RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/progressive-big-lies-bruce-thornton/

The “big lie” was Adolf Hitler’s term in Mein Kampf  for the propaganda tactic of telling a lie so “colossal” that nobody would believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Far from being specific to Nazism, this technique of political persuasion has been to varying degrees universal. These days, the masters of the “big lie” are the Leftists and those progressives who, addled by Trumpophobia, regularly promulgate whoppers that today’s internet can easily discredit.

Of course, from the Russian collusion fabrication to the Ukraine “quid pro quo,” the Dems have publicized numerous lies and distortions of facts. Now they’re at it again with hysterical attacks on Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. During the last debate, Mike Bloomberg charge that Trump “defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t have the organization we need,” a lie seconded by Joe Biden who added, “He cut the funding for the entire effort.” As the New York Post, commented, “It’s a lie that can only sow fear: The CDC budget is higher than when Trump took office. Same for the National Institutes of Health. And top career officials from both have been working with the White House for weeks to direct the US response.” This lie was so “colossal” that the AP––which was so skewed toward Democrats during Obama’s tenure that wags said AP stood for “administration’s press”–– ran a headline that read, “AP FACT CHECK: Democrats distort coronavirus readiness.”

This penchant for accepting lies as truth, however, has warped the minds of Leftists both hard and soft ever since New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty lied about Stalin’s engineered famines in the 1930s. They have accepted the Marxist, as in Groucho, stance “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” One of the best examples is Bernie Sanders’ stubborn, unapologetic support for vicious totalitarian regimes like the Castro cartel in Cuba, based on a variation of the fascist excuse that Mussolini “made the trains run on time” combined with the old proverb favored by communists, and used in print by Duranty, that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/globalization-bleeding/#slide-1

When we become citizens of the world, that is, citizens of everyplace, then we end up citizens of utopia. That is, as citizens of οὐ τόπος — of “no place.”

The recurring dream — or nightmare — of being a ‘citizen of the world’

By the early 21st century, cosmopolitans were gushing that high-tech, instant communications, transnational agencies and agreements, free-flowing capital, international corporations, and a new eerily uniform global elite had, finally, made nationalism, borders, and even the nation-state itself all irrelevant. Nationalism was apparently relegated to dustbin of history, as we hit peak Socratic citizen-of-the-worldism.

There were always two flaws to these adolescent giddy reports from world-bestriding New York Times op-ed journalists about win-win globalization, with their praise of gleaming airports and superior high-speed rail in what was otherwise Communist China, or accounts of flying first-class on Qatar Airlines was heavenly compared with backward United or American Airlines.

Nothing New under the Sun
One, globalization was not the end of history. It is a recurrent, cyclical, and at best morally neutral phenomenon that has always, at least in relative terms, waxed and waned over the past 2,500 years of civilization — although recent transcontinentalism carries greater consequences in the era of electronic interconnectedness.

By a.d. 200, there was a globalized Roman world of 2 million square miles, stretching from Hadrian’s Wall to the Persian Gulf, and from the Rhine to the Atlas Mountains. Like frogs around the pond of Mare Nostrum, all official business was conducted in Latin or, increasingly in the East, Greek. A Roman citizen could enjoy habeas corpus from Bithynia to the Atlantic. Thousands of small towns were marked by fora and agorae, colonnades, and basilicas. While multiracial and non-Italian, otherwise uniformly equipped and trained legions secured the vast borders. It was quite an achievement of providing aqueducts, security, and property rights to 70 million disparate peoples, but it was no longer really the earlier Roman Republic of the Scipios, either.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15020/imported-antisemitism-supporters

A 2014 survey of antisemitism by the US Anti-Defamation League covered 100 countries. It found that all the countries in the top 10 most antisemitic locations were in the Middle East or north Africa region, with an overall figure of 73%. The West Bank and Gaza came at the top, with 93% of Palestinians expressing antisemitic views.

