RUTHFULLY YOURS

The confluence of developments in medical knowledge and military technology enabled doctors to learn a great deal about surgery during the American Civil War. Since, at the war’s outset, very few physicians had any experience treating gunshot wounds, P.J. Horwitz—a Jew from Baltimore and the Union navy’s surgeon general—authored a brief manual on the subject.

At the Start of the Civil War, Few Union Army Surgeons Had Ever Treated a Gunshot Wound By Rebecca Onion

In this three-page, handwritten document, Baltimorean P.J. Horwitz, who served as surgeon general of the Navy for the Union during the Civil War, tries to get his fellow medical officers up to speed on the presentation and treatment of gunshot wounds.

The document is included in an online exhibition,”Passages Through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War,” put together by the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. In introducing Horwitz’s treatise, the anonymous curator notes: “At the outset of the war, the Union medical corps consisted of 83 surgeons and assistant surgeons, few if any of whom had ever treated a gunshot wound.”

The basic information in Horwitz’s treatise, written in January 1862, reflects physicians’ need for rudimentary advice, at this early stage of the war. “One of the first things to be done is to stop the hemorrhage, if there be any, and then carefully examine the wound to see that no foreign body is lodged there in, and then after bathing the flesh in cold water, apply to the wound a piece of lint on which may be spread a little cerate [an ointment],” Horwitz writes.

While the medical corps may have started the war laughably unready for the types and volume of wounds it would see, it would make many improvements in the next four years. “Each side was woefully unprepared, in all aspects, for the extent of the war,” argues Robert F. Reilly, M.D., in an assessment of the performance of physicians and surgeons during the conflict. “Despite this, many medical advances and discoveries occurred as a result of the work of dedicated physicians on both sides”—advances including the safer use of anesthetics, the organization of large hospitals, and the performance of rudimentary neurosurgery.

A transcript follows the document images.

Whoopi Goldberg said on the view that black women wearing blond hair weaves amounts to “cultural appropriation.”

“I think there’s a lot of appropriation going back and forth, the weave . . . the weave doesn’t look like this,” Goldberg said, grabbing her own hair, and then adding “the weave kind of looks like this,” while pointing to the hair of her blonde co host.

“If you are going to talk about appropriating and what’s cool and what’s not, then we are all in deep doo-doo because we are doing it to each other constantly. Everybody is appropriating. Japanese are appropriating. Black folks are appropriating. Spanish people appropriate. We are appropriating each other. It’s not just a black thing.”

In an article for Jet Magazine, Zainib Karim stated that although “to the naked eye, Goldberg’s words might hold some truth,” “what she is speaking of is not cultural appropriation; it’s assimilation.”

“Assimilation is the sister-wife that sprung from white supremacist standards of beauty, living, and social practices,” he writes.

Appropriation is, as another View co host, Sunny Hostin, put it: When “a dominant group in society exploits the culture of a less privileged group without understanding that group’s experience.”

Basically, Goldberg didn’t understand that just because someone uses something from another culture, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that person is engaging in “cultural appropriation.”

But is this misunderstanding really that surprising?

After all, it does seem that, particularly in social justice circles and on college campuses, any use of something from another culture – regardless of the circumstances or intent — is fair game for being called out as “cultural appropriation.” Everything from yoga to toe rings to sumo-wrestling fat suits have earned this label, and perhaps it’s time that more people take a look at actual impacts and definitions before knee-jerk shaming others.

In Dallas, Obama mentioned the name of dead sex offender Alton Sterling more times than those of the murdered police officers whom he was pretending to memorialize. After quickly dispensing with the formalities of eulogizing the slain officers, Obama demanded that “even those who dislike the phrase ‘black lives matter’” should “be able to hear the pain of Alton Sterling’s family”.

Alton Sterling was a convicted sex offender, burglar and violent criminal who was shot while reaching for a gun. His family may mourn him, just as every criminal’s family mourns their own, but it was obscene to class him together with five police officers who were murdered by a violent racist while doing their duty.

It is even more obscene when Obama’s favorite sex offender displaces the murdered police officers.

