RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=1d2351192c

At the Manhattan Contrarian family dinner table the other day, the subject of conversation turned to this question: Should we be optimistic about the future of the United States? Good and valid points were made on both sides of the issue. But the most important point weighed for the side of optimism. That point was that, of all the countries in the world, the United States is the place where the people — rather than the government — really run the country. Here, more than anyplace else, people can pursue their own initiatives and dreams without the government having the ability to obstruct and stymie private efforts, and force resources into pathways chosen by elite government functionaries.

Why does this matter? It’s not complicated. From the perspective of aggregate economic performance, the simple answer is that a trial-and-error process with hundreds of millions of participants will come up with much better and more numerous solutions to human problems than the small number of the very smartest people with government authority can ever come up with. From the perspective of the individual, the answer is that the only worthwhile life to lead is the life of freedom, where you make your own choices and take responsibility for your own success or failure.

As Exhibit A of how personal freedom and autonomy from the government leads to better economic performance, consider the fracking revolution. At the time of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, U.S. crude oil production had been dropping for decades, and had reached the level of barely 5 million barrels per day. President Obama had drunk the climate Kool Aid, and he and his administration made it a priority to keep oil production as low as possible in order, they thought, to “save the planet.”. They blocked drilling on federal lands, ceased granting offshore oil leases, refused permits for pipelines, issued negative environmental reviews, and otherwise did everything in their power to obstruct and stymie any and all new oil production and/or transmission. Yet by the time Obama left office in January 2017, U.S. crude oil production had soared to around 9 million barrels per day. The fact is that a presidential administration, under existing law, simply did not have the power to stop private actors from carrying the fracking revolution forward. (U.S. crude oil production has since further increased under the more energy-friendly Trump administration to 12.2 million barrels per day as of June 2019.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-a-brawler-for-democracy-11564175760

His partisan opponents and those who believe Donald Trump unfit can still try to remove or at least defame him with allegations that he sought to obstruct Robert Mueller’s investigation even if the investigation found no underlying crime.

That’s part of the political game but context is required. If a statement by John Dowd, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, to reporter Byron York is an accurate reflection of reality, then it reflects well on Mr. Mueller. Of his conversations with the special counsel, Mr. Dowd said: “Bob was a big boy about the political side of it. He understood the president had to address the politics of [the collusion investigation]. . . . People were pounding him about this thing every day, both privately and publicly, and he had to take [Mueller] on.”

Politicians, by the time they’ve asked millions for their money, their time, their support and their votes, are obliged to do just about anything to win. Once elected, they have an even bigger responsibility to defend their power and ability to govern. Ask any president: This, and not governing, is what they spend much of their time doing. And one thing you can say about President Trump: This most unlikely and in some ways weakest of presidents has brawled his way to victory over the most concerted delegitimization campaign any president has ever faced.

He was under attack from day one from partisan and media enemies who promoted the Russia collusion theory without especially caring whether it was true. He had every reason to wonder (and still does) whether he was getting a fair shake from the FBI and intelligence agencies. He has good reason to wonder, especially after Mr. Mueller revealed himself this week to be largely a figurehead in his own inquiry, whether the investigation was dragged out for two years in hopes of inducing him to commit obstruction crimes in place of the nonexistent collusion crimes. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-i-am-not-celebrating-the-mueller-hearings_3016865.html

I am certainly no stranger to the far end of a limb, but this time, I am really out there. I watched the Mueller hearings and despaired. I saw the Original Sin of Trump-Russia — “Russia hacked the DNC,” shaped by time and “messaging” into “Russian interference in 2016 on behalf on Donald Trump” — enter the record, accepted and even regurgitated by the GOP.

But Mueller gave a foggy performance! He never even read his own report! Impeachment is dead! The response by the estimable Mollie Hemingway typifies conservative satisfaction.

I rubbed my eyes, tried to smile, but it didn’t work. I still felt snookered and betrayed by Republicans who inexplicably failed to take the kill shot and win a victory for the country by exposing the whole rotten Deep State conspiracy, enabled and amplified by the MSM, to concoct a tale of a massive Russian cyber-strike on our democracy supposedly designed to prevent Hillary Clinton from being elected. This Big Lie has not only delegitimized Trump’s presidency now and forever, it simultaneously aligns Trump supporters — American patriots — with our adversaries in the Kremlin. Believe me, this will come back and haunt us all when Commissars Schiff, Tlaib, Brennan and the rest of the Party get real power.

Why did no Republican want to pull the pin on Russian hacking? I went back to a June 2017 op-ed I wrote by the same name: “Pulling the Pin on Russian Hacking.” Change the names around and it could run this morning.

About those Comey hearings.

Not one US senator asked former FBI Director James Comey to account for the sinister fact that the source of the explosive determination that “Russia hacked the DNC” computer system is a DNC contractor, not the FBI.

Not one US Senator asked why Comey’s FBI deferred to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s DNC when the DNC refused to permit FBI forensics specialists to examine the DNC computer system; or why the FBI was never able to examine John Podesta’s personal devices, either. Not one member of the Senate Intelligence Committe inquired as to why the DNC servers have not, after all of this time, ever been re-examined by the FBI; or whether it is just possible that this same DNC contractor putting forward the DNC/Russian hacking charge might have destroyed the DNC computer system.

