Displaying the most recent of 90901 posts written by

Ruth King

If Black Lives Matter, then don’t Palestinian Lives? Nothing is sacred and all is fair game when it comes to the “woke” generation taking personal or political offense. By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/if-black-lives-matter-then-dont-palestinian-lives-matter-opinion-631983

Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters across the West are on a rampage against cultural and historical symbols that they deem racist. No book, film, play or monument is safe from their scrutiny and disdain.

Minnesota removed Mark Twain and Harper Lee novels from its schools’ curricula. HBO pulled Gone with the Wind from its movie line-up.

The Paramount Network canceled the new season of the popular reality show Cops before its June 15 premiere. Other studios and companies are rushing to follow suit with everything from sit-coms to old classics.

Statues of American founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have been defaced. Even the legacy of Britain’s lionized late prime minister Winston Churchill is under assault.

Indeed, nothing is sacred and all is fair game when it comes to the “woke” generation taking personal or political offense.

Given the unapologetic ignorance displayed by students everywhere these days, it is heartening to discover that the young people demonstrating from California to Melbourne are remotely familiar with the iconic figures they’ve been trashing since the horrific killing of George Floyd on May 25 by a Minneapolis police officer. While most are able to rattle off the names of every Kardashian, sports star and Instagram influencer, few appear to be versed in much of anything other than fashionable slogans and platitudes about the world in which they live.

To ‘Annex’ West Bank Land or Not to ‘Annex’: The Hour Draws Near By P. David Hornik

https://pjmedia.com/columns/p-david-hornik/2020/06/18/to-annex-west-bank-land-or-not-to-annex-the-hour-draws-near-n545168

July 1, which is fast approaching, is the day on which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying Israel will start the process of applying sovereignty to the strategically vital Jordan Valley and the Israeli communities throughout the West Bank.

The issue remains fraught with controversy. The Trump administration, which seemed to green-light the move with its “Peace to Prosperity” plan, is still giving mixed signals and has a lot else on its plate. Rumors are flying about whether and what Netanyahu plans to “annex” (a convenient misnomer since the lands in question were not part of a recognized sovereign state before Israel regained them in the 1967 war).

The Trump plan is not, of course, just a plan for an Israeli application of sovereignty. It envisions Israel taking permanent control of about 30 percent of the West Bank (historically known as Judea and Samaria) while the other 70 percent would go to a demilitarized Palestinian state.

Not only are the Israeli right and left divided (predictably) on the merits of the plan, but there’s sharp disagreement even within the Israeli right.

For its more ideological wing, any talk of a Palestinian state is heresy. For its more pragmatic wing, a prospective demilitarized Palestinian entity (a “state minus” as Netanyahu calls it) would make sense because Israel cannot and should not annex over two million Palestinians to itself.

More significant, though, is the heated right-left dispute on the issue.

John Bolton’s book looks like a fairy-tale for Trump haters By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/john_boltons_book_looks_like_a_fairytale_for_trump_haters.html

The Trump administration has sued to stop John Bolton’s purported “tell-all” from being released next week on the ground that it is filled with classified information that affects national security. That suit hasn’t stopped Bolton’s publisher from leaking the supposed “bombshells” in the book.

Those bombshells will excite Trump haters, but those who support Trump will immediately recognize them as lies, deliberate misinterpretations, and resentment. Expect the activist Democrat media to sing the book’s praises, but that won’t change the outcome of the November election.

The book’s biggest alleged bombshell, which Bolton writes about in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), is his claim that, in June 2019 at the Osaka G20, Trump begged Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him get reelected. According to Bolton, Xi said that America’s relationship with China was important and that it was wrong for some in America to want a Cold War. Trump countered that Democrats were hostile to China and then, says Bolton, the begging started:

Americans Should Never Again Comply With Pandemic Lockdown Orders By John Daniel Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/18/americans-should-never-again-comply-with-pandemic-lockdown-orders/

By treating Black Lives Matters protests differently than other large gatherings, public officials and health experts have exposed themselves as hypocrites.

We’re told a second wave of coronavirus infections is coming. As businesses open back up and states relax lockdown orders, the number of new cases is ticking up in a handful of states. We’ve heard warnings in recent days from the Centers for Disease Control and various public health experts and elected officials that a new series of lockdowns might be necessary.

What these experts and officials don’t seem to realize is that Americans will never comply with their lockdown orders again. They have burned their credibility to the ground, and they no longer have the moral authority to tell us what to do.

Simply put, the people in charge have shown themselves to be rank hypocrites who care more about politics than science. For months, we were told that large gatherings were deadly because of the coronavirus, but when protests broke out in late May, large gatherings were suddenly okay.

The exact day the experts lost their credibility was June 4, when more than 1,000 public health workers signed a letter claiming the protests were “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people in the United States.” The woke corporate press scrambled to assure us this wasn’t hypocritical at all, and that “health is about more than simply remaining free of coronavirus infection,” as a pair of epidemiologists put it in The Atlantic.

Why Washington, D.C. Is In Trouble – 7,780 Public Employees With $100,000+ Salaries Cost Taxpayers $1 Billion Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/06/16/why-washington-dc-is-i

Local politicians in Washington, D.C. claim a $1.5 billion budget deficit due to the coronavirus pandemic. So, they’re lobbying Congress for a two-year $3.15 billion bailout.

But the city’s financial woes aren’t stopping nearly 8,000 city government employees – including the mayor and city council – from bringing home six-figure salaries and higher.

Washington’s leaders try and fail each year in their application for statehood, but they’re already out-earning their state counterparts.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that Mayor Muriel Bowser earned $220,000 last year – an amount exceeding every governor of the 50 states ($202,000).

