going-forward narrative of differences among the “moderates” and “progressives.” The Wall Street Journal opined on “the sharpest ideological differences in decades.”

Don’t buy it.

Every Democrat on the stage was selling the same thing: Bigger Government. 

Let’s zero in on key domestic issues covered in the three-hour midsummer night’s nightmare, shall we?

Health care was supposedly a differentiator, with alleged middle-of-the-roaders fixing to pour cold water on Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’ $32 trillion Medicare for All dream.

Former Maryland Congressman John Delaney managed to squeeze in his money line — “real solutions, not impossible promises” — on four separate occasions, and called Medicare for All “extreme.” But he also shoehorned in the phrase “universal” in conjunction with health care four times, proposing “a universal health care system to give everyone basic health care for free.” That’s telling ‘em, congressman.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

“The Pioneers” by David McCullough- A Review by Sydney Williams

By on August 4th, 2019

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

History allows us to marvel at our own time with renewed perspectives. For example, how rich and easy our lives are – despite a freshman Congresswoman telling a Newsweek interviewer that “an entire generation [millennials] came of age and never saw American prosperity” – compared to the hardships experienced by early pioneers, like those along the Ohio River.

David McCullough, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, in his new book, follows several families, including those of Manasseh Cutler and his two sons, Ephraim and Jervis, along with Joseph Barker and Samuel Hildreth, from the founding of the Ohio Company in 1784, through the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, to 1863, when the Territory had become five states and all the founders were dead.

In 1783, as a condition for signing the Treaty of Paris, John Adams insisted that Britain cede rights to what was called the Northwest Territory, an area west of Pennsylvania, east of the Mississippi River, north of the Ohio River and south of British Canada. It consisted of 265,878 square miles – an area larger than France, an area from which five states would eventually be carved: Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837) and Wisconsin (1848). In 1800, the U.S. Census recorded a population of 51,000 in the Territory. By 1860, those five states had a population of seven million.

The land they first settled in 1788, where the Muskingum River meets the Ohio, became the town of Marietta. It was named after the French Queen, Marie Antoinette. Marietta was settled by forty-eight pioneers led by General Rufus Putnam, a Revolutionary War veteran and friend of George Washington. It is in the southeastern part of what is now Ohio, bordering on Virginia (now West Virginia). The passage of the Northwest Ordinance gave ownership of the land to the U.S. government which, via the Ohio Company, sold land to pioneers, including Revolutionary War veterans – men, as Joseph Barker later wrote, who “had been disciplined to obey, and learned the advantage of subordination to law and good behavior in promoting the prosperity of themselves and the rest of mankind.” Traits needed by those who would venture west included, Mr. McCullough writes: “fortitude, perseverance, patience, resolution and good sense.”

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

With autocrats on defensive, US has opportunity BY Lawrence J. Haas

By on August 4th, 2019

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/456055-with-autocrats-on-defensive-us-has-opportunity

Moscow detains nearly 1,400 protesters after a bloody crackdown and returns its most prominent opposition figure to jail after what he suspects was a state-ordered poisoning that put him in the hospital. Beijing hints that it will send its army to quell protests against Hong Kong’s China-backed government.

For all their outward self-confidence, the governments of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping seem unusually unnerved by recent protests, perhaps reflecting unstated concerns that the protests could threaten both regimes.

That’s unlikely, but those governments would be wise to take nothing for granted. After all, no one knows what will trigger an uprising that’s large enough to topple a government, or a series of them. No one could have predicted the Soviet crack-up of three decades ago or the “Arab Spring” of more recent years, however much the populations in both places were itching for change.

Moreover, autocracies face new challenges to maintaining power. Modern communications – computers, mobile phones, social media – make it harder for autocracies to prevent their constituents from securing information from the outside and, in turn, comparing their plight with their brethren in freer and more democratic societies.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Steve Frank: J Streeters duped on alternative tour of Israel

By on August 4th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/j-streeters-duped-on-alternative-tour-of-israel/

Nonprofit advocacy group J Street has recently been campaigning against Birthright Israel, an educational program that sponsors free 10-day heritage trips to Israel for young Jewish adults. Over 600,000 young adults have participated in the program since its founding in 1999.

J Street charges that Birthright trips lack Palestinians voices, fail to incorporate the Palestinian narrative and neglect to visit Palestinian sites in the West Bank. As an alternative to the traditional Birthright tour, J Street recently sponsored a trip to Israel for 28 participants who visited Palestinian sites in the West Bank and heard from spokesmen for the Palestinian cause.

