RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton’s defense that the emails she received were not “marked” as classified is great news for anyone accused of any crime with email evidence.

For example, Jared Fogle of Indianapolis may reopen his child porn case, and defend himself by saying he didn’t know the photos he received via email were child porn since they were not marked as “child porn.”

The IRS may have to adopt different enforcement policies, since they could no longer use anything not marked as “taxable income” as income. The IRS should soon come out with new regulations backing up this idea. Those paid by cash or who work as independent contractors would no longer have to declare any of this as taxable income, since it is not “marked” as taxable income. How were they to know?

Those who violate the 1996 Immigration Act and hire illegal immigrants can defend themselves by saying that the illegal immigrants’ job applications did not mark them as “illegal” or “undocumented” immigrants.

Yusef is a five-year-old United States citizen. His parents aren’t U.S. citizens. He speaks no English. He doesn’t dress or act like an American. He doesn’t remember America.

Abdul is Yusef’s brother and also a U.S. citizen. He understands very little English. He speaks, reads, and writes in Arabic. At age 14, he obsesses about football, but not American football. He has no memories of Georgia.

Around 1999, their father attended Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia on a student visa. Abdul was born while the family lived in Georgia. Nine years later, on a short ‘visit’ to the U.S., Yusef was born.

Yemen is the only home the boys know. Yemen is the center of their national identity, interest, and memories. Although born to Yemeni parents — with no loyalty or ties to the United States – both boys became U.S. citizens.

If you are bent on re-making society, first change or undermine long-held norms and values. Under a transforming officialdom, and with the police enlisted to serve as The Guardian’s paramilitary auxiliaries, the very concept of respectability is decried as “middle-class privilege”, a stigma in and of itself.
(editor’s note: Below, the edited text of an address by John O’Sullivan, editor of Quadrant, to the Samuel Griffiths Society)

As science has established, the human brain starts working from birth and continues doing so right up to when someone rises to make a public speech. But I look forward, having survived tonight, to enjoying the debates of tomorrow without reserve. Those debates are very necessary—if sadly so. In all the nations of the Anglosphere, with the partial exception of the United States, law was, until recently, a political battleground mainly at the stages of electoral debate and parliamentary law-making. There was usually a general understanding that decisions of the court that made law, rather than merely interpreting it, could be reversed by the legislature. And the legislature’s decision, like that of the editor, was final.

All that has changed in recent years with the Human Rights Act in the UK, the Mabo decision in Australia, and the growing power of Supreme Courts in Canada (where the Court recently rejected the government’s nominee on grounds that seem constitutionally dubious and politically biased) and in the United States (where the Court has taken to discerning constitutional rights founded solely in the musing of its members on the meaning of life.) In the great majority of these decisions, the political direction of change has been leftwards, and their political content has been supplied in great measure from ideas and values floating in the cultural atmosphere. That cultural atmosphere is not drawn, however, from the beliefs of the whole of society, or even of a majority of its citizens, but as the late Robert Bork used to complain, from the mindset of the academic-media-philanthropy complex that has metastasized since the Sixties and replaced the military-industrial complex as the dominant ideological force in political life throughout the Anglosphere.

Stocks took another tumble on Tuesday on a weak manufacturing report out of China, and investor shivers about Japan, the oil patch and the U.S. are increasing. The shaky markets and underlying economy seem relevant to the presidential debate—yet the front-runners of both parties have next to no pro-growth ideas to contribute.

Hillary Clinton favors higher taxation, heavier regulation, more political shackling of business, and centralizing more economic control inside the White House. So does Donald Trump—at least as far as we can tell.

Mrs. Clinton is promising Obamanomics Plus: continue the agenda of the last eight years, with bonus corrections toward the left as necessary. She’s proposed to nearly double the top tax rate on some capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8%, for example, up from 15% as recently as 2012.

On energy, one of the few U.S. growth areas of the Obama era, she is even further to the left. The green elites used to tolerate support for the U.S. oil and natural gas boom if gas could be levered as a transition fuel toward a post-carbon future. Now they favor massive subsidies for wind and solar today and no fossil-fuel drilling, and Mrs. Clinton is moving their way.

This column is correct but McCain is a cheerleader for the global warming groupies and together with another faux conservative, Joe Lieberman he sponsored “The Climate Stewardship Acts” whose aim was to set “mandatory cap and trade system for greenhouse gases, as a response to the threat of anthropogenic climate change.” Fortunately, the act failed to gain enough votes to pass through the senate.In April 2007, McCain called global warming “a serious and urgent economic, environmental and national security challenge.” rsk

Obama focuses on global warming while Putin’s neo-imperialist dreams continue to spread north.

