RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-contemptible-oprah-sussex-circus?token

It will take time before the smoke of battle clears from the Oprah Winfrey interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and we can more properly assess its impact. It is unlikely, however, to dent support for the monarchy in Britain. 

Indeed, the whole Oprah/Sussex circus tells us nothing about the Royal Family that withstands proper scrutiny. It tells us a great deal more about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and America itself. And none of it is good. 

From the reported reaction, it seems America is overwhelmingly on the side of Meghan and unquestioningly believes the preposterous story she has told of her own alleged persecution and suffering at the hands of the royals (other than the Queen herself, who by Meghan’s own account treated her with nothing but kindness and has now had her whole family smeared and trashed for her pains). 

In America, there seems precious little desire or ability to subject the Sussexes’ denunciation to anything like the scepticism it requires. For the whole thing was not only an attempt to besmirch the Royal Family by spraying a poisonous miasma of unspecific smears and unsubstantiated assertions. It was also riddled with astonishing ignorance and contradictions.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/britain-the-battle-royal/91440/

Prince Harry and Meghan Markel no doubt stopped short, in their interview with Oprah Winfrey, of the offense of lèse-majesté. It’s no longer illegal in Britain to deface the dignity of the crown, anyhow, at least not in any practical sense. Then again, too, their unburdening themselves of their grievances seems calculated to wound a monarchy that, at least in our view, Britons are likely to need more rather than less in the generation ahead.

That might sound like an odd sentiment from these quarters. The New York Sun is, after all, a tribune of republican principles. Yet we make no secret of our admiration for Britain and, most recently, its scramble for independence from the European Union. It has just placed a strategic bet on its own Commonwealth, and it’s going to need the monarchy that does so much to hold it together.

Even without these larger issues, the drama of the Sussexes is simply unseemly. In Ms. Markle’s own telling, it began with a quarrel over wedding dresses, when her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Cambridge, made her cry. To plunge from there to a charge of racism is horrifying, all the more so in the way it was done; Meghan, almost in passing, mentions “concerns and conversations” about “how dark” Archie’s “skin might be when he’s born . . .”

That left Ms. Winfrey staring, open-mouthed, for several long seconds until she exclaimed “What?!” At one point she asked: “Who is having that conversation with you?” It elicited no clarifying answer. So it’s a classic small group libel. By refusing to name the alleged racist, British journalist Daniel Johnson writes, Harry and Meghan must know that they are casting aspersions on the entire royal family.

To make matters worse, Prince Harry, according to Ms. Winfrey, later asked her to make clear that the culprit wasn’t his grandmother or grandfather, meaning the Queen or Prince Philip. That has the effect of focusing the aspersions on an even smaller group. All wrapped in the rhetorical device of preterition, the damning of someone or something — in this case the monarchy — while suggesting one is not doing so.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9338343/PIERS-MORGAN-Meghan-Harrys-nauseating-two-hour-Oprah-whine-athon-disgraceful-diatribe.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailUK

Salacious.Scandalous.Sanctimonious.Spectacularly self-serving.

Those were just my initial thoughts after ten minutes of the Oprah whine-athon with Meghan and Harry, and while restricting myself to only using words beginning with the letter ‘s’.

By the time I’d finished the whole two-hour orgy of pious, self-indulgent, score-settling twaddle, the steam was erupting out of my ears like an exploding geyser, and my lexicon of rageful epithets extended to the full range of the alphabet.

Never have I watched a more repulsively disingenuous interview.Nor one more horrendously hypocritical or contradictory.

Here we had the Duke and Duchess of Privacy flinging out the filthy family laundry for the delectation of tens of millions of people all over the world, whilst simultaneously bleating about press intrusion.

They moaned about the terrible pain of their royal titles but were also outraged their son Archie wasn’t allowed to be a Prince.

They told of their constant trauma from nasty newspaper stories, but repeatedly insisted they never read any of them.

They claimed they were forced to sign gazillion-dollar deals with Netflix and Spotify because Prince Charles cut off their allowance, despite Harry inheriting millions from his late mother Princess Diana and having his entire life bankrolled by the Royal Family.

And so, it went nauseatingly on.

In the middle of a pandemic that has already taken over 2.5 million lives, a staggeringly rich and entitled couple living in a $14 million sun-kissed California mansion wanted us all to know that THEY are the real victims around here.

