RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/10/the-punishing-agenda-of-the-anti-punishment-movement/

Punishment is a public declaration of moral standards. It is an extension of natural law. Descend into the anti-incarceration activists’ amoral abyss, and you abolish the very fabric of our ethical tradition.

On November 29, 2019, a man now called the London Bridge terrorist slaughtered British student Jack Merritt. While the killer has been named for a famous London landmark; his victim has been all but forgotten.

The killer’s family was quick to condemn the London Bridge terrorist’s actions. The family of his victim—not so much.

David Merritt, the late lad’s dad, got busy condemning those who wish to condemn that killer and his ilk to life in a cell. By December 2, Merritt the elder was already penning op-eds about clemency and leniency for criminals like the man who murdered his son.

Such minute-made forgiveness would have been Jack’s wish, asserted Merritt rather presumptuously—for how can the living speak for the dead?

David Merritt, then, proceeded to minimize what was murder with malice aforethought by dismissing what his son’s killer did as a mere “tragic incident.”

Just how obscene is the progressive mindset can be gleaned from what Mr. Merritt wrote:

If Jack could comment on his death—and the tragic incident on Friday 29 November—he would be livid. We would see him ticking it over in his mind before a word was uttered between us. Jack would understand the political timing with visceral clarity.

He would be seething at his death, and his life, being used to perpetuate an agenda of hate that he gave his everything fighting against . . . What Jack would want from this is for all of us to walk through the door he has booted down, in his black Doc Martens.

That door opens up a world where we do not lock up and throw away the key. Where we do not give indeterminate sentences … Where we do not slash prison budgets, and where we focus on rehabilitation not revenge. [Emphasis added.]

Henry Jackson Society: Home

https://henryjacksonsociety.org

Coming into this week, so-called “woke liberals” were pretty confident of two things: President Trump could do no right and Meghan Markle could do no wrong.

The Markle situation requires little exposition. Family splits are hard at the best of times, only more so when business is combined with family life.  In such circumstances, it is wise to tell your family before the press that you’re quitting the firm.  Not much, therefore, to be learned from this episode beyond basic courtesy and communication.

President Trump’s week, however, has proved more revelatory.

Prior to his election, the world was widely warned – indeed it became an article of faith – that President Trump did not have the proper temperament or approach to foreign policy.  “Dangerous” was how one New York Times editorial referred to the prospect. 

This lack of confidence has continued into his presidency.  Trump’s approaches to NATO, North Korea, China, and the Middle East have been questioned respectively.  Time and again, we have been told that his unorthodox approach risks nuclear war, economic ruin, or both.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/the_jewish_elite_bails_out.html

Attacks on New York Jews continue unabated in the New Year. A Jewish teen was threatened with a knife by a mob on New Year’s Eve, and a Jewish man was attacked by two women on the street on New Year’s Day. Many of the attacks are simply not reported out of fear.

No wonder — unless the attack causes serious injuries, most of the suspects have been released without bail and are walking the same neighborhoods as their victims, unlikely to serve any time or even make their court appearances. One of the attackers, who allegedly slapped three Orthodox Jewish women while yelling, “F— you, Jews,” was released and rearrested three more times for new assaults. She was unrepentant, telling the cops: “Yes, I slapped them. I cursed them out. I said ‘F-U, Jews.’” A Jewish man who was beaten with a chair by a mob on December 24 told the New York Post that he felt there was no use reporting the beating, “given new bail reform legislation that bars judges from detaining suspects in assaults that don’t result in injury — even in the case of hate crimes.”

Thanks to the new bail law, Jews are now being beaten in the streets with impunity. The law eliminates bail and requires pre-trial release for those charged with many violent and heinous crimes, such as second-degree manslaughter, aggravated vehicular homicide, criminal possession of a gun, and dozens of other serious charges.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/five-years-later-we-still-havent-learned-from-the-charlie-hebdo-massacre/

Giving a bunch of religious extremists or government bureaucrats veto power over our speech doesn’t make us safer. It just makes us less free.

Five years ago today, two French Islamists forced their way into the Paris editorial offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and began shooting. The journal’s offices had been moved to an unmarked building after they were hit by a 2011 firebombing in response to the publication of a satirical cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. The shooters managed to kill twelve people. A related attack soon followed in a kosher supermarket, where four Jews were murdered by a friend of the shooters.

Even today, the paper’s editor, who’s published offensive caricatures of popes and rabbis, lives under police protection for the crime of slandering Mohammed. Charlie Hebdo, whose circulation has dropped precipitously after an initial post-attack spike, is an ill-mannered slayer of sacred cows of a kind that, sadly, doesn’t exist in the United States. The only American enterprise I can think of that has a comparable openness to skewering all faiths is South Park, but even its excellent brand of satire is staid by comparison.

