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Ruth King

IT’S OFFICIAL: F-22 Pilots Kick Booty By Stephen Green

It’s not even September yet, but I’m already hailing this USA Today item as the feelgood story of the year.

Read:

Two American fighter pilots who intercepted Syrian combat jets over northern Syria last week said they came within 2,000 feet of the planes without the Syrians aware they were being shadowed.

The tense encounter occurred after Syrian jets dropped bombs near a U.S. adviser team with Kurdish forces in northern Syria. The Pentagon warned Syria that American forces were authorized to take action to defend its troops. Syrian aircraft haven’t dropped bombs in the area since then, and the U.S. military is no longer operating continuous combat patrols there.

“I followed him around for all three of his loops,” one of the American pilots, a 38-year-old Air Force major, told USA TODAY Wednesday in the first detailed account of the incident. “He didn’t appear to have any idea I was there.”

The two pilots asked that their names be withheld for security reasons.

“The behavior stopped,” said Brig. Gen. Charles Corcoran, commander of the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing, which conducts airstrikes in Iraq and Syria from an undisclosed location in this region. “We made our point.”

But wait — it gets better:

Friday’s incident, as described by commanders here, began in the afternoon, when a Syrian aircraft was spotted entering the airspace around Hasakah, and the pair of F-22s, already in the area, raced toward them.

The captain said he quickly got on a common radio frequency in an effort to reach the Syrian aircraft, asking the pilot to identify himself and state his intentions. There was no response.

U.S. commanders also contacted the Russians by phone to seek information, but the Russians were unaware of the Syrian action.

At that point the only way to get information was to have the American pilots approach the Syrian planes, Su-24 Fencers, to determine if they were armed or dropping bombs.

The American pilots asked permission to get closer to the Syrian aircraft to determine if they were carrying weapons on their wings or appeared to be attacking ground targets. Normally pilots are under orders to keep their distance from Russian or Syrian planes to avoid a miscalculation.

Permission was granted. One of the F-22s watched as the other maneuvered behind the Syrian aircraft to get a closer look. After about 15 minutes, the Syrian jet left the area, apparently unaware it was being followed.

Enjoy the Internet, Before Obama Abandons It to the UN By Claudia Rosett

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Gordon Crovitz sounds an urgent warning about President Obama’s plans, during his final months in office, to fundamentally transform the internet. It’s an intricate tale, but the bottom line is that unless Congress acts fast, the World Wide Web looks likely to end up under control of the UN.

That would be the same UN that serves as a global clubhouse for despotic regimes that like to wield censorship as a basic tool of power. Russia and China occupy two of the five veto-wielding permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Iran since 2012 has presided over one of the largest voting blocs in the 193-member General Assembly, the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement. Among the current members of the Human Rights Council are Venezuela, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia — where blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced in 2014 to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, for blog posts the Saudi government considered insulting to Islam.

We’re talking here about the same UN which for generations has proven incorrigibly corrupt, opaque and inept at managing almost anything except its own apparently endless expansion and self-serving overreach. This is the UN of the Oil-for-Food worldwide web of kickbacks; the UN of the evidently chronic problem of peacekeepers raping minors they are sent to protect; the UN that can’t manage to adequately audit its own books, and offers its top officials an “ethics” program of financial disclosure under which they are entitled to opt out of disclosing anything whatsoever to the public.

This is the UN where a recent president of the General Assembly, John Ashe, died this June in an accident that reportedly entailed a barbell falling on his neck, while he was awaiting trial on fraud charges in the Southern District of New York — accused by federal authorities of having turned his UN position into a “platform for profit.”

So, how might this entrancing organization, the UN, end up controlling the internet? Crovitz in his Journal column explains that Obama’s administration is about to give up the U.S. government’s longstanding contract with Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which, as a monopoly, operates “the entire World Wide Web root zone.”

If that sounds like a good idea, think again. This is not a case of Obama having some 11th-hour 180-degree conversion to the virtues of minimalist government. It works out to the very opposite. Here’s a link, again, to Crovitz’s column on “An Internet Giveaway to the UN.” Crovtz explains that as a contractor under government control, Icann enjoys an exemption from antitrust rules. When the contract expires, the exemption goes away, unless Icann can hook up with another “governmental group” so as to “keep its antitrust exemption.” What “governmental group” might that be? Well, some of the worst elements of the UN have already reached out. Crovitz writes:

Authoritarian regimes have already proposed Icann become part of the U.N. to make it easier for them to censor the internet globally. So much for the Obama pledge that the U.S. would never be replaced by a “government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Social Justice Warriors Against Free Speech: Charles Lipson ****

Well, that didn’t take long.

