RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14642/alan-dershowitz-defense

In fact, former FBI Director Louis Freeh studied the allegations and concluded that “the totality of the evidence refutes the allegations against Professor Dershowitz.”

The intent of The New Yorker seems to be to convince folks that Dershowitz is guilty even though there is not enough evidence to charge him, let alone convict…. This is where famed Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz finds himself: accused of a heinous crime without any real recourse or due process protection. As the accusations pop up on screens across the globe, they are assumed to be true even though Dershowitz has not been charged or convicted.

In fact, he has done the unthinkable and asked — in an op-ed with the Wall Street Journal — for the FBI to investigate him.

So what can be done to deter false allegations in the internet era? For starters, if a false accusation is made and proven, the accuser should be prosecuted and punished. There needs to be real consequences for falsely accusing someone of a crime.

Our criminal justice system is built on the notion that the burden is on the prosecution to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt before one’s liberty, our most valuable asset, can be taken away. And for good reason. We don’t want innocent people in jail.

We are willing to live with some guilty folks going free so that we don’t have the horror of an innocent person behind bars. Our system, with all of its flaws (including the concept that prosecutors who charge people with baseless claims cannot be charged), has clung to this bedrock principle of presumed innocence.

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-menace-of-political-correctness/

olitical correctness started out as a minor project of the international firm known as the Good Intentions Paving Company. What, after all, could be better intended than insisting that denigrating ethnic names (“polak,” “kike,” “spic,” “wop,” and worse) and language debasing women be debarred from public discourse and put out of bounds in civilized private conversation? Nothing, surely. But political correctness soon came to be about much more than social decorum. As with so many projects of the Good Intentions Paving Company, things haven’t worked out quite as planned.

Lashed up as it soon became with the campaign for a misguided equalizing in all American institutions, political correctness took a large leap forward in its ambitions. Criticism of any action or attempt to bring equality soon became, ipso facto, politically incorrect. Affirmative action—the rigging of admissions requirements at the country’s most prestigious universities in favor of what were deemed oppressed minority groups—was an early gambit in the campaign for equal outcomes and a boost, too, for political correctness. Criticizing affirmative action carried with it the penalty of being thought racist.

How could one admit minority students, it was felt, without catering to their special interests? So an ample buffet of courses in African-American, Chicano, and other studies were offered at universities. These courses would, naturally, be taught by matching minority-group faculty. To denigrate these courses, to argue that they were largely victimology, and as such that they lowered the standard once in place for the liberal arts in higher education, would in itself of course be politically incorrect, and most people who knew better were hesitant to step forth and say so.

What became known as the women’s movement soon claimed oppressed status, since it could not claim actual minority status. Homosexuals, male and female, were next on board. Hispanic Americans surely qualified, and so others who could construe a history—or, in the cant phrase of the day, a narrative—of inequality forced upon them. The United States began to seem a country of victims—and victimology, the study of victimhood from the point of view of the victims, became a dominant subject in high schools and especially in the social science and humanities departments of universities.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/31/menacing-invective-against-trump-creates-dangerous-climate/

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has bragged on two occasions that he would like to beat up President Donald Trump.

In March 2018, Biden huffed, “They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

Biden’s tough-guy braggadocio was apparently no slip. A year later, he doubled down on his physical threats.

“The idea that I’d be intimidated by Donald Trump? … He’s the bully that I’ve always stood up to. He’s the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.”

Had former Vice President Dick Cheney ever dared to say something similar of President Obama, what would the media reaction have been?

Recently, Sen. Corey Booker (D-N.J.), another presidential candidate, took up where Biden left off:

“Trump is a guy who you understand he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to feel like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly, out-of-shape man that he is if I did that. This physically weak specimen.”

One trait of the Democratic field of presidential candidates is always to sound further to the left than any of their primary rivals. Apparently, a similar habit is to see who can most effectively imagine beating up the president. For now, Booker seems to be in first place.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/07/sometimes-a-coup-is-just-a-coup/

I see that Nigel Farage has sparked yet another political innovation. Dry cleaners of the world are smiling. A few weeks ago, Mr Farage presented what Aristotle might have described as the final cause, that for the sake of which, an agitated onlooker tossed the contents of his plastic cup into the campaigning politician’s face and all over his dark blue suit. It looked like a nice suit, too.

