RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theepochtimes.com/marx-didnt-distinguish-between-communism-and-socialism-why-should-we_3225448.html

When President Donald Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he believes the Democrats’ frontrunner, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), is a communist, the president clarified, “You could say socialist,” but then again, “I think of Bernie sort of as a socialist but far beyond a socialist.”

As the pundits trip over poli-sci-class definitions, my question is, what’s the difference?

As far as freedom-lovers go, safeguarding our liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, there is none. To be sure, communists and socialists argue and split hairs. They fight and break heads. But they also work together and destroy liberty because they all travel to the same soul-crushing destination of collectivism.

What anti-communists need to know is that communists and socialists—and “democratic socialists,” Fabians, progressives, Alinskyites (not to mention most Democrats and an awful lot of Republicans)—believe in the same centrally planned, varyingly totalitarian vision for America that our Founding Fathers would have had to declare independence from all over again.

To that point of ideological convergence, here are a couple of clarifying quotations from recognized experts—one, from the anti-communist camp; the other, from the communist camp.

https://www.city-journal.org/viral-epidemics-coronavirus

Over the past century, as globalization accelerated, viral epidemics have become a serious threat to humanity. In 1918, the Spanish flu killed about 50 million people around the world. The average age of victims was 20, and many died within a day. A comparable flu struck Mexico in 2009, infecting at least 1 million victims. This time, the average victim age was 40. Such flus or pneumonias, different from ordinary seasonal flus, kill the young rather than the elderly. Youth lack natural immunity because of their limited exposure to viruses.

These epidemics are becoming recurrent, too, and emerging more quickly. They’re especially prevalent in China, which has experienced remarkable growth since the turn of the century. In 2003, a pneumonia epidemic, SARS, infected thousands in China before reaching Canada and the United States. At the time, the SARS story paralyzed media, but even today, we don’t know how many people succumbed to the virus, because Chinese authorities hid the evidence.

Now China’s latest epidemic, the coronavirus, is causing anxiety worldwide while remaining largely a mystery. Coronavirus typically spreads between animals and humans, the illness leaping from one to the other, mutating and becoming deadlier as it evolves. The latest mutation originated somewhere in China’s Wuhan region, home to vast chicken and pig farms, where dubious hygienic conditions prevail amid a large population. But now the virus has traveled, as did previous epidemics. The Spanish Flu, for example, likely started on a U.S. chicken farm and then traveled by ship. It took one infected sailor, going from port to port, to create a global pandemic. But the risk is even greater today, with airline traffic making the globalization of a virus almost immediate.  

When a new virus emerges, it takes months to create a vaccine for treatment. In the interim, only time and isolation can manage infection rates. Nor is there any remedy other than medicines that ease symptoms. The highly respected French epidemiologist Robert Sebag told me that, judging from past experience, it’s conceivable that up to 15 percent of those who contract the Wuhan virus could die. Chinese officials, though conceding that the virus is highly contagious (and more so than SARS), maintain that the more likely figure is 3.5 percent. This is, of course, largely guesswork for the time being. The only effective measure against the virus at this point is to isolate the sick to control contagion. But the source remains unknown, making management difficult; and not enough Chinese doctors exist—and not all are competent—to contain an illness spreading from city markets to the countryside.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/why-impeachment-failed/

House Democrats rushed through a botched process and then complained bitterly and endlessly that Senate Republicans wouldn’t do their work for them.

Unless more incriminating evidence emerges to dramatically alter public perception, the impeachment trial of Donald Trump is effectively over.

It’s comforting, no doubt, to believe that Trump has survived this entire debacle because he possesses a tighter hold on his party than Barack Obama or George W. Bush or any other contemporary president did. But while partisanship might be corrosive, it’s also the norm. In truth, Trump, often because of his own actions, has likely engendered less loyalty than the average president, not more.

