RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/07/sometimes-a-coup-is-just-a-coup/

I see that Nigel Farage has sparked yet another political innovation. Dry cleaners of the world are smiling. A few weeks ago, Mr Farage presented what Aristotle might have described as the final cause, that for the sake of which, an agitated onlooker tossed the contents of his plastic cup into the campaigning politician’s face and all over his dark blue suit. It looked like a nice suit, too.

It’s a gesture that is catching on. During President Trump’s recent state visit to the UK, one of the President’s supporters was—language police: what’s the correct participle?—milkshaked? Milkshook? I favour “shook”. Anyway, a chap in Trafalgar Square got doused by an angry anti-Trump protester. (Why are all anti-Trump protesters always so red-in-the-face angry?) What a waste of a good milkshake. Were Thomas Aquinas available, he might analogise the procedure to the sin of Onan, the misuse of a God-given faculty and improper spilling of precious liquid. But the Atlantic, noting the new popularity of (left-wing) people tossing milkshakes at (right-wing) people with whom they disagree, assures us that “Sometimes a Milkshake Is Just a Milkshake”. At least it’s not boiling hot coffee, the author wrote—or acid, or a Molotov cocktail. Be thankful for small mercies.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to note the artificially induced persistence of public insanity on the issue of Donald Trump. Here, the title of Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds says it all. As Noël Coward sang of mad dogs and Englishmen, “They’re obviously, definitely nuts!” There is, however, a looming disturbance in bedlam. There is still plenty of skirling insanity. Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, gives almost daily performances from behind his desk in the US Capitol. But there is a chill wind blowing through those chambers that is making the children shiver and think of heading home. The name of that refreshing breeze is William Barr, Donald Trump’s new Attorney-General.

Mr Barr has been around the political block a few times. He was Attorney-General once before, way back in the last century, under George H.W. Bush. Unlike his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, there is no rabbit about William Barr. When he was first confirmed, there were cries from people in Jerry Nadler’s corner for him to recuse himself from anything that had to do with the Democrats’ campaign to destroy President Trump (this is what we call an “investigation”), but Barr did not even bother to laugh. The man is entirely unflappable. After Robert Mueller delivered his two-volume fantasy fiction manuscript to Barr this spring, Barr and his colleagues dissected the report. They noted that it had determined that there was no collusion or co-ordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin (sadness!).

They also concluded (what Mr Mueller had forborne to conclude) that the President exercising his constitutionally-defined powers did not count as obstruction of justice. The Democrats in Congress and their PR representatives—that is, the press—had been bitterly disappointed to learn that the President of the United States was not in fact a Manchurian candidate who was in Putin’s pocket. (Actually, I could have told them that years ago, but they never asked.) After that bitter disappointment they had pinned everything on obstruction. “Surely we can get Trump for that! It worked against Richard Nixon, didn’t it?”

swtotd.blogspot.com

The TED spread – the difference between Three-month U.S. Treasuries and Three-month LIBOR and an indicator of perceived credit risk in the general economy – declined from 314 basis points to 131 basis points during the fourth quarter of 2008, after reaching a high of over 458 basis points on October 6. (Historically, the yield spread had been closer to 50 basis points). The S&P 500 bottomed on March 9, 2009 at 676.53. The Second Quarter of 2009 marked the end of the 2007-2009 recession. The rate on Fed Funds, which began 2008 at 4.25%, ended the year at 0.25%. Despite having spent almost half a century on Wall Street, I am an observer not an expert on credit markets, so what follows are opinions that should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. It is my contention, however, that monetary policy over the past decade has been driven by political wants not economic needs.

In my opinion, the incoming Obama Administration, in 2009, used the credit-driven recession to justify a political agenda of increasing the role of government and “…fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” as Mr. Obama put it five days before the 2008 election. Apart from demonizing Republicans, the first thing the new Administration did was to call the seven-quarter recession a “Great Recession,” reminding people of FDR and the Great Depression. Certainly, the bankruptcy of Lehman on September 15, 2008, and the ensuing credit crisis, made for a frightening few weeks, but the scare was over by the end of the year. While Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank Timothy Geithner have been criticized by some for their handling of the crisis, it is my belief they saved the system. Monday morning quarter-backing may argue that there were some things they did they should not have done and other things they did not do they should have done, but the bottom line is that, while Lehman want bankrupt and other banks were forced to sell out, by the end of December the crisis was largely resolved, as could be seen in the decline of the TED spread mentioned above and in the fact that high-yield bonds had begun to rally a month before year end.

