RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/

When Judge Salvatore Vasta  ruled on Peter Ridd’s case against James Cook University, he introduced his 76-page decision with a few thoughts on the key element in any “quest for truth”:

… Intellectual freedom is also known as academic freedom. It is a concept that underpins universities and institutions devoted to higher learning. Obviously such institutions must have administrators that care for the governance and proper direction of the institution. However, the mission of these institutions must undoubtedly be the search for knowledge which leads to a quest for truth. In reality, intellectual freedom is the cornerstone of this core mission of all institutions of higher learning.

This is so because it allows ideas to conflict with each other; to battle and test each other. It is within this “battle” that the strengths and weaknesses of ideas are found out. In this process, there comes “learning”. And with learning comes discovery.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/victor_davis_hanson_weighs_in_on_the_notre_dame_cathedral_fire_brilliantly.html

Victor Davis Hanson is a well known conservative historian, academic, and author. He contributes commentaries prolifically on the current political scene to a variety of publications. He is a frequent guest commentator on the Fox News Channel. When Dr. Hanson speaks, I listen.

On Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle on Tuesday, April 16, Hanson appeared live from his home in California for a three-minute Q and A on the burning of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. When a transcript of the program appeared online on Wednesday, I read his comments, which were as impressive as when I first heard them.

His comments totaled 362 words. I can’t think of anyone who can fit more substance and meaning into so few words.

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS CHANNEL HOST: Hundreds marched through the streets of Paris today to ask for the intercession of Notre Dame, Our Lady. The cathedral named in her honor was heavily damaged by fire yesterday, but it is structurally sound. French President Macron vows it will be rebuilt as donations pour in from around the world. And amid the tragedy at Notre Dame, there is a lesson to be learned.

Joining me now is Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Victor, you say there’s an irony in the history here in the aftermath of this architectural tragedy, tragedy in terms of what we’ve lost in church history. What is the irony?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, HOOVER INSTITUTION: After 800 years, we were the steward of this iconic representation of western civilization, Catholicism, Christendom. And of all the years, 2019, at the height of our sophistication and technology, I’m not blaming the French or anybody, but we were found wanting and we didn’t protect this icon. And we don’t build them anymore.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/things-that-cant-go-on-forever-simply-dont/

Economist Herbert Stein’s old adage — “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” — still holds.

Take illegal immigration.

There are currently somewhere from 11 million to 15 million immigrants living in the United States without legal authorization. Last month, nearly 100,000 people were apprehended or turned away while trying to illegally cross the southern border. Some experts suggest that at least that number made it across without arrest. At that rate, the United States would be gaining a fairly large city of undocumented arrivals each month.

Most of the people who enter the United States illegally arrive without fluency in English, a high-school diploma, competitive job skills or money. The majority will require support subsidies, and collectively they will require increased legal and law-enforcement investments.

At some point, American social services will be so taxed that the system will be rendered dysfunctional — as is already occurring in areas of the American Southwest. Or, some regions of America will so resemble the countries undocumented immigrants abandoned that there will be little point in heading north.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273445/reparations-and-weaponization-slavery-bruce-thornton

The Democrats who have announced their candidacy for the presidential primary have all declared their support for paying reparations to the descendants of slaves, after they kissed the ring of notorious race-baiter, tax cheat, and liar Al Sharpton. None has a clue exactly how such a policy would be implemented, and it’s clear their support is nothing more than virtue-signaling and pandering to the racialist left. Nor is it likely such a policy will come to pass.

But this political stunt is still useful for exposing just how dishonest is the left’s use of slavery in our public discourse. Once a universal evil now existing only in the global shadows, slavery has been weaponized by the left and identity politics tribunes in order to attack the West, especially the United States, and caricature both as unique evils responsible for all the world’s ills.

First, this focus on the West ignores the fact that all peoples everywhere kept slaves. Slavery was as unexceptional as the domestication of animals. Nor were Europeans the biggest slave-owners and slave-traders. Eight centuries before the Europeans began importing slaves from Africa, the Islamic Middle East had been exporting or kidnapping slaves––an estimated 17 million Africans, over one-and-a-half times the estimated 10 million purchased by Europeans. Millions were forced-march across the Sahara to coastal ports. The males were brutally castrated––all the genitals, not just the testicles–– to provide eunuchs for harems and service to rulers. Thousands died along the way from their wounds, their bones littering the desert sands. And don’t forget the millions of white Europeans kidnapped and sold into slavery by privateers serving the Muslim Barbary states in North Africa, or the Balkan Christian boys, perhaps as many as one million, taken from their parents, forcibly converted, and made to serve the Ottoman regime as janissaries.

https://quillette.com/2019/04/12/jordan-peterson-and-the-new-chivalry/

In his recent appearance at Liberty University, Jordan Peterson delivered this verdict on the dominant attitude toward masculinity among our society’s elites: “I don’t think we do a very good job at the moment of encouraging men. We have this idea that there’s something intrinsically oppressive about the patriarchy and about masculinity in general. And I think that’s nonsense. I think that strong, honest, truthful, courageous men pursuing noble goals is of great benefit to everyone, male and female alike.” Members of the student audience applauded loudly, little knowing that not 10 minutes later, a scene would unfold in which Peterson would have an opportunity to match action to words.

By now, tens of thousands of people have seen the clip of the desperate young man who slipped past security to rush the stage and appeal to Peterson for help. The high-definition video feed was cut, but amateur footage shows Peterson leaving his seat and following David Nasser, Liberty University’s Campus Pastor, to engage. Nasser assures the troubled boy that he is “in the right place,” telling security to stand down while he leads the audience in prayer. As the student collapses in sobs, Peterson can be seen kneeling down to put a calming hand on his heaving shoulders. After the student is escorted offstage, the video feed comes back up as Nasser and Peterson return to their seats. Peterson seems shaken and visibly moved to tears.The whole vignette plays out in less than two minutes. Yet it affords an opportunity for reflection—by shedding light not only on the specific nature of Jordan Peterson’s appeal, but also on the larger question of what masculine virtue can and should look like in the modern age.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/15/wikileaks-or-the-washington-post/

The imbroglio du jour of the political class is the question of whether Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder arrested last week in London, is a hero or a villain. Is he a journalist entitled to special treatment or a criminal deserving punishment?

And if pursuing then publishing classified materials is a federal offense, what kind of consequences should American journalists face for reporting classified information? Especially when the illicit information is intended not to warn the public of a legitimate threat posed by their government but for partisan political purposes—specifically, to advance the bogus Trump-Russia collusion hoax?

Assange has been charged in a federal district court in Virginia with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for allegedly working with former U.S. Army security analyst Chelsea Manning to access and post a massive trove of stolen classified documents.

“The primary purpose of the conspiracy was to facilitate Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information,” the indictment read. “Assange was knowingly receiving such classified records from Manning for the purpose of of publicly disclosing them on the WikiLeaks website.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/15/breathless-reports-hate-groups-aim-panic-americans-speech-controls/

A cluster of events this past week marked a steepening in the upwards trend toward online censorship.

In a New York Times and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report about online extremism, authors claimed the social media sphere enabled a “global network of white extremists” to develop and that this has led to a “surge of white supremacist and xenophobic terrorism in the West.” Although grasping in its conclusions and broadly flawed, the report was no doubt a clear enough justification for many to continue culling speech freedoms online.

In a near-identical report, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said certain social media platforms have become “round-the-clock digital white supremacist rallies.” They also conclude more policing from both industry and government must be done. Both reports coincided with social media executives being called to a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, where lawmakers demanded they do more to “stem white nationalist propaganda and hate speech online.”

The collective push to double down on a free-speech atmosphere already challenged post-Christchurch seems to beg the question: is it a surge in “hate” we’re witnessing, or a surge in “hate panic”?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/15/feds-tell-every-american-exactly-theyre-money-every-year/

Congress should require that, within six months of Tax Day, the Internal Revenue Service must issue to all taxpayers a rundown of how much they paid, and what programs it went to fund.

Every April 15, Americans think about taxes. For something that grabs such a large part of our income, federal income taxes should be more prominent in our thoughts. Every day, every hour that you work, a piece of what you earn gets taken by the government before it even gets into your hands.

That is by design, and the withholding system not only guarantees the government the steady revenue it needs to function, but also makes sure that average taxpayers do not spend money that they will need to pay on tax day. The system is important—even necessary—to the functioning of a modern government, but it has one significant downside: people often do not realize how much they pay in taxes every year. That was shown to be especially true after the latest tax law changes: most people paid less in total taxes, but because their refunds may have decreased, they didn’t know it.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/15/candace-owens-has-shown-us-the-way/

How did this happen?

When did it become OK for one of the two major political parties in America to attack a young black woman, who works for an orthodox Jew, as a fascistic fan of Adolf Hitler after she was invited to testify before Congress?

When did it become OK for the representatives of the same party openly to label Israel, our closest friend in the Middle East, an “evil” state which has “hypnotized the West,” then libel their fellow representatives of having “dual loyalties” because they are Jewish, or to intimate that Israel simply shouldn’t exist?

And when did the all the leading names in that party’s list of candidates for president come to see it as obligatory to endorse a Green New Deal for the nation that has as its objective the outlawing of the internal combustion engine and air travel?

Anna Wintour, the longtime editor-in-chief of Vogue, magazine, explained why she will never have Melania Trump on the cover: “”You have to stand up for what you believe in, you have to take a point of view,” she told chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour. “Hmmm….

In 2011 with the assent of Ms.Wintour, Vogue magazine featured an adoring paean to Asma Assad the first lady of Syria – consort to Bashar al-Assad.

This is from that column since “disappeared” from the website.

Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert by Joan Juliet Buck

“Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote.”