RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13536/donald-trump-gary-cooper

President Obama posed as a defender of human rights but refused to lift a finger to help Iranians rising for democracy and Syrians fighting for dignity. President Trump is being castigated for something which he might do but hasn’t done yet, while many of his predecessors actually did.

Gary Cooper had a choice: Stand and fight or jump into the cabriolet where his new bride was waiting to start their honeymoon trip.

Unwittingly, perhaps, and in his unorthodox way, Trump may have invited Americans to also contemplate the choice they have.

Like some of his other quick-tweet decisions, President Donald Trump’s announcement, last month, on troop withdrawal from Syria, triggered a tsunami of instant-coffee comment, most of it adverse.

Ardent advocates of global retreat by the United States feigned anger because Trump was doing what their darling Barack Obama dared not contemplate. Dyed-in-the-wool isolationists hailed the tweet as the start of a return to the Monroe Doctrine, while pathological Trump-haters labeled it as another example of his supposed subservience to Vladimir Putin.

Had everyone waited a little bit longer, the storm-raising tweet may have looked different in the manner that a hologram seems different from different angles.

If a week is a long time in politics, a month must be four times longer. So, what does the quick-tweet “decision” look like now?

https://canadafreepress.com/article/phony-unity

Mitt Romney renewed the familiar charge last week that President Trump has been dividing Americans rather than uniting them. But it is not Mr. Trump who is dividing America.

When Barack Obama commandeered one seventh of the U.S. economy in the name of making health insurance available to a small minority of Americans who did not have it, and he did so through political chicanery, with no support from the Republicans, and against the wishes of the majority of Americans, that was divisive.

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When Mr. Obama tried to force schools to allow males who “identified as” females to use women’s bathrooms (and vice versa), and he did so with no public debate of the matter and in the complete absence of credible scientific evidence that a biological male can in any psychologically healthy sense claim to identify as a female, that was divisive.

When white students at our best colleges (and even recruits to the U.S. Army) are taught that they have enjoyed undeserved advantages because they happen to have been born white in a nation founded and peopled mostly by whites, that’s divisive. And when our political and economic institutions are vilified as expressions of “white supremacy” because they were developed predominantly by the white majority, that’s divisive.

When Colin Kaepernick intrudes on our Sunday recreations to let us know that, in his estimation, the freest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world does not merit his respect, that’s divisive.

And when, through “sanctuary” enactments, many cities and even the State of California seek to thwart the enforcement of valid and necessary laws regulating entry into the United States, that’s divisive.

Unity is possible in America only when there is fundamental agreement as to what this country is and ought to be. But such agreement no longer exists, and this is the fault not of those who would preserve our commitment to individual rights, limited government, and private property, but of those who since the 1960s have sought to refashion America in the name of an impoverishing, soul-destroying, state-managed “equality.”

Pretending that we are still one unified people, as Mr. Romney and the Republican establishment do, is worse than useless

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13530/lessons-unwilling-to-learn

The question to ask is why are there so many people in the Muslim community who would object to such an exhibition and why these extremists have so much sway (as opposed to merely being an embittered fringe) that they can actually get their way. If a church in Britain put on an exhibition about the Holocaust, it would not be forced to cancel it under pressure from any Holocaust-denying Anglicans.

So what is it about the fragility, and vulnerability of the Muslim community to the dictates of extremists that we can learn from an episode such as this one?

Quite a lot, I would suggest. Which is one of the reasons why there has been so little focus. Because what can be learned from such events are lessons that, as a society, we still seem distinctly unwilling to learn.

An enormous amount about the hopes and expectations of a society can be learned from the news that people want to report and the stories its readers apparently want to hear. An equally large amount — perhaps even more — can be learned from the stories they would most likely rather not hear and the facts they would probably prefer not to know about.

