RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-troubled-by-rob-henderson

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, by Rob Henderson (Gallery Books, 336 pp., $26.09)

In Rob Henderson’s first recounted memory in his new memoir, Troubled, he is three years old, screaming in terror and clinging to his mother as two policemen wrestle handcuffs onto her wrists. He had no idea why this was happening, of course; the scuffle likely had something to do with his mother’s incorrigible drug addiction. A Korean-born college dropout, she relied on prostitution to support her habit. When she and Rob weren’t living in a car, she would tie him to a chair in the apartment to attend to her customers. Her other two boys, Rob’s brothers, had different fathers; Rob would never know them or learn what became of them. He has no pictures, no letters, no trinkets—not a scrap to give substance to the phantom family he knows only through a few official documents and unverifiable rumors.

Hard-knocks orphan sagas are common in world literature, but Henderson’s story is extraordinary—and not because of cruelty, loss, truancy, and addiction, though there is plenty of that. It’s not extraordinary because of an uplifting story of triumph over adversity, though Troubled is a particularly impressive example of that, too; now in his early thirties, Henderson has an undergraduate degree from Yale and a Ph.D. in psychology at Cambridge. No, Troubled is extraordinary because of its author’s ability to mine both the grief of his childhood and the challenges of his rise into an elite world.

After Henderson was taken from his mother, the only constant in his young life was Gerri, a social worker who every few weeks would appear at one of the seven foster homes through which he cycled. She often would show up without warning to take him to a new home, hauling a garbage bag to pack his few possessions.

Children are easily controlled because they live in a world of feelings, subjective reality. They have not developed the critical-thinking skills required to survive in the adult world of objective reality.

In a society of ordered liberty, stealing is a crime regardless of who the thief is. Stealing is the WHAT of the crime, the thief is the WHO. Blind justice evaluates behavior according to WHAT is being done, not WHO is doing it, ensuring that no one is above the law. When blindfolds come off and tribal norms of identity politics take over, freedom is the casualty. Blind justice is foundational in a constitutional republic specifically because it evaluates the WHAT of behavior, not the WHO being charged with a crime.

This is an extremely important distinction for two reasons. First, it is a dramatic departure from the binary sociopolitical infrastructure of rulers and ruled. Binary sociopolitical systems support a two-tiered system of justice, one for the rulers and one for the ruled. In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the goal is one system of justice for all.

Second, distinguishing between the WHAT and the WHO separates childish feelings, which focus on the WHO, from adult, rational thinking that focuses on the WHAT. Children view authority figures through the unquestioning, trustful eyes of dependence. 

If a society can be pressured to remain in eternal childhood, its citizens do not psychologically develop past the WHO of behavior. They remain stalled in the emotional world of childhood, accepting what they are told, because they never developed the critical-thinking skills needed to question the WHAT of information. A regressed society is the unaware, compliant population made famous by the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27515/chapter-3-birdman-and-the-reality-revolution

The ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is an essential survival skill. If a man believes he can fly and jumps off a twenty-story ledge, he falls to his death because gravity is a fact, an objective truth. Birdman’s fantasy, a subjective reality, cannot compete with the objective reality of gravity.

Let’s break down the process of thinking and doing. Thinking is a private matter and human beings are free to think their thoughts at any time in any place. Birdman is free to think he can fly, without consequence to himself or others. It is the moment he steps off the ledge that his subjective reality collides with objective reality.

Adults and children are evaluated differently in society. The fantasies of children are an accepted part of the growth process. In a sane society, adults who are out of touch with reality are deemed insane. In our example, Birdman would be considered insane.

Civil society and the laws that govern it are based on the acceptance of objective reality by its citizens. What would happen if there was a movement that deliberately rejected the teaching of objective reality and taught subjective reality instead? What would be the purpose of driving a society insane?

Remember, the ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is a survival skill, because thought precedes action. Birdman thought he could fly and jumped to his death. Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts in order to form a judgment, and is the foundation of rational thought. 

