RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/after-isis-claims-credit-for-toronto-attack-new-york-times-reporter-says-killer-could-not-be-pro-isis/

A shooting in the Greektown area of Toronto Monday evening killed two and injured 13 more victims:

#BREAKING: Toronto police have identified the 10-year-old girl killed in the Danforth shooting as Julianna Kozis of Markham.

CP24 has learned the identity of one of the victims killed in last night’s mass shooting on the Danforth: 18-year-old Reese Fallon.

BREAKING: Canadian officials identify suspect in Toronto mass shooting as Faisal Hussain of Toronto.

Early on Wednesday, ISIS claimed credit for Monday’s attack, calling Hussain a “soldier of the Islamic State”:

But later in the day, New York Times reporter Rukmini Callamachi claimed that because Hussain killed himself immediately following the attack, he could not possibly have been inspired by ISIS:

Now, alert readers might be a bit confused here. Not only did ISIS claim credit for the attack, as seen in the earlier tweet, but Callamachi herself had reported it.

Strangely, Callamachi was on Canadian TV giving an interview earlier today following the ISIS claim of credit acknowledging that, at least from ISIS’s point of view, they were praising Hussain for responding to their call for supporters to conduct attacks at home to terrorize Western countries:

The phrasing that refers to responding to calls to target coalition countries, that refers to a famous speech put out in 2014 by ISIS’s then spokesman Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani, where they called on people who could not travel to the Islamic State who were still back home in Western countries and elsewhere in the world to carry out attacks in situ, in their own communities, anyway they could. It was in that speech that they spoke about using cars to run people over, even using rocks to use them to smash the heads of their enemies.

So what the phrasing indicates is that from ISIS’ perspective this was a man who was most likely self-radicalized, who was inspired by their propaganda, and not somebody who actually traveled to Syria, or took more concrete direction from the group. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/facebook-lawsuits-loom-tens-of-billions-on-the-line/

Facebook stocks plunged precipitously on Thursday after the company’s earnings report showed they missed expectations on revenue and that the social media platform’s monthly users are down significantly. All of this comes in the wake of ongoing scandals, including charges of data misuse and anti-conservative bias.

“During a conference call Wednesday, Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Wehner predicted bad news for the second half, and the company’s shares immediately began a drastic retreat in the extended session,” Marketwatch reported on Thursday.

According to Reuters, “Facebook shares dived 18.6 percent, set for its biggest one-day percentage drop ever, after the social media giant said profit margins would plummet for years due to costs to improve privacy safeguards and slowing usage in its big advertising markets.”

But stock prices aren’t the only problems facing the beleaguered social media behemoth. The company is facing massive fines and possible government intervention as lawsuits pile up in the U.S. and around the world. In fact, Facebook is facing more than three dozen class-action lawsuits over Cambridge Analytica privacy breaches alone. The looming legal nightmare is so significant that the company felt the need to include a note about it in their quarterly SEC report:

Beginning on March 20, 2018, multiple putative class actions and derivative actions were filed in state and federal courts in the United States and elsewhere against us and certain of our directors and officers alleging violations of securities laws, breach of fiduciary duties, and other causes of action in connection with the misuse of certain data by a developer that shared such data with third parties […] the events surrounding this misuse of data became the subject of U.S. Federal Trade Commission and other government inquiries in the United States, Europe, and other jurisdictions. Any such inquiries could subject us to substantial fines and costs, divert resources and the attention of management from our business, or adversely affect our business. [Emphasis added]

Here are a few of the dozens of lawsuits Facebook is facing:
1. Facebook accused of using ad tools to discriminate against older job seekers

PJM’s Phil Baker wrote in May that “A potential class-action lawsuit claims that companies are using Facebook’s ad creation tools to create ads for job hunters that discriminate by age, which is against federal law. The lawsuit is not against Facebook, but against a number of companies using their tools to weed out older job hunters.” CONTINUE AT SITE

http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/398940-polling-could-be-missing-reality-again

The biggest “fake news” story of the last few years was that Donald Trump had almost no chance of being elected president. The entire pundit-polling-news establishment (including myself) was wrong, and the expectation was that these institutions would recalibrate their coverage to reflect a true picture of the country. They made an enormous miscalculation and they would, of course, make changes.

Almost two years later, very little has changed in polling and analysis at major institutions and news media. If anything, the polling has drifted even further from reality when you look at the questions being asked and, more importantly, the questions not being asked. You don’t need polls to see the America you live in. You need polls to understand the part of America you don’t know, don’t see, and don’t understand.
I believe that, in 2016, many of the national election polls were basically accurate, depicting a fairly close race, but the analysis of them was sophomoric, failing to understand the electoral college power of the unique coalition Trump amassed. His daily Midwest rallies were dismissed as curiosities of a desperate candidate with no real chance of winning. Boy, were they wrong.

