RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/15/feds-tell-every-american-exactly-theyre-money-every-year/

Congress should require that, within six months of Tax Day, the Internal Revenue Service must issue to all taxpayers a rundown of how much they paid, and what programs it went to fund.

Every April 15, Americans think about taxes. For something that grabs such a large part of our income, federal income taxes should be more prominent in our thoughts. Every day, every hour that you work, a piece of what you earn gets taken by the government before it even gets into your hands.

That is by design, and the withholding system not only guarantees the government the steady revenue it needs to function, but also makes sure that average taxpayers do not spend money that they will need to pay on tax day. The system is important—even necessary—to the functioning of a modern government, but it has one significant downside: people often do not realize how much they pay in taxes every year. That was shown to be especially true after the latest tax law changes: most people paid less in total taxes, but because their refunds may have decreased, they didn’t know it.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/15/candace-owens-has-shown-us-the-way/

How did this happen?

When did it become OK for one of the two major political parties in America to attack a young black woman, who works for an orthodox Jew, as a fascistic fan of Adolf Hitler after she was invited to testify before Congress?

When did it become OK for the representatives of the same party openly to label Israel, our closest friend in the Middle East, an “evil” state which has “hypnotized the West,” then libel their fellow representatives of having “dual loyalties” because they are Jewish, or to intimate that Israel simply shouldn’t exist?

And when did the all the leading names in that party’s list of candidates for president come to see it as obligatory to endorse a Green New Deal for the nation that has as its objective the outlawing of the internal combustion engine and air travel?

Anna Wintour, the longtime editor-in-chief of Vogue, magazine, explained why she will never have Melania Trump on the cover: “”You have to stand up for what you believe in, you have to take a point of view,” she told chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour. “Hmmm….

In 2011 with the assent of Ms.Wintour, Vogue magazine featured an adoring paean to Asma Assad the first lady of Syria – consort to Bashar al-Assad.

This is from that column since “disappeared” from the website.

Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert by Joan Juliet Buck

“Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote.”

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/laffaire-assange/

Julian Assange’s arrest inside the embassy of Ecuador in London would not have been possible had that country’s government not authorized the British police to enter its theoretically sovereign territory. The lesson is clear: if you plan to seek asylum in a foreign embassy, you should be careful to choose the diplomatic premises of a country (a) not likely to be pressurized into betraying you; and (b) comfortable enough to make a long sojourn tolerable.

The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations reaffirmed the long-established principle of inviolability of diplomatic premises. The host-country’s police and security forces are not allowed access without a specific authorization of the chief of mission, which was granted in this case. Assange had spent almost seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy, after being welcomed there by the country’s former president Rafael Correa. The hosts’ political calculus has changed to his detriment over the past two years, however.

The British police arrested Assange supposedly for skipping UK bail seven years ago, but also—and far more importantly—under a previously secret U.S. indictment. The exact charge is for conspiracy, with Chelsea Manning, to hack into a “classified U.S. government computer.” Assange lawyer Barry Pollock said the allegations “boil down to encouraging a source to provide him information and taking efforts to protect the identity of that source.” Assange had predicted that this would happen years ago, and stated it as his reason for seeking asylum in the first place.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D, W.V.) gloated “He is our property!” when told of Assange’s arrest, and he accurately reflected the sentiment shared by the entire Beltway swamp, Democrats in particular:

Assange committed the unpardonable sins of embarrassing the establishment—from members of Congress to intelligence officials to the media. And he will now be punished for our sins. Despite having significant constitutional arguments to be made, it is likely that he will be stripped of those defenses and even barred from raising the overall context of his actions in federal court. What could be the most important free speech and free press case in our history could well be reduced to the scope and substance of an unauthorized computer access case.

Before becoming a fugitive Assange had unveiled a massive, likely unconstitutional NSA surveillance program potentially affecting all Americans. He later published emails that showed that the DNC and the Clinton campaign lied in various statements to the public, including the rigging of the primary for her nomination. As USA Today columnist Jonathan Turley says, “No one has argued that any of these emails were false. They were embarrassing. Of course, there is not crime of embarrassing the establishment but that is merely a technicality.” The American media machi

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14046/nation-of-islam-womens-march

Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, stands for almost everything the Women’s March principles claim to deplore. He is a misogynist who wants to keep women in their traditional roles, he hates all LGBT people in an exceptionally vicious way, he is a black separatist, unlike the marchers, who call for unity between races, and has shown close support for a number of dictators, notably the late Libyan president Mu’ammar Ghadhafi, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, and Cuba’s Commadante Fidel Castro — even though the Women’s March progressives seek reform through democratic means achieved through working hand-in-hand as free people.

Given that most of the values are those on which most liberals and conservatives agree, one might ask how three of the four board members of the Women’s March came to embrace Louis Farrakhan, praise him, and even attend his 2018 Saviors’ Day rally. These three were Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez.

“Rank, vile, open, gutter-level anti-Semitism is apparently a pleasure that the progressive left is unwilling or unable to abstain from. Why?” — James Kirchick, Tablet, March 19, 2019.

It is well-known by some and wholly ignored by others that Islam has a long, sad history of antisemitism, a bigotry that originated in the seventh century CE (the first Islamic century) and has grown more vicious in the 21st. Combined with an almost universal anti-Zionism and bolstered by many on the political “left”, it is today the most ubiquitous and deadliest form of Jew-hatred. It takes the form, not just of insults, boycotts, and lawfare, but of wars, terrorist attacks, and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of the Jews.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialism-fails-every-time-11554851786

Self-described socialist Bernie Sanders has become a favorite of young voters by posing as an apostle of daring new ideas. Socialism, however, is anything but new. It’s hard to think of another idea that has been tried and failed as many times in as many ways or at a steeper price in human suffering.

