RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-7-13-the-essence-of-socialism-is-declining-productivity

In our freedom-based economic system, we are accustomed to economic growth of a percent or two or three every year. How does that happen? Every person with a private business quickly catches on that they can make a little more money if they can just figure out how to make the product a little better, or a little more efficiently, or with slightly less input material or labor. Millions of people working independently on this project in the aggregate deliver a little economic growth most every year.

Meanwhile, socialism follows the incentive system of the bureaucracy. If you are the business manager, your superior in the central planning bureau headquarters has no idea whether the product you are making is any good or not. Your way to get ahead is to convince that guy that you need a bigger budget and more staff to accomplish your mission. Each year you use more people and more materials to produce less and lower quality product. In the aggregate, the economy is shrinking, although that tends to get hidden for decades in fraudulent economic statistics, until it becomes too obvious to conceal. Like, for example, when starvation sets in on a mass scale.

You would think it would be almost impossible in today’s world for mass food shortages and starvation to happen in an entire country. After all, all a government needs to do to provide plenty of food for everyone is to allow private businesses to operate in the fields of food production and distribution. Just get out of the way, and the private sector will take care of it, and the people will have plenty to eat. And yet examples of mass food shortages and even starvation are not difficult to find. Funny, but it’s always the usual (socialist) suspects:

Cuba

Likely you have read about the mass protests in Cuba over the past couple of days, and about the widespread calls for “freedom” among the people. But then, Cuba has been under the thumb of the same dictatorship for about 60 years, with the same lack of freedom all that time, and without much in the way of these mass protests. So why now?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/13/voter-integrity-group-in-georgia-says-2020-election-in-fulton-county-riddled-with-massive-errors-and-provable-fraud/

The 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia was “riddled with massive errors and provable fraud,” a voter integrity group alleged Tuesday reviewing ballot data.

Data analysts working for VoterGA, a voter integrity non-profit led by co-founder Garland Favorito, have determined that an astounding 923 of 1539 mail-in ballot batch files contained votes incorrectly
reported in Fulton’s official November 3rd 2020 results.

The mail-in ballot images—like the ones seen in the video below—were made public after petitioners won a court order on April 13. An analyst showed how ballots were re-fed into the system, and counted again.

As American Greatness reported last week, the Keystone State is preparing to launch a forensic audit of its own highly suspect 2020 election. Former President Donald Trump said in a recent interview that it would be “up to the public” to decide what happens if forensic audits in multiple battleground states prove that the election was stolen.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/old-moral-idiocy-anti-patriotism-bruce-thornton/

This year’s Fourth of July celebrations brought out the predictable snarky dudgeon of the “woke” left. Major propaganda organs like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR featured stories trashing the Statue of Liberty, the Declaration of Independence, and the displaying and waving of the flag, to the Left a fascist dog-whistle.

For the “woke,” celebrating patriotism on Independence Day is dangerous low-brow kitsch at best, and an equivalent of a Nazi Nuremberg Party Rally at worst. Such attitudes bespeak not a cosmopolitan, sophisticated intellect, but rather a shameless moral idiocy, as well as a mind filled with ideological clichés and stale received wisdom.

More important, despising one’s own country is dangerous, for the Marxist bacillus is still infecting our body politic and attacking patriotism, which is the immune system of a healthy state that can resist a murderous ideology.

Hatred of America both domestic and foreign reflects Marxists’ long resentment of the U.S. and its success in ushering their biggest achievement, the Soviet Union, into the trash-can of history. But this obvious superiority of capitalism to Marxism was obvious decades before the Soviet Union’s collapse. As French political philosopher Raymond Aron wrote in 1957, leftists have “a grudge against the United States mainly because the latter had succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency toward uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought up intellectual has been taught to despise.” In other words, it was the capitalist U.S. that delivered prosperity and equality, while the Marxist U.S.S.R. produced misery and corpses.

But historical failure could not dampen Marxism’s appeal, which fed Western anti-patriotism even before the early 20th century. Whether from genteel Fabian socialists, or hardcore communists activists, disillusionment with, and disaffection from one’s nation was the mark of sophistication and progress. Attacks on patriotism, moreover, had already followed the growing dislike of the British Empire, a distaste that started accelerating after the gruesome Boer War (1899-1902). The industrialized carnage of World War I further eroded pride in, and affection for one’s own country. Both causes, anti-imperialism and Marxism, were combined in Vladimir Lenin’s 1916 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which substituted colonial subjects for the industrial proletariat that had become middle class instead of violent revolutionaries.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/blinken_invites_un_racism_investigators_to_inspect_the_us.html

Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Tony Blinken, has invited the United Nations’s racism investigators to come inspect the U.S.

