RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nothing here but a halfbright screed against Trump with vile comparisons to Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin and praise for herself and Hillary Clinton….rsk

“She frequently nudges the reader to make connections between the president of the United States and past dictatorships. She reminds us who first coined the Trumpian phrase “drain the swamp”. It was drenare la palude in the original, Mussolini Italian. She quotes Hitler talking about the secret of his success: “I will tell you what has carried me to the position I have reached. Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people could make nothing of them… I…reduced them to the simplest terms. The masses realised this and followed me.” Sound familiar?”

The former US secretary of state decries the global rise of authoritarianism in her new book, Fascism: A Warning, and talks about Trump, Putin and the ‘tragedy’ of Brexit

Madeleine Albright has both made and lived a lot of history. When she talks about a resurgence of fascism, she says it as someone who was born into the age of dictators. She was a small girl when her family fled Czechoslovakia after the Nazis consumed the country in 1939. After 10 days in hiding, her parents escaped Prague for Britain and found refuge in Notting Hill Gate, “before it was fancy”, in an apartment which backed on to Portobello Road. Her first memories of life in London are of disorientation. “I didn’t have a clue. My parents were very continental European and I didn’t have siblings early on. I felt isolated.” As Hitler unleashed the blitz, “every night we went down to the cellar where everybody was sleeping.”

She has since been back to the redbrick block in Notting Hill. “I rang the doorbell of the person who lived in the apartment – it was a lot smaller than I remember it. I asked a stupid question: whether the cellar still existed. They said: ‘Of course the cellar exists.’ So they took me down and I had this moment – the green paint was exactly the same. I remember the green paint.”

It was decades later that she discovered that, though she was raised a Catholic, her parentage was Jewish and many of her family had been murdered in the Holocaust, including three grandparents.

From Notting Hill, the family moved out of central London to Walton-on-Thames, where they shared a house “with some other Czechs”. The bombs fell there too, but she enjoyed “every minute” of this part of her childhood. “I went to school and we spent a lot of time in air raid shelters singing A Hundred Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall.” It was less terrifying than it might have been because “my parents had a capacity of making the abnormal seem normal”.

This is a story about the appeasement of Islam. To be specific, it’s about appeasement on the part of book publishers. To be even more specific, it’s about a little mom-and-pop operation known as Random House, and a German author named Thilo Sarrazin.

I’m not unfamiliar with Random House. In 2006, Doubleday, a division of that storied firm, published my book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. Although it sold briskly from the git-go, it was (like many other honest books on the subject) delicately ignored by most of the mainstream media. Nonetheless, it made the New York Times bestseller list and was translated into several languages – and the paperback edition, published by Broadway Books, another Random House subsidiary, continues to sell. In 2009, Doubleday put out my follow-up book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. Whereas While Europe Slept had warned of the dangers attendant upon Islam’s rise in the West, Surrender addressed the growing Western tendency to assuage alleged Muslim sensitivities, largely through censorship and self-censorship: museums were putting away art works that might offend the Prophet’s followers; universities were installing propaganda factories disguised as centers of Middle Eastern Studies; Hollywood, which during World War II had specialized in patriotic cheerleading, was responding to the “War on Terror” with films in which Americans were bad guys and Muslims were victims; and while cops and prosecutors were doing all they could to avoid bringing Muslim malefactors to justice, they were hauling critics of Islam into court for “hate speech.”

As for book publishers – well, let’s not forget that the first big modern example of cultural jihad in the West was the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses, he thundered, had insulted “Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an.” At the time, that debacle seemed a one-off, and publishers, to their credit, continued to put out books that criticized Islam. The record, however, was not spotless. When Yale University Press, in 2009, released an account of the Danish cartoon crisis, it decided not to include the actual cartoons – a ludicrously cowardly move. Yale wasn’t alone. Over time, it became clear that major presses were becoming more timid on this front: while happy to churn out agitprop by the likes of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, they were growing increasingly uneasy with blunt truth-telling. Hence more and more writers in this genre have had to put out their books themselves. (In Norway, where I live, one of the top bestsellers of 2015, Hege Storhaug’s Islam: Den 11. landeplage – which will appear in English later this year as Islam: Europe Invaded, America Warned – was self-published.)

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21361/dear-america-who-driving-the-bus http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com

Dear America: Who’s Driving the Bus? is a philosophy book that offers a universal paradigm for understanding the often confounding and contradictory ways in which people behave.

America is currently embroiled in a second civil war that it is unaware of and that threatens our way of life. The civil war in this country is being fought over the same thing all great wars are fought over: power. But in this war, the adversaries are ourselves. Civil War II is not a race war, an economic war, or a war between states. It is a psychological battle between states of mind that will determine who has the power in our society, who is in control.