According to The New York Times, “In the West Bank settlement of Har Gilo,” the J Streeters “received a harsh history lesson from a veteran opponent of the occupation. Then they toured an impoverished, water-starved Palestinian village that Israeli settlers want to demolish, and visited the city of Hebron, where repeated outbreaks of violence have turned an entire Palestinian business district into a ghost town.”

The J Street trip and the Times article about it were highly criticized in a pointed piece in Commentary magazine. The Commentary review noted that there was not a word in either the trip or the Times article “on the murderous Palestinian anti-Semitic violence that necessitates Israel’s policing of such places [as Hebron] to begin with,” “no mention of the kleptocratic Palestinian leadership that’s consigned generations of Palestinians to certain ruin” and “no mention of the fact that the Palestinians have, again and again—and again—refused to make peace with Israel when it was offered.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Latest UN Horror Show: Christian Refugees Ignored by Uzay Bulut

By on August 4th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14631/un-christian-refugees

Jordan is supposed to be their transit country; they are seeking resettlement to other countries via the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Australian Special Humanitarian Program.
The registration with the UNHCR gives them the protective status of refugee as they await resettlement. Yet, the process of resettlement takes at minimum several months and sometimes even years due to the growing refugee backlog….. “The majority of those stuck in limbo have been waiting more than two years—some since the rise of ISIS in 2014,” according to the report.
“Since January, the process has become even slower and more difficult. The UNHCR has not even granted newcomers refugee status since. They just give them an appointment date, then they cancel the date and give them a new one. So we all keep waiting.” — Lorance Yousuf Kazqeea, a Christian originally from Baghdad, has been an asylum seeker in Jordan with his wife and two children since September 2017; to Gatestone Institute.
“You can contact the local UNHCR office in your country and demand answers – why Iraqi Christians have been waiting for resettlement for years and why the West continuously rejects them.” — Juliana Taimoorazy, founding president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, which has been active in Jordan since 2015; to Gatestone Institute.

Since the 2014 invasion and genocide by the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, at least 16,000 Assyrian Christians from Iraq have become refugees in Jordan. Most are still suffering economically and psychologically there, under extremely difficult circumstances.

These Assyrian Christians are in Jordan on a temporary basis with plans to emigrate to a third country. However, as they have not been given official work permits by the Jordanian government, they largely rely on their savings, remittances sent by relatives abroad or aid from charity organizations and churches. Jordan is supposed to be their transit country; they are seeking resettlement in other countries via the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Australian Special Humanitarian Program.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran: Flogging a Dead Donkey Is Futile by Amir Taheri

By on August 4th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14649/iran-flog-dead-donkey

The Europeans pretend to be working on a magic potion that shall have the dead donkey up and running in no time. For their part, Tehran’s Khomeinist leaders insist that the donkey is alive and well but continue to pull off its legs one by one. The Russians and the Chinese serenade the dead donkey every now and then but are clearly not interested in whether it is dead or alive.

Trump may have done everyone a service by exposing the fraudulent nature of the JCPOA and seeking a fresh round of negotiations to address the totality of issues that have kept relations between Iran and the outside world in a state of crisis for the past four decades. The wisest course in the interest of all concerned is to bury the dead donkey and clear the deck for new initiatives on a solid legal basis.

The failure of the G7 summit to come up with a united and constructive stance on the “Iran problem” would encourage the mullahs to pursue policies that have done so much harm to Iran, indeed to the whole Middle East, in the past four decades.

Of all the futile things one could imagine, beating a dead donkey in the hope of forcing it to move on is the proverbial example. Right now, we are witnessing an example of that in the diplomatic gesticulations designed to maintain the so-called “Iran nuclear deal” on a life-support machine.

The Europeans pretend to be working on a magic potion that shall have the dead donkey up and running in no time. For their part, Tehran’s Khomeinist leaders insist that the donkey is alive and well but continue to pull off its legs one by one. The Russians and the Chinese serenade the dead donkey every now and then but are clearly not interested in whether it is dead or alive.

In theory, the “deal”, also known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was the fruit of collective efforts by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany on one side and Iran’s Khomeinist establishment on the other. However, in reality, it was a diabolical elixir that President Barack Obama concocted by using every dubious ingredient he could get hold of.

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