The former situation can be seen after any Islamist terrorist attack in the West, when people are immediately given ‘good news stories’ either to dampen any rage they might be feeling or distract from any difficult questions they might be asking. On New Year’s Eve in Manchester, England, for instance, a 25-year-old man began stabbing people at random on a platform at the city’s Victoria Metrolink station. It appears that the venue was chosen because it is near the Manchester Arena, where Salman Abedi murdered 22 people in a suicide-bombing at a pop concert in May 2017.

http://politicalmavens.com/

Not everyone reads the WSJ but any American who wants to understand what happened at the Parkland School Massacre should read the interview conducted by Tunku Varadarajan with Andrew Pollack, father of Meadow, murdered by Nikolas Cruz ( A Parkland Father’s Quest for Accountability 1/12/19). If you can’t get that, read the book that Pollack co-wrote – “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endangered America’s Students” coming out in February. For those who believe that the primary problem here was and is gun control, this is particularly mandatory.

The title of this piece refers not to any pledge but to an acronym for a program created in 2011 by Robert Runcie, superintendent of the Broward County Public Schools: Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support and Education. This was developed to combat the assumed racism of teachers because of the disparity between white and minority students when it came to reported out of control behavior at school. Under this new program, students committing criminal acts would be evaluated and dealt with by school personnel, not by law enforcement.

One of the worst examples of the law of unintended consequences is that no student offender ever developed a criminal record so that background checks for buying weapons would be non-existent. Instead of apprehension and punishment, students were sent to “healing circles” and other politically correct remedial activities. To give you a measure of Mr. Cruz’s behavior in school, here is a summary: vandalizing a bathroom that required $1,000 of repair; racial fist fights; carving swastikas on his desk; bringing dead animals to school and waving them at other students; threats to kill teachers, students and to shoot up the school; bringing knives and a backpack of bullets to school, writing KILL in his notebooks. None of this was reported to police. Along with the school chancellor, the sheriff was intent on reducing juvenile arrests so that despite being called to the Cruz home an incredible 45 times, the police never arrested the out of control perpetrator who was able to maintain a clean record.

https://www.newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/socialism-as-a-hate-crime-9746?utm_source=The+New+Criterion+Subscribers&utm_campaign=432f5ac8d7-Most-Read_dispatch_2019_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f42f7adca5-432f5ac8d7-104843169
On the human cost of a persistent and pernicious political doctrine.
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.–Joseph Stalin

It is a great irony that at a time when Facebook and Twitter are closing accounts of conservatives for allegedly promoting “hate,” and conservative speakers are banned from college campuses for (as it is charged) “peddling hate,” opinion polls suggest that socialism is more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, is the most popular figure among progressive Democrats, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has emerged from the Bronx as the newest socialist celebrity and is traveling the country singing the virtues of socialism, as if no one has heard those songs before.

Which raises the question: given our loose standards on the subject, why isn’t socialism a “hate crime”?

After all, the evidence for its malignant effects is obvious to anyone with sufficient curiosity to look at the historical record. The socialist movement has been responsible for the murder, imprisonment, and torture of many millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of innocent people during its heyday in the twentieth century. That history of murder and tyranny continues on a smaller scale today in the handful of countries living under the misfortune of socialism—for example, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and (more recently) Venezuela.

How do socialists escape the indictment that, in view of the historical record, they are purveyors of tyranny and mass murder? Many deny that Stalin, Mao, and the others were true socialists and, indeed, that socialism has never really been tried—a manifest absurdity. Senator Sanders and others claim that they are for something called “democratic socialism,” a popular and peaceful version of the doctrine, but that’s what Lenin, Mao, and Castro said until they seized power and immediately began to sing a different tune. Democracy and diversity are what they say when out of power; tyranny and authoritarianism are what they practice once in power. That is the tried-and-true technique of all socialist movements.

Democracy and diversity are what socialists say when out of power; tyranny and authoritarianism are what they practice once in power.

The late R. J. Rummel, a noted scholar of political violence and totalitarian movements, coined the term “democide” to describe large-scale government killings for political purposes—in other words, politically motivated murder. While communists and socialists have not had a monopoly on democide, these movements (Rummel says) have been responsible for far more political killings in the modern era than any other political movement or form of government.

He concludes that

“[i]n sum the communists probably have murdered something like 110 million, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course the total itself is shocking. It is several times the thirty-eight million battle-dead that have been killed in all this century’s international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone—one communist country—well surpasses this cost of war.”

Rummel suspects that the estimate of one hundred ten million killed may be too low, and in fact that the death toll from socialist democide in the twentieth century may be as high as 260 million.