RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/27/chicago-mayor-orders-removal-of-christopher-columbus-statues-in-the-city/

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D-Ill.) has ordered the removal of several statues of iconic explorer Christopher Columbus, after violent protests at the monuments have seen police attacked by Antifa and Black Lives Matter terrorists, as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

Following the outbreaks of violence, Lightfoot ordered city workers to remove the Columbus statues located in Grant Park and Arrigo Park, with both memorials coming down early Friday morning, in the dead of night.

Lightfoot attempted to justify the city-sanctioned iconoclasm with a statement, claiming that the move was made “in response to demonstrations that became unsafe for both protesters and police…this step is an effort to protect public safety and to preserve a safe space for an inclusive and democratic public dialogue about our city’s symbols.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/sanders-campaign-co-chair-compares-endorsing-biden-to-eating-a-bowl-of-sht/

Endorsing Joe Biden for president would be like eating a “bowl of s**t,” Bernie Sanders campaign co-chairwoman Nina Turner commented in an article that appeared in the Atlantic on Monday.

The Biden campaign has attempted to reach out to Sanders supporters since the former vice president took a commanding lead in the Democratic primaries. While many Sanders supporters have backed Biden, some progressives have made clear their disappointment at having to vote for the more centrist candidate.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/founding-era-antislavery-and-the-overheated-freakout-over-tom-cottons-history-of-slavery/

The Founders did have a plan to abolish slavery; it just didn’t work out the way they expected.

As John McCormack notes, Tom Cotton may have been awkward in his phrasing, but there is nothing shocking in saying of slavery, “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.” Jonathan Chait writes:

Cotton seems not to be saying that slavery was necessary in order to get slave owners to accept the union, but that it was necessary to the “development of our country.” Here, oddly enough, he is recapitulating one of the most important errors in the 1619 Project itself.

There are two ways to read “necessary”: that slavery was necessary to build the country, or that tolerating the pre-existing institution was necessary because nationwide abolition was politically and perhaps economically and socially infeasible in 1776 or 1787. I agree with Chait that the 1619 Project is off-base in claiming the former; I do not read Cotton as saying that, and the people who are jumping on him over this are, it appears, just people who already hate Tom Cotton.

The formulation that slavery was tolerated as a necessary evil at the time of the Founding, and that the Founders expected (overoptimistically) that it was on an inevitable path to extinction, is a fairly standard one, and mostly an accurate way of putting the more complicated story of Founding-era slavery and anti-slavery into a nutshell. It most accurately captures the views of the Virginia Founders (such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and George Mason), who saw slavery as wrong — unlike John C. Calhoun and his followers in a later generation, who framed it as a positive good — but were unwilling or unable to face the effort to end it. It also accurately captures the view of anti-slavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention, who concluded that it was not worth breaking up the new nation in a vain effort to force the South to abandon slavery immediately.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/portland-protesters-injure-six-federal-agents-with-fireworks-lasers/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

At least six federal agents were injured during demonstrations in Portland Friday night when protesters launched fireworks at them and shone lasers at their eyes.

Protests have been nearly constant in Oregon’s largest city since the police custody death of George Floyd in May. Local officials have called for federal law enforcement agents deployed by the Trump administration to leave as nightly violence continues to rock the city. Some protests have been peaceful, but demonstrators who remain on the streets after dark have engaged in property destruction, throwing rocks at police, marking buildings with graffiti, and setting fires.

One agent had his hearing deadened and suffered bloody lacerations and burns on both his forearms after protesters shot a firework over the fence, the Associated Press reported. Other agents helped him to strip down to his boxers and T-shirt so his injuries could be photographed for evidence. The injured agent said he was more worried about his hearing than the injuries on his arms.

Another agent was hit in the head by a commercial-grade firework and suffered a concussion, and several agents left the demonstrations with vision issues resulting from lasers that the protesters pointed at their faces. Of the six agents injured, at least one was hospitalized.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/07/mccloekey-saga.html

The McClosky story deserves a recapitulation.

