RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/28/fbi-diagnosed-with-cia-disease/

The Justice Department’s inspector general this month reprimanded the FBI for the manner in which it recruits and supervises its “confidential human sources.” To the layman, this seems about technicalities. In fact, it shows that one of the CIA’s deadliest dysfunctions now infects the FBI as well.

This disease consists of choosing and rejecting sources for the purpose of indulging the agencies’ and their leaders’ private agendas rather than to further intelligence work on the public’s behalf. 

Necessarily, the language of the inspector general’s November 19 report is vague: “Ineffective management and oversight of confidential sources.” This means the FBI has failed to use “adequate controls” in its validation of human sources, which has resulted in “jeopardizing FBI operations, and placing FBI agents, sources, subjects of investigation, and the public in harm’s way.”

The inspector general’s concern with the FBI’s source management stems from the investigation into the FBI’s involvement in the 2016 presidential campaign, including by taking seriously the infamous Steele dossier that it knew was a fabrication as well as, likely, some Russian communication intercepts that also should have been rejected on strictly professional grounds. In short, the FBI departed from its tradition of professionalism and honesty in pursuit of domestic political influence.

Choosing and recruiting sources, validating and managing them, is the very heart of intelligence. Doing it badly, taking sources that come easy—especially dispensing with due skepticism about the ones that contribute to one’s own agendas—is professional corruption. But doing it right is hard. To the extent that intelligence agencies find it difficult to fulfill expectations, they are tempted to substitute such corruption for the competence they lack. The pursuit of agency interests or even personal agendas takes over.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/crowdstrike-conspiracy-wrapped-conspiracy-inside-oleg-atbashian/

In the last few days, media talking heads have been saying the word “CrowdStrike” a lot, defining it as a wild conspiracy theory originating in Moscow. They were joined by Chris Wallace at Fox News, who informed us that president Trump and his ill-informed fans believe in a crazy idea that the DNC wasn’t hacked by the Russians but by some Ukrainian group named CrowdStrike that stole the DNC server and brought it to Ukraine , and that it was Ukraine that meddled in our 2016 election and not Russia.

A crazy idea indeed. Except that neither Trump nor his fans had ever heard of it until the Democrat-media complex condescendingly informed them that these are their beliefs.

Let’s look at the facts:

Fact 1. In 2016 the DNC hired the Ukrainian-owned firm CrowdStrike to analyze their server and investigate a data breach.

Fact 2. CrowdStrike experts determined that the culprit was Russia.

Fact 3. The FBI never received access to the DNC server, so the Russian connection was never officially confirmed and continues to be an allegation coming from the DNC and its Ukrainian-owned contractor.

Fact 4. Absent the official verdict, other theories continue to circulate, including the possibility that the theft was an inside job by a DNC employee, who simply copied the files to a USB drive and sent it to WikiLeaks.

None of these facts was ever disputed by anyone. The media largely ignored them except for the part about the Russian hackers, which boosted their own, now debunked, wild conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian agent.

https://www.dittoville.com/2019/07/14/the-house-i-live-in-when-even-avowed-comm

There was a time when even avowed communists had a startling recognition among their utopian, delusional Soviet dreams that there was undeniable greatness at the heart of America. Take the case of Abel Meeropol, writing under the pen name Lewis Allan, who crafted the lyrics to the inspiring Frank Sinatra wartime movie short “The House I Live In.” The lyrics celebrate the America of small towns, big cities, “but especially the people” going about their business independently, FREELY. What American, liberal or conservative, could or can fault its sentiments and unabashed patriotism?

Meeropol would also write Billie Holiday’s harrowing “Strange Fruit,” a poetically graphic account of Black lynchings  in the Deep South. Clearly, he was a talented artist moved by both the soaring greatness and grave shortcomings of American life. And he should be remembered and honored as such. Both songs are still sung and worthy of their durability.

The Left claims to own such “protest” as exemplified by “Strange Fruit,” but factually no decent person anywhere on the political spectrum, then or now, could object to exposure and correction of  injustices and blatant flaws in our society. It remains a mystery of human complexity to explain the contradictions within each human soul, and none poses a bigger question than how Jewish Americans like Meeropol (or anyone FREELY enjoying the blessings of living in a FREE country like this) could embrace the Marxist ideology of mass human enslavement.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/27/in-restoring-civics-start-with-the-basics/

In a bit of good news for this Thanksgiving, it appears that many would-be shapers of education policy are plugging for the return of civics to the curricula of schools and colleges.