The Social Justice Warriors have emerged from their safe spaces and begun attacking the University of Chicago’s statement supporting free speech and opposing trigger warnings and safe spaces. They are complaining for a good reason: They don’t want free speech to spread to other campuses.

What are the main arguments against the Chicago letter? One of my former graduate students sent me this report from a group website for her liberal arts college (a very fine school). What do her fellow alums say?

Well, for one, they are surprised they even need to make arguments for their side. For years, they haven’t had to. Administrators, like those at the University of Missouri, simply rolled over and played dead rather than confront them. But that was political cowardice, not real intellectual engagement. Now that the Social Justice Warriors must defend their position, what do they say?

The arguments against Chicago’s free-speech letter

They object to “no trigger warnings” because it is insensitive to people who have experienced trauma and might need a “heads-up” if they are going to encounter triggering content in class.

They object to “no safe spaces” because those are the only places where marginalized groups will feel completely free to voice their opinions.

They say safe spaces are not about banning dissenting viewpoints but about banning hateful, bigoted speech that is truly harmful.

They reject the idea that colleges should be places where ideas are freely exchanged because “not all ideas are equal and some are too offensive to have a place in the community.”

The common theme is “we must all be more sensitive. Otherwise people will be harmed psychologically.”

What’s right with those arguments, and what’s wrong?

First, let’s consider trigger warnings. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a professor or teaching assistant saying, “We are going to discuss Greek myths and some of you might find them troubling.” But it’s also perfectly fine if, all of a sudden in a class on Greek myths, the professor discusses one. The students at Columbia University actually wanted warnings before all myths. Their demand was not about helping one or two students in a large class. It was simply bullying under the cloak of “sensitivity.”

Anyway, universities are all about discussing sensitive subjects and raising troubling questions. If a university is really vigorous, then the whole place should be wrapped in a gigantic trigger warning.

Finally, as a teacher, how can I possibly anticipate all the things that might trigger students in my class on “Big Wars From Ancient Greece to Early Modern Europe” (a lecture course I am teaching next year)? When I mention the Roman war with German tribes on the Rhine, how can I know that your grandfather died fighting on the Rhine in World War II?

Shock video: Jesse Jackson gushes with praise for Donald Trump By Carol Brown

A C-SPAN video documents at least one, if not two, Push Coalition forums from as early as 1998 that focused on Wall Street, minority business executives, and the black community, honoring those who’ve made a difference. In addition to one other notable individual, the clips feature Jesse Jackson. (I know. Hang in there with me.)

Who is the other notable person being honored at the gathering?

Donald J. Trump.

Why? Because of his support of and investment in the black community.

Jesse Jackson was absolutely gushing with praise for Trump, whose work crews comprised a disproportionately high percentage of black and Hispanic builders, stating:

Let me bring forth a friend who has, well, he is deceptive in his social style [inaudible], one can miss his seriousness and his commitment for the success is beyond argument…He has a sense of the curious and a will to make things better.

Jackson went on to enumerate various ways that Trump had shown himself to be a genuine partner in promoting inclusivity and helping those living in underserved communities.

How Many Ways Do You Say Liar, Hillary? By Eileen F. Toplansky

In his 1978 paperback titled Word Power Made Easy, author Norman Lewis devotes an entire chapter to the number of words used to describe lying. Thus, “it was the famous Greek philosopher and cynic Diogenes who went around the streets of Athens, lantern in hand, looking for an honest person. This was over two thousand years ago, but I presume that Diogenes would have as little success in his search today.” Indeed, some have theorized “that language must have been invented for the sole purpose of deception.”

In reviewing the chapter, it is hard not to make the connections about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

As notorious liars, it is clear that “everybody knows [Obama’s and Clinton’s] propensity for avoiding facts. [They] have built so solid and unsavory a reputation that only a stranger is likely to be misled — and then, not for long.” Which is why the Millenials of today need to be exposed to the “liar who lies about her lies.” And they need to be reminded of the lie told over thirty times by Obama that they could keep their doctor and their premiums would decrease under Obamacare. Hardly — as evidenced by the weekly tally (at Apothecary) of the failures of Obamacare across the country. And Hillary wants to continue in the same vein — thus cementing the complete destruction of the American health care system.

