RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/08/02/justice-system-allows-innocent-mans-reputation-trashed-not-fit/

EXCERPT

“Innocent until proved guilty” is – or was – one of the proudest legal doctrines of Western civilisation. It dates back to Roman law, and is particularly strong in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Why does it matter so much? I suggest two reasons. The first is about human nature. We are not always naturally fair. If we see a wrong done, we are often so angry that we wish to punish someone straightaway, without bothering to establish guilt. Society has to guard against that instinct. Otherwise, mob rule takes over.

The second reason is about human dignity. If you do not presume a person is innocent, you presume he or she is guilty. If that is the way a society thinks, the authorities gain terrifying power over the individual. The burden of proof lies on him. If he faces hostility, that word “burden” is apposite. If you have to show you did not commit any crime of which anyone accuses you, how on earth do you do it?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/01/the-war-on-the-obvious/

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/01

When was the last time you were called racist? If a supporter of President Trump, it’s a safe bet the gross epithet is regularly seared upon your forehead. Always, by those who self-anoint as progressive.

Such a charge, once preserved for the truly primitive of mind, is now stamped and singed on anyone who dares to disagree with anything issuing from the left side of the political aisle.

To point out the obvious is “racist.” This week, President Trump’s blistering comments on Baltimore’s cadaverous state invited the familiar threadbare cries. Perhaps, because that city is majority-black. Or perhaps because that term is the only resort of those defending the indefensible.

Because Baltimore is indefensible. And its denizens deserve better.

President Trump’s greatest gift is his penchant for forcing his foes to defend the indefensible. Baltimore, like many Fishtowns across post-industrial America, is Hell, for the forgotten majority, at least.

Baltimore condemns its citizens with the country’s worst schools and mops up more murders than El Salvador. Its poverty rate is nearly twice the national average.

This scandal, of course, has nothing to do with a congressman’s melanin density. In the 1950s, city residents, buoyed by chrome, copper, and steel industry jobs, enjoyed a 7 percent pay bump on the average American. The number earning middle-class wages was one-fifth higher, poverty one-fifth lower than average America.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-would-we-do-without-the-word-racism-11564782112

If the country had a National Language Commission, and I were appointed commissioner, the first word I would put in cold storage—filed permanently away beside the N-word, the C-word, the K-word and other prohibited words—would be “racism.” In our day the word has been used imprecisely, promiscuously, perniciously and well beyond abundantly. If you are politically on the left, racism is what you accuse people of who don’t agree with you. If you are on the right, you can accuse them, I suppose, of socialism, but it doesn’t carry anything like the same resonance in moral opprobrium or self-awarded virtue as does racism.

The racist, if we can use the dictionary definition, believes that all members of a particular race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, which distinguish it as superior or inferior to other races. The true racist of course feels his own race is superior, and thereby he hasn’t any difficulty in discriminating or otherwise ill-treating members of other races, sometimes through government policy—as formerly under apartheid in South Africa or during the strict segregation once pervasive in the American South—or sometimes through ugly personal actions.

I am old enough to remember Jim Crow racism in action. When I lived in Arkansas in the early 1960s, there were still “colored” and white drinking fountains, separate bus and movie seating, and obvious differences in the quality of school buildings and other facilities available to blacks, and most people made no bones about it. Blacks were suppressed, oppressed and made to feel inferior in nearly every way that local governments could devise. The word racism wasn’t much in vogue in that place, or anywhere else, at that time. The majority of people who could rightly be called racist would not know what you were talking about if you accused them of racism.

https://quillette.com/2019/08/01/how-feminism-paved

In the last decade, in many parts of the English-speaking world, transgender advocacy has made substantial, and at times, expansive gains, with trans rights becoming embedded in institutions and enforced by the state. Like any significant historical event, this gender revolution has multiple causes. One is digital technology, providing virtual worlds which transcend physical reality and online networks for spreading activism. Another is academic theory: postmodernism and queer theory. I want to make the less obvious argument that transgenderism has been promoted by feminism.

Not all feminism, of course. From the start of the second wave, some radical feminists opposed the inclusion of male-to-female transsexuals under the general heading of “women.” Their argument culminated in Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire (1979): “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact.” Transsexualism, she observed, was the creation of medical men like John Money and Harry Benjamin. As the current wave of transgenderism was building at the beginning of the 21st century, a handful of radical lesbian feminists warned that it was detrimental to the material interests of women. They included Sheila Jeffreys, an English political scientist then teaching at the University of Melbourne, and Gallus Mag, a pseudonymous American blogger. At the time, their warnings must have seemed hysterical; they now appear remarkably prescient.

These radical feminists argued that “trans activism is misogyny” and “a men’s rights movement.” They were correct about its objective consequences being bad for females, as set out by the philosopher Kathleen Stock and the journalist Helen Joyce. The end of segregation by sex threatens the dignity and safety of women rather than men, because men are more violent and sexually predatory than women. Men in prison, for example, have a huge incentive to claim a female identity. In sports, the physical advantages of men are so great that their entry into women’s competitions automatically takes places from females. Women who enter men’s competitions, by contrast, are destined to lose. In the realm of sexuality, young lesbians are vulnerable to aggressive pursuit by transwomen, which activists celebrate as “breaking the cotton ceiling.” There is no equivalent pressure on men, whether straight or gay.

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.