RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2020/10/20/the-toobin-zoom-is-even-worse-than-we-thought-heres-what-they-were-talking-about-n1071724

Jeffry Toobin, a CNN contributor and writer at The New Yorker, got caught tickling his pickle on a work Zoom call. This wasn’t a situation where he thought he had hung up but hadn’t. Oh no. Toobin was purposefully masturbating during a work call.

He claims he thought he had “muted the video” but left it on “accidentally.” But that’s not believable, because when turning the camera off on Zoom, there is an avatar where the video used to be. How does he expect us to believe he did not check this before deciding to whip out wee Willie? And worse, why is that a good excuse for flogging the dolphin during a work call? Do we need congressional intervention to tell us that being an Army of One on a Zoom call is the wrong thing to do? Do we need a new criminal code for 2020 specifying that hoisting your own petard while attending a conference call is offensive to others? It’s sad that humans can’t just self-police.

Toobin is rabidly anti-Trump as any famous journalist must be. He’s also already well-known for running afoul of the #MeToo crowd when Patty Hearst blasted him for sensationalizing her rape in his book American Heiress in 2018. Fox canceled plans for a movie based on the book after Hearst got through with Toobin.

https://babylonbee.com/news/portland-erects-statue-in-honor-of-antifa-rioters-who-tore-down-all-the-statues

PORTLAND, OR—In a powerful and stunning move, the city of Portland has decided to memorialize its bravest heroes and their courageous acts of toppling racist statues. The city has now erected a statue of these statue-toppling Antifa rioters to forever commemorate them for their efforts.

“Even when they knew they could do whatever they wanted without repercussions, and with the full support of the media, these brave freedom fighters decided to tear down statues anyway!” said Mayor Ted Wheeler holding back tears at the statue’s unveiling. “It is my great privilege to honor these gender non-conforming persons with this taxpayer-funded statue.”

One of the Antifa heroes, who was wearing a black leather jacket replete with anarchist symbols and wielding a crowbar, stopped by to give a comment. “It’s time we rise up against racists like Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt! With every window we break, business we burn, and statue we topple, we stand against fascism and grow one step closer to ending oppression!”

https://www.jns.org/how-the-armenian-azerbaijani-conflict-could-impact-israels-regio

Over the last several weeks, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been engaged in an escalating conflict centered around a decades-long dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory but has illegally occupied by Armenia since their first war ended in 1994.

While this conflict seemingly revolves around a dispute between two small Caucasus countries, it has larger regional and even global implications.

While the conflict in the Caucasus does not directly threaten Israel, its long-standing close ties with Azerbaijan and fledgling relations with Armenia—coupled with the larger geopolitical landscape of the region involving heavyweights Turkey, Russia and Iran—put the Jewish state on high alert for developments.

“Israel and Azerbaijan maintain a strategic alliance. It is not just about arms sales or oil, but a very deep strategic cooperation,” Brenda Shaffer, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, told JNS.

“Azerbaijan’s long-term open friendship with Israel has helped other Muslim-majority states establish open cooperation with Israel and even contributed to the current blossoming of ties between Israel and several Muslim-majority states, like the UAE.”

She said that “Azerbaijan, despite bordering Iran, was not afraid to openly cooperate with Israel over the years. This showed other Muslim majority states that they can, without worrying about repercussions from Iran or other states, establish open cooperation with Israel.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-former-catholic-dances-with-the-torah-11602198181?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

“The night of Simchat Torah is usually one of the most raucous of the Jewish year. Jubilant songs are sung, and dancing suffuses the sanctuary as the Torah scroll is passed from Jew to Jew.”

Stephen Dubner, a co-author of “Freakonomics,” is the son of Jewish parents who converted to Catholicism and raised him in their newfound faith. Mr. Dubner’s 1998 memoir, “Turbulent Souls,” recounts his later return to Judaism. His turning point came when his then-girlfriend suggested that he visit a synagogue. Mr. Dubner did so reluctantly, and on arriving instantly regretted the decision, surprised by “how little it felt like Church,” and feeling “like an intruder, perhaps an imposter.”

Then the Torah came out of the ark. Suddenly, Mr. Dubner writes, “The air itself seemed to grow lighter, easier to breathe.” As all in attendance hurried over to kiss the scroll bearing the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, he did likewise. “A resonance, a gratefulness, a relief, blistered its way inside me: It is the book they are venerating here.” Mr. Dubner today has a Jewish family. His son, Solomon, is named for Mr. Dubner’s father, who went by Paul. His rediscovery of his roots began with a synagogue experience: “The way a Jew greeted the Torah, as though it contained everything he would ever need, everything that had ever been known or could ever be known.”

The Torah scroll is the most sacred object of Jewish life and the centerpiece of its Sabbath service. Every week it is escorted from the dark. A portion is read aloud in the synagogue, and the scroll is reverently returned to its place. On the next Sabbath, we pick up the text where we left off; and this weekend, on a holiday known as Simchat Torah, or “The Joy of the Torah,” we achieve the annual completion of the scroll.

What Jews celebrate on this day is not only that the Torah is completed, but that we can begin it again. While Christians often call their reading of scripture “Bible study,” Jewish parlance refers to “learning Torah.” It’s not a review, but a constant search for new insights. “One cannot compare,” the Talmudic rabbis reflected, “one who has learned one-hundred times to one who has done so for the one-hundred and first.” The biblical books contain everything we could ever know.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/leadership-in-a-time-of-pandemonium?token

It is difficult, to put it mildly, to peer through the blinding blizzards of partisan mainstream media reporting and venomous malice on social media to detect what is actually happening in both American and British political life.