The 1988 Covenant (Mithaq) of Jeremy Corbyn’s good friends (and Israel’s enemies)… could not be more religious in nature…. “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” Note that they say they are fighting “Jews”, not “Israelis”.

In the end, the only thing that can oppose it will be a renewal of a secular reform that once had a deep impact in many Muslim countries only to falter after the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. Without that, peace may never return to the Middle East.

On March 6, 2019, Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission launched a probe into claims that the country’s Labour Party, currently led by the lifelong Trotskyite Jeremy Corbyn, is “institutionally anti-Semitic”.

We are all too familiar with the development that the conflation of antisemitism and antizionism may be found today within politics.[1] Challenging this distortion remains a priority in Western countries. Fortunately, as recent events within Britain’s Labour Party have shown, many constituents are rejecting the overt antisemitism and anti-Israel extremism of the groups who have often underhandedly taken control of their party.[2]

It increasingly seems as if one source of antisemitism — as shown by more than one survey in Europe and in the United States — is that there often seems to be widespread antisemitism within Muslim communities (here, here and here).

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/music-review-billy-joel-madison-square-garden/

Now 70, Billy Joel has all of the swagger & sangfroid of late-period Frank Sinatra.

H e is 70, and expansive across the midsection, and with his shaved head he could be a barroom bouncer. There is a line running up from his right eye into his forehead. That eye looks like it took a punch, or maybe it’s just being squeezed by the years. Billy Joel used to race around the stage in tennis shoes, sometimes jumping up on his grand piano. “Don’t take any s*** from anyone!” would be his Long Island valedictory at the end of an evening. Now he limits his movements, spends nearly the entire evening seated at the piano, which is on a turntable that does a half-turn once in a while. He brought on a surprise guest — “the world’s greatest violinist!” Itzhak Perlman added his beautiful violin to two numbers. Perlman is 74. We’re none of us as young as we used to be.

So: Let’s party? The crowd was non-young on February 20 at Joel’s 118th Madison Square Garden concert, but 40,000 creaky knees got a workout beneath that giant sports-style banner in the rafters (currently reading JOEL 118) up there with the Knicks and Rangers jerseys. Joel spoke for all of us who are old but feisty: “Last time I was here they hit my house!” he cried at the top of the show. “They knew I wasn’t home, so . . .” Joel was referring to the strange break-in at his Centre Island, Long Island estate (14.6 acres) the weekend of January 25. The burglars didn’t steal anything; they merely damaged several specimens of Joel’s prized motorcycle collection. Who breaks into a man’s home and beats up on his bikes? “This time I got dogs, I got guns, I got everything,” Joel said. “I hope they come back.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/balkanized-democrats-bruce-thornton/

The slogan of “diversity” has always contained a fundamental incoherence. On the surface, the variety of identities expressed mainly in cosmetic differences hides deeper, more contentious variations ignored by diversicrats and their media champions. Chanting “diversity is our strength,” the purveyors of “rainbow coalitions” forget that diversity can also be a weakness despite the conformity of their public “woke” political aims. The contentious Democrat presidential primaries have exposed these fissures that are threatening the Left’s aim of retaking presidency.

Start with the obvious division within the party: That between Bernie Sanders and a DNC establishment that believes, probably correctly, that a cranky socialist village explainer is electorally radioactive. Bernie and his passionate Bros have already been primed by the 2016 primary to suspect the party establishment of “moderate” squishes, who are plotting to promote plutocrat Michael Bloomberg and his billions as the candidate, or to rig the convention once again. Whether Bernie is the candidate or not, this conflict will leave a lot of bad blood that will weaken the party in the general election.

