RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/get-your-lives-oxford-professor-says-people-have-become-overly-frightened-covid-19

Even though BoJo’s system of localized COVID-19 measures seems to be working, the unrelenting hysteria peddled by the British press has left millions of Britons traumatized.

Now, Carl Heneghan, a professor of Evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, is calling for the government to intervene and “proactively reassure” his young students that the coronavirus won’t kill them if they contract it.

He said exaggerated fears of the virus have led to “people going about their daily lives misunderstanding and overestimating their risk,” something with which many Americans can probably empathize.

And as parts of north Manchester remain on ‘partial lockdown’, the professor said introducing local lockdowns could do more harm than good by forcing people into their homes, potentially infecting other vulnerable people who live with them, especially as the temperature drops.

Professor Heneghan’s work has led to a lowering of the official death toll after he revealed COVID-19 deaths were being counted even if someone had subsequently died of other causes.

As we learn more about the virus, the pandemic could end up no worse than a bad flu season, the professor said, with a touch of hyperbole.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/_a_revolution_in_sensibility__and_what_to_do_about_it.html

The virus of collectivism has taken hold among the young, and equality of personal opportunity has yielded to equality of forced outcome.

For many Americans, the enemy is the conservative patrimony of individual agency, traditional marriage, competitive achievement, historical memory, freedom of thought, expression and peaceful assembly, and the morality of public reciprocity. The handshake has been replaced by the clenched fist, a communist salute and emblem adopted by BLM. The virus of collectivism has taken hold among the young, and equality of personal opportunity has yielded to equality of forced outcome.

This is no less than a revolution of sensibility, aggressively promoted by the big digital platforms and the open sewer of social media where the scourge of rampant vigilantism, infantilism run amok and mob justice has infected the entire culture and eroded the principle of legal justice by the politics of indiscriminate revenge for evils real and imagined. Twitter, of course, has now become the major conduit for the neural filth of the nation to disgorge into the mainstream.

The responsible and literate individual is gradually disappearing into a featureless mass. The mob and its movers prevail. The result is an epidemic of iconoclasm (destruction of images and statues), antinomianism (rejection of laws and customs), and the degradation of rational thought. America’s foreign enemies and competitors can scarcely contain themselves as they watch the country implode, a pervasive leftist fifth column doing their work for them.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/08/the-grievance-industrial-complex-and-me/

EXCERPTS:

“Thirty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall I am no longer a member of the working-class oppressed. Having failed as an economic system, Marxism has switched its focus to the cultural barricades of race, gender and general ‘otherness’. These days, as I am given to understand, I am now a member of the privileged white heterosexual elite.”

“When the Berlin Wall came down and the West appeared triumphant in defeating Communism, my academic colleagues and I, safe in the sanctuary of a taxpayer-funded university, remained unmoved and defiant. While studying Soviet politics, my lecturers never introduced us to dissidents and critics like Solzhenitsyn or Koestler. Even if they had, such warnings of state sanctioned brutality would have gone unheeded by the likes of me.

“Socialist ideology relies on subjective rationalisation and wilful blindness.

“Witnessing Marxist dogma’s switch to apportion privilege on the basis of race and sexual identity, rather than  the class struggle of yesteryear, led me to reconsider the legacy bequeathed to us by Western civilisation. So what did this former red-ragger conclude? It’s simple really: the source and mainspring of justice for all is and must always be equality before the law. We have seen the dystopian consequences of doing otherwise playing out on our TV screens as flames light American cities and innocent truck drivers are hauled from their rigs to be kicked senseless for the crime of being white.

“Resisting the temptation to assign guilt based on collective denunciations of class, race and/or gender protects us all from anarchy — an anarchy dangerously encouraged by the ideological underpinnings of the  grievance-industrial complex. Before we see America’s ordeal repeated here, our elected leaders really should do something about it. But they most likely won’t, more’s the pity.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/children_playing_with_dynamite.html

These grim children of the Marxist gods do not perceive the danger that lies along the path they have chosen

The Antifa and BLM rioters doing their best to destroy leftist cities ruled by confused idealists are the outward manifestation of a more dangerous impulse threatening to destroy all of America.

It is an impulse to self-deification that motivates the rioters and their enablers to see themselves as righteous crusaders saving the world. They insist that the rest of us conform to their lofty worldview, but they are like children playing with idealistic dynamite, oblivious to its destructive power while they earnestly fumble with matches to light the fuse.

We have seen them at play on a big stage this week where they gathered to applaud candidates for president and vice-president whose ideology will rule us all forever, if they have their way. It has been a theatre of the absurd where crackpot notions and perverse solutions for the real and imagined ills of America are presented in solemn tones by equally crackpot and perverse demigods who are deadly serious in their intentions to bend everything and everyone to their collective will.   

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/democrats-play-hide-the-agenda-as-their-convention-kicks-off/

The DNC’s opening night offered plenty of warm vagueness and attacks on Trump, while avoiding the party’s unpopular, radical platform.

 C ute kids in red, white, and blue T-shirts singing the national anthem. Calls for unity and reminders that black lives matter. A citation of the Constitution. Michelle Obama exhorting us to be nice. Oh, and President Trump being blamed for the pandemic, because no other country has struggled with that. Welcome to the opening night of the Democrats’ convention.

Mostly unmentioned in this bubble bath of warm vagueness interrupted by occasional blasts of acid at Trump was the Democratic Party’s agenda. It’s unpopular. Democrats know it. Yet they’re stuck with it, because in order to energize their fundraising apparatus and activist base, both of which lay comatose as Joe Biden wrapped up the nomination last winter, they have to go hard to the left. If the opening night of the DNC is any indication, Biden’s plan is to stick his agenda under the sofa cushion when talking to the general public and limit himself to the following message: I’m nice, and I’m not Trump. Don’t concern yourselves, he is telling us, with what I and the person everyone expects will soon take over for me have promised the extremists we will do once we’re in power: ending fossil-fuel usage, rewiring the American economy to satisfy the whims of social-justice obsessives, packing the Supreme Court, deploying the nuclear option to end the filibuster, confiscating guns, and spending trillions dividing Americans along racial and gender lines.

The number one reason Biden supporters, if you can call them that, intend to pull the lever for Uncle Joe? A large majority, 56 percent, say it’s because he is “not Trump.” Second and third are the amorphous personal qualities — “leadership/performance” and “personality/temperament” — he intends to highlight. Way back in fourth place, only 9 percent of voters cite his actual “issue/policy positions,” according to this month’s Pew survey.

So not even one in ten Biden voters is backing him mainly because of his policies? Say Biden wins a landslide, with 55 percent of the vote. That would mean that all of 5 percent of the American electorate voted for him because of his platform.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24474/the-riddle-of-animals-and-small-children

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com  http://lindagoudsmit.com

What do animals and small children have in common? They both live in the “NOW.”

Animals and small children live in the present tense, in the immediate moment without a concept of past or future.

Why is this important? Because the radical leftist Democrats and their globalist handlers are attempting to regress chronological adults back to childish thinking where they can be easily manipulated and controlled. It is a sinister and intentional exploitation of the NOW thinking of childhood. It is a psychological operation, a PSYOP.

If you think this is hyperbole or some unhinged conspiracy theory—think again.

To understand how the political regression-PSYOP works we must consider the psychodynamics of fear. An individual’s response to fear can be quantified on a continuum from the response of a young child to the response of a rational adult. The frightened child closes his eyes or hides under a bed in hopes of evading the threat. A child’s response is an instinctive avoidance strategy. The rational adult assesses the danger, considers possible responses, calculates which will likely be the most effective strategy, and then acts on it. The adult’s response requires critical thinking and results in an action strategy.

Weekend break with no internet

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.