RUTHFULLY YOURS

When did we begin to accept mere opinion as unquestionable truth, with no hint of doubt or uncertainty allowed, no need for deeper knowledge, no possibility of error and no place for any change of mind? Such is the arrogance of the loudly uninformed that fervour these days overwhelms mere fact.

There are three levels of ignorance. Simple ignorance is just not knowing and knowing you don’t know. Compound ignorance is thinking you know but knowing so little you can’t recognise your own ignorance. Tertiary malignant ignorance is then not knowing, thinking you do know and that, for their own good, others should be forced to conform to what you believe.

The simple form is the most honest and least harmful. It can even be beneficial in avoiding stupid mistakes as well as prompting one to learn more. Unfortunately, in our culture it seems to be noticeably less popular than the compound and malignant varieties. In the current version of democracy, the idea of one-person one-vote appears to have become equated with the notion that all opinions are of equal value and everyone is not just entitled to an opinion, but should have one on every issue regardless of how ill-informed they may be. Indeed, it appears that the only socially acceptable consideration for a belief is for the fervour and conviction with which it is held. Conviction thus trumps reason, and certainty prevails.

In public opinion polls it is unusual for anyone to say they do not know enough about something to have an opinion, or to be uncertain, to need to know more or even to be open to better knowledge. It seems that opinions are not only necessary but must be expressed as beliefs with no hint of doubt or uncertainty, no need for better knowledge, no possibility of error and no place for any change of mind in the light of better information. When the idea of simply not knowing about something or of making a tentative assumption that may be subject to change become unthinkable, believing a half-dozen impossible things before breakfast becomes the norm.

With such a dynamic prevailing in the public sphere, the future of our current form of democracy looks dubious. This problem is now manifest across a growing number of complex and uncertain issues of critical importance. These include mass immigration from failed societies, premature adoption of technically and economically unviable energy systems, an ongoing unchecked proliferation of government that is stifling essential productive activity, plus ever-increasing commitments for health, education, welfare and defence spending which are simply impossible to sustain. Another major and pervasive problem would also have to be the whole obscene morass of taxation that is now beyond any possibility of effective reform and desperately requires a fundamental rethink.

It is Easter weekend and my mind wanders, my thoughts are sad and full of fear for what is overtaking us. Yes, His rising fills me great wonder, gives me reassurance as to what lies ahead. But in this world, the Left marches, ever marches on, every day freedom erodes, the insidious march and relentless, doggedness of their pursuit to destroy America’s liberty, to bind us, reeducate us, to mold a new man in a Utopian vision. For they are God, they are creating a heaven on earth and we are nothing, worse than nothing, an obstacle in their long progressive drive. We stand in their way, they of the angels, we block them; therefore we must be destroyed. Liberty, the very thought of liberty must die.

So, my mind takes me, takes me into the Plains, north of the Platte, crossing the Missouri, fast as the winds could take me, past, into the way back, rushed and with fear at my heels, I pushed forward into hills of time, given over to time, before, long before this time of tragedy. Into the Dakotas and badlands, wheat high, winds strong and true, the breath of free men and liberty still blow through our bodies strong.

Liberty trampled, burned, destroyed and for what? This God’s graceful land, bequeathed by Founders of a vision unseen, unheard, unknown from all time and history. But now being shattered, transformed for a Utopian dream of hell, an equality of man’s God, a rejection of Him, a tyranny built on jealousy, envy and hatred, from the devil himself. How man, so easily fooled and sold into slavery of shattered illusions of self-righteousness and the striving to be their own God, to make heaven here, to want to mold men to break and destroy them.

All for want of peace, justice, equality and security, we so easily pursue a false God. We pursue our own God, to remake us as the Creator and Judge, to rule over all, to destroy all that is good, just and true and free. The enemy of the Illusionary is the free; their enemy is the very essence of liberty. The free must be destroyed, by the millions they have fallen, and how many more? I fear for all of us, the how many more that will suffer from their progressive crusade.

We have paved the way for tyranny, every day, every minute gone, we drift away from that dream, that dream of our Founders and of that timeless dream of a free man and his faith, his liberty to live and think and be as God made him.