It’s difficult to recall a single Democratic senator throwing anything but hosannas Obama’s way, which allowed the former president to ride his high horse from one scandalous attack on the Constitution to the next. In 1998, not a single Democrat voted to convict Bill Clinton, who had engaged in wrongdoing for wholly self-serving reasons, despite the GOP’s case being methodical and incriminating. Attempting to impeach a president for lying under oath to a federal grand jury in a sexual-harassment case in an effort to obstruct justice was, as Alan Dershowitz and many others argued, “sexual McCarthyism.” Few Democrats, though, claimed Clinton was innocent, because no one could credibly offer that defense; they merely reasoned that the punishment was too severe for what amounted to a piddling crime.

http://politicalmavens.com/

In a country reeling from the uptick in violence such as school shootings, cop-killings, anti-semitic, anti-Christian and racist massacres, not to mention the daily news reports of random street and subway stabbings, slashings and shootings – the NYTimes chose to offer this as its front page article on the impeachment :
(2/2/20): “Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to foresee the lesson of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. ‘When you strike at a king,’ Emerson said, ‘ you must kill him.” This advice, quoted by the Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker sounds very similar to that issued by various Islamic religious leaders who have urged their followers to kills Jews anywhere they find them, using any implements at their disposal, particularly knives and large trucks Unfortunately, it resembles some of what Black Lives Matter urges on its followers with signs hailing “Kill the Pigs.”

The quote was originally a response to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s request to Emerson to critique the paper he was writing about Plato for the course he was taking as a Harvard undergraduate Emerson, obviously concerned about the loose ends Holmes had left in the paper, gave the young student some strong metaphoric advice: Plato was the king and though Holmes had struck him, he had not successfully completed his arguments against him.

Seen in the newspaper which has blamed most of the divisiveness in our society on Trump’s “racist rhetoric,” this little known quote, completely out of context, can be seen as an inflammatory invitation to the deranged malcontents in a lawless and dangerous society, one which also increasingly has trouble parsing the meaning and intent of metaphor.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Since time immemorial, a perfect society has been a dream. In the “Book of Revelations,” a thousand, golden, peaceful years are promised, when Christ returns to reign before the final judgment day. In 1516, Thomas More coined the word “Utopia” that he incorporated into the title of his classic work, in which he described perfect conditions on the island of Utopia. In 1620, Pilgrims came to the “New World,” in search of a “city on a hill,” a society under God’s guiding hand. Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts was founded by the transcendentalist and former Unitarian minister, George Ripley in 1841. It was to be an egalitarian, self-sufficient community with no distinction between intellectual and manual labor. While FDR’s New Deal was a response to the Great Depression, the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson was an attempt to banish poverty and let equality rule. The belief that man could live as brothers in peace has long been a promise of idealists, swindlers, fraudsters, charlatans and politicians – or do I repeat myself?

The word ‘inequality’ evokes emotion. Webster defines equality as the “quality or state of being equal.” When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…,” he was not implying that all persons are equal in talents, or that outcomes should be equal. He was saying we are equal in those natural rights granted by God. Under the Constitution, we are equal in our right to assemble and to speak freely; we are equal in our rights under and before the law, and we are equal in our right to vote.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-30-two-reasons-why-continuing-a-little-with-impeachment-might-not-be-such-a-bad-thing

As of this writing it looks like the impeachment farce in the Senate may end as early as tomorrow. The Democrats’ “more witnesses” gambit appears to be fizzling out — although that is not a certainty until the vote is taken. I suppose that ending this thing is for the better. However, I do have a couple of reasons why having it continue for at least a little while longer may not be so bad.

The first is that there is an obvious witness for the President’s side to call, someone whose testimony could be the first real “bombshell” in this whole matter. No, it is not Joe or Hunter Biden. I have seen the Bidens mentioned dozens of times as potential witnesses to be called by the President, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. As indefensible as the Bidens’ conduct in Ukraine may be, calling them as witnesses would likely turn into a net negative for the President. As a general matter, if you can avoid it, you never want to call a well-prepared hostile witness who is devoted to defeating your case. When you start questioning such witnesses, they will almost certainly follow the strategy of ignoring whatever questions you may ask and delivering pre-prepared self-serving monologues justifying their own position. Rarely will a judge give you any meaningful relief to get the testimony focused on what you want.

The President’s counsel calling Joe or Hunter Biden would be like the House managers seeking to call the President himself, or somebody like William Barr or Mike Pompeo. Those people are just not going to say anything unfavorable to the President if they can possibly avoid it. Instead you call people like Alexander Vindman and Marie Yovanovich. People who think that their stellar performance in office has been ignored. Even better, people (like Yovanovich) who have been fired by your target, and maybe have also been insulted by your target and have a powerful motive to use their testimony to get revenge.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/winston-churchill-speaking-on-th

From Winston Churchill’s first election broadcast on June 4, 1945:

….there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. …liberty, in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism. …there is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus boss.