The human growth process is twofold; it has a physical component and a psychological component. Chronological age is an uncontested biological accomplishment. Psychological growth is another matter entirely. We struggle with the wish to become powerful, independent adults and the longing to remain powerless, dependent children.

Psychological growth is the universal challenge of childhood. Every society in the world needs its children to grow into physical and psychological adulthood in order to continue the cycle of life. Theoretically, if a society were to remain a society of children that society would necessarily collapse and extinguish itself. The psychological growth process is a difficult struggle, but it always involves a choice. It is impossible to become a responsible adult without choosing to relinquish the irresponsibility of childhood.

Until the 1960s American institutions cooperated in common cause to help American children become responsible adults whose individualism and embrace of the meritocracy produced enormous contributions to society that strengthened the country. The family, the church, and the government including educational curricula were uniformly determined that American children grow into responsible productive psychological adulthood. What happened??

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/book-review-lead-yourself-first-raymond-kethledge-courage-a-judge-needs/

A review of Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude, by Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin.

Judges used to be rugged, because they had to be: Back when Supreme Court justices “rode circuit,” they traveled to far-flung parts of the country to hear cases. Justice Field — wearing a coat with pockets big enough for two pistols — would sail to Panama, cross the country by burro, and then sail up the coast to San Francisco. Nowadays, the more popular image of a judge might be that of a soft-handed Ivy League establishment type: Someone who grew up with elites, went to school with elites, got his ideas from elites, and eventually rejoined his kind inside the Beltway. President Trump himself famously has “one overarching question” when evaluating judicial nominees: “He’s not weak, is he?” Are there any judges left of the old mold?

I can think of at least one. I don’t know if Judge Raymond Kethledge has ever ridden a burro (or gone to San Francisco), but I do know that he has tracked game through the Michigan wilderness, pulled salmon out of the St. Mary’s River, and battled swells in his aluminum fishing boat on Lake Huron. Although not formally part of his job description as a federal judge (his own “circuit riding” takes him south to Cincinnati rather than north to upper Michigan), these rugged pursuits nonetheless illustrate the way Kethledge approaches his job. He is well-renowned for not mincing words. His decisions (which he writes himself, from outline to published opinion) are refreshingly concise, especially compared to the doorstops routinely churned out by other chambers. He holds fast to the text of statutes and the Constitution (i.e., the law) and rebukes those litigants (often federal agencies) who do not. His rigorous thinking mirrors his rigorous living.

Judge Kethledge, along with coauthor Michael Erwin, has now given us a book, Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude, about other leaders who have found clarity, creativity, balance, and courage through a process of rigorous thought and focused reflection. Think of General Ulysses S. Grant, holed up in the cabin of his ship until he composed a daring plan to get his troops through Vicksburg. Or General James Mattis, the “Warrior Monk” (and now the secretary of defense) who in 2011 assumed command of American military operations in the Middle East, and who took his copious library with him wherever he went.

Several others have already glowingly reviewed Lead Yourself First, but none have explained what it tells us about the man who co-wrote it. I recognize in these pages the Raymond Kethledge I’ve known since he worked for me as a young staffer more than 20 years ago, a man who has displayed the same vital leadership qualities — intelligence, creativity, balance, and, above all, courage — that he identifies in the book.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/27/scrubbing-laura-ingalls-wilder-is-a-dangerous-step-toward-ignorance/

Few people are unfamiliar with the Little House on the Prairie book series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her simple retellings of her childhood memories of life in the big woods of Wisconsin, to the prairie of the Dakota territories, to her life as a married frontier wife have captured the imaginations of generations of readers.

Wilder’s stories of her family’s journey west in a covered wagon, the careful details of the minutiae of their daily lives, and her descriptions of an America most commonly seen in history books should, without question, cement her place in history as a talented and important author. Wilder’s books also have served to introduce children for decades to disability issues, specifically blindness, and are an important look at the positive difference a supportive family can make for people with special needs. The enduring nature of her work is a testimony to her ability to write, and that talent and ability to capture reader’s minds and hearts led the Associate for Library Service to Children to name a literary award after her in 1952. Now her presence has been stripped from the the award, which has been renamed the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

Wilder’s removal came after repeated rounds of criticism that her books, written about her girlhood in the 1800s, contained racist and offensive characterizations most commonly of Native Americans. These complaints started in the 50s with a reader writing into Harper, the publisher of Wilder’s books, about sentences that she disagreed with. The publisher responded by rewording sections. These gentle rewordings quelled critiques until more recently, when statutes and school names became battle grounds for removing the presence of people with problematic parts of their history. No longer can Confederate leaders of the past have any public monuments. Their part in the Civil War renders them best forgotten, ripped from places where their names and images could remind people of uncomfortable parts of history. And here is where Wilder’s name and image are now being stripped away.