Although Britons do have affordable access to primary-care doctors, and everyone in the UK is covered through high taxes, they are subjected to extensive waiting periods for specialists, surgeries and hospitalization. The fact is that many patients die waiting for treatment.

Rather than rejecting the basic free-market principles of the US economy — as a 2016 Harvard University survey found that most do — young Americans would do well to ask themselves why it is that so many people from countries with socialized medicine flock to the United States for treatment.

According to a recent Pew poll, support for universal health care, provided and paid for by the federal government, is higher among American millennials than among older generations. Young Americans seem to believe that socialized medicine is a “cure-all” for health-care ills in the United States, as it ostensibly is elsewhere, such as Canada and Britain.

Unfortunately, there are facts that would appear to put this fantasy to rest by the facts — for instance, the tragic and untimely death of a 20-year-old British woman in her dorm room last March. Victoria Hills, a first-year student, died of an ear infection, after “postpon[ing] visiting her campus general practitioner because her student loan had not come through and she couldn’t afford the prescription.”

There seems to be a myth that all medical care, procedures and drugs are free under a socialized system. Although Britons do have affordable access to primary-care doctors, and everyone in the UK is covered through high taxes, they are subjected to extensive waiting periods for specialists, surgeries and hospitalization. The fact is that in the West, as the ability of physicians to provide services becomes stretched, many patients die waiting for treatment.

Tonight Jews will gather with friends and family to celebrate Passover. We will recount the hardships of slavery in Egypt and the harsh oppression by the Pharaoh. We will rejoice in the rescue by Moses who demanded freedom for our people. We will recite the ten plagues that were unleashed on the Egyptians when the Pharaohs refused to free the Jews .The Pharaoh finally relented but when the Jews were leaving he sent an army to capture them and return them to enslavement. We will cheer when we retell how the waters of the Red Sea miraculously parted giving the Jews an escape, and the waters returned drowning the pursuing army.

Then, we will have a moment of silent prayer in memory of the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto who courageously rebelled on Passover in April of 1943 and held off the well-armed Nazis for over a month.

Finally, we will recount another miracle- the return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 when the seas again parted- this time for the steel hulls of vessels bringing besieged and beleaguered and traumatized survivors of the Genocide of World War 2 to safety and succor in the Jewish state of Israel.

Then we will eat, drink and be merry.

But, the story of Passover continues with great consequences:

The book of Exodus says that after crossing the Red Sea, Moses led the Jews into the Sinai, where they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness. After travelling through the desert for nearly three months, they camped before Mount Sinai and it was there that God made a covenant with Moses and revealed the Ten Commandments on two stone tablets that codified the mandate to create a just and humane society and govern the lives of Jews and all decent people and nations. There are actually 613 commandments which cover every aspect of life-even hygiene and diet, but the Decalogue- the Ten Commandments are the most famous.

Think about that. At a time and place of local mores that sanctioned and celebrated murder and pillage and tyranny, these laws set forth principles of morality which have lasted for millennia.
Here, in this great nation we live in freedom from intimidation, oppression and harassment because those founding fathers who sought to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” were religious Christians who were informed and guided by the Bible and the Ten Commandments which were revealed more than 3,000 years ago to Moses and the Jewish people on their way to their homeland in Israel.

Re-enacting slavery is not everyone’s idea of a good time, but this is how Jews celebrate Passover. Eating matzo—the bread of affliction—and horseradish, Jews gather at the ceremonial Seder to recall their enslavement under Pharaoh in ancient Egypt. Every family and household recreates the text of the Haggada, the narration, in its own way, to ensure that each participant experiences the national ordeal.

It might seem strange that people who prepare challah for the Sabbath and welcome the New Year with apples and honey choose to mark the low point of their history. Slavery is emotionally humiliating, physically harmful and psychologically degrading. It includes having sons killed at birth and daughters at the mercy of rapists, eating only bitterness and providing sweetness for slaveholders.

