RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/08/cowardice-la-carte.html

cowardice

: lack of courage or firmness of purpose

Synonyms

cowardliness, 
cravenness, 
dastardliness, 
gutlessness, 
poltroonery, 
pusillanimity, 
spinelessness

High Noon

I never mind all the political “Red Scare” info surrounding “High Noon” (released 1952), nor the conflicts between Carl Forman and  Fred Zinnemann, the associate producers. What fascinates me about the film is not the gun fights, but rather the variety of  expressions of cowardice and of the betrayal of Will Kane, (played by Gary Cooper ) the marshal of the town of Hadleyville in the Arizona Territory, as he prepares to face a gang of killers who arrive to kill him. He can find no one willing to be deputized to help him face the gang. He experiences hostility, indifference, and hatred,

The cowardice evokes  for me the current cowardice of Americans who are willing to submit to the COVID-19 panic and are willing to don face masks and buckle into “social distancing” in their behavior. They are willing to wear face masks even during their personal, one-on-one  encounters.

https://spectator.us/never-virus-been-oversold/

There’s nothing unprecedented about COVID-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain: scaled up for today’s population, the equivalent of 42,000, while the UK’s (statistically flawed) COVID death total now stands at 46,000. Globally, the Asian flu was vastly more lethal, causing between two and four million deaths. The Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 also slew up to four million people worldwide, including 80,000 Britons. Yet in both instances, life went on.

What is unprecedented: never has a virus been so oversold. Why, I’d like to sign on with COVID’s agent. What a publicity budget.

In a recent Kekst CNC poll, British respondents estimated that nearly 7 percent of the UK population has died from the coronavirus. That would be 4.5 million people. Scots supposed that more than 10 percent of the UK population has died. That would be seven million people. Astonishingly, Americans believed that COVID has killed nine percent of their compatriots, or almost 30 million people! The real US total has indeed crossed the milestone of 150,000, but for pity’s sake, ‘only’ 20 million people died in World War One.

True, your average everyman and woman are not dab hands at statistics. Nevertheless, broadcast news has bludgeoned audiences daily with COVID death totals. And a citizenry ought to have some vague notion of their country’s population. So folks convinced that in five meagre months they’ve lost a tenth of their fellows — the literal meaning of the word ‘decimate’ — need only drop a digit to realize how absurdly their bloated estimate compares with familiar figures on the news. But then, the public is never good with zeroes — a failing which treasuries in deficit count on.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/05/the-three-perils-threatening-the-united-states/

The Republic is in grave danger.

There, I said it.

Does anyone really doubt it? America is stumbling and the vultures are circling. What is the nature of these perils that afflict us?

America sits atop a global system created at the outset of the 20th century. That century saw the United States elevated to the status of global imperial power, having been victorious in two world wars and the beneficiary of an international monetary system that, post World War II, provided for a vast global, if not regional, peace. Sure, there was a Cold War with the Soviet Union and other limited wars, but no true great global war in which the entire geo-political order came into question.

Times have changed. Today the United States is faced with three enormous perils: an external threat, an internal threat, and a fulcrum on which the two interoperate to synchronize a multi-prong attack on America. 

The first peril is that China has emerged as a geopolitical and economic challenger to the United States. The simmering geopolitical threat from China is multilateral in nature. In fact, a geopolitical reordering on an historic scale is taking place. 

Supported by financial stakeholders, China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” seeks no less than the unification of the Eurasian landmass. This geopolitical and economic reordering has seen China peel off NATO ally Turkey, make common cause with Iran, align with Pakistan, and subsume Hong Kong. Even European Union nations, beneficiaries of 75 years of American security, are drifting into the arms of the Chinese Communists.

The second peril, a domestic counter-state, has emerged pressing a Marxist revolutionary insurrection in alignment with China’s objectives. With a century of Marxist subversion in the making, this counter-state manifested as a silent or soft coup attempt in 2017, and subsequently has evolved into a Marxist revolutionary insurrection rising to a boil inside the United States. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/06/no-doubts-now-that-the-democrats-are-part-of-the-riot-problem/

Qui tacet consentire videtur is the Latin phrase which means he who remains silent appears to consent. The Democrats’ silence when asked to condemn Antifa violence is coming through louder than a deranged Joe Biden outburst on the campaign trail.

