I am not defending Moore because I do not know the facts only the accusations which are compelling. However, we are, supposedly, not guilty until proven otherwise in a court of law where the accused has certain rights and protections.. Being tarred and feathered in the mass media is not "justice."
This is what distinguished our nation when we sought our freedom from England. It has served us well and we should never forget that fact. (See 1 below.)
And:
What about Hillary? (See 1a below.)
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Suppose Canada allowed Iran's military forces to move within several miles of our northern border. (See 2 below.)
And
You gotta love Che Guevara and Castro because they duped the liberals, and the mass media who saw them as hero's. (See 2a below.).
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Trivia but interesting. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) In Defense of Judge Roy Moore
If one reads the original Washington Post
First, a few definitions. I shall call a human female who is under the age of consent, a “girl.” I shall call a human female who is of the age of consent, a “woman.” I shall also define the “age of consent” to be what the legal code of the state of Alabama, both in the 1970s and today, to be the age of consent: 16. This age is above the biological age of consent, which is puberty: menstruation for a woman, pubic hair for a man. In medieval canon law, a woman was thus of the age of consent around 12. In most of current-day Mexico, this is still the age of consent. I am a 70-year-old college professor, and to me, a woman under the age of 30 seems like a young girl. I personally regard none of my female students as women; all are children in my eyes But I shall reject both the biological age of consent, and my own personal view of the age of consent, and adopt Alabama’s age of consent.
Now read the Post article and assume that the reporters wrote the exact truth about what four human females told them (a big assumption, I grant). Then three of the four claim that Roy Moore dated them when they were women, not girls. And not only did they themselves consent to dating Moore, their families consented to their dating Moore. (Actually, according to one, her family withdrew consent, after which Moore ceased to date her). Furthermore, according to these three women, Moore never went beyond kissing and hugging. Which are the only acts a Christian man is permitted to engage in with a woman not his wife. According to these three women, Moore consistently acted as the Christian he claims to have been, and claims to be now.
The fourth human female told the Post reporters a completely different story. She claims that not only did Moore date her when she was a girl of fourteen, but that he also undressed her, and exposed himself. Notice the differences between this single claim and the other three reports: In a single case, Moore, a trained lawyer, dated jailbait. In this single case, Moore behaved in a dishonorable manner to a girl, not a woman. In this single case, we have reasons, given in the Post article, to doubt the claim: the accuser has been married three times, and has been in bankruptcy twice.
A commonsense view of human behavior is that bad guys repeat their MOs. Willie Sutton did not stop with a single bank robbery. Harvey Weinstein, Roman Polanski, and Bill Cosby have numerous rape accusers, not just one. Yet we are asked to believe a single report of mere sexual misbehavior, which is not even a claim of statutory rape.
On the basis of the Post article alone, I would have no doubt that Judge Moore dated young women when he was a young man in his early 30s. It is irrelevant that these women were in their late teens. They were of the age of consent, and hence women, not girls. It was my own experience in my thirties that women preferred older men. My own wife is six years my junior. Judge Moore’s wife is fourteen years his junior. (Judge Moore was 38 when he married his wife of 24, which an indication that he preferred younger women -- and that his wife preferred older men.)
Disregarding the single dubious accusation, Judge Moore is accused of behavior which has been considered completely moral for almost the entirety of human history: courting a young women in her teens while being more than ten years older. In contrast, John McCain, who has demanded that Judge Moore resign from the senate race, committed adultery, and divorced his wife to marry the woman with whom he committed adultery.
Notice that I don’t have to write “alleged to have committed adultery.” McCain admits it, because adultery is not only no longer illegal, it is now not even immoral. But for the entirety of human history, adultery has been, not only immoral, but a capital offence (Leviticus 20:10). “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is the Seventh Commandment. No doubt this is real reason the federal judges object to Judge Moore placing the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.
Democrat Doug Jones, Judge Moore’s opponent in the senate election, supports partial birth abortion, which is to say, infanticide. In earlier times, Jones would have been considered not merely immoral, but a homicidal psychopath. Jones, should be elected, fully intends to continue supporting infanticide. Judge Moore will support pro-life Christian morality.
The Alabama voters have a choice. I hope they make the only moral choice.
Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He is the co-author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press) and the author of The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity, both published by Doubleday.
1a) Hillary Clinton, the DNC and the Law
Did their arrangement violate legal limits on coordination between a candidate and a party?
By Cleta Mitchell and Hans von Spakovsky
Ms. Brazile reports that when she arrived on the job in July 2016, Gary Gensler, the campaign’s chief financial officer, told her the DNC was fully under the control of the campaign. In September 2015, 10 months before Mrs. Clinton’s nomination, the party had moved its bank account to the same bank in New York used by the Clinton campaign and created a joint fundraising committee, the Hillary Victory Fund, whose treasurer, bank account, and control were vested in the campaign.
