RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is it better to represent the agenda of one rich guy or 1,000 rich guys?

Donald Trump continues to lead the GOP presidential field in the polls, which means it’s time to start taking his ideas more seriously. One place to start is his argument that because he’s a billionaire who doesn’t depend on contributions from others, he’s somehow superior because he’s immune from political influence.

The casino magnate refers to his competitors who accept political donations as “puppets” who are “totally controlled by special interests, lobbyists and donors.” In contrast, he says, “I don’t need anybody’s money. I don’t want anybody’s money.” It is a consistent part of his pitch to voters—that he’s “very rich” and therefore cannot be induced to indulge a narrow special interest.

The argument plays into the current political frustration with Washington, but it is as self-serving as it is dangerous to democracy. What he’s really saying is that nobody who isn’t wealthy should be able to run for President because only the superrich can be untainted by political corruption.

The Chautauqua Institution, deemed an adult education center, is less education than it is indoctrination to the world of The Left. In the month of July, in an idyllic setting, the Institution invited Islamists who speak of “Love and Justice in a World of Suffering,” hiding the truths about the suffering caused by Islam – both the harsh Sharia law already in effect for its adherents and to establish it in Dar Al-Harb (House of War), the countries not yet under Sharia – until the entire world will writhe under Islamic oppression.

Omid Safi, appointed director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center in July, 2014, spoke in terms to please the under informed. He and they would prefer that hideous acts of violence, such as perpetrated by ISIS, ISIL, Boko Haram, Hamas, and countless others with like purpose, be removed from the news media and replaced with stories of compassion. In so doing, of course, he would silence the reporters and critics and destroy our freedom to speak, report, and inform the masses about the evils perpetrated by Muslims, so that we would remain oblivious to Islam’s stealth control over our media and our minds. He would then pursue and obtain legal accommodations without obstacle, force Sharia law over our Constitutional laws without hindrance, and threaten all our freedoms through influence, treachery, and force.

Hillary Clinton may finally have outdone herself by creating an entirely new offense: commingling information.

Commingling funds has a lengthy history as criminal behavior resulting in its being completely banned in any of the fiduciary professions such as law and real estate. Lawyers and brokers dumping funds earmarked for their clients into their own or the company account claimed convenience and security as an excuse, but in almost all cases it was intended as a method of muddying the waters as regards fraud. By the 60s it was banned, no ifs, ands, or buts. (When I was involved in real estate decades ago, commingling was repeatedly and vehemently proscribed in the state handbook.)

So here comes the smartest woman in the world with her homebrew server. Though not put in quite these terms, Hillary’s major excuse since the start of the email imbroglio has been that the commingling of official and private communications on her server somehow inoculated all the governmental data, rendering it innocuous and fully justifying her initial refusal to turn over the information and her later wiping of the server. Yoga schedules and Chelsea’s marriage, according to Hillary’s argument, outweighed national security. A bold excuse, but no more so than the claims of ancient shysters that their client’s settlement funds somehow got lost in the wrong account.

A Common Core-sanctioned reading method “respected by both teachers and parents” has been ruining children’s reading ability for decades
Hundreds of websites still casually assert what is probably the most destructive sophistry in the history of education:

The Dolch Sight Words [created in the 1940s] are a list of the 220 most frequently used words in the English language. These sight words make up 50 to 70 percent of any general text….Dolch found that children who can identify a certain core group of words by sight could learn to read and comprehend better. Dolch’s sight word lists are still widely used today and highly respected by both teachers and parents. These sight words were designed to be learned and mastered by the third grade.

It has been well confirmed that many Muslims fanatics, such as members of ISIS, al Qaeda and Boko Haram have utterly no regard for anyone not a follower of Islam. By the standards of civilized people the following sample acts are barbaric. It is estimated that Islamic terrorists have kidnapped 3700 females as young as […]

Nothing special in the air: World’s largest airline prefers Oneworld alliance that numbers carriers from Jordan, Qatar and Malaysia
Rina Rozenberg and Zohar Blumenkrantz

Citing financial considerations, American Airlines said at the end of last week it would stop flying to Israel, but sources in the aviation industry told TheMarker that the real reason is the United States carrier’s ties with Arab airlines through its Oneworld alliance.