President Obama is on a three-day visit to Alaska that will include a stop north of the Arctic Circle. The focus of his trip is climate change. Some of my Senate colleagues and I recently returned from the Arctic, and while we saw the challenges of melting polar ice, we also saw a greater and more immediate threat. It is a menace that many assumed was relegated to the past: an aggressive, militarily capable Russian state that is ruled by an anti-American autocrat, hostile to our interests, dismissive of our values, and seeking to challenge the international order that U.S. leaders of both parties have maintained for seven decades.

Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperial ambitions are clear enough in his attempt to dominate Russia’s neighbors, Ukraine most of all. But his ambitions increasingly extend to the Arctic and Europe’s northern flank. That is where I and my colleagues met with leaders and security officials from Norway, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Lowering ozone—from cars, trucks, factories and power plants—in the name of an imaginary health benefit.

This fall the Environmental Protection Agency plans to take its next grand regulatory step, following the announcement of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan over the summer. The agency is likely to introduce stringent new standards for ground-level ozone, arguing that a lower allowable level of ozone—an important component of smog—will reduce asthma in the U.S., among other claimed health benefits. Yet the EPA ignores decades of data and studies, some under the agency’s auspices, that reveal no detectable causal relation between past reductions in ozone and better public health, including reductions in asthma cases.

For decades many Americans were ambivalent about immigration. The false arguments made by the open borders advocates – whom I have come to refer to as the “Immigration Anarchists” – succeeded in suppressing the truth from the majority of American citizens.

The notion that the United States has just four “border states” was blindly accepted by many people, along with the false statement that illegal aliens did the work Americans won’t do.

The concept of four border states caused many Americans, who lived far from the U.S.-Mexican border, to believe that the impact of illegal immigration was of scant consequence for them. Most Americans were unaware that nearly half of all illegal aliens were actually lawfully admitted into the U.S. and then, in one way or another, violated the terms of their admission.

For years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and various lobbying groups have peddled the false notion that the U.S. needs to import high-tech workers from overseas. Indeed, there are still politicians who support greatly increasing the number of H-1B visas for those high-tech workers. However, as John Adams famously remarked, “Facts are stubborn things.” News reports have made it clear that Silicon Valley and various U.S. corporations, such as Disney, have fired their highly qualified and experienced American workers, replacing them with workers from India and other countries.

Two Israelis have made MIT’s prestigious “35 Innovators Under 35” list for 2015, which the university published on Monday.

One of the Israelis is Cigall Kadoch, 30, who holds a doctorate from Stanford. She is the daughter of an Israeli and was raised in San Francisco. Her field of expertise is cancer research, with a focus on breast cancer.

Gilad Evrony, 33, the second Israeli on the list, is a Harvard Medical School researcher. Evrony helped make a surprising discovery: Brain cells sitting right next to each other don’t always have the same genetic codes.

According to the MIT’s Technology Review, Evrony’s discovery “could provide insight into age-related cognitive decline and brain disorders such as epilepsy and schizophrenia.”

Jason Pontin, the editor in chief and the publisher of the MIT Technology Review, said: “Throughout the years we have successfully chosen young innovators whose work has had a profound impact on humanity. Past lists have included the likes of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s chief designer, and many others.

Ideas are the most powerful human force. And the idea of jihad that the Obama administration will not discuss is perhaps the most powerful idea in the world’s marketplace of ideas today.We have arrived at the point where the consequences of the West’s intellectual disarmament at the hands of political correctness begins to have disastrous consequences in the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Speaking last month at the memorial service for the five US marines massacred at a recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tennessee, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said, “The meaning of their killing is yet unclear, and what combination of disturbed mind, violent extremism, and hateful ideology was at work, we don’t know.”

On Tuesday, Three Reps and two Senators announced their support for the Nuclear Iran Deal. One More Senator in support will dash opponents’ hope.

By mid-afternoon on Tuesday, Sept. 1, three members of the U.S. House of Representatives announced they were supporting the Nuclear Iran Deal. As the afternoon wore on, word came that first Senator Bob Casey (D) of Pennsylvania, and then, to close out the afternoon, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) also came out in favor of the agreement.

The three members of the House of Representatives who said they will support the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action are Rep.s Patrick Murphy (D-FL-18), Bobby Rush (D-IL-01) and Adam Smith (D-WA-09). None of these were real surprises.

But people were quite hopeful that Casey might swim against the tide. In fact, his statement announcing his support went on for 17 pages.

Casey, like so many other politicians who say they will vote to support the deal, admits that the chances of Iran cheating are significant. He began his analysis with this understanding.