Displaying the most recent of 90925 posts written by

Ruth King

Solzhenitsyn 40 Years Later By Herbert London

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/solzhenitsyn_40_years_later.html
Herbert London is president of the London Center for Policy Research

In June 1978 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement address at Harvard titled “A World Split Apart.” It was a speech devoted to the emergence of “different worlds,” including our own Western society. On one side of the divide is a freedom diverted to unbridled passion with the accumulation of material riches to be valued above all else. Man is the center in this equation, as there isn’t any power above him, resulting in a moral poverty searching for meaning.

In days after this speech, the Fourth Estate accused Solzhenitsyn of “losing his balance,” of representing a “mind split apart.” He thought one could say what one thinks in the USA, but democracy expects to be admired. The press argued “the giant does not love us.”

Was Solzhenitsyn right? He did use positive signs in the heartland. “Gradually another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small town, and robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing this speech.”

Now we have the luxury of examining the address forty years later. As I see it, Solzhenitsyn was “cautious” based on the way cultural conditions have unfolded over these four decades. The U.S. is preoccupied with material goals, a condition that has reached full efflorescence from the rationalist humanist tradition. The Higher Power to which Solzhenitsyn refers is in serial descent, having gone from more than 90 percent of the populace embracing God to about 70 percent, with the trend line in descent well established.

Scrubbing Laura Ingalls Wilder Is A Dangerous Step Toward Ignorance Pretending things that make us uncomfortable never happened isn’t going to make America better, or make American children more informed. By Holly Scheer

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/27/scrubbing-laura-ingalls-wilder-is-a-dangerous-step-toward-ignorance/

Few people are unfamiliar with the Little House on the Prairie book series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her simple retellings of her childhood memories of life in the big woods of Wisconsin, to the prairie of the Dakota territories, to her life as a married frontier wife have captured the imaginations of generations of readers.

Wilder’s stories of her family’s journey west in a covered wagon, the careful details of the minutiae of their daily lives, and her descriptions of an America most commonly seen in history books should, without question, cement her place in history as a talented and important author. Wilder’s books also have served to introduce children for decades to disability issues, specifically blindness, and are an important look at the positive difference a supportive family can make for people with special needs. The enduring nature of her work is a testimony to her ability to write, and that talent and ability to capture reader’s minds and hearts led the Associate for Library Service to Children to name a literary award after her in 1952. Now her presence has been stripped from the the award, which has been renamed the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

Wilder’s removal came after repeated rounds of criticism that her books, written about her girlhood in the 1800s, contained racist and offensive characterizations most commonly of Native Americans. These complaints started in the 50s with a reader writing into Harper, the publisher of Wilder’s books, about sentences that she disagreed with. The publisher responded by rewording sections. These gentle rewordings quelled critiques until more recently, when statutes and school names became battle grounds for removing the presence of people with problematic parts of their history. No longer can Confederate leaders of the past have any public monuments. Their part in the Civil War renders them best forgotten, ripped from places where their names and images could remind people of uncomfortable parts of history. And here is where Wilder’s name and image are now being stripped away.

The Court After Kennedy The consequential jurist has done the country a favor by retiring.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-court-after-kennedy-1530142949

Anthony Kennedy acted in the best interests of the Supreme Court and his own legacy Wednesday by deciding to step down after 30 years as an Associate Justice. The fight to replace him was always going to be titanic, and by retiring on July 31 he gives a Republican President and Senate an opening to nominate and confirm a replacement with the best chance of keeping the Court tethered to the Constitution.

The raw political reality is that Democrats will refuse to confirm any nominee likely to be chosen by Donald Trump if they win Senate control in November. They are still furious that Senate Republicans refused to confirm Merrick Garland in 2016 after the death of Antonin Scalia, and the political left would insist that they return the favor through 2020, and 2024 if they have to.

