Displaying the most recent of 91920 posts written by

Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lopsided Joe Biden Edward Cline

By on July 1st, 2020

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/06/lopsided-joe-biden.html

Biden wants to convert the country, once a free one, into a nation of mask-wearing lepers. The Hollywood Reporter writes:

Soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he would use his power to require Americans to wear face masks in public.

According to KDKA, Biden said:

“I would go back to making sure that everybody had masks, that you had PPE lined up, making sure we stockpile all the things that we need and we don’t have now. The one thing we do know, these masks make a gigantic difference. I would insist that everybody in public be wearing that mask. Anyone to reopen, it would have to make sure that they walked into a business that had masks.”

The difference is imaginary and specious, as I’ve written before.

Ken Rice of KDKA asked Biden if he could use his federal leverage to mandate it in which Biden responded “yes”.

Rice then pressed Biden if he would use it.

Here’s the exchange:

Rice: Would you?

Biden: Yes, I would from an executive standpoint, yes I would.

Victor David Hanson, on Ruth King, explains Biden’s state of mind better than I can:

“Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity.

“I say “pretext” without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews, speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Swallows Hong Kong By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on July 1st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/china-swallows-hong-kong/

The Chinese Communist Party, through what it portrays as its legislature (the “National People’s Congress”), has enacted a law crushing democracy in Hong Kong.

Under the guise of protecting “national security,” the new law criminalizes as “subversion” and “terrorism” various expressions of protest and political dissent. It further endeavors to cut off Hong Kong’s support lines by criminalizing, as conspiracy to endanger national security, sundry exchanges with other countries and outside groups.

The people of Hong Kong have been protesting against Beijing’s increasingly overt repression for over a year. President Trump, however, has prized what he claims is a strong personal relationship with China’s CCP strongman, Xi Xinping; he has thus been reluctant to pressure Beijing or lend rhetorical support to democracy activists — in stark contrast to President Reagan’s support for the anti-Communist democracy movement in Poland.

More recently though, with Beijing’s cover-up of the origins and seriousness of the novel coronavirus having contributed mightily to a deep U.S. economic downturn and the wounding of his reelection bid, the president has reversed course. “China claims it is protecting national security, but the truth is that Hong Kong was secure and prosperous as a free society,” he recently asserted. “Beijing’s decision reverses all of that.”

The Trump administration has indicated that some sanctions would be imposed on some Chinese officials responsible for strangling Hong Kong, though not on Xi. It has further vowed to revoke Hong Kong’s preferential customs and trade status — a move that makes sense if Hong Kong is now like any other Chinese city, but that will hurt Hong Kong more than it does China. All in all, however, the U.S. has done nothing with much bite, certainly nothing that has dissuaded Xi from his course.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The True Crisis of the Humanities Mervyn Bendle

By on June 30th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/the-true-crisis-of-the-humanities/

The Humanities are in crisis, as readers of Quadrant will be only too aware. What was once the jewel in the crown of scholarship in Western Civilization has become a pedagogical sheltered workshop in our universities, totally dedicated to promulgating anti-Western, anti-Liberal, anti-Democratic, and (literally) anti-Human ideologies. This situation has recently attracted the attention of the media and the Federal government, which has proposed changes to course fee structures that are intended to dissuade students from enrolling in what have become useless if not in fact pernicious degrees in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences – sending students into the streets instead of into careers.

Unfortunately, the intensity of the reaction to this appalling situation has obscured the true nature of the Humanities and their once illustrious history as the scholarly arm of Humanism, stretching back seven centuries as a field of study, and over 2000 years as a project to lay claim “to the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” (to quote Edgar Allen Poe’s famous words from To Helen).

This heritage has been forgotten in the increasingly furious reaction to the ideological coup that has taken place over the past 50 years. What has happened in the Humanities is that the field has been ‘hollowed out’, leaving only a shell; the traditional disciples have either been driven out or completely debauched intellectually, and a whole range of new ideology-infested subjects have set up home in their place. Perversely, while living comfortably in this ‘Humanities’ shell the tenured practitioners of these subjects have adopted as their mission the complete denunciation and destruction of the Humanities and Humanism, along with Western Civilization in general. This is the true crisis of the Humanities.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NJ Councilman, Three Others Charged with Voter Fraud as Democrats Continue to Push for Voting by Mail Ellie Bufkin

By on June 30th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/elliebufkin/2020/06/30/four-men-charged-with-voter-fraud-in-new-jersey-n2571445

Democrats and their media surrogates have uniformly chosen to reject any notion that voting by mail could result in fraudulent results, despite ample evidence to the contrary. But against their narrative, four men in New Jersey were indicted last week for committing voter fraud related to mail-in ballots. 

Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal announced on Thursday that current Paterson City Council Vice President Michael Jackson along with Councilman-elect Alex Mendez were being charged along with two others in fraud related to the May 12 election. According to the charges, all four men are facing multiple counts of ballot tampering and incorrect ballot handling related to the election. 