And yet that was Obama’s theme in Dallas. Murdered police officers were contrasted with dead criminals. The proper thing for Americans to do, as Obama told us, was to mourn both officers and criminals, to respect the sacrifices of the police and the anti-police accusations of #BlackLivesMatter.

Obama did not come to Dallas to mourn the murdered police officers, but to defend the ideology that took their lives. And this is what he has done from the very beginning.

Before the shootings, Obama expressed his “condolences for the families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile” and insisted that the criminal justice system was racist. His statements and speeches after the shootings echoed the same talking points and spin complete with the claims that accusing the police of racism is “not to be against law enforcement”.

“When people say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter”, he famously said.

That’s true. Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean that blue lives don’t matter. It means that blue lives are evil. As Ta-Nehisi Coates, an author on Obama’s reading list, wrote of the dead police officers who gave their lives on September 11, “They were not human to me.” That’s the kindest thing that the black nationalists whose cause Obama has championed have said of the police.

For two years American police departments have endured relentless attacks from the Obama administration, its media allies and the Black Lives Matter movement alleging that U.S. law enforcement is a racist, deadly threat to African-Americans. A handful of disturbing videos depicting police shootings helped galvanize widespread hostility to law-enforcement officers, and cops began backing away from the proactive policing that stops crime but has been repeatedly denounced as racial oppression.

The result, especially in the first half of this year, has been an appalling increase in shootings and murders in many cities across America. Most of the victims, in this poisonous era spawned by Black Lives Matter, have been black. Now the consequences of this stream of falsehoods about police may be spinning out of control, with the assassination of five police officers in Dallas last week and the attacks on cops in other cities since then.

Make no mistake: Assertions about systemic, deadly police racism are false. That has been true throughout the period following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014; recall that the cop involved was ultimately exonerated by the Justice Department. But no number of studies debunking this fiction has penetrated the conventional story line.

A “deadly force” lab study at Washington State University by researcher Lois James found that participants were biased in favor of black suspects, over white or Hispanic ones, in simulated threat scenarios. The research, published in 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, confirmed what Ms. James had found previously in studying active police officers, military personnel and the general public.

In 2015 a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. And this month “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” by Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr., analyzing more than 1,000 officer-involved shootings across the country, reports that there is zero evidence of racial bias in police shootings.CONTINUE AT SITE

Multicultural societies — from 19th-century Austria–Hungary to contemporary Iraq, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda — have a poor record of keeping the peace between competing tribes. They usually end up mired in nihilistic and endemic violence.

The only hope for history’s rare multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious nations is to adopt a common culture, one that artificially suppresses the natural instinct of humans to identify first with their particular tribe. America, in the logical spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, was exceptional among modern societies in slowly evolving from its original, largely European immigrant population to a 21st-century assimilated, integrated, and intermarried multiracial society, in which religious and racial affiliations were incidental, not essential, to one’s public character and identity.

But such a bold experiment was always tenuous and against the cruel grain of history, in which the hard work of centuries could be easily torn apart by the brief demagoguery of the moment. Unfortunately, President Obama, ever since he first appeared on the national political scene in 2008, has systematically adopted a rhetoric and an agenda that is predicated on dividing up the country according to tribal grievances, in hopes of recalibrating various factions into a majority grievance culture. In large part, he has succeeded politically. But in doing so he has nearly torn the country apart. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that no other recent president has offered such a level of polarizing and divisive racial bombast.

Most recently, without citing any facts about the circumstances of the police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana, Barack Obama castigated the police and the citizenry on their culpability for racial disparity and prejudicial violence. “[T]hese fatal shootings are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal-justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve.” Obama did not yet know the race of the policemen involved (as in the case of Baltimore, the Minnesota shooting involved non-white officers), the circumstances that led to the shootings, or the backgrounds of either the officers or their victims.

