Another blonde joke. (See 1 below.)
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Bill Buckley was one of my conservative heroes and I had the pleasure of cruising, several years ago, with one of Buckley's relative who was married to a man who had his own NYSE Seat . She was a very sophisticated and well traveled lady. (See 2 below.)
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This from a dear friend who is a conservative and fellow memo reader. He thinks rationally, disagrees with most inane and hysterical ideas that belch forth from the minds and mouths of most liberals and occasional conservatives and therefore, is a racist, xenophobe and anti-feminist.
He also pays taxes, obeys laws, drives within the speed limit,, is generous to a fault and loves music.
Time to lock my friend up because he has serious mental issues. (See 3 below.)
And
This from another conservative friend and fellow memo reader discussing Trump's problem: "A man with common sense in a town with none."
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My house guest for the Bolton weekend and the surgeon who got me back on the tennis courts is an avid reader. He graciously bought me a book entitled "Sapiens." I am only 1/3 rd of the way through it and it is a fascinating story of man's development.
The author delves into man's history to help us understand who we are and what made us the way we are. So much of who we are and the way we now live is because of how life evolved and our success went hand in hand with much individual suffering."Sapiens" is a very penetrating read.
A LTE I sent inspired by what I am currently reading. (See 4 below.)
And
Dennis Prager's thoughts. (See 4a below.)
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A deranged person killing people is bad enough but liberal contempt for spying on societal privacy through purposeful and illegal surveillance is ultimately far worse.
The former kills people whereas, the latter intends destroying an entire society. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)THE BLONDE AND THE COW
A blonde city girl, Amy, marries a Wisconsin farmer.
One morning, on his way out to check on the cows, the farmer says to her, 'Amy, the artificial insemination man is coming over to impregnate one of our cows today, so I drove a nail into the 2 by 4 just above the cow's stall in the barn. Please show him where the cow is when he gets here, OK?'
The farmer leaves for the fields. After a while, the artificial insemination man arrives and knocks on the front door.
Amy takes him down to the barn. They walk along the row of cows and when Amy sees the nail, she tells him, 'This is the one right here.'
The man, assuming he is dealing with an airhead blonde, asks, 'Tell me lady, 'cause I'm dying to know.
How would you know this is the right cow to be bred?'
'That's simple," she said. "By the nail that's over its stall,' she explains very confidently.
Laughing rudely at her, the man says, 'And what, pray tell, is the nail for?'
Amy turns to walk away and says sweetly over her shoulder...... 'I guess it's to hang your pants on.'
(It's nice to see a blonde win once in a while.)
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2)
Was William F. Buckley a Populist?
Not quite. He disliked the liberal elite mostly because it was liberal.
By Alvin S. Felzenberg
William F. Buckley wrote in 1963 that “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard.” What would Buckley, who died Feb. 27, 2008, have made of today’s populism?
The answer isn’t entirely clear. He certainly preferred entrusting the nation’s fate to the public at large rather than to an elite he saw as uniform in opinion, hopelessly left-leaning and usually wrong. He dedicated his career to opposing that elite’s central doctrine, “moral equivalence.”
Buckley wanted American institutions to affirm capitalism on the grounds that it created more wealth and higher civilization than any alternative. He wanted them to acknowledge that not all cultures were equal and that the Judeo-Christian creed was superior because it recognized that man was created in the image of God. That premise, he held, was the source of all liberty, justice and law.
By the time he scoffed at the Harvard faculty, Buckley had already waged two celebrated battles against the prevailing liberal establishment—Yale’s curriculum and the State Department’s failure to take internal security seriously. Populism became the means through which he took each institution to task.
With insular academic departments prone to conformity rather than diversity of thought, Buckley would have university trustees, themselves accountable to alumni, reassert their authority to hire and fire faculty. If federal bureaucracies proved slow to ferret out security risks, Buckley would have Congress, the branch of government closest to the people, exercise oversight.
But in both instances, Buckley’s ultimate goal was to build a conservative elite—he called them “tablet keepers”—that would police the movement he founded, and if necessary purge it of bigots, anti-Semites, racists and kooks. One of his most notable campaigns was waged against the John Birch Society’s Robert Welch, who held that much of the U.S. government, from President Eisenhower down, took orders from Moscow. Another was against race-baiting “welfare populists,” such as Govs. Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George Wallace of Alabama, who cynically cloaked themselves in “states rights” and other conservative tenets.
