RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward showed the difficulty of getting the future right, especially when idealism co-opts reason. National socialism proved a disaster to Germany and Italy (and the world), and state ownership of industry deep-sixed the Soviet Union. Kierkegaard suggested in the rubric above, life is best lived with an understanding of history. And as George Santayana famously wrote in Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Divisiveness characterizes our age, like the years leading to the Civil War, the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, or the late 1960s when the Country was divided by the Vietnam War. In last Friday’s The Wall Street Journal Lance Morrow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center wrote: “Exaggeration is the traditional style of American politics, but permanent culture wars, the global pandemic, the agitations of social media and the collapse of party discipline – and, not least, the role modeling of Joe Biden and Donald Trump – have left Americans discontent with mere exaggeration.” We have, he added, “gotten addicted to apocalypse…”

Is there a way out? Can reason subsume emotion? Is a middle ground achievable? I think there is, but I don’t believe that either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump will lead the way. The former is in cognizant decline and the latter has become detached from reality. There are big issues that separate the two parties, but democracy is about debate and compromise, not incoherent brawling, which is what our politics have become.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20367/angel-on-your-shoulder

This article was first published by Gatestone on December 8, 2022.

Scientists have long sought to bring order to our universe through the application of formulas.

Einstein created what is probably the most recognized formula with his explanation of energy as “E = mc²”. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras has been given credit for stating the relationship between two legs of a right triangle and its hypotenuse. Calculus, with its many different equations, sits on the shoulders of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz who labored during the 1600s.

But what these formulas will never be able to compute is the function of the human heart, the role of individual conscience, and ability to recognize right from wrong.

For that, each human being on the planet must depend upon the Angel on their shoulder. The values offered by that Angel are not interchangeable. To secure happiness for us, and those around us, it is important for us to be guided by that Angel on our shoulder, for it is only then we can walk tall.

When that Angel is absent so too is morality. Equally lost is empathy. And for those who have forsaken that Angel on their shoulder, the very concept of love is missing.

During this holiday season it is particularly important to pause and insist upon a period of self-reflection for, regardless of one’s faith, that Angel is in search of the person who embraces the humanity within ourselves and the ability to love.

Author Emily Brontë understood this. In her novel, Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw, one of the main characters, was asked how she could love the gypsy stable-boy, Heathcliff. She replied, “Whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same.” That might be as close to love, rapture, happiness as it gets.

Ironically, it may have been Einstein who authored the most cogent explanation of how that Angel on our shoulder allows us to love.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/02/joe-bidens-election-year-phantasmagoria/

EXCERPTS:

Just now, though, as the process of selecting America’s next president leaves the station and gathers speed towards the summer conventions and November, it might well be that only a writer with the eye of Thompson’s better years can do justice to the phantasmagoria unfolding from the southern border to the snowy north, New York’s courtrooms to the mob-looted stores of Oakland, Chicago, St Louis, Los Angeles and, well, just everywhere. There is no need to hit the hallucinogens; wide-eyed reality mocks illicit pharmacology’s fantasies and distortions.

Start with the Middle East, where the remains of three Americans killed over the weekend as they slept in their Jordan barracks will by now be in Germany and the care of Mortuary Affairs Specialists, the Pentagon’s in-house undertakers. The drone that did for them was launched by what the White House’s team of press-office obfuscators prefer to call “militants”, although there are times when reporters’ questions oblige them to preface that description with “Iran-backed”. Thompsonesque weirdness prevails in the Biden administration’s perception of the situation it is attempting with limited success to sell the American public. “We don’t want a war with Iran,” National Security Council flack John Kirby has repeatedly insisted, despite Iran quite clearly being very much at war with America.

Since early October, US bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan have been targeted on a near daily schedule — some 160 times in a campaign which might well serve as the very definition of asymmetrical warfare. The drones Iran makes and supplies its proxies costs peanuts; the missiles that have destroyed all but a handful of those incoming threats cost millions and, worse, are said to have been used so often they are now in short supply. That tally of attacks, just by the way, doesn’t include what the Houthis of Yemen have been throwing at Red Sea shipping and, when the opportunity presents itself, US warships. Joe Biden’s response to all this? So far nothing but a series of ineffective air strikes on Yemen targets and his flacks’ vague promise that more action will be taken somewhere, somehow, to some extent.

“I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East,” Biden said on Tuesday, “that’s not what I’m looking for.” That comment, like all his interactions these days with the White House press corps, was delivered as he prepared to board the presidential helicopter, those words even harder to make out above the chopper’s turbines than the standard incoherence of any typical public appearance. Would he mount direct attacks on Iran, the reporters shouted? America’s commander in chief stumbled, then landed upon a jesuitical distinction. His “problem” , he said, was that Tehran had provided drones and missiles to those pesky “militants”. That Iran also funds and directs them, from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah’s various iterations in Lebanon and elsewhere, was nothing he thought worth mentioning or, just as likely, thought about at all.

Contrast that wait-and-see prevarication with, say, Ronald Reagan, who reacted to just one Iranian provocation, the 1988 mining of a US frigate in international waters, by sinking five of Tehran’s warships and pulverising a pair of former drilling rigs converted to offshore radar stations.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/hell_must_be_empty.html

In New York City, the bad guys have long understood an unwritten rule: you don’t hit a cop.  In the past, doing so put you at the top of the NYPD’s to-do list and ensured that you would not be free on the streets for long.  When 30,000 officers are tasked with securing a metropolis of nine million residents, the impenetrability of the “thin blue line” is a matter of life and death.  When video emerged of a group of illegal aliens wrestling two cops to the ground near Times Square and beating them with fists and feet, that thin blue line got thinner.  When news broke that the offenders were released without bail and that a left-wing “charity” had likely given them a free ride to California, the blue line all but disappeared.  

By looking the other way as criminal invaders attack the people charged with protecting the city, NYC mayor Eric Adams and district attorney Alvin Bragg not only betray their duties to those who risk their lives every day for others’ safety, but also prove their complicity with those who wage war against citizens of the United States.  Before he disappeared without a care in the world, one of the foreign nationals apprehended for the attack left Manhattan Criminal Court with two middle fingers extended into the air and a broad smile across his face.  It was an “F you” to all Americans from a man who should never have been allowed to illegally enter the United States in the first place.  At the same time, it sure felt as if Adams, Bragg, Biden, Mayorkas, and all the other open-borders advocates and politicians were really the ones flipping off desperate American citizens whose decades-long pleas for secure borders have been entirely ignored.  

Ever since Obama’s presidency, Democrats have demonized police officers and lionized criminals.  They lied about “hands up, don’t shoot”; maligned cops as Klan members with badges; and instigated race riots throughout the country.  They excused criminal behavior, cut bail requirements, reduced felonies to misdemeanors, and celebrated unethical prosecutors who have used their powers to lock up police officers for spurious charges while treating violent crime as some kind of race-based civil right.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder (the corrupt attorney general who regularly abused the law to protect friends and target political enemies) set the country down a dangerous path, where criminal gangs are psychologically empowered to target law enforcement officers for assassination and municipal politicians are so desperate to prove their soft-on-crime bona fides that they release violent criminals from jail in order to make room for unjustly indicted cops.