For six and a half years, while the economy expanded from $14.2 trillion in 2009 to $18.2 trillion in 2015, the Federal Reserve left the Fed Funds Rate at 0.25%. It was only in the fourth quarter of 2015 that the Federal Reserve finally lifted the rate to 0.50%. The rate remained at that level until December 2016 when it was increased to 0.75%, just before the Trump Administration took office. During 2017, the rate rose, in three increments, to 1.50%. In 2018, the rate rose in four increments to 2.50% where it remains today – higher than it was but still low by any historical measure. However, once again, political pressure is being put on the Fed, this time by President Trump – and silently acquiesced to by members of Congress – to lower rates, a mistake, in my opinion. It is expected that this afternoon the Fed will reduce rates by twenty-five basis points.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/23010/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-islamic-zakat-killing

   http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Barack Obama’s infamous June 2009 “New Beginnings” Cairo speech laid the groundwork for eight years of pro-Islamic policies at the expense of Judeo-Christian America. One of Obama’s least understood and most destructive promises made in Cairo involved Islamic terror financing disguised as charitable giving and humanitarian relief. This is how it works.

There are Five Pillars of Islam that govern Muslim life. They are acknowledged, obligatory, and practiced by Muslims worldwide:

1. Shahada – the profession of faith

2. Salat – five times a day prayer

3. Zakat – charitable giving

4. Sawm – fasting

5. Hajj – pilgrimage to Mecca

Zakat, the Third Pillar of Islam, requires Muslims to deduct a portion of their income to support the Islamic community. It is a religious obligation, a mandatory charitable contribution or tax, usually about 2.5% of an individual’s income. Zakat sounds familiar and unthreatening like traditional tithing to churches, synagogues, and temples paid by Christians, Jews, and Buddhists around the world.

On June 4, 2009 in Cairo, Obama exploited that familiarity and promised the Muslim world he would make zakat easier for American Muslims saying, “Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We must always examine the ways in which we protect it. For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That’s why I’m committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.” So, what is the problem?

Zakat is not charitable giving like traditional charitable giving in other religions. In 2009 Obama knew that zakat was being used to finance Islamic terrorism. WHAT?? Obama knew? Let’s examine the chronological dates to confirm what Obama knew and when he knew it.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/30/donald-trump-at-the-overton-window/

I shall leave it to the theologians to decide whether it is providential or merely coincidental that it was this very week in 1729, on Tuesday in fact, that the city of Baltimore was founded. I think we can say that, for the genus rattus, the city has been providential, at least since 1967. That was the year Thomas D’Alesandro III—the brother of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (and son of Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a former mayor of Baltimore)—began the city’s 50-plus years of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule. (If you except the younger Mr. D’Alesandro’s immediate predecessor, you can push the run of Democratic mayors of Baltimore all the way back to 1947.)

Things have been good for the rats in Baltimore. For homo sapiens sapiens? Not so good. Drugs. Violence. Poverty. Squalor. “The Wire” was more documentary than fiction.

But rats have, as the book of Genesis recommended, been fruitful. Also, they have multiplied. Quoth Catherine Pugh, mayor of Baltimore until just a couple of months ago, when she stepped down because of charges of corruption, rats were so plentiful in Baltimore that “you could smell them.”

But that was in September of last year, before Donald Trump turned his gimlet eye on Baltimore, a city that has suffered not only from more than half a century of local Democratic control but also from nearly 25 years of representation by Elijah Cummings, a race-hustling confidence man right out of central casting.

Over the weekend, the president opened up on “King Elijah” in a series of tweets. “Baltimore, under the leadership of Elijah Cummings,” he wrote in one, “has the worst Crime Statistics in the Nation. 25 years of all talk, no action! So tired of listening to the same old Bull . . . Next, Reverend Al will show up to complain & protest. Nothing will get done for the people in need. Sad.”

https://spectator.us/trumps-truths-about-baltimore/

‘You would think you were in a Third World country,’ the millionaire white New Yorker of retirement age said of Baltimore’s heavily black Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in 2015.

There is nothing remotely racist about this statement. We know that because Bernie Sanders said it. Yes, the Bernie Sanders who lives in whites-only Vermont and whose inability to connect with a key group of the Democratic base means that he has what the pollsters call an ‘African American problem’.

It was, however, disgracefully and irredeemably racist of President Trump to refer to Rep. Elijah Cummings’s Baltimore district as a ‘disgusting rat and rodent infested mess’ and a ‘very dangerous & filthy place’. It was racist not because Baltimore has the highest murder rate of any large American city, a corrupt and violent police force and, according to posts from residents and public-spirited enquiries by the London Independent, rats and mould in apartment complexes owned by Jared Kushner’s family. It was racist because Trump said it about a Democratic-controlled city with lots of African American, Democratic-voting inhabitants.

If you believe that what white millionaire New Yorker Donald Trump said about Baltimore was racist, then you should believe that what white millionaire New Yorker Bernie Sanders said about Baltimore was racist too. We’ll give Sanders a pass on the detail that the Third World ceased to exist around the time his beloved Soviet Union went under, and cut to the key question: is there, was there, a single ‘Third World’ country that was majority white?