On June 28th, When protesters marched along his private street in St. Louis on Sunday, Mark McCloskey and his wife emerged barefoot from their mansion to wave and point loaded weapons at the crowd. Video of the fiery scene instantly went viral, even being retweeted — and then deleted — by President Trump.

But in an interview with CNN’s Chris Como on Tuesday night, McCloskey said he and his wife, Patricia, were in fact the ones being threatened.

 In July the police seized the rifile held by  Mark McCloskey.

Mark and his wife, Patricia, were not charged. Joel Schwartz, the couple’s lawyer, said a search warrant was served Friday evening and that the gun Mark McCloskey was holding in the video was seized. Schwartz told The Associated Press that arrangements have been made to turn over to authorities on Saturday the gun that Patricia McCloskey had been holding, adding that her gun was inoperable at the time of the protest and still is.

The couple have  been charged, and Schwartz said charges against them would be “absolutely, positively unmerited.”

Patricia McCloskey’s pistol was removed as well, but the DA decided to render it operable and capable of shooting by having forensics diddle with the pins. This was on order by Kim Gardner, the prosecuter.

The pro-Second Amendment McCloskey couple was seemingly framed for firearms abuses to push the Democrats’ anti-gun agenda, according to reports.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/07/27/heres-exactly-how-andrew-cuomo-covered-up-his-deadly-nursing-home-policy-n715550

New York, particularly downstate New York, isn’t just the hot-spot of the coronavirus pandemic of the United States. Nowhere else in the world did as poorly, thanks to Governor Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. The Wall Street Journal conducted an extensive investigation into the failures of New York’s coronavirus response that is worth reading, but the deadly nursing home policy, and the cover-up that followed, is perhaps the most notable failure, contributing greatly to the state’s poor performance.

On March 25, Cuomo ordered nursing homes to accept patients regardless of their coronavirus status. Even then it was well-known that the elderly were more vulnerable to the virus. Despite the folly of this policy, Cuomo defended it. Nursing homes “don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that,” Cuomo said in April. He finally rescinded the order on May 11, but the damage had been done. Cuomo enabled a massive outbreak in New York nursing homes and long-term care facilities (NH/LTC) and has been trying to cover up his mistakes ever since with the help of the New York Department of Health.

Cuomo undercounted nursing home deaths 

The first step in the cover-up was to not count the deaths of nursing home residents who died in hospitals in their tallies of nursing home resident deaths. New York was the only state to do this, and, of course, it resulted in a massive undercounting of nursing home deaths. 

The New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) admitted a couple of months ago that they quietly changed their reporting policy around late April/early May so that nursing home and long-term care patients who died from COVID-19 in a hospital were not included as nursing home COVID-19 fatalities. 

“Deaths of nursing home and adult care facility residents that occurred at hospitals is accounted for in the overall fatality data on our COVID-19 tracker,” explained NYSDOH spokeswoman Jill Montag.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/a-dubious-order-against-the-seattle-ban-on-police-use-of-non-lethal-force/

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against an asinine Seattle law. Unfortunately, the legal theory underlying the order is weak.

Rioting continues to rage in Seattle, with property, construction sites, and cars being torched by anti-American radicals posing as anti-racism, social justice “protesters.” Beginning with Saturday’s organized mayhem, there were dozens of arrests and at least 59 police officers injured attempting to quell the violence.

Could it have been worse? Could it get worse? These are questions raised by a temporary restraining order issued Friday night by a federal district court, which suspended a Seattle ordinance that bars police from using tear gas, blast balls (essentially, rubber-coated grenades), and similar non-lethal anti-riot measures (e.g., pepper spray).