And in fairness to everyone seeking to explain it all, the almost daily shocks being produced by one extraordinary development after another mean that all previous political signposts have been demolished by the storm.

Like the north star, however, there’s one constant we should keep in sight as we try to decipher the fortunes of both US president Donald Trump and British prime minister Boris Johnson. That constant is why each of them was brought to power. 

Although the circumstances are obviously different, the reason was fundamentally the same. Millions of people, who had had it up to here with an arrogant and unaccountable political and cultural establishment intent upon destroying their right to live in a national home of recognisably shared, historic values and traditions and under a rule of law reflecting their own sovereign and democratic consensus, seized the opportunity to elect a leader who promised to uphold that right against that establishment.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/why-anti-zionism-is-antisemitism?

The indivisible relationship explains much, but few, alas, acknowledge it.

A few days ago Mia Werner, a  Jewish student at the University of Portland, Oregon, described being the victim of an antisemitic incident on her Middle East politics course. You can read her account here. 

The incident occurred when her professor brought in an Iranian dissident as a visiting speaker. Werner writes: 

When he spoke to us, what ensued was three long hours of egregious prejudice. He espoused support for recognised terrorist groups, like Hamas and the Houthis. He called all American soldiers cowards. He went on a long-winded tirade about how Iran could and should blow Israel off the face of the earth. Then he explained how no one in that region was antisemitic. He looked me in the eye and told me that I could go anywhere I wanted to in the Middle East and I wouldn’t be murdered for being a woman nor for being Jewish (lucky me). They would only kill me if I said I supported the existence of Israel, if I admitted to being a Zionist.  

Throughout the entire three hours, my professor never said a word. She sat a few chairs down from me, silently watching as this man spewed absurd and harmful erasure of the persecution of the Jewish people.

The indivisible relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is little understood, even among those who have a reasonably benign view of Israel. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/03/anti-americanism-then-and-now/

The habit of liberal accommodation has precipitated a crisis in what one used to be able to call, without apology, manly self-confidence.

As members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter continue their nightly exercise of kinetic economic redistribution, and protestors assemble outside Walter Reed Hospital, where President Trump is receiving treatment for the Wuhan Flu, to shout anti-Trump slogans, I thought it might be useful to step back and consider this current wave of anti-American sentiment in historical context. 

Anti-Americanism is not new, of course. It was, as many writers have noted, a staple of 1960s’ radicalism. What seems novel today, however, is the extent to which radical anti-American sentiment has installed itself into the heart of many institutions that, until about 15 minutes ago, were pillars of the American establishment. How odd that (Democratic) members of Congress should lament that America is guilty, and has always been guilty, of “systemic racism,” etc., etc. Somehow, the fact that Boston Mayor Martin Walsh hoisted the Chinese Communist flag in front of City Hall there epitomizes the rot.

Anti-Americanism is hard to argue with. I don’t mean that there are good arguments in favor of the phenomenon. Quite the contrary: insofar as arguments enter the arena at all, they usually lean heavily on assertion backed up by belligerence and cliché. 

But it is seldom that argument does enter. Anti-Americanism has always been more a matter of attitude than argument. It depends on, it draws its strength from, the wells of passion, not reason. The composition of that passion is complex and shifting. Envy generally enters into it, as does a congeries of political attitudes that the literary critic Frederick Crews aptly dubbed “Left Eclecticism”: a bit of cut-rate Marxism to start with, leavened with a dollop of some trendy academic theory, a dash of utopian fantasy and snobbery, seasoned to taste with resentment and paranoia. 

The late Paul Hollander provided a connoisseur’s overview of the favored configurations in his classic compendium Anti-Americanism: Irrational & Rational, first published in 1995. Reading through Hollander’s inventory, one is again and again struck by the combination of virulence and absolutism that fuels expressions of anti-Americanism. Hollander quotes the Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov, who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in the late 1970s: 

Even now, after living in America for more than five years, I keep wondering what provokes so many people in Latin America, Russia, and Europe to anti-American sentiments of such intensity that it can only be called hatred. There is something oddly hysterical about it all.

https://spectator.us/testing-positive-coronavirus-donald-trump/

Almost everyone, no matter his political coloration, has been predicting that the presidential election would be close. I was thinking of writing a column in the next few days arguing against this conventional position. I am no Nate Silver, psephologist to the stars, but the more I looked around, the more it seemed to me that President Trump was going to win handsomely. I was thinking he would take all the states he took last time, with the possible exception of Wisconsin (10 electoral votes). Further, it seemed to me that he had a good chance to pick up Nevada (6 votes), Minnesota (10) and New Hampshire (4). I even thought that Colorado (9 votes) and Virginia (13) might be in play.

The President’s announcement earlier today that he and Melania had tested positive for the Chinese flu has made me pause to reconsider that prognostication.

One of the reasons I was so upbeat in my psephological prophecy was the vigor of the President’s campaign. Notwithstanding the restrictions imposed on public gatherings by our latest Chinese import, his team has devised and robust strategy for him to campaign safely and effectively. His rallies are outdoors, usually involve Air Force One as an elegant prop, and the draw large and enthusiastic crowds.

But wait, how can I say that these rallies are safe when the President has just tested positive for COVID? I won’t give you a lecture about the difference between post hoc and propter hoc but will merely observe that we have no idea from where the President was exposed to the virus.

Naturally, the left is having none of. The Los Angeles Times, for example, wheeled into print with an editorial gleefully lambasting the President for his ‘recklessness’ (in fact ‘deadly, foolish recklessness’).

Moreover, we do not know whether he will sicken from the exposure. The vast majority of people who test positive are asymptomatic, many more experience on mild symptoms.