RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/17/spare-peace-love-mythology-woodstock-nothing-phoney-festival/

It was fifty years ago this week that Woodstock stopped the Vietnam War and ushered in a new era of peace, love and understanding – sorry, that should read when 400,000 hippies sat in mud sharing one toilet for every 800 people like a bunch of huge overgrown toddlers staging a dirty protest. They had turned their backs on conventional society but when it turned out that they couldn’t even feed themselves, the ladies of the local Jewish community centre prepared 30,000 sandwiches which were handed out by local nuns.

Despite their railing against authority, more than 300 off-duty policemen were drafted in to keep order along with several hundred State Troopers and personnel from a nearby airport base to airlift the precious performers. One hopes they were being paid more than the onsite workers who were on a miserable $1.60 per hour minimum wage compared to, say, Santana, who were getting $2,000 per hour.

But at least none of them were amongst the three deaths that occurred including a man run over in his sleeping bag by a never-identified tractor driver and an 18-year-old Marine who had survived Vietnam but overdosed on some of the nasty drugs circulating, many of which were laced with rat poison. 

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/16/the-mountebank

Some time ago, I noted the irreconcilable difference between the Left and the rest of America: the majority of our fellow citizens believe America is an inherently good nation that continues its pursuit of a more perfect union; the Left believes America is an inherently evil nation that must be transformed fundamentally into an oppressive socialist state—at best.

For the Left to win this existential argument, it must distort and revile America’s history to destroy the truth of American Exceptionalism. If the past is evil, the present has no choice but to reject America’s history and its defenders; and to embrace the dishonest leftist ideology and the agenda of those who loathe America.

This is a dangerous devolution of the classical American political paradigm, in which both antagonists, conservatives and liberals, agreed America was an exceptional, fundamentally decent nation but differed about how to effectuate a more perfect union. This devolution has several causes, but notable is the incestuous relationship between the leftist media and left-wing academics. 

But, then, what can one expect when citizens subsidize leftist “professors” who use their positions to indoctrinate the hatred of America; and subscribe to a hubristic media that have conveniently jettisoned the veneer of objectivity in favor of the “righteous” left-wing propagandizing of “accountability journalism”?

What one can expect is this: the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project.”

According to Mara Gay of the New York Times’ editorial board, the 1619 Project “[i]n the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”

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

The eminent African-American economist Glenn Loury recently wondered in the New York Times why leading Democrats would defend Al Sharpton, a man who is a blatant anti-Semite, an anti-white racist, and to many, a simple con man.  Joe Biden calls him “a champion in the fight for civil rights.” Elizabeth Warren says “he has dedicated his life to the fight for justice for all,” and Kamala Harris lauds him as a man who “has spent his life fighting for what’s right.” Records show that President Obama had Sharpton visit his White House 118 times.

This, after Sharpton’s many outrages: the Tawana Brawley rape hoax of 1987, the anti-Jewish Crown Heights riots of 1991, and the firebombing of a Jewish-owned Harlem fashion boutique in 1995.

Loury suggests that any one of these things should have disqualified Sharpton from national platforms, along with any praise by Democratic Party leaders. But there’s something else, something no less repugnant, and perhaps even more shocking, that should obliterate once and for all the perception of Al Sharpton as a tough guy who never buckles when it comes to defending his race.

Al Sharpton is betraying black people currently enslaved in Africa. He went there. He spoke to them. He promised the slaves he met that he would awaken American blacks to their plight, but then he abandoned them. He abandoned them, I believe, because they are enslaved by Arab Muslims.   A review of just how this came about should be instructive.

In 2001, as Sharpton contemplated a run for president in the 2004 election, he made a trip to Sudan to verify reports of the ongoing enslavement of Christian blacks there by Arab Muslims. Reports were emerging of Arabs from northern Sudan raiding black Christian villages in the south of Africa’s then-largest country, killing the men and enslaving the women and children. (Full disclosure: At the time, I headed a movement to educate the public about modern-day slavery. We worked with the human rights organization Christian Solidarity International, which over the years redeemed tens of thousands of slaves in Sudan who were returned to their villages.)

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-israel-tlaib-omar-trump

“Israel has hypnotized the world. May Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” So says Rep. Ilhan Omar, D., Minn. Well, it’s a free country. Omar is not only entitled to her political opinions; she is entitled to express them as long as she avoids unlawful incitement.

The same goes for Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D. Mich., who advocates the “one-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a final settlement in which there would no longer be a Jewish state and the territory that is now Israel would gradually become Palestine. Omar and Tlaib are members of the hard left, self-styled “squad.” They are both BDS zealots. That is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement by which opponents of the Jewish state seek its extirpation.

Israel later – graciously – agreed to allow Tlaib to visit her aged and ailing grandmother in the West Bank, provided she didn’t use the trip to undermine her host. But the Jewish State was on solid ground with its initial denial. After all, the liberty to express one’s views does not imply immunity from the natural consequences of doing so. Among these is that the nation Omar and Tlaib seek to destabilize and ultimately dismantle may deny them entry.

That is precisely what the Israeli government did on Thursday. President Trump not only endorsed the move; he appears to have catalyzed it with a tweet, asserting that Israel would “show great weakness” if it permitted a visit from Omar and Tlaib because, according to the president, they “hate Israel & all Jewish people.”

While this rhetoric is abrasive in the Trumpian style, Israel’s exclusion of Omar and Tlaib makes eminent sense. Since when must a country, particularly one that daily confronts a terrorism challenge the likes of which we have never experienced, roll out the red carpet for aliens who mean it harm and encourage its enemies?

Naturally, because the alliance of Islamists and leftists calls the tune to which our media-Democrat complex dances, we are enduring gaseous denunciations from official Washington. Progressive groups are echoing Omar’s latest blather about how the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “insult[ed] democratic values” (as if a nation’s survival were not a democratic value). Despite this precious sensitivity about insults, Omar could not help herself but add that President Trump is an “Islamophobe.” That term, shrewdly developed by sharia supremacists, intimates that critical examination of Islam – particularly, its doctrinal calls for jihad against non-believers – is racist.

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.