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Paterson election for city council members faced the unique obstacle of being relegated only to vote-by-mail, something President Trump has lambasted throughout the national crisis. On election day, Jackson and Mendez, along with Shelim Khalique, brother of councilman Shahin Khalique, and Abu Razyen allegedly violated several election laws by collecting said mail-in ballots from voters’s homes and incorrectly delivering them to the Board of Elections. 

Jackson is further charged with possessing ballots that were not his nor was he assigned the bearer. One of those ballots was reportedly unsealed and unmarked by a voter but was later turned in to the Board of Elections sealed. Mendez is also charged with registering voters he knew to be ineligible to vote in the municipal election. 

The reported actions of these four men caused one in five ballots cast on the May 12 election to be removed as ineligible. More than 3,000 ballots were ruled by the Board of Election to be unqualified for counting. 

Continue reading →
P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Great Awokening :The Year of Stupid By Kyle Smith

By on June 30th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/great-awokening-year-of-stupid/Has any people’s uprising ever been as moronic as the Great Awokening?

 I t turned out that the novel coronavirus was only the second-most-infectious disease to spread through the U.S. this year. Satan’s Cupcake has, after all, been diagnosed in less than 1 percent of Americans. The not-so-novel imbecility virus is, on the other hand, ravaging the minds of everyone from news reporters and politicians to brand managers, high-school kids, and utility-company executives. The fervor out there is often compared to the French Revolution, complete with the installation of a toy guillotine/vegetable chopper in front of Jeff Bezos’s house. But this revolution has a distinctly 21st-century American flavor: Let’s hear it for liberté, égalité, stupidité. Has any people’s uprising ever been this moronic? It’s like a sketch-comedy spoof of history, Bastille Day reenacted by the characters from Anchorman.

Item: In Minneapolis, the City Council votes unanimously to disband the police department and replace it with a “department of community safety and violence prevention” driven by “a holistic, public-health-oriented approach.” So, a Committee of Public Safety, then? Should Minneapolis ever follow through on this barmy scheme, which it won’t, I guess the Mini Apple can look forward to friendship bracelets instead of handcuffs, armed robbers getting suites at the nearest Hilton Garden Inn instead of jail cells, and lots of holistic counseling sessions for rapists. If there’s one thing we owe black folks, it’s to let criminals roam unchecked in their neighborhoods while rich, white, and well-connected people surround themselves with private security. People like, er, the members of the Minneapolis City Council.

Item: In Washington, D.C., working with the loud backing of leading public intellectuals who claim Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans did nothing to free the slaves, a mob of the historically challenged gather around a statue commemorating emancipation that was universally understood as a moving symbol of the liberation of black America until ten minutes ago, before the super-spreading of the stupidity virus.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Val Demings vs. Susan Rice By John McCormack

By on June 30th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/val-demings-vs-susan-rice/

One is heiress to Hillary, the other to Obama.

T he website PredictIt now shows California senator Kamala Harris as the clear frontrunner in the Biden veepstakes, with close to a 50 percent chance of getting the nod. The second most likely Biden VP, according to the site, is Florida congresswoman Val Demings — who is at 14 percent — and in third place is Susan Rice, the former national-security adviser to President Obama, who is at 12 percent.

The conventional wisdom appears to get the three finalists in the veepstakes correct. Biden seems increasingly likely to pick an African-American woman, so that rules out Elizabeth Warren. And other potential female African-American running mates, such as former Georgia legislator Stacey Abrams or Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, lack experience in federal government, which is a real deficiency during a pandemic.

So, which of the three will it be? I think it’s closer to a tossup than conventional wisdom has it. Kamala Harris’s strengths and weaknesses are well known to anyone who followed the Democratic primary. She is the only black woman to hold statewide office. She’s been vetted by the national press and is cautious enough that it’s likely she wouldn’t commit any earth-shattering gaffes that would sink the Democratic ticket.

On the other hand, Harris endorsed a radical and unpopular plan to abolish private health insurance by passing Medicare for All, so she could alienate some of the suburban voters that abandoned the GOP for the Democrats in 2018. At the same time, she waffled on the issue and generated little enthusiasm on the left. She also effectively accused Biden of being racist for opposing busing policies, and she could face withering attacks from the left and the right for her record on criminal justice.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

1 Week After Mayor Promises To Close CHAZ, Councilwoman Blames CHAZ Shootings On ‘Capitalism’s Brutality’ By Tristan Justice

By on June 30th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/30/1-week-after-mayor-promises-to-close-chaz-councilwoman-blames-chaz-shootings-on-capitalisms-brutality/

Socialist Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant blamed “capitalism” for yet another shooting in the city’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ), also known as the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” (CHOP) Monday.