The term “socialism” was coined by followers of Robert Owen (1771-1858), whom Karl Marx would label a “utopian socialist.” In 1825 Owen founded New Harmony, an Indiana commune, to demonstrate the superiority of what was first called the “social system.” The same year, Owen explained his experiment to a joint session of Congress attended by Supreme Court justices, President James Monroe and President-elect John Quincy Adams. Although Owen poured his fortune into it, New Harmony collapsed in disarray and recrimination within two years.

Owen’s son Robert Dale Owen salvaged the community by implementing what he called “a policy the very reverse” of socialism: “giving each respectable citizen every facility and encouragement to become (what every adult ought to be) a landed proprietor.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/elites-share-common-interests-changes-conventional-wisdom/

Conventional wisdom may change in a flash (remember ‘peak oil’?), but elites remain elites, united by common interests.
“All things are in flux.” — Heraclitus

The adage “nothing last forever” is an understatement. Far more accurate is something like “nothing lasts until next week.”

Saint-to-Sinner Silicon Valley

A decade ago, even most Republicans admired the rugged entrepreneurialism of the high-tech Masters of the Universe who had built a multitrillion-dollar, world-dominating Internet, and the computer, mobile-phone, online-sales, and social-media industries, defined by marquee companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo.

In turn, Democrats gave up their suspicions of big money, as they canonized liberal Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Their wealth was okay, since the creators of it were progressives and dressed like Woodstock hipsters as they spread their billions freely among progressive think tanks, foundations, and political campaigns.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/08/same-people-behind-iraq-war-lies-pu

For more than two years they misled us.

Exploiting fear and confusion after a shocking event, they warned that our country was in imminent danger at the hands of a mad man. They insisted that legitimate intelligence, including a CIA report issued a month before a national election and a dossier produced by reliable sources in the United Kingdom, proved the threat was real. The subject monopolized discussions on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and in the press.

They argued that the situation was so dire that it was straining our relationship with strategic allies. Any evidence to the contrary was readily dismissed. And anyone who questioned their agenda was ridiculed as a coward, a dupe, or a conspiracy theorist. The news media dedicated endless air time and column inches to anyone who wanted to repeat the falsehood.

But an investigative report released two years after the propaganda campaign began found no evidence to support their central claim. The CIA report was highly flawed. The official dossier, some concluded, was deceptive and “sexed-up.”

No, I’m not referring here to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, although the similarities are nearly identical. I’m talking about the period between 2002 and 2004 when many of the very same people who recently peddled collusion fiction also insisted that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—including material to produce nuclear bombs. On the heels of the horrors of 9/11, the United States and our allies waged war against Iraq in 2003 based primarily on that assurance.

But in 2004, a special advisor to the CIA concluded Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. There were no stockpiles of biological or chemical agents; no plans to develop a nuclear bomb. The main argument for the war had been wholly discredited. But it was too late: The conflict officially raged on for another seven years, including a “surge” of 20,000 more U.S. troops in 2007 at the behest of the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). We still have a troop presence in Iraq to this day.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-radical-suggestion_2869905.html

I wouldn’t call it an out-of-body experience exactly, but I did get a thrill in reading the autobiography of former CIA Director Richard Helms, “A Look Over My Shoulder.” It served as strong validation of the line of research I followed to write my new book, “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”

Helms’ book explained that it’s this same line of research—which Helms followed in 2003—that helped identify Soviet agents.

Helms, who led the CIA between 1966 and 1973, was recounting a post-retirement luncheon he had with a World War II buddy from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. It was the day before Helms was to meet with the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, and his old friend told him: “Remind them that no intelligence agency can for very long be any better than its counterintelligence component. And recommend that they chisel the words into the granite entrance out there.”

Helms continued: “He had a point. A quick glance in the rearview mirror shows that the most notorious traitors and successful spies in this century would have been barred from sensitive government work, or exposed early in their careers, had basic counterintelligence measures been taken.”

As Helms explained them, these basic counterintelligence measures include conducting precisely the kind of research I have put together under the rubric of “red threads” to build ideological profiles of leading persons in the anti-Trump conspiracy: Nellie Ohr, Christopher Steele, John Brennan, James Comey, and others.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-5-if-there-is-white-privilege-what-does-it-consist-of

You can’t have helped noticing that assertions of “white privilege” are all the rage on the left these days. Or maybe it’s “white male privilege.” For example, back in January, there was CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson throwing down the “white privilege” gauntlet on Beto O’Rourke: “Beto’s excellent adventure drips with white male privilege.” Beto, of course, promptly acknowledged that Henderson was right, stating in Iowa on March 16, “As a white man who has had privileges that others could not depend on, or take for granted, I’ve clearly had advantages over the course of my life.”

When I first heard the term “white privilege” gaining currency, my initial reaction was to doubt that it could amount to much of significance. In my own experience, ever since I was old enough to notice, every institution that I came in contact with, to the extent I could tell, was making every effort it possibly could to attract and advance minorities candidates, particularly African Americans. In many cases, these efforts would clearly have the effect, explicit or implicit, of disadvantaging whatever white candidates were competing for a limited number of slots. For example:

Way back in 1968, when I was applying to college, elite colleges already explicitly practiced affirmative action. Although the details were closely guarded then as now, my own college (Yale) constantly boasted about its efforts to find and admit qualified minority candidates.