But being the consummate liar that she is, “her skill has, in short, reached the zenith of perfection. Indeed [her] mastery of the art is so great that [her] lying is almost always crowned with success.” So much so that she is still in the running for the highest office of the land. And Obama made it to the office lying all the way to those who could not see through his artifice and prevarications.

As an incorrigible liar, Obama is “impervious to correction” Even when caught in his fabrications, there is no reforming him — he goes right on lying.” Those who are paying attention can tell when he is lying because (a) he smiles the big grin, (b) feigns hurt feelings or (c) engages in a masterful bait and switch maneuver which changes the topic completely. Hillary responds with artful shrugs of her shoulders, cackling laughter, and smug remarks about “wiping email servers with a cloth” when she is caught.

Hillary is an inveterate liar who managed to receive the highest rating of Pinocchios from the liberal Washington Post since “telling untruths is as frequent and customary an activity as brushing [her] teeth in the morning.” It is simply a “reflexive act” with this woman.

As a congenital liar, Hillary has a “long history of persistent falsification” proving that she has been lying from the moment she could. See the 13-minute video capturing Clinton’s biggest lies.

Chronic lying is when someone “never stops lying.” She lies “continually — not occasionally, or even frequently, but over and over.” Consider Clinton’s removal from her House Judiciary Committee staffer job because of incompetence and lying; her involvement in the Whitewater scandal; lying about “sniper fire;” stealing furniture, and artwork from the White House; ignoring the proper structure and rules for the handling of sensitive national information; and the pay-for-play deals that endanger American security — the list goes on.

Both Obama and Hillary are pathological liars since neither “is concerned with the difference between truth and falsehood; they do not bother to distinguish fact from fantasy.” Obama makes a mockery of the language as falsehoods and fibs have marked his entire presidency. In fact, lying is a “disease” for them. Like parasites, they “benefit at the expense of the host — the parasite uses the host to gain strength, and the host loses some strength as a result.” Hence, America now has a lowered economic index ranking, her military prowess has been stripped, and her Constitutional base is negated at every opportunity.

Neither Obama nor Clinton has a conscience. No matter “what misery their fabrications may cause innocent victims, they never feel the slightest twinge of guilt. Totally unscrupulous, they are dangerous people to get mixed up with” — thus unconscionable liars through and through.

‘Who Did This to Us?’ Donald Trump asks that question. So do Putin, Erdogan and Black Lives Matter. Bret Stephens see note please

This is a good column with a cogent “tour d’horizon” of foreign and national events. Too bad it ends with a “tour de hatred” of Trump. The question “who did this to us?”- our domestic and policy failures- could swiftly be answered by ” President Obama and the corrupt candidate Hillary Clinton that you endorsed.” rsk

Bernard Lewis once made the point that there are two basic ways in which people and nations respond to adversity and decline. The first, the great historian wrote in 2002, is to ask “Who did this to us?” The second is, “What did we do wrong?” One question leads to self-pity; the other to self-help. One disavows personal responsibility and moral agency; the other commands them. One is a recipe for economic failure and political squalor; the other for success.

Mr. Lewis, who recently turned 100, was writing about the Islamic world’s destructive habit of blaming its ills on imperialism, Jews and other assorted bogeymen. But his test also applies to other regimes and regions, not to mention political parties and movements, from Vladimir Putin to Black Lives Matter. So let’s take a tour of the world.

Begin with Turkey. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is again at war with the Kurds, thanks to Ankara’s violent crackdown on Kurdish protesters in 2014. It has a terrorism problem courtesy of Mr. Erdogan’s previous willingness to turn his country into a jihadist entrepôt. And it recently had a coup attempt, the result of Mr. Erdogan’s suppression of his erstwhile fellow travelers in the Gulenist movement.

But don’t expect Mr. Erdogan to offer up any mea culpas. He’s conducting the greatest political purge of the 21st century, and has released 38,000 convicts from his prisons to make room for his political enemies. Ankara’s incursion into northern Syria—supposedly to fight ISIS—has become an opportunity to expand the war against the Kurds. The Turkish media is abuzz with “reports” that assorted American military men were behind the coup.