It’s a gesture that is catching on. During President Trump’s recent state visit to the UK, one of the President’s supporters was—language police: what’s the correct participle?—milkshaked? Milkshook? I favour “shook”. Anyway, a chap in Trafalgar Square got doused by an angry anti-Trump protester. (Why are all anti-Trump protesters always so red-in-the-face angry?) What a waste of a good milkshake. Were Thomas Aquinas available, he might analogise the procedure to the sin of Onan, the misuse of a God-given faculty and improper spilling of precious liquid. But the Atlantic, noting the new popularity of (left-wing) people tossing milkshakes at (right-wing) people with whom they disagree, assures us that “Sometimes a Milkshake Is Just a Milkshake”. At least it’s not boiling hot coffee, the author wrote—or acid, or a Molotov cocktail. Be thankful for small mercies.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to note the artificially induced persistence of public insanity on the issue of Donald Trump. Here, the title of Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds says it all. As Noël Coward sang of mad dogs and Englishmen, “They’re obviously, definitely nuts!” There is, however, a looming disturbance in bedlam. There is still plenty of skirling insanity. Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, gives almost daily performances from behind his desk in the US Capitol. But there is a chill wind blowing through those chambers that is making the children shiver and think of heading home. The name of that refreshing breeze is William Barr, Donald Trump’s new Attorney-General.

Mr Barr has been around the political block a few times. He was Attorney-General once before, way back in the last century, under George H.W. Bush. Unlike his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, there is no rabbit about William Barr. When he was first confirmed, there were cries from people in Jerry Nadler’s corner for him to recuse himself from anything that had to do with the Democrats’ campaign to destroy President Trump (this is what we call an “investigation”), but Barr did not even bother to laugh. The man is entirely unflappable. After Robert Mueller delivered his two-volume fantasy fiction manuscript to Barr this spring, Barr and his colleagues dissected the report. They noted that it had determined that there was no collusion or co-ordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin (sadness!).

They also concluded (what Mr Mueller had forborne to conclude) that the President exercising his constitutionally-defined powers did not count as obstruction of justice. The Democrats in Congress and their PR representatives—that is, the press—had been bitterly disappointed to learn that the President of the United States was not in fact a Manchurian candidate who was in Putin’s pocket. (Actually, I could have told them that years ago, but they never asked.) After that bitter disappointment they had pinned everything on obstruction. “Surely we can get Trump for that! It worked against Richard Nixon, didn’t it?”

swtotd.blogspot.com

The TED spread – the difference between Three-month U.S. Treasuries and Three-month LIBOR and an indicator of perceived credit risk in the general economy – declined from 314 basis points to 131 basis points during the fourth quarter of 2008, after reaching a high of over 458 basis points on October 6. (Historically, the yield spread had been closer to 50 basis points). The S&P 500 bottomed on March 9, 2009 at 676.53. The Second Quarter of 2009 marked the end of the 2007-2009 recession. The rate on Fed Funds, which began 2008 at 4.25%, ended the year at 0.25%. Despite having spent almost half a century on Wall Street, I am an observer not an expert on credit markets, so what follows are opinions that should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. It is my contention, however, that monetary policy over the past decade has been driven by political wants not economic needs.

In my opinion, the incoming Obama Administration, in 2009, used the credit-driven recession to justify a political agenda of increasing the role of government and “…fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” as Mr. Obama put it five days before the 2008 election. Apart from demonizing Republicans, the first thing the new Administration did was to call the seven-quarter recession a “Great Recession,” reminding people of FDR and the Great Depression. Certainly, the bankruptcy of Lehman on September 15, 2008, and the ensuing credit crisis, made for a frightening few weeks, but the scare was over by the end of the year. While Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank Timothy Geithner have been criticized by some for their handling of the crisis, it is my belief they saved the system. Monday morning quarter-backing may argue that there were some things they did they should not have done and other things they did not do they should have done, but the bottom line is that, while Lehman want bankrupt and other banks were forced to sell out, by the end of December the crisis was largely resolved, as could be seen in the decline of the TED spread mentioned above and in the fact that high-yield bonds had begun to rally a month before year end.

For six and a half years, while the economy expanded from $14.2 trillion in 2009 to $18.2 trillion in 2015, the Federal Reserve left the Fed Funds Rate at 0.25%. It was only in the fourth quarter of 2015 that the Federal Reserve finally lifted the rate to 0.50%. The rate remained at that level until December 2016 when it was increased to 0.75%, just before the Trump Administration took office. During 2017, the rate rose, in three increments, to 1.50%. In 2018, the rate rose in four increments to 2.50% where it remains today – higher than it was but still low by any historical measure. However, once again, political pressure is being put on the Fed, this time by President Trump – and silently acquiesced to by members of Congress – to lower rates, a mistake, in my opinion. It is expected that this afternoon the Fed will reduce rates by twenty-five basis points.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/23010/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-islamic-zakat-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.