And many families need no reminder national enslavement recurs for the Jewish people. Benjamin Ferencz, who helped prosecute the major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, named his 1979 book about Jewish forced labor “Less Than Slaves.” Whereas slaves are generally well-maintained to ensure they remain productive, concentration-camp inmates were worked to death as another means of annihilation. The Haggada is mild compared with the Jewish experience under Hitler. Why commemorate a repetitive history of bondage?

The answer lies in the prescribed rhythm of the Seder, which passes from slavery through stages of gratitude to the Almighty to songs of liberation. Jews tell the hard truth about their past because they might otherwise take freedom for granted. Like athletes who know they must train for the marathon, Jews rehearse the Exodus to practice overcoming slavery.

President Donald Trump is facing a revolt from his base for having signed the bloated omnibus spending bill that torpedoes his “drain the swamp” pledges. But the president now has an opportunity to achieve a small measure of redemption: he should offer loud and unequivocal support to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is being hammered for reportedly having rejected identity politics in favor of meritocracy.

Zinke is facing a storm of media criticism from liberals for allegedly saying that diversity is “not important,” though his office denies that he said this. The same sources that reported Zinke’s comments say that he followed up by stating that what he cared about was excellence—and that by hiring the best people, he would in fact put together the most diverse group anyone has ever had. This second statement is a cowardly concession (as is his denial of his initial diversity observation, assuming that he made that initial statement). Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal.

Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades. The #MeToo movement has only intensified pressures on public and private organizations to hire based on sex and skin color. The result: wasted resources, the sidelining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t—because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

What’s fantastic about the Zinke story, which appears to be gaining momentum, is that the Interior Secretary is being condemned for allegedly saying that he discounts racial categories in hiring, and prefers “having the right person for the right job.” This position, uncontroversial for decades, was the essence of Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind, merit-based society. Treating people the same way regardless of their race or sex used to be considered the definition of fairness; now it is understood to be vicious and intolerable. Kristen Clarke, president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, writes of Zinke, “the racist views harbored by members of this administration and their failure to ensure diversity must be condemned.”

There was a headline recently about the death in Kenya of the last captive northern white rhino.

This item has not yet made the MSM, but give it time. The bloviating MSM is pretty desperate for news of any kind that will shoot down Trump, and I’m certain that a determined “reporter” will come up with ambiguous and verbose parallels between Trump and the dead rhino. Perhaps the rhino shed his yellow hair?

At the moment, however, the MSM is gathering steam to make a major impeachment-worthy story over Stormy Daniels’ claim that over a decade ago (or more) she hugged Donald Trump in amorous and scandalous collusion. It is supposed that no American president ever had “relations” with a “loose” woman; one supposes that JFK was a chaste Catholic, and that FDR was a pillar of sexual propriety, as well, and that having such a tête-à-tête proves that a man who so dallied was not qualified to sit in the Oval Office. Name me a president who never had sex with any women outside his family circle. Jimmy Carter, perhaps. The MSM is no doubt hoping that Stormy will help to accomplish what Humpty Dumpty Robert Mueller failed to do after a year of “investigating” the existence of a prancing unicorn. The Mueller investigation, amounting to likely thousands of pages of useless documents, has the credibilityof the Steele Dossier, with the consistency of a dandelion puff.

The subject here is not Trump’s extracurricular adventures, which I think most Americans care very little about, but rather, freedom of speech, here and abroad. Germany’s outlawing freedom of speech concerning the opposition to and criticism of Islam is by now old hat.

The MP for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party detected in the force’s multilingual new-year greeting a bid “to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men”. The next day her tweet—and, for 12 hours, her entire account—vanished from Twitter. In the subsequent political storm Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, came to Ms von Storch’s defence: “Our authorities are subordinating themselves to imported, rampaging, groping, punching, stabbing migrant mobs,” she tweeted. That, too, was promptly deleted.

