RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

On August 4, 1944, the Grüne Polizi, along with the Gestapo, raided the “secret annex” of an abandoned office building complex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family had been hiding for over two years. Less than three weeks earlier, on July 15, 1944, Anne wrote in her diary: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.” Ultimately, peace did come. The Nazis were defeated, and Europe has been free of wars for seventy-five years – the longest period in its history – thanks to the people of the United States. But peace came too late for Anne Frank. Less than a year later, she was dead at age fifteen, probably of Typhus, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Nazi-held Germany.

One marvels at Anne Frank’s outlook, when bleakness enshrouded her environment and hoped dimmed for millions caught in the Nazi’s web and in a world gone dark. As we reflect today, in far better circumstances than were hers, is there not a lesson for us, in our pandemic, fear–filled world?

Optimism is a state of mind. Perhaps a dream over reality, or naïveté over cynicism? In retrospect, Anne Frank’s optimism appears innocent or guileless. Yet, she lives on through her Diary of a Young Girl, because in spite of everything she experienced she had the vision to see that sunlight would return and the world would move on. In her optimism, she was wise, for the two – optimism and wisdom – are linked. Optimists draw from the ancient classics, the birth of Christianity, the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the Industrial Revolution and the recent victory of democracy over socialism. All have helped man’s condition to improve. Individual freedom, democracy and free-market capitalism have lifted multitudes from poverty and early death. Optimism, it should be remembered, does not mean nostalgia for an earlier time, but the expectation of enhanced prospects for a better future.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-12-31-happy-new-year-reality-den

On the last post a few days ago, several commenters raised the subject of the popular and long-running TV series Law & Order, particularly as to the race of the perpetrators of the crimes. The show purports to be based on actual incidents, and tries to give an impression of basis in reality. On the episodes of that show that I have watched — admittedly not a large sample — the perpetrator of the violent crime has seemed almost always to turn out to be white and, for that matter, rich. But are the show’s producers intentionally skewing the reality of the race of perpetrators of violent crimes? And if so, by a little, or by a lot?

I decided to look around to see if I could find some relevant statistics. It turns out that several researchers (if you want to call them that) have gone through collections of these shows to compare races of crime perpetrators to actual crime data. As suspected, the difference is staggering.

Here is a July 2015 piece with the title “Manufacturing white criminals: Depictions of criminality and violence on Law & Order,” from a journal called Cogent Social Sciences. The authors reviewed several seasons of L&O, and compared the races of the perpetrators of the crimes in the episodes in those seasons with actual New York City police data for the same years. Stripping out a lot of social science mumbo jumbo, here are the results for two of the years:

1992. In New York City, there were 51,490 arrests for violent felonies, of which 5,567 (10.8%) were white, 27,976 (54.3%) black, 16,096 (31.3%) Hispanic, and 1,851 (3.6%) Asian/other. On L&O season 3, covering the same year, the perps were 15 (65%) white, 2 (9%) black, and 6 (26%) Hispanic.

1995. In real NYC data, there were 49,549 violent felony arrests, of which 5,332 (10.8%) were white, 27,405 (55.3%) black, 15,169 (30.6%) Hispanic, and 1,643 (3.4%) Asian/other. On L&O season 6, the percentages were 26 (79%) white, 3 (9%) black, and 4 (12%) Hispanic.

Other years showed virtually identical patterns. To summarize, on L&O whites are over-represented (compared to real-world data) among perpetrators of violent crime by a factor of around 6 to 8, while blacks are under-represented by also a factor of around 6 to 8. This is not some small random mismatch, but rather a very intentional effort to paint a wildly distorted view of reality.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/30/a-year-of-lies/

WHO agrees with whom it serves: the Chinese Communist Party. About this rule, it is impossible to deny—it is unreasonable to doubt—that the World Health Organization serves the world’s worst rulers. About this fact, we have proof. We have a year-old message from Taiwan about the virus now known as COVID-19. We have an inquiry that now reads like a record of inquest. We have a record that now reads like a requiem, where votaries live in darkness and votives flicker and die before a veil of ignorance. 

Before us lies the history of 2020, of a missive of truth versus a big red book of lies. Before us lies the history of lives lost during a year-long march by Beijing to conquer Western culture without firing a shot; without developing a shot to save the life of a single Westerner, either. Before us lies more of the same unless we remove our masks, if only for a moment, so the world may hear us.

Whether what we say lasts on paper is less important than our belief in certain everlasting truths, that among these are the rightness of a people with an everlasting name and the glory of the righteous among the nations; that Jews and Christians refuse to rend their garments in mourning or mourn what they have no right to render unto anyone; that the Constitution exists to protect more than contracts; that the Declaration of Independence is a defense of existence itself; that our rights belong to a covenant with our Creator; that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is greater than the god that failed in Russia—and the god that will fail in China.

These rights transcend the will of tyrants and the tyranny of nonexistent majorities born on Election Day.

These rights endure because they are true, despite the forces of monopoly or the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Because these rights are true, they are the reason the world remembers an unknown rebel—Tank Man—rather than any member of a tank crew in Tiananmen Square. 

Tank Man stands above the legends of the battlefield. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/29/how-the-1619-project-aims-to-change-middle-america/

The 1619 Project, along with historical sites such as James Madison’s Montpelier, is part of a deliberate effort to undermine civic education by targeting middle America. For middle America is the final and most formidable obstacle for woke cultural institutions.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project supplants 1776 as the date of America’s founding in favor of 1619, the year slaves were first brought to America. It does this because America’s founding principles are the source of our unity. The ideas of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, along with our shared history, language, land, and institutions, forged us into one people.

If Americans are taught to reject our founding principles, that leaves room for us to be defined and shaped by new ideas and theories. Coincidentally, the 1619 Project proposes an alternative founding principle: identity politics. America is not one people but a plurality of oppressed and oppressor groups. She was born out of a conflict between free and enslaved peoples and is defined to this day by struggles between men and women, straight and gay, black and white, etc.

To construct this narrative, the writers of the 1619 Project had to ignore certain historical facts. Rather than evaluate our history and founding documents objectively, they first crafted a theory and then looked for evidence to fit that narrative.

This strategy and narrative has already successfully captured higher education. Many universities welcome critical race theory but reject freedom of speech. Still, only about 36 percent of Americans over the age of 25 have a college degree. Identitarians understood that they needed to reach more Americans.