RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/william-barr-claims-there-were-serious-irregularities-at-jail-where-epstein-died/

Attorney General William Barr said Monday that there were “serious irregularities” at the Manhattan federal jail where billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was found dead Saturday morning.

“We are now learning of serious irregularities at this facility that are deeply concerning and demand a thorough investigation,” Barr said during remarks before a law enforcement conference in New Orleans.

“We will get to the bottom of what happened and there will be accountability,” he added.

Epstein, 66, was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center early Saturday morning.The billionaire financier, who was being held on charges of sex trafficking and sexual assault, died in what authorities are calling “an apparent suicide.”

He was placed on suicide watch for just one week after he tried to hang himself in his cell last month. It remains unclear why he was taken off suicide watch.

Under the rules of the special housing unit where Epstein was being held, guards were required to check on him every 30 minutes but no such checks occurred for “several hours” prior to his death, the Washington Post reported Monday. Epstein’s cell mate was also transferred in the days prior to his death in violation of special housing unit protocol.

The guards tasked with watching Epstein the night he died were working an overtime shift and one of them had worked  five such shifts in a row.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/06/igniting-civil-war/

Government sponsorship of violence against opponents or complacency in the face of incitement to violence is a powerful tool of political repression. Regimes such as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, China, and other tyrannies have used such tactics to great effect. When mobs attack anti-government demonstrators, for example, the police either disappear or stand by watching. In American cities run by Democrats and on the U.S. college and university campuses, the authorities increasingly have been standing by as radicals do the dirty work of beating up or silencing conservatives.

In societies riven by mutual hate, the people who control the police and public communications make all the difference. When they maintain impartiality, as did Germany’s Weimar government while the Nazis and Communists struggled for primacy, partisan warfare tends to be resolved politically—though the results are harsh. When societal hatred or the partiality of authorities results in deaths, long-smoldering cold civil war can blaze into holocaust.

We Americans are now facing the danger of a civil war thus ignited. We do not think of civil war this way because our Civil War from 1861 to 1865 was less a conflict within society than it was a highly organized war between states. That war notwithstanding, personal friendships and mutual esteem persisted on both sides, such as that between Ulysses S. Grant and prominent Confederate General James Longstreet.

What we face now is worse.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274549/el-paso-fort-hood-lloyd-billingsley

Last weekend, Patrick Crusius shot down 22 victims in El Paso, Texas. Ten years earlier in Fort Hood, Texas, some 500 miles to the east, U.S. Army major Nidal Hasan was planning a deadly attack, similar in some ways but decidedly different in response from the media and political establishments. Unlike the El Paso shooter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then headed by Robert Mueller, was on to Hasan from the start.

On May 31, 2009, the Muslim army psychiatrist, a self-described “soldier of Allah,” contacted  terrorist mastermind Anwar al-Awliki, probing whether it was okay to kill American soldiers by suicide bombings and such in order to help fellow Muslim combatants. “This logic seems to make sense to me,” Hasan replied. These and other emails between the two were in the hands of the FBI at that time.

In June of 2009, the FBI’s Washington field office responded “WFO does not currently assess Hasan to be involved in terrorist activities.” The FBI promptly dropped the case until November 5, when field agents said: “You know who that is. That’s our boy.”

As it emerged in the 2012 congressional hearings on Lessons from Fort Hood: Improving our Ability to Connect the Dots, their boy Nidal Hasan, “walked into the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood, Texas, and shouted the classic jihadist term ‘Allahu Akbar’ and opened fire on unarmed soldiers and civilians. He killed 13 and wounded 42 others. This was the most horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.” That was accurate, but did not capture the details. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/karen_armstrong_and_the_islamists.html

What do the Dalai Lama, a former nun, and a group accused of supporting terrorism have in common? All of them are connected to a multinational initiative to “help people adjust creatively to our globally interdependent world,” known as the Charter of Compassion.

The former nun is prominent author and academic Karen Armstrong.  In 2009, after receiving the prestigious $100,000 TED Prize, she, along with other members of the founding council, drafted the Charter for Compassion, advocating that those of all religions bind together to create a “global community.” The list of signatories of the charter reads like a “Who’s Who” of global superstars, including New Age guru Deepak Chopra, South African Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu, filmmaker David Lynch, actress Goldie Hawn, Oxford scholar Tariq Ramadan, the Dalai Lama, and singer Peter Gabriel, to name a few.  

Even though the Charter for Compassion bills itself as a document to bind all of the religions of the world together around the concept of compassion, the charter seems far more interested in Islamic jurisprudence than true ecumenicalism.

