RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/16/will-lefts-violent-tendencies-lead-to-u-s-breakup-or-dictatorship/

he Democratic Party’s far-left wing — or is that redundant? — has pursued a relentless gaslighting campaign against conservatives. It goes like this: Pay no attention to the Democrat fringe’s insane violence of the last year, members of the conservative right are the real troglodytes, prone to extreme political savagery. The Big Media, ambling in their own leftist zombie trance, repeat the mantra over and over. Only problem: It’s utterly false

It should be no surprise that it’s actually the left that has violent proclivities. And now, new data clearly back up what we’ve known instinctively.

The numbers come from the 2020 poll of election opinions by the highly respected and widely cited American National Elections Studies (ANES), a joint effort of Stanford University and the University of Michigan. It’s funded by the National Science Foundation, and while it formally began in 1977, its roots and data go all the way back to the 1940s.

So, yeah, “science.”

We found the chart below in a tweet by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, the renowned Canadian psychologist who has been vilified by the left for not blindly supporting its cultural insanity. The numbers are both enlightening and frightening at the same time.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/14/woke-science-has-no-place-in-government-policymaking/

“Science, at its core, is a social phenomenon.” This observation, from Alondra Nelson, the newly appointed deputy director of President Biden’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), certainly qualifies for a prominent place in the Pantheon of Inane Statements. The core of science, in fact, is the scientific method—posing and testing hypotheses; carefully gathering, examining, and generating experimental evidence; and finally, synthesizing all the available information into logical conclusions. 

Dr. Nelson’s assertion is inauspicious, but perhaps we should not be too surprised by a “squishy” statement from someone whose undergraduate degree was in sociology, while her doctorate is in “American Studies.” What, we wonder, qualifies her to be deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy? And how does it comport with President Biden’s commitment to always rely on “science and truth.” We suspect it is an example of how lip service to science has invaded the domain of real science. 

“Hard” sciences are a framework for understanding physical, chemical, subatomic, biological, and other natural or even man-made phenomena. The disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and especially mathematics, have nothing to do with society as such, because the phenomena they characterize exist independently of humans. Mathematics is typically the language of this framework, whether it is arcane calculus, probability theory, combinatorics, topology, or some other branch well understood by only a very select group. 

The presence of uncertainty or unresolved questions in the hard sciences does not make them soft or diminish their rigor. In fact, scientific findings incorporate statistical uncertainty, but without ascribing motives or a social context. 

As an example of the evolution of science, Newton’s laws of physics were once believed to be immutable. Centuries later, Einstein hypothesized mathematical principles that questioned the validity of certain of Newton’s laws in extreme conditions—seminal speculations that were unusual and daring but amenable to the process of hypothesis and experimentation. In fact, subsequent experiments—the essence of science—have validated most of Einstein’s theories. In other situations, the process is reversed: an experiment produces new or unexpected results, spawning theories to explain them, which then require further testing to validate or disprove them. This is how science works. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/14/the-legends-of-our-fall/

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. ”
— Carleton Young in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

Many politicians at one point or another live by lies—if they can get away with them. 

Our supposed sentinels, the media—self-defined as independent, cynical, and skeptical journalists—are supposed to separate political fictions from truth.  

Legends As Facts 

Of course, sometimes they used to do that—if only selectively. There were Communist sympathizers in the Roosevelt Administration and holdovers in the 1950s deep state. But the Red Peril was not always what the demagogic Joe McCarthy claimed when shaking his lengthy, indiscriminate “lists” of “commie” names and crimes.  

Once U.S. Army counsel Joseph Welch, Edward R. Murrow, and assorted journalists began to demand proof of all of McCarthy’s charges, his public following dissipated.  

The George W. Bush Administration in its case to remove Saddam Hussein unwisely ignored all the 23 bipartisan writs authorizing the use of the force by the Congress. Instead, it rhetorically bundled all congressional authorizations into one case against Saddam Hussein: the existential threat of huge Iraqi stockpiles of deliverable “weapons of mass destruction.”  