The bad news is that many of the prime movers and shakers behind a “new civics” still cling to the old progressive hostility toward a knowledge-based approach to teaching and testing American students about representative government and its historical roots in this exceptional nation.

A little more bad news: A survey released this fall by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni added to a mountain of evidence that adults, including many who attend college, don’t command much civic knowledge. For example, fewer than half knew that John Roberts is the current chief justice of the United States. More than one-quarter thought Brett Kavanaugh was.

Term lengths of U.S. senators and representatives? That is a piece of information any informed voter should know; however, fewer than half of college graduates could give the correct numbers. (The answer, by the way, is six and two, respectively).

Now for some better news: Five years ago, a coalition of prominent leaders assembled by the Arizona-based Joe Foss Institute launched a Civics Education Initiative intended to ensure that all young Americans are taught basic civics and tested on their grasp of the fundamentals. Former U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein were among the participants.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/bizarre-delicacy-is-cruel-de-blasio-signs-bill-banning-foie-gras-in-nyc

Whew! We have until 2022! By then we may be dining by candlelight and using our fingers instead of utensils.rsk

Foie gras will soon be pulled from menus across New York City after Mayor Bill de Blasio signed legislation that bans sales of the French delicacy.

De Blasio signed the bill into law on Monday. It had been widely supported by the New York City Council, which voted overwhelmingly in favor of banning the food over concerns of animal cruelty. The ban will go into effect in 2022 and is expected to have an impact on the approximately 1,000 restaurants that serve the dish, according to the New York Times.

Foie gras, created through a process called gavage, is made from the liver of a duck or goose that is force-fed a fatty mixture through a tube inserted into its throat. During the 20-day feeding process, the bird’s liver becomes engorged for human consumption.

Allie Feldman Taylor, president of Voters for Animal Rights, hailed the decision.

“New York has sent a clear message to foie gras producers that shoving a foot-long pipe down a bird’s throat and intentionally diseasing and enlarging their liver up to ten times its normal size in order to create some bizarre delicacy is cruel and has no place in our compassionate city,” Taylor said in a press release.

Marco Moreira, the executive chef and owner of French restaurant Tocqueville, criticized the law and said that it would damage the city’s fine dining scene.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/28/what-the-democratic-candidates-should-be-reading-over-the-thanksgiving-break/

If the Democratic presidential candidates can take a break from their campaigns over the long holiday weekend, they should catch up on their reading. We have for them a few suggestions that might give them a new perspective.

Declaration of Independence. If they were to actually read and internalize this founding document, the Democrats might accidentally learn that the policies they are so set on imposing on this country are hardly different from many of the cruel acts committed by the crown the Founders rebelled against.

U.S. Constitution. There’s no greater reminder that we have guaranteed freedoms, that Congress’ power is limited, that this nation was intended to have a “republican form of government,” not a democracy, which is easily transformed into mob rule, than our Constitution.

“Economics in One Lesson,” Henry Hazlitt. This Thanksgiving happens to coincide with the 125th anniversary of Hazlitt’s birth. As Pepperdine University economist Gary Galles notes nearby, Hazlitt was one “of America’s most prolific public intellectuals (who) published roughly 10 million words as a journalist, literary critic, philosopher, and economist.” “Economics in One Lesson” ought to be required reading for Democrats. In this seminal work, Hazlitt explains in clear and compelling fashion why their prescriptions will make the country worse off. He also explains why we should be thankful for our free market system.

“Breaking Point,” C.J.Box. Washington needs to understand how its policies affect everyday people across the country and Box shows them. The novel is based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s vicious harassment of the Sacketts of Idaho, who, says Box, went through “a nightmare” just trying to build a modest home that was to be their dream house.

“The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It,” Timothy Sandefur. We should not have to have our rights cleared by government before we exercise them. This might seem like a new idea to the Democrats, who not only want to the authority to grant fundamental rights to petitioners, but wish to shut them down whenever possible.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-will-turn-over-the-2016-rocks-11574812212?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

A forthcoming report by the Justice Department inspector general will look into the FBI’s formal handling of the Steele dossier and its launching of a counterintelligence investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign. Far more consequential, though, was the FBI’s informal role in allowing itself to be used to inject the dossier into the political sphere to spark the Russia collusion folly.

