RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274199/pandemic-false-knowledge-bruce-thornton

When I wrote Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge twenty years ago, I focused on the bad ideas underlying many of our social, cultural, and political dysfunctions. I was particularly concerned with the universities, where most of these ideas had been born and nurtured. Though aware of the larger malign effects of the intellectual and political corruption of higher education, I never imagined that the “higher nonsense,” as one critic called it, produced in universities would so pervasively infect the larger culture and lead to policies, politics, and cultural mores so absurdly irrational.

At the heart of these bad ideas lay a strange hybrid of technocratic hubris and the therapeutic imperative. The former is a species of scientism founded on the category error of believing that human beings with minds, cultures, languages, and free will, can be understood and manipulated the way hard science understands and manipulates the material natural world.

The latter is the obsession with individual feelings and subjective perceptions of personal well-being and happiness, accompanied by demands that environmental, historical, or social impediments to both be corrected or eliminated with rational techniques developed by the “human sciences” like psychology, sociology, economics, and especially political science.

Moreover, this hybrid in its public guise uses the methodologies and quantification of science to give a spurious authority to its unscientific and politicized conclusions about human nature and behavior, while at the same time relying on ancient myths, cultural memes, and modern political programs. This incoherence is the essence of false knowledge. But these days, this debased Enlightenment idea joined with an equally debased Romantic one has burst out of its university nursery and become a culture-wide pandemic.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/03/democratic-candidates-arent-on-a-winning-track/

Presidential candidates from both parties usually sound hard-core in the primaries to appeal to their progressive or conservative bases. But for the general election, the nominees move to the center to pick off swing voters and centrist independents.

Voters put up with the scripted tactic as long as a candidate had not gone too extreme in the primaries and endorsed positions too far out of the mainstream.

A good example of this successful ploy was Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. In the primary against Hillary Clinton, Obama ran to her left. But he was still careful not to get caught on the record going too far left. That way, he was still able to tack to the center against John McCain in the general election.

As a general election candidate, Obama rejected the idea of gay marriage. He blasted illegal immigration. He railed against deficit spending. And he went so far as to label then-President George W. Bush as “unpatriotic” for taking out “a credit card from the bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt.”

The result was that Obama was elected. After taking office, in cynical fashion he endorsed gay marriage, ran up far more red ink than did Bush, offered blanket amnesties and relaxed immigration enforcement.

Yet the current crop of would-be Democratic nominees has forgotten the old script entirely. Nearly all of them are currently running so hard to the left that the successful nominee will never be able to appear moderate.

Bernie Sanders leads the charge for abolishing all student debt. Kamala Harris wants reparations for slavery. Joe Biden talks of jailing health insurance executives if they falsely advertise.

The entire field seems to agree that it should not be a criminal offense to enter the U.S. illegally. The consensus appears to be that no illegal entrant will be deported unless he or she has committed a serious crime.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22893/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-the-united-nations

   http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The United Nations is an institutional humanitarian hoax promoting its destructive Agenda 2030 infrastructure for one world government as the altruistic advancement of world peace. This is how it works.

First, a little history. The United Nations began as a wartime alliance between the allies against Nazi Germany. President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested using the name United Nations to refer to the allies of World War II. In 1942, the declaration of the allied United Nations articulated its purpose and was signed by twenty-six sovereign governments:

“A JOINT DECLARATION BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND, THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, CHINA, AUSTRALIA, BELGIUM, CANADA, COSTA RICA, CUBA, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, EL SALVADOR, GREECE, GUATEMALA, HAITI, HONDURAS, INDIA, LUXEMBOURG, NETHERLANDS, NEW ZEALAND, NICARAGUA, NORWAY, PANAMA,POLAND, SOUTH AFRICA, YUGOSLAVIA

The Governments signatory hereto,

Having subscribed to a common program of purposes and principles embodied by the Joint Declaration of the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of Great Britain dated August 14, 1941, known as the Atlantic Charter,

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/the_lefts_endgame_is_not_chaos_its_worse.html#ixzz5sd4PSl51

On an episode of The Candace Owens Show that aired this past May, Owens had as her guest Dennis Prager.  While I agreed with most of the points made by both Ms. Owens and Mr. Prager, one item struck me as an example of superficial analysis.  They declared that the primary objective of the Left is “chaos.”  In an immediate sense, this seems true; the so-called “progressive left” does appear to be deliberately sowing chaos in America today.

However, I submit that the Left’s “chaos” is an intermediate objective, the means to an end.  They have a well defined endgame.  The Communist Bloc countries were a lot of things, but they were generally not chaotic.  They were highly regimented societies, and while they did not have the material standard of living or political freedoms enjoyed in the West, there were some agreeable aspects, as related by the wife of one Carlo Alcos in an online feature story on the Matador Network about her early childhood experiences growing up in East Germany:

It wasn’t all trying, though.  Everyone had a job, school lunches were free, after-school care was free, people were generally happy, necessities were extremely cheap, and there was more community spirit than there is nowadays.  In those times, there were no Joneses to keep up with.

