RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/03/30/socialisms-endless-refrain-

Germany’s socialist left is currently embroiled in a row over the correct stance on Venezuela. The conflict came to the fore at the February conference of Die Linke, the country’s main socialist party, when a group of Nicolás Maduro fans stormed the stage, chanting slogans and waving banners with pro-Venezuela messages.

Nicolás Maduro is the successor to Hugo Chávez, and has served as Venezuelan President since 2013. The legitimacy of his presidency has been in free fall in recent years, and many now call him a dictator. As Maduro’s popularity has waned, his tactics have become increasingly brutal. In 2018, a panel of legal experts convened by the Organization of American States recommended that the regime be referred to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Many members of the Die Linke party establishment, however, still side with Maduro, whom they see as a comrade under siege. Others, especially in the party’s youth organisation, take the opposite view—which is why the February conference was contentious. One young member describes the party’s in-house Chavistas as “die-hard reactionaries, who have an antiquated understanding of socialism.”

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22541/the-squeaky-wheel-gets-the-greasehttp://goudsmit.pundicity.com  http://lindagoudsmit.com

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease” is an American proverb that means that whoever screams the loudest gets the attention.The Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) is a very squeaky wheel. 

CAIR is the propaganda arm of the Muslim Brotherhood whose unapologetic stated objective in North America is settlement – NOT assimilation. The tactical strategy for the Muslim Brotherhood in America is documented with precision in their 1991 Explanatory Memorandum which was recovered in an FBI search of the Virginia home of Ismail Elbarrasse. The Memorandum was found among 80 banker-boxes worth of documents discovered hidden in Elbarrasse’s sub-basement.

The document confirms that most Muslim-American groups in the United States are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Explanatory Memorandum was entered into evidence in the 2008 U.S. v Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial that convicted HLF leaders of providing material support to Hamas Terrorist Organization. In other words the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic “charity” was the fundraising arm of the Palestine Committee in the US. The Palestine Committee was created by the Muslim Brotherhood to support Hamas in its efforts to create an Islamic Palestinian state by eliminating the State of Israel through violent jihad.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-top-5-investigations-obstructed-by-the-obama-administration/

With Democrats and the media licking their wounds over the Mueller Report not finding Russian collusion, they’ve been refocusing their energy on claims of obstruction of justice, even accusing Trump Attorney General William Barr of “protecting” Trump. Which is both amusing and hypocritical considering how they tolerated obstruction of justice by the Obama administration and sometimes assisted in that obstruction.

If Robert Mueller couldn’t conclude that Trump obstructed his investigation, then it’s quite clear there wasn’t any. Having written extensively about Obama-era corruption, I felt it was necessary to remind everyone that not only was the Obama administration plagued by multiple scandals but that obstructing investigations was standard operating procedure. For Democrats, Trump calling the Mueller an investigation a witch hunt is an impeachable offense, but Obama refusing to cooperate with investigations was much ado about nothing.

Despite many abuses of power during the Obama years, not once did Attorney General Eric Holder or Attorney General Loretta Lynch ever appoint a special counsel to investigate them. Instead, they’d occasionally launch their own investigations, which always exonerated them, or, when the Republican-controlled House launched their own investigations, the Obama administration refused to cooperate and obstructed their investigations. In August 2014, 47 of 73 inspectors general wrote an open letter to Congress informing them that the Obama administration of obstructing investigations by not giving them full access to the information they need to investigate properly. Such a letter was unprecedented, and the systemic corruption and obstruction the inspectors general would have been considered an impeachable defense for almost any other president. Emboldened by the lack of outrage (thanks to lack of media attention to the scandal) emboldened the Obama administration to impose new restrictions on the investigative powers of inspectors general. Imagine President Trump trying to get away with that today?

Obstruction of justice was integral to the entire operation of the Obama administration. Whenever a scandal erupted, the kneejerk reaction by Obama and his cronies was to cover-up and obstruct. Below are the top five examples of investigations obstructed by the Obama administration.CONTINUE AT SITE

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/04/revolution-comes-creepy-uncle-joe/

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency,” Maximilien Robespierre wrote in his post-French Revolution impassioned defense of state tyranny against the ruling class. “To forgive them is cruelty.” Robespierre, was, of course, the architect of the great terror, where thousands of innocents were sacrificed in the zeal of purifying fire, as every revolution undergoes.