As a child, Buckley learned to fear mobs by watching newsreels that depicted enthusiastic crowds cheering on foreign dictators at rallies. “They did not appear to have been coerced,” he wrote in a paper when he was a boarding-school student.
He lamented in another student submission that a ballot cast by an unintellectual, uneducated citizen received the same weight as one cast by a voter who had studied the issues and was able to distinguish among the candidates. He worried that uninformed voters would be manipulated by corrupt political machines or flattered by demagogues. Today’s political scene would have given him ample cause for anxiety.
Mr. Felzenberg is author of “A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.” He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications.
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3)Hysteria of course prevails, particularly on the left side of the aisle,
When our nation undergoes a horrific tragedy such as the recent school shooting in Broward county Florida. It is of no importance that the FBI ignored many direct indications that the gunman was a loose cannon.
It is of no importance that the local police responded to over 40 domestic disturbance calls involving the perpetrator, with no follow-up action.
It is of no importance that the Broward county security officials changed their reporting methods, and indeed reduced penalties for various malfeasances to "lower the crime perspective" in their jurisdiction.
Nope, the only hope is gun control.
I especially like the latest liberal proposal (unfortunately joined and mirrored by some supposed conservatives) to prevent individuals from buying rifles until they are 21 years old.
Wow, what a great idea.
Now an individual can neither buy a pistol or a rifle until they are 21.
That should solve the problem!
Doesn't it make any difference that at age 18, an individual may be issued both a hand-gun and a rifle capable of both semi-automatic and automatic firing and sent off to a dismal part of the world and told to try to stay
alive protecting the interests of our country?
alive protecting the interests of our country?
Get a life people.
Guns don't kill people. People kill people. A spoon doesn't make me fat. Itis my ingestion of the ice cream that produces the result.
The individual in Florida needed help. He needed mental help. He should have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution.
If you want to stop school shootings, do two things: 1.) improve psychiatric analysis and care in our schools and 2.) permit administrators and/or teachers to carry concealed weapons (after proper training) on campus.
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4)The Agricultural Revolution is controversial in many ways but we are living its consequences.
By this I mean, man left the hunt, settled into small areas to farm, built permanent homes and collected things which became difficult to move. As man evolved from small tribes to large population centers more needed to engage in agriculture to provide for expanding populations and next came the elites who governed through bureaucrats. Sound familiar?
Farmers, in order to protect themselves, their possessions and farms needed armies and this led to emperors, armies, walled cities and, yes, taxation. Sound familiar?
As more sapiens began to live huddled together, social order became challenged and man became more stressed because farming was not easy and the concern of worrying about/ planning for the future occupied much of his time and resulted in increased mental pressure. Sound familiar?
Now that man has access to weapons many resort to solving their stressful issues through random killings..
Blaming guns for man's evolution may be a way for liberals to solve an issue that disturbs/challenges their concerns but the problem is rooted in how man evolved from a natural hunter to a farmer to an industrialized person living among millions of other worried sapiens.
Blaming the NRA is also another political way to beat a dead horse but it , too, will not solve the issue's caused by the way sapiens evolved.
Most societies break apart because their success becomes unsustainable and discord issues cause fissures in their social order. It becomes evident in the breakdown of the family, the decline in educational standards, an increasing population incapable of reasoning, growing disparities between haves and have nots and debt that overwhelms their financial structure. These societies eventually fall from within and/or from without. History is replete with such.
The recent tragedy is Florida is a manifestation of where we are along the evolution spectrum and to this sapien it cast a disturbing shadow..
Why does the left oppose allowing a small number of highly trained teachers and other adults who work at schools to arm themselves?
When asked, their response is consistent: "It's a crazy idea." And "We need fewer guns, not more guns."
When asked, their response is consistent: "It's a crazy idea." And "We need fewer guns, not more guns."
A New York Times editorial offered the following argument against having any armed teachers: "Nationwide statistics on police shooting accuracy are not to be found. But if New York is typical, analyses show that its officers hit their targets only one-third of the time. And during gunfights, when the adrenaline is really pumping, that accuracy can drop to as low as 13 percent."
But if that is an argument against armed teachers, why isn't it an argument against armed police?
And that argument was Aristotelian compared to this one from a Los Angeles Times editorial: "If a pistol-strapping chemistry teacher had grabbed her .45 and unloaded on today's gunman after he killed, what, one student? Three? Five? That would be good news?"