Shortly afterwards, twelve Dallas law-enforcement officers were shot, and five of them killed, by a black assassin who declared solidarity with Black Lives Matter and proclaimed his hatred for white law enforcement. That outbreak prompted Obama to take to the podium again to recalibrate his earlier message. This time he amplified his gun-control message, and somewhat delusionally added that the upswing in racial polarization did not imperil national unity — in much the same way that, in years past, he had announced that al-Qaeda was on the run, we were leaving behind a stable Iraq, and ISIS was a jayvee organization. Note the Obama editorial method in the case of police incidents, from Skip Gates to Louisiana and Minnesota: He typically speaks before he has the facts, and when subsequent information calls into question his talking points and theorizing, he never goes back and makes the corrections. Nor does he address facts — from Ferguson to Dallas — that do not fit his political agenda. Finally, a police shooting of an African-American suspect is never an “isolated event,” while the shooting of an officer by a black assassin is isolated and never really thematic of any larger racial pathology.

The murder of five Dallas policemen at a protest march is the gruesome consequence of the rhetorical war on police being waged by the progressive race industry. The shooter, of course, bears the primary responsibility for the killings. But a climate of opinion makes such events more likely, and those who create such a climate are culpable as well.

The justification for the war on police is that they gun down unarmed black men out of racial animus. The 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri sparked a nationwide movement predicated on this popular urban myth. The Black Lives Matter movement quickly came to national prominence, instigating protests over every police shooting of a black person, and popularizing their signature chant, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

Everything about this organization is based on a lie. Even Eric Holder’s politicized DOJ determined the Brown shooting was justified, and cleared the officer involved. Brown never put up his hands and said “Don’t shoot,” nor was he a “gentle giant,” as the race-baiters and media claimed. Nor is there an epidemic of racist police killings of unarmed blacks. More blacks than whites are killed relative to their population, but that’s a consequence of blacks being a much larger proportion of violent criminals. Race is not the issue: Whites and Hispanics are three times more likely to die at the hands of police than are blacks, and minority police officers are three times more likely to fire their weapons than are other cops. And a police officer is 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a black than he is to kill an unarmed black.

Despite the empirically false claims of racist police murdering blacks, the myth has attracted support from government and media. A fish rots from the head down, as the proverb has it, and Barack Obama has set the tone. He has intruded himself into interracial incidents and police shootings of blacks, whether justified or not, stoking further the racial divisions he has exploited throughout his presidency. Obama called the police “stupid” in the Henry Louis Gates incident. He said if he had a son “he’d look like” Trayvon Martin, and said of the recent shooting in Minnesota that “there’s a big chunk of our citizenry that feels as if, because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same.” He also praised Black Lives Matter for doing “outstanding work,” and said that the arson and looting following the decision not to prosecute the policeman in Ferguson was “an understandable reaction” and that “the law too often feels like it’s being applied in a discriminatory fashion.”

The Black Lives Matter movement “…doesn’t care any more about the lives of black people than the Ku Klux Klan…” Sheriff David Clarke asserted during an interview with Accuracy in Media. Clarke is the Sheriff of Miwaukee County, Wisconsin.

“Black Lives Matter, which I have renamed ‘Black Lies’ L-I-E-S Matter, it’s nothing more than an astroturf operation, it’s just the latest shallow disguised, confederation if you will, of community organizers and leftists that specialize in fostering disorganization and rebellion in ghettos and other struggling areas throughout the United States of America.”

Sheriff Clarke cited “a study done by Dr. Timothy Johnson of Toledo University…” that invalidates the widespread claim that police officers practice racial discrimination. He said the study found that twice as many white men “…are killed in police use of force situations” than black men.

“There is no research, there is not one bit of research or data that supports their lie-which is why I call them ‘Black Lies’-their lie about police use of force in the United States of America.”

Sheriff Clarke calls Black Lives Matter a “hate group,” saying, “These are nothing more than riot makers and they stoke up bitterness and resentment in people; and they use the police as a distraction from the staggering failure of liberal politicians in these large urban areas where these ghettos are contained.”

Comparing Chicago’s crime-ridden culture of death to “… some war-torn, sub-Sahara African nation that’s constantly under civil war with a tribal mentality,” Sheriff Clarke confronted the movement’s passivity on this issue.

