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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)"This generation's Hillel." (Nathan Cofnas)
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Twitter: ‘Legendary journalist and political commentator Cokie Roberts has died at 75’
I’ve spent many hours listening to Cokie Roberts on NPR and watching her on TV. I can’t remember anything memorable she ever said or did. What exactly makes her legendary? One hundred thousand American journalists could have performed her job at least as well. I’m told she was a pioneering woman, so does that mean we should grade her on the curve?
A friend says: “The reason Cokie Roberts is so highly thought of is because she put NPR news on the map. When I first started listening to NPR (when it was on KUSC) the had their two shows: Susan Stamberg held down the evening slot and Bob Edwards the morning one. This was pre cable news and NPR couldn’t compete with the big networks for national talent. NPR instead hired Cokie Roberts and others. Because of Roberts’ background she was able to get her fair share of scoops as a congressional beat reporter.Her father Hale Boggs before he was killed in a plane crash had been the House Majority Leader and her mother succeeded him in his seat. Her brother Tommy Boggs is and has been one of Washington’s top lobbyists and her then husband (I don’t know if they are still married) Steve Roberts was also a respected political reporter. There is no doubt that NPR’s national news became a go to news source for many because they had hired Cokie Roberts. Later she also worked for ABC. But she benefited from being a woman, when at the time she began reporting most reporters were men, and from her connections.”
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The Outsider
Matthew Rose writes for First Things:
Francis was right about many things. He was right that elites seek to subvert the institutions and ideas that resist their power. He was right that their promise to deliver us from the unfreedoms of the past creates a tyranny of its own. He was right that no society is purely liberal, especially the one that aspires to become so. But he was wrong to imagine that the racial identities that divide us are more important than our common filiation as children of God. He denied the transcendent horizon that is the greatest enemy of the managerial ideology. It inspires rather than satiates, and evokes loyalties that bind us together rather than condemning us to be “individuals” manipulated by marketers and bureaucrats. Francis accused religious traditionalists of playing by house rules, seeking dialogue rather than conflict, preferring to be “beautiful losers” rather than ugly winners, and surely his criticism had some merit. But he failed to see that they offer a more fundamental challenge to liberalism than he ever did, by seeking to unite people in a shared love, a common covenant ordered to the highest good. The nationalist and populist movements that Francis anticipated will succeed in challenging liberalism only to the extent that they abjure Francis’s racial resentments and assert the common goods and transcendent horizon his materialist thinking denies.
Francis claimed that he sought only to defend Western culture. It is impossible to believe him. He displayed no feeling for literature, art, music, philosophy, or theology. He did not see, because his ideology prevented him from seeing, that our culture’s greatest achievements have come in pursuit of ideas that transcend human differences. Francis’s failure of gratitude and wonder made him more than incompetent about power. It made him an outsider to his civilization.
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Jewish Influence
Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House
he U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior, one of the former officials said.
* The law of life is that losers always say they finished last because they were too nice a guy. Jews are good at influencing elites, but they are so successful at it, that everyone assumes Jewry’s success must be due to them employing unscrupulous methods. Jews are most dangerous and effective when they are using freindly persuasion and the language of mutual advantage, or to put it differently: trade. At the James Bond stuff, Jews are comparatively poor.
Like the Rothschilds’ fortune that got started by them gaining the confidence of a coin collecting prince by selling to him at silly low prices, the Jewish way is to place under obligation by acts of apparent selflessness. Epstein rang rings round everyone not by blackmail, but by seeming to be a nice guy and gracious intelectuals’ salon host who was loyal to his many eminent friends, which they reciprocated even after he was exposed. Ehud Barak was unaware of what Epstein had actually been convicted of, having obviously trusted and been misled by him.
Intelligence services rarely do anything useful, but being the subject of an intense espionage effort by their opposite number makes everyone feel terribly validated and significant.
* Why would anything secure be sent in the clear over an ordinary cell phone? If the Israelis can sprinkle these devices around Washington, then why can’t the Russians and the Chinese and those branches of the Permanent Government that hate Trump (i.e. all of them) do the same?
Stingrays are used a lot by police. Washington has a whole alphabet soup of police agencies – the DC Police and the Capitol Police, etc., not to mention a whole bunch of intelligence agencies – the FBI and the CIA and military intelligence, etc.
Many of these agencies don’t really like Trump and would love to get the goods on him. When Comey met “privately” with Trump, Comey was peeing in his pants he was so anxious to leak the details of the meeting to the press. (Trump asked for his loyalty – can you imagine that? The President asking for high officials of the Executive Branch to be loyal to the Administration – how dare he? Doesn’t he know that the FBI is accountable to no one?) The FBI always liked being in a position to blackmail the President going all the way back to Hoover days. Maybe they were still trying to prove that Trump was talking to the Rooshians.
If I had to bet, the Stingrays belonged to one of those agencies. Maybe the Israelis were tasked to plant them to preserve deniability and that’s why they haven’t been rebuked. Israeli intelligence and US intelligence are frenemies.
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Forbes: Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse
California is home to some of the world’s toughest environmental and public health laws, but skyrocketing homelessness has created an environmental and public health disaster. The 44,000 people living, eating, and defecating on the streets of L.A. have brought rats and medieval diseases including typhus. Garbage is everywhere. Experts fear the return of cholera and leprosy.
And homelessness is making people violent. “We are seeing behaviors from our guests that I’ve never seen in 33 years,” said Bales. “They are so bizarre and different that I don’t even feel right describing the behaviors. It’s extreme violence of an extreme sexual nature. I have been doing this for 33 years and never seen anything like it.”
Bales says he was one of the people who urged the US Government’s Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) to intervene. “We’ve been crying out for a National Guard-like response,” said Bales, whose church provides food, showers, and shelter to 1,350 people camped nearby. In 2016 Bales lost the lower half of his leg to a flesh-eating bacteria from contamination on Skid Row.
How did things get so bad in California? The state has long prided itself on being humanistic and innovative. It is home to some of the world’s largest public health philanthropies, best hospitals, and most progressive policies on mental health and drug addiction. The Democrats have a supermajority. What went wrong?
According to Bales and other experts, California made homelessness worse by making perfect housing the enemy of good housing, by liberalizing drug laws, and by opposing mandatory treatment for mental illness and drug addiction.
Other states have done a better job despite spending less money. “This isn’t rocket science,” said John Snook, who runs the Treatment Advocacy Center, which advises states on mental health and homelessness policy around the country. “Arizona is a red state that doesn’t spend a ton on its services but is the best scenario in every aspect. World-class coordination with law enforcement. Strong oversight. They don’t let people fall apart and then return to jail in 30 days like California does.”
What happened in California isn’t the first time that we progressives let our idealism get the better of us. To understand how the current disaster unfolded, we have to go back in time, back to the post-World War II era when progressive reformers convinced themselves and others that they could destroy the country’s system for dealing with the mentally ill and replace it with a radically different and wholly unproven alternative.
Posted in California, Homeless, Los Angeles, San Francisco
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