Barack Obama’s infamous June 2009 “New Beginnings” Cairo speech laid the groundwork for eight years of pro-Islamic policies at the expense of Judeo-Christian America. One of Obama’s least understood and most destructive promises made in Cairo involved Islamic terror financing disguised as charitable giving and humanitarian relief. This is how it works.

There are Five Pillars of Islam that govern Muslim life. They are acknowledged, obligatory, and practiced by Muslims worldwide:

1. Shahada – the profession of faith

2. Salat – five times a day prayer

3. Zakat – charitable giving

4. Sawm – fasting

5. Hajj – pilgrimage to Mecca

Zakat, the Third Pillar of Islam, requires Muslims to deduct a portion of their income to support the Islamic community. It is a religious obligation, a mandatory charitable contribution or tax, usually about 2.5% of an individual’s income. Zakat sounds familiar and unthreatening like traditional tithing to churches, synagogues, and temples paid by Christians, Jews, and Buddhists around the world.

On June 4, 2009 in Cairo, Obama exploited that familiarity and promised the Muslim world he would make zakat easier for American Muslims saying, “Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We must always examine the ways in which we protect it. For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That’s why I’m committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.” So, what is the problem?

Zakat is not charitable giving like traditional charitable giving in other religions. In 2009 Obama knew that zakat was being used to finance Islamic terrorism. WHAT?? Obama knew? Let’s examine the chronological dates to confirm what Obama knew and when he knew it.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/30/donald-trump-at-the-overton-window/

I shall leave it to the theologians to decide whether it is providential or merely coincidental that it was this very week in 1729, on Tuesday in fact, that the city of Baltimore was founded. I think we can say that, for the genus rattus, the city has been providential, at least since 1967. That was the year Thomas D’Alesandro III—the brother of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (and son of Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a former mayor of Baltimore)—began the city’s 50-plus years of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule. (If you except the younger Mr. D’Alesandro’s immediate predecessor, you can push the run of Democratic mayors of Baltimore all the way back to 1947.)

Things have been good for the rats in Baltimore. For homo sapiens sapiens? Not so good. Drugs. Violence. Poverty. Squalor. “The Wire” was more documentary than fiction.

But rats have, as the book of Genesis recommended, been fruitful. Also, they have multiplied. Quoth Catherine Pugh, mayor of Baltimore until just a couple of months ago, when she stepped down because of charges of corruption, rats were so plentiful in Baltimore that “you could smell them.”

But that was in September of last year, before Donald Trump turned his gimlet eye on Baltimore, a city that has suffered not only from more than half a century of local Democratic control but also from nearly 25 years of representation by Elijah Cummings, a race-hustling confidence man right out of central casting.

Over the weekend, the president opened up on “King Elijah” in a series of tweets. “Baltimore, under the leadership of Elijah Cummings,” he wrote in one, “has the worst Crime Statistics in the Nation. 25 years of all talk, no action! So tired of listening to the same old Bull . . . Next, Reverend Al will show up to complain & protest. Nothing will get done for the people in need. Sad.”

https://spectator.us/trumps-truths-about-baltimore/

‘You would think you were in a Third World country,’ the millionaire white New Yorker of retirement age said of Baltimore’s heavily black Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in 2015.

There is nothing remotely racist about this statement. We know that because Bernie Sanders said it. Yes, the Bernie Sanders who lives in whites-only Vermont and whose inability to connect with a key group of the Democratic base means that he has what the pollsters call an ‘African American problem’.

It was, however, disgracefully and irredeemably racist of President Trump to refer to Rep. Elijah Cummings’s Baltimore district as a ‘disgusting rat and rodent infested mess’ and a ‘very dangerous & filthy place’. It was racist not because Baltimore has the highest murder rate of any large American city, a corrupt and violent police force and, according to posts from residents and public-spirited enquiries by the London Independent, rats and mould in apartment complexes owned by Jared Kushner’s family. It was racist because Trump said it about a Democratic-controlled city with lots of African American, Democratic-voting inhabitants.

