RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fusion-the-collusion-puppeteer-11565910174

The Justice Department is investigating how a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, came to exert so much influence over the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s erroneous Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Let’s hope the department is also investigating an even more influential man who had even less business manipulating the government: Glenn Simpson, the head of opposition-research firm Fusion GPS.

That’s a pressing question in light of new documents from high-ranking Justice official Bruce Ohr, obtained recently by Judicial Watch. The papers include, among other things, a dozen official FBI interviews (known as 302s) of Mr. Ohr that date from just after the 2016 election through May 2017. The documents suggest Mr. Simpson was the real puppet master of the collusion drama.

Most of the FBI’s debriefs of Mr. Ohr center on information about or from Mr. Steele—itself a major breach of FBI protocol. The bureau fired Mr. Steele as a source in autumn 2016, when it became clear he was blabbing about the FBI investigation to the press. The FBI nonetheless continued to use Mr. Ohr as a back door to its discredited source. The 302s relate the numerous times and ways Mr. Steele contacted Mr. Ohr with information—although many of the details of the conversations remain redacted.

More eye-popping in the 302s is the ease with which Mr. Simpson landed meetings with powerful officials, for no apparent purpose other than to peddle unverified accusations against the Trump team. This isn’t a former intelligence officer or government official, or even someone with specialized knowledge of Russia. Mr. Simpson is a private citizen—and one who Mr. Ohr and the FBI knew was providing information to Hillary Clinton ’s team (as Mr. Ohr acknowledges in his initial 302). Yet when Mr. Simpson called, officials across Washington hopped to, swallowing the claims that would become the basis of a false hysteria.  CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.city-journal.org/jeffrey-epstein

Here are a few things I know firsthand about being in jail. First and foremost, you have virtually no control over your life and surroundings. You can’t get so much as an aspirin without authorization. In most jails, you can’t wear a belt, or shoelaces, or keep a razor in your cell. You have no privacy, no sense of dignity, and no rights. And in a well-run jail, high-profile prisoners have virtually no chance of killing themselves.

So the alleged suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the 66-year-old financier with powerful American and foreign friends who was about to stand trial for allegedly sexually abusing dozens of girls, many of them underage, is particularly unfathomable—and outrageous. In a letter to the Justice Department, Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska called it inexcusable that Epstein did not live to face his accusers. “Obviously, heads must roll,” he wrote. Attorney General William Barr clearly agrees. Saying that he was “appalled” to have learned that Epstein was found dead at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday morning at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in lower Manhattan, Barr instructed the department’s inspector general to investigate precisely how Epstein died at MCC, a long-troubled, pretrial detention facility.

Epstein was placed on suicide watch on July 23 after being found semi-conscious in his cell with marks on his neck, in what prison officials described at the time as a failed suicide attempt. He was removed from suicide watch six days later, on July 29, and returned to a segregated area of the prison with extra security known as the special housing unit. Why Epstein was removed from suicide watch is a focus of the DOJ investigation.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/clarence-page/ct-column-mass-shooters-dayton-el-paso-toxic-masculinity-page-20190813-cin4sh2iszb7xl5a7hcbvq3i6a-story.html

As the toll from mass shootings this year already approaches the total for all of last year, more people are openly asking a question that has lurked mostly in the shadows: Why are the shooters so often white men?

“Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun,” declared President Donald Trump when he condemned shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which left at least 31 people dead and dozens wounded.

I wish it were that simple. The president was right about hatred, but as psychiatrists and social scientists look for factors that might help us to predict mass violence, they find it’s not mental illness as often as it’s just men, overwhelmingly white men.

Sure, there have been infamous exceptions, such as the 30-year-old woman who shot and killed one boy and wounded five other children in a Winnetka elementary school in 1988 before shooting a man and then killing herself.

Or there was the D.C. sniper case, in which two African American men, ages 41 and 17, terrorized the Washington metropolitan area in 2002, killing 17 people and wounding 10 others in a nationwide killing spree.

