RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/marxism_and_marriage.html

In its centuries-long efforts to dismantle the load-bearing structures of traditional and classical liberal society, Marxist dogma in its various forms – communism, socialism, neo-Marxism, Cultural Marxism – has embarked on a sustained campaign to weaken and ultimately to abolish the institution of marriage as it has been commonly understood since time immemorial. The dissolution or misprision of marriage, as a contract between a man and a woman committed to raising a family and recognizing its attendant responsibilities, is a prerequisite for the revolutionary socialist state in which the pivotal loyalty of the individual belongs to the sovereign collective, not to the family.

Advocacy and legislation that sunder the intimate love between a man and a woman, that deprive children of male and female parental role models, that compromise the integrity of the family and that dissolve the purpose of marriage as a guarantor of cultural longevity are indispensable strategies essential to realizing the left’s master plan. Dismissing the nuclear family as an archaic and repressive arrangement whose time has passed, the state would then operate in loco parentis.

The problem for the left is that the family is a traditional dynamic that precedes and eclipses the tenure of the authoritarian state, not only because it encourages a prior allegiance, but because it allows for the retention of inheritance and property rights within the generational unit. This is anathema to the Marxist vision of, in historian Jacob Talmon’s phrase from The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, the “all-property-owning state,” a function of “political Messianism.” The Marxist offensive against marriage may be seen, in part, as the ideological version of a corporate takeover.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/andrew-cuomo-and-american-exceptionalism-1534451407

A potential contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President appears to have just disqualified himself. If he hasn’t, it suggests that the U.S. educational system is in worse shape than many Americans realize.

Politico reports:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo blasted Donald Trump during a bill-signing ceremony on Wednesday, twisting the president’s signature slogan as he made a point about the need for greater women’s equality.

“We’re not going to make America great again — it was never that great,” said Cuomo, a Democrat seeking a third term. “We have not reached greatness. We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged. We will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping against women — 51 percent of our population — is gone and every woman’s full potential is realized and unleashed.”

Mr. Cuomo’s press secretary Dani Lever attempts to clarify in a press release:

The Governor believes America is great and that her full greatness will be fully realized when every man, woman, and child has full equality. America has not yet reached its maximum potential.

As Ms. Lever elaborates, her message seems to sound more and more like her boss’ original statement:

When the President speaks about making America great again – going back in time – he ignores the pain so many endured and that we suffered from slavery, discrimination, segregation, sexism and marginalized women’s contributions.

The New York Times for its part notes the irony in Mr. Cuomo’s attack on the President’s signature campaign slogan:

In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo, who is facing a primary challenge from his Democratic rival, Cynthia Nixon, explained that he saw Mr. Trump’s slogan as backward looking.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/08/ignorance-is-strength.html

When I lived and worked in New York City I would encounter almost every variety of con -artist – from professional beggars who’d utter a plaintive “Please!” with out-stretched palms, to a man who wanted to sell me a rare coin, possibly gold, but obviously a gold-plated lead one.

And there was one who would rake in money by luring people in search of something for nothing and end the day on Fifth Avenue with wads of cash.

He was one of the most successful con-artists. He ran a sidewalk game called “Three Card Monte.” It was a one-man game, but often it required a shill who would appear to the onlookers as a player, who usually picked the winning card. This encouraged other players to bet which of the three cards the dealer laid face down was the queen or six of spades or whatever. The player would invariably point to the wrong card, unaware that the dealer was a cardsharp who could probably deal a whole deck of cards from a dozen Jokers. The random player never won the bet.

The Left and its minions operate in the same fashion.

Brendan O’Neill on Spiked remarked on the banning of Alex Jones from Facebook, YouTube, Google, Apple, and other internet sites:

Despite having millions of subscribers, despite there being a public interest in what he has to say, Jones has been cast out of the world of social media, which is essentially the public square of the 21st century, on the basis that what he says is wicked.

http://www.bostonherald.com/opinion/op_ed/2018/08/ambrose_donald_trump_doing_plenty_for_black_americans

President Trump is making life better for black Americans everywhere you look while his predecessor fumbled. But hey, say his critics, not everything is perfect yet, so don’t give in to his policies. It’s an unbudging, self-inflicted blindness that can hardly be called racism itself even though it is similarly destructive.

The loudest Trump triumph of the moment has been dips to the lowest black unemployment in history, and get this: Jobs confer purpose, they provide pride, they build community, they set one up to help others, they enable social mobility, they lift the spirit. Welfare limps, jobs jog and you don’t get them through semi-socialist policies. You get them through deregulation and tax reform of the Trump kind, encouraging businesses to expand, lowering expenses and inspiring entrepreneurship.

Well, the critics say, there is still a large gap between black and white unemployment, and yes, there is, but you hardly address it by saying current job gains are therefore not that big a deal. We’re told, too, that jobs multiplied during the Obama administration. They did, but slowly as black family income dropped, hindrances known as regulations abounded and President Barack Obama said manufacturing would never be the same again. Manufacturing is now taking off.

To begin with, I don’t agree with Nancy Pelosi on anything. However, the hypocrisy of the Democrat Party throwing her under the bus is perverse. This is especially so from a party that has found common ground with racism, anti-Semitism, scandal mongering and scraping the bottom for “dirt” on adversaries. Pelosi is not a racist like her fellow Democrat Maxine Waters who is so easily tolerated by Keith Ellison’s party. She has never uttered anything like the lyrics of Anthony Delgado running for New York’s District 19, who said “ni**a” and critiqued America’s founders as “dead presidents” who “believe in white supremacy.”