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27496/chapter-2-the-art-of-psychological-warfare

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite themselves. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses psychological, informational, asymmetric warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. The primary target of the globalist predators is America’s children.

Parents must adopt a wartime mentality in order to understand and challenge the dangerous government policies affecting their children. Globalist strategists based their tactical and operational plans for their War on America on Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The differences between Sun Tzu’s strategies of the 6th century BC and 21st-century globalist psychological/informational warfare are the advances in science and technology available for implementing the weapons of mass social engineering and mass psychological destruction today.

Modern psychological warfare (PSYWAR) and psychological operations (PSYOPS) utilize the 21st-century digital environment and its integrated communications landscape to communicate and coordinate censorship, disinformation, and misinformation. The hearts and minds of unsuspecting viewers are being manipulated with websites, cloud servers, search engines, social media outlets, mobile apps, audio, video, podcasts, webinars, and even immersive digital environments using artificial, interactive, computer-generated scenes. Information wars are 21st-century propaganda wars, foundational to PSYWAR and PSYOPS because the information presented is socially engineered to produce a desired political effect.

Loss and grief are equal opportunity predators. Two friends have written books which resonate with all who have mourned a loss of beloved parents, spouses, children and dear friends. “Everything is a Little Broken” is a poignant novel by Rebecca Sugar about the sorrow, and even humor when confronted by a father’s crumbling health. Warren Kozak’s “Waving Goodby” is about losing his lovely and loving wife after a grim diagnosis, extraordinary efforts to cure her and reinventing his life alone. Both will be available in February and April respectively. rsk

Waving Goodbye: Life After Loss

by Warren Kozak

To those around me—my friends, my colleagues, even my daughter—I appear normal, but in one very fundamental way, I am not.

The old me left with my wife. I’m not sure who this new person is—I am still evolving. But I will tell you this with absolute certainty: I am not the same person I was before my wife died on January 1, 2018.

For anyone struggling with the loss of a spouse—anyone whose world has been turned upside down in a way they’ve never encountered before—here is something that could help. Waving Goodbye is a candid, honest, and approachable guide to dealing with the death of a spouse written by a very ordinary guy who has lived through the ordeal.

Warren Kozak doesn’t just tell you that time heals all wounds; he explains how the passage of time actually helped. Despite the shattering heartbreak and insurmountable grief, Kozak shares what worked, what didn’t, and the insights he learned along the way to help anyone who has suffered this kind of loss.

Everything Is a Little Broken Paperback – February 27, 2024

by Rebecca Sugar

Aging is hard, but watching those you love get older isn’t much easier.

What do you do when the people you love are declining right in front of your eyes? What can you do but rage at all that is cruel, laugh at all that is absurd, and show up for whatever happens next?

Mira Cayne’s father has been in physical decline for decades, ever since his spinal cord injury at the age of forty-four. He was never the dad who ran a marathon, but he was the strongest and most resilient man Mira knew. Now, at seventy-nine, Matt Frank is recovering from his second surgery, and Mira can see a change in him. The compounding effects of old age and his infirmity are taking a toll on his fighting spirit, and Mira is trying to be strong for them both. She isn’t sure she is up to the task.

As Matt heals, his fragile condition produces daily indignities that offer the father and daughter a choice: to laugh or to cry. Luckily for Mira, she is built just like her father, and there is no doubt which choice they will make.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27460/chapter-1-what-is-reality

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite themselves. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses psychological, informational, asymmetric warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. The primary target of the globalist predators is America’s children.

What is reality? Objective reality is the world of facts. Subjective reality is the world of feelings. Objective reality is the fulcrum of human sanity, the foundation of ordered liberty in our constitutional republic. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Opinions are based on feelings; facts are based on actuality. Feelings are not facts.

