RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/08/08/where-is-your-god-now-portland-cops-do-nothing-as-antifa-attacks-prayer-event-led-by-persecuted-christian-pastor-n1467987

If you wondered what it looked like when Nazi brown shirts went after the churches in Germany, wonder no more: It probably looked like Portland on Saturday, when black bloc-outfitted antifa thugs burst into a waterfront prayer event featuring persecuted Canadian Pastor Artur Pawlowski. The antifa members sprayed those gathered, including toddlers, with chemicals and lobbed IEDs.

“Where is your God, now?” taunted one of the attackers.

Antifa has attacked at least one church before. Antifa members organized their violent attack via Twitter and other social media platforms. They later gloated on Twitter that they had stolen the Christian group’s food and water.

Portland police watched as antifa bear-sprayed parents and their kids, lobbed “flash bombs” into the sparse crowd, and reportedly threw the group’s sound equipment into the Willamette River. This being Portland, police didn’t arrest antifa members for polluting the river, much less attacking people.

Portland’s police bureau has been defunded by at least $15 million and there’s been a mass exodus of officers retiring or going to places where the rule of law is observed.

As a result of antifa and BLM attacks on (the defunded) police, Portland is now awash in violent crime and on course to break records for shootings.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“There’s a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing.”

                                                                                                                                Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

                                                                                                                                Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852

It is not that I am without concerns, for everything that happens today is a ‘crisis.’ We live on a planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years. Over that time, it has been warm enough in Connecticut, where I live, to host dinosaurs and cold enough to place it under thirty feet of ice. By the time of the last ice age, man had been around for tens of thousands of years. He adapted. Yet today’s changing climate is said to present an existential challenge for the planet. “Woke” governments and large businesses demand diversity, equity and inclusion, but what they really mean are uniformity, unjustness and exclusion. Universities, once places for inquiring minds, have become venues for intellectual conformity. In sports, men, as transgender women, compete against biological women. Merit has fallen victim to social equity. What gives? The United States was founded on principles of personal liberty and the rule of law, derived from the Enlightenment. Should we let what has taken 250 years to create devolve into darkness?

We should not. We need to lighten up. The political atmosphere has become nasty. In an essay (“Old Glory, new anger”) in the August issue of The Spectator, Peter Wood wrote: “There is the wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters.” As for the Right, he noted: “Their complaint lies far deeper as they see the purposeful destruction of American values by an elite that bullies and derides them.”  Friends and family members are no longer able to air political differences without one being called a racist and the other a toady. If we are to survive as a free, decent and independent people, composed of myriad races, religions and nationalities, political leaders, the media and universities must promote tolerance and mutual respect. To achieve this, they must encourage traditional American values, like family formations and public schools that teach. They must reaffirm the values of common sense, responsibility, hard work, merit and reintroduce civility and humor.

The political spectrum is linear, with autocracy at one end and anarchy at the other. Understanding that, we should know where on that line our own political philosophies lie. Fundamentally, our differences are simple. Progressives believe equitable progress is best achieved with more government involvement. Conservatives believe in what Margaret Thatcher said in Gdansk in 1988: “Economic freedom and personal freedom go hand in hand.” The first depends on the ability of a few hundred senior bureaucrats. The second relies on millions of people making millions of decisions. There are gradations of belief. A few extremists are clustered at either end, believing in either the benevolence of autocracy or the benignity of anarchy. Mainstream media would have us bunched (along with them) at extremes – the “woke” on one end and “deplorables” at the other. Most of us, however, lie within a few degrees of the center. But anger divides us, and communication is difficult.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=21c1dc7597

There has been a lot of talk recently about “systemic racism” in the United States. At first, I was skeptical of the term, particularly because those who throw the term around rarely name an example of specific conduct by anyone that intentionally disadvantages blacks. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that there actually are quite a number of instances of major societal institutions engaging in systemic conduct that is clearly known to differentially disadvantage blacks. In every case I can think of, the conduct that systemically disadvantages blacks is a sacred cow of the left promoted for the benefit of some other progressive interest group.

For today, I’ll discuss two of the most clear-cut examples. One has been going on for a long time, while the other is new. Because both involve sacred cows of the political left, the harmful systemic effect on blacks just gets ignored.