That could leave the Court with eight Justices for as long as three years or more, with a 4-4 ideological split on many contentious issues. The Court now has a chance for a full complement again by the start of its October term. The 81-year-old Justice Kennedy has done right by the country and the Court.

A Republican nominee also offers the best chance to sustain Justice Kennedy’s legacy, despite the fear and loathing you hear on the left. Democrats are already predicting the demise of abortion rights, the end of gay marriage, and no doubt we’ll be hearing about the revival of Dred Scott before the confirmation hearings on Justice Kennedy’s replacement are over. But that overlooks the entirety of Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence, which is far richer than the cultural cases like Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Obergefell v. Hodges for which he is celebrated on the left.

The Rule of Law Prevails in the Travel-Ban Case Dissenters cite the views of former officials, a radical departure from American constitutional norms. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rule-of-law-prevails-in-the-travel-ban-case-1530139894

The judicial “resistance” to President Trump suffered a well-deserved defeat in the Supreme Court’s “travel ban” ruling, Trump v. Hawaii. At issue was Mr. Trump’s order limiting entry to the U.S. of nationals from eight (now seven) countries that are unwilling or unable to cooperate sufficiently in U.S. antiterrorist screening efforts. The plaintiffs challenged the order on several grounds, arguing that it exceeded the president’s authority and was animated by anti-Muslim bias, violating the First Amendment. (Six of the eight covered countries are mostly Muslim.) The court upheld Mr. Trump’s order 5-4.

Whatever one thinks of the travel ban as policy, the ruling is an important victory for the rule of law. Federal trial and appellate courts have persistently enjoined Mr. Trump’s orders, defying clear Supreme Court precedent supporting his power to limit the entry of aliens. The decision has removed all doubt that the president’s orders are lawful under both the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Constitution.

The justices made short work of the plaintiffs’ statutory claims, affirming that the Immigration and Nationality Act’s plain language gives the president the power to deny “any aliens or any class of aliens” entry to the U.S. whenever he finds that letting them in “would be detrimental” to U.S. interests. This provision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “exudes deference to the President in every clause.” Mr. Trump’s proclamation, the justices concluded, was “well within this comprehensive delegation.” The court also concluded that a “searching inquiry” into the president’s justifications for the order, such as the lower courts in this case conducted, is inconsistent with both the statute and “the deference traditionally accorded the President in this sphere”—namely “international affairs and national security.”

Democrats’ Competing Midterm Messages on the Economy by Adele Malpass

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/
As the midterm election season heats up, a mixed economic message is coming from Democratic congressional candidates as the progressive wing finds itself at odds with party moderates. Partly, this is a reflection of the difficulty the out-of-power party has getting traction during robust economic times. The 2018 midterms are taking place at a time when the unemployment rate is at its lowest point in 18 years. But this dichotomy is also indicative of the Democratic Party’s leftward movement. The moderate wing is in shock after 10-term New York Congressman Joe Crowley lost a primary battle Tuesday to Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old underfunded outsider candidate to the left of “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders.

Progressives have absorbed the Sanders playbook and are campaigning on platforms advocating free college tuition, free single-payer health care, and a jobs guarantee program for all. This is on top of calls for a $15 minimum wage and a new affordable housing mandate to address income and wealth inequality. They insist that this all can be done by taxing Wall Street, millionaires and rolling back the recent Republican tax cuts.

They will get a chance to test their liberal economic message in one of the most watched midterm races, a congressional election in Orange County, California, where Mimi Walters is the two-term Republican incumbent. This is an upscale swing voter district that Hillary Clinton won by five percentage points. Democrats have identified it as a key district to flip in their quest to retake the House. Facing Walters in the November general election is Katie Porter, a Democrat who finished a distant second to Walters in California’s “top-two” primary system.

Porter, a university professor and a protégé of Elizabeth Warren’s from her Harvard days, has been dubbed the “Elizabeth Warren of the West.” She has endorsed Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal, touts Nancy Pelosi’s plan to roll back the recently passed tax cuts, and insists that wealthy corporations “pay their fair share.”