Well minds, in my nonmedical opinion, do not commit such horrible acts.

But a deeper dive into statistics finds serious mental illness to be conclusively present in only a small minority of mass shootings, according to various studies using different standards for what constitutes a mental health problem. A 2014 FBI study, for example, found that most mass shooters have a history of showing some symptoms of mental illness, though only about a fourth actually have been diagnosed.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/15/why-isnt-aoc-taking-blame-for-violent-attacks-on-ice/

If you didn’t know about Tuesday’s shooting at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Antonio, Texas, don’t feel bad. The story got almost no coverage. Even though it was the fourth attack on ICE offices in just the past four weeks, and these attacks are clearly politically motivated.

The San Antonio shooter knew what he was doing. He targeted two floors that housed ICE administrative offices. Another shooting occurred at a separate facility that housed an ICE contractor.

In other words, this was an attack specifically targeting ICE and those who work with ICE. The fact that the shooting took place at 3 a.m. is irrelevant, since there were people working in the offices at the time who were reportedly inches away from being hit.

On its own, this incident is troubling. But it comes in the wake of an attack on another ICE office in Tacoma, Washington, where 69-year-old Willem Van Spronsen went armed with a rifle and threw Molotov cocktails, hoping to hit a propane tank.

Sawn Fallah, head of the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility, said that had that July 14 attack been successful, it “could have resulted in the mass murder of staff and detainees housed at the facility.”

A couple of days before that, protesters stormed an ICE detention facility in Aurora, Colorado, took down an American flag, which they burned, and replaced it with a Mexican flag. And protesters blocked entrances to ICE’s national headquarters in D.C.

See the trend here? Protests are starting to turn violent.

:https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/12/stop-the-madness-before-it-drives-us-all-crazy/

Each week the world produces news that irritates, stuns and infuriates, and on occasion makes us question our collective sanity, leaving us, for example, wondering just how the likes of Joe Biden has been able to reach lofty positions from which he has been able to affect policies that impact our lives.

Here are a few stories from the last week that confirm suspicions we are living in foolish times:

While the Democrats fight to see who can build the biggest welfare state and promise voters that if they just gave them the power, they would make sure everyone has health care, in Great Britain — where everyone has health care — 4.4 million in a country of 66 million are waiting on surgery.

According to the United Press International, “new statistics posted by the National Health Service also showed a 16% increase of patients who’d waited for more than 18 weeks for non-emergency operations, such as hip or knee replacements.

“The NHS figures showed 233,000 Britons had waited for more than six months and 37,000 more than nine months.”

In America, Medicare for All promises free and easy health coverage, but the reality is it “would outlaw all private insurance,” makes sharp cuts in provider payments, which will lead to physician shortages and government rationing of care, and means higher taxes and Americans losing the coverage they have now.

Sen. Bernie Sanders is no longer unhinged — the door that once a barrier between his raging mind and the real world outside has completely fallen off.

On Saturday, Sanders, the Democrat or Socialist or just plain crazy uncle from Vermont, tweeted that “Donald Trump believes climate change is a hoax. Donald Trump is an idiot.” We don’t think the global warming scare is a hoax. Maybe a fraud. Perhaps a spreading swamp fever. Possibly just a big mistake. But not a hoax. We don’t believe Trump is an idiot, either. But quite a few on Twitter think Sanders is. Look at some of the responses:

“Bernie Sanders believes bread lines are good. Bernie Sanders is a communist idiot.”

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/23077/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-white-supremacy-killing

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com 

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The radical leftist hucksters in the Democrat party have repeatedly accused President Trump of being racist and a white supremacist. Is it true? Let’s find out.

Racial unity has been the subject of political speeches since before the Civil War. The United States was founded in 1776 during an era of worldwide slavery when even black men owned black slaves. Supremacy is the corollary of enslavement – you have to be a supremacist to own a slave. Slavery was outlawed in the United States in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment. So, let’s be clear, slavery has been illegal in the United States of America for 154 years.