American, the world’s largest airline by passengers flown, fleet size and revenue, said on Thursday it would end its Philadelphia-Tel Aviv route as of January. The airlines’ Israeli office was given no advanced warnings and learned about the decision from the media.

Liberals applaud the new contract designed to protect women on campus from rapacious men by insisting on consenting signatures for every step of the mating dance. They applaud the trigger warnings that have been implemented in our educational institutions to warn the young and innocent that politically incorrect words may appear in some of our greatest works of literature and traumatize them. Yet when it comes to thrusting the young into the midst of topless hustlers in a part of town that abounds in stores and entertainment designed specifically to attract children, liberals are strangely blasé. In the SundayTimes lead editorial of Aug 22nd, the writer opines: “….being shirtless in the city is perfectly legal….the people who flock around the painted women in Times Square do not seem terribly offended. And those who are can walk away.”

Those who want to limit freedom of speech are misusing Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous 1919 line about ‘shouting fire in a theater’
In any debate today about how to respond to “offensive” or “inflammatory” speech, it is only a matter of time before somebody trots out that most familiar of talking points. “There is no right,” the opiner will say, “to shout fire in a crowded theater!”

Taken from a 1919 Supreme Court decision by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the fire-in-a-crowded-theater standard seldom gets much scrutiny. It tends to shut down discussion rather than to open it up. But that shouldn’t be—it is a flame well worth extinguishing.

First, its meaning has been inflated and distorted beyond recognition.

The 1919 Supreme Court case concerned Charles Schenck, secretary of the U.S. Socialist Party, who was convicted under the Espionage Act for distributing anti-draft leaflets during World War I. The justices unanimously upheld Schenck’s conviction and dismissed his plea for free speech.
Writing for the court, Justice Holmes conceded that “in many cases and in ordinary times,” the defendant’s words would have been perfectly legal—but not in the extraordinary times of world war. The key issue, Holmes concluded, was “the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

“A Disgrace to the Profession”: The World’s Scientists on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science

Before we start, a quick addendum to my post about “science journalist” David Appell’s false accusation that I doctored a quote in my new book. Mr Appell has now withdrawn the charge:

Fair enough. I’ll believe him. My bad. My apologies.

You might think he’d learned his lesson about making specific accusations about a book he hasn’t read. And yet, amazingly enough, he goes and does it all over again two inches down the page:

I wonder if Steyn has examined any of the other evidence for the hockey stick, some derived with independent mathematical techniques. Like Marcott et al Science 2013, PAGES 2k, or Tingley and Huybers.

I expect he hasn’t. If not, why not?

Yes, why not, Steyn? Ha! You’ve got no answer to that, have you?

In fact, there’s an entire section on other, supposedly “independent” hockey sticks, starting at page 171, and I devote pages 185-190 to Marcott et al.

Between apologizing for his previous false accusation and making his new false accusation, Mr Appell observes plaintively of himself:

Me, a poor freelancer scratching the floor for grains of wheat.

You might want to re-think your business model. Assuming people are as stupid as you wish they were doesn’t usually work out well.

The mosque fire received huge attention, while the rape epidemic is basically ignored. When a Swedish woman and her son are brutally knifed to death in the most Swedish of all places – an IKEA store – the Prime Minister has nothing to say.

The normal democratic order, where citizens can contact politicians or the media to make their voices heard, has all but evaporated in Sweden. Newspaper websites have removed the reader comment fields, and the politicians hide behind a wall of officials who brand callers expressing concern “racist,” and hang up. Sweden is governed by a power that has shut down the democratic process.

Questions flooded the social media: Who are these people that are let into Sweden? How many of them are not innocent victims of war, but in fact war criminals and other criminals, hiding among the refugees?

The most relevant question is: Why has one government after another chosen to spend Swedish taxpayers’ money to support and shelter citizens of other countries, while some of them try to kill us?