This disconnect could be happening all over again. Take a look, for example, at the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll for July. It’s very professional and a generally accurate poll. Look at what it found this month: Trump’s approval rating edged up 1 point and his “strong approval” went up 3 points. His personal image improved several points. The congressional horserace closed 4 points in the direction of Republicans.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/26/media-gaslighting-cant-hide-fact-trump-campaign-was-spied-on/

After a year of alarming revelations, the media are still more interested in proving the Trump campaign treasonously colluded with Russia than wrestling with the fact that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign.

On Saturday night, heavily redacted copies of the FBI’s application to wiretap Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page were released. The portion of the 412-page document that was not redacted supported the claims of Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as those made by the majority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The senators and the representatives had issued reports alleging that the FBI used an unverified Clinton campaign document to secure a wiretap against an American citizen, that the application for the wiretap used circular reporting and lacked verification for its central claims, and that it made materially false claims related to the source’s credibility.

President Trump tweeted triumphantly and hyperbolically about what the documents showed regarding the FBI’s behavior toward his campaign. Whatever you think about Trump’s reaction to the release of the FISA application, the media reaction to the story was disingenuous and even more hyperbolic than the president’s tweets. After a year of continuous and alarming revelations, the media are still more interested in proving the Trump campaign treasonously colluded with Russia than wrestling with the fact that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign, and used dubious partisan political research to justify their surveillance.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270841/greatest-hysteria-american-history-dennis-prager

You and I are living through the greatest mass hysteria in American history. For many Americans, the McCarthy era held that dubious distinction, but what is happening now is incomparably worse.

For one thing, any hysteria that existed then was directed against the greatest evil in the world at the time: communism. Then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee notwithstanding, there really were Americans in important positions who supported communist regimes enslaving their populations and committing mass murder. McCarthy was on to something.

In contrast, the country is choking on hysteria over the extremely unlikely possibility — for which there is still no evidence — that Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, and the absurdity that President Trump works for Russian President Vladimir Putin.​

For another, the mainstream media did not support McCarthy. Most in the media were highly critical of McCarthy. Today, the mainstream media are not the voices of caution. They are the creators of the hysteria. There have been conspiracy theories throughout American history (e.g. Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t kill President John F. Kennedy alone; the moon landing never happened). But this is the first time the media have created and promoted a conspiracy. Not surprisingly, they have dropped any pretense of objective reporting in the process.

And while some Americans were unfairly labeled communists during the McCarthy era, countless Democratic politicians and leaders in news and entertainment have called members of the Trump administration and the tens of millions of Americans who support the president fascists, white supremacists, haters, xenophobes and even Nazis.​

In the case of Mariia Butina, the lengths to which derangement is driving the left.

Another sign of the left is losing its mind and overplaying its hand in the Trump-Russia saga is the sudden obsession and fulmination over a Russian woman named Mariia Butina.

“Republicans Have an Alger Hiss Problem Named Mariia,” exclaims the title of a Politico piece getting a lot of play in the press. It states:

Alleged Russian spy Mariia Butina was arrested just a few days short of the 70th anniversary of the last major accusation of Russian infiltration in America’s political system: when on August 3, 1948, Time editor and ex-communist Whittaker Chambers publicly accused former high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Soviet agent.

Rattled Democrats, including President Harry Truman, handled the fallout poorly, hesitating to distance themselves from Hiss and unwittingly feeding a conservative narrative that they were soft on communism.

Republicans are now having their own Alger Hiss moment.

The author maintains that Butina’s alleged efforts to ingratiate herself with conservative organizations and the GOP speaks to “how intertwined Russia and the Republican Party are becoming, and whether the Republican Party is willing and able to disentangle itself.” (A noteworthy aside: this Politico piece could use an update in light of Reuters’ exclusive report that Butina in 2015 had met with “wider high-level contacts in Washington than previously known,” including actual government officials from the Obama administration.)