While observing that revolutionary social restructuring, Edmund Burke compared the virtues of a fixed rule of law in relatively peaceful England: “To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.”

In what became the most recurring twist of irony thereinafter, Robespierre was himself guillotined. Talking of revolutions devouring their own children brings us to Joe Biden, who is the frontrunner in the Democratic primary without having announced that he is running. He is also perhaps the first candidate whose candidacy is already toast, even before he starts the sprint.

He seems to be aware of the great danger to his possible campaign, as he’s released a response to the mounting allegations of sexual impropriety and weirdness against him:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273359/joe-biden-and-progressive-hypocrisy-bruce-thornton

One of the more interesting fronts in the Democrat internecine struggle between the rich, old People of Pallor and the “woke,” young People of Color centers on Joe Biden and his penchant for inappropriately touching women. Biden’s bad habit of invading the personal space of women and girls in sexually suggestive ways has long been known and dismissed as a personal quirk of his regular-guy persona.

But with Biden making noises about entering the 2020 presidential race, many Dems on the left are suddenly having epiphanies about Uncle Joe’s sexist sins. With a dozen candidates vying for the nomination, Biden’s long-forgiven antics are now coming back as “woke” political karma.

Once more, for Democrats, claims of alleged identity-politics principle come down to questions of whose political ox is being gored.

Take Lucy Flores, a former Nevada assemblywoman, who claims that five years ago at a political event Biden stood close behind her and kissed her hair, leaving her feeling “uneasy, gross, and confused. She made no bones about her political motivations, telling CNN, “The reason why we’re having these conversations about Vice President Joe Biden is because he’s considering running for president.” Flores supported Bernie Sanders in 2016.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/04/conspicuous-grieving-and-the

The recent tragedy of Christchurch was, for once, not an act of the God of earthquakes but yet another in the long history of actions that serve to remind us all of the “evil that men do”.

One always hopes, against hope, that there will be at least a few days, even a few hours, for those grieving to be allowed to begin to deal with their losses, to come to terms with the enormity of what has occurred, and simply to set their faces to the suffering and pain that must come their way. One hopes, though sadly nowadays it is only a futile hope, that they will be left in peace by the analysers, the 24-hour-news cycle jockeys, the instant pundits and ideologues of all persuasions. But no, it was indeed too much to hope for. Even when the site of the carnage is dear, sweet, innocent New Zealand.

Alas, there is a phenomenon emerging in the age of instant media and of hopelessly divided societies – perhaps we should call it Tarrant’s Law – of the shrinking of the time between an atrocity and the first political comment about it. There can be little doubt that this time lapse is getting shorter and shorter, and that the propensity to be outrageous in one’s politicisation has proportionally increased as well. The prize for Christchurch surely goes to the tweeters who blamed Donald Trump, for “enabling” white supremacist slaughters. But there have been other contenders; politicising tragedy now takes a number of broad forms.

First, there is the naming of adjectival terrorism. The aversion that many in the mainstream and leftist media and across most police forces to placing the “M” adjective in front of terrorists who slaughter Christians and the infidel generally, lest we light a fire under rampant, casual Islamophobia, strangely vanishes in cases where Muslims are the sad victims of the slaughter.

In cases like Christchurch, the adjectives tumble out. There were three here: “Australian”, “white” and “right wing”. Labelling early saves analysts and ideologues the trouble of justifying this later. By then, everyone is usually on board with the descriptors, and therefore with the embedded understanding of why something like this happens. The use of adjectives merely saves you from having to come up with any deeper explanation of what are inevitably complicated matters with both proximate and remote causes.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-primordial-ooze-of-the-collusion-conspiracy/?utm_source=ntnlreview&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=amconswap

The end of the Special Counsel’s investigation into the non-existent conspiracy between President Donald Trump and the Russians has created an army of “Mueller Truthers,” demanding additional investigations. But Republicans are also demanding to know more, specifically how the FBI came to look into collusion, and what that tells us about the tension between America’s political and intelligence worlds. In Rudy Giuliani’s words “Why did this ever start in the first place?”