After Saddam’s removal, U.S. forces did not find depots of poisonous and nerve gases. Whether they were nonexistent, or moved stealthily to border dictatorships like Syria or even Iran, or were destroyed no one knew. The public only remembered the government assurance that WMDs, the popular justification for the preemptive invasion, would be there upon U.S. arrival—a narrative that the media originally did not question and then later swore that it always had been skeptical as it led the cheer: “Bush lied, people died.”

 Noble Lies

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/03/14/democrats-will-blame-trump-for-every-problem-they-create-for-the-next-20-years-n1432420

Poor Herbert Hoover. The Republican president had the misfortune of being in office when the Great Depression hit. While some of his policies contributed to the severity of the downturn, the depression was the inevitable outcome of ruinous tariffs and overproduction.

But from 1930 to the 1960s, Democrats made the word “Hoover” synonymous with “disaster.” Hoover became a whipping boy for every Democratic president up to and including John Kennedy.

Now, with a disaster at the border entirely of their own making, Democrats are casting about for someone to blame for the crisis. Naturally, they didn’t have to look very far.

Washington Examiner:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the number of migrant children and teenagers currently held in custody at the southern border a “humanitarian challenge,” blaming the Trump administration’s handling of immigration for the uptick.

“This is a humanitarian challenge to all of us,” Pelosi told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border, and they are working to correct that in the childrens’ interest.”

The media has prepared the battleground for Democrats superbly. Trump has become a villain in every morality play the Democrats are staging. And that probably won’t change for decades.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/joe_bidens_parttime_presidency.html

Barack Obama never seemed very enamored of the work that went along with being president. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it, it was that he didn’t want to do it. By contrast, the much older Donald Trump was a whirlwind workaholic. Joe Biden is a different creature entirely: he is not a dynamo like Trump, nor a slacker like Obama. One gets the impression, instead, that he is incapable of putting in a full day of work. The best evidence yet comes from his schedule for this week.

Steve Herman, a White House reporter, posted on Twitter what Joe Biden’s schedule is over the next five days. On Monday, he will deliver remarks; on Tuesday, he will travel to Pennsylvania; on Wednesday, he will have a telephone meeting with the President of Ireland; and on Friday, he will travel to Georgia. In case you are thinking I skipped over Thursday, I did not. He has nothing on his calendar for Thursday (hat tip: The Gateway Pundit):

If reporters were to ask about this relaxing schedule (not that they ever would), one can be assured that the White House would insist that Biden is very busy taking care of business for America. You see, the president is traveling to highlight to people across America how the $1.9 trillion spending binge that the Democrat-run Congress passed, and that Biden signed, will benefit ordinary Americans.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_tyranny_of_woke_capital.html

Traditional American values have long been under attack by social justice warriors, cultural Marxists advancing the insidious tenets of critical theory. Their “long march through the institutions” has infiltrated schools, universities, entertainment, the mass media, the courts, politics, and beyond. One might assume that business, adhering to the Milton Friedman doctrine of maximizing returns for shareholders, would be insulated from their malign agenda. But that assumption is no longer valid, according to Stephen Soukup’s recent book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business. He illuminates how ‘progressive’ forces have insinuated themselves into regulatory agencies, the finance industry, and corporate America, jeopardizing capital markets and the free-market system itself.

The book traces the genesis of American progressivism to Richard Ely (1854-1943) of Johns Hopkins University. Believing in a confused amalgam of religion, socialism, white superiority, and a paternalistic state, Ely advocated that the state should be harnessed to fix social problems like poverty, alcoholism, racial tension, and child labor in G-d’s name. He never presented himself as a socialist, but believed G-d works through the state, which should heal the ills of capitalism through labor reform and compulsory education. With little faith in the canaille to vote in society’s and their own best interests, he favored a “third way”: employing professional administrators to manage society rationally, guard against laissez-faire economics, and make socialism unnecessary. This new progressivism looked at the American state as the natural, necessary “administrator” of civic life.