Then, in an August 2015 memorandum of understanding, the DNC essentially handed over its operations to the Clinton campaign for the next 15 months.
The purpose of joint fundraising committees is to allow more than one entity to collaborate in raising money and share in the costs. Each participant is subject to federal contribution limits. When the party itself is a participant, its committee (in this case the DNC) normally handles accounting and financial controls. Not here. The Hillary Victory Fund was controlled by the Clinton campaign, with a campaign employee as treasurer and the fund’s bank account established at the Clinton campaign’s bank. According to Federal Election Commission reports, the Hillary Victory Fund has raised more than $526 million.
The DNC asserted its “neutrality” by also entering into a joint fundraising committee with the Sanders campaign. It raised a total of $1,000. And the Bernie Victory Committee treasurer was the DNC’s designee.
“Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state,” Ms. Brazile writes, “but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn”—i.e., Clinton headquarters. She says state parties raised $82 million, of which they kept less than 0.5%.
The memorandum of understanding promised the Clinton campaign, among other things, “complete and seamless access to all research work product and tools” paid for by the DNC, despite Federal Election Commission regulations that prohibit privately sharing such research with a candidate without either reporting the costs as an in-kind contribution or allocating them against the party’s coordinated spending limits for that candidate.
The memo also tied transfers of funds raised for the DNC by the Hillary Victory Fund to operational control of the DNC’s expenditures: “The release of the Base Amounts each month are conditioned on the following: . . . hiring of DNC Communications Director . . . DNC senior staff . . . joint authority over strategic decisions . . . alerting HFA”—Hillary for America, the campaign—“in advance of . . . any direct mail communications that features a particular Democratic primary candidate or his or her signature.”
Contributions to the DNC, even though made through the Hillary Victory Fund, were required by law to be transferred to the party and could not legally be withheld by the Clinton-designated treasurer. Nor does the law allow a single candidate to control a political party’s operations and expenditures.
National party committees have higher contribution limits than candidates do—$334,000 a year vs. $2,700 for each election. The memorandum raises the possibility that Clinton campaign took advantage of the DNC’s higher limits, then availed itself of all the resources the DNC could buy—without having any of the attendant costs or expenditures assessed against the campaign.
There are strict statutory limits on what a party committee can contribute to any candidate and what a party can spend in coordination with its candidates. We don’t like limits on the ability of parties to support their candidates. But campaign-finance zealots, egged on by media outlets (which are not subject to any limits), made certain that the McCain-Feingold law of 2002 stringently limited coordination between candidates and political parties. Although the Supreme Court struck down parts of McCain-Feingold in the 2010 Citizens United case, the coordination limits still apply. The FEC and the Justice Department should investigate the Clinton-DNC arrangement.
Candidate Clinton railed against Citizens United—a case that involved a documentary film critical of her—arguing that “big money” and “secret spending” are ruining our politics. Is it too much to ask that those who loudly demand greater regulation of political speech and spending themselves abide by the laws already on the books?
Ms. Mitchell is a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP who practices federal campaign finance law. Mr. von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission.
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2)
Iran-backed forces could be 3 miles from Israel under Syria deal — report
Israel says agreement does not go far enough in moving Iran and affiliated militias away from Golan Heights border
In other areas, the Iranian-allied forces would be pulled back as far as 30 kilometers from the border, explained the official, who spoke with the news agency on condition of anonymity. The final arrangements will depend on the current positions held by rebel forces fighting against the Assad regime on the Syrian part of the Golan Heights.
According to media reports, the deal applies even to Iranian proxies fighting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Transportation and Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz (Ohad Zweigenberg)
Israeli intelligence minister Yisrael Katz refused to confirm those details but Israeli authorities have indicated the agreement does not go far enough in moving Iran and affiliated militias away from the Israeli border.
“Even though we view favorably the agreement on the need to eliminate the foreign forces — namely, the Iranian forces, Hezbollah and the Shiite militias from the area — the test will be on the ground, not in words but in deeds. Israel has already made it clear that it shall not accept Iran and its affiliates and proxies basing themselves in Syria, which will be a permanent threat and a constant source of tension, friction and instability,” Katz said Monday.
Israel has lobbied against allowing Iran to maintain any foothold in Syria. On Saturday, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said Israel “will not allow the Shiite axis to be established in Syria as a base for action,” after new photos were published of a permanent Iranian base being built some 50 kilometers from the Israeli Golan Heights.
