RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/benjamin-crump-breonna-taylor/

With precious little comment from the mainstream media, American progressives have disavowed Atticus Finch and aligned themselves with the mob in front of the county jail — this summer, the mob calling for the head of whichever white cop Benjamin Crump has chosen to lynch.

This is no small transition. The Atticus of To Kill a Mockingbird (not the buzzkill Atticus of the Harper Lee’s earlier effort, Go Set a Watchman) defies the racist mob and demands due process. Crump stirs up the racist mob and subverts due process. Atticus leads with evidence. Crump leads with accusations. Atticus sticks to the facts. Crump invents facts, occasionally invents witnesses, and consistently conjures up an America foreign to every black person under 70.

Historically, the Left, with occasional help from the Comintern, has made heroes out of defense attorneys. If fictional defense attorneys like Atticus defended the innocent, his real-life counterparts were not so particular. That these attorneys often defended the conspicuously guilty — from Sacco and Vanzetti to Mumia Abu-Jamal — did not much matter. The larger goal was not to free the accused but to indict America for its systemic racism and injustice.

Crump also indicts America for its systemic racism and injustice. As a trial lawyer, however, he does so to stir the mob and scare the cash out of the besieged party, a reported $12 million out of the City of Louisville in the shooting death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. Last week found Crump back in Louisville inciting the crowd to disorder after the grand jury refused to indict any of the implicated three police offers for Taylor’s death. As is his custom — “Skittles and iced tea,” Hands up, don’t shoot,” “I can’t breathe” — Crump and his public relations team served up a mantra for the occasion: “Release the transcripts.”

The grand jury transcripts will prove nothing that is not already known. As with George Floyd, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin before her, Taylor’s consistently disastrous lifestyle choices put her in harm’s way. If Taylor had not been shot in the police raid, she might have ended up like Fernandez Bowman, the man found dead in her rental car in 2016. Or she might have ended up in prison like her boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, who made 26 of the 48 calls from that prison to Taylor.

Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) Guide for the Perplexed, 2020
 https://bit.ly/3n2dZVR  

1. Jewish national liberation is the 3rd Jewish pilgrimage holiday (following Passover and Shavou’ot – Pentecost), which has been celebrated for the last 3,300 years. Sukkot commemorates the Exodus, the 40 years of wandering in the Sinai Desert, the construction of the Holy Tabernacle and the victories along the way into the Land of Israel. It reaffirms faith in G-D, gratitude for the harvest and the Ingathering of Jews in their Homeland, and the highlighting of reality-based optimism.

2. Commemorating the Exodus. Sukkot (in Hebrew) is named after the first stop during the 40-year-Exodus from Egypt, the town of Sukkota (סוכותה), as documented in Exodus 13:20-22 and Numbers 33:3-5.  It commemorates the gradual transition from slavery in Egypt and nomadic life in the desert to liberty in the Land of Israel; from oblivion to deliverance; and from the spiritual state-of-mind during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to the mundane of the rest of the year.

3. The Hebrew meaning of Sukkot. The Hebrew root of Sukkot ()stands for the key characteristics of the relationship between the Jewish people, the Jewish Homeland and faith in God. The Hebrew word Sukkah () means wholeness and totality (), the shelter of the tabernacle (), to anoint (), divine curtain/shelter() and attentiveness ().

4. The 7-day-holiday. The 7 days of Sukkot are dedicated to the 7 Ushpizin (monumental leaders/guests), who represent positive human and, particularly, leadership qualities in their pursuit of ground-breaking initiatives: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron and David, who were endowed with faith, humility, magnanimity, compassion, reality-based optimism, tenacity in face of dramatic odds, courage, peace-through-strength, principle-driven leadership.   

https://www.jns.org/opinion/amy-coney-barrett-jewish-liberals-and-the-us-constituti

For Jews who worship at the altar of abortion and gun control, RBG was practically a religious figure, and filling her seat with a Catholic who rejects judicial activism is blasphemous.

The apoplexy on the part of Democrats in general and Jewish liberals in particular to the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court was to be expected. Anything that President Donald Trump does drives them crazy.

But the fact that he decided to fill the seat vacated by the Sept. 18 death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before the fast-approaching election has been more than they can tolerate. How dare the president exercise his right to do so, they have been moaning, when his days in office are numbered?

Or so they have been praying. Literally.

Indeed, when news of Ginsburg’s death on the eve of Rosh Hashanah reached many Reform and Conservative congregants (the Orthodox don’t tune into electronic devices on Friday night, and certainly not during the Jewish New Year), their rabbis devoted the following morning’s services to her legacy.