Of course, no murder is "good news." But to most of us, one or three or five as compared with 17 murdered is good news. Only those who think it isn't good news think permitting some teachers and other school staff to be armed is a bad idea.
Beyond such arguments, the left rarely, if ever, explains why allowing some teachers and other adults in a school to be armed is a crazy idea. They merely assert it as a self-evident truth.
But, of course, it's not a self-evident truth. On the contrary, having some adults who work at schools be trained in the responsible use of guns makes so much sense that the left's blanket opposition seems puzzling.
It shouldn't be. On the question of taking up arms against evil, the left is very consistent.
The left almost always opposes fighting evil and almost always works to disarm the good who want to fight.
This is as true on the national level as it is on the personal.
Those old enough to remember the Cold War will remember that the left constantly called for a "nuclear freeze," including a unilateral freeze by Western countries. Likewise, the European left mounted huge demonstrations against America bringing Pershing 2 missiles into Western Europe. No matter how violent the Soviet Union was, the left always opposed a strong Western military. The left mocked then-President Ronald Reagan's call for an anti-ballistic missile defense system; it couldn't understand why Americans would think being able to protect America from incoming ballistic missiles was a good and moral idea. The left so effectively derided the idea, mockingly dubbing it "Star Wars," that few knew its real name: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
So, too, the left universally condemns Israeli attacks on those who seek not merely to defeat Israel but to exterminate it. The left around the world condemned Israel's military responses to Hamas launching missiles at Israeli civilian targets. They declared Israel's counterattacks "disproportionate" -- because more Gazans were killed than Israelis. Never mind which party was the aggressor or which party targeted civilians. Had the left been as active in the 1940s, it surely would have condemned the Allies for their bombing of Germany and Japan; after all, far more German and Japanese civilians were killed in Allied bombing raids than Allied civilians were killed in German bombing raids. Now that was really "disproportionate."
Fighting evil is the left's Achilles heel. As I have repeatedly noted, the left fights little evils, or even non-evils, rather than great evils.
With regard to fighting communism in the 20th century and today fighting radical Islamic terror and Islamist treatment of women, the Stalinist North Korean regime, the Holocaust-denying and Holocaust-planning theocracy of Iran, the Syrian mass murderers and the violent crime in America, the left is either silent or appeasing. And, of course, it works constantly to weaken the American military, the world's greatest force against evil.
But the left does direct its fighting spirit against Confederate statues, schools with the name of slave owners (including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson), carbon emissions, income inequality, "microaggressions," "white privilege," any limitation on abortion, Columbus Day, "Islamophobia," Israeli settlements, "Russian collusion" and the like. Against these minimal or nonexistent evils, the left is ferocious.
That is why the left opposes enabling some teachers and other adults in schools to carry arms in order to possibly stop a mass murderer: The left doesn't fight evil; it fights those who do. Just as the left hated anti-communists, hates opponents of Islamism and hates Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (far more than the Iranian ayatollahs), it hates those who wish to see teachers and others voluntarily armed take down the murderers of our children.
So, too, the left universally condemns Israeli attacks on those who seek not merely to defeat Israel but to exterminate it. The left around the world condemned Israel's military responses to Hamas launching missiles at Israeli civilian targets. They declared Israel's counterattacks "disproportionate" -- because more Gazans were killed than Israelis. Never mind which party was the aggressor or which party targeted civilians. Had the left been as active in the 1940s, it surely would have condemned the Allies for their bombing of Germany and Japan; after all, far more German and Japanese civilians were killed in Allied bombing raids than Allied civilians were killed in German bombing raids. Now that was really "disproportionate."
Fighting evil is the left's Achilles heel. As I have repeatedly noted, the left fights little evils, or even non-evils, rather than great evils.
With regard to fighting communism in the 20th century and today fighting radical Islamic terror and Islamist treatment of women, the Stalinist North Korean regime, the Holocaust-denying and Holocaust-planning theocracy of Iran, the Syrian mass murderers and the violent crime in America, the left is either silent or appeasing. And, of course, it works constantly to weaken the American military, the world's greatest force against evil.
But the left does direct its fighting spirit against Confederate statues, schools with the name of slave owners (including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson), carbon emissions, income inequality, "microaggressions," "white privilege," any limitation on abortion, Columbus Day, "Islamophobia," Israeli settlements, "Russian collusion" and the like. Against these minimal or nonexistent evils, the left is ferocious.