The permanent threat to “rainbow” diversity, however, is social and economic class. All the Democrat primary front-runners are rich one-percenters, with the exception of Mayor Pete, who languishes among the top ten percent of earners.  And all the candidates this cycle have been political insiders, senators mostly, and are festooned with gilt-edged university and professional credentials. Especially during televised debates, this graphic privilege is an embarrassment to a party that touts diversity and its strengths, and styles itself as the party of the working class and dispossessed. And what’s so “transformational” about rich and university credentialed people wielding power? Since the days of Julius Caesar, ambitious elites have championed the plebeians in order to aggrandize their own power and privilege.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/25/artificial-unintelligence/

When an artificial intelligence clearly fails, like a chatbot that starts making racist remarks or an autopilot that flies an aircraft into the ground, its designers shut it down. America’s 17 intelligence agencies are like that failed chatbot and autopilot.

The president should ground the 17 intelligence agencies until they can be reformed and proven safe.

Think about it like an ant farm. A blank layer of sand sits between two plates of clear plastic. Introduce the ants, and each following their own ant agenda, the ants construct a maze of purposeful tunnels and activity—a colony.

No individual ant understands the colony, but each runs its simple routine. Taken as a whole, however, the ants produce a complex system of functional outputs.

In the human brain, 86 billion neurons interact according to the agendas of the individual neurons. Exactly how no one knows, but this produces the intelligent outputs of a human being.

In the field of artificial intelligence, a “neural network” works similarly. A web of computational nodes runs simple algorithms to process inputs and to generate additional sub-inputs to other nodes, generating complex outputs that reflect deep learning. No individual node itself is capable of intelligence, but taken together their routines synthesize intelligent output.

Institutional organizations, bureaucracies, have an artificial intelligence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-make-bloomberg-th

Poor Democrats. As if they don’t already have enough trouble, they also happen to be lashed to political correctness. How firmly lashed we learned at last week’s presidential debate, in which candidates competed over who is the most PC.

This came out emphatically in the attacks on Michael Bloomberg. He was vulnerable on the two major political-correctness fronts: race and the treatment of women. Nearly everyone on the debate stage took a moment out to spit upon Mr. Bloomberg for his stop-and-frisk policy while mayor of New York. That the policy seemed to work, radically reducing the number of murders in New York, mattered little beside what the other candidates took to be its inherent and loathsome racism. The logic, apparently, is that it is better to live in a murderous city than a racist one. One of the hallmarks of political correctness is that words matter more than deeds.

Nor are the purveyors of political correctness notable for self-examination. Thus Bernie Sanders, a mere millionaire with the utmost contempt for billionaires, blithely called Mr. Bloomberg a racist. Sen. Sanders apparently forgot that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union at a time when it was still murdering its own citizens and sending them to gulags. He apparently also forgot that he long approved of the cruel and stunting regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Sanders was one of those people Lenin called “useful idiots,” dupes of a murderous regime. Is a useful idiot in a position to call another man racist? Perhaps, since there is nothing politically incorrect about being a useful idiot, whereas a racist is clearly beyond the pale.

https://www.voteherut2020.com/ ]

His hometown newspaper calls him “Seattle’s Jeremiah.” An Israeli publication once hailed him as “Jewry’s premier polemicist.” After half a century fighting for Israel and the Jewish people in the trenches of the literary world, Edward Alexander is in yet another battle—as a candidate on the Herut list in the current U.S. elections for the World Zionist Congress. Alexander grew up in the heavily-Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The “most vivid and satisfying memory” of his childhood occurred in May 1948, when he was eleven years old. It involved Brooklyn Dodgers star Jackie Robinson, whom he and his boyhood pals regarded as “the greatest man in the world,” and David Ben-Gurion who was “a close second to Robinson in our esteem.” “These two heroic figures came together for me almost magically when I heard Robinson address a block party to celebrate Israel’s independence,” Alexander recalled.

“I consider myself lucky,” he wrote, “never to have been disillusioned about what my parents taught me: that both men symbolized the belated righting of ancient historical wrongs, that Robinson was indeed a uniquely courageous figure and that the birth of Israel just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry was one of the greatest affirmations of life ever made by a martyred people…” After earning his bachelor’s degree in English literature at Columbia, Alexander completed his master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. That was where he met his future wife, Leah. She, too, was a scholar of English literature and her senior thesis, on Henry James, was published as a book. Leah passed away in 2017.

