RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/all-for-nothing-nihilism-in-cinema
It is common knowledge that, as Washington is now the citadel of the Left, Hollywood has been a fiefdom of the Left for a very long time. The Left picks the projects, the scripts, the actors, and the directors, and then foists its films on a hapless American movie-going public, saying it’s only entertainment and not to be taken seriously, adding, “We don’t mean nothin’ by it.” The Left calls nearly all the shots in Hollywood. Anyone who doesn’t toe the Left’s Party line is left unemployed, unnoticed, shunned, and ostracized, regardless of talent or experience. In short, blacklisted. They may be invited to fill seats on Oscar night, but that is the limit of their visibility.

But how did the Left take over Hollywood? What made it possible? Without rehashing a history of Hollywood’s political struggles, its flirtation with self-censorship (the Hays and Breen Offices), and subsequent abandonment of self-censorship in favor of “ratings” (the MPAA), the Communist infiltration of the studios and various unions, the McCarthy Era, the HUAC hearings, and the Hollywood Ten, the subject here will be what I perceive to be one of the means by which the Left effected its conquest. That method is psycho-epistemological in nature, and it is insidious.

What is epistemology? Novelist/Philosopher Ayn Rand defined it as “a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge.” Psycho-epistemology, she went on to explain, is “is the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.”

Briefly, epistemology can tell us existence exists and why we know it. Psycho-epistemology tells us the method of our awareness of existence. Epistemology can validate that you are reading these words and that they are real. Psycho-epistemology, for example, will prove that reality is not some kind of super piñata to be approached blind-folded with a stick in hopes of thwacking some meaning from it.

In her brilliant essay on the effects of modern education on children, “The Comprachicos,” Rand noted that:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324235104578242121666374116.html?mod=opinion_newsreel President Obama likes to talk about civility in politics, but then he has a particular personal talent for attributing to his political opponents only base motives and beliefs they don’t come close to holding. Consult his Monday press conference for a classic of the genre. Mr. Obama was asked an anodyne question at one […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324734904578240023150080286.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

“The facts speak for themselves. Today in America, 26% of children are raised by a single parent, including 72% in the black community. Among poor families with children, 71% are headed by single parents, mostly single mothers.”

The first lady can help kids by encouraging marriage the way she has by encouraging exercise.

As Barack Obama approaches his second term, there has been much discussion about new goals the president should set for the next four years. But what about the first lady?

Michelle Obama must also be drawing up plans to build on a first term devoted to promoting healthy eating and the greater well-being of American children. Her “Let’s Move” campaign to encourage exercise has probably done some good for young people, but there is an even better message the first lady could promote—one likely to have an even longer-lasting and more significant effect on the lives of young people and on society in general: “Let’s Marry.”

The facts speak for themselves. Today in America, 26% of children are raised by a single parent, including 72% in the black community. Among poor families with children, 71% are headed by single parents, mostly single mothers.

The economics are plainly better for married couples with children—their joint income averages $80,000, while single mothers average $24,000. And getting out of poverty from a single-parent situation isn’t easy. A 2010 Pew report found that “among children who start in the bottom third of the income distribution, only 26% with divorced parents move up to the middle or top third as adults, compared to 50% of children with continuously married parents.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324081704578237722576889786.html?mod=opinion_newsreel “What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home?” —Franz Kafka, “The Trial” Like many […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/01/we_await_our_caesar.html Civilized cultures are mortal; they have a predetermined life span just like an organism. There are numerous examples from antiquity whose skeletal remains are still with us. Each example represents a unique metaphysical enterprise that has expired. We can only imagine what the lives of the peoples were like and wonder at the remnants […]

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/01/14/obamas-latest-political-slander/ During his press conference earlier today, we witnessed President Obama’s persistent habit of engaging in a form of political libel. When the president was asked about a possible government shutdown, Mr. Obama said this: But it seems as if what’s motivating and propelling at this point some of the House Republicans is more than […]

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/swirsky/130114 The kindness of strangers Joan Swirsky, RenewAmerica.com When Sandy hit, my husband Steve and daughter Karen and I spent day after day after day freezing in our ordinarily-cozy home, unable even to leave the premises, as police tape cordoned off every means of egress to protect all the shivering residents of our block from […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324734904578241561480345042.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Colin Powell thinks Chuck Hagel’s use of the term “Jewish lobby” was an innocent mistake, for which he should atone by writing “Israel lobby” 100 times on a blackboard.

“That term slips out from time to time,” the former secretary of state told David Gregory on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” Mr. Powell also thinks that when Mr. Hagel’s critics “go over the edge and say because Chuck said ‘Jewish lobby,’ he is anti-Semitic, that’s disgraceful. We shouldn’t have that kind of language in our dialogue.”

OK, I get it. An errant slip of the tongue isn’t proof of prejudice. We have all said things the offensiveness of which we perhaps didn’t fully appreciate when we opened our mouth.

Like the time when, according to Bob Woodward, Mr. Powell accused Douglas Feith, one of the highest-ranking Jewish officials in the Bush administration and the son of a Holocaust survivor, of running a “Gestapo office” out of the Pentagon. Mr. Powell later apologized personally to Mr. Feith for what he acknowledged was a “despicable characterization.”

Or the time when, according to George Packer in his book “The Assassins’ Gate,” Mr. Powell leveled another ugly charge at Mr. Feith, this time in his final Oval Office meeting with George W. Bush. “The Defense Department had too much power in shaping foreign policy, [Powell] argued, and when Bush asked for an example, Powell offered not Rumsfeld, the secretary who had mastered him bureaucratically, not Wolfowitz, the point man on Iraq, but the department’s number three official, Douglas Feith, whom Powell called a card-carrying member of the Likud Party.”

Anyway, on this business of hypersensitivity to prejudicial remarks, real or perceived, here is Mr. Powell in the same interview talking about what ails the Republican Party:

“There’s also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities. How can I evidence that? When I see a former governor [Alaska’s Sarah Palin] say that the president is shuckin’ and jivin,’ that’s a racial-era slave term. When I see another former governor [New Hampshire’s John Sununu] say after the president’s first debate when he didn’t do well, he said he was lazy. Now it may not mean anything to most Americans but to those of us who are African-Americans, the second word is shiftless and then there’s a third word that goes along with it.”

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=5810 Barack Obama is laying out a revolutionary agenda for his second term, and he’s calling up his heaviest artillery to enforce the transformative presidency delayed in the first. The campaign to confirm Chuck Hagel will be no campaign for the faint-hearted summer soldiers who know only small-caliber combat. The emerging White House strategy is […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3542/fatah-armed-gangs The US and the EU, which have been funding and training the the Palestinian security forces, need to bang on the table — now — for Abbas to rein in the Fatah militiamen, before scenes of anarchy, violence and lawlessness return to the West Bank. After keeping a low profile for the past few […]