RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/progressive-virtue-signaling-jussie-smollett-morris-dees/

Virtue-signaling is now the refuge of scoundrels.

Since ancient times, it has always been scary when moral auditors audit their own. Or as the Roman satirist Juvenal put it of male guardians entrusted to shield chaste girls from randy males, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“Who will watch the watchmen?”)

When humans sense that there’s neither an earthly nor divine deterrent between them and social acceptance, power, riches, or their appetites, what follows is a foregone conclusion.

Such exemption is precisely the problem with modern American progressivism. It currently enjoys almost a captive mainstream media. It assumes the lockstep approval of the university. The movies that come out of Hollywood pound progressive themes. Most foundations fund race, class, and gender agendas. Popular culture has defined cool and hip as left-wing. In sum, all the secular dispensators of moral approval are hard left.

The result is that progressive actors and institutions understand that even their bad behavior will be contextualized rather than audited. Such medieval-style exemption gives them a natural blank check to overreach and to act unethically, crudely, and even unlawfully — as they might not have if they had expected ramifications.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sallypipes/2019/04/01/britains-version-of-medicare-for-all-is-collapsing/#1cbea0d736b8Nearly a quarter of a million British patients have been waiting more than six months to receive planned medical treatment from the National Health Service, according to a recent report from the Royal College of Surgeons. More than 36,000 have been in treatment queues for nine months or more.

Long waits for care are endemic to government-run, single-payer systems like the NHS. Yet some U.S. lawmakers want to import that model from across the pond. That would be a massive blunder.

Consider how long it takes to get care at the emergency room in Britain. Government data show that hospitals in England only saw 84.2% of patients within four hours in February. That’s well below the country’s goal of treating 95% of patients within four hours — a target the NHS hasn’t hit since 2015.

Now, instead of cutting wait times, the NHS is looking to scrap the goal.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/01/social-justice-is-at-odds-with-american-ideas-of-justice/

What is justice? This complicated question is the subject of much study by philosophers, lawyers, clergy, and laymen. It is often easier to determine the metes and bounds of justice from what it is not than to define what it is in the abstract. Unfair procedures, treating the rich differently from the poor, racial discrimination, or the infusion of bribery and perjury into criminal procedures strike almost everyone as forms of injustice. Likewise, light punishments for serious crimes or excessive punishments for minor ones all have the stench of injustice. In criminal matters, justice chiefly requires that the guilty are punished and the innocent go free.

Individualized Justice
This understanding stems from the traditions of western justice, particularly the Anglo-American variety, which places a premium on the rights of the individual and the importance of fair procedures. This is why our Constitution allows one the right to remain silent and prohibits the use of illegally-obtained evidence, while permitting the accused a defense counsel and a trial by jury. These procedures were the products of centuries of experimentation. They reflect the concern not only with justice but also the fear of the “run-amuck” majority, i.e., the mob.

Anglo-American justice fundamentally is an individual affair. The question it normally confronts is whether a particular person committed a particular offense. One’s station in life, his relative wealth, background, race, and the background of his relatives are supposed to be irrelevant. This is the origin of the expression, “Justice is blind.” Justice deliberately averts its gaze from one’s other social merits and demerits. It presupposes that otherwise good people can do very bad things and that otherwise bad people may not have done the bad thing they may be accused of having done.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

March is when we move from winter to spring. We had days with temperatures in the single digits and others when the thermometer approached seventy. Mark Twain once wrote about spring, “I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.” Perhaps we weren’t that extreme, though it did snow here in southeastern Connecticut on the third full day of spring. And there were days when Robins must have thought they came north too early. March is when the clocks advance by an hour – an anachronism from a time when family farms were ubiquitous, and more daylight hours were important. In 1920, 27% of the U.S. population lived on farms. Today, 2% do. So, why do we still change our clocks?

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The month blossomed with news, if not with flora. A terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand; the release of the long-anticipated Mueller report; the fatal crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia; the fifteenth (or was it the sixteenth?) announced candidacy for the Democrat nomination for President; Brexit; a college admissions scandal that rocked Hollywood, Wall Street, law firms and some of our top universities; Nicolás Maduro gained traction in Venezuela, with help from China and especially Russia, while Juan Guaidó’s wife Fabiana Rosales visited the White House; President Trump acknowledged the reality of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and he issued his first veto (sustained) over Wall funding; the ISIS Caliphate in Syria was defeated; China enlisted a deeply indebted Italy into its Belt and Road Initiative; friends in high places, and hatred for Trump convinced the Cook County State’s Attorney to drop charges against Jussie Smollett for a feigned racial attack.

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Three events during the month said much about modern American culture – none of it positive, which should give us pause. The first was the revelation uncovered in the college admissions scandal, a scandal that said a lot about the values of so-called elites – how they lied and cheated to get their children into top colleges.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/30/the-peoples-sovereignty-is-the-found

Although I don’t believe I have ever seen so many errors in such a short essay, the principal error in Mark Pulliam’s response to my recent piece, “Don’t Read the Constitution the Way Robert Bork Did” is this: If one claims to adhere to the original intentions of the Founders, one must first understand those intentions. In that effort, Pulliam fails in every respect.

