RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3768/Compared-to-What.aspx

Good thing I got back from vacation in time for the really important news, the story Drudge, Breitbart, WaPo and NYT are all on the same page about this morning — or, at least, are all putting forth the same Page One about. The Michael Cohen tape. Big Story. Stop the whatever they’re called.
I have a question. It’s the same question I had last week about Trump and Putin in Helsinki. This question is one of the most important ones to ask about any such “news” blasted out by the news media, those special operators of the psychological battlefield, which they drive into every particle of collective American brain with exploding headlines and siren soundbytes. The Michael Cohen tape is the single most important thing for all of us to think about right now …. compared to what?
Compared to nothing, which is the media m.o. Last month was all Stormy Daniels, all the time. (Who?) Last week, it was “treason!” “impeachable offenses!!” “crimes!!!” committed by Trump at his press conference with Putin in Helsinki. Compared to what?
I don’t ask the question lightly. The truly brilliant anti-communist writer Josef Mackiewicz was a biologist by training. (By the way, so is Bukovsky.) “One of my professors,” he wrote in his 1962 book, The Triumph of Provocation, reissued by Yale University Press in 2009, “used to say that only a comparitive science is an exact science; only by comparisons can objective knowledge be gained. All my life I have tried to use this maxim as a guide, since it seems to me to be the only correct method in the assessment of all the truth that is accessible to man.”
We postmoderns feed on a poor diet of “all the news that’s fit to print.” Imagine, instead, assessing all the truth that is accessible to man.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/fake-hate-texas-waiter-made-up-story-about-racist-note-media-fooled-again/

Last week the mainstream media went all in on an unverified story about a waiter in Texas who got a “racist note” from a mean and nasty racist patron who wrote “We don’t tip terrorist” on the top of his bill.

The Washington Post, Newsweek, ABC, BBC, USA Today, CBS, New York Post, Huffington Post, The Root, and many other local, national, and international media outlets ran with a sketchy story, even though the exact same type of hoax has been tried before.

Most — if not all — of the reports were written without the smallest degree of skepticism, even though the MSM should be savvy enough by now to be wary of such stories because the odds are pretty good that they are going to turn out to be fake hate.

But the dream narrative of the establishment media is to show racist white people trying to victimize minorities and so such stories are always “too good to check,” as they say, and so the fake story went viral.

Here’s a sample from Newsweek, where they laid it on so thick readers were probably reaching for the Kleenex box by the end:

Texas restaurant is standing behind its waiter after a customer refused to leave him a tip and instead left behind a message calling him a “terrorist.”

Khalil Cavil shared a photo on Sunday of the customer’s nasty note—“We don’t tip terrorist”—and his name circled on the top of the $108 bill at Saltgrass Steak House. The customers did not leave a tip.

“At the moment I didn’t know what to think nor what to say, I was sick to my stomach,” the 20-year-old waiter wrote on Facebook. “Although, this is nothing new, it is still something that will test your faith.”

Cavil is working at the steakhouse in Odessa, Texas, as he gets ready to head to Dallas Baptist University later this year, the Odessa American reported. He wrote that he chose not to get angry but instead “decided to let this encourage” him and “fuel me to change the world.”

“I have decided to let this encourage me, and fuel me to change the world the only way I know how. So to all the haters out there, keep talking, your [sic] only helping me step into my destiny!” he added.

CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/denver-post-runs-letter-to-the-editor-comparing-trump-to-soviet-spies-demanding-his-execution/

On Saturday, the newspaper of record in Colorado published a letter to the editor demanding the execution of President Donald Trump. The paper’s opinion editor insisted that was not the author’s intent, but the letter speaks for itself.

“If it walks like a traitor, and talks like a traitor, and acts like a traitor … it is a traitor,” Lakewood resident Suzanne Gagnon wrote in a letter to the editor published by The Denver Post on Saturday. Gagnon did not hesitate to suggest what should be done with “traitors” like Trump.

“Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed on a basis of far less evidence than is had on Trump and many in his administration,” she wrote. “Besides being in agreement with the actions recommended in the editorial of July 19, I believe there are many more actions that can and should be taken against Trump to keep him from destroying the U.S.”

Execution is the historic punishment for traitors, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were Soviet spies convicted and executed for espionage. While the Rosenbergs’ children argue that their father did not deserve the death penalty and that their mother was wrongly convicted, there is a broad consensus among historians that both were guilty, but their trial was marred by clear judicial and legal improprieties. Many historians argue they should not have been executed. In the words of Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, they were “guilty — and framed.”

It is possible that Suzanne Gagnon’s sentence about the Rosenbergs could be read as a call to not have them executed, but in the context of her declaration of Trump as a traitor and her ominous suggestion that “many more actions … can and should be taken against Trump to keep him from destroying the U.S.,” it seems far more likely she was indeed calling for Trump’s execution.

The Denver Post defended publishing the letter to the editor, however, arguing that Gagnon did not call for Trump’s execution.

“We would never run a letter suggesting that the president of the United States be executed,” Megan Schrader, editor of the editorial page, told the Washington Free Beacon. “Upon reviewing this letter, I don’t think that was the letter writer’s intent.”

“She wrote to be critical of an editorial I wrote lauding Sen. Cory Gardner’s efforts to impose sanctions on Russia and supportive of another editorial we had run that suggested actions Congress could take to respond to the Helsinki press conference,” Schrader argued. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/oops_alleged_russian_spy_maria_butina_met_with_obama_officials_in_2015.html

Desperate Trump-haters, searching for something – anything! – to show that the Trump administration is in bed with Vladimir Putin seized on the news a week ago that a young Russian named Maria Butina had been indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), or, in the words of the DOJ, for “conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General.”

Here at last was a face – and a red-headed female one, to boot – to attach to the charges of treason being thrown around by the likes of John Brennan.

So intense was the fever that their dream had come true that, as Bre Payton reported in The Federalist:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, members of the media mistook a Trump administration staffer for a Russian spy.

Emily Singer, a senior political reporter for Mic, tweeted out a photo from inside the White House and claimed that Maria Butina, who was charged Monday for conspiring against the U.S. as a secret Russian agent, was among a gaggle of staffers inside the Oval Office. She later realized her mistake and deleted the tweet, but only after it went viral.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/facebook-google-twitter-refuse-to-say-if-china-or-n-korea-tried-to-meddle-in-2016-election/

In a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday investigating charges of anti-conservative bias by Facebook, Google, and Twitter, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) queried representatives of those platforms about whether they have found any evidence that countries other than Russia — namely China and N. Korea — had attempted to interfere in U.S. elections in 2016. The individuals representing the Big Three social media platforms couldn’t — or wouldn’t — say.

Gohmert asked, “You have been asked specifically about Russian use of your platforms. But did you ever find any indication of use of your platform utilized by the Chinese, North Korea, or any other foreign country, intelligence, or agency of that country?”

Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, attempted to evade the question. “I would note, congressman, that we are not in N. Korea or China,” she said, adding that Facebook has a “robust” security team.

Gohmert tried asking his question again. “We have foreign governments, intelligence agencies in this country. It seems to me you were each a little bit vague about ‘Oh yes, we found hundreds,’ or whatever, I’m asking specifically: were any of those other countries besides Russia that were using your platform inappropriately? It should be a yes or no.”

“I don’t have the details,” Bickert replied. “I know we definitely work to detect and repel attacks — ”

“I know that,” Gohmert interrupted, “but were any of them foreign entities other than Russia?”

“I can certainly follow up with you on that,” she said.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/media-beclown-themselves-with-yet-another-bogus-russian-conspiracy-theory

The greatest threat to the press’ credibility is the press.

Consider, for example, the extra-absurd and bogus viral narrative created Tuesday by Mic Senior Political Reporter Emily Singer.

