RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anna Wintour, world famous garmentologist, Hillaryac and Obama supporter is editor of Vogue Magazine.

In 2011 the magazine tucked among its ad pages featuring $20,000.00 pocketbooks and other expensive must have accessories, a column praising Asma-al Assad, the wife of Bashar al Assad titled “A Rose in the Desert.”

Here is what the article said about Syria:

“Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. ”

Rather Vague on Syria wouldn’t you say?????rsk

Last year, President Obama assured the world that “we are living in the most peaceful, prosperous, and progressive era in human history,” and that “the world has never been less violent.”

Translated, those statements meant that active foreign-policy volcanoes in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and the Middle East would probably not blow up on what little was left of Obama’s watch.

Obama is the U.S. version of Stanley Baldwin, the suave, three-time British prime minister of the 1920s and 1930s. Baldwin’s last tenure (1935–1937) coincided with the rapid rise of aggressive German, Italian, and Japanese Fascism.

Baldwin was a passionate spokesman for disarmament. He helped organize peace conferences. He tirelessly lectured on the need for pacifism. He basked in the praise of his good intentions.

Baldwin assured Fascists that he was not rearming Britain. Instead, he preached that the deadly new weapons of the 20th century made war so unthinkable that it would be almost impossible for it to break out.

Baldwin left office when the world was still relatively quiet. But his appeasement and pacifism had sown the seeds for a global conflagration soon to come.

Obama, the Nobel peace laureate and former president, resembles Baldwin. Both seemed to believe that war breaks out only because of misunderstandings that reflect honest differences. Therefore, tensions between aggressors and their targets can be remedied by more talk, international agreements, goodwill, and concessions.

Ideas such as strategic deterrence were apparently considered by both Baldwin and Obama to be Neanderthal, judging from Baldwin’s naÏve efforts to ask Hitler not to rearm or annex territory, and Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy and his pledge never to “do stupid sh**” abroad.

Obama issued various empty deadlines to Iran to cease enriching uranium before concluding a 2015 deal that allowed the Iranians to continue working their centrifuges.

Aggressors clearly assumed that Obama’s assurances were green lights to further their own agendas without consequences.

Iran routinely threatened U.S. Navy ships, even taking ten American sailors into custody early last year. Obama issued various empty deadlines to Iran to cease enriching uranium before concluding a 2015 deal that allowed the Iranians to continue working their centrifuges. Iran was freed from crippling economic sanctions. And Iran quietly received $400 million in cash (in the dead of night) for the release of American hostages.

The final report of the Senate’s “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” revealed that U.S.-stationed Saudi intelligence officers, who provided assistance to the hijackers ahead of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, were in direct contact with senior members of the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

During the Taliban regime in Kabul, the Brotherhood had training camps in Afghanistan for Kashmiri militants fighting against India and Central Asian states.

In his inaugural address on January 20, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to “unite the civilized world against… and eradicate radical Islamic terrorism.” So far, however, the administration in Washington, like its predecessors, has done little to rein in one of the key sources of this growing global phenomenon — the Muslim Brotherhood.

Founded by Sheikh Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood does not always openly advocate violence. But its main agenda is to establish a worldwide Islamic Caliphate by way of the sword. As its motto reads: “The Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our wish.”The Brotherhood’s hostility towards the United States has been clear. It not only backed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but founded al Qaeda, nineteen of whose operatives perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.

The final report of the Senate’s “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” — released in December 2002 — revealed that U.S.-stationed Saudi intelligence officers, who provided assistance to the hijackers ahead of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, were in direct contact with senior members of the American branch of the Brotherhood.

Tonight Jewish families all over the world will retell the story of the Exodus from bondage and oppression in Egypt and the beginning of the journey to Israel-the Promised Land. There is more to the inspiring story. It was on this journey that Moses gave the Ten Commandments, revealed by God, to his people. The Decalogue, as they are known, provide the obligations for a decent life: to worship God, keep the Sabbath, honor parents, reject murder, adultery, the bearing of false witness, theft, and envy.

Most people do their best to follow these commandments. Except for the Second Commandment which invokes: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” It has been roughly translated to mean “Thou shalt not worship false idols.”

Modern false idols do not take the shape of golden calves, but cults and liberal cant that people worship with equal fervor. The very people who deride Creationism continue to worship at the altar of man-made global warming, despite the glaring absence of scientific evidence.