New York Democrat Jerry Nadler didn’t hit the mute button when he absurdly claimed Antifa was “imaginary,” then later said its role in the Portland riots was a “myth that’s being spread only in Washington D.C.”

But the congressman set the tone for his party.

During Tuesday’s Senate hearing – titled The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble: Protecting Speech by Stopping Anarchist Violence – Democrats had a wide open opportunity to state their position. Instead, they went quiet.

“It is unbelievable the Democrats will not come out and say violence is wrong, breaking the law is wrong,” Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn told Fox News.

To her credit, Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, asked “how many times have I had to say that we all should be denouncing violent extremists of every stripe?” during the hearing. But when asked by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the subcommittee chairman, if that included Antifa, she dodged the question.

“I have the time,” was Hirono’s non-responsive response.

https://jcpa.org/article/the-fragility-of-the-liberal-democracies-and-the-challenge-of-totalitarianism/

The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, triggered rioting, looting, and arson across the United States. It became evident that an underground leadership structure had been in place and set in motion a wave of violence whose destructiveness was unforeseen.
According to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the goal of organized mob violence is to foment a state of civil war, which will lead to revolution. The would-be revolutionaries in the United States did so well that their success exceeded their expectations.
Mayors of several major cities and governors of some states where violence took place chose not to act and ordered the police and firefighters to stand down. Such inaction created a state of anarchy, leaving the public without protection.
The moral shock resulting from the outbreak of mob violence which was not put down may have been worse than the actual damage caused by the rioters.
In the United States, it has been assumed that the creation of wealth is good for society, especially if through hard work, one could achieve the “American Dream.” Nonetheless, for the past decade, life has become complicated for many young adults. The growing numbers of this increasingly dissatisfied group in society must be taken into account.
The fragility of the liberal democracies is a serious dilemma. There is a short distance between “peaceful demonstrations” and mob violence, civil war, and regime change. The dynamics of political warfare and the methods of mob violence are knowable. Because it is a matter of self-defense, we must use this knowledge to safeguard our democracies and our freedoms.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Anger has been a constant in American politics since the beginning. On July 11, 1804, a long and bitter feud between Vice President Aaron Burr and former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton ended in the latter’s death by gunshot on a field in Weehawken, New Jersey. On February 6, 1858, as the House of Representatives debated the Kansas Territory’s pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, Pennsylvania’s Republican Galusha Grow and South Carolina Democrat Laurence Keitt traded insults and then blows. On March 1, 1954 four Puerto Rican nationalists in the visitors’ gallery unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and opened fire on members of Congress, wounding five. When heated political dialogue becomes angry words (or worse), the nation loses. The 1960s were angry years, fed by opponents and proponents of Civil Rights and an unpopular war in Southeast Asia. We are living through another period where anger has become pervasive and political extremism has made the middle way a difficult passage.

We are in a summer of discontent, made inhospitable by Covid-19, an economic depression and unprecedented hatred for the President of the United States. Political extremism has always been around, but usually on the fringes. Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Lester Maddox once represented right-wing extremists, just as Henry Wallace and George McGovern did on the left. (George Wallace and Maddox were both Democrats, but extreme rightwing in their views). However, they were all marginalized by the far larger center-right and center-left parts of their respective Parties. That is no longer the case. Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, is contributing to the Democrat platform. Like a mutating cell infected with a virus, the country has been dividing and separating, creating extremists on both ends.

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Virtue signaling comes from all quarters about which statues should be destroyed in this country.  Is there a difference between the ISIS wielding fanatics who decimated statues dating as far back as antiquity and the black-clad people who destroy in the name of radical leftwing ideology? Read on and digest the standard leftwing/Marxist imprimatur.