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22987/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-the-2019-2020-equality

  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 116th Congress 2019-2020 Equality Act is a Democrat bill prohibiting discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in multiple areas including public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment, housing, credit, and the jury system. Sounds great – what’s the problem?

The Equality Act “updates” the definitions of three terms: sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity, and “expands” the categories of public accommodations. On May 17, 2019 H.R. 5: Equality Act passed the Democrat controlled House with unanimous support from Democrats plus eight Republican votes. Next, it goes to the Republican controlled Senate for consideration. Why the partisan split?

The Equality Act seeks to amend and expand the expressly recognized “non-discrimination” categories in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act was designed to provide equal protection under the law to African Americans and to women in 20th century America making it illegal to discriminate against them based on race, ethnicity, or gender. In 1964 the word “gender” was specifically understood to mean male or female in the biological, chromosomal, colloquial sense of the word. In the 21st century the leftist Democrat party is selling sameness as equality and feelings as facts – they are not the same.

Even the name Equality Act is part of the deception. The name evokes compassion in the casual observer, but there is nothing equal about the Equality Act, it is a colossal humanitarian hoax that redefines maleness and femaleness with the words “gender identity.” This is how it works.

No longer satisfied with laws prohibiting discrimination based on gender, the radical left has taken aim at the biological definition of maleness and femaleness making it a subjective matter of opinion rather than an objective matter of chromosomes. Gender identity is not the same as gender. Why is this important?

Facts are not feelings. Facts support the objective reality that is the foundation of biological science, laws, and ordered liberty. Feelings support the subjective reality of political science, the arts, and psychology. We can have feelings about facts, but feelings cannot change facts in a society of ordered liberty. The danger of confusing objective and subjective reality is discussed at length in “The Humanitarian Hoax of Multiple Realities.”

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Those of us of a certain age were brought up in a time when spiteful words were common, unpleasant to endure, but not “harmful.” In those long-past days, if we came home in tears we were told to ignore what words may have hurt our pride or our sensibilities. Today, “harmful” words create victims, especially if directed at women, people of color, gays or those of the Muslim faith, and are deemed “harmful;” perpetrators must be punished. This attitude is prevalent in educational institutions, the media, the entertainment industry and among progressive politicians. The prohibition of uncomfortable remarks and dissenting opinions is reminiscent of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. It brings to mind a letter from E.B. White written to the New York Herald Tribune in 1947. The Tribune had defended the movie industry for requiring its employees to state their political beliefs: “…I can only assume that your editorial writer, in a hurry to get home for Thanksgiving, tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.” We are at the same point today, only now it is the Left doing the blacklisting, not the Right. 

This is not to suggest that words cannot have effect. They can and they do. We find solace in words from the Bible, beauty in poetry from Keats and Shelley, and meaning in writings from Shakespeare to Hemingway. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is a metonymic adage coined by the English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. In speeches, Thomas Paine rallied Americans for independence. Adolph Hitler used the power of his voice to incite hatred of Jews, while Churchill’s speeches held a nation together as it fought alone against the tyranny of Nazism for over a year. Saul Alinsky was a master wordsmith. In his 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, a book that influenced Barack Obama as a community organizer in the early 1990s and later as a politician, Alinsky emphasized that ridicule was man’s most effective weapon. Political rallies are used to gin up enthusiasm. But just as we should ignore the words used in political rallies for those we support, we should not take seriously those used in rallies for those we oppose.

Russiagate prober Robert Mueller testified yesterday on Capitol Hill for a total of five hours. Or perhaps he testified twice, which would be a reasonable assumption in the light of two diametrically opposed accounts of his performance.

Were you to invest faith in the report of ABC Washington bureau veteran Zoe Daniels, the Russiagate inquisitor’s turn at the microphone was a creditable performance. Here’s a little taste of how she saw the quizzing:

Democrats spent weeks practising for that exact scenario and strategically loaded their questions with all the phrases they needed.

# Cedric Richmond: “So, it’s fair to say the President tried to protect himself by asking staff to falsify records relevant to an ongoing investigation?”

# Hakeem Jeffries: “Donald Trump told [former White House counsel] Don McGahn that Mueller has to go. True?”

# Mike Quigley: Do any of Trump’s quotes about Wikileaks disturb you?

Mr Mueller answered in the affirmative for all those questions (and added “problematic is an understatement” for the last one). Democrats, surely, cheered internally.

So Mueller acquitted himself with aplomb? Not according to The Federalist‘s David Harsanyi, whose column touches on a number of matters concerning bias and prosecutorial incuriosity that somehow escaped Ms Daniels’ notice. Harsanyi writes:

[Mueller was asked] if he could cite a single example besides Donald Trump where the DOJ “determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined.” Mueller responded: “I cannot, but this is a unique situation.”

After lecturing everyone about how justice must be meted out equally to all Americans, we now hear that rules are malleable if we’re talking about Donald Trump. As [was] also pointed out, Trump should not be above the law, but he should not be below it, either.