Mr. Erdogan is a “Who did this to us?” man, and it shows in Turkey’s fast descent from beacon of Muslim secularism and democracy to another paranoid Middle Eastern regime. It’s the same story in Iran and Russia, which was to be expected, but also increasingly in China, which wasn’t.

Hillary Clinton’s KKK Smear The Democratic Party has for years painted the GOP as one giant hate group. By William McGurn

Let’s get this straight. Calling Hillary Clinton a “bigot” has reporters asking every Republican in sight if Donald Trump has gone too far. But the Clinton campaign releases a video saying Mr. Trump is the candidate of the Ku Klux Klan and it’s all okey-dokey?

Then again, Mr. Trump has already been likened to Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Small wonder there’s a collective ho-hum when Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine says Mr. Trump is peddling “KKK values.”

This is what Democrats do.

It didn’t start with Mr. Trump, either. For years Democrats have portrayed the GOP as one giant hate group. Each presidential election, the drill goes like this: After Republicans nominate someone, he immediately finds himself having to prove he’s not a hater—of African-Americans, of women, of gays, etc.

This year Democrats added a twist. Mr. Trump, they claim, represents a break with all those decent and lovable Republicans such as Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush. Of course, this isn’t what they were saying back when these men were running for president.

• In 2000, for example, an NAACP ad recreated the gruesome murder of James Byrd to imply that then-Gov. Bush was sympathetic to lynching black men. Over footage of a chain being dragged by a pickup truck, Mr. Byrd’s daughter says, “So when Gov. George W. Bush refused to support hate-crimes legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.”

• When John McCain ran in 2008, Barack Obama warned that Republicans would scare people by saying, “You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.” The McCain campaign fired back, accusing Mr. Obama of playing the race card from the “bottom of the deck.” Funny thing: All those reporters always hearing “dog whistles” from Republicans somehow didn’t hear this one.

• In 2012, when Mitt Romney went to the NAACP and told them face-to-face about his opposition to ObamaCare, the stories were all about how he was really just trolling for the racist vote. Vice President Joe Biden put it more explicitly, telling a largely African-American audience that if Mr. Romney were to win, he’d “put ya’ll back in chains.”

The only difference today is that Republicans now have a nominee giving as good as he gets. It’s often clumsy; it comes late in the day; and his case hasn’t been helped by, say, his belabored moaning that a federal judge’s Mexican heritage meant he couldn’t be unbiased in litigation involving Trump University. CONTINUE AT SITE

Black Lives Matter to Donald Trump The Republican says every child—in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore—should be able to walk to school safely. For that, he’s called racist. By Heather Mac Donald

Hillary Clinton tried to tar Donald Trump as a racist last week by associating him with the “alt-right.” Yet it is Mr. Trump who has decried the loss of black life to violent crime—and has promptly been declared biased for doing so. Whether intentionally or not, Mr. Trump has exposed the hypocrisy of the Black Lives Matter movement and its allies.

Speaking in West Bend, Wis., on Aug. 16, only days after the recent riots in Milwaukee, Mr. Trump observed that during “the last 72 hours . . . another nine were killed in Chicago and another 46 were wounded.” The victims, as in other cities with rising crime, were overwhelmingly black.

Bringing safety to inner-city residents should be a top presidential priority, Mr. Trump said: “Our job is to make life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets and walk to school. Or the senior citizen waiting for a bus. Or the young child walking home from school.” Mr. Trump promised to restore law and order “for the sake of all, but most especially for the sake of those living in the affected communities.”

The reaction was swift. The progressive website Crooks and Liars deemed Mr. Trump’s speech a “mashup of Hitler and George Wallace.”On CNN the activist and former Obama adviser Van Jones called it “despicable” and “shocking in its divisiveness.” Historian Josh Zeitz told USA Today that “the term law and order in modern American politics is, ipso facto, a racially tinged term.”

Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech in July at the Republican National Convention provoked similar dismay. “Young Americans in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Ferguson,” he said, have “the same right to live out their dreams as any other child in America.”

This defense of black children was too much for Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. “The terrifying vision that Donald J. Trump is putting forward casts him alongside some of the worst fascists in history,” Ms. Garza said. The executive director of the Advancement Project, Judith Browne Dianis, complained that “the speech lends itself to be interpreted as isolating and scapegoating of communities of color.” Political commentator Sally Kohn wrote in Time that Mr. Trump “has basically recycled Richard Nixon’s version of dog whistle racism by insisting he is the ‘law and order candidate’—implicitly protecting White America.”