For a brief moment after attack, the free world rallied around Charlie Hebdo. “Je suis Charlie” became a global rallying cry. The massive march through the streets of Paris that followed included virtually every major world leader, including those hypocrites who are happy to clamp down on free expression in their own nations. One leader conspicuously, and embarrassingly, absent from the proceedings was the president of the United States, Barack Obama. He sent the U.S. ambassador to France instead.

https://jrnyquist.blog/2020/01/06/the-killing-of-general-soleimani-was-it-right/

There are many approaches to the subject of ethics. Aristotle said that we do not naturally possess goodness of character. Only by obedience to rules of valid conduct do we acquire such goodness. Does our national security establishment even know what goodness is? And was it right to assassinated General Soleimani?

Rightness of action, according to Aristotle, involves taking a middle path between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess.

Now let us examine President Trump’s order to kill General Soleimani. As actions go, the killing partakes of the spheres of Fear and Confidence, Honor and dishonor (major), actuated through temper and truthfulness (or lies).

On the first of these dimensions, did President Trump act with rashness, courage or cowardice? We cannot say it was cowardly, because he publicly took responsibility for killing a high-ranking Iranian general. No coward would place himself in the crosshairs of a violent terrorist regime. The question is whether or not President Trump acted rashly (i.e., the vice of having too much confidence).

Is Trump over-confident? In terms of acceptable risk, a leader should not create a situation in which he is likely to be killed. Leaders are not invincible, immortal, supermen. Therefore it is not, in principle, wise to wage war with poison weapons, or to target enemy leaders, unless you are prepared to suffer the same fate as those you have targeted.

In principle, a policy of killing enemy leaders, which (I am sad to admit) the United States has followed intermittently since Pearl Harbor, exposes our own leaders to assassination. An example of how this works may be found in the case of President John Kennedy’s assassination. It is known that Kennedy ordered a hit on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. It is also known that Castro learned of Kennedy’s order through a double agent (i.e., the prospective assassin), and said he knew about Kennedy’s hit when he visited the Brazilian Embassy in September 1963. These facts have been alluded to by famous persons, including President Lyndon Johnson and the chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, James Angleton. It is believed by some intelligence experts that two communist bloc intelligence services (DGI and KGB) were complicit in Kennedy’s assassination; that the Soviets acted to defend Castro, preemptively, and to lay down the law to future American presidents. This action had the intended effect when President Gerald Ford instituted Executive Order 12333, prohibiting assassinations. Because President Ford understood why Kennedy was assassinated, he exercised prudence to safeguard the person of the president — reflecting the lesson of Dallas, learned on 22 November 1963. The lesson was simple: America should not attempt to assassinate foreign leaders or officials. President Carter and President Reagan affirmed Executive Order 12333 during their terms of office.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-5-some-perspective-on-iran

As you probably know, over the course of several weeks in December Iranian proxies known as the Kataib Hezbollah carried out multiple attacks against military installations in Iraq. On December 27, one of those attacks killed an American contractor, and wounded several other Americans and Iraqis, at the K1 military base near Kurkuk. Then on December 31 the same Iran-backed group stormed the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad. On January 3, the U.S. military, under orders from President Trump, conducted a retaliatory strike that killed the leader of Iran’s so-called Quds Forces, Qasem Soleimani. Subsequently, Iran has threatened further rounds of retaliation against the U.S., although those have not occurred as of this writing.

Before getting too caught up in the tensions of the current moment, perhaps we should step back and look at how things have been going lately for Iran. The answer is, not very well. This is one of those things that you can figure out if you look around enough, but rarely is the information compiled in one place. So I’ll do it for you. As I have remarked before, the U.S. has been incredibly blessed over the years by the rank incompetence of its geopolitical adversaries. Think Russia, Cuba and North Korea as examples. China too, although I’ll save more detail on that one for a future post.

Iran’s population in 2020 (from worldometers.info) is just under 84 million. That is slightly more than 1% of world population, and makes Iran the second most populous country in the Middle East, after Egypt. And Iran has the seeming blessing of vast oil reserves.

So you would think that Iran would have a relatively large and growing economy. Not so. Iran’s GDP (IMF 2019 estimate) is only $458 billion, or about 0.57% of world GDP, and just over $5000 per capita. (For comparison, the per capita GDP of Mexico and China are around $10,000, Brazil about $9000, and the U.S. over $60,000.).

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-multiple-faces-of-anti-semitism/

Several years ago, in an article for Commentary magazine, I offered a distinction between two kinds of anti-Semitic mindsets. I named the first one “bierkeller” anti-Semitism and the second one “bistro” anti-Semitism, as a way of illustrating the cultural gulf between these two forms.

Bierkellers, or “beer cellars,” were the drinking establishments in Germany that during the 1920s and ’30s were the domain of Nazi thugs. They also provided an arena for Adolf Hitler to refine his foaming gutter rhetoric targeting communism, liberalism, and most of all, the Jews. There was no attempt to camouflage or prettify any of this rhetoric, which loudly declared that the Jews were Germany’s misfortune. The thorough dehumanization of the Jews in Nazi propaganda prepared the ground for a decade of persecution that culminated in the Holocaust.