Many countries and religions in the world continue to legally practice and embrace slavery – not Judeo-Christian America. The United States has Constitutionally rejected slavery and the attitude of supremacism that supports it. Instead, our American national credo strives for racial equality that is made possible through upward mobility and a robust middle class.

Equality in America is a matter of equal opportunity, not a guarantee of equal outcome. This is a very important distinction because it is what separates President Trump’s America-first ethos of individualism, from the radical leftist Democrat party’s ethos of collectivism. We will come back to that.

President Donald Trump is an unapologetic advocate of upward mobility and wealth creation for ALL Americans. Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! President Trump’s economic policies are color-blind and responsible for the lowest unemployment in the black community in history, as well as the lowest unemployment rate for hispanics in America since records were kept.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/racist_the_word_that_has_been_stripped_of_all_meaning.html

It should be clear to all Americans by now that the word the left loves to spew indiscriminately — racism — often now means nothing, absolutely nothing.  That word is meant to be an accusation of the worst order, an epithet that is supposed to destroy all those so charged.  But now it’s used so frequently, it has no meaning at all.  It’s like the f-word, overused and merely a sign of one’s lack of a wider vocabulary.  Like the overused f-word, calling someone a ‘racist’ is a sign of sloppy, uncritical thinking.  The word “racist” now means nothing more than any other bit of profanity hurled at those whom lefties have been directed to hate.  As the eminent Charles Kesler said a few weeks ago, it just an all-purpose epithet.  Martin Luther King, Jr., someone who knew about real racists, would have been appalled by the cheapening of the term, as much as he would be horrified to learn that one’s character no longer counts at all; not one bit.  Only skin color, sexual orientation or some other fabricated victim grouping of which one can claim membership matters, or perhaps having a sufficiently Alinskyite ideology. 

President Trump is no racist by any definition of the word and all those Democrats calling him one know it.  The president has a long record of color-blindness in business and in his personal life. The Dems know that as well.  They are the people who see skin color first and foremost.  They think their abdication to its primacy above all is crucial to their taking back the presidency.  In reality, they are the actual racists.  But the word no longer has any meaning and they know it.  That is why they have escalated their attacks on Trump as a “white supremacist.”  How absurdly ridiculous.  If there are any white supremacists in the U.S. today, they are small in number and certifiably insane.  Everyone knows that, including the Democrats who are tossing that smear around.  

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=9887e5bea6

I’m old enough to have been around when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, on November 22, 1963. The suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was caught by Dallas police within about an hour after the shooting. They initially put him in a lock-up at Dallas police headquarters, where Oswald instantly became the highest-profile prisoner in the country. Just two days later, on November 24, the police undertook to transfer Oswald from the police headquarters to the county jail. They allowed a group of reporters into the basement of the police headquarters to observe as they escorted Oswald out to a waiting armored car to take him to the jail. Suddenly, with TV cameras rolling, a guy named Jack Ruby emerged from the group of reporters and shot Oswald dead at point blank range. By the end of the day, pretty much everybody in the country (myself included) had seen the clip of the shooting.

Who was this Ruby? He owned a couple of nightclubs in Dallas, but had a highly sketchy background that included alleged mob ties and involvement in drug dealing. No direct links between him and Oswald were ever revealed. His motive for killing Oswald? Excellent question.

You can easily understand why there has been an endless profusion of alternatives to the official “lone gunman” theory of the Kennedy assassination. If Oswald had been working with or backed by some powerful interests, they would clearly want him disposed of as soon as possible once he was arrested. Now Oswald had been silenced before ever saying a word. Ruby had no obvious personal motive for the shooting, and was just the kind of guy who might be carrying out a “hit.” And the Ruby hit doesn’t gibe very well with the “lone gunman” hypothesis of the Kennedy assassination. Thus we have had half a century of theories — officially going by the name “conspiracy theories” — as to who might have been working with Oswald to kill Kennedy, and why. Multiple official inquiries, most notably the Warren Commission, have tried to put these speculations to rest, but have never fully succeeded.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/12/the-white-

The specter of white supremacy haunts America. Let us empower the government to crush it.