Rigidly communist East Germany hardly sounded like “chaos.”  So what is the progressive left’s game in the Era of Trump? 

First, at present, leftists want to create a state of political cultural chaos in the U.S. for a specific reason.  They need chaos as a smokescreen to defend their current leaders — that is to say, Obama, Hillary & Co. — from prosecution.  Make no mistake: Obama, Hillary, and their cohorts committed some  serious crimes of an unprecedented nature for people at their level.  We executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for far less. Their degree of culpability is suggested in an October 2016 email from Hilary Clinton to then DNC Chair Donna Brazile, revealed by WikiLeaks, in which Hillary shrieked to the effect that “if that f‑‑‑‑‑‑ b‑‑‑‑‑‑ wins, we’re all going to hang from nooses.  You better fix this s‑‑‑!”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/01/is-chief-justice-roberts-the-jim-comey-of-the-supreme-court/

American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp last week called for Chief Justice John Roberts’ impeachment over his vote with four liberal justices to deny the Trump Administration a total victory on whether the Census could include a question on citizenship.

Schlapp, whose wife Mercedes is the Trump White House communications director, goes too far—though he may have tapped into an understandable conservative sentiment. I don’t believe Roberts is quite the Jim Comey of the Supreme Court, yet he seems to be asking for the label. Comey’s troubles surfaced when he tried both to condemn and absolve Hillary Clinton of criminal security breaches. All the while, he self-righteously claimed to cleave to a higher loyalty. But that loyalty seems to have ensnared him in an even more insidious conspiracy, which the Justice Department is now investigating.

For his part—and the comparison with Comey goes only so far—Roberts in trying to depoliticize a case ended up protecting partisanship within the government, that is to say within the bureaucracy. He had done something similar in his 2012 opinion on the Affordable Care Act—finding its mandate a constitutional tax after declaring the law unconstitutional based on the main commerce clause arguments presented. In allegedly taking politics out of his opinion Roberts also removes the Constitution. (To be fair, he also enabled Republicans to gain majorities in Congress that should have repealed the ACA, but those majorities failed to it.)

As President Trump blasted the partisan actions of various judges, the chief justice shot back, claiming there are “not Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.” Trump replied, “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274172/straining-defend-rashida-tlaib-jewish-telegraphic-kenneth-levin

Attacks on Israel that distort the reality of the Jewish state’s past and present in the service of undermining its well-being and its very survival have become ever more widely disseminated in bastions of the Left in America. This is occurring most strikingly in academia, among both students and faculty, but also in prominent mainstream media and even within the Democrat party. At the same time, those Jews who align themselves with the Left often resort to the most contrived of contortions to mitigate the message of such attacks.

A representative example of this phenomenon was recently provided by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Silow-Carroll. The context was his contribution to the storm of comment in response to Rashida Tlaib’s remarks in a May interview on the podcast Skullduggery. Silow-Carroll’s article was entitled, “What did Rashida Tlaib say about the Holocaust? It’s probably not what you think.” What makes the piece particularly noteworthy is that the JTA is a news service whose stories are picked up by Jewish papers around the world and the rhetoric of its articles, not least that of pieces by its editor-in-chief, is shaped to have a desired impact on the service’s Jewish readership. In Silow-Carroll’s gloss on the Tlaib interview – as in many other articles put out by the JTA having to do with Israel and its critics on the Left – the rhetoric is clearly intended to reassure readers that attacks on Israel from the Left, in this case the Democrat Congresswoman’s statements, were not so problematic and that reactions to the contrary are overwrought.

https://quillette.com/2019/06/30/antifas-brutal-

All revolutionary movements seek to sanctify their lawless behaviour as a spontaneous eruption of righteous fury. In some cases, such as the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine, this conceit is justified. But usually their violence is a pre-meditated tactic to intimidate adversaries. Or as Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin put it, “In revolution, he will be victorious who cracks the other’s skull.”

The Antifa thugs who attacked Quillette editor and photojournalist Andy Ngo in Portland yesterday did not quite manage to crack his skull. But they did manage to induce a brain hemorrhage that required Ngo’s overnight hospitalization. (For those seeking to support Ngo financially as he recovers, there is a third-party fundraising campaign.) The scene was captured by local reporter Jim Ryan, whose video can be accessed at the link below. We caution readers that it is an unsettling spectacle—by which we mean not only the violence itself, but the unconstrained glee this pack of mostly young men exhibit as they brutalize a journalist whom they’d spent months demonizing on social media, and whom they’d explicitly singled out for attack.