They have instituted orthodox political correctness in lieu of honest debate and diversity; they have actively banned depictions of the Ten Commandments from schools, state houses and local courts. Most perverse of all, they use reference to the Commandments to justify their abandonment and slander of Israel.

In spite of this as in the ancient tale of the Haggadah when the Red Sea miraculously parted so that Moses could lead our people from Egypt, today Israel’s steel hulled Naval vessels part the sea to defend the most humane, most decent, most accomplished democracy in the Middle East.

And tonight, my ladle will part the soup to fetch the matzah balls.

Happy Passover to all….rsk

Robert M Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist and historian of psychiatry. He has written biographies of the Melbourne psychiatrist Reg Ellery and New Zealand psychiatrist Mary Barkas

For those who care deeply about the profession and its goal to treat genuinely debilitating conditions, the state of the profession is cause for deep dismay. Needed is nothing less than a thorough review of the framework in which psychiatry operates, plus a clear plan for its future.

Psychiatry, it must be said, is at an all-time low, the culmination of a steady slide since the Eighties. Its practitioners have little to be excited about, and that hardly does much for patients. If we look back on history – something about which psychiatry is notoriously lax – the closest analogy would be the Thirties, when there were a number of biological treatments but, in truth, they were hardly successful cures (ECT was a notable exception). Cynicism ruled supreme until the Fifties, when a golden age of psychopharmacology started.

Several issues can be indicted for the current desuetude. The first is the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM) which, in the eyes of some critics, has become the Mein Kampf of the discipline. Started, like so many things that go wrong, with the best of intentions, it has given the world an American-based classification of ‘disorders’ (no one is allowed to have a disease or illness now) derived from in-house committees subject to intense political, social and personality processes. The result has not been pretty.

Conditions that were determined by 150 years of careful psychiatric observation have been put through a bureaucratic grinder that killed off paraphrenia and Asperger’s syndrome, seriously messed up depression and inflicted such etymological nightmares as Late Luteal Phase Dysphoria Disorder (aka premenstrual syndrome). By putting everything in a neat pocket manual and providing a tick-box list for every disorder, the DSM made instant diagnosis a reality for professionals, if not the less skilled who wanted to get in on the mental health business. So much for the lengthy and careful psychiatric examination! Add to all this the appetite of a voracious legal profession for new “conditions” that might provide pretexts to sue and, with one thing and another, we are where we are today.

Then there are the drugs. It seems, a new product is launched on the market every day, judging by the journal ads, the glossy flyers in the mail and the bevvies of pert and perky sales reps who come calling with their latest brochures. The problem is that the new drugs are all variations on a theme. Antidepressants, antipsychotics and sedatives have not changed for decades; the only real difference is in the side effects.

A particularly egregious practice is the use of the so-called “atypical antipsychotics” as a kind of psychiatric penicillin. They are prescribed now for just about any disorder, regardless what other drugs are used. Their effect is to produce an emotional flattening. This can be considered something of an improvement, but hardly a cure. Add to this the most spectacular side effect is weight gain, turning skeletal figures into Michelin men and women in a few weeks. Journals are full of articles about the metabolic syndrome produced by these drugs.

It cannot be said that the public image of psychiatry is in the ascent. The disclosure that some prominent researchers have their hands deeply in the drug companies’ pockets is less than a good look. Add to this that psychiatry’s mandate – its exclusive control of the designated illnesses – is fragmenting to an unprecedented degree. There have always been turf wars with neurology and psychology, but they were but kindergarten squabbles compared with the present situation. Witness the disparate agencies which have not just a foot, but an arm and a leg, in invading (and, in the process, facilitating) the raging epidemics of autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder ADHD (another user-friendly acronym that says as much as its hides). The best example is the widespread use of stimulant drugs to control behaviour in children. Add to that all the adult cases and you get some idea of the mess. Future generations will not thank us for this unwanted legacy.

You know, if I hadn’t seen the unending denial and resistance of those in Britain who are dead against Britain’s exit from the European Union and want to stop it even now, I’d never have believed the extent and nature of the unremitting attempts to delegitimise and unseat in some way President Donald Trump.

Even so, I find those attempts hard to credit. A truly titanic struggle is going on in Washington DC by Trump’s opponents to destroy him – and by Trump himself to fight them off. So far he hasn’t done very well, mainly because… well, he hasn’t yet managed to see off his foes.

Trump has been dogged by persistent claims that he or his campaign team or his circle had alarmingly close connections to President Putin’s Russia. This McCarthyite red scare has been quite something to behold, coming as it has from the left which until now defined itself by its principled opposition to such red-baiting.

But let’s put that particular irony to one side. The fact is that, despite all the heat and noise about this, nothing at all has been found to link the Trump circle improperly to the Russians. The former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who endorsed Hillary Clinton and previously called Donald Trump a dupe of Russia, has said: “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.”

You don’t say. But the spark that has become a little flame is evidence that links the Obama administration to improper and possibly even illegal activity in trying to use intelligence-surveillance information against Trump and his circle. Trump claimed that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower shortly before last November’s presidential election. This claim was immediately scorned and held up as yet more proof that Trump lived in a world of alternative reality.

Then something rather extraordinary happened. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, said he had received information from an intelligence whistleblower that members of the intelligence community “incidentally collected” communications from the Trump transition team during legal surveillance operations of foreign targets. This, said Nunes, produced “dozens” of reports which eventually unmasked several individuals’ identities and were “widely disseminated”.

Nunes was promptly accused of Republican partisanship and protecting Trump, particularly since he told the President of this development before telling his committee – although he also said he had told the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, before briefing the President.

The Democrats’ frenzied calls for Nunes to recuse himself as a result increased still further when it emerged that he had met his shadowy source on the White House estate. Proof positive, cried the Democrats, that Nunes had been caught red-handed. Really? Was it ever likely that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee would expose himself to the obvious risk that peddling false information from a tainted source like that would inevitably become known and end his career?

In Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” a soothsayer confronts Caesar: “Beware the Ides of March,” he warns. In 44BC, the Ides foretold the death of Caesar. In 2017, they portended a difficult month, domestically and globally. Creating further mistrust among already polarized Americans has been a rash of “fake” news, which I define as not just news that is blatantly false, but news that is based on innuendos and half-truths. One example: A week ago, a column in The New York Times carried the headline, “Amid ‘Trump Effect,’ Fear: 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applications.” It was half true. The survey found that 39% of responding institutions did see a decline in applications, but 35% saw an increase and 26% had no change.

The allegation that Putin interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump is predicated on the likelihood that Russia did try to interfere in the election. It should not surprise us. Interference in elections is something competing nations do. However, the implication that Putin would have preferred Trump, an untested politician and a man characterized as volatile, stupid and xenophobic, is nonsensical. It is unlikely he would have preferred Mr. Trump to Mrs. Clinton, a woman he knows – and perhaps dislikes – but who he had been able to use for his benefit. Think of Russian ties to the Clinton Foundation and Russian purchase of U.S. uranium assets, with help from the Clintons. Consider the Podesta brothers. It makes no sense that Putin would have preferred the unknown to the known.

The assertion by Mr. Trump that Obama wiretapped him has been met with derision and disbelief. While it appears far-fetched, intercepted communications among the Trump transition team were uncovered in an investigation into links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald Trump, at least according to an article in The New York Times by Michael Schmidt, Matthew Rosenberg, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo on January 19, 2017. The article begins: “American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications…into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump.” Further on, they add, “One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided by the [Obama] White House.” Are we now witnessing the uncovering of a massive ‘cover-up’?

In 2013, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid detonated the nuclear option for all judicial nominations, other than for the Supreme Court. Would it be surprising if current Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell invokes the nuclear option for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch if Democrats filibuster? Polarization has poisoned our politics. It has made us less civil. Would Republicans treat an incoming Democrat President, in four years or eight years, with dignity or with disdain?

The most curious thing about the political class’s war in defence of truth is that it coexists with a war against freedom of speech. In one breath, our betters, whether it’s the technocrats of the EU or broadsheet thinkers, bemoan a crisis of truth, claiming that a combination of demagoguery and populist myth-making has propelled the modern West into a ‘post-truth’ era. Yet in the next they express disdain for the ideal of unfettered free thought and debate. Whether they’re instituting laws against ‘hate speech’ or enforcing social stigma against such things as ‘climate-change denial’ or ‘Europhobia’, they exhibit a palpable discomfort with the idea of a fully open public sphere in which nothing is unsayable.

We might even say that in 2017, there are two things that really animate the political and cultural elites of the West: first, their self-styled urge to defend truth, their pose as warriors for honesty against the misinformation of the new populists; and secondly, their agitation with unfettered discussion and with the expression of what they consider to be hateful or outré views. This is striking, because truth without freedom, without the freest possible space in which to debate and doubt and blaspheme, is not truth at all. It is dogma. It represents an assumption of intellectual and moral infallibility rather than a winning and proving of it in the only way that counts: through free public contestation. That our rulers both claim to love truth and fear freedom of speech utterly explodes the pretensions of their moral panic about a ‘post-truth’ era. It’s not truth they want to protect – it’s the authority of their prejudice.

Anybody genuinely concerned with the idea of truth, with deepening humanity’s understanding of itself, nature and society, with encouraging the deployment of reason in order to render the world more knowable, ought to have a natural and in fact quite fierce disposition to freedom of thought and speech. The two go hand in hand. Actually, the one — truth — is reliant on the other — freedom. This point has been consistently argued by liberals throughout the modern period. John Milton, in his passionate plea in 1644 against the licensing of the press in England, famously argued that we should ‘Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter?’ To guard the truth, or what we presume to be true, from free, open discussion is to do truth an ‘injury’, said Milton — it ‘misdoubts her strength’.

Truth without freedom, without the freest possible space in which to debate and doubt and blaspheme, is not truth at all.

Censorship, Milton argued, is the implacable enemy of truth. In fact it is the ‘stop of Truth’. Repressing the utterance or publication of ‘scandalous, seditious, and libellous’ material is often done in the name of preserving truth, he said, but in fact it commits two wrongs against truth. First, in assuming the public should not have to think for itself, and in fact cannot do so, it weakens the public’s intellectual and moral capacities, dulling their ability autonomously to distinguish truth from falsehood. In ‘disexercising and blunting our abilities’, censorship represents a ‘discouragement of all learning’, said Milton. ‘Our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs’, he said. That is, we must use our mental and moral muscles, our faculty of judgement, as surely as we use our physical muscles, and censorship prevents us from doing that. And secondly, the censorship of scandal or sedition or ‘evil’ shrinks the sphere of public discussion and thus puts off the potential discovery of greater truths, he argued — by ‘hindring and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civill Wisdome’.

So censorship is hostile to truth both in its implicit doubting of the public’s capacity for critical, truthful thought and in its weakening of the kind of conditions in which old ideas might come to be superseded by newer, more truthful ones. Milton strikingly argued that if someone thinks something is true simply because he has been told it’s true, then this isn’t ‘truth’ in any meaningful sense. He wrote: ‘If [a man] beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, [then] though his belief be true, the very truth he holds becomes his heresie.’ Why? Because he has ‘gladly [posted] off to another’ the ‘charge and care’ of his beliefs and worldview. That is, he has outsourced his own moral universe to a higher authority; his belief in truth is passive and childish; truth has been given to him, not discovered or learned by him. CONTINUE AT SITE

Boston

Jews have a way with catastrophe; the hundreds of images in “Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross” are testimony to it. Ross said, “Having an official camera, I was able to capture all the tragic period in the¼ Lodz Ghetto. I did it knowing that if I were caught my family and I would be tortured and killed.” Ross (1910-1991) was one of the only two Jews in the Ghetto allowed to have cameras; they were required to take pictures to be used by the Nazis for propaganda, but each also surreptitiously documented the deterioration and removal of the Ghetto’s inhabitants. It is a tradition that goes back to the prophet Jeremiah crying, “Alas,” over the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.
Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Through July 30

Very little is known for sure about Ross. He was apparently born in Warsaw and may have had a career there as a photojournalist of some sort. In 1939 he joined the Polish army, and when it was defeated he ended up in Lodz. In the middle of present-day Poland, Lodz was an important industrial city with a mixed population of Poles, Germans and Jews. With the Nazi conquest, the Jews were moved into a blighted section and physically segregated from the rest of the city. All Jews, eventually well over the original 160,000, were made to wear a yellow Star of David sewn on their clothes. The Germans found Ross’s name on the Photographers Association list and confiscated his camera, but when the Judenrat, the “Jewish council” set up by the Nazis for inhabitants to administer the Ghetto, was established, the camera was returned.

Ross was responsible for taking identity photos, recording the activities of the Judenrat, and documenting the factories established in the Ghetto in the hope that the Nazis would spare Jews doing productive work. Examples of these pictures were included in the 6,000 negatives Ross buried in the fall of 1944. “I buried my negatives in the ground in order that there should be some record of our tragedy….I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom.” The negatives were in metal canisters placed in wooden boxes, but when they were retrieved in 1945, water had ruined half of them. The swirls and signs of deterioration on the prints made from the still usable ones are emblematic of the harrowing experiences of their subjects. CONTINUE AT SITE