RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-meet-your-frenemies-in-europe-11609103726?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Biden administration is committed to restoring normal service in U.S. relations with Europe, but the truth is there is no “normal” left. The European Commission talks of a “new trans-Atlantic agenda for global change,” but the European Union is also rushing to complete a trade deal with China. The incoming administration finds itself at odds with the EU over trade and investment. The Biden crowd should ponder one of President Obama’s favorite lines, “The world is what it is,” and respond with as much realism and as little idealism as possible.

Trans-Atlantic relations may improve in tone, but their content has changed and was changing long before Donald Trump entered the White House. The Cold War ended three decades ago. The fruits of that American-led victory include a liberal, democratic and peaceful Europe. The worm in the apple is that the Europeans can act independently, whether as individual nations or in concert through the EU. The more independent they are, the less they want advice from Americans.

The post-Cold War divergence of American and European interests is usually attributed to the George W. Bush administration’s response to 9/11: the bungled interventions that set off a human wave of migrants and terrorism in Europe; the hostile behavior of the Department of Homeland Security, which remains a powerful disincentive to visiting the U.S. All true, but deeper processes were already at work.

The full quotation, from V.S. Naipaul, is: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” In 1945, most of Europe was nothing but rubble. By 1990 Western Europe had remade itself under American supervision and protection. The EU has since expanded to 27 states and sought to secure a place as an independent node in a multipolar world.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/531632-trump-signs-relief-bill-despite-criticism

President Trump on Sunday signed the government funding and coronavirus relief package, the White House said, averting a government shutdown and delivering economic aid as the pandemic worsens.

Trump signed off on the $2.3 trillion package from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., days after he expressed displeasure with the spending outlined in the omnibus and complained that the coronavirus relief measure should include direct payments of $2,000 per person, up from $600.

But the delay came after Trump single-handedly brought the government to the brink of a shutdown and unemployment benefits expired for millions of Americans Saturday as the bill went unsigned.

Trump has visited his golf club in Florida each day since arriving in the state on Wednesday and has made no public appearances. He did so again on Sunday both before and after signing the legislation.

“I will sign the Omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed,” Trump said in a statement upon signing the legislation. “I will send back to Congress a redlined version, item by item, accompanied by the formal rescission request to Congress insisting that those funds be removed from the bill.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-12-26-testing-the-systemic-racism

How do you establish that a hypothesis is true? According to numerous explainers of the scientific method, starting with philosopher Karl Popper, the best you can do is to try to prove the hypothesis false, and fail. By this method — the scientific method — you can never definitively establish “truth” of a hypothesis, but over time you can get close.

Of course, we now live in the era of official narratives permanently immunized from attempts at falsification, nevertheless incorrectly claiming the mantle of “science.” The big three for this crazy year of 2020 are (1) the proposition that forced “lockdowns” and mask-wearing mandates slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus, (2) the proposition that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous increase in global surface temperatures, and (3) the proposition that income and wealth inequality are the result of “systemic racism” in our society. Proponents flood us with information consistent with these narratives, as if such information, if only provided in sufficient quantity, could prove their truth. But if we are really interested in getting as close as possible to the truth, shouldn’t we instead be looking for information inconsistent with the narratives?

Here is the exposition of the scientific method from physicist Richard Feynman from his classic series of recorded lectures:

[W]e compute the consequences of the [hypothesis], to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.  If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.  In that simple statement is the key to science. . . .

For today, let’s consider applying this logical method to testing one of this year’s big three narratives, namely the narrative that “systemic racism” is the principal explanation for disparities of income and wealth in our society. Following Feynman’s exposition, our first step would be to come up with some of the necessary consequences of this hypothesis, so that they can be tested.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2016/02/08/black-on-black-indifference/

Name a black American politician, academician or celebrity who has publicly condemned the atrocities of Boko Haram, Al Shabab or Al Qaeda Affiliates.  When did you see a protest march  by Black Lives Matter in solidarity with their murdered Nigerian sisters and brothers?  Has there been any black voice from any black group concerning the 219 schoolgirls who are still missing from the original 276 black girls kidnapped in Nigeria in  2014?  Has Oprah organized a campaign to raise awareness of this ongoing crime among all school-children here and in So. Africa where she has created her own school?  Have there been any demonstrations on American campuses concerning the targeting by Boko Haram of black Nigerian students – killing boys and kidnapping, raping and impregnating girls?  Which academic groups have organized to pressure our government or the UN to take action to stop the slaughter of thousands of Nigerian civilians, their villages burned by the vicious Muslim group whose name translates as “Western Education Forbidden.”  Point to a lead op-ed in the NYTimes written by Cornel West, Alice Walker, Al Sharpton or Spike Lee in the last year that has drawn world attention to the horrific slaughter led by Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Al Qaeda Affiliates or Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa.

