RUTHFULLY YOURS

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 (To be fair, he also enabled Republicans to gain majorities in Congress that should have repealed the ACA, but those majorities failed to it.)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.”

It’s cultural appropriation when privileged white people wear cornrows or braids or even sport sombreros. It’s fine for a Hispanic woman to refer to a detention facility as a concentration camp – and to use the phrase “never again” – a specific reference by Jews to the holocaust – to the congestion of illegal immigrants who have insistently forced their way across the border. The name of a raped woman must never be published by our newspaper of record but slanderous statements by the defense lawyer about the missing mother of 5 whose blood-stained clothes were found among 30 bags deposited by the husband and his girlfriend in 30 different garbage bins are freely published in the paper and broadcast on t.v. news. The trial of the husband and girlfriend has not even begun. A new law restricts landlords from de-activating rent stabilization from apartments whose tenants have moved out, thereby forcing landlords to continue to relieve the govt of providing its own housing for the indigent. Other businesses such as restaurants and stores are free to raise their prices without restrictive laws. State senators who passed the law that hogties landlords are scheduled to get large raises that would make their salaries the highest of any state.

Colleges and universities must take into account the sensitivities of diverse ethnic groups providing them with counselors and safe spaces – all except for Jews who continue to be treated as pariahs during the Israel Apartheid Week that occurs yearly across America’s campuses and the BDS resolutions that go hand in hand with them. Freedom of speech is touted when it refers to BDS but is non-existent for anything that would make people of color or in the LGBTQ protectorate uncomfortable. Conservatives and Zionists are persona non grata who must be hurried off stage in deference to mob rule but student protesters who occupy administrative offices are seldom if ever punished. Schools with billion dollar endowments are allowed to have their students incur prolonged debt which taxpayers will ultimately pay without govt insisting that private colleges and universities take care of their own scholarship payments. And lastly, it’s unfair that Asian students spend years studying hard in order to get into the elite free high schools in New York but it’s fine to discard testing on the grounds of discrimination against those who are less-endowed or just plain lazy. Hopefully the same standards will also be applied to sports teams and school orchestras.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/23/crack-ups-at-the-crossroads-of-intersectionality/

Progressives do not see the United States as an exceptional uniter of factions and tribes into a cohesive whole—each citizen subordinating his tribal, ethnic, and religious affinities to a shared Americanism, emblemized by our national motto e pluribus unum. Instead, they prefer e uno plures: out of one nation arise many innately different and separate peoples.

Progressivism’s signature brand is now tribalism: all of us in different ways are victims of a white male Christian heterosexual patriarchy—or a current 20 percent hierarchy that past and present has supposedly oppressed anyone not like themselves. In contrast, our differences define who we are, and are not incidental to the content of our characters. The salad bowl, not the melting pot, is the new national creed. America is to be a conglomeration of competing tribal parties in the fashion of the Balkans, Rwanda, or contemporary Iraq.

How does the relative victimhood work politically? Progressive elites (oddly often white, but “woke,” males) serve as umpires who adjudicate familial spats and intersectional fractures. Like good cowboys, they ride herd, directing the squabbling and snorting flock in the right direction without losing too many strays on the way to the election booth.

Is Mayor Pete Buttigieg, recently confronted as an unwoke white guy by Black Lives Matter activists, a white male elite, or an oppressed gay male victim who feels the Christian faithful, like his former working associate Mike Pence, supposedly oppress him to the degree he cannot ever be slurred as an oppressor of others who are nonwhite, not affluent, and non-male? In this world of collective woke stereotypes, are inner-city blacks and Catholic Hispanics victims of white males like Buttigieg, or disproportionately insensitive victimizers of such gays as Buttigieg?

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22837/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-neutral-google-searches

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 humanitarian hoax of neutral Google searches is a dangerous example of destruction presented as altruism.

Google is an American multinational technology company that specializes in internet-related services and products including online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. Google’s revenues in 2018 were a whopping $75 billion, and its market capitalization a staggering $791 billion – just behind Amazon’s market capitalization of $802 billion.

Google is currently the nation’s premier web-based information outlet with 63,000 searches per second, 3.8 million per minute, and 5.8 billion searches a day. So, what is the problem?

Google has reversed its lofty 1998 foundational mission, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Making information universally accessible and useful describes a free and open Internet that is diametrically opposed to censorship, curating content, and algorithms for social engineering the masses.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

The liberal world order grew from the ashes of World War II, a war that killed almost four percent of the world’s population – that is one out of every twenty-five people. Look at your town, city, street or apartment building and consider the human cost! It is no surprise that Western leaders wanted to ensure that no such atrocity happened again. It was the United States that exited the War in a position of global strength, and thus became the guarantor of security and the principal provider of funds necessary to rebuild both its allies and its enemies. The U.S., in 1945 had about 50% of the world’s wealth, with only 6.5% of its population. Militarily, the U.S. was peerless and, until 1949, the only country with an Atomic weapon.

The liberal order was committed to democratic ideals and the free movements of goods and people. It was organized around nation states. The result has been seventy years of unprecedented prosperity. And, while genocides in subsequent years were experienced in Cambodia and Rwanda, Europe and Japan remained at peace. To help enforce that liberal order, supranational organizations were built, like the United Nations, NATO and the World Bank. However, because of transnational governance, those institutions threatened to override the laws of the sovereign states they were charged to uphold. As well, the impulse to impose progressive norms on all nations was a natural consequence of these organizations. They interfered with internal affairs, when autocracies threatened, and they spread progressive ideas, without regard to a country’s customs and traditions. As well, well-intentioned Presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush wanted to transform autocratic regimes into democratic ones, with the former’s National Endowment for Democracy and the latter’s “freedom agenda” – a task that proved insurmountable.  

As early as February 1948, George Kennan said we must avoid “sentimentality” and deal in “straight power concepts” – a role played by the United States’ military, which was not always welcomed. In the same memo, Mr. Kennan was emphatically realistic: “We should cease to talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization.” Yet the reach of humanitarian groups within the United Nations has expanded: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the United Nation Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the United Nations Department of Global Communications, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and UNICEF. These NGOs employ tens of thousands of people, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, with the U.S. being the principal benefactor. While purporting to further the “liberal order,” they, in fact, undermine it, at least according to the dictates of Mr. Kennan. Brock Chisholm, a Canadian and first Director- General of the World Health Organization and who died in 1971 was blunt: “To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas” – an Orwellian concept, the beginnings of which we see in Brussels today and in the words and deeds of those who put supranational organizations and treaties above the nation state.