RBG, as she came to be called, had been their heroine. She was not only the first Jewish woman to sit on the Supreme Court and the second woman after Sandra Day O’Connor. She was a warrior for all left-wing causes, whose opinions on and off the bench gained her the adoration of liberals far and wide, including in Israel, which has one of the Western world’s most politically interventionist Supreme Court.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-democrats-frivolous-three-pronged-att

Progressives’ main arguments against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee don’t withstand scrutiny.Doing some commentary over the weekend about President Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, I was struck by not just the emptiness but the outright deceptiveness of the three main Democratic lines of attack against her. These are early days, so perhaps Barrett’s opposition will find something of substance that gains some traction. For now, the main salvos against her are frivolous:

(1) President Trump has a litmus test for nominees, who must take predetermined positions that support his policy agenda; (2) Relatedly, Judge Barrett will “destroy” the Affordable Care Act, consideration of which comes up on the Supreme Court’s oral-argument docket the week after Election Day; and (3) Barrett, a devout Catholic, is on a crusade to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973).

I will take these in order.. Litmus Test

There is no evidence that President Trump has imposed a litmus test on judges whom he would nominate to the Supreme Court. That Democrats say there is a litmus test, tirelessly, on every media platform available to them, is not proof of anything other than a campaign to drive a fact-free political narrative into the public’s consciousness. Specifically, there is no evidence that Judge Barrett, in order to be nominated, had to agree to take the Trump administration’s position of staunch opposition to Obamacare and abortion. As I noted on the Corner earlier today, it is not unusual for Trump-appointed judges to rule against the administration.

https://www.thegoodgopher.com/home/the-good-gopher-satire-liberals-confident-that-current-utopian-state-of-democrat-led-cities-reveals-the-paradise-to-come-once-biden-elected

“The Garden of Eden isn’t a fairy tale after all! It’s been reimagined all over the nation in cities like Portland, Seattle, and Chicago!”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/26/barrett-will-sail/

As I write, President Trump has just confirmed what the rumor mill has been disgorging with increasing confidence over the last few days: Judge Amy Coney Barrett is his pick to replace the feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died at 87 a little over a week ago, as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The wheels of government tend to turn slowly, but Donald Trump has once again demonstrated that if need be, they can be made to turn with dizzying speed. 

He did it last spring when he mobilized the awesome resources of American business to produce a mountain of medical materiel in record time to meet the emergency sparked by the Chinese virus. 

And he just did it again by nominating Judge Barrett to meet the political emergency threatened by anti-democratic forces massing to upset the 2020 election. 

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has already announced that Barrett’s confirmation hearings will begin October 12. With the Republicans holding a 53-47 majority, and with no more than two likely defections (at most), she is likely to be seated before the election on November 3. It is imperative that the Supreme Court, which may be called to rule upon various electoral anomalies, be sitting with its full complement of nine justices. 

Barrett graduated first in her class from Notre Dame Law School and then held two clerkships, the second for Justice Antonin Scalia. She was in private practice briefly before returning to teach law at Notre Dame, where she still teaches. In 2017, President Trump nominated her for the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. 

I became aware of Judge Barrett in 2018 after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. Her name appeared on a shortlist of candidates for Kennedy’s replacement. In the event, President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, whose disgraceful treatment during his hearings by Democratic senators and the media is still horrifying to contemplate. 

Will Barrett face the same level of unhinged vituperation? I think it unlikely, though I remember a conversation I had with a well-informed legal observer in the immediate aftermath of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “Well, the public was so repelled by that spectacle that Trump’s next nomination is likely to go more smoothly,” I said. 

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The hope was that exposure to the West would cause China to develop free market economies and more freedom for its people. Yet, as Kevin Rudd and Daniel Rosen wrote in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, “China’s economic norms are diverging from, rather than converging with, the West’s. Long promised changes detailed at the beginning of the Xi era haven’t materialized.” China’s defense spending has risen ten-fold in the past two decades, while the U.S.’ slightly more than doubled. The U.S. still spends more than three times what China spends, but the gap is narrowing. China has built at least seven artificial islands in the South China Sea and has conducted war games in that area, through which an estimated one-third of global trade passes. In consolidating power, Xi Jinping has become the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.

In 2013, on visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia, Xi unveiled his “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), a center piece of China’s foreign policy. The “belt” refers to the old “Silk Road,” which extended from Xi’an in Central China to the Mediterranean Sea, just west of Aleppo. The “road” refers to 21st Century sea routes. Today, according to Wikipedia, 138 countries in Asia, Africa the Middle East, the Caribbean, South America and Europe have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China’s BRI. The stated purpose is to connect Asia with the Middle East, Africa and Europe to improve regional integration, increase trade and stimulate economic growth. This has been done through loans to countries and direct investments in ports, roads, rail lines, airports, “…one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived” is the way the Council on Foreign Relations put it in January of this year.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-9-23-the-taboo-on-reporting-the-r

When you read something, you generally notice the things that the writer explicitly mentions, while you rarely take note of what the writer omits. So at first it’s easy to skip over the omission, in nearly all reporting about violent crime in the United States, of the information about the race of the perpetrator or suspect. Still, if you read enough about this subject of violent crime, at some point you just can’t help noticing this universal omission. Indeed, should you once start to look for information on the race of criminals or suspected criminals, you will quickly realize that something weird is going on.

