RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/15/no-trump-didnt-radicalize-the-left/

Our current crisis speaks as much to the failures of the old-guard conservative movement, particularly neoconservatives, as it validates the triumph of the Left.

A new poll offers grim but realistic news about America: One-third of our fellow countrymen, including 40 percent of Republicans, say we are on the verge of a civil war. It is a dangerous time—terrifying for parents of children of any age—as the radical Left’s 50-year incursion into every American institution finally is reaping long-sought dividends with the full cooperation of the country’s academic, corporate, and media leadership as well as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president.

Political observers on the NeverTrump Right, however, have analyzed the moment and identified the culprit for the widespread mayhem and destruction: Donald Trump.

Of course.

Always eager to play the role of useful idiot, NeverTrump is blaming the president—not lawless loons on the Left or their powerful guardians occupying executive mansions and mayoral offices and C-suites across the country—for our current state of brinkmanship.

“[Trump’s] spirit of authoritarianism creates a sense of perpetual crisis among his opponents, uniting left-wingers and liberals despite their differences,” wrote Ross Douthat in the New York Times over the weekend. “His spirit of chaos, the sense that nothing is planned or under control, turns moderates and normies against him. And finally, his spirit of incompetence means that conservatives get far less out of his administration than they would from a genuine imperial president, a man of iron rather than of pasteboard.”

Now, imagine witnessing not only the rampage of the past few weeks but also all that has been unleashed over the last several years and tagging Trump as the authoritarian, chaotic, and incompetent one. (Before his diatribe against the president, Douthat admitted his “dire predictions” about Trump’s presidency have been wrong for three years in a row.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/should_jews_endorse_black_lives_matter.html

We are living in a maelstrom of hatred, ignorance, and virtue-signaling that is breathtaking to observe.  Jewish organizations and synagogues are marching in support of Black Lives Matter.  White people are prostrating themselves like slaves “bowing before black people and asking for forgiveness for their ‘white privilege’ and the ‘structural racism’ in the deplorable, irredeemable United States of America.”

Anyone who is appalled at these actions is beginning to wonder about the sanity of this country.

 Of particular concern is the apparent all-in capitulation by American Jewry as they engage in this feel-good liberal response.

An open letter calls on Jewish organizations to endorse Black Lives Matter.

The letter asks Jewish organizations, federations … to commit to fulfilling seven actions within three years.  They are endorsing Black Lives Matter; establishing racial justice as an organizational pillar; having a fifth of staff, senior leadership and board seats be filled by people of color; participating in anti-racist education; investing a fifth of all grants in organizations led by people of color; creating racial justice requirements for grant organizations, including ‘a commitment to replacing contracts with police departments with alternative structures of community safety’; and developing a five-year, $1.5 million ‘communal accountability’ initiative.

The letter was organized by Lindsey Newman, director of community engagement at the Jewish diversity organization Be’chol Lashon; Aaron Samuels, co-founder and COO of the black media company Blavity; and Rachel Sumekh, the founder and CEO of the hunger relief organization Swipe Out Hunger.  ‘We chose these proposals because we believe they are achievable and if put into practice would make significant inroads toward making the Jewish community anti-racist[.]’

Frankly, a burglar intent on doing well in property appropriation couldn’t ask for a better list of demands!

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/who-now-dares-to-confront-the-left/

“Here’s a quick question: name an institution not now in the hands of the Left? Certainly not universities, the media or public service. And don’t dare cite the police as upholders of one-rule-for-all law and order, not when they’re fining petty violators of social-distance diktats while standing idle as protesters in their tens of thousands ignore the same rules.”

“It is past time to fight back. But where do the leaders come from? Not from senior clerics. Not from the pantywaists who occupy most of the centre-right parliamentary seats; whether here, in the US or elsewhere. We are left with Trump, I believe, as in 1940, when we had only Churchill. But, ignoring the Left, have a look at the way conservative commentators constantly snipe at Trump; white-anting his standing. They can’t give him any credit without including a sanctimonious personal insult, in order to establish their own moral credentials. Talk about cutting off your nose…”

The truth is the enemy of those who practice deceit and who find their anchor not in truth but in an agenda. Whether Christian or not, a decent person wants to live in truth. Personally, I define my conservatism as falling out of my own search for truth – the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Let the chips fall where they may.