To the east of Nigeria is Sudan and the newly formed South Sudan which gained its independence from the militantly Islamic north in 2011.  The South, comprised of Christian and other native religions has suffered starvation of thousands of its people along with rape, forced cannibalism and the massacres of thousands. Since 1955, more than two million people have died, tens of thousands have been kidnapped and enslaved and five million have been displaced in what was the longest running civil war among all nations.  Has the UN established an agency similar to UNRWA, the only relief organization dedicated solely to the needs of Palestinian refugees, kept in that status for more than three generations to sustain anti-Israel political hatred.  Have Europeans and Americans donated billions of dollars to help Christian Sudanese as they are threatened and menaced by Arabization and Islamization?  Has any Muslim organization offered food, medical care, social service welfare to the thousands of blacks victimized by Islamic violence in South Sudan?  The  Islamist persecution of blacks has spread all over Africa to countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Somalia and Tanzania –  has the Pope issued a plea for world leaders to intercede in this human tragedy?

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/26/constants-liberty-ancient-and-modern/

Benjamin Constant’s writing is as pertinent to our concerns today as it was in the immediate post-Napoleonic era.

As this most peculiar year wends its petulant and morose way to the end, I find myself returning to some signal apostles of liberty. The unrelenting static of our time can make it difficult to appreciate what those sages of yore had to say. But as we continue to quiver obediently in place, bemasked, shunning our fellows almost as assiduously as we shun common sense, I think back to some anatomists of the totalitarian impulse—George Orwell, for example, who would have been surprised to discover that his searing portrayals of tyranny have been adopted as how-to manuals by the new lobotomized Left whose maliciousness is exceeded only by its ignorance. 

I think, too, of the Swiss-born French writer Benjamin Constant, whose famous essay “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns” (1819) is as pertinent to our concerns today as it was in the immediate post-Napoleonic era in which Constant wrote.

I first encountered Constant’s work years ago at a conference about the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, another apostle of freedom who has much to teach a culture besotted by self-appointed “experts” and insatiable purveyors of “policy.” (I recommend in particular Oakeshott’s brilliant essay “Rationalism in Politics.”)

One of the first things that struck me about Constant’s essay was its optimism (“naïveté” would not be the right word for so nuanced a thinker). With the carnage of the Napoleonic wars still fresh in Europe’s memory, Constant nonetheless assured his readers that he discerned a “uniform tendency towards peace.” The imperatives of war, he thought, must at last give way to the subtler though ultimately more efficacious imperatives of commerce. “[A]n age must come,” he argued, “in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.”

Tell that to the Kaiser, to Hitler and Stalin, to Mao, Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Minh, not to mention all the ayatollahs, imams, and African butchers who succeeded them!

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24930/prove-that-you-love-me

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Christmas season has traditionally been a time for hopefulness. Families gather with hopes of joyful reunion. Christian families celebrate the birth of Christ with food, wine, laughter, gift giving, and religious services. But you don’t have to be a Christian to enjoy Christmas. The Christmas season delights us all with its music, twinkling lights, messages of peace on earth, and the holiday spirit of giving. Businesses reward their employees with company parties and bonuses. Retail shops and government offices close in observance of the holiday. Not this year.

The coronavirus has changed everything. Christmas in the time of coronavirus portends the future. The final outcome of the 2020 presidential election will determine if we celebrate Christmas past, or if Christmas present will be our Christmas future. Let me explain.

The fearmongering campaign of political medicine that deliberately terrified the American public into submission has served its purpose. Fear of COVID19 was used as the rationalization for Democrat swing states to unconstitutionally mail out millions of unsolicited ballots. We all know by now that only legislators have the constitutional authority to change election laws – not governors, not mayors, not city councilmen, and not secretaries of state.