Is it appropriate that this subject of race of perpetrators almost never gets mentioned? Perhaps there is some legitimate concern about not wanting to potentially tar all members of a race with the suspected bad conduct of a relative few. But that concern would not explain the extremes to which the suppression of this information gets carried. Even when the race of the perpetrator is known and could be helpful to the public in potentially assisting the police in identifying a suspect, you won’t find the information in a media report of the crime. Clearly there is a powerful taboo at work. Maybe it’s a rule officially prescribed and enforced by media higher-ups; or perhaps it’s one of those unspoken orthodoxies that reporters must follow in order to avoid being “canceled” by their erstwhile friends and colleagues.

This subject turns out to be important. The reason it is important is that the general suppression of information about the race of suspects enables narratives to arise that run directly contrary to facts, but the facts have been so effectively suppressed that no one knows them. The obvious narrative at issue here is the narrative that police across America unfairly target young black males in enforcement of the criminal laws.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-science-is-an-experiment-certain-to-fail-11600972161?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Trump has ordered an end to training on “white privilege” and “critical race theory” in the federal bureaucracy. The directive is a good first step toward removing identity politics from federal operations. Next up should be the millions of taxpayer dollars devoted annually to cultivating race- and sex-based grievance in the sciences. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all embraced the idea that science is pervaded by systemic bias that handicaps minorities and women. Those agencies have taken on the job of extirpating such inequity on the theory that scientific advancement depends on a “diverse” scientific workforce.

Earlier this year the NIH announced a new round of “Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research.” Academic science labs could get additional federal money if they hire “diverse” researchers; no mention was made of relevant scientific qualifications. This latest grant solicitation expanded the agency’s social-justice agenda into novel territory. Besides the usual preferences for blacks, Hispanics and women, the NIH would fund student researchers who were or had been homeless, who were or had been in foster care, who had been eligible for free school lunches, or who had received WIC payments (a food program for low-income mothers) as a child or mother.

The federal science agencies have absorbed the vocabulary of academic victimology—from “intersectionality” to “heteronormativity” and “stereotype threat.” Intersectionality holds that people who can check off more than one victimhood box are particularly burdened by American bigotry. Science labs angling for the latest NIH diversity supplements will increase their chances of federal funding by hiring a woman who is also an underrepresented minority, disabled or from a “disadvantaged background.”

The National Science Foundation is currently doling out $29 million through its “Advance” program. Advance seeks to use “intersectional approaches in the design of systemic change strategies” to combat bias in the STEM fields. Successful applications will recognize that “gender, race and ethnicity do not exist in isolation from each other and from other categories of social identity.” The NSF funders are particularly concerned about policies that “do not mitigate implicit bias in hiring, tenure, and promotion” and that lead to “women and racial and ethnic minorities being evaluated less favorably.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16542/transition-integrity-project-nils-gilman

It seems that criticizing the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) and their plan to disrupt and steal the 2020 presidential election can be dangerous.

So — the leadership of TIP has spoken. Now you know their thinking, their motives and their true objectives. It seems Nils Gilman wants Michael Anton executed.

The brutality and viciousness of Marxism and its adherents is on display. Those that may have held reservations or harbored some doubt on my analysis of what TIP really had in store for the election now have their answers.

If Gilman advocates executing someone by firing squad for daring to question TIP, what other penalties and extraordinary measures were discussed by the supposed bipartisan arbiters of the electoral process? How is this “normal?”

Are you disturbed by how your news information is “curated?”

It seems that criticizing the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) and their plan to disrupt and steal the 2020 presidential election can be dangerous. Michael Anton, a former Trump administration official and now of the Claremont Institute, published an article titled, “The Coming Coup” that seems to have caught the attention of TIP co-founder Nils Gilman. According to the journalist Natalie Winters:

“Gilman, who serves as Vice President of Programs at the Chinese Communist Party-linked Berggruen Institute, took to Twitter to express his desire that Anton be executed in the same fashion as Robert Brasillach.

“Specifically, he insisted ‘Michael Anton is the Robert Brasillach of our times and deserves the same fate.'”

I’ll save you the effort of searching for Brasillach — he was a French author and journalist who advocated for the fascists and was executed by firing squad in 1945. So — the leadership of TIP has spoken. Now you know their thinking, their motives and their true objectives. It seems Gilman wants Anton executed.