Aristotle said it first but no one cared to remind Anderson Cooper or Sixty Minutes of that saying when they headlined Stormy Daniels’ appearance on the show as Porn Star’s Affair With Trump. Turns out to have been Brief Encounter more than Affair to Remember, specifically a one time experience. For many $130,000 would have seemed more than generous remuneration, even for a woman with a sense of self as inflated as her chest, but Stormy has been fortunate in receiving even bigger offers for her ability to add to the media’s hate campaign against the truculent tweeter. The serious journalists who have occupied seats on Sixty Minutes must be chagrined at having Stormy earn the show its highest ratings in years. As for Anderson, he seems to have become the reporter with a specialty niche of asking former Playboy centerfolds and current porn-hackers whether they or their johns used protection during sex. One wonders whether he would ask a gay compatriot a similarly salacious question and whether his concern was for the spread of venereal disease, unwanted pregnancy or just to experience the frisson of rudeness.

Stormy claims that she went public because she feared for her child’s life after receiving a threat from an unknown man on the street; this might explain why she would notify the police but makes us wonder why a woman who occupies one’s entire field of vision would want to amplify that target for additional unhinged people who would see her up close on t.v. Is it possible that someone who has been in a dubious business, known for using underage performers, might have fibbed about her motivation?

The Chinese Cultural Revolution – a terrifying decade of totalitarian purging of everyone and everything that did not conform to Maoist ideology – ended in 1976. But everything old becomes new again, so welcome to the new Cultural Revolution which is not on the rise in China but instead is eroding the freedoms of the Western world.

The architects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution employed the ruthless tactics of totalitarianism everywhere: public humiliation, capricious imprisonment, hard labor, torture and execution, the seizure of private property, and in China’s case, the forcible displacement of much of the young urban population to rural regions where they and millions of others were starved to death. And just as Muslim supremacists strive to erase any pre-Islam cultural and historical artifacts in conquered territories, the Chinese revolutionaries attempted to wipe the slate clean of pre-Communist history as well, ransacking cultural and religious sites.

Certainly such abuses are not underway in the democratic West – yet. But a similar totalitarian impulse is on the move among the radical Left. In America and England, for example, historical relics and artifacts are being destroyed as college activists radicalized by the Marxist professors who dominate Humanities departments clamor for the removal of monuments to the “slave-owning” Founding Fathers, to “colonialist” giants like Cecil Rhodes, and to “mass murderers” like Winston Churchill.

What has been the West’s response to such assaults on its cultural heritage? For the most part, it too often has been self-censorship, naval-gazing self-loathing, and apologetic compliance. The Left’s loud denunciations of so-called white privilege, colonialist imperialism, and cishetero-normativity have resulted not in pushback but increasingly in pre-emptive confessions of racial sin and gender intolerance.

National Geographic, for example, issued an embarrassing mea culpa recently titled, “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It,” in which the editor admitted the magazine’s long history of a self-described “colonialist” perspective in articles and photo layouts featuring racial caricatures. “It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine’s past,” she wrote. But having confessed, the magazine had earned permission to move forward cleansed of its past transgressions.

There is a “gender crisis” in America today, and it has nothing to do with the alleged 63 varieties of genders espoused by leftists. Nor does it have to do with women’s marches. Quite simply it deals with the “expendable male,” where, “in the space of just a few decades[,] American women have managed to demote men from respected providers and protectors to being unnecessary, irrelevant, and expendable ” (Venker & Schlafly, The Flipside of Feminism).

It is apparent by attitudes from well known women – e.g., Pamela Paul, who authored Are Fathers Necessary and wrote, “The bad news for Dad is that despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution.” Then there is actress Jennifer Aniston, who once stated, “Women are realizing they don’t have to settle with a man just to have a child.”

Naomi Schaefer Riley at the Washington Post writes that “while our culture often celebrates the single life as empowering, this empowerment rarely trickles down to children. We can cheer the mother who dragged her son away from rioting in Baltimore after Freddie Gray was killed, and we can find it sweet that the former star of ’16 & Pregnant’ is taking her young son on ‘dinner dates’ to teach him how to treat women, but there is something sad about the fact that these boys do not have a father to offer these lessons in a more effective way.”

It is commonplace in the college composition classroom to read where single mothers assert that they do not need men since their own single mothers told them never to depend on anyone else. “Don’t need men since they are childish and immature” is a frequent refrain.