RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/05/the-three-perils-threatening-the-united-states/

The Republic is in grave danger.

There, I said it.

Does anyone really doubt it? America is stumbling and the vultures are circling. What is the nature of these perils that afflict us?

America sits atop a global system created at the outset of the 20th century. That century saw the United States elevated to the status of global imperial power, having been victorious in two world wars and the beneficiary of an international monetary system that, post World War II, provided for a vast global, if not regional, peace. Sure, there was a Cold War with the Soviet Union and other limited wars, but no true great global war in which the entire geo-political order came into question.

Times have changed. Today the United States is faced with three enormous perils: an external threat, an internal threat, and a fulcrum on which the two interoperate to synchronize a multi-prong attack on America. 

The first peril is that China has emerged as a geopolitical and economic challenger to the United States. The simmering geopolitical threat from China is multilateral in nature. In fact, a geopolitical reordering on an historic scale is taking place. 

Supported by financial stakeholders, China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” seeks no less than the unification of the Eurasian landmass. This geopolitical and economic reordering has seen China peel off NATO ally Turkey, make common cause with Iran, align with Pakistan, and subsume Hong Kong. Even European Union nations, beneficiaries of 75 years of American security, are drifting into the arms of the Chinese Communists.

The second peril, a domestic counter-state, has emerged pressing a Marxist revolutionary insurrection in alignment with China’s objectives. With a century of Marxist subversion in the making, this counter-state manifested as a silent or soft coup attempt in 2017, and subsequently has evolved into a Marxist revolutionary insurrection rising to a boil inside the United States. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/06/no-doubts-now-that-the-democrats-are-part-of-the-riot-problem/

Qui tacet consentire videtur is the Latin phrase which means he who remains silent appears to consent. The Democrats’ silence when asked to condemn Antifa violence is coming through louder than a deranged Joe Biden outburst on the campaign trail.

New York Democrat Jerry Nadler didn’t hit the mute button when he absurdly claimed Antifa was “imaginary,” then later said its role in the Portland riots was a “myth that’s being spread only in Washington D.C.”

But the congressman set the tone for his party.

During Tuesday’s Senate hearing – titled The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble: Protecting Speech by Stopping Anarchist Violence – Democrats had a wide open opportunity to state their position. Instead, they went quiet.

“It is unbelievable the Democrats will not come out and say violence is wrong, breaking the law is wrong,” Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn told Fox News.

To her credit, Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, asked “how many times have I had to say that we all should be denouncing violent extremists of every stripe?” during the hearing. But when asked by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, the subcommittee chairman, if that included Antifa, she dodged the question.

“I have the time,” was Hirono’s non-responsive response.

https://jcpa.org/article/the-fragility-of-the-liberal-democracies-and-the-challenge-of-totalitarianism/

The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, triggered rioting, looting, and arson across the United States. It became evident that an underground leadership structure had been in place and set in motion a wave of violence whose destructiveness was unforeseen.
According to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the goal of organized mob violence is to foment a state of civil war, which will lead to revolution. The would-be revolutionaries in the United States did so well that their success exceeded their expectations.
Mayors of several major cities and governors of some states where violence took place chose not to act and ordered the police and firefighters to stand down. Such inaction created a state of anarchy, leaving the public without protection.
The moral shock resulting from the outbreak of mob violence which was not put down may have been worse than the actual damage caused by the rioters.
In the United States, it has been assumed that the creation of wealth is good for society, especially if through hard work, one could achieve the “American Dream.” Nonetheless, for the past decade, life has become complicated for many young adults. The growing numbers of this increasingly dissatisfied group in society must be taken into account.
The fragility of the liberal democracies is a serious dilemma. There is a short distance between “peaceful demonstrations” and mob violence, civil war, and regime change. The dynamics of political warfare and the methods of mob violence are knowable. Because it is a matter of self-defense, we must use this knowledge to safeguard our democracies and our freedoms.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Anger has been a constant in American politics since the beginning. On July 11, 1804, a long and bitter feud between Vice President Aaron Burr and former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton ended in the latter’s death by gunshot on a field in Weehawken, New Jersey. On February 6, 1858, as the House of Representatives debated the Kansas Territory’s pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, Pennsylvania’s Republican Galusha Grow and South Carolina Democrat Laurence Keitt traded insults and then blows. On March 1, 1954 four Puerto Rican nationalists in the visitors’ gallery unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and opened fire on members of Congress, wounding five. When heated political dialogue becomes angry words (or worse), the nation loses. The 1960s were angry years, fed by opponents and proponents of Civil Rights and an unpopular war in Southeast Asia. We are living through another period where anger has become pervasive and political extremism has made the middle way a difficult passage.

We are in a summer of discontent, made inhospitable by Covid-19, an economic depression and unprecedented hatred for the President of the United States. Political extremism has always been around, but usually on the fringes. Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Lester Maddox once represented right-wing extremists, just as Henry Wallace and George McGovern did on the left. (George Wallace and Maddox were both Democrats, but extreme rightwing in their views). However, they were all marginalized by the far larger center-right and center-left parts of their respective Parties. That is no longer the case. Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, is contributing to the Democrat platform. Like a mutating cell infected with a virus, the country has been dividing and separating, creating extremists on both ends.