It is often observed that the best way to get a foolish law repealed is to apply it faithfully — or, if you prefer, the old H. L. Mencken snark that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

In that spirit, as violence and chaos took hold in the Pacific Northwest last month, Seattle’s ultra-progressive City Council unanimously enacted this law barring the textbook non-lethal police response. It is an inane policy because, stripped of standard non-lethal tactics, police are left with only lethal tactics, such as firearms, and such non-lethal weapons as tasers and batons, which necessarily bring them into close contact with violent subversives. That is, instead of numerous injuries sustained by police and rioters, we could be talking today about numerous deaths.

Realizing that, at the end of an emergency court hearing on Friday night, Judge James Robart issued a temporary restraining order against enforcement of the ban, to expire in two weeks. He did so at the Justice Department’s urging. Judge Robart’s order seems to be long on hope of preventing fatalities and of getting the interested parties to reconsider their position — particularly the lawmakers, there being no hope for the rioters.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/27/why-john-durham-should-release-his-spygate-findings-before-november/

The fact that John Durham’s findings could play a role in how some Americans think about a particular person or party should not dissuade Durham from releasing them before the election.

There is growing speculation that U.S. Attorney John Durham, the lead prosecutor looking into the origins of the Russia probe and the spying on the Trump campaign, is close to wrapping up his investigation. Once he does, it is unclear whether he will release a report of his findings or issue indictments against one or more individuals if the evidence so warrants.

As reported by the Washington Examiner, several sources have indicated that “Durham may end up waiting until after November to reveal what he has found or to hand down indictments” because Durham does not want his investigation or any decisions to be viewed as “political.” This would be a mistake. There is no question that he should release his findings and issue any necessary indictments before the November elections.

Historically, the Department of Justice has refrained from taking any action for partisan purposes. As reported in Just Security:

Department of Justice employees are entrusted with the authority to enforce the laws of the United States and with the responsibility to do so in a neutral and impartial manner. This is particularly important in an election year.

The Memorandum further states (emphasis added):

As Department employees … we must be particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality and nonpartisanship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=FtO3sT_0o84&feature=emb_logo

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/26/where-are-the-new-heroes-of-the-revolution/

Cultural revolutions are suicidal, nihilistic, and incoherent. Those who survive such cannibalism do so by arbitrarily exempting their leaders from their own rules of mandated purity and no statute of limitations.

Since late May, the United States has been convulsed by a cultural revolution unlike any seen in its recent history. Statues have been toppled, often without any logic or consistent grievance. Institutions have been renamed, again without coherent consistency.

Christian iconography has been a common target. Television shows have been taken off the air; particular corporations boycotted; professional sports recalibrated into social activist spectacles. 

If there is any common denominator to this madness, it is apparently that the past was toxic, and erasing it in the present will make for a more just and united future.

For example, because of the glorification of the imperialist and spoiler of native paradise Christopher Columbus, his statue in Chicago must be removed nocturnally by the order of the mayor—in order to restore peace of mind, social justice, and calm. That act of iconoclasm will rectify things in the present, and thus there will not be another 500 annual homicides in Chicago.

But once names are replaced and commemoration destroyed, what exactly follows the erased?

Anarchy Is the Replacement

Mao and Stalin had their pictures put up everywhere—while making the prior czars and the warlords amateurs in the arithmetic of genocide. The revolutionary Castro Brothers and Muammar Gaddafi turned the streets of Havana and Tripoli into Disney-like ads for their persons. So did Saddam Hussein—as thousands were rounded up and murdered.

Will the founders of Black Lives Matter demand such statues for themselves?

In truth, the iconoclasts and revolutionaries are guided by an informal set of chaotic rules that ensures their movement must remain anarchical and nihilist. They cannot really replace what they have destroyed—at least according to their own ad hoc rules of political correctness. And after over two months of constant protests, we know what those protocols are. 

One, we do not judge famous people by weighing their bad and good deeds. One sin—with or without confession—condemns you to politically incorrect Hell. One bad characteristic—especially supposed racism—cancels whatever good one otherwise accomplished.