However, her close association with Warren, which includes a fundraiser headlined by the Massachusetts liberal and numerous photos with her, are viewed as a vulnerability by some Republicans. “Katie Porter is out of touch with this district as a far-left progressive,” said Courtney Alexander, communications director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with the Republican House leadership. “Going into the fall, she will be a sharp contrast to the Republican message of less taxes.”

MY SAY: PUTTING CHILDREN FIRST….IN THE LINE OF MEDIA FIRE

There is an iconic picture of a child, a young boy, terrified, holding his hands up as armed Nazis surround and round up the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Pictures of children who are injured or at risk evoke a special horror among decent people.

Indecent journalists exploit and stage such photographs to further bias and political agenda. A recent Time magazine cover is an example. In Gaza, Hamas paid the grieving family of a dead baby, Layla al-Ghandour to use her photo to blame Israeli troops who fired on violent “demonstrators” along the Gaza border with Israel.

Nothing is new here.

In August of 1982 during the first Lebanon/Israel War, front pages and television footage were flooded with pictures of a Lebanese baby with bandages covering her body. The headlines and networks screamed: “ A baby who lost both arms was severely burned as a result of a bomb dropped by and Israeli plane.”

Then U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, by every measure a decent and fair man, declared after being shown the photograph and headline: “The symbol of this war is a baby whose arms have been amputated.”

Harsh words indeed, but totally wrong. The baby, it was soon disclosed, had not lost any limbs nor suffered severe burns. In fact, the light injuries were sustained from a shell misfired by the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Many years later, following the terrorist spree that segued the Oslo Agreement, the mainstream media failed to notice or record photos of mangled baby strollers or the blood soaked sheets of a crib in Israel.

Telling truth to biased journalists is akin to casting pearls before swine. rsk

European Terrorism: The ‘Batman Syndrome’ by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12567/european-terrorism-batman-syndrome

“It is the ‘Batman syndrome’: the hero refuses to kill, he systematically saves his enemy who escapes and kills new victims until the hero catches up with him, and so on”. — Causeur magazine.

“These crimes will continue so long as the Republic leaves the enemy in peace”. — Ivan Riofoul, Le Figaro.

In the end, there might be still a region called “Europe”, but it may no longer enfold European culture.

The European Union lost €180 billion (USD $210 billion) in GDP due to terrorism between 2004 and 2016. The United Kingdom (€43.7 billion) and France (€43 billion) suffered the highest losses, followed by Spain (€40.8 billion) and Germany (€19.2 billion), according to a Rand Corporation study.

“Beyond those who have been directly physically affected by terrorist attacks, the extensive coverage of terrorist attacks through multiple media and social media channels has substantially increased the amount of people and companies that could be psychologically affected. This subsequently affects their economic behaviour”.

New statistics have also come from the Britain’s anti-terrorism office. 441 people have been arrested in the UK for terrorism in the last year alone, and 4,182 since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The threat of terrorism is exhausting Europe.

According to the Spanish “black book” of terrorism, 658 Europeans have been murdered in terror attacks on European soil, while 1,029 Europeans have been killed by them abroad. Half of the French army has been deployed within the French Republic to protect the civilian targets, such as schools, monuments, and religious sites. Europe’s armies are exhausted from patrolling the streets, to the point that NATO planners now fear that, over time, European armies “may get better at guarding railway stations and airports than fighting wars”. An officer who recently returned from Afghanistan for guard duty in Belgium said: “We are standing around like flowers pots, just waiting to be smashed”. Germany also sent troops into the streets for the first time since the Second World War.

Years after Genocide, Yazidis Urgently Need Help by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12590/yazidis-need-help

There are two types of aid urgently needed by Yazidis at Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in northern Iraq, according to Saad Babir, media director of Yazda: psychological support for the victims of genocide, and basic services such as healthcare, food, water, electricity, heat, new tents — and even firetrucks and ambulances. Many Yazidis have died in IDP camps due to a lack of the latter two.