Political scientist Dwight Waldo, the defining figure of modern public administration, refined Ely’s ideas and propounded that public servants should be “value advocates,” “agent of change,” and stewards of “social equity, democratic administration, and proactive, non-neutral public administration.” Voters and their elected representatives were to be superseded by unelected, unaccountable experts — with ostensibly better values than the people. Though it was seen as being in violation of the Constitution, Waldo wanted a central bank with an administrative elite controlling monetary policy to maintain stability.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/coronavirus-bruce-hendry/

In 1841, Charles Mackay wrote a 702-page book titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The book details investment hysteria and panic, but it’s really about human nature, something that doesn’t change throughout recorded history. I will show the reader, in this essay, how we are experiencing popular delusions and the madness of crowds, right now, with the current corona virus, COVID-19 hysteria and panic.

Today’s social psychologists use the term “groupthink” to describe the modern versions of crowd madness. “Groupthink” represents the prevailing beliefs and rationalizations that influence the decisions of the general public as well as the experts. Their groupthink beliefs are shaped by the opinions of others (think CNN, New York Times and Twitter) and not by the rigor of their own personal and independent analysis. The current hysteria and panic over the COVID crisis is a modern example of groupthink. This essay will examine that claim.

My career history, in distressed investments, was predicated upon an independent analysis and sometimes a rejection of the accepted investment community beliefs. My rule is that when everybody accepts a belief or story, it’s time to critically examine the assumptions. Community-held investment views are often correct, but many times they are wrong too. Challenging accepted community views is not a way to win a popularity contest, but it’s important for someone to state the truth and I intend to do that here. I will use my skill in questioning popularly-held assumptions and share my thoughts with you on the COVID crisis.

Diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of a democracy. My opinion on the COVID crisis will differ from the accepted community view — and probably from your own view too. This essay was removed from Facebook — just like the Nazis’ burning of books that differed from proscribed ways of thinking. I hope that you will read this essay carefully and with an open mind.

https://spectator.us/book-and-art/amazon-book-bullying-just-latest-act-woke-intolerance/

The house of the Lord, we are told, has many mansions. So does the house of wokeness. If you are Coca-Cola, you address flagging sales by embarking on an ad campaign (and internal training regimen for employees) urging those drinking its sugar water to ‘try to be less white’, i.e.,  ‘less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant and more humble’.

If you are Disney, you scour your cartoons for images, situations, or language that worried white bureaucrats imagine might cause offense to anyone on this week’s list of designated victim groups.

If you are Dr Seuss Enterprises, you cashier six of your books because they ‘portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong’.

And if you are Amazon, ‘the world’s largest bookstore‘, you slip quietly into the censorship business by suddenly delisting When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, a three-year-old scholarly book by Ryan T. Anderson about the psychological costs of blithely embracing the vogue of transgenderism.

I was proud to publish When Harry Became Sally at Encounter Books back in 2018 and was pleased when, over the course of the next couple of years, it sold some 26,000 copies in various formats.

Now, thanks to Amazon’s decision to cashier the book, it is well on its way to selling another 26,000. (Although the book has vanished without trace from Amazon and its subsidiaries, you can still get it at Barnes & Noble, various independent bookshops, and direct from Encounter.)

So should I be pleased that Amazon, in its latest act of woke intolerance, is doing so much to spread the news about this important book?

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/03/12/charles-hurt-welcome-to-the-white-privilege-presidency/

Washington really is the last nakedly racist place in America. And the very face of this city’s institutional racism is President Biden himself.

Welcome to the White Privilege Presidency.

Mr. Biden is living proof that no matter how dumb you are or how wrong you have always been or how many things you have screwed up, if you are just White enough and willing to wait around long enough accomplishing nothing, the kingship will eventually be yours.

This is a guy who had been rejected by voters — often in his own party — in his endless quest for the presidency many times during his five decades running his mouth in Washington. It was only when a gifted political outsider needed an old White guy for a running mate that Mr. Biden’s ticket to the White House finally got punched.

Literally, Mr. Biden’s only contribution was to be White. And old. And a barnacled deadweight from Washington.

This is why it is so astonishing — though not entirely surprising — to watch Mr. Biden so monumentally screw up everything he touches now that he is supposedly in charge. Nowhere is his reckless incompetence more obvious than on the border with Mexico.