Race is the third rail of American life, but the Democrats and their massed supporters in the media think that their way of talking about race is the only way. This is an insult to the rights of their fellow Americans, and an affront to common sense. Sanders and Trump both said what everyone knows, but fears to admit because the penalties for talking candidly about race in the United States are so high. The truth is that Baltimore’s poverty, violence and sustained failure make it an embarrassment to the United States.

https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/M7HMpG

California’s Office of Administrative Law (OAL) recently made it official: Your morning cup of coffee won’t give you cancer. Next week’s newsflash probably will be, swallowing an orange seed doesn’t cause a tree to grow in your stomach.

After more than a year of legal wrangling, OAL signed off on a proposed rule exempting coffee from Proposition 65, a decades-old voter-approved measure that requires warning labels on products that contain chemicals the state has deemed potentially carcinogenic. So that means cancer warning labels and the universally ignored coffee shop warnings can be removed at long last.

That’s good news for anyone who was actually worried. But this the whole silly struggle over coffee warnings highlights an explosion of exaggerated food fears, a bureaucracy run amok, and the baleful influence of trial lawyers who have generated over $500 million in settlement payments for Proposition 65 nuisance lawsuits (not including awards from cases that went to trial).

The public never faced a real risk of coffee related cancer, of course. But prodded by activists and lawyers, California’s Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) wildly overstated the risks of a natural substance called acrylamide that’s found in many cooked and roasted foods, including french fries, potato chips, bread, cookies, breakfast cereals—and coffee. It ignored the assessments of the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and more than 100 studies showing coffee is safe and instead followed the dubious lead of a little known and completely unaccountable international organization called the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

IARC, which is known to do the bidding of trial lawyers and which relied on questionable laboratory studies in animals, classified acrylamide as a “probable carcinogen.” In the real world, adults with the highest acrylamide exposure could consume 160 times as much as they now do and still not reach a level that toxicologists think would cause tumors in mice. Drowning in coffee, in short, is a greater risk than contracting cancer from it.

Consumers need useful, scientifically accurate, and truthful information about the possible health effects of the foods we eat, but this is not the way to get it. No one viewing this pseudo-controversy over coffee could conclude that Proposition 65 and OEHHA served the public well. In fact, as the Los Angeles Times predicted last year, the opposite is true. Millions of coffee drinkers simply ignored the warnings (and added what some trial lawyer would likely argue are dangerous levels of cream and sugar to boot).

Thus, we’ve reached the point where we need warnings about food warning labels, because they’ve become so confusing, complicated, and uninformative that the most rational course of action is to ignore them.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/28/woke-racism/

Well before Sigmund Freud formalized the idea of “projectionism”—the defense of one’s own shortcomings and sins by attributing them to others—it was a common theme in classical literature and the New Testament: the ridiculing of the mole on someone else’s nose to hide one’s own boil.

The term projection more or less sums up much of the woke identity politics movement, in which obsessions with racial privilege and tribal exceptionalism are justified by accusing others of just such bias.

While such racist projectionism can often be a psychological tic that assuages the guilt of one’s own rank prejudice, just as often accusing others of racism is a peremptory careerist move to win media attention, lucre, or job advancement.

Racists—those who assume those of different races always act collectively in predictable ways, usually far worse than does their own tribe—who charge racism assume that unlike the proverbial wolf crier, there is currently no downside to their hysterias and fantasies.

That is, the racist who for a variety of reasons lobs “Racist!” at others assumes that, even when his tired charges are proven false, in our postmodern society he can argue that these accusations in theory always could be true, and therefore no one would ever accuse a self-identified victim as a racist perpetrator himself.

For example, a Louisiana State University student, who falsely claimed she encountered a noose on campus—supposedly planted by whites to intimidate African-American students such as herself—was hardly contrite when the “noose” turned out to be simply a dangling power wire. Instead of apologizing, the accuser redoubled her claims: “Considering what is currently happening in this country, someone hanging a noose certainly seems plausible . . . Black students all over are being threatened for speaking out. I’ve previously been threatened for talking about race at LSU.”

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=1d2351192c

At the Manhattan Contrarian family dinner table the other day, the subject of conversation turned to this question: Should we be optimistic about the future of the United States? Good and valid points were made on both sides of the issue. But the most important point weighed for the side of optimism. That point was that, of all the countries in the world, the United States is the place where the people — rather than the government — really run the country. Here, more than anyplace else, people can pursue their own initiatives and dreams without the government having the ability to obstruct and stymie private efforts, and force resources into pathways chosen by elite government functionaries.