The primordial ooze for all things Russia began in spring 2016 when the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, through a company called Fusion GPS, hired former MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele to compile a report (“the dossier”) on whatever ties to Russia he could find for Trump.

Steele’s assignment was not to investigate impartially, but to gather dirt aggressively—opposition research, or oppo. He assembled second and third hand stories, then used anonymous sources and Internet chum to purported reveal Trump people roaming about Europe asking various Russians for help, promising sanctions relief, and trading influence for financial deals. Steele also claimed the existence of a “pee tape,” kompromat Putin used to control Trump.

Creating the dossier was only half of Steele’s assignment. The real work was to insert the dossier into American media and intelligence organizations to prevent Trump from winning the election. While only a so-so fiction writer, Steele proved to be a master at running his information operation against America.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/progressive-virtue-signaling-jussie-smollett-morris-dees/

Virtue-signaling is now the refuge of scoundrels.

Since ancient times, it has always been scary when moral auditors audit their own. Or as the Roman satirist Juvenal put it of male guardians entrusted to shield chaste girls from randy males, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“Who will watch the watchmen?”)

When humans sense that there’s neither an earthly nor divine deterrent between them and social acceptance, power, riches, or their appetites, what follows is a foregone conclusion.

Such exemption is precisely the problem with modern American progressivism. It currently enjoys almost a captive mainstream media. It assumes the lockstep approval of the university. The movies that come out of Hollywood pound progressive themes. Most foundations fund race, class, and gender agendas. Popular culture has defined cool and hip as left-wing. In sum, all the secular dispensators of moral approval are hard left.

The result is that progressive actors and institutions understand that even their bad behavior will be contextualized rather than audited. Such medieval-style exemption gives them a natural blank check to overreach and to act unethically, crudely, and even unlawfully — as they might not have if they had expected ramifications.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sallypipes/2019/04/01/britains-version-of-medicare-for-all-is-collapsing/#1cbea0d736b8Nearly a quarter of a million British patients have been waiting more than six months to receive planned medical treatment from the National Health Service, according to a recent report from the Royal College of Surgeons. More than 36,000 have been in treatment queues for nine months or more.

Long waits for care are endemic to government-run, single-payer systems like the NHS. Yet some U.S. lawmakers want to import that model from across the pond. That would be a massive blunder.

Consider how long it takes to get care at the emergency room in Britain. Government data show that hospitals in England only saw 84.2% of patients within four hours in February. That’s well below the country’s goal of treating 95% of patients within four hours — a target the NHS hasn’t hit since 2015.

Now, instead of cutting wait times, the NHS is looking to scrap the goal.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/01/social-justice-is-at-odds-with-american-ideas-of-justice/

What is justice? This complicated question is the subject of much study by philosophers, lawyers, clergy, and laymen. It is often easier to determine the metes and bounds of justice from what it is not than to define what it is in the abstract. Unfair procedures, treating the rich differently from the poor, racial discrimination, or the infusion of bribery and perjury into criminal procedures strike almost everyone as forms of injustice. Likewise, light punishments for serious crimes or excessive punishments for minor ones all have the stench of injustice. In criminal matters, justice chiefly requires that the guilty are punished and the innocent go free.

Individualized Justice
This understanding stems from the traditions of western justice, particularly the Anglo-American variety, which places a premium on the rights of the individual and the importance of fair procedures. This is why our Constitution allows one the right to remain silent and prohibits the use of illegally-obtained evidence, while permitting the accused a defense counsel and a trial by jury. These procedures were the products of centuries of experimentation. They reflect the concern not only with justice but also the fear of the “run-amuck” majority, i.e., the mob.

Anglo-American justice fundamentally is an individual affair. The question it normally confronts is whether a particular person committed a particular offense. One’s station in life, his relative wealth, background, race, and the background of his relatives are supposed to be irrelevant. This is the origin of the expression, “Justice is blind.” Justice deliberately averts its gaze from one’s other social merits and demerits. It presupposes that otherwise good people can do very bad things and that otherwise bad people may not have done the bad thing they may be accused of having done.