The Code of Federal Regulations comprises 50 titles, 235 volumes, over 200,000 pages, and over 1.1 million specific regulatory restrictions. Imagine that if you can.

Regulations reach into every conceivable – and inconceivable – aspect of life. Any new legislation passed by Congress is a statement of legal intention. Regulations are the snarling legal fangs of that legislation, the nitty-gritty core of the law. In practice, regulations are written by unelected and anonymous bureaucrats, “interested parties,” and lobbyists. Also in practice, regulations are not reviewed by Congress. Is it reasonable to expect our elected representatives to plow through 223 pages a day of tyrannical minutia (see below) when they don’t even bother to read the legislation that spawns it?

Let’s try to get a numerical handle on the magnitude of the federal regulations imposed during the seven and a half years of Obama’s reign, focusing on the last full year, 2015. (The figures are deficient. Like the national debt, they grow relentlessly, with no abatement.)

The Juggernaut of Federal Regulations During Obama’s Reign

Number of new regulations

20,642

Average per year

2,752

New regulations in 2015

2,353

Pages of regulations in 2015

81,611

Average pages per day in 2015

223

Average pages per hour

9.3

Untold numbers of unelected anonymous worker bees in offices public and private secretly, and without oversight, churning out over nine pages of new laws every hour, around the clock, ceaselessly, year after year. Who needs Carroll, Kafka, or Orwell?

After Thursday’s terrorist slaughter of policemen in Dallas, it’s fair to say that Barack Obama might well be the worst president in U.S. history. Here’s why.

The keynote of America’s domestic politics for the last 60 or 70 years—from sometime between the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education school desegregation decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act—has been the nation’s effort to undo the heinous wrongs that slavery and Jim Crow perpetrated on black Americans ever since the first slave was brought here in the 1640s. I am old enough to have had friends who were Freedom Riders, white college kids who went to Mississippi to register black citizens to vote. One I’ll never forget returned with tales of old people, whom legal chicanery had blocked from voting all their lives, marveling in almost Biblical language that such a miracle could be occurring in their own lifetimes, in their own towns. I remember how Sherriff Bull Connor turned the fire hoses and German Shepherds on those civil rights protesters, black and white, in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and how that same year governor George Wallace stood at the door of the University of Alabama to prevent the enrollment of two black students, proclaiming himself Jefferson Davis’s spiritual heir and vowing “segregation forever!” But what I most remember is skinny Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach walking heroically down that hostile Alabama street—alone, but followed by federal marshals—to force Wallace to stand aside and let the two students enter. It was as heart stopping as Gary Cooper walking toward the showdown on Main Street in High Noon.

I also remember how civil rights zeal turned into zealotry. We made the integration of our schools, and then the closing of the black-white achievement gap, our principal educational goal for half a century, with the unintended consequence that we neglected actual education and turned urban schools into machines for perpetuating black failure. Judge-ordained busing in Boston, completely contrary to the terms of the Civil Rights Act, made the schools more segregated than ever. A judge-ordained Kansas City school-funding-equalization order, forcing local taxpayers to shell out $2 billion over a decade, including building a bizarrely unnecessary Olympic swimming pool, produced no educational gains whatsoever and proved to anyone with eyes to see that money was not the key to racial equality in education.

Then, the colleges turned to affirmative action in admissions, the ed schools taught their students not how to teach or what facts they needed to transmit but only “social-justice” ideology, and deans of diversity began to outnumber actual teachers on college campuses. The professors themselves brought the stupendous achievements of Western culture under the suspicion of creating nothing but racial inequality (and later an unimaginably broad smorgasbord of inequity). They replaced Plato with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Believing that welfare payments constituted well-deserved reparations for 300 years of slavery and oppression, we New Yorkers created a come-and-get-it dole that ended up with one in eight of our neighbors on the welfare rolls—paid for by the rest of us and resulting in a multi-generational underclass. We entertained the foolish notion that black crime was a manly revolt against oppression—that black criminals were only protesting against the closure of all avenues of honest advancement for their race, as well as against the daily humiliation heaped on African-Americans.