RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.bostonherald.com/opinion/op_ed/2018/08/ambrose_donald_trump_doing_plenty_for_black_americans

President Trump is making life better for black Americans everywhere you look while his predecessor fumbled. But hey, say his critics, not everything is perfect yet, so don’t give in to his policies. It’s an unbudging, self-inflicted blindness that can hardly be called racism itself even though it is similarly destructive.

The loudest Trump triumph of the moment has been dips to the lowest black unemployment in history, and get this: Jobs confer purpose, they provide pride, they build community, they set one up to help others, they enable social mobility, they lift the spirit. Welfare limps, jobs jog and you don’t get them through semi-socialist policies. You get them through deregulation and tax reform of the Trump kind, encouraging businesses to expand, lowering expenses and inspiring entrepreneurship.

Well, the critics say, there is still a large gap between black and white unemployment, and yes, there is, but you hardly address it by saying current job gains are therefore not that big a deal. We’re told, too, that jobs multiplied during the Obama administration. They did, but slowly as black family income dropped, hindrances known as regulations abounded and President Barack Obama said manufacturing would never be the same again. Manufacturing is now taking off.

To begin with, I don’t agree with Nancy Pelosi on anything. However, the hypocrisy of the Democrat Party throwing her under the bus is perverse. This is especially so from a party that has found common ground with racism, anti-Semitism, scandal mongering and scraping the bottom for “dirt” on adversaries. Pelosi is not a racist like her fellow Democrat Maxine Waters who is so easily tolerated by Keith Ellison’s party. She has never uttered anything like the lyrics of Anthony Delgado running for New York’s District 19, who said “ni**a” and critiqued America’s founders as “dead presidents” who “believe in white supremacy.”

She was also, as my mother might have said “well brought up.” She is the daughter of the late US congressman Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., of Maryland, a hard Roosevelt supporter. As Rafael Medoff wrote in the Jerusalem Post in 2007 (https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Pelosis-father-and-the-Holocaust)

“What is not widely known is that D’Alesandro broke ranks with president Franklin D. Roosevelt on the issues of rescuing Jews from Hitler and creating a Jewish State. D’Alesandro was one of the congressional supporters of the Bergson Group, a maverick Jewish political action committee that challenged the Roosevelt administration’s policies on the Jewish refugee issue during the Holocaust, and later lobbied against British control of Palestine. The Bergson activists used unconventional tactics to draw attention to the plight of Europe’s Jews, including staging theatrical pageants, organizing a march by 400 rabbis to the White House, and placing more than 200 full-page advertisements in newspapers around the country. Some of those ads featured lists of celebrities, prominent intellectuals, and members of Congress who supported the group – including D’Alesandro. D’Alesandro’s involvement with the Bergson Group was remarkable because he was a Democrat who was choosing to support a group that was publicly challenging a Democratic president. ”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-jordan-peterson-1533935771

Caitlin Flanagan writing at the Atlantic’s website, Aug. 9:

There are plenty of reasons for individual readers to dislike Jordan Peterson. . . . There are many legitimate reasons to disagree with him on a number of subjects, and many people of good will do. But there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it?

It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/the_problem_with_gay_marriage.html

Lately I’ve been thinking of a former close friend and colleague who happens to be one of the most brilliant and insightful political writers of our time. I had referenced his work in my own books long before I got to know him and was honored to find after we’d met that the esteem was mutual. I regarded his camaraderie as one of the blessings that conservative affiliations can afford, especially to those toiling in the scribbling trade.

Our relationship lasted many years. We met often when he visited our shores, enjoyed many pleasant, conversation-rich dinners, shared the same circle of friends, continued to read one another’s works with admiration, exchanged emails several times a week, and even wrote for the same magazines. I introduced him to my wife, with whom he developed a friendship and appreciation for her own contributions to the conservative movement. We were like an extended family. What could possibly go wrong?

The short answer is, a lot. Our relationship foundered over the vexed issue of redefining marriage, for my friend was gay and expected us to affirm the legalization of gay marriage in the United States and his forthcoming betrothal, as he referred to it, to his longtime partner. This we could not do. He objected to a rather obscure Facebook comment in which my wife deplored how the gay lobby’s justifiable plea for tolerance, with which she was fully on board, had morphed into the triumphalist demand for the unconditional celebration of all things gay, from gay politicking to Gay Pride to so-called gay marriage.

A lazy eye, technically amblyopia, is a childhood disorder of sight in which each eye sees a single object but the brain does not fuse the two objects into one single object – the child sees double. Double vision is intolerable to a human being so the brain turns one eye off – hence the name lazy eye. The vision in the turned off eye weakens sometimes to the point of blindness. The goal of treatment is to have both eyes see the object and for the brain to fuse the twin images into a single object. Treatment for amblyopia is designed to force the patient to use the lazy eye. Usually the child wears an ocular patch over the strong eye that forces him/her to use the weaker eye thereby strengthening its vision. Treatment is extremely uncomfortable for the child and often resisted because the vision in the lazy eye is so much weaker than the vision in the strong eye.

So it is with cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a theory developed in the 1950s by American psychologist Leon Festinger who said that inconsistency between thoughts or between thoughts and actions leads to discomfort (dissonance) which motivates changes in thoughts and behavior. When the cognitive dissonance becomes too overwhelming the person turns one of the thoughts off. People cannot tolerate double vision and they cannot tolerate inconsistency – they seek homeostasis.

According to Festinger, “The motivation to reduce dissonance is directly proportional to the magnitude and importance of the discrepant cognitions, and inversely proportional to the magnitude and importance of the consistent cognitions.” So, the more important the subject of the discrepancy the more motivated the person is to end the discordance.