Joe Biden Has Not Held Solo Press Conference in 42 Days, Setting 100-Year Record https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/03/03/joe-biden-has-not-held-solo-press-conference-42-days-setting-100-year-record/

 
So far, Biden is all gloom and no sunshine http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michael/reagan030121.php3

Banned Dr. Seuss Books Selling for Hundreds of Dollars on eBay https://www.theepochtimes.com/banned-dr-seuss-books-selling-for-hundreds-of-dollars-on-ebay_3719454.html

 
Flashback: Obamas Hosted Special Events at WH — ‘Dr. Seuss Books Still Inspire Children Throughout the World’ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/03/03/flashback-obamas-hosted-special-events-at-wh-dr-seuss-books-still-inspire-children-throughout-the-world/

‘Too Radical for Obama’: Crenshaw Makes Observation About Dr. Seuss Critics https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2021/03/03/more-dr-seuss-books-to-be-discontinued-n2585560?

  
Just What You’ve Been Waiting For: Obamas to Produce All-Muslim Podcast for Ramadan https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2021/03/01/just-what-youve-been-waiting-for-obamas-to-produce-all-muslim-podcast-for-ramadan-n1429234 
 
Conservative actors speak out on ‘cancel culture’ in Hollywood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i56iOVLjrpE

 
108 Illegal Immigrants Released by Border Patrol in Texas Tested Positive for COVID-19: Officials https://thejewishvoice.com/2021/03/108-illegal-immigrants-released-by-border-patrol-in-texas-tested-positive-for-covid-19-officials/

 
Texas A.G. Paxton: Biden Is Letting ‘More COVID’ into U.S. Through Border, Texas Is Allowing Personal Choice https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/03/03/texas-a-g-paxton-biden-is-letting-more-covid-into-u-s-through-border-texas-is-allowing-personal-choice/

https://spectator.org/covid-lockdowns-experts/

It has now been nearly a year since “public health experts” began appearing on television talk shows insisting that, to survive COVID-19, the nation would have to pursue unprecedented mitigation policies. They told us that our salvation required draconian measures such as school closures, stay-at-home orders, and business lockdowns. Moreover, we were advised not to expect a fast return to our normal lives. In early April 2020, for example, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel solemnly assured us, “We will not be able to return to normalcy until we find a vaccine…. We need to prepare ourselves for this to last 18 months or so and for the toll that it will take.”

The good doctor didn’t mention that, for a man of his means, “the toll that it will take” would be negligible even as it disrupted the education of millions of children, rendered their parents unemployed, and wreaked social and psychological havoc throughout society. The sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci echoed Dr. Zeke: “I know it’s difficult … this is inconvenient from an economic and a personal standpoint, but we just have to do it.” Not coincidentally, Fauci is the highest-paid bureaucrat in Washington. But not all public health experts accepted the cost-benefit analyses offered by Drs. Emanuel and Fauci.

Among the first actual epidemiologists who advised that more information was needed before draconian mitigation measures could be scientifically justified was Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis of the Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Ioannidis questioned the reasoning used by people like Emanuel and Fauci in an essay published in STAT, where he wrote that the precipitous response to the pandemic was “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco” and that decisions of monumental significance were being made without truly dependable data concerning how many people had been infected:

The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed.… In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work.… [w]e don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health.

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/why-zionists-must-learn-to-laugh/2021/02/18/

“Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote his greatest novel about the Biblical hero Samson. In the most well-known passage of the book, Samson declares: “Tell [the Jewish people] three things in my name, and not two: they must get iron [i.e., weapons]; they must choose a king; and they must learn to laugh.”

Synagogues are being vandalized. Jews are being attacked. University professors and student governments endorse boycotts of Israel and call IDF soldiers “war criminals.” The UN singles out Israel time and again for criticism as Iran and its proxies threaten to wipe Israel off the map.

We stare in horror at the headlines. Media bias against Israel rages out of control while the leaders of most Jewish organizations are reduced to paralysis, focus on nonsense, or – tragically and shamefully – side with our enemies.

Seeing all these developments, a chorus of pundits predict doom and gloom. Many friends of Israel think the world has gone mad while “experts” see all signs pointing to catastrophe ahead.