For example, a section of the official website deals exclusively with Islamophobia and links to resources by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

CAIR has long been accused of promoting an Islamist ideology, and even U.S. Federal prosecutors have shown the group’s close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. CAIR itself has been designated as a terror group by the United Arab Emirates.

In its “Islamophobia Guidebook” section, Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid advises Charter supporters, in an article entitled “Fourteen Ways You Can Fight Islamophobia”, to “Remember the Prophet” who “remained steadfast, patient and tolerant in the face of Islamophobia.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/flagging-future-killers-11565132691

The Dayton and El Paso shootings have spurred familiar calls for more gun control, and by all means let’s have a debate. But the focus should be on denying weapons to the potential killers rather than on gun laws that may be politically satisfying but won’t make much difference.

Start with the calls for more “background checks,” which implies none now exist. Yet nearly all gun purchasers today have their backgrounds checked on the spot via the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Most mass shooters obtained their guns through licensed dealers after checks, or from family members. The Dayton and El Paso killers, and the Gilroy, Calif., shooter of late July obtained their firearms legally.

Democrats want to expand background checks to person-to-person sales, though policing that would be a challenge as most such sales could be done off the books. They also want to extend to 10 days from three the amount of time dealers must wait to get a response from the background check system before proceeding with a sale. Senators Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) and Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) want background checks to cover unlicensed sales at gun shows and online, but exempt sales between friends and family.

Congress should have that debate, but no one should think they would reduce the number of mass shootings. Most mass shooters don’t have a criminal history that would pop up in the background system. There is also no evidence that longer waiting periods reduce suicides, homicides or mass shootings. Determined killers can always get a weapon.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/yes-the-u-s-has-a-mental-health-problem/

What Congress can do to fix our broken treatment system

The Dayton killer, according to his ex-girlfriend’s interview in the Washington Post, heard voices, suffered troubling hallucinations, and battled psychosis from his youth.

But there is no connection between violence and mental illness. Say it over and again if you must, at least until you disabuse your lying eyes. The experts have spoken. CNN distilled the media’s recitation of this creed in their headline Monday: “Blaming mass shootings on mental illness is ‘inaccurate’ and ‘stigmatizing,’ experts say.”

“Experts say,” as employed here, means what it usually does: a handful of ideologues get to pawn off their ideology as fact under the pretense of “expertise” to those in the media eager to toe a particular line. Whatever the “experts say,” the fact remains that the untreated, seriously mentally ill (those with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, most often) are significantly more likely to engage in violence. Individuals with schizophrenia, most of whom are non-violent, still commit homicide at a rate 20 times that of the population at large. The prevailing social science on the matter suggests that at least 33 percent of mass shootings are committed by someone with a serious mental illness (even when this is narrowly defined).

What are we to do about it?

Congress might start by repealing the Johnson administration’s so-called “IMD (Institutions for Mental Disease) exclusion” in the Medicaid statutes, which prevents individuals over the age of 21 from using Medicaid funds at a facility with more than 16 psychiatric beds. The measure was included to forward the vision of Johnson’s late predecessor, John F. Kennedy, whose final legislative act was the signing of the Community Mental Health Act (CMHA) of 1963. CHMA usurped state control of mental-illness treatment and anointed the federal government architect of an entirely new method of care.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/another-evil-and-deranged-bastard/

I have been away, so have just caught up on the reporting on the Dayton shooter from the last couple of days:

Connor Betts, the Dayton, Ohio mass shooter, was a self-described “leftist,” who wrote that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.”

Betts’ Twitter profile read, “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” One tweet on his page read, “Off to Midnight Mass. At least the songs are good. #athiestsonchristmas.” The page handle? I am the spookster. On one selfie, he included the hashtags, “#selfie4satan #HailSatan @SatanTweeting.” On the date of Republican Sen. John McCain’s death, he wrote, “F*ck John McCain.” He also liked tweets referencing the El Paso mass shooting in the hours before Dayton. The Twitter page contains multiple selfies of Betts.

It’s a banal point to make at at this point, but there obviously hasn’t been the same focus in the media on his politics and religion as there would be if he had been a right-wing Christian. Indeed, the press has been scrupulous about attributing a motive to him, taking an appropriate care it doesn’t show in other cases.

Politics aside, he was obviously deeply disturbed:

During his senior year of high school, Connor Betts seemed to always have caffeine pills in one hand and an energy drink in another. He was unable to sleep, he told his then-girlfriend Lyndsi Doll, because of dark, animal-like shadows that tormented him at night.

Seven years after they dated, Doll recalls Betts as a serious and reserved kid who wrestled with hallucinations and menacing voices in his head.