A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and aspects… could not afford opposition. Socialism is, in its essence, an attack upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.   

But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are shortsighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/01/we-may-never-see-his-like-again/

Greg Gutfeld is a conservative host on Fox News. He started off some years ago when Donald Trump was first elected as being something of a Trump sceptic. He has been won over. I think there are two ways to be won over, if you need be won over. First, consider Trump’s policies and his achievements.

To mention a few: lower business taxes; massive and continuing deregulation; 6.7 million new jobs created; unemployment rate down to 3.5 per cent; the lowest unemployment rate on record for African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans; real earnings up 2.5 per cent; poverty down; stock prices and home prices way up; energy sufficiency; the ISIS caliphate destroyed; the US embassy in Israel moved to Jerusalem; new trade deals negotiated with South Korea, Mexico, Canada and first-phase deals with Japan and China, with Europe and the UK to come; border security tightened; over 180 new (literalist) federal judges appointed and two supreme court justices; freeloading NATO countries heavied to pay more for their own defence; extracting the US from the flawed Iranian nuclear deal and imposing tough sanctions on Iran, opting out of the ineffective Paris (climate) Agreement designed to penalise Western industrial countries while giving those countries whose emissions are growing the fastest – China and India prominently – a free pass.

It would be possible to go on and on but my drift is clear. This is a presidency without precedent. He will go down as the most successful president ever, particularly if, as seems certain in view of the calibre of those jockeying to oppose him, he is given another four-year term. And all this, so far, while being continuously pelted with rotten eggs by the rampantly biased and dishonest media and being continually investigated for non-crimes, ending up with the current hollow impeachment trial.

The likes of him we have never seen before, unlike any previous president or political leader in the history of the world. And this provides a bridge into the second way to be won over by Trump.

He is a billionaire, the president and yet the common man. What you see is what you get. And how refreshing it is.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/01/29/an-action-plan-for-a-new-jewish-leadership/

The chickens have come home to roost. Years of neglect and misguided policies by mainstream Jewish leaders have helped enable a shocking surge of Jew-hatred in America. It is encouraging to see some concern and support from the public and media, and it is heartening to see the Jewish community come together. These are critical first steps. It is sad and frustrating that this required the hunting and murder of Jews.

There have been multiple analyses of the nature and extent of the failure of mainstream Jewish leaders. The community’s major donors need to recognize that they too have failed by their selection of academic, legal, social worker types or diplomats as leaders in a time of conflict. The times require “wartime” leaders who can develop a clear vision of the crisis and a plan of action for the future.

New leaders will have to jettison some of the fundamental premises of Jewish communal policies that have clearly failed. They will also need to pivot from their 100-year-old mission of gaining acceptance of Jews in American society to ensuring the safety of the community.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/01/the-postmodern-pursuit-of-global-governance/

Todd Huizinga was a United States diplomat from 1992 to 2012 and is now director of International Outreach at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is author of The New Totalitarian Temptation (Encounter Books). He gave this paper to the Danube Institute, Budapest, in November 2010

We in the West are now living in a world in which our political differences are no longer based, as they once were, on different perspectives within a shared worldview, but rather on diametrically opposed presuppositions about first things: what is good, what is true and what it means to be human. The premise of a basically unchanging human nature embedded in tradition, religion, community and family—a fundamental component of the Western worldview that has grounded individual freedom and self-government for centuries—no longer commands the general allegiance of Americans or Europeans.

Indeed, progressives are committed to a diametrically opposed view: a radically secularist vision of the virtually unlimited flexibility of human nature according to each person’s choice, essentially independent of traditional institutions and social relations. Every day we are witnessing the results: once freedom of choice—the right to choose—has been exalted above all else, there remain no meaningful limits on the social pressure and governmental power that are now wielded to impose “choice” on everyone, whether they want it or not.

This manifests itself primarily in two ways. First, in the increasing polarisation within the nations of the West, and the weakening of our democratic freedoms as the progressive ideology takes root in our societies; and second in the conflict between globalism and national sovereignty that is roiling the trans-Atlantic partnership as the struggle intensifies between the EU’s globalist vision and America’s traditional concern for sovereignty.

First, my home country. In the US, our system of self-government is based on the recognition that certain things are unchangeably true, and thus that government must respect these truths in order to be just. As the Declaration of Independence says: