RUTHFULLY YOURS

I knew and appreciated  Helen Freedman  the co-Executive Director of Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI) for decades. We spoke recently, and weakened as she was, she never lost that particular fight and determination to support Israel and its legitimate and historic claim to sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. She walked the walk in countless visits and missions to the whole area and especially to Hebron, the first capital of the Jewish people. She was buried there yesterday.

My condolences to Judy Kadish, Helen’s daughter and co-Director of AFSI, to Charlie, to her son, to her wonderful brother and sister-in law. Your great loss is shared by thousands and all present and past members of Americans for A Safe Israel. Her memory is a blessing.

Ruth King

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/racism-america-worse-nazi-germany-bruce-bawer/

As Shelby Steele has famously pointed out, there are two basic approaches that black American public figures take when addressing whites. There are “challengers,” such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who “say you are racist until you prove otherwise.” Then there are “bargainers,” who send white Americans a message to the effect that “I won’t rub America’s racism in your face if you won’t hold my race against me.” Writing in 2007, Steele identified Oprah Winfrey and then presidential candidate Barack Obama as bargainers. Of course, after the election Obama flipped, transforming into a world-class racism scold. That left Oprah, who for a long time was America’s #1 bargainer, and who owes her popularity – and hence her status as the richest black person in America – largely to her longtime tendency to celebrate America for the opportunities it offers rather than to excoriate it for its sins.

Oprah remained a bargainer, more or less, until very recently, when, in a transparent effort to play catch-up with the Black Lives Matter movement, she put Breonna Taylor – who was shot to death on March 13 by Louisville police officers – on the cover of O Magazine and paid for 26 billboards demanding the perpetrators’ arrest. Continuing down the same path, Oprah has now glowingly endorsed Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the latest in the current wave of bestselling, poorly written jeremiads depicting America as a cesspit of race hatred. Announcing on August 5 that Caste was her new Book Club selection, Oprah gushed: “I don’t think that there has ever been another pick that has been as vital as this one. This book might well save us.”

Is Wilkerson’s book the key to America’s salvation? On the contrary, Wilkerson, a former Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, has written a truly execrable and genuinely dangerous tome which, along with Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, seems destined to further Obama’s wicked work of sowing racial discord in the least racist county on earth.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-thin-veneer-of-american-civilization/

In a flash, it’s been blown away, revealing the barbarism beneath. The seeds of destruction were planted long ago.

 N ine months ago, New York was a thriving, though poorly governed, metropolis. It was coasting on the more or less good governance of its prior two mayors and on its ancestral role as the global nexus of finance and capital.

The city is now something out of a postmodern apocalyptic movie, reeling from the effects of a neutron bomb. Ditto in varying degrees Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — the anti-broken-windows metropolises of America. Walking in San Francisco today reminds me of visiting Old Cairo in 1973, although the latter lacked the needles and feces of the former.

At the present increasing rate of police defunding, homeless encampments, the emptying of jails and prisons, the green-lighting of rioting and vandalism, the flight of the wealthy, the revolutionary change to Skype/Zoom tele-working, and the exodus of upper-middle-class liberal families to safe houses in the New York and New England countryside, once beautiful New York City is in danger of becoming the nation’s aneurysm. That is, after the “recovery,” it and other blue cities may be seen as permanent weak veins and arteries prone to sudden fatal hemorrhaging that could implode at any moment, and thus may become metaphorically tied off, as the country reroutes around them.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/10/wealth-tax-on-billionaires-great-if-you-want-stagnation-fewer-jobs-more-poverty/

Senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has another bright socialist idea: A 60% wealth tax on billionaires to pay for nationalized health care for a year. Such nuttiness would be easy to ignore were it not for the fact he’s now the driving intellectual force behind Joe Biden’s basement-based presidential campaign.

As any economist worth his salt will tell you, a wealth tax is perhaps the most pernicious tax, since it punishes people retroactively for their hard work, thrift and smart investments.

Not only does it dissuade people from accumulating wealth, but it also dramatically reduces the amount of capital in our economy. Everyone will be poorer, with lower incomes for all and fewer jobs as the inevitable result.

We already had this debate, if you recall, last year. Both Sanders and his socialist pal Sen. Elizabeth Warren both brought it up. It was one of the many reasons why voters rejected both Sanders and Warren, favoring instead the mentally challenged Biden.

Yet, the wealth tax keeps getting burped up like a bad meal. Maybe with COVID-19 lockdowns and the public’s very real economic worries, the Sanders-led left (and, by extension, Biden) thinks it can take advantage and finally get a wealth tax passed. Or maybe it’s just political theatrics.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-take-a-dim-view-of-todays-lightbulbs-11597006857?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

I like to think of myself as a smart shopper who knows what to look for when buying a car or a computer—or even a townhouse. But recently I was flummoxed looking at a display of lightbulbs: Which packet of four bulbs should I buy? Since this was a chain pharmacy, there was no one to ask for help. I decided to buy the cheapest pack, but I kept the sales slip. I thought I might want to return the packet after learning more about lightbulbs.

When I got home I found an article on the internet that explained what to look for in a lightbulb. Every writer admits that buying a lightbulb is not easy. There are so many types of bulbs: standard incandescent bulbs, fluorescent tubes, compact fluorescent swirls, halogen pucks and LEDs. Though I had no idea what a “halogen puck” is, I read on, in search of illumination.

I learned about lumens, which measure how bright the light is. Maybe all I need to know about lightbulbs is how many lumens is the equivalent of a 100-watt bulb, which is the lightbulb I used to buy. But I soon realized that I need to choose the kind of lightbulb I want before I check out the lumens. I ruled out fluorescent bulbs because I hate fluorescent light. LED bulbs are popular but they are expensive. They last much longer than other lightbulbs—11 years, according to one account, as opposed to roughly one year for an incandescent bulb. But I’m 79, so why should I spend twice as much money for lightbulbs that probably will outlast me?

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/free-speech/2020/08/an-age-of-wretched-and-rotten-rhetoric/

“Words are everything, the precursor to fierce ideas and therefore of sound politics. In an era when a misjudged word can and will end a career beneath a social media pile-on, ideas will lack vigour and politics be reduced to the predictably poor. Meanwhile, the town square becomes a bloody battleground, the pursuit of truth a casualty found wrapped in the dead arms of butchered civility.”

Politics becomes wretched when the ideas in circulation turn bad, and ideas degenerate when the rhetoric is rotten. The words are everything. They are the lungs of politics and the foundation upon which parties, factions, fiefdoms and scholarship of all uniforms is built. Regrettably, the poverty of our political discourse is such that it has divided us to the point of conquering us. It would have taken those with the powers of prophesy to predict that the leaders of the Free World – the US – would be ravaged by large-scale civil unrest in 2020. With November’s US presidential election looming it is impossible to envisage a scenario – regardless of the result – where the looting, violence and diabolical dialogue is ameliorated one iota. The discourse is sick with no vaccine being developed and, problematically, this illness has multiple causes.

At some point in the not too distant past, a fissure opened up, irreversibly separating the warring blocs and creating the perfect wasteland for bloody tribalism and rage without sage. The fissure grows wider as the months roll on and the opposing combatants shriek more and listen less.

Far below in the abyss of this political and cultural rupture dwell the everyday people of the world, just trying to get on with their lives. Bewildered and baffled, they stare up and watch the verbal punch-ups, trying to follow the shots being fired as though they were spectators of a tennis match to the death. Up above in the battleground, diplomacy and measured words are muddied corpses being squelched into the trenches by the boots of dogged partisanship and zero-sum tactics. Because this is a war, it is personal. Talk to either sides’ foot soldiers and you quickly see the fire in the belly and the survivalism in the eyes. Incensed, they don’t seek allies, but subordination. Utter and complete victory is the name of the game. Any suggestion of peace talks or compromise would sooner see an individual sacrificed as cannon fodder than moved up the ranks. The biggest casualty in this squalor is, of course, the truth and measured solutions to real problems.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

It may seem hyperbolic and overly provocative to refer to the “wokeness” that has permeated our society as a cultural revolution; for it brings to mind China’s Cultural Revolution that lasted ten years and caused, perhaps, twenty million lives. On the other hand, it may prove to be longer lasting but less deadly, more like the Romanticists of the 19th Century, who questioned the intellectual foundations of Enlightenment-derived, reason-based western culture. Like then, todays “woke” have abandoned liberalism and objective truth for narratives and stories based on the belief we live in a Marxian world of oppressors and oppressed.

Wokeness: noun, a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality. (Definition provided by the Cambridge English Dictionary.) That definition sounds harmless. We should all be concerned about social problems, helping the needy, playing fair, being respectful and applying the Golden Rule. But wokeness steps across the line. It takes its ideology from “critical theory,” a social philosophy that stems from Karl Marx and the 1930s Frankfurt School. Critical theory offers social justice in place of real justice. It challenges traditional power centers; though it does not permit challenges to its own structure. To be woke, in this sense, is to be awake to the concept that what matters is diversity of identities, not ideas – that, for example, all blacks, all gays, all women should express ideas based on identity, not individual thought. Individual opinions are seen as oppressive. Black conservatives are anomalous, in that it is claimed they support white oppression. (I suspect, however, if one asked Condoleezza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Alveda King, Clarence Thomas, Candace Owens, Tim Scott or scores of other Black conservatives if that were true, the accusation would be denied.)

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/08/cowardice-la-carte.html

cowardice

: lack of courage or firmness of purpose

Synonyms

cowardliness, 
cravenness, 
dastardliness, 
gutlessness, 
poltroonery, 
pusillanimity, 
spinelessness

High Noon

I never mind all the political “Red Scare” info surrounding “High Noon” (released 1952), nor the conflicts between Carl Forman and  Fred Zinnemann, the associate producers. What fascinates me about the film is not the gun fights, but rather the variety of  expressions of cowardice and of the betrayal of Will Kane, (played by Gary Cooper ) the marshal of the town of Hadleyville in the Arizona Territory, as he prepares to face a gang of killers who arrive to kill him. He can find no one willing to be deputized to help him face the gang. He experiences hostility, indifference, and hatred,

The cowardice evokes  for me the current cowardice of Americans who are willing to submit to the COVID-19 panic and are willing to don face masks and buckle into “social distancing” in their behavior. They are willing to wear face masks even during their personal, one-on-one  encounters.

https://spectator.us/never-virus-been-oversold/

There’s nothing unprecedented about COVID-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain: scaled up for today’s population, the equivalent of 42,000, while the UK’s (statistically flawed) COVID death total now stands at 46,000. Globally, the Asian flu was vastly more lethal, causing between two and four million deaths. The Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 also slew up to four million people worldwide, including 80,000 Britons. Yet in both instances, life went on.

What is unprecedented: never has a virus been so oversold. Why, I’d like to sign on with COVID’s agent. What a publicity budget.

In a recent Kekst CNC poll, British respondents estimated that nearly 7 percent of the UK population has died from the coronavirus. That would be 4.5 million people. Scots supposed that more than 10 percent of the UK population has died. That would be seven million people. Astonishingly, Americans believed that COVID has killed nine percent of their compatriots, or almost 30 million people! The real US total has indeed crossed the milestone of 150,000, but for pity’s sake, ‘only’ 20 million people died in World War One.

True, your average everyman and woman are not dab hands at statistics. Nevertheless, broadcast news has bludgeoned audiences daily with COVID death totals. And a citizenry ought to have some vague notion of their country’s population. So folks convinced that in five meagre months they’ve lost a tenth of their fellows — the literal meaning of the word ‘decimate’ — need only drop a digit to realize how absurdly their bloated estimate compares with familiar figures on the news. But then, the public is never good with zeroes — a failing which treasuries in deficit count on.