If you believe that what white millionaire New Yorker Donald Trump said about Baltimore was racist, then you should believe that what white millionaire New Yorker Bernie Sanders said about Baltimore was racist too. We’ll give Sanders a pass on the detail that the Third World ceased to exist around the time his beloved Soviet Union went under, and cut to the key question: is there, was there, a single ‘Third World’ country that was majority white?

Race is the third rail of American life, but the Democrats and their massed supporters in the media think that their way of talking about race is the only way. This is an insult to the rights of their fellow Americans, and an affront to common sense. Sanders and Trump both said what everyone knows, but fears to admit because the penalties for talking candidly about race in the United States are so high. The truth is that Baltimore’s poverty, violence and sustained failure make it an embarrassment to the United States.

https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/M7HMpG

California’s Office of Administrative Law (OAL) recently made it official: Your morning cup of coffee won’t give you cancer. Next week’s newsflash probably will be, swallowing an orange seed doesn’t cause a tree to grow in your stomach.

After more than a year of legal wrangling, OAL signed off on a proposed rule exempting coffee from Proposition 65, a decades-old voter-approved measure that requires warning labels on products that contain chemicals the state has deemed potentially carcinogenic. So that means cancer warning labels and the universally ignored coffee shop warnings can be removed at long last.

That’s good news for anyone who was actually worried. But this the whole silly struggle over coffee warnings highlights an explosion of exaggerated food fears, a bureaucracy run amok, and the baleful influence of trial lawyers who have generated over $500 million in settlement payments for Proposition 65 nuisance lawsuits (not including awards from cases that went to trial).

The public never faced a real risk of coffee related cancer, of course. But prodded by activists and lawyers, California’s Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) wildly overstated the risks of a natural substance called acrylamide that’s found in many cooked and roasted foods, including french fries, potato chips, bread, cookies, breakfast cereals—and coffee. It ignored the assessments of the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and more than 100 studies showing coffee is safe and instead followed the dubious lead of a little known and completely unaccountable international organization called the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

IARC, which is known to do the bidding of trial lawyers and which relied on questionable laboratory studies in animals, classified acrylamide as a “probable carcinogen.” In the real world, adults with the highest acrylamide exposure could consume 160 times as much as they now do and still not reach a level that toxicologists think would cause tumors in mice. Drowning in coffee, in short, is a greater risk than contracting cancer from it.

Consumers need useful, scientifically accurate, and truthful information about the possible health effects of the foods we eat, but this is not the way to get it. No one viewing this pseudo-controversy over coffee could conclude that Proposition 65 and OEHHA served the public well. In fact, as the Los Angeles Times predicted last year, the opposite is true. Millions of coffee drinkers simply ignored the warnings (and added what some trial lawyer would likely argue are dangerous levels of cream and sugar to boot).

Thus, we’ve reached the point where we need warnings about food warning labels, because they’ve become so confusing, complicated, and uninformative that the most rational course of action is to ignore them.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/28/woke-racism/

Well before Sigmund Freud formalized the idea of “projectionism”—the defense of one’s own shortcomings and sins by attributing them to others—it was a common theme in classical literature and the New Testament: the ridiculing of the mole on someone else’s nose to hide one’s own boil.

The term projection more or less sums up much of the woke identity politics movement, in which obsessions with racial privilege and tribal exceptionalism are justified by accusing others of just such bias.

While such racist projectionism can often be a psychological tic that assuages the guilt of one’s own rank prejudice, just as often accusing others of racism is a peremptory careerist move to win media attention, lucre, or job advancement.

Racists—those who assume those of different races always act collectively in predictable ways, usually far worse than does their own tribe—who charge racism assume that unlike the proverbial wolf crier, there is currently no downside to their hysterias and fantasies.

That is, the racist who for a variety of reasons lobs “Racist!” at others assumes that, even when his tired charges are proven false, in our postmodern society he can argue that these accusations in theory always could be true, and therefore no one would ever accuse a self-identified victim as a racist perpetrator himself.

For example, a Louisiana State University student, who falsely claimed she encountered a noose on campus—supposedly planted by whites to intimidate African-American students such as herself—was hardly contrite when the “noose” turned out to be simply a dangling power wire. Instead of apologizing, the accuser redoubled her claims: “Considering what is currently happening in this country, someone hanging a noose certainly seems plausible . . . Black students all over are being threatened for speaking out. I’ve previously been threatened for talking about race at LSU.”