According to Reuters:

The U.S. State Department has invited U.N. experts who investigate racism and minority issues to conduct an official visit to the United States, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday.

“Responsible nations must not shrink from scrutiny of their human rights record; rather, they should acknowledge it with the intent to improve,” Blinken said in a statement.

“I urge all U.N. member states to join the United States in this effort, and confront the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia,” he said.

Blinken said the United States welcomed the U.N. Human Rights Council’s adoption on Tuesday of a resolution to address systemic racism against Africans and people of African descent in the context of law enforcement.

That’ll fix ‘er. They’ll get to the bottom of all this systemic racism in the U.S. and hold up America’s sins for all to see. We can’t do this ourselves. So, Blinken’s called the United Nations in.

None of these members of the vaunted United Nations Human Rights Council involved in this resolution that led to this “inspection” would have an agenda, would they? Who are their members?

According to the UN, they’re:

Bolivia, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, France, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Senegal, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.

They wouldn’t have a need to cut the U.S. down a peg, now would they? They wouldn’t profit from holding up the U.S. as a racist hellhole and passing some cockamamie resolution condemning the states or issuing a stern warning to us for the cameras, now would they?

Who better to judge us than communist Cuba? Let’s have China weigh in on U.S. human rights. Pakistan will judge the U.S. best. So will Russia.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/shocking_report_finds_navy_far_more_interested_in_diversity_than_winning_wars.html

The signs are clear that the United States Navy is in crisis. A series of ship disasters, including the scrapping of ¾ billion dollar carrier, The Bonhomme Richard, after a fire, and the fatal seaborne collision of the guided missile destroyer Fitzgerald that killed 7 sailors have revealed problems with training and readiness.

China, which now has more ships in its navy than we do, is boasting of having “chased” as US warship out of disputed waters. The AP reports:

China’s military said it chased a U.S. warship out of a disputed area of the South China Sea on Monday after Washington warned an attack on the Philippines might activate a mutual defense treaty.

Beijing affirmed its claims to portions of the sea that also are claimed by Southeast Asia governments. It rejected the Biden administration’s declaration of support Sunday for an international tribunal ruling in favor of the Philippines that threw out most of them.

China is increasingly assertive about pressing its territorial claims, which are fueling tension with neighbors including Japan, India, Vietnam and the Philippines.

The People’s Liberation Army said it sent ships and planes after the U.S.S. Benfold entered waters claimed by Beijing around the Paracel Islands.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/when_woke_is_more_sacred_than_old_glory.html

On my desk is a framed political cartoon with the caption: “Burning the American Flag is a form of free speech? Try burning a rainbow flag and see if that too is considered a form of free speech?” You could replace “rainbow flag” with “BLM flag,” or even “Antifa flag.” The cartoon lances the recent rise in free-speech hypocrisy that promptly abandons the First Amendment and drums up hysterical charges of “hate speech” when certain sacred cows du jour are so much as mildly criticized.

In the Left’s campaign to “fundamentally transform” America and rid it of soi-disant racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other perceived ills, certain symbols — the American flag, and a panoply of images of western culture — have been isolated as representative of “the white patriarchy,” deserving of derision and destruction. Therefore, it has become perfectly acceptable to desecrate them. At the same time, it has become hateful to even give a disapproving look to banners or murals representing the LGBTQ+, militant black groups, or anything remotely leftist. “Woke” symbols are untouchable; free speech be damned.

Quite a few incidents point to this bizarre dual trend, which aims to crush American ideals underfoot and ridicule — even eradicate — the patriotic emotions true Americans have honestly felt and nurtured in their hearts while forcing them by propaganda and law to embrace ideas their hearts have always militated against. The U.S. flag has been a symbol of freedom and justice for over 225 years and represents the American people in vibrant plurality: e pluribus unum, not one constituency or point of view. It also honors all those who fought and died to preserve our freedom and liberty. So, it has obviously been a prime target of America’s enemies within.

On Memorial Day in 2016, veteran Robert Rosebrock was criminally charged for displaying two four-by-six American flags on the fence outside a Veteran Affairs facility in West Los Angeles and faced up to six months in jail. Says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, which successfully defended Rosebrock, “Why in the world would the feds prosecute a 74-year-old veteran over the placement of two small American flags at the entrance to a park honoring veterans on Memorial Day?”