Unverified mail-in ballots were the insurance policy used in conjunction with the massive election fraud executed by Dominion machines and Smartmatic software. Patrick Byrne, entrepreneur and tech billionaire assembled a cyber intelligence team to analyze the U.S. voting system. In a stunning December 16, 2020, Epoch Times article Byrne explains that election fraud is the secret “assassin’s mace” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“Byrne says that stealing the national election doesn’t require cheating across the board. ‘There are six counties that you need to steal. If you steal these six counties around the country, that flips the six states they’re in, which flips the electoral college votes that come with them, which flips the nation,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to take six places and cheat like crazy there.'”

The country has been convulsed by the Democrat attempt to steal the 2020 election. But there’s more.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/nashville_a_bomb_blast_unlike_any_other_on_american_soil.html

The facts about the Christmas morning bomb in Nashville are not complicated. What is complicated is understanding who set off the bomb and why. That’s because this bombing does not match any other bombs that have exploded in the Western world.

As I said, the facts about the bomb are not complicated:

Early Christmas morning, someone parked an RV in front of the AT&T building near Second Avenue and Commerce Street in downtown Nashville.

Shortly before it exploded, the RV began playing a recording telling people to leave the area:

Note the precision of that announcement: If you can hear this recording, you are in the blast range. The person who prepared that bomb knew precisely how far the blast would carry – and how far the announcement would carry.

Nashville police, upon hearing that announcement, went door to door telling people to evacuate:

Doing so was extremely brave because there was no reason to believe that the announcement was honest. That bomb could have gone off at any minute.

At least three people ended up in the hospital. The police also announced that they’d found human remains, although they have not stated whether they were from a victim or the bomber.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woke-see-no-eviland-nothing-but-evil-11608925768?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

It is impossible to read Mark Twain in the 21st century without being aware, each time one encounters it, of the single most unspeakable word in the English language today; a word that in Twain’s time was as common as mud and therefore completely unremarkable on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The issue concerning the appropriateness of designating “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” in their original and unexpurgated state as assigned reading in English classes in the public schools has troubled teachers and administrators since at least the 1990s.

I am not concerned here with the question of whether the bowdlerization of these texts is defensible, a moral imperative, or an offense against literature—New South published a sanitized edition of the two books in 2011—but rather with the paradoxical character of postmodern political correctness. That character was exposed, also in 2011, when the Virginia Department of Education adopted a textbook, “Our Virginia: Past and Present” by Joy Masoff, which contained the claim that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two under the command of Stonewall Jackson.” That prompted anger and indignation on the left and an advisory to teachers from the department to ignore the passage.

Yet it is a historically confirmed fact that many Southern blacks, freemen as well as slaves, fought on the side of the Confederacy, as attested to by the historian William Freehling and documented by Harvard’s Prof. John Stauffer in an essay for TheRoot.com. Even so, many Civil War historians continue to deny it for ideological reasons.

The dispute over the existence of black Confederate soldiers is a clear instance of how radical progressives, in their war on America, have been pursuing two contradictory aims at once. First, they have worked tirelessly to expose what they view as the fundamentally and indelibly racist character of America from its inception. Thus the central purpose of the “1619 Project,” conceived by Nikole Hannah-Jones and subsequently developed by the New York Times magazine: to rewrite, edit and otherwise “correct” the history of the American Republic. Second, they have sought to sanitize America’s cultural achievements and thereby satisfy the moral demands of the present time, all for the good of future generations.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/obamas_spending_christmas_in_hawaii_and_generate_the_embest_picture_everem_of_the_former_first_couple.html

It’s no surprise anymore when our ruling class travels for Christmas or any other reason that strikes their fancy, while the rest of us are told to give up family reunions, and even church services. So seeing Barack and Michelle Obama in Hawaii, able to jet around wherever their fancy takes them, enjoying their scores of millions of dollars earned from Netflix, books and other post-presidential activities is no surprise. Obviously, Barack has not reached the point he mentioned in 2010, when he said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

I am actually grateful they took the opportunity to go kayaking and generate the picture in the tweet below, which is to my eyes the best, most revealing view of the couple ever taken.