RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/tyler-o-neil/2020/08/29/new-book-provides-a-terrifying-glimpse-into-how-antifa-justifies-looting-and-rioting-n864754

After the police killing of George Floyd, mobs descended on major cities, rioting, looting, and burning down buildings. Yet left-leaning journalists, commentators, and politicians insisted that the riots were “mostly peaceful protests.” A new book seeks to justify looting, in particular, and taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) published a lengthy interview with the author. Among other things, the author defends looting as a way to undermine the “white supremacy” behind the idea of property and that the value of small businesses is a “right-wing myth.”

NPR’s Natalie Escobar introduced the subject by claiming “there has been a lot of hand-wringing about looting.” In the newly-released book In Defense of Looting, (published by Hachette Book Group, which has published books by Joel Osteen, J.K. Rowling, Newt Gingrich, and others) Vicky Osterweil “argues that looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society. The rioters who smash windows and take items from stores, she says, are engaging in a powerful tactic that questions the justice of ‘law and order,’ and the distribution of property and wealth in an unequal society.”

Indeed, in an interview with Escobar, Osterweil claimed that looting — which she defined as “the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot” — is a tool for justice that doesn’t really harm anyone. She also dispelled certain “myths” about looting, like the idea that rioters and looters are disconnected from a peaceful protest.

Attacking the idea of property

https://fee.org/articles/andrew-cuomo-s-book-deal-and-why-the-worst-rise-to-the-top-in-politics/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FEE-Freeman+%28Foundation+for+Economic+Education+-+Latest+Articles%29

The coronavirus pandemic has hit the state of New York especially hard. Almost 33,000 New Yorkers have died from the virus, more total deaths than any other state in the country. And New York ranks as the second-worst state for deaths when adjusted for population. The Empire State alone accounts for one in five coronavirus deaths in the US despite having only around six percent of the nation’s population.

Why did New York fare so poorly?

Well, the coronavirus is far more lethal for older people. How well a state has mitigated the death count closely corresponds with how well they protected elderly, vulnerable populations. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo mandated that nursing homes accept patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 even if it means exposing their residents to the virus.

Yes, you read that right.

It shouldn’t come as a shock, then, that at least 6,600 of the state’s deaths happened in nursing homes. And this is almost certainly an undercount, as the Associated Press says it could be more like 11,000 when you adjust for the odd way in which New York defined its deaths. (The AP described New York’s death toll as “cloaked in secrecy” and even Democratic state legislators have accused the state of trying to cover up the number of nursing home deaths).

Of course this is what would happen if you force institutions housing the elderly to accept carriers of a virus that is highly lethal for older people. Other states such as Florida did the opposite. By barring COVID-19 positive patients from nursing homes, they escaped thousands of deaths.

Worse, Cuomo has refused to allow an independent investigation into his handling of the nursing home debacle despite bipartisan calls for oversight.

From start to finish, Cuomo botched the COVID-19 response woefully. National Review’s Kyle Smith summarized the governor’s mistakes “breathtakingly bad moves” that “in retrospect amounted to catastrophe.”

No informed American ought to be surprised by the cultural revolution of 2020.

America’s Hundred Year War: Red October 1917-Red November 2020 reveals the rise, “fall,” and the resurgence of communism in America. It is the story of a century of communist political operations among America’s cultural elites from Lenin’s Bolsheviks to Xi Jinping’s penetration of Hollywood, corporations, universities and media.

The outcomes are Antifa and BLM riots burning Democrat cities over issues of capitalism and race, the socialist platform of the Democrat Party, and Red November elections for President, House and Senate.

America’s Hundred Year War captures the long march of Communism through American cultural institutions from the Red October of 1917 to the Red November 2020.

The book highlights the major personalities and events in the struggle between American culture and Communism. Prominent American intellectuals, actors/writers, and journalists are inspired by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Xi Jinping. They see a brighter future outside of American values and institutions. Anti-communism and reverence for America faded away.

The story begins in the year 1948, focusing on a spirited dialogue between Whittaker Chambers, Richard Nixon and Alger Hiss before the House committee on Un-American Activities in August 1948. The story then flashes back to the Red October of 1917 and forward into the Red November of 2020. There are major stopovers in The Russian Revolution, WWI, WWII, Vietnam culminating in consequences of 2020. 

Chambers, Nixon, Hiss and their friends and allies speak for their own versions of history. 

The book has a detailed INDEX of major events and words and deeds of the named protagonists and antagonists.

Roger Canfield, Ph.D.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-rise-of-mohammed-bin-salman-11597931772

The models arrived first. Boats carrying some 150 women, from Brazil, Russia and elsewhere, docked in the summer of 2015 at Velaa Private Island, an opulent Maldives resort. Upon arrival, each woman was driven in a golf cart to a clinic, tested for sexually transmitted diseases and settled into a private villa.