The young couple settled in Seattle in 1960, where Alexander became professor of English at the University of Washington and, later, the first chairman of the school’s Jewish Studies program. Alexander’s academic career began in conventional fashion, teaching a full load of courses and authoring books that were well-regarded in his field although they did not attract the attention of the wider public. He wrote volumes about such noted 18th-century literary figures as Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill as well as more recent giants, including Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. But the UN’s infamous Zionism-is-racism resolution and the rise of the Soviet Jewry protest movement in the 1970s inspired the Alexanders to dive head first into the world of Jewish controversy. In 1976, Edward and Leah traveled to the Soviet Union to assist refuseniks.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In the summer of 1961, after my sophomore year in college, I worked in the smelter of Canada’s Falconbridge Nickel Mines just outside of Sudbury, Ontario. There were a number of Canadian students – all men – working in the mine that summer. On weekends, we would head into Sudbury to have a few beers and otherwise relax. One evening, fortified with libations, we attended a student union debate. The subject:“Resolved: I Would Rather be Dead than Red,” a common debate topic at the time. At the debates’ conclusion, members of the audience were asked if they would like to come up and speak, first for the affirmative and later for the negative. Having enjoyed debate in school and with vocal cords loosened with a couple of Molson Ales, I approached the dais and gave my reasons in the two minutes of allotted time. A few other students did as well. Then the moderator asked who would speak for the negative. At first no one rose, so again I approached the dais, this time to applause, to offer my opposing views.

The idea of debating two sides of an issue was always good training. Aristotle is alleged to have said that “it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” I would go further and claim that if one does not understand an opponent’s position, then there is no possibility of reaching compromise. We have entered a twilight zone where biases are so extreme that we no longer communicate but talk over one another. Institutions, like family, church (or, at least, traditional Christian churches) and community organizations are in decline. They have been replaced by groups like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #Resistance, #MAGA and social media, which give participants a chance to gather on like-minded platforms but offer little opportunity to witness or appreciate opposing views.

Unlike Swedes, French, Chinese or Japanese, we are Americans by choice, a choice that was either ours or that of our forefathers. While a typical Swede or Chinese can be imagined, a typical American cannot. We are too diverse.

https://spectator.org/to-fully-comprehend-trump-an-insight-into-the-jargon-of-nycs-inner-boroughs/

DPS NOTE: “Yes, he doesn’t speak the way Ivy league college graduates do. Yes, he is closer to Groucho Marx than he is to Cornell West. But if you give it a try and listen to what he means as opposed to how he expresses it, I think you’ll have a better grasp of why so many Americans like him. You can remain adamantly opposed to his political agenda but maybe you can give yourself a break and save some of your apparent need to hate for people who deserve it – like the Mullahs in Iran, or Chairman Xi in China, or Tsar Putin in Russia, or Kim Jong-un in North Korea. ”

For four years, polling has documented that the president’s strongest support demographic is America’s Orthodox Jews. The support runs between 70 percent in radical Los Angeles to 90 percent most everywhere else. This has been documented hereand here and here and here and here. Although much of that support stems from a deep affinity with his stands on the whole gamut of traditional American cultural and social issues, an underestimated factor is that community’s natural acquaintance with Borscht Belt humor. Those who “get” that humor know precisely how to understand Trump, what to take seriously, what to brush off, and what deeper messages to take away from his speeches and tweets. Those who do not get the style and nuance end up completely misunderstanding him and then attacking him for communicating thoughts he never contemplated.

As is manifest from Trump’s yuuuuge crowds from Alabama to Iowa to everywhere else he goes, one does not have to be from 1950s Borscht Belt New York or of Orthodox Jewish orientation to “get” him. All it takes is an open mind and a sense of humor from a time in the not-so-distant past when people could joke about things and could say ridiculous and absurd things without being taken so literally and without being hunted down by the PC police.