Beginning with the question of natural law and the Declaration of Independence and moving in all directions from there, Pulliam presents a blinkered understanding of the purposes and meaning of our Constitution. There is not a single prominent American Founder—not Madison, Hamilton, Adams, Mason, Randolph, Wilson or any of a host of others—who did not believe that the Declaration served as the authoritative source of the Constitution’s authority. Miss this point and you cannot understand the original intent of the Constitution.

Pulliam cites Justice Scalia as an authority. However much we may praise many of the conclusions Scalia reached on the bench, it remains that Scalia, unlike Justice Thomas, was a positivist—saying on one occasion that if the majority voted to legalize abortion, then it should be legal. Thomas, however, realizes that according to natural law principles, abortion is a violation of the natural right to life that is expressly protected by the Constitution. In the face of Thomas’ argument, Pulliam collapses: natural law—“whatever that is.” Is it really so difficult!

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/mueller-report-collusion-debate-inflated-talking-points/

Both sides are peddling inflated talking points.

‘There was absolutely no collusion!”

“Are you kidding? There was a boatload of collusion!”

I’ve been doing legal analysis in hotly contested cases, including political cases, for about 35 years. By now, I should be used to the insidious word games, as well as the confusion inherent when people imprecisely use ambiguous words because they don’t know any better. Yet it seems like it has never been worse than it is now.

That’s because I’m spoiled. I spent the first couple of decades in the confines of a top-tier judicial system. In legal proceedings, a judge is there to make sure no one plays fast and loose with language. As a young prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, I was very fortunate that my cases were assigned to exceptional judges, who made it their business to mind the court record.

At the time, I didn’t appreciate how valuable that was — judges interrupting the testimony, even if there had been no objection, to clarify what a lawyer or witness meant by some loaded word planted in a question or uttered in an answer. But by the end of the trial, in the transcript that would ultimately be reviewed by appellate courts, there was no way a fuzzy term, such as “collusion,” would be permitted to muddy the waters. Everyone understood what it meant, and didn’t mean, within the four corners of the case.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-3-29-the-russia-hoax-should-we-all-now-just-move-on

A week ago today, the issuance of the Mueller Report finally popped the long-inflating bubble of the Trump/Russia collusion hoax. After thousands of excited and breathless press reports and cable news segments over two-plus years (“new bombshell,” “the walls are closing in,” “impeachment,” etc.), it turned out that there was nothing there. So is there any point in wasting any more time on this? Why don’t we all just move on?

You won’t be surprised that many voices in the media are already advocating for that. At the New York Times, they had barely made it to Tuesday when the lead front page article, headlined “Trump, Citing ‘Evil Deeds,’ Turns Wrath on His Critics,” started pushing for Trump to “drop the subject,” citing the precedents of Reagan and Clinton:

[Trump’s] approach [of seeking retribution against his critics], if it lasts, contrasts with those of other presidents who survived major scandals. After the Iran-contra affair, President Ronald Reagan happily dropped the subject and focused on arms control talks with the Soviet Union and other issues. After being acquitted at his Senate impeachment trial, President Bill Clinton was just as eager to move on to Social Security and other initiatives.

Less expected, perhaps, was the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the same day from long-time G.W. Bush advisor Karl Rove, with the headline “Move On From Robert Mueller, Mr. President.” That article’s gist was captured in its sub-headline, “Obsessing over the investigation’s origins isn’t the way to win over swing voters.” Rove urges Trump to switch his attention to focusing on a positive message, including the strong economy.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22503/what-siegfried-roy-forgot

Siegried & Roy were illusionists whose famous Las Vegas act with Bengal tigers thrilled audiences at the Mirage Resort and Casino for thirteen years. Their daredevil performance was predicated on the technique of “affection conditioning” in which Roy bonded rather than trained the animals. The method required raising tiger cubs from birth and sleeping with them until they were a year old. Roy described the experience saying, “When an animal gives you its trust, you feel like you have been given the most beautiful gift in the world.”

On October 3, 2003 Roy Cohn’s prized cat, 380 lb Montecore, sunk its teeth into Roy’s neck and dragged him offstage before a horrified audience.

Roy faithfully insisted that Montecore was just trying to protect him. Other experts had a more realistic view of the attack. Kay Rosaire, head of the Big Cat Encounter in Florida at the time said, “They’re predators, so who can really know what goes on in their minds? Even though they are raised in captivity and they love us, sometimes their natural instincts just take over.”

Trying to tame the wildness of a Bengal tiger for entertainment denies the predatory nature of the animal. So it is with the Muslim Brotherhood in America

THERE WILL BE NO POSTINGS UNTIL MARCH 30, 2019

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22477/it-time-to-kiss

The familiar acronym KISS, “keep it simple stupid,” began as a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s according to Wikipedia. “The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

The current maelstrom created by Fox News suspending Judge Jeanine Pirro over a question she posed concerning the symbolism of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab can best be understood using the KISS principle.

Mohammed, the 7th century prophet and founder of Islam, believed himself to be the messenger of the one and only god Allah. Mohammed believed that all people should honor Allah and only Allah. This was and continues to be the foundational premise of Islamic expansionism and its desire to establish a worldwide caliphate to make the whole world Muslim – including the United States. Islam is a replacement theology.

Islam has been at war with competing ideologies since the time of Mohammed but war is expensive. The Islamic movement’s fortunes waxed and waned over the centuries until oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Saudi Arabia in 1938. A seismic shift in geopolitical power took place and the oil rich Muslim nations were able to pursue their expansionist dreams of an Islamic caliphate once again.