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3768/Compared-to-What.aspx

Good thing I got back from vacation in time for the really important news, the story Drudge, Breitbart, WaPo and NYT are all on the same page about this morning — or, at least, are all putting forth the same Page One about. The Michael Cohen tape. Big Story. Stop the whatever they’re called.
I have a question. It’s the same question I had last week about Trump and Putin in Helsinki. This question is one of the most important ones to ask about any such “news” blasted out by the news media, those special operators of the psychological battlefield, which they drive into every particle of collective American brain with exploding headlines and siren soundbytes. The Michael Cohen tape is the single most important thing for all of us to think about right now …. compared to what?
Compared to nothing, which is the media m.o. Last month was all Stormy Daniels, all the time. (Who?) Last week, it was “treason!” “impeachable offenses!!” “crimes!!!” committed by Trump at his press conference with Putin in Helsinki. Compared to what?
I don’t ask the question lightly. The truly brilliant anti-communist writer Josef Mackiewicz was a biologist by training. (By the way, so is Bukovsky.) “One of my professors,” he wrote in his 1962 book, The Triumph of Provocation, reissued by Yale University Press in 2009, “used to say that only a comparitive science is an exact science; only by comparisons can objective knowledge be gained. All my life I have tried to use this maxim as a guide, since it seems to me to be the only correct method in the assessment of all the truth that is accessible to man.”
We postmoderns feed on a poor diet of “all the news that’s fit to print.” Imagine, instead, assessing all the truth that is accessible to man.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/fake-hate-texas-waiter-made-up-story-about-racist-note-media-fooled-again/

Last week the mainstream media went all in on an unverified story about a waiter in Texas who got a “racist note” from a mean and nasty racist patron who wrote “We don’t tip terrorist” on the top of his bill.

The Washington Post, Newsweek, ABC, BBC, USA Today, CBS, New York Post, Huffington Post, The Root, and many other local, national, and international media outlets ran with a sketchy story, even though the exact same type of hoax has been tried before.

Most — if not all — of the reports were written without the smallest degree of skepticism, even though the MSM should be savvy enough by now to be wary of such stories because the odds are pretty good that they are going to turn out to be fake hate.

But the dream narrative of the establishment media is to show racist white people trying to victimize minorities and so such stories are always “too good to check,” as they say, and so the fake story went viral.

Here’s a sample from Newsweek, where they laid it on so thick readers were probably reaching for the Kleenex box by the end:

Texas restaurant is standing behind its waiter after a customer refused to leave him a tip and instead left behind a message calling him a “terrorist.”

Khalil Cavil shared a photo on Sunday of the customer’s nasty note—“We don’t tip terrorist”—and his name circled on the top of the $108 bill at Saltgrass Steak House. The customers did not leave a tip.

“At the moment I didn’t know what to think nor what to say, I was sick to my stomach,” the 20-year-old waiter wrote on Facebook. “Although, this is nothing new, it is still something that will test your faith.”

Cavil is working at the steakhouse in Odessa, Texas, as he gets ready to head to Dallas Baptist University later this year, the Odessa American reported. He wrote that he chose not to get angry but instead “decided to let this encourage” him and “fuel me to change the world.”

“I have decided to let this encourage me, and fuel me to change the world the only way I know how. So to all the haters out there, keep talking, your [sic] only helping me step into my destiny!” he added.

CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/denver-post-runs-letter-to-the-editor-comparing-trump-to-soviet-spies-demanding-his-execution/

On Saturday, the newspaper of record in Colorado published a letter to the editor demanding the execution of President Donald Trump. The paper’s opinion editor insisted that was not the author’s intent, but the letter speaks for itself.

“If it walks like a traitor, and talks like a traitor, and acts like a traitor … it is a traitor,” Lakewood resident Suzanne Gagnon wrote in a letter to the editor published by The Denver Post on Saturday. Gagnon did not hesitate to suggest what should be done with “traitors” like Trump.

“Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed on a basis of far less evidence than is had on Trump and many in his administration,” she wrote. “Besides being in agreement with the actions recommended in the editorial of July 19, I believe there are many more actions that can and should be taken against Trump to keep him from destroying the U.S.”

Execution is the historic punishment for traitors, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were Soviet spies convicted and executed for espionage. While the Rosenbergs’ children argue that their father did not deserve the death penalty and that their mother was wrongly convicted, there is a broad consensus among historians that both were guilty, but their trial was marred by clear judicial and legal improprieties. Many historians argue they should not have been executed. In the words of Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, they were “guilty — and framed.”

It is possible that Suzanne Gagnon’s sentence about the Rosenbergs could be read as a call to not have them executed, but in the context of her declaration of Trump as a traitor and her ominous suggestion that “many more actions … can and should be taken against Trump to keep him from destroying the U.S.,” it seems far more likely she was indeed calling for Trump’s execution.

The Denver Post defended publishing the letter to the editor, however, arguing that Gagnon did not call for Trump’s execution.

“We would never run a letter suggesting that the president of the United States be executed,” Megan Schrader, editor of the editorial page, told the Washington Free Beacon. “Upon reviewing this letter, I don’t think that was the letter writer’s intent.”

“She wrote to be critical of an editorial I wrote lauding Sen. Cory Gardner’s efforts to impose sanctions on Russia and supportive of another editorial we had run that suggested actions Congress could take to respond to the Helsinki press conference,” Schrader argued. CONTINUE AT SITE