The women were due to spend the better part of a month with their hosts, several dozen friends of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman, for a party marking his ascent. A 29-year-old prince with a taste for opulence, a hunger for money and a need for power found himself with an abundance of all three.

Prince Mohammed had worked doggedly for a year, outmaneuvering rivals and easing the path for his septuagenarian father Salman to assume the Saudi throne. After Salman took the crown in early 2015, he delegated extraordinary powers to Mohammed, who consolidated control of the military and security services and began upending the sleepy kingdom’s oil-dependent economy.

By that July, Mohammed wanted a break. His privacy-obsessed entourage booked the entire Velaa resort for a month, at a cost of $50 million, according to people familiar with the trip. Staff were banned from bringing cellphones with cameras. The American rapper Pitbull and the South Korean pop star Psy performed. The Maldives party was described by several people in attendance, including some involved in its planning.

https://www.realclearbooks.com/book_of_the_week/2020/08/19/book_of_the_week_reclaiming_common_sense_574721.html

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this RealClearBooks series, we highlight recent nonfiction books from across the political spectrum. This week’s book is Robert Curry’s ‘Reclaiming Common Sense’, published by Encounter Books.

In America today, right is wrong, men are women, 2+2=5, and the truth as we all understood it is over. What happened? In his philosophic survival guide for our postmodern age, Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World, Robert Curry describes a war on reality that spilled from the academy into all corners of American life and scrambled our rational mind in the process.

Though BLM, gender, and environmental activists often dominate our post-truth headlines, the left’s war on common sense is not merely intended to advance noisy progressive pet schemes. In fact, Curry reveals, subverting the truth as we know it is central to a far a more insidious plot to erode and eliminate the very conditions that make our Constitution work. For, as Curry writes, a war on reason is a war on the mind itself, and with it our capacities to think clearly and govern ourselves.

In a series of thoughtful vignettes, Curry urges Americans to preserve our fragile republic by restoring the common-sense realism that informed our Founders and grounded our nation as a shared project. These wise passages are essential reading for those who see and feel America drifting into a surreal state. In fact, as Reclaiming Common Sense underscores, those perceptive powers are the very thing that unite us and make our experiment in self-rule possible. Don’t let them go.

https://dianebederman.com/white-supremacy-brought-to-you-by-an-east-african-bl

Experts have inundated us with lectures and books about white privilege. According to these experts, “White supremacy is arguably the most complex social system of the last several hundred years.” White privilege, rather the evil of white privilege/white supremacy, is being taught in our schools, and not just universities. Are there white people who believe they are better than others because of the colour of their skin? Yes. And we are working hard to undo the damage of those beliefs. Seems we have not learned any lesson from those biases. Today, the path is to attack white people; for being born white and therefore innately superior and privileged.

Who are these “experts” whose books are being promoted to teachers and schools and the rest of society?

One is Layla F Saad and her book, “me and white supremacy,”a resource for white people.

The book came about following her free month-long Instagram challenge during the summer of 2018. She knew her audience. Her book has also been recommended for teachers to read so they can look inside themselves and find that active and passive racism that lurks within, and work diligently to remove it. She describes herself as an East African, Black, Muslim woman, born in Cardiff Wales, living for a time in Great Britain, before moving with her family to Qatar, where she now lives with her husband and children.. She thinks of herself as sitting at “a unique intersection of identities” from where she can help white people “work with the intention of creating a new world where Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) live with dignity and equality” and remove “oppression and marginalization.”

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“Although marching to your own drummer has its downsides, both personally and professionally, it also made me no stranger to controversy.”  Thomas Sowell 1930 A Personal Odyssey, 2000

This memoir was written twenty years ago, so some will have read it. I had not. Sowell is a man I have long admired for his independent thinking on many issues. Trained as an economist, he writes as well on education and race, and of how politics, protests and policy prescriptions influenced his thinking.

Like Odysseus’ return from Troy, we follow him from birth and young boyhood in rural North Carolina, through his school years in Harlem, and his leaving home at age seventeen. We follow him into the Marine Corps, and we learn of his years in college and graduate school, of marriage and children. We read of his years of teaching, writing and thinking, and, finally to his Ithaca, Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where he researches and writes – a passage through trials to triumph.

He was born in 1930. His father died before he arrived and his mother, who could not afford to feed and care for him, had to give him up to his father’s Aunt Molly. The poverty in which he lived was bleak. His first home: “Like most of the houses in the area, ours had no such frills as electricity, central heating, or hot running water…The toilet was a little shed on the back porch.” At age nine, his family moved to New York City, to a shared apartment in Harlem. In 1944, his intelligence got him admitted to Stuyvesant High School where he first spent time with white children. But he quit before graduation. He worked and went into the Marine Corps: “Never in my life did race mean less than during those two months at Parris Island. The Drill Instructors saw their job as making everybody miserable, and they did so without regard to race, color, creed or national origin.”