Sawant, a member of the left-wing group “Socialist Alternative,” which advocates for a $15 minimum wage and free college among a litany of other far-left fantasy items, said Monday’s shootings in the anarchist utopia that left a 16-year-old dead and a 14-year-old critically injured “highlights capitalism’s brutality & endemic violence.”

“Our movement rejects insinuations & falsehoods perpetuated by corporate & conservative media that this violence is outcome of CHOP or of our movement,” Sawant wrote. Except that this is at least the area’s fourth shooting within two weeks, and the second to become fatal, according to Seattle’s King5 News.

Continue reading →
CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Media Are Playing Games Yet Again With Anonymous Russia Leaks

By on June 30th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/30/media-are-playing-games-yet-again-with-anonymous-russia-leaks/

Watch nearly the entire corporate media establishment run wild with claims from completely anonymous sources in the intelligence community this week.

Much of the case for the Iraq War was based on the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. When the United States declared an end to the war late in 2011, more than 4,400 American military members had been killed and nearly 32,000 wounded. No weapons of mass destruction had been found.

It’s one of the most significant and catastrophic intelligence errors in U.S. history. A bipartisan commission found that U.S. intelligence “seriously misjudged” Iraq’s weapons program because of their “heavy reliance on a human source–codenamed ‘Curveball’–whose information later proved to be unreliable.” The commission wrote, “Even more misleading was the river of intelligence that flowed from the CIA to top policymakers over long periods of time–in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB)” and other reports that were “more alarmist” and “less nuanced.”

Curveball was Germany’s codename for Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, an Iraqi defector who claimed to have built mobile weapons laboratories. President George W. Bush highlighted the claims in his 2003 State of the Union address.

Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, relied heavily on Curveball’s claims. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.”

Powell went on to describe Janabi’s claims at length, concluding, “This defector is currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him. His eyewitness account of these mobile production facilities has been corroborated by other sources.”

Years later, Curveball admitted he had completely fabricated his claims out of a desire to oust Saddam Hussein from power.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kneeling in the Church of Social Justice America certainly has work to do on race, but ritual and symbolic acts aren’t the way forward. John McWhorter

By on June 30th, 2020

Over the past several years, a social justice philosophy has arisen that is less a political program than a religion in all but name. Where Christianity calls for people to display their moral worth through faith in Jesus, modern Third-Wave Antiracism (henceforth TWA) calls for people to display their moral worth through opposition to racism. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, this vision has increasingly been expressed through procedures, routines, and phraseology directly patterned on Abrahamic religion.

America certainly has work to do on race. For one, while racism does not explain why cops kill more black than white people—poverty makes all people more likely to be killed by the cops, hundreds of poor whites are killed annually, but more black people are poor—they harass and abuse black people more than white people, and the real-life impact of this is in its way just as pernicious as the disparity in killings would be. If the tension between black people and the cops were resolved, America’s race problem would quickly begin dissolving faster than it ever has. But making this happen will require work, as will ending the war on drugs, improving educational opportunities for all disadvantaged black children, and other efforts such as steering more black teenagers to vocational programs training them for solid careers without four years of college. 

These are real things, upon which we must behold scenes like in Bethesda, where protesters kneeled on the pavement in droves, chanting allegiance with upraised hands to a series of anti-white privilege tenets incanted by what a naïve anthropologist would recognize as a flock’s pastor. On a similar occasion, white protesters bowed down in front of black people standing in attendance. In Cary, North Carolina, whites washed black protesters’ feet as a symbol of subservience and sympathy. Elsewhere, when a group of white activists painted whip scars upon themselves in sympathy with black America’s past, many black protesters found it a bit much.

Continue reading →
CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s current straits represent the victory of 1960s radicals Roger Kimball

By on June 30th, 2020

https://nypost.com/2020/06/29/americas-current-straits-represent-the-victory-of-1960s-radicals/

Many people think the chance to say “I told you so” is a source of pleasure. This isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes one’s insight is more mournful than gratifying.

A case in point: Back in September 1982, in a note on the inaugural issue of The New Criterion, the late Hilton Kramer, the founding ­editor of the magazine I lead, wrote: “We are still living in the aftermath of the insidious assault on the mind that was one of the most repulsive features of the radical movement of the 1960s. The cultural consequences of this leftward turn in our political life have been far graver than is commonly supposed.”

Indeed. A good index of the success of a cultural revolution is the ­extent to which it manages to render the ideas and values it set out to subvert not merely “problematic” but inert. A counterculture has really triumphed when it ceases to ­encounter significant resistance, when its values seem not merely victorious but inevitable.

That is where we are today.

America’s cultural revolution, launched in the late 1960s and never quite stopped, has always been a Janus-faced phenomenon. One face was the Boomers’ euphoric hedonism and disregard for the moral guardrails of tradition and authority — the “revolution” of easy sex and relentlessly bad taste that now defines our aesthetics and cultural arrangements.

Continue reading →