“When I was in the camps, I noticed that when UN officials came in to do an assessment, the Yazidi people were not able to tell them the truth about what was happening for fear of retaliation from the country’s leaders.” — Dawood Saleh, Yazidi author and activist.

“We wrote many reports to the UN, for it to consider Yazidis in the camps refugees, due to their dangerous situation, but our pleas were rejected. The UN has not reported on the situation accurately and sufficiently to enable Western countries to help Yazidis more.” — Dawood Saleh.

On June 13, Mark Green, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), finally offered some good news for the persecuted Christians and Yazidis in Iraq. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled: “Help Is on the Way for Middle Eastern Christians,” he wrote:

“Every day of delay brings persecuted communities that much closer to extinction. In Iraq alone, nearly 90% of Christians have fled in the past 15 years, emptying entire villages that had stood for more than a thousand years. The Yazidi population has been similarly decimated. Without immediate additional support, these groups may be forced to continue their unprecedented exodus, perhaps never to return to their ancient homes.

It’s Getting Dangerous to Disagree in America By Karin McQuillan

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/27/it-is-dangerous-to-be-

This weekend, Sarah Sanders Huckabee and her family were thrown out of a Virginia restaurant after a vote by the staff.

Do not trivialize this as a failure of civility, or a small incident in the soap opera of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Victor Davis Hanson says it will pass. It is not passing. It is growing. This is more than an assault on the Trump Administration; it is an assault on all of us.

Everywhere, in city, town, and country, Republicans keep their mouths shut among their neighbors, at dinner parties, at community gatherings, at their workplaces. To be openly Republican is to lose old friends, to alienate neighbors, to risk losing your job or career. Everyone on the Right has experienced this.

President Trump is adept at protecting himself. His policy successes speak louder than the hysteria. What about the rest of us? Ordinary people are vulnerable.

If a highly qualified job candidate votes Republican, his or her chance of employment shrinks to 7 percent in journalism, 3 percent in Ivy League colleges, 7 percent in Hollywood, and 10 percent in Silicon Valley.

Fields that create our educational, cultural, and technological world are deprived of the talent pool of roughly half the country. It also means the country is subjected to political thought control in precisely the fields that determine people’s cultural norms and values and shape their politics.

My Attendance at a “Rally for Palestine” Something was missing. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270563/my-attendance-rally-palestine-hugh-fitzgerald

I recently attended a Rally for Palestine in the main square of a medium-sized French city close to Marseille. There were flags aflutter of the State of Palestine, two booths full of anti-Zionist propaganda, French middle-aged leftists, committed to the cause, concolorous in their political views with their American cousins of circa 1970, all granola and granny glasses. There were pamphlets of testimonies by “Palestinians” describing the unbelievable behavior of the Zionists, when they started the 1948 war, and then the 1956 Sinai war, and then the 1967 war, and the 1973 war, and several wars made on the peaceful citizens of Gaza — all entirely unprovoked attacks by the monstrous Israelis. There were flags of Palestine for sale. There were photographs of Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. There was something — I couldn’t make out the title — by Noam Chomsky. But what attracted my attention the most were the four outline maps of “Palestine” that were spread out on the ground, depicting an ever-expanding seizure of Arab land by the Zionist “settlers.”

The first map of “Palestine” showed it in 1946 as almost entirely Arab, with a handful of diminutive Jewish islands in an Arab sea.

The other three maps told a tale of inexorable Zionist expansion. The second map showed Palestine according to the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947. Palestine is still overwhelmingly Arab, but with a little more land area — still discontinuous bits — than in the 1946 map, assigned to the Jews. Then a map showing Israel just before, and then just after, the Six-Day War. No discussion of what caused the Six-Day War. No display of the Sinai as part of the territory Israel won in that war, or mention of how it was given back to Egypt by the Israelis.