RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/531632-trump-signs-relief-bill-despite-criticism

President Trump on Sunday signed the government funding and coronavirus relief package, the White House said, averting a government shutdown and delivering economic aid as the pandemic worsens.

Trump signed off on the $2.3 trillion package from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., days after he expressed displeasure with the spending outlined in the omnibus and complained that the coronavirus relief measure should include direct payments of $2,000 per person, up from $600.

But the delay came after Trump single-handedly brought the government to the brink of a shutdown and unemployment benefits expired for millions of Americans Saturday as the bill went unsigned.

Trump has visited his golf club in Florida each day since arriving in the state on Wednesday and has made no public appearances. He did so again on Sunday both before and after signing the legislation.

“I will sign the Omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed,” Trump said in a statement upon signing the legislation. “I will send back to Congress a redlined version, item by item, accompanied by the formal rescission request to Congress insisting that those funds be removed from the bill.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-12-26-testing-the-systemic-racism

How do you establish that a hypothesis is true? According to numerous explainers of the scientific method, starting with philosopher Karl Popper, the best you can do is to try to prove the hypothesis false, and fail. By this method — the scientific method — you can never definitively establish “truth” of a hypothesis, but over time you can get close.

Of course, we now live in the era of official narratives permanently immunized from attempts at falsification, nevertheless incorrectly claiming the mantle of “science.” The big three for this crazy year of 2020 are (1) the proposition that forced “lockdowns” and mask-wearing mandates slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus, (2) the proposition that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous increase in global surface temperatures, and (3) the proposition that income and wealth inequality are the result of “systemic racism” in our society. Proponents flood us with information consistent with these narratives, as if such information, if only provided in sufficient quantity, could prove their truth. But if we are really interested in getting as close as possible to the truth, shouldn’t we instead be looking for information inconsistent with the narratives?

Here is the exposition of the scientific method from physicist Richard Feynman from his classic series of recorded lectures:

[W]e compute the consequences of the [hypothesis], to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.  If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.  In that simple statement is the key to science. . . .

For today, let’s consider applying this logical method to testing one of this year’s big three narratives, namely the narrative that “systemic racism” is the principal explanation for disparities of income and wealth in our society. Following Feynman’s exposition, our first step would be to come up with some of the necessary consequences of this hypothesis, so that they can be tested.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2016/02/08/black-on-black-indifference/

Name a black American politician, academician or celebrity who has publicly condemned the atrocities of Boko Haram, Al Shabab or Al Qaeda Affiliates.  When did you see a protest march  by Black Lives Matter in solidarity with their murdered Nigerian sisters and brothers?  Has there been any black voice from any black group concerning the 219 schoolgirls who are still missing from the original 276 black girls kidnapped in Nigeria in  2014?  Has Oprah organized a campaign to raise awareness of this ongoing crime among all school-children here and in So. Africa where she has created her own school?  Have there been any demonstrations on American campuses concerning the targeting by Boko Haram of black Nigerian students – killing boys and kidnapping, raping and impregnating girls?  Which academic groups have organized to pressure our government or the UN to take action to stop the slaughter of thousands of Nigerian civilians, their villages burned by the vicious Muslim group whose name translates as “Western Education Forbidden.”  Point to a lead op-ed in the NYTimes written by Cornel West, Alice Walker, Al Sharpton or Spike Lee in the last year that has drawn world attention to the horrific slaughter led by Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Al Qaeda Affiliates or Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa.

To the east of Nigeria is Sudan and the newly formed South Sudan which gained its independence from the militantly Islamic north in 2011.  The South, comprised of Christian and other native religions has suffered starvation of thousands of its people along with rape, forced cannibalism and the massacres of thousands. Since 1955, more than two million people have died, tens of thousands have been kidnapped and enslaved and five million have been displaced in what was the longest running civil war among all nations.  Has the UN established an agency similar to UNRWA, the only relief organization dedicated solely to the needs of Palestinian refugees, kept in that status for more than three generations to sustain anti-Israel political hatred.  Have Europeans and Americans donated billions of dollars to help Christian Sudanese as they are threatened and menaced by Arabization and Islamization?  Has any Muslim organization offered food, medical care, social service welfare to the thousands of blacks victimized by Islamic violence in South Sudan?  The  Islamist persecution of blacks has spread all over Africa to countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Somalia and Tanzania –  has the Pope issued a plea for world leaders to intercede in this human tragedy?

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/26/constants-liberty-ancient-and-modern/

Benjamin Constant’s writing is as pertinent to our concerns today as it was in the immediate post-Napoleonic era.

As this most peculiar year wends its petulant and morose way to the end, I find myself returning to some signal apostles of liberty. The unrelenting static of our time can make it difficult to appreciate what those sages of yore had to say. But as we continue to quiver obediently in place, bemasked, shunning our fellows almost as assiduously as we shun common sense, I think back to some anatomists of the totalitarian impulse—George Orwell, for example, who would have been surprised to discover that his searing portrayals of tyranny have been adopted as how-to manuals by the new lobotomized Left whose maliciousness is exceeded only by its ignorance. 

I think, too, of the Swiss-born French writer Benjamin Constant, whose famous essay “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns” (1819) is as pertinent to our concerns today as it was in the immediate post-Napoleonic era in which Constant wrote.

I first encountered Constant’s work years ago at a conference about the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, another apostle of freedom who has much to teach a culture besotted by self-appointed “experts” and insatiable purveyors of “policy.” (I recommend in particular Oakeshott’s brilliant essay “Rationalism in Politics.”)

One of the first things that struck me about Constant’s essay was its optimism (“naïveté” would not be the right word for so nuanced a thinker). With the carnage of the Napoleonic wars still fresh in Europe’s memory, Constant nonetheless assured his readers that he discerned a “uniform tendency towards peace.” The imperatives of war, he thought, must at last give way to the subtler though ultimately more efficacious imperatives of commerce. “[A]n age must come,” he argued, “in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.”

Tell that to the Kaiser, to Hitler and Stalin, to Mao, Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Minh, not to mention all the ayatollahs, imams, and African butchers who succeeded them!