Why does this matter? It’s not complicated. From the perspective of aggregate economic performance, the simple answer is that a trial-and-error process with hundreds of millions of participants will come up with much better and more numerous solutions to human problems than the small number of the very smartest people with government authority can ever come up with. From the perspective of the individual, the answer is that the only worthwhile life to lead is the life of freedom, where you make your own choices and take responsibility for your own success or failure.

As Exhibit A of how personal freedom and autonomy from the government leads to better economic performance, consider the fracking revolution. At the time of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, U.S. crude oil production had been dropping for decades, and had reached the level of barely 5 million barrels per day. President Obama had drunk the climate Kool Aid, and he and his administration made it a priority to keep oil production as low as possible in order, they thought, to “save the planet.”. They blocked drilling on federal lands, ceased granting offshore oil leases, refused permits for pipelines, issued negative environmental reviews, and otherwise did everything in their power to obstruct and stymie any and all new oil production and/or transmission. Yet by the time Obama left office in January 2017, U.S. crude oil production had soared to around 9 million barrels per day. The fact is that a presidential administration, under existing law, simply did not have the power to stop private actors from carrying the fracking revolution forward. (U.S. crude oil production has since further increased under the more energy-friendly Trump administration to 12.2 million barrels per day as of June 2019.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-a-brawler-for-democracy-11564175760

His partisan opponents and those who believe Donald Trump unfit can still try to remove or at least defame him with allegations that he sought to obstruct Robert Mueller’s investigation even if the investigation found no underlying crime.

That’s part of the political game but context is required. If a statement by John Dowd, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, to reporter Byron York is an accurate reflection of reality, then it reflects well on Mr. Mueller. Of his conversations with the special counsel, Mr. Dowd said: “Bob was a big boy about the political side of it. He understood the president had to address the politics of [the collusion investigation]. . . . People were pounding him about this thing every day, both privately and publicly, and he had to take [Mueller] on.”

Politicians, by the time they’ve asked millions for their money, their time, their support and their votes, are obliged to do just about anything to win. Once elected, they have an even bigger responsibility to defend their power and ability to govern. Ask any president: This, and not governing, is what they spend much of their time doing. And one thing you can say about President Trump: This most unlikely and in some ways weakest of presidents has brawled his way to victory over the most concerted delegitimization campaign any president has ever faced.

He was under attack from day one from partisan and media enemies who promoted the Russia collusion theory without especially caring whether it was true. He had every reason to wonder (and still does) whether he was getting a fair shake from the FBI and intelligence agencies. He has good reason to wonder, especially after Mr. Mueller revealed himself this week to be largely a figurehead in his own inquiry, whether the investigation was dragged out for two years in hopes of inducing him to commit obstruction crimes in place of the nonexistent collusion crimes. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-i-am-not-celebrating-the-mueller-hearings_3016865.html

I am certainly no stranger to the far end of a limb, but this time, I am really out there. I watched the Mueller hearings and despaired. I saw the Original Sin of Trump-Russia — “Russia hacked the DNC,” shaped by time and “messaging” into “Russian interference in 2016 on behalf on Donald Trump” — enter the record, accepted and even regurgitated by the GOP.

But Mueller gave a foggy performance! He never even read his own report! Impeachment is dead! The response by the estimable Mollie Hemingway typifies conservative satisfaction.

I rubbed my eyes, tried to smile, but it didn’t work. I still felt snookered and betrayed by Republicans who inexplicably failed to take the kill shot and win a victory for the country by exposing the whole rotten Deep State conspiracy, enabled and amplified by the MSM, to concoct a tale of a massive Russian cyber-strike on our democracy supposedly designed to prevent Hillary Clinton from being elected. This Big Lie has not only delegitimized Trump’s presidency now and forever, it simultaneously aligns Trump supporters — American patriots — with our adversaries in the Kremlin. Believe me, this will come back and haunt us all when Commissars Schiff, Tlaib, Brennan and the rest of the Party get real power.

Why did no Republican want to pull the pin on Russian hacking? I went back to a June 2017 op-ed I wrote by the same name: “Pulling the Pin on Russian Hacking.” Change the names around and it could run this morning.

About those Comey hearings.

Not one US senator asked former FBI Director James Comey to account for the sinister fact that the source of the explosive determination that “Russia hacked the DNC” computer system is a DNC contractor, not the FBI.

Not one US Senator asked why Comey’s FBI deferred to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s DNC when the DNC refused to permit FBI forensics specialists to examine the DNC computer system; or why the FBI was never able to examine John Podesta’s personal devices, either. Not one member of the Senate Intelligence Committe inquired as to why the DNC servers have not, after all of this time, ever been re-examined by the FBI; or whether it is just possible that this same DNC contractor putting forward the DNC/Russian hacking charge might have destroyed the DNC computer system.