Opposition to School Choice

Over the course of the last year or so, the two big national teachers unions (National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers) have been mostly in the news for their advocacy to keep schools closed and kids at home. That’s bad enough, but hopefully will end soon. But then the teachers unions will revert to their previous and perennial priority number one, which is the opposition to school choice — otherwise known as keeping minority kids trapped in failing urban public schools.

Here in New York, charter schools saw major expansion under the strong advocacy of Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013). But current Mayor de Blasio, who was backed by the teachers union, has done everything in his power to stall and halt the expansion of the charters, and thereby keep as many kids as possible trapped in the failing unionized schools. Moreover, the state legislature, also at the behest of the union, has imposed a cap on the number of charters. That cap has been reached in New York City, meaning that no more charters can open; and the legislature has failed to raise the cap. A charter school advocacy group called the New York City Charter School Center lists 6 new charters ready to open but unable to do so due to the cap. Meanwhile, applications by students to attend the charters exceed available slots by factors of 2:1 in Manhattan and Brooklyn, 3:1 in the Bronx, and 4:1 in Queens.

Data on school performance overwhelming show that the charters wildly outpace the unionized public alternatives. In a post back in 2017 I quoted this statistic from 2016 comparing the regular public schools to Success Academies, one of the top charters:

Test scores released by the state Friday show 94% of Success Academy students passed the 2016 math exam and 82% passed the reading exam. . . . By comparison, 38% of students in traditional public schools met state reading standards this year, up from 30.4% in 2015. And 36.4% of city kids passed math tests in 2016, up from 35.2% in 2015.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/07/when-in-doubt-blame-a-republican-for-covid-deaths/

Throughout the COVID crisis, we’ve witnessed an amazing display of leftist logic. No matter the circumstances, Republicans were always at fault.

When the coronavirus first swept the nation in early 2020, the deaths were concentrated almost entirely in the country’s liberal enclaves: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania.

And we know a big reason: Democratic governors in those states panicked and ordered nursing homes to take sick elderly out of hospitals, even if they were positive for COVID. The result was that nursing homes turned into death camps.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was even caught red-handed lying about the number of nursing home deaths to cover up this tragedy.

Yet at the time, blame for every COVID death in the country was pinned on the supposed ineptitude of President Donald Trump (rather than communist China, where the blame ultimately rests).

That was almost exactly how candidate Joe Biden framed it, as a matter of fact. “If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive,” Biden said during the presidential campaign, as the death toll reached 200,000. “All the people. I’m not making this up. Just look at the data.”

Trump did, to be sure, send lots of mixed messages about COVID. But so did Democrats.  Biden himself attacked Trump’s supposed xenophobia after he quickly slapped a travel ban from China – before we knew of any cases in the U.S. Top Democrats, along with the sainted Anthony Fauci, were publicly downplaying the disease early on, telling people not to worry, not to bother with masks, and get out and party.

Never mind. Now that Biden’s in charge, he and the rest of the liberal chorus is blaming … Republican governors for the current rise in COVID cases.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/the_predators_among_us.html

In our cities exists a culture of violence, and we ignore it at our peril, for we are all potential victims.

University of Chicago student Max Lewis was commuting to school on the Green Line Elevated Train when a bullet tore into his spine. A good Samaritan nurtured and consoled him until the paramedics came. An active and vibrant twenty-year-old, Lewis could only move his eyes when he awoke in his hospital bed. And with that, he communicated that he wanted the plug pulled. He did not want to live as a vegetable. He was ready to greet death.

Another life in a long list of lives tragically snuffed out by a “stray” bullet on Chicago’s southside. The police have no idea from where the bullet was fired. But was it a stray bullet? Did someone target the Elevated train the way people have targeted airline pilots with lasers, hoping to blind them on their approach and witness a plane crash?

As I read the demographics of victims of Chicago’s gang violence, I wonder, as have others, if there are predators out there hunting people for sport the way game hunters wantonly kill for sport. There are simply too many women and children, too many innocents, on the victims list.

I stumbled upon this notion when, during the George Floyd riots, carloads of young blacks descended on my exurban community and smashed their way into the upscale shopping mall. Armed police stood in place as the vandals looted the stores and unnecessarily damaged showcases and fixtures while helping themselves to whatever they desired.

Having successfully looted the stores as police looked on, the vandals loaded up their vehicles and drove toward the freeway. As one car veered out of the shopping area, someone fired a random shot into a group of shoppers.