Here are some truths, among a much longer list. Admittedly, not logical or tautological, but truths in the sense that they correspond with the facts on the ground as we know them or should know them. Some abiding, some more profound than others; some specific to the moment.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/06/covid-19-and-the-problem-with-official-science/

All models are wrong but some are useful, which cannot be said of the casualties projected for a disease that has proven about as lethal as a seasonal flu. Recall that 1969’s Hong Kong flu killed an estimated one million worldwide but did not stop the Woodstock festival. Yet driven by fear and folly we have trashed an entire economy.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.  —Lord Salisbury, 1877

The desideratum in modern governance is evidence-based policy. It is not always achieved or, as we have seen with the coronavirus panic, possible. It is far preferable, however, to policy-based evidence, which was to be found with the rushed production of new evidence that had not met the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration quality assurance processes in a desire to influence Donald Trump’s deliberations over whether to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement (as I describe in my forthcoming essay in Climate Change: The Facts 2020).

In climate science the problem appears irrevocable. Scholars like Roger Pielke Jr in his book The Honest Broker have pointed out that there is no linear relationship between science and public policy: scientific findings rarely lead to single policy conclusions. Despite this, the epistemic community in climate science seems to think that even more scary model-driven scenarios will lead policy-makers to do “the right thing”.

https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-enacts-tariffs-travel-ban-on-chaz

Trump has announced a new set of tariffs and a travel ban on CHAZ, escalating the trade war between the United States and the fledgling nation-state.

“Effective immediately, no travel to or from the foreign country of Seattle,” the president said at a press conference. “Additionally, a 25% tariff will be placed on all goods coming from CHAZ, once they start exporting things.” The president will also be cutting all diplomatic ties with the communist nation, further increasing tensions.

The tariffs aren’t expected to do much, however, as the only thing the people of CHAZ have been able to produce so far is a few beans in the community garden.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/14/class-not-race-divides-america/

Nothing is stranger in these tense days than the monotony of the inexact and non-descriptive mantra of “white privilege” and “white solidarity”—as if there is some monolithic white bloc, or as if class matters not at all.

In truth, the clingers, the deplorables, the irredeemables, and Joe Biden’s “dregs” have very little in common with those who so libel them, but superficially share supposedly omnipotent and similar skin color.

In the past, we saw such tensions among so-called whites in CNN’s reporting of the allegedly toothless rubes at Trump rallies, in the Strzok-Page text trove about Walmart’s smelly patrons, in the callous coastal disregard for the five-decade wasting away of the American industrial heartland, in the permissible elite collective disparagement of Christian evangelicals, and in the anthropological curiosity about and condescension toward such exotic, but presumably backward, Duck Dynasty and NASCAR peoples. 

As a result, we have reached the surreal point at which the nation’s privileged whites on campuses such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, in the top echelon of politics, and the corporate and entertainment worlds, all deplore in the abstract something they call “white privilege” in others who have never really experienced it. 

Of course, whatever such a thing is, they possess it in abundance but give no hint they have any intention of giving it up other than rhetorically or through the medieval concept of hair-shirt penance and Twitter confessionals. On the other hand, they are furious that middle-class whites do not join their theatrics of bending the knee and offering abject apologies for original sins. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/the_morning_after_the_riots_end.html

There will come a morning when the protests stop, the riots end, the fires are extinguished, and insufficiently woke editors will cease to be intimidated.

The Democratic leadership will no longer wear kente cloth or take a knee.

Before us will be shopping malls littered with shards of glass and merchandise that looters couldn’t carry off. The burned-out vehicles and rubble of once-viable businesses will scar our communities.

The notion of people of color will become less meaningful as the Korean dry cleaner weeps over the ruins of his business. The Palestinian-American in Chicago looks at the liquor store he inherited from his father and wonders if he can rebuild the business.

The Asian restaurant owner whose small take-out establishment supported a family and sent two children to college will wonder where to begin again. The Mexican-American business owner will wonder why he was targeted. The black firefighter who built a sports bar that was burned to the ground will ask the same question.

The corporate directors of the smoldering manufacturing facilities will consider pulling up stakes. There are no riots in rural America. 