I disagree. I believe 2021 could prove to be a decisive year for Zionism in America, and it’s up to those of us who consider ourselves Zionists to decide whether to be incapacitated by worry or move forward with confidence.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/03/t-s-eliot-and-the-jews

There recur in the work of ­T. S. Eliot two obsessions that make one cringe: his Jew-­hatred and his contempt for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The first is sometimes excused as a reflection of ambient prejudice, the second as critical crankiness. In fact, these obsessions have a common source. The characteristically Jewish contribution to Western literature is the tragicomedy, which reached one of its peaks in Hamlet. Just as he disliked the Jews in general, Eliot rejected what might be termed the Jewish sensibility in culture.

None of this would concern us if Eliot were not the author of some important poems and even more important lines. There is no question about Eliot’s rank among the leading English-language poets of the past century, nor about his critical acumen. The issue is the end to which he directed his ability.

If the canonical definition of anti-Semitism is hating the Jews more than is absolutely necessary, the word surely applies to Eliot. One finds the stray smirk about Jews in the verse of ­Belloc and Chesterton, but Eliot, as Anthony ­Julius observed, makes Jew-hatred into art. No other poet employed so great a talent to elicit as much loathing as Eliot did in the “Bleistein” poems. First published in 1920 and reprinted in all subsequent editions of Eliot’s poetry through 1963, “Burbank with a ­Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar” depicts a “­Chicago Semite Viennese” tourist on the Rialto Bridge in Venice, a nod to Shylock. He is less than a rat: “A lustreless protrusive eye / Stares from the protozoic slime. . . . The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot.” Eliot revisited ­Bleistein in his masterwork, The Waste Land. The passage was dropped from the initial printings on the advice of Ezra Pound, who thought it too inflammatory, but it appeared posthumously in the annotated edition:

Full fathom five your Bleistein lies
Under the flatfish and the squids.
Graves’ Disease in a dead jew’s eyes!
When the crabs have eat the lids
Lower than the wharf rats dive
          Though he suffer a sea-change
          Still expensive rich and strange.

My favorite jazz pianist Chick Corea died yesterday. He was a brilliant virtuoso in many music forms- salsa, classical and pop-but in jazz he was Olympian.  He always sprinkled humor and charming narrative and audience participation in his live performances. And he always championed other musicians:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khwF8v6voIE

The last time I saw and heard him live was in a joint performance with the equally legendary Herbie Hancock a few years ago. The played and joked and even invited Karim Abdul Jabbar to the stage whose 7.2 height dwarfed them both as they straddled him, much to the amusement of the audience.

Now Chick Corea is playing for the angels…..rsk

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/israeli-behind-game-changing-covid-nasal-spray-says-its-99-9-effective/?fbclid=IwAR1Rc4bbw3F_OzgOloJWrq4gWsKO_rOAsx3alPUFPS5TpujTtIJLM7bKqPI

The Israeli co-founder of a nasal spray that kills 99.9% of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, has told Jewish News that she believes the spray will be a game changer in the fight against Covid-19.

Dr Gilly Regev, who co-founded SaNOtize Research and Development Corp. based in Vancouver, Canada explained via telephone that “If you use it daily, I really believe you won’t be affected by Covid-19. We have shown in the clinical trials that the people who used it did not get infected.”The first UK clinical trials for The SaNOtize Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray (NONS) begins this week.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9163665/amp/Chief-Justice-John-Roberts-does-NOT-want-preside-Donald-Trumps-second-impeachment-trial.html?__twitter_impression=true

Trump’s historic second impeachment trial will take place after he leaves office
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has yet to send over impeachment article
House impeached Trump for ‘incitement of insurrection’
Roberts presided over first impeachment even while doing daily duties at Supreme Court
During that trial Roberts was forced to read aloud questions from lawmakers furious over the failure of the trial to include witness testimony 

Chief Justice John Roberts is eager to avoid presiding over Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial – after he became a lightning rod during the first one.

Just as the Senate is seeking to ascertain how it might proceed with an impeachment trial without blowing up the start of Joe Biden’s term, the Supreme Court could face its own business being rearranged.

The Constitution states that ‘When the President of the United States is tried the Chief Justice shall preside.’

But with the Senate having been in recess since the House voted to impeach, the trial will occur when Trump is no longer in office – potentially giving Roberts an out.