Tzachi Hanegbi (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
On Sunday, minister Tzachi Hanegbi said the agreement “does not answer Israel’s unequivocal demands that there will be no developments that bring Iranian or Hezbollah forces closer to Israel’s border with Syria in the north.”
The Israeli official who spoke to Reuters said the deal is intended to keep rival Syrian factions from clashing with each other but will also control the presence of Iranian proxies.
The agreement, announced in a US-Russian statement Saturday, affirms a call for “the reduction, and ultimate elimination” of foreign fighters from southern Syria.
A tank flying the Hezbollah terror group’s flag is seen in the Qara area in Syria’s Qalamoun region on August 28, 2017.(AFP Photo/Louai Beshara)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in the past voiced concerns over Iran’s plans to cement its presence in Syria, which, he has said, include the establishment of naval and air force bases.
Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad Momani confirmed Sunday no non-Syrian fighters would be allowed in the “de-escalation zone” under the agreement, which he said was built on a previous ceasefire reached in July.
He also said the deal was a “key step” in ending the fighting in Syria and would help lead to a political solution to the Syrian civil war, according to the country’s al-Ghad newspaper.
The reports on the new ceasefire agreement came after the BBC published satellite photos on Friday said to show the construction of a permanent Iranian military base in Syria.
According to the BBC report, the base is situated at a site used by the Syrian army near El-Kiswah, 14 kilometers (8 miles) south of Damascus, and 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the Israeli border.
Satellite image of alleged Iranian base in Syria from October 2017 (Airbus, Digital Globe and McKenzie Intelligence Services/BBC)
In July, the Times of London reported that Israel was pushing Russia and the US for an agreement that would prevent “Hezbollah or other Iranian-backed militias” from operating in the area, which would extend some 30 miles (48 kilometers) beyond the Israeli-Syrian border on the Golan Heights.
Hezbollah, the Lebanese terror group that acts as a proxy of Iran, has been fighting on behalf of the Syrian President Bashar Assad in his efforts to suppress a six-year long insurgency. Russia, an ally of both Syria and Iran, has also provided military assistance in the war.
In recent years there have been several airstrikes inside Syria, attributed to the Israel, that targeted alleged shipments of advanced weapons and rockets for Hezbollah. Israel has vowed to prevent the Shiite organization, which holds positions along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, from obtaining game-changing weaponry.
In August Netanyahu met with Russian President Vladmir Putin in Sochi, Russia, and entreated him to curb Iranian military expansion in Syria.
On Friday Pravda reported that while Putin told Netanyahu at their talks that “Israel is also an important partner for Russia in the region,” he stressed that “Iran is Russia’s strategic ally in the Middle East” and declined to abandon Russia’s alliance with the Islamic Republic.
2a) A Soviet Cleansing in Cuba
The Russians used their experience at home to annihilate dissident peasants
Most Americans have never heard of the anti-Castro uprising in Cuba’s Escambray Mountains, which began in 1959 and took Fidel and the Soviet Union six years to put down. At the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the episode is worth revisiting. If not for 400 Soviets sent to Cuba under the command of the Red Army and the KGB in 1961, it is unlikely that Castro would have prevailed.
What happened in the Escambray pokes a giant hole in Castro’s narrative that his revolution was a justified power grab supported by working-class and rural Cubans. The fact is that when Cubans began to understand that Fidel planned to replace Fulgencio Batista as the next dictator and to impose communism, many rebelled. None fought harder than central Cuba’s guajiros—small land owners and tenant farmers.
Forty years after Castro took power, a protégé named Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela and allowed to consolidate power. Today that once-rich country is an authoritarian hellhole where toilet paper is a luxury and malnutrition is widespread.
Venezuelans did not see what was coming in part because of the failure of historians, journalists, lawyers, academics and politicians throughout the Americas to expose the atrocities committed in the 1960s against the guajiros and other dissidents.
Castro understood the importance of controlling the press, foreign as well as domestic. He used that control to popularize his version of events. He framed the resistance—those who rejected his communist takeover—as a white, urban aristocracy unhappy because it was losing its privilege under his new justice. Meanwhile, he wiped out whole farming communities with Stalinesque ruthlessness, and he did it with guidance from the Kremlin, which exported its experience in intelligence gathering and repression.
Agapito Rivera was born in 1937 in central Cuba, one of seven children in a poor family that cut sugar cane on a large estate. He told me in an interview in Miami earlier this year that when he first started cutting cane he was so small that his older brother had to throw the shoots onto the cart for him. By the time Castro took power, Mr. Rivera was 22 and married. That year a daughter was born. The young family lived in a small house Mr. Rivera had built himself.