The viral removals of monuments symbolizing racial terror are a corrective to a culture that valorizes violence and embeds false narratives about history into its landscapes. But to what end? The real work of dismantling monuments that embody white supremacy doesn’t end by toppling a few statues — but their withdrawal from the public realm is a long overdue start.

Addressing the fundamental problem of racism in our country will take more than erecting new monuments or toppling old statues. The system that installed statues of Confederate generals and violent police chiefs, and lovingly maintained and protected them, is the same system that built highways through black neighborhoods, invests more money in law enforcement than in schools, and created a surveillance state. These racist symbols are somehow more obvious than statues, yet more surreptitious. As Che Gossett said: ‘Tear down all the monuments to slavery, especially jails and prisons. Removing these visual emblems will be the ultimate accounting.’

For those who do not know, “Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, and archivist. They are currently an archivist at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and a doctoral candidate in trans/gender studies at Rutgers University. Gossett grew up in Massachusetts with their sibling, activist and filmmaker Tourmaline.”  Note  the leftwing use of the pronoun their even though only one person is being spoken about.

EXCERPT- FROM AUSTRALIA-https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/07-08/rebels-without-a-pause/

Global news coverage of the riots, looting and arson that spread across America portrayed the “protests” as a righteous response to racially-tinged police brutality. Murder is murder, and the video footage of police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd is chilling indeed. Concerned bystanders repeatedly asked, then yelled at the police to stop. Floyd already had his hands cuffed behind his back, and there were at least four armed officers on the scene, so it’s unlikely that he could have posed any threat. Chauvin awaits the verdict of a jury of his peers.

Meanwhile America faces the jury of the press corps, which has fallen in love with the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, an attractive young millennial who in looks, speech and politics resembles nothing so much as an American Justin Trudeau. He is a Democrat—the top five candidates in the city’s Australian-style transferable preference voting system were all Democrats—who campaigned on a platform of (wait for it) police reform. Frey wanted to hire an additional 400 officers in a bid to reshape the force. The coronavirus put paid to that.

In America’s mirror-image political colour scheme, Minneapolis is the bluest of blue cities in a consistently blue state. It is represented in Congress by the Somali-American former refugee Ilhan Omar. After going heavily for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party primaries, Minnesota (the state of which Minneapolis is the capital) voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the ensuing presidential election. If the Derek Chauvin riots (it seems unfair to associate them with the apparently peaceable George Floyd) are a product of the divided America we hear so much about, it’s an America divided between African-Americans and the Democrats who govern them.

Nearly all the cities that have been hit hard by riots and looting are long-time bastions of the Democratic Party. Yet when the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Joe “you ain’t black” Biden, said in a teary-eyed video plea that George Floyd was a victim of America’s “original sin” of “systemic racism”, the media lapped it up. Biden’s written follow-up statement condemning looting and rioting was less well reported. Not that he called it “looting” or “rioting”. He wrote that “protest” was “an utterly American response” to injustice, but that “burning down communities” and “violence that endangers lives” were not. One out of three ain’t bad.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/01/the-choice-before-us/

Somehow, news that the Antifa-Black Lives Matter nexus burned a stack of Bibles in front of the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland the other night put me in mind of President Trump’s magisterial speech in Krasinski Square, Warsaw, just over three years ago.

A short digression: has any other modern president delivered so many brilliant speeches? The Warsaw speech was tip-top, but then so was his 2020 State of the Union speech and, just last month, his magnificent speech at Mount Rushmore. And let’s not forget his speech before both Houses of Congress in 2017 or his speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations that same year. Barn-burners all. 

I said at the time that the president’s Warsaw speech was worthy of comparison with Pericles’ Funeral Oration as described by Thucydides. Naturally, that comment occasioned much obloquy, but mostly, I’d wager, from people who have never read Thucydides. 

Mounting a wide-ranging and spirited defense of core Western values and achievements, Trump noted that what made the West so important was not just its wealth and power. Equally important was its commitment to such enabling civilizational values as individual liberty, the rule of law, religious freedom, and a generous and innovative spirit of curiosity and exploration. “The world has never known anything like our community of nations,” Trump said.