Why this frenzied effort to demonize Mr. Trump for addressing the heightened violence in inner cities? Because the Republican nominee has also correctly identified its cause: the false “narrative of cops as a racist force in our society,” as he put it in Wisconsin.

Ongoing Middle East Scenarios By Herbert London

With the ongoing love fest between Turkey and Russia, there are several interesting and dangerous scenarios emerging for the United States. For years Incirlik Air Base has been the centerpiece of NATO forces on the southern tier of this alliance. This air base is also home to the U.S. nuclear force which serves as a deterrent to possible Russian adventurism.

Although it is a long arduous way for the Russians to gain access to this base, official requests have been made as a launch pad for Russian air strikes against Syrian rebels. Imagine, for the moment, a situation in which NATO permits this Russian access. Fifty U.S.-B61 nuclear warheads would be vulnerable to Russian intervention; a key U.S. deterrent would be rendered nugatory.

Moreover, there is the additional fear that these weapons of mass destruction are only 65 miles from the Syrian border and ISIS forces. Unaided by Turkish troops, it might be difficult for a small contingent of U.S. forces to prevent a breach in the present security arrangement.

Igor Morozov, a Russian official, said, “It just remains to come to an agreement with Erdogan that we get the NATO base Incirlik as [our] primary airbase.” Assuming the plausibility of this claim, Russian aircraft would be flying out of Iran and Turkey, a truly unprecedented situation.

Not only would this gesture add to Russian ascendency in the region, it would unequivocally demonstrate the diminished status of the United States. Russia has emerged as the Middle East “strong horse,” despite an economy rocked by failure and entirely dependent on the price of oil.

What has surprised U.S. State Department officials is the rapidity of this change. Part of the explanation lies with President Erdogan who believes the U.S. was at least partially responsible for the recent coup against his government by harboring Mr. Gulen – the man Erdogan believes planned and executed the plot against him.

What Clinton’s Mental Health Plan Won’t Do for Seriously Mentally Ill: D.J. Jaffe

DJ Jaffe is Executive Director of Mental Illness Policy Org., and the author of Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill (Prometheus Books, April 2017, 340pp.)

There are two problems with Hillary Clinton’s mental health plan: What’s in it and what’s not. The plan mainly continues the practice of moving mental health funds away from helping the most seriously mentally ill, and instead allocates the funds to helping people without serious mental illness and programs that lack any independent evidence they work.
We need an all-hands-on-deck approach aimed at helping reduce homelessness, arrest, incarceration, suicide and violence among the seriously mentally ill. While there are bills in Congress that do that, this plan doesn’t. It focuses on where serious mental illness isn’t, rather than where it is.
What’s in the Hillary Clinton mental health plan.

The plan for early diagnosis and intervention, focuses spending on kids younger than eighteen in spite of the fact that serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder begin in late teens and early twenties, not grade school. While some serious mental illness strikes early, most of the illness that affects kids, like ADHD, is mild and transient.
The plan diverts resources to fund programs that are proven not to work including Positive Parenting and Mental Health First Aid.
The national initiative for suicide prevention, will focus on spending dollars on high-school and college students the two groups least likely to commit suicide. In 2014, there were 43,000 completed suicides of which 5,500 involved people under the age of twenty-four. Congressional mandates already target $54 million in suicide prevention funds to that age group and only $2 million to address the 37,500 completed suicides by people over twenty-four. The plan proposes to make the disparity worse.
The plan focuses on requiring private insurers to provide parity coverage for mental illness, but is silent on the federal government’s own discrimination within Medicaid (IMD Exclusion) that prevents the most seriously ill from getting treatment.
The plan does nothing to increase hospital beds and instead trains police on how to handle those who will become their responsibility as a result of the lack of beds.
The initiative funds peer support, in spite of the fact there is no independent evidence it works and plenty that it doesn’t.
It provides additional funding to the Protection and Advocacy Program. These are federally funded lawyers who go to court to oppose parents who want to help seriously ill children get care, oppose states that want to provide hospital care, and oppose localities that want to fund Assisted Outpatient Treatment as an alternative to incarceration or involuntary commitment.