What’s more, DC city councilmembers ($141,282) out-earned members of every state legislature – including New York ($130,000). DC city council chairman Philip Mendelson ($210,000) out-earned all members of Congress except for Speaker Nancy Pelosi ($223,500).

Knives Out: Bolton Lacerates Nikki Haley in New Book By Philip Wegmann

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/18/knives_out_bolton_lacerates_nikki_haley_in_new_book__143483.html

As far as exit interviews are concerned, this one was unofficial and especially ugly.

In his forthcoming book, “The Room Where It Happened,” John Bolton condemns President Trump as a bumbling executive and mocks Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as a political opportunist and dismisses Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as generally averse to conflict.

But he doesn’t stop there, as one rising GOP star is finding out.

The highly unflattering 494-page tome, cataloguing the former national security adviser’s time in the Trump White House, seems destined for bestseller lists — that is, if it can get published. Citing national security concerns late Wednesday, the Department of Justice asked a judge to issue a restraining order.

But copies are already floating around Capitol Hill, and regardless of what the court rules, a harsh picture of Nikki Haley is among the portraits emerging. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during much of Bolton’s tenure acted like a “free electron” more concerned with political ambition than international diplomacy, according to a copy of the book obtained by RealClearPolitics.

Haley, the rare Cabinet member to leave the White House on good terms with the president, is considered a top presidential aspirant in a post-Trump Republican Party. Bolton seems intent on denting that reputation.

After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad unleashed a chemical attack on his own people, Bolton suggested that Haley stand with ambassadors from the United Kingdom and France in the U.N. Security Council to present a united front against the rogue leader.

“I had done that many times,” Bolton wrote, “but Haley declined, preferring to have pictures of her alone giving the U.S. statement in the Council. That told me something.” It was indicative, he added, of an “untethered performance in New York over the past year-plus,” and Bolton, still new in his job at the time, made a note to discuss the performance with Pompeo.

How Cultural Revolutions Die — or Not By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/how-cultural-revolutions-die-or-not/#slide-1

They eat their own, unless a cruel dictator rises to unite and control the mob.

Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don’t just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them “holistic” and “systematic.”

Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being: Reason.

Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence such as the wearing of eyeglasses, and he made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.

Moammar Qaddafi’s Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.

The current Black Lives Matter revolution has “canceled” certain movies, television shows, and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries.

But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.

If toppling Confederate statues is required, what then about Nancy Pelosi’s own mayor father, who once, as Baltimore’s mayor, dedicated honorific statues to Confederate generals?

If racists understandably do not deserve their names on national shrines, what to do with the iconic liberal graduate program at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? It was named for a president who did more to further segregation and racial prejudice than any chief executive of the 20th century.

Stanford and Yale, coveted brand names of the progressive professional classes, are named after men whom protestors now deem racists.

Harvard Eliminates SAT and ACT from its Application Process By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/17/harvard-eliminates-sat-and-act-from-its-application-process/

The elite Harvard University has announced that it will be removing the SAT and ACT scores requirement from its application process, citing the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse, according to The Daily Caller.

The change will go into effect for all prospective students applying for the class of 2025. In a statement, the university said that the pandemic “has created insurmountable challenges in scheduling tests for all students, particularly those from modest economic backgrounds.” The statement also seems to confirm that the removal of the test score requirement will not be permanent, saying that “we believe this temporary change addresses these challenges.”

Instead, applying students will be asked “to send whatever materials they believe would convey their accomplishments in secondary school and their promise for the future.”

Other universities have already permanently dropped the SAT and ACT requirements, including the entirety of the University of California system, which encompasses 10 different colleges across the state. Far-left “civil rights” groups have falsely claimed that the score requirement amounts to discrimination against poor students and minority students.

Flights to and from Beijing canceled amid new coronavirus outbreak By Marty Johnson –

https://thehill.com/policy/international/503105-flights-to-and-from-beijing-canceled-amid-new-coronavirus-outbreak

Both of Beijing’s major airports have seen a large portion of their flights canceled, as China’s capital tries to snuff out the country’s latest coronavirus outbreak.

More than 60 percent of flights at Beijing Capital International Airport were canceled Wednesday, while around 50 percent were canceled at Daxing, the city’s other main airport, according to multiple reports.

The Associated Press reported that 1,255 flights to and from both airports had been canceled, roughly two-thirds of those scheduled. Reuters reported that the majority of those flights were domestic.

Beijing officials reported 31 new cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday, bringing the total of new cases since Thursday up to 137. The source of the outbreak has been determined to be Xifandi, a market that sources nearly all of the city’s fresh produce.

Since the outbreak was identified, Beijing has locked down surrounding neighborhoods and closed schools and some bars and restaurants.

Let’s ‘Demonetize’ NBC News And Google

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/18/cancel-nbc-news-and-google/

This week saw a depressing new low in the attempt by the left to silence voices with which it disagrees when an NBC News “reporter” tried to enlist Google to block two conservative websites’ ability to make money.

In a report on Tuesday, NBC News’ London-based Adele-Momoko Fraser claimed that Google had banned The Federalist and Zero Hedge from its ad platform over articles that were “pushing unsubstantiated claims about the Black Lives Matter protests.”

Google soon tried to correct the record, saying that “The Federalist was never demonetized.” Google had only threatened to blacklist the site from its ad network. (It did “demonetize” Zero Hedge.)

What’s more, contrary to NBC News, Google’s actions against The Federalist and Zero Hedge had nothing to do with articles they published, but with reader comments on those sites. Google told Fox News that it has “strict publisher policies that govern the content ads can run on, which includes comments on the site. This is a longstanding policy.”

It turns out that not only did NBC’s Fraser botch the story, she also played an active role in generating the “news” in the first place. It was NBC News that notified Google of “research conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate,” a heretofore unknown and sketchy outfit, which got the ball rolling.