Cognitive dissonance in the 21st century has been weaponized and is the preferred leftist strategy being used to destabilize and drive America crazy – it is a malicious tool of social engineering that impels behavior change. The purpose of leftist cognitive dissonance is submission to its tenets of political correctness, moral relativity, and historical revisionism. The left wants its contradictory ideas and norms to overwhelm the population with anxiety so that traditional norms are turned off and unconventional leftist norms accepted. The left wants one eyed vision.

http://washingtonjewishweek.com/47645/summer-is-a-time-for-jewish-unity-and-savi

Working for Jewish unity should have been an imperative for Jews the world over this summer. All summer long Islamic terrorists in Gaza have been sending incendiary kites in order to set fire to Israeli farmland and forests. The terrorists have also been launching barrages of missiles aimed at Israeli civilian neighborhoods. One firebomb balloon landed in the yard of a kindergarten in the southern Israeli moshav of Tkuma. All of this while the Jewish people were in the midst of the very season when we mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple.

To make matters worse, there were reports of Jews in the United States and in Britain seemingly showing more concern for our adversaries than our fellow Jews. News headlines about Kaddish being recited for Hamas terrorists, Birthright participants being led off of tours to learn about “the occupation,” and Jewish summer camp counselors conspiring to teach their campers the Palestinian narrative seemed all too frequent this summer.

That is why the news that a Magen David Adom ambulance was donated by a coalition of synagogues in suburban Philadelphia was especially encouraging and heartwarming to hear just before Tisha B’Av.

Unfortunately, at this time, Israelis need to know that Red Magen David Adom ambulances must be depended upon once again to save the lives of Jews.

The Talmud Bavli in Sanhedrin 37a states: “Anyone who saves the life of one of the children of Israel, the verse ascribes him credit as if he saved an entire world.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270960/racist-communist-famine-grows-south-africa-daniel-greenfield

“Strongman politics are ascendant,” Barack Obama warned in South Africa. He spoke passionately about “the politics of fear and resentment” at the Mandela Lecture. He worried that we were entering a world, “where might makes right and politics is a hostile competition between tribes and races and religions.”

While the media used the remarks to attack Trump’s meeting with Putin, Obama had shared a stage with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who had come to power promising to seize land from white farmers. Ramaphosa was the latest in a series of ANC strongmen, including his predecessor, an alleged rapist, beginning with the Communist terrorist whose legacy Obama was commemorating.

President Ramaphosa had vowed early on to seize land from white farmers without compensation. “The expropriation of land without compensation is envisaged as one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans,” he had declared. And denied that such racist Communist tactics were unconstitutional. Now he’s moving to modify South Africa’s constitution.

Initially, the ANC, which is partnered with the South African Communist Party, had claimed that seizing land would not violate the law. Now it’s actually going to change the South African constitution.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12807/multiculturalism-spain-july

The United Nations reported that June 2018 was a record month for illegal migration to Spain. In all, 17,781 illegal migrants arrived in Spain during the first six months of 2018, almost double the 9,581 migrants who arrived in Spain during the same period in 2017.

The Islamic Commission of Spain, a Muslim umbrella group, threatened to file a lawsuit against the regional government in Valencia if it fails to offer Islam courses in public schools.

“It is not possible that there are residency permits for everyone, nor is a welfare state sustainable that absorbs the millions of Africans who want to come to Europe. We have to say it, even if it is politically incorrect. Let’s be honest and responsible with this question.” — Pablo Casado, leader of the center-right Popular Party.

July 1. The United Nations reported that June 2018 was a record month for illegal migration to Spain. At least 7,142 illegal migrants arrived in Spain during the month, more than twice the number of arrivals in Italy (3,101) and three times as many as in Greece (2,157). By way of comparison, 2,682 illegal migrants arrived in Spain in June 2017. In all, 17,781 illegal migrants arrived in Spain during the first six months of 2018, almost double the 9,581 migrants who arrived in Spain during the same period in 2017.

July 2. The European Commission provided Spain with €25.6 million ($30 million) in aid to improve the reception capacity of migrants in the country. The money will be used to provide food and shelter for people arriving through the so-called Western Mediterranean route. With this transfer, the EU has provided Spain with €692 million ($800 million) since 2014 to help manage migration flows.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270886/wise-giants-and-arrogant-dwarves-bruce-thornton

In the 12th century Bernard of Chartres first pointed out that we have more knowledge than those who came before us not because of our greater intelligence and understanding, but because we are “dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants,” and can see farther because of the accumulated achievements of generation after generation of intellectual pioneers who preceded us.

That intellectual modesty and respect for tradition that once characterized Western Civilization has been scorned and spurned by modernity, leading to many of the bad ideas and lethal ideologies that have plagued the last two centuries. Indeed, we are historically unprecedented––but only in the coexistence of an astonishing depth of knowledge about nature and its laws, with a profound lack of the wisdom and common sense once possessed by even our illiterate forbearers. Rather than acknowledge the traditions and wisdom on whose shoulders we sit, we arrogantly imagine ourselves to be self-created giants.

Our hubris comes from the remarkable success of Western science at understanding the material world and its laws, and then using that knowledge to create transformational technologies. But the wonders of technology led us into a category error. We began to think that human beings could be understood in the same way and with the same predictability as we achieved with the material world. Such knowledge in turn would lead to “scientific” techniques that could transform humans and correct the evils caused by ignorance, tradition, and superstition.

This illusion and the hubris it nourishes dominates our culture, especially among those called progressives, who endorse the arrogance of technocratic elites who believe power backed by the “human sciences” can reshape and improve humans, and so create a perfect society free from the suffering and misery of the past.