In 2019, air force veteran Robert Huey was denied permission by his homeowners association (HOA) to fly an American flag at his residence in South Carolina. Huey, who is suing the HOA, had researched the association’s rules before buying the house and found no prohibitions against displaying the American flag. He is now fighting a case for the freedom to broadcast his love for the country.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-adl-chiefs-disingenuous-epiphany-about-left-wing-anti-semitism/

(July 13, 2021 / JNS) It’s a sad day when the head of the Anti-Defamation League receives accolades for acknowledging that anti-Semitism “also” hails from the left. If the person in question had been living in a cave until last week—when he published an op-ed in Newsweek called “It’s Time to Admit It: The Left Has an Anti-Semitism Problem”—he might be excused for having an epiphany about a phenomenon that has been obvious for decades.
But Jonathan Greenblatt hasn’t been in isolation for the past six years, when he replaced Abraham Foxman as CEO of the Jewish organization, established in 1913 by B’nai B’rith. On the contrary, he’s been as active a participant in American political culture throughout his current tenure as he was during his term in the White House as special assistant to former President Barack Obama.

It is thus that Jews across the spectrum viewed the ADL’s announcement in November 2014 that he would be taking over the reins from Foxman in July 2015 as “dramatic.” Unlike Foxman, a liberal but an indefatigable defender of Israel, Greenblatt’s love for the Jewish state was and still is conditional on its policies—particularly those of the government under former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
His attitude is par for an ardent Democrat whose subsequent loathing for former President Donald Trump made his feelings about Netanyahu pale in comparison. Nor was his mission to transform the ADL into an NGO devoted to a distorted version of tikkun olam, a Jewish concept of making the world a better place that morphed over the years into a branch of “woke-ism” that bears no resemblance to its original meaning.
Nor was combating the globe’s evils the founding purpose of the ADL. That emerged during the trial of American Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank, who was lynched by an angry mob two years after he was wrongly convicted of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan in Atlanta.
At the time, the severe anti-Semitism that gripped the U.S. South emanated particularly from white racists who hated Jews and blacks in equal measure. They saw the Jewish community and members of the press mobilize on behalf of Frank as proof that Jews control the world and certainly the media.
The irony is inescapable here since Frank’s key champion was The New York Times. And the idea behind the ADL was that when anti-Semitism is allowed to thrive, the rest of society is in trouble—not that Jew-hatred is one among many forms of racism.

What a difference a century makes.

Today, it’s not white supremacists who pose a threat to Jews in particular and society as a whole, but rather movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Students for Justice in Palestine. There’s a simple reason for this, and it has nothing to do with the identity of the targets of abhorrent positions and behavior. It is, rather, the fact that the former is on the fringe, while the latter is completely mainstream.

Greenblatt’s piece on Thursday, then, was more deserving of ridicule than praise.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/11/trump-winds-and-biden-whirlwinds/

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

What was common to the media’s deification of the criminally minded Michael Avenatti, and the promotion of a series of abject hoaxes? Do we remember the Steele “dossier,” the supposed authority of Fusion-GPS, the Schiff “report,” and the entire Russian “collusion” yarn? 

Do we recall how the Left invented the Charlottesville construct out of a supposedly racist and unqualified endorsement by the president of the Klan and neo-Nazis? Who has forgotten the charge of “racism” for merely connecting the origins of COVID-19 to a Wuhan, level-4 security, gain-of-function-research, Chinese-military-affiliated virology lab rather than to a chopped-up wet bat or pangolin? 

Do we remember the names of our supposed best and brightest retired intelligence officials who lied shamelessly and on spec for the Biden campaign, claiming that Russian “disinformation” accounted for a supposedly fictitious Hunter Biden’s laptop? And are the fabrications by Joe Biden and the media—that men with guns staged an “armed insurrection” of January 6 and “killed” officer Brian Sicknick—the new standard of truth? 

What ties together the efforts of Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $40 million witch hunt, and the two impeachment proceedings—the last dispensing with witnesses, formal hearings, cross-examinations, a special prosecutor, and the Chief Justice presiding, all in mob-like efforts to try to convict in the Senate now private citizen Donald Trump? Must a Joe Biden, one day as president-emeritus and private citizen, fear that there will be no statutes of limitation to his vulnerability, when the vast trove of Hunter Biden’s laptop is finally accessed and turned over to a future hostile congress or federal prosecutor?

What is the common denominator of the Lt. General Michael Flynn debacle, the unmasking and leaking of surveilled American citizens, the nonstop politicized commentaries of retired military officers, and the weaponization of the intelligence agencies? What binds together the text trove of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the cleansing of FBI cell phones, or the forgeries of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith?