Many peasants opposed Batista. When he fled, they celebrated. But they quickly recognized Castro’s ambitious plan to betray the revolution. Ironically it was the takeover of a large sugar plantation called Sierrita that confirmed their worst suspicions. Sierrita had been an excellent employer. The owners paid well and treated workers with dignity. Yet it was the first property seized in the area.
I wondered why Mr. Rivera had objected, since Castro was promising “social justice” for the poor. “I looked at that,” he said, referring to the confiscation of Sierrita, “and I said to myself, if he can do that to them, what future do I have?”
Mr. Rivera went into combat with other guajiros and alongside former Castro guerrillas who had fought in the Sierra Maestra to restore the constitutional democracy.
In his 1989 book, “And the Russians Stayed: The Sovietization of Cuba,” Cuban-born Nestor Carbonell uses the testimony of a former Castro intelligence officer to describe how the Soviets crushed the Escambray rebellion, which at one point numbered 8,000 insurgents. Castro had sent 12,000 soldiers and 80,000 militia to the region in late 1960, but they’d made no headway. So in January 1961 the Kremlin stepped in. It sent a contingent of Soviet coaches to a military compound near the city of Trinidad. That compound became a “KGB redoubt,” Mr. Carbonell explains. “From there, the Soviets secretly directed a major offensive to quash the insurgency.”
The operation mobilized 70,000 Cuban soldiers and 110,000 militia. They “uprooted most of the peasant families living in the area, and dragged them into concentration camps” in the far western part of the country. More than 1,800 prisoners were executed, according to Mr. Carbonell. “The obsessive goal was total extermination,” so the government forces “destroyed crops, burned huts and contaminated springs as they systematically combed the region for rebels or suspects.”
The U.S. made secretive attempts to get supplies to the resistance, but poor coordination hampered operations. When President John F. Kennedy withdrew support for the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, the U.S. also abandoned the Escambray. The rebels were outnumbered and outgunned but they did not give up easily. It wasn’t until 1965 that they were entirely defeated.
Mr. Rivera was captured in 1963, spent 25 years in prison, and was exiled in 1988. And the story of the Soviet campaign in Cuba to annihilate farmers and peasants—who rejected the collectivization of agriculture just as they had in Russia—never made it into popular culture.
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3)
Gold is the only metal that doesn't rust, even if it's buried in the ground for thousands of years.
Your tongue is the only muscle in your body that is attached at only one end.
If you stop getting thirsty , you need to drink more water. When a human body is dehydrated, its thirst mechanism shuts off.
Zero is the only number that cannot be represented by Roman numerals.
Kites were used in the American Civil War to deliver letters and newspapers.
The song Auld Lang Syne is sung at the stroke of midnight in almost every English-speaking country in the world to bring in the new year.
Drinking water after eating reduces the acid in your mouth by 61 percent. Drinking a glass of water before you eat may help digestion and curb appetite.
Peanut oil is used for cooking in submarines because it doesn't smoke unless it's heated above 450F.
The roar that we hear when we place a seashell next to our ear is not the ocean, but rather the sound of blood surging through the veins in the ear.
Nine out of every 10 living things live in the ocean.
The banana cannot reproduce itself. It can be propagated only by the hand of man.
Airports at higher altitudes require a longer airstrip due to lower air density.
The University of Alaska spans four time zones. (Weird!)
The tooth is the only part of the human body that cannot heal itself.
In ancient Greece , tossing an apple to a girl was a traditional proposal of marriage. Catching it meant she accepted.
Warner Communications paid 28 million for the copyright to the song Happy Birthday, which was written in 1935!
Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.
A comet's tail always points away from the sun.
The Swine Flu vaccine in 1976 caused more death and illness than the disease it was intended to prevent.
Caffeine increases the power of aspirin and other painkillers, that is why it is found in some medicines.
The military salute is a motion that evolved from medieval times, when knights in armor raised their visors to reveal their identity.
If you get into the bottom of a well or a tall chimney and look up, you can see stars, even in the middle of the day.
When a person dies, hearing is the last sense to go. The first sense lost is sight.
In ancient times strangers shook hands to show that they were unarmed.
Strawberries and cashews are the only fruits whose seeds grow on the outside.
Avocados have the highest calories of any fruit at 167 calories per hundred grams.
The moon moves about two inches away from the Earth each year.
The Earth gets 100 tons heavier every day due to falling space dust.
Due to earth's gravity it is impossible for mountains to be higher than 15,000 meters.
Mickey Mouse is known as "Topolino" in Italy.
Soldiers do not march in step when going across bridges because they could set up a vibration which could be sufficient to knock the bridge down.
Everything weighs one percent less at the equator.
For every extra kilogram carried on a space flight, 530 kg of excess fuel are needed at lift-off.
The letter J does not appear anywhere on the periodic table of the elements.
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