That is why the left opposes enabling some teachers and other adults in schools to carry arms in order to possibly stop a mass murderer: The left doesn't fight evil; it fights those who do. Just as the left hated anti-communists, hates opponents of Islamism and hates Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (far more than the Iranian ayatollahs), it hates those who wish to see teachers and others voluntarily armed take down the murderers of our children.
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5)
FISA Abuses Are a Special Threat to Privacy and Due Process
The standard for obtaining an intelligence surveillance warrant is lower than that in a criminal investigation.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
The House Democratic surveillance memo is out, and it should worry Americans who care about privacy and due process. The memo defends the conduct of the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation in obtaining a series of warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The Democrats argue that Christopher Steele, the British former spy who compiled the Trump “dossier” on which the government’s initial warrant application was grounded, was credible. They also claim the FISA court had the information it needed about the dossier’s provenance. And they do not dispute former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s acknowledgment that the FBI would not have sought a FISA order without the Steele dossier.
The most troubling issue is that the surveillance orders were obtained by withholding critical information about Mr. Steele from the FISA court. The court was not informed that Mr. Steele was personally opposed to Mr. Trump’s election, that his efforts were funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or that he was the source of media reports that the FBI said corroborated his dossier. These facts are essential to any judicial assessment of Mr. Steele’s veracity and the applications’ merits.
The FBI should have been especially wary of privately produced Russia-related dossiers. As the Washington Post and CNN reported in May 2017, Russian disinformation about Mrs. Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch evidently prompted former FBI Director James Comey to announce publicly the close of the investigation of the Clinton email server, for fear that the disinformation might be released and undermine the bureau’s credibility.
In addition, even assuming the dossier was accurate regarding Mr. Page, its allegations are thin. Mr. Page was said to have met in Moscow with Russian officials, who raised the potential for cooperation if Trump was elected; Mr. Page was noncommittal. The most significant claim—that those officials offered Mr. Page a bribe in the form of Russian business opportunities—suggests he was not a Russian agent. Existing operatives don’t need to be bribed.
There was no good reason to withhold from the FISA court any information regarding Mr. Steele, his anti-Trump biases, or the dossier’s origin as opposition research. The court operates in secret, so there was no danger of revealing intelligence sources and methods. The inescapable conclusion is that the information was withheld because the court would have been unlikely to issue the order if it knew the whole truth.
That’s a problem because following the rules and being absolutely candid with the court is even more essential in the FISA context than in ordinary criminal investigations. Congress enacted FISA in 1978 to create a judicial process through which counterintelligence surveillance could take place within the U.S., even when directed at American citizens, consistent with “this Nation’s commitment to privacy and individual rights.”
Because the purpose of counterintelligence is to gather information, not necessarily to prosecute criminals, the standards required for issuance of a FISA order are less demanding than those governing warrant requests in criminal cases. In both contexts a finding of “probable cause” is required. But an application for a criminal warrant must show, among other things, that “there is probable cause for belief that an individual is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a particular offense” under federal law. Under FISA, it’s enough to show probable cause that the targeted U.S. person’s “activities may involve a violation of the criminal statutes of the United States” (emphasis ours).
This difference is subtle but crucial. The FISA standard is far easier to meet; and in the past, the FISA court has criticized the government for taking advantage of the lower standard to obtain FISA warrants for use in criminal investigations. The lower standard makes it imperative that the responsible officials be extra careful when validating the information on which the order is based, in ensuring that the statutory standards are met, and in keeping the FISA court fully informed.
Slipshod and duplicitous FISA order applications also necessarily raise constitutional issues. FISA has been generally considered permissible under the Fourth Amendment, even though its probable-cause standard is “more flexible,” as one court noted, because of the statute’s procedural safeguards. But those protections mean very little if investigators withhold material information from the court. Moreover, in an ordinary criminal case, the target of surveillance has full due-process rights in a public trial. If a FISA order is obtained improperly, the target’s privacy is still invaded, but there is no opportunity for vindication. The perpetrators of the abuse, and even the abuse itself, will likely never be exposed.
Congress must consider carefully the actions of the FBI and Justice Department, with a determination to hold the responsible parties to account and to ask whether these abuses, which nearly went undetected, demand significant changes to the FISA process itself to protect the privacy and due-process rights of Americans.
Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served in the White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
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