Bierkeller anti-Semitism, then, was unmistakable and instantly recognizable. But “bistro” anti-Semitism – named a bit mischievously in honor of the cozy restaurants and bars where metropolitan intellectuals tend to gather – was, I argued, harder to identify. That is because Jews as Jews are rarely the direct targets of these writings, speeches, parliamentary resolutions and so on. Instead, the bistro mindset relies upon qualifiers, codes and euphemisms that seek to separate “Jews” and “Judaism” from “Zionism,” “The State of Israel,” “The Jewish Establishment” and the other bugbears of progressives who advance anti-Semitic arguments while indignantly deflecting the charge of anti-Semitism as a reputational smear without foundation.

This contrast between the full-throated anti-Semitism that denies the Jews their humanity and the camouflaged anti-Semitism that denies the Jews their nationality isn’t the only difference. Arguably more important is the observation that the “bierkeller” form of anti-Semitism explicitly aims to visit physical violence upon Jews, whereas in its “bistro” form, protestations against Jewish power and privilege manifest in the main non-violently form: for example, boycott campaigns, demonstrations against pro-Israel and Zionist speakers on university campuses, the constant opprobrium poured upon the Jewish state in the halls of the United Nations, and by leading human-rights NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

DPS Note:

This was a terrific rally and enormously encouraging to see so many people get off their sofas on a Sunday and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge in cold weather to make their point.

But ……Some of it annoyed me – a lot.For example, as reported, Gov. Cuomo denounced “discrimination, racism and antisemitism” ….. 

But he didn’t denounce the new State Law which he proudly signed which puts violent anti-Semites back on the street the same day as they’re arrested, with no bail and no regard for their being a continuing danger to the community. 

He’s at a rally which is the result of an appalling number of attacks on Jews by Jew haters. The whole point of the outpouring of anger and emotion was to demonstrate against anti-Semitism. But the good Governor couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t just say that anti-Semitism is bad. He had to throw in discrimination and racism to cover all the required politically correct bases so no one can accuse him of favoring the Jews. READ IT ALL

We have ordnance that can kill enemies 200 feet underground. But the important part is to limit civilian casualties while causing the Iranian economy and regime to implode.

While the mullahs in Iran continue to threaten the United States with worldwide terrorist attacks against American individuals and groups, it might be time for them to reconsider their position.

The mullahs are attempting to run a formerly evolving modern state, utilizing the ideas of 12th-century Shia Islam; they remain in power through the repression of the well-paid Revolutionary Guard. Their most urgent strategic priority is a regeneration of Persian ascendancy not seen since Darius the Great. Their methodology for this new Persian Empire is to complete a nuclear bomb production industry now nascent among some 40 dispersed and hardened sites.

The mullahs are willing to force the Iranian people to absorb the effects of crushing economic sanctions imposed by the United States, the United Nations, and cooperating countries in order to build their bomb.

As a result, the mullahs in 2019 precipitously raised fuel prices 50 to 200 percent and immediately were inundated by waves of violent protests in most of Iran’s larger cities. An estimated 1,500 Iranian protesters died.

The Iranian economy remains dependent on oil production and export. Its most vulnerable points are the six oil production centers at Abadan, Esfahan, Bandar-e Abbas, Tehran, Arak, and Tabriz. If any one of those is reduced in capability, even for a short time, the economy will further weaken, and domestic instability will increase.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/2019s-adult-of-the-year-11578009044?emailToken=

Person-of-the-year awards are almost always bestowed on men and women who already meet with fawning praise. Let’s instead craft an award based on a person’s willingness to speak truth to power—whether to the press, the boss, or to partisan operators. Call it Adult of the Year. The winner: Attorney General William Barr.

President Trump nominated Mr. Barr in December 2018, and for a moment he received the respect he deserves. The press had grown accustomed to demeaning all Trump nominees, but was stymied by Mr. Barr’s impressive career and bipartisan legal support. A Justice Department and Central Intelligence Agency veteran, he served as attorney general from 1990-91 with distinction. Media outlets had to acknowledge his “pedigree,” and CNN even quoted an unnamed Justice Department lawyer who had been “nervous” about a Trump pick but pronounced Mr. Barr “a great choice” because “he’s tough he’s principled and he’s independent.”

Mr. Barr remains all those things. He has been vilified precisely because he has maintained an impartial view of the Justice Department and has kept his promises. The great hope—and demand—of the Russia-collusion crowd was that Mr. Barr—as a longtime man of the institution—would circle the department’s wagons. His refusal to do so has made him a threat.

And so commenced one of the more obvious, not to mention nasty, delegitimization campaigns in modern Beltway history. Journalists and Democrats accused him of manipulating the rollout of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in March. They pounced on his decision in May to name U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into the 2016 Trump campaign, accusing both of engaging in “conspiracy theories.” CONTINUE AT SITE