Just yesterday, “the deplorables” were to be deplored because they were “racist, sexist, homophobic,” clingers to “God and guns,” and Russian dupes to boot. Today, the agility and unanimity with which our politicians and media—heck, the ruling class—have shifted to indicting roughly 72 percent of the population as white supremacists, likely violent, would fill with envy their homologues in China, Cuba, North Korea, and other tyrannical places. By comparison, Joseph Goebbels had sloppy message discipline. Not even the Soviets in their salad days were so “on message!”

One may suppose that our ruling class merely intends to energize its constituencies and cower the opposition in the 2020 elections. But this is no game. Their proposals would impose pre-punishment for pre-crimes on persons accused or “suspected” of being a “white supremacist.” By whom? On the basis of what?

In practice, a “white supremacist” is anyone whom anyone in power dislikes enough to so label him. Who would accept being outlawed at will? Our ruling class plays with matches in a house drenched in gasoline.

Here is the latest. The Wall Street Journal on Saturday featured an essay by one Clint Watts, formerly of the FBI and West Point’s Counter Terrorism Center. Watts makes those proposals using the word “white” 16 times in 18 paragraphs. The sociopolitical ideas rife among white people are the main matrix of terrorism in America, Watts contends. Racial profiling, anyone?

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/07/the-global-triumph

“The fact that American civilisation is growing in so many different directions at the same time makes it much more robust then past civilisations, even while ensuring that it will always offend someone. It has always offended European sensibilities, but Europe is the past. America is the future, and it will be for a long time to come.”

Like St Peter’s Basilica, the entire city of Rome is a palimpsest on which ancient structures undergird the modern streets. Take an espresso on the Piazza Navona, and you may notice that it is exactly the shape of a Roman stadium, which of course is what it was. Beyond Rome, the sites of London and Paris were selected and developed by Roman colonial administrators. The boundaries of Roman occupation continue to divide the island of Great Britain into the nations of England, Scotland and Wales.

Just as visible as the physical traces of ancient Rome are the human ones. Italy, Spain, Portugal and France still speak languages derived from Latin. All of the countries of continental Europe, as well as the super-national European Union, still use Roman legal systems. And notwithstanding the recent influx of Muslim immigrants, the dominant religion of Europe is still the religion of Constantine—to the extent that Europeans have any religion at all.

Yet for all this continuity, the civilisation of Western Europe is not the civilisation of Rome. Western civilisation was built upon the ruins of Rome. The population of Rome is thought to have shrunk by 90 per cent (or more) following the Germanic invasions that overthrew the Roman empire. The Ostrogoths, Visigoths and Vandals all sacked Rome. The Franks established what would become modern-day France. The Burgundians and Lombards left their names on regions of France and Italy, respectively. The Anglo-Saxons gave both their name and their language to Angle-land, or England.

Western civilisation thus emerged as a hybrid of the collapsed civilisation of Rome and the culture—one hesitates to call it a “civilisation”—of the Germanic invaders who conquered it. It is the civilisation that developed in those areas of the western Roman empire that fell under the rule of German aristocracies. North Africa, which ultimately came under Arab rule, was lost to the West in the seventh century. The rural north and east of what is today Germany had never been Romanised in the first place.

Visit the historical centre of Rome today, and Western civilisation is all around you: magnificent sixteenth-century churches, grand piazzas adorned with decorative fountains, the artwork of Bernini and Michelangelo. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of almost every other city in Europe. Americans tour Europe in droves to experience these living museums for themselves. Defying the destructive force of the Reformation, mass industrialisation and two world wars, the “sweetness and light” of Western civilisation still delights and shines. And the Pope still celebrates Mass at the “new” St Peter’s, now nearly 400 years old.