The ideological moorings of ordered liberty require consensus on what is real. This is no small matter. Language is based on such consensus. Laws are based on such consensus. Without agreement on what is real, there is no societal order, only chaos. It is for this reason that globalists support the leftist Culture War on America and its attack strategy to replace factual, objective reality with subjective multiple realities based on feelings.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

As Carl Sandburg wrote, battles are fought far from those who direct them. As Mr. Englund explains in his “Note to the Reader,” this book does not describe what war was during the four weeks in November 1942, but tries “to say something about how it was.”

It was the month of November 1942 that saw Germany stymied at Stalingrad, the American invasion of North Africa and the German-Italian defeat at El Alamein; it witnessed the Guadalcanal campaign that ended Japanese expansion in the South Pacific and the Japanese retreat in New Guinea. At the start of November, it appeared that the Axis might be victorious. By the end of the month, it seemed certain that the Allies, ultimately, would be victors. It was on November 10, following Montgomery’s victory over Rommel at El Alamein that Churchill spoke at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon in London: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” While he was right, of the estimated 60 to 80 million people who died in World War II most were yet to meet their fate.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * How has a small nation of 9 million people, forced to fight for its existence and security since its founding and riven by ethnic, religious, and economic divides, proven resistant to so many of the societal ills plaguing other wealthy democracies?

Why do Israelis have among the world’s highest life expectancies and lowest rates of “deaths of despair” from suicide and substance abuse? Why is Israel’s population young and growing while all other wealthy democracies are aging and shrinking? How can it be that Israel, according to a United Nations ranking, is the fourth happiest nation in the world? Why do Israelis tend to look to the future with hope, optimism, and purpose while the rest of the West struggles with an epidemic of loneliness, teen depression, and social decline?

Dan Senor and Saul Singer, the writers behind the international bestseller Start-Up Nation, have long been students of the global innovation race. But as they spent time with Israel’s entrepreneurs and political leaders, soldiers and students, scientists and activists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Tel Aviv techies, and Israeli Arabs, they realized that they had missed what really sets Israel apart.

Moving from military commanders integrating at-risk youth and people who are neurodiverse into national service, to high performing companies making space for working parents, from dreamers and innovators launching a duct-taped spacecraft to the moon, to bringing better health solutions to people around the world, The Genius of Israel tells the story of a diverse people and society built around the values of service, solidarity, and belonging.

Widely admired for having the world’s highest density of high-tech start-ups, Israel’s greatest innovation may not be a technology at all, but Israeli society itself. Understanding how a country facing so many challenges can be among the happiest provides surprising insights into how we can confront the crisis of community, human connectedness, and purpose in modern life.

Bold, timely, and insightful, Senor and Singer’s latest work shines an important light on the impressive innovative distinctions of Israeli society—and what other communities and countries can learn.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/the_great_taking_you_really_no_longer_own_your_securities_and_you_could_also_lose_your_freedom.html

Under a veil of benevolence, the Great Reset engineered by the World Economic Forum (WEF), aims to shift wealth from individuals and small businesses to global organizations controlled by the elite.  As part of this agenda, a revamping of the financial system has been underway for – believe it or not – over half a century, says David Rogers Webb in his recent book The Great Taking and its accompanying documentary.

Webb’s research and insights demonstrate that the WEF’s dubious catchphrase You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy already has risky implications for investments in securities, mutual funds, pension funds, and the like. Investors, he shows, are no longer ‘owners’ of securities; they are only ‘unsecured creditors.’ Besides, investments are vulnerable to the vagaries of the opaque derivatives market.  If the system collapses – he says this is inevitable – investors will not only lose money, they will receive no compensation.

This is the ‘Great Taking’ of the title, the beginning of the end of property rights, deemed the bedrock of prosperity by our Founding Fathers and enshrined in the Constitution.  We no longer really own shares; soon, we no may longer own anything.

Having been an investment manager for decades, Webb has a keen understanding of the markets and the intricacies of the financial system.  He realized early on that Wall Street was out of sync with Main Street: money creation by the Federal Reserve, a privately owned institution controlled by large private banks, dwarfed real economic activity.  The movement of financial markets is in fact steered by private banks and big investment firms.