Andy Ngo is an elfin, soft-spoken man. He also happens to be the gay son of Vietnamese immigrants—salient details, given Antifa’s absurd slogans about smashing the heteronormative white supremacist patriarchy. Like schoolboy characters out of Lord of the Flies, these cosplay revolutionaries stomp around, imagining themselves to be heroes stalking the great beast of fascism. But when the beast proves elusive, they gladly settle for beating up journalists, harassing the elderly or engaging in random physical destruction.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22878/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-ballot-harvesting

  http://goudsmit.pundicity.com. http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Harvesting is defined as collecting or obtaining a resource for future use. We commonly equate harvesting with agricultural crops – but in the 21st century harvesting has far more to do with political crops – the resource is votes.

Ballot harvesting is like the Greek hydra – the many headed snake whose heads grew as they were cut off. So, let’s examine the heads of this ballot harvesting Democrat hydra.

Ballot harvesting is defined as the political jargon for a practice in which organized workers or volunteers collect absentee ballots from certain voters and drop them off at a polling place or election office. WHAT?

Let’s review. In ballot harvesting someone picks up someone else’s ballots and drop them off somewhere else? Any voter who has ever voted in person knows that great care is taken to secure the confidentiality of voters and the legitimacy of their votes. Ballots are filled out in the privacy of a voting booth, placed into a secrecy envelope, and then hand delivered by the voter into a machine that automatically pulls the ballot into itself. No one besides the voter touches his ballot – the ballot chain is unbroken.

Voting is the most sacred of rights guaranteed by our Constitution and is protected at every point in the voting process. The idea that organized workers pick up ballots and drop them off at a polling place or election office is equivalent to a broken chain of evidence in a criminal jury trial. When the chain is broken the evidence is inadmissible because it may have been tampered with.

Anyone with a functioning brain cell understands that ballot harvesting is an invitation for voter fraud because the ballot chain is broken.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274035/old-wisdom-modern-folly-bruce-thornton

The central fallacy of modernity is the belief that science and technological progress have made traditional wisdom and the insights of earlier thinkers irrelevant or malign. This presentist hubris of what G.K. Chesterton called the “small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about” is particularly misplaced when it comes to understanding human nature and behavior, especially political action. Since “enlightened” moderns believe they know more about human nature and possess the technical means of altering it, they dismiss or ignore earlier wisdom and common sense based on centuries of experience and observation of how humans consistently behave over time.

When it comes to America’s political order, no commentator today has yet come close to the brilliance of Alexis de Tocqueville, who was astonishingly prescient in pointing out the dangers inherent in the democracy he so admired. The political dysfunctions and crises roiling our nation today were predicted by Tocqueville in Democracy in America, published in 1835 when the United States was not yet fifty years old.

Take the age-old complaint that democracy indiscriminately empowers the many, who may not have the knowledge and judgement of character necessary in choosing a leader. Hence Tocqueville’s observation that in America, “the ablest men . . . are rarely placed at the head of affairs.” With the citizens’ attention focused on their private affairs and necessity to make a living, “it is difficult for [them] to discern the best means of attaining the end,” which is “the welfare of the country.” Hence the voters’ “conclusions are hastily formed from a superficial inspection of the more prominent features of a question.” As a result, “mountebanks of all sorts are able to please the people, while their truest friends frequently fail to gain their confidence.”

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22862/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-planned-parenthood

   http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Planned Parenthood began in 1916 as the American Birth Control League when Margaret Sanger and her two sisters opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, NY. They distributed birth control, birth control advice, and birth control information. Abortion was illegal and throughout her incumbency Margaret Sanger maintained that abortion would not be necessary if women had access to birth control. In 1942 the name American Birth Control League was changed to Planned Parenthood Federation of America. What happened?

Planned Parenthood began advocating for abortion law reform in the early 1950s. At first they focused on therapeutic abortions – medically necessary abortions in the first trimester before the fetus is viable outside the womb. By the 1960s, Planned Parenthood advocated liberalizing abortion laws to include non-therapeutic abortions.

The first birth control pill was commissioned by Margaret Sanger and funded by suffragist Katherine McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune. On May 9, 1960 the FDA approved the pill and women’s reproductive freedom became foundational to the Women’s Liberation Movement, the sexual revolution, and the anti-establishment counterculture movement which supported Planned Parenthood’s rejection of all limits on abortion.

By 1969 Planned Parenthood was demanding total repeal of all abortion laws.

In 1973 the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Roe vs Wade and abortion was legalized in America. Women had the right to choose whether to have an abortion, but the right was not absolute because of the competing interests of protecting prenatal life, and also the government’s interest in protecting women’s health. The Court issued restrictions that addressed the complexity of the issue in what is known as a balancing test.

“The Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy: during the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when they were necessary to save the life or health of the mother.”