She was also, as my mother might have said “well brought up.” She is the daughter of the late US congressman Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., of Maryland, a hard Roosevelt supporter. As Rafael Medoff wrote in the Jerusalem Post in 2007 (https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Pelosis-father-and-the-Holocaust)

“What is not widely known is that D’Alesandro broke ranks with president Franklin D. Roosevelt on the issues of rescuing Jews from Hitler and creating a Jewish State. D’Alesandro was one of the congressional supporters of the Bergson Group, a maverick Jewish political action committee that challenged the Roosevelt administration’s policies on the Jewish refugee issue during the Holocaust, and later lobbied against British control of Palestine. The Bergson activists used unconventional tactics to draw attention to the plight of Europe’s Jews, including staging theatrical pageants, organizing a march by 400 rabbis to the White House, and placing more than 200 full-page advertisements in newspapers around the country. Some of those ads featured lists of celebrities, prominent intellectuals, and members of Congress who supported the group – including D’Alesandro. D’Alesandro’s involvement with the Bergson Group was remarkable because he was a Democrat who was choosing to support a group that was publicly challenging a Democratic president. ”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-jordan-peterson-1533935771

Caitlin Flanagan writing at the Atlantic’s website, Aug. 9:

There are plenty of reasons for individual readers to dislike Jordan Peterson. . . . There are many legitimate reasons to disagree with him on a number of subjects, and many people of good will do. But there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it?

It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/the_problem_with_gay_marriage.html

Lately I’ve been thinking of a former close friend and colleague who happens to be one of the most brilliant and insightful political writers of our time. I had referenced his work in my own books long before I got to know him and was honored to find after we’d met that the esteem was mutual. I regarded his camaraderie as one of the blessings that conservative affiliations can afford, especially to those toiling in the scribbling trade.

Our relationship lasted many years. We met often when he visited our shores, enjoyed many pleasant, conversation-rich dinners, shared the same circle of friends, continued to read one another’s works with admiration, exchanged emails several times a week, and even wrote for the same magazines. I introduced him to my wife, with whom he developed a friendship and appreciation for her own contributions to the conservative movement. We were like an extended family. What could possibly go wrong?

The short answer is, a lot. Our relationship foundered over the vexed issue of redefining marriage, for my friend was gay and expected us to affirm the legalization of gay marriage in the United States and his forthcoming betrothal, as he referred to it, to his longtime partner. This we could not do. He objected to a rather obscure Facebook comment in which my wife deplored how the gay lobby’s justifiable plea for tolerance, with which she was fully on board, had morphed into the triumphalist demand for the unconditional celebration of all things gay, from gay politicking to Gay Pride to so-called gay marriage.

A lazy eye, technically amblyopia, is a childhood disorder of sight in which each eye sees a single object but the brain does not fuse the two objects into one single object – the child sees double. Double vision is intolerable to a human being so the brain turns one eye off – hence the name lazy eye. The vision in the turned off eye weakens sometimes to the point of blindness. The goal of treatment is to have both eyes see the object and for the brain to fuse the twin images into a single object. Treatment for amblyopia is designed to force the patient to use the lazy eye. Usually the child wears an ocular patch over the strong eye that forces him/her to use the weaker eye thereby strengthening its vision. Treatment is extremely uncomfortable for the child and often resisted because the vision in the lazy eye is so much weaker than the vision in the strong eye.

So it is with cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a theory developed in the 1950s by American psychologist Leon Festinger who said that inconsistency between thoughts or between thoughts and actions leads to discomfort (dissonance) which motivates changes in thoughts and behavior. When the cognitive dissonance becomes too overwhelming the person turns one of the thoughts off. People cannot tolerate double vision and they cannot tolerate inconsistency – they seek homeostasis.

According to Festinger, “The motivation to reduce dissonance is directly proportional to the magnitude and importance of the discrepant cognitions, and inversely proportional to the magnitude and importance of the consistent cognitions.” So, the more important the subject of the discrepancy the more motivated the person is to end the discordance.

Cognitive dissonance in the 21st century has been weaponized and is the preferred leftist strategy being used to destabilize and drive America crazy – it is a malicious tool of social engineering that impels behavior change. The purpose of leftist cognitive dissonance is submission to its tenets of political correctness, moral relativity, and historical revisionism. The left wants its contradictory ideas and norms to overwhelm the population with anxiety so that traditional norms are turned off and unconventional leftist norms accepted. The left wants one eyed vision.

http://washingtonjewishweek.com/47645/summer-is-a-time-for-jewish-unity-and-savi

Working for Jewish unity should have been an imperative for Jews the world over this summer. All summer long Islamic terrorists in Gaza have been sending incendiary kites in order to set fire to Israeli farmland and forests. The terrorists have also been launching barrages of missiles aimed at Israeli civilian neighborhoods. One firebomb balloon landed in the yard of a kindergarten in the southern Israeli moshav of Tkuma. All of this while the Jewish people were in the midst of the very season when we mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple.

To make matters worse, there were reports of Jews in the United States and in Britain seemingly showing more concern for our adversaries than our fellow Jews. News headlines about Kaddish being recited for Hamas terrorists, Birthright participants being led off of tours to learn about “the occupation,” and Jewish summer camp counselors conspiring to teach their campers the Palestinian narrative seemed all too frequent this summer.

That is why the news that a Magen David Adom ambulance was donated by a coalition of synagogues in suburban Philadelphia was especially encouraging and heartwarming to hear just before Tisha B’Av.

Unfortunately, at this time, Israelis need to know that Red Magen David Adom ambulances must be depended upon once again to save the lives of Jews.

The Talmud Bavli in Sanhedrin 37a states: “Anyone who saves the life of one of the children of Israel, the verse ascribes him credit as if he saved an entire world.”