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

Last week — after President Trump via Twitter had accused Representative Elijah Cummings of Baltimore of “incompetent leadership” and making a “mess” of his very-high-crime, high-poverty district, and after numerous media critics had responded by hurling the charge of “racism” at Trump — I weighed in with a post titled “It’s About Time That Someone Pushed Back About The Disaster Of Democrat-Controlled Cities.” The post made what I think is the obvious point that when a group of people have for decades promoted certain government spending programs as the appropriate solution to low incomes and poverty in African American communities, and when after decades of time and trillions of dollars of spending the problems of low income and poverty persist and indeed worsen, it is entirely appropriate to hold the promoters of these spending programs accountable for their failure.

On July 30, the often-creative Kevin Williamson of National Review offered his own even more contrarian view on the subject, in a piece titled “Which Party Can We Blame For Poverty And Crime?” (More contrarian than the Manhattan Contrarian? How is that even possible?) Williamson points out that Census data from around the U.S. give no clear correlation between poverty and crime on the one hand, and Republican versus Democratic governance on the other. He notes that the very poorest county in the whole country is Owsley County, Kentucky — a place with almost entire white demographics (98+%) and very strongly Republican politics. Meanwhile, there are numerous examples of Democrat-run cities that Williamson says are “very good places to live,” with relatively low-ish rates of crime and poverty. He cites Austin and Denver as prime examples.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/06/nation-mourns-shootings-el-paso-dayton-chicago-sees-violent-weekend-year/

Fifty-five people were wounded by gunfire in Chicago this weekend, with seven killed in what became the most violent weekend for the Windy City this year.

The Chicago Tribune reported that nearly all of the gun violence that took place Friday night through Monday morning occurred in the west and south sides of the city, with victims ranging from ages 5 to 56 years old among those whose wounds were fatal.

The weekend shootings left the city with a toll that was slightly higher than Chicago’s last major outburst of gun violence during the first weekend of June, when 52 people were shot and eight of them killed.

According to data from the Tribune, more than 1,600 people have been shot this year in Chicago, along with 300 homicides. While the paper reports that both numbers are still down from last year, the city has struggled to shed its reputation as a crime-infested city where gun violence is rampant even though Illinois has some of the strictest gun laws in the country.

Residents in the state are required to have a license to own a firearm and must undergo a 72-hour waiting period before owning a gun. Residents are also subject to “red-flag laws,” where relatives or law enforcement may request that a court take away firearms from individuals who could be a threat to themselves or others.

This weekend’s outbreak of violence in Chicago comes on the same weekend where back-to-back shootings occurred in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, leaving a total of 31 people dead. The weekend’s events have once again led to calls for more gun regulations from Democrats and for an increased focus on mental health from Republicans.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/05/whats-

The anti-Trump forces, now stripped of their Russian collusion ammunition, have invented another imaginary threat they hope to weaponize against the president: The public menace posed by “white supremacist” terrorism.

Much like the collusion conspiracy theory—which relied on random incidents, fictional villains, unconvincing evidence, and the Bad Orange Man in the White House—there is little substance to this purported danger.

Unironically, the whole ruse is being pushed by the same people who foisted the Russian collusion hoax on the American people for three years in the hopes of prompting President Trump’s impeachment and removal. The political agenda behind this manufactured white supremacy crisis is equally sinister because its specific purpose is to influence and undermine the 2020 elections.

The “white supremacy” canard is intended to further demonize Trump; falsely defame his supporters as white supremacists; and pressure nervous voters into defeating Trump and Republican candidates next year. The strategy is as cynical as it is pernicious.

Let’s clear one thing up before I get into the details: There is no systemic threat posed by white supremacy. Domestic white terrorists are not the same as, let alone worse than ISIS Jihadis. There has been no massive “surge” in white supremacy activity, as I wrote in November. These groups remain fringe, disorganized, and unrespected.

In his Senate testimony last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray was intentionally vague when questioned by Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) about the supposed rise of white supremacy.

“In terms of number of arrests, we have, through the third quarter of this fiscal year, had about, give or take, a hundred arrests in the international terrorism side, which includes the homegrown violent extremists,” Wray explained. “But we’ve also had about the same number, again, don’t quote me to the exact digit, on the domestic terrorism side. And I will say that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence but it includes other things as well.”

Some version of what you might call white supremacist violence? Even giving Wray the benefit of the doubt, that means the FBI investigated roughly 50 or so cases of some version of white supremacy. Not exactly solid evidence to justify a law enforcement, political and media war against white supremacy.