What was the catalyst that turned a left-wing Democratic Party into a cultural revolutionary mob? In other words, why in our 233rd year of the republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, junk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws? What was so wrong with assimilation, integration, intermarriage, the “content of our character,” and race as incidental rather than essential to who we are? What has the woke revolution offered us instead?

Since when did regaining a House majority equate to impeaching a president on the eve of a reelection campaign, with his future and fiercest campaign opponents possibly as senators to be sitting in judgment on him in any Senate trial? What was common to all the “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” mythologies regarding meetings with Russians in Trump Tower, or mysterious “pings” of Trump tower machines automatically communicating with Russians, or the certain impending indictments of the Trump family?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17558/european-union-superstate

The July 2 “Joint Declaration on the Future of the European Union” represents the first significant endeavor by euroskeptic parties to jointly oppose efforts by European federalists to transform the European Union into a godless multicultural superstate.

The document states that the European Union requires “profound reform” because, “instead of protecting Europe,” it has itself become “a source of problems, anxiety and uncertainty.” The signatories say that the EU has become a tool of “radical forces” that are determined to carry out a civilizational transformation of Europe. Their objective, they say, is to create a European superstate void of European traditions, social institutions or moral principles.

“We are convinced that the cooperation of European nations must be based on tradition, on respect for the culture and history of European States, on respect for the Judeo-Christian heritage of Europe and on the common values that unite our nations — and not in their destruction.” — Joint Declaration on the Future of the European Union, July 2, 2021.

“All attempts to transform European institutions into bodies that take precedence over national constitutional institutions create chaos, undermine the sense of the treaties and call into question the fundamental role of the constitutions of EU member states. The resulting disputes over competences, in effect, settled by the brutal imposition of the will of the politically stronger entities on the weaker ones. This destroys the basis for the functioning of the European Community as a community of free nations.” — Joint Declaration on the Future of the European Union, July 2, 2021.

“Some EU officials are doubtful that an additional layer of bureaucracy — the conference will have a ‘Joint Presidency,’ an ‘Executive Board,’ a ‘Conference Plenary’ and a ‘Common Secretariat’ — will solve the EU’s already confusing bureaucratic ills.” — Maïa de La Baume, French journalist, Politico, March 4, 2021.

“The EU’s ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ has already written its conclusions. It seeks the forced federalization of the EU against the true will of European nations and apart from the national parliaments…. We do not want a federal Europe in which all decisions are made in Brussels.” — Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s conservative party Vox, July 2, 2021.

The leaders of 16 political parties from across Europe have announced an unprecedented alliance to defend the sovereignty of European nation states, protect the nuclear family and preserve traditional Judeo-Christian values.

The July 2 “Joint Declaration on the Future of the European Union” represents the first significant endeavor by euroskeptic parties to jointly oppose efforts by European federalists to transform the European Union into a godless multicultural superstate.

ttps://bariweiss.substack.com/p/a-witch-trial-at-the-legal-aid-society?token=

If you google “bleeding heart liberal,” Maud Maron might well turn up as the first hit. Every cause liberals are supposed to fight for, every group they are supposed to champion, every candidate they are supposed to support — well, that was Maron’s not so atypical life and career. Until recently.

A New York City native, Maron lived her early years in subsidized housing when her father walked out on her mother, who was a pediatric nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital. Her mother remarried, the family moved to Pennsylvania, and Maron returned to the city for college. While a student at Barnard, Maron was a clinic escort for Planned Parenthood. Later, she went to Cardozo Law School knowing she wanted to be a public defender. There, she was a student of Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther who was then a visiting professor. (Cleaver calls Maron her “excellent research assistant” on the first page of this published paper about Mumia Abu-Jamal.)

After Maron graduated from Cardozo in 1998, she joined the Legal Aid Society, where she represented the most disadvantaged people in Manhattan. She left in 2006, after the birth of her first child, and then rejoined the nonprofit in 2017, working in the Bronx. “I had always intended to go back. It just took longer than I thought because I wound up having four children over a decade. But when my youngest was 18 months I went back to work,” Maron told me over the weekend. “For me, being a public defender is more than a job. It’s who I am.”

Maron and her husband, an Argentine immigrant, chose to send all of their children to public schools. In 2017 and, again, in 2019 she was elected to the local Community Education Council — the equivalent of a school board. Then, two years ago, she decided to run as a Democrat for City Council in lower Manhattan. Maron had always been politically involved: she was a poll watcher for John Kerry in Pennsylvania during 2004 and contributed many times to Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016.

In short, Maron is exactly the kind of lawyer you’d imagine Legal Aid would put on the cover of its brochures. But today the public defender is filing suit in the Southern District of New York against the organization to which she has dedicated her career.