And where is the similar report on the CIA under John Brennan ? His promotion of the Russia collusion canard was bad enough. Unexamined is his role in promoting the still-secret Russian “intelligence” used to justify FBI Director James Comey’s chaotic intercessions in the matter of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The story is worth retelling. Mr. Comey’s rationale, not disclosed until after the election, we may suppose was of crucial importance to somebody who makes himself out to be such a stickler for doing the right thing. Yet his public explanations have been a tissue of absurdities. He claims the secret Russian intelligence might have leaked and discredited a Justice Department decision to clear Mrs. Clinton, but how did his usurping the DOJ’s decision improve matters? The information still could have leaked. Plus didn’t his own actions discredit the DOJ?

He says he was protecting the FBI, that an FBI decision would be more credible than a Justice Department decision. This is laughable. On the eve of the convention, the FBI was going to deprive the president’s party of its nominee even as the reviled Mr. Trump was storming to the GOP nomination? It would have been institutional hara-kiri. Nobody believes the FBI’s decision was any less foreordained than the Justice Department’s.

Making further mincemeat of Mr. Comey’s rationale, the inspector general has revealed that his FBI colleagues judged the Russian intelligence to be “objectively false” and possibly a Kremlin plant. If the Russians can fake one email chain to discredit the Justice Department, they can fake another to discredit the FBI. Again, how did Mr. Comey fix any problem?

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-11-25-no-amount-of-disastrous-failure-can-kill-the-fantasy-of-a-government-directed-great-society

It was 1964 — I was in the 8th grade — when Lyndon Johnson, newly elevated to the presidency by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, announced the launch of the “War on Poverty” and the imminent coming of the “Great Society.” The U.S. economy was in the midst of achieving new levels of prosperity unprecedented in human history. For the first time, the resources appeared to be at hand to eradicate poverty and to reach for universal fairness and justice. All that was needed was to put the powers of government to work to apply the available societal resources to the problems at hand; and presto! the problems would be solved. This was obvious to all thinking people. Experts within the government agencies would quickly set to work to devise the programs that would use the gusher of federal tax revenue to end poverty and bring about universal fairness and justice in short order.

Running on a platform emphasizing the War on Poverty and the Great Society, Johnson swept to a landslide victory in the 1964 election. The landslide brought with it super legislative majorities in both houses of Congress. Programs designed by the experts to eradicate poverty proliferated rapidly, both before and after the 1964 election — Medicaid, the Community Action Program, the Job Corps, the Food Stamp program, Project Head Start, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Housing and Urban Development Act, and on and on.

Fifty-five years on, is it possible to name any public policy disaster in the United States greater than the disaster of the War on Poverty and Great Society? Over the half-century-plus, spending on so-called “anti-poverty” programs has soared from initial levels of a handful of billions of dollars per year, to current amounts well in excess of a trillion dollars per year (including federal, state and local spending). Meanwhile, the so-called “poverty rate” has barely budged (it’s been between about 11% and 15% for the whole five plus decades), and the number of people deemed to be “in poverty” by the official measure has about doubled as the population has grown.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15218/marijuana-impact

Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University, is quoted in the media observing that marijuana drug addiction is quietly becoming a stealth public health crisis.

During the new year, Gatestone will be empaneling experts to examine this potential threat to the motoring public, those in the workplace, and young people.

As the nation moves towards the widespread legalization of marijuana, Gatestone Institute has announced plans for a series of symposiums during 2020 that will closely examine the potential impact of those actions on the nation’s children, occupational safety, and transportation.

Gatestone’s founder and president, Nina Rosenwald, observed:

“We have seen the tragic, unintended consequences of other formerly regulated substances on our young people and the nation’s population as a whole. From the most recent disturbing deaths among our youth from vaping to what is now a death toll of 9,000 children and adolescents from opioid poisonings over nearly two decades, there is little doubt that our children are the most vulnerable to what we don’t know about these types of chemicals. And that is only part of the equation as we seek to more fully understand the potential impact of legalized marijuana on our society.”

Unintended consequences from a little understood threat

Of equal concern to Gatestone Institute is the evolution of marijuana with far more potent mixtures now being produced with the potential for grave consequences in the workplace and on the streets of our towns and cities.

Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University, is quoted in the media observing that marijuana drug addiction is quietly becoming a stealth public health crisis.

“It wasn’t obvious to me 25 years ago, when nine percent of self-reported cannabis users over the (prior) month reported daily or near-daily use. I always was prepared to say, ‘No, it’s not a very abusable drug. Nine percent of anybody will do something stupid.’ But that number is now [something like] 40 percent.”