Singer found a Getty Images picture from May 2017 showing Trump meeting in the Oval Office with a delegation of Russian officials, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. If you look at the photo carefully, you can see White House National Security Council staffer Cari Lutkins huddled in the back.

This is where things take a turn for the stupid.

On Monday, the Justice Department announced charges against Russian national Maria Butina, who they say conspired against the U.S. as a secret agent.

Butina has red hair. Lutkins also has red hair. This shared trait was enough for Singer, who tweeted the Getty picture Tuesday morning with the accompanying caption: “I thought this was a photoshop, but it’s not. This is Maria Butina — arrested for being a Russian spy — in the Oval Office with Trump.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/13/fusion-gps-targets-jim

Congress is slowly closing in on exposing the media’s shameful role in perpetuating the Trump-Russia collusion myth on the American people. Prominent news organizations are the accomplices—if not coconspirators—in the biggest political scandal in U.S. history. Now, two years later, there is no sign of surrender: A ludicrous article in New York magazine on July 8 suggested Donald Trump has been a Russian intelligence asset for 30 years.

Fully invested in pushing the phony Trump-Russia plotline in a malicious attempt to destroy Trump’s presidency, the media are intensifying this narrative and creating new villains in the process.

Enter Rep. James Jordan (R-Ohio).

The Ohio congressman has been under a relentless media siege since NBC News reported on July 3 that Jordan ignored “sexual abuse” by a team doctor when Jordan was an assistant coach for the wrestling team at The Ohio State University from 1986 to 1994. The article is short on evidence of sexual abuse but quotes a few of Jordan’s former teammates who insisted the congressmen knew of the inappropriate behavior by Dr. Richard Strauss and did nothing about it. In April, the university announced it would investigate allegations against Strauss, who committed suicide in 2005.

The NBC News report offered mostly innuendo from less-than-credible sources: One accuser is an ex-con who did time in prison for mail fraud, drug possession, and stealing from investors; another is a shady business owner with a “long history of litigation and an apparent bone to pick with the Jordan family” who allegedly sent a disturbing picture to the widow of a former OSU wrestler.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/11/jeffrey-toobins-clueless-supreme-court-meltdowns-embarrass-cnn/

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement has ignited a competition in Big Media for apocalyptic hot-takes on how a marginally more conservative Supreme Court will destroy America. CNN’s senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin seems bent on taking home the trophy for the most molten meltdown.

Toobin’s most recent rave, to the network’s Anderson Cooper, was that the stakes are higher on judicial confirmations today because “[w]hen the Constitution was written in the late eighteenth century, people were expected to die in their 50s. The framers never contemplated that these terms would regularly go to 30-plus years as they do now.”Toobin is as ill-informed about statistics as he is about the framers’ view on de facto life tenure for federal judges.

Toobin, like many people in the media, seems to have little idea about the difference between life expectancy—a figure including infant mortality—and life span. It also appears he may not grasp the difference between the mean and the median in considering what an “average” number is.
About Life Expectancy in the Eighteenth Century

Modern medicine has greatly decreased infant mortality and thereby increased average life expectancy in America and elsewhere. But after infant mortality is accounted for, the human life span has not changed nearly as much over time. During the late 1700s, males who reached age 20 could be expected on average to live to age 63-66. At age 30, they could be expected to live to age 65-68. At age 50—when Toobin thinks men were being wiped out—they could be expected to live to age 71-73.

Moreover, infant mortality will affect both the mean—which is what most people think of as an average—and the median, the number at which half the population will be above and half below. The median still provides the opportunity for half the population to live well beyond the average.

Of course, the framers were no more expert on these subjects than Toobin is. But James Madison lived to age 85. Ben Franklin lived to age 84. Paul Revere made it to age 83, while John Adams lived until age 90. Thomas Jefferson, while technically not a framer of the Constitution, lived to 83. The first Supreme Court chief justice, John Jay, lived to 83. They likely noticed that their contemporaries were not all keeling over in their 50s.