The injured or assassinated police, be they white, black, or any other color, will be remembered by their fellow officers and many in their communities as having been blue — the only color that mattered.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/06/engineering-america.html

Rule of Reason no. 2542

I open this column with a review of the overture to the nationwide riots, destruction, and looting that occurred over the last few weeks.  The venu is in a Shoprite store on Staten Island, NY, in which a masked, loud-mouthed shopper with his masked harpies together chased a a maskless shopper out of the store. Calling her a “dirty assed pig.”  It’s more horrifying than any of the rioter videos I’v e seen, and I’ve seen the most grisly ones. It’s evidence of how non-intellectual most Americans are and how submissive they have become in lieu of the virus “crisis.”  Had I been there, I would’ve been maskless, too ( and as I always will be), and challenged the thug to chase me out. If he’d become toe-to-toe with me I would have smashed an egg in his face. If he wanted to take it further I was perfectly willing to take it to the next level.  I’ve had many fights in my life and lost not a one.

Tucker Carlson wondered what was going on in the country . His video is worth a listen.

This is what is going on, among other developments.  Colorado passed a law that requires that parents be punished for refusing to have their children Covid-19 vaccinated, and that they be “reeducated.”  Where have we heard that term before? This “reeducation” is ubiqitous in many state governments and agents of “authority” tasked with the imperative of instituting the “new norm” of submission.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Ignorance is the bane of civilized society. It is inexcusable in a country with free high schools. In a manifestation of cancel culture, mobs tear down statues of yesteryear’s heroes. I wonder: what is gained by destroying historical artifacts? Where is the curiosity expressed by Washington Irving in Sketchbook almost two hundred years ago? “I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievements.”[1] Should we rename army bases in a moment of exuberant zeal, or would it be wiser to debate the issue when heads are cooler? Are past wrongs righted when relegated to the ash heap of ignorance? Can we assume we have reached perfection where our descendants will find nothing wrong in today’s actions? Would those whose bravery stems from being part of a mob tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus have had the courage of the Italian navigator to sail across an infinite sea to an unknown land?

History must be considered in context and with perspective. It is impossible for us to judge the behavior of our forefathers based on today’s moral standards, just as it will be unfair to us for our descendants to mock our actions today based on values a hundred years hence. Should we ignore Columbus because he is now pilloried as a racist, more than five hundred years after his voyage of discovery? Should we disregard Thomas Jefferson, and the words he wrote about self-evident truths and of how all men were created equal with unalienable rights, because he kept slaves? Cannot we admire the former and criticize the latter?

The cultural war is perhaps most pronounced in the Washington D.C. environs, where 283,000 federal bureaucrats work. They are joined by about 14,000 staffers for the 535 Congressmen and Senators. Lobbyists comprise another 11,600 people. Added to the mix are thousands who work in media. In all, they make up almost 20% of the metro areas workforce. These are highly paid people who live in four of the nation’s five wealthiest counties – Howard (MD) and Loudon, Fairfax, and Arlington, all in Virginia. It is a self-contained culture where most jobs are based on who you know. Once hired, they are ensconced, moving from agency to lobbyist firm to agency. But as Richard Grenell, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany and ex-acting Director of National Intelligence, recently noted, the D.C. culture is autonomous, where there is “no outside thought, there’s no perspective.” While forty million Americans lost their jobs due to a state-mandated shut-down of the economy, these people kept theirs, even when told to stay home – most paid from our tax dollars. The contrast to the rest of the country is startling. It was this narcissistic cocoon that Donald Trump threatened to dismantle in 2016 when he pledged to “drain the swamp.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/13/expert_models__fear__stress_pandemic_143428.html

“It’s the science, the science, the science, not politics.” This from leaders calling for the continuation of the shutdown. It is “the science” they say they’re responding to when they tell us how to live every moment of our waking lives. It is the science that tells citizens in Michigan not to buy seeds, not to take their boats out on the lake. It is lifesaving not to go to church. It is lifesaving to wear masks even when you are walking in the park. It is lifesaving to stay six feet apart. Listen up. We, your leaders, have no choice. It’s the science. And remember, if you don’t listen to us, it’s death, and more death, everywhere death.

Apparently, our science-induced leadership has a formula to solve the virus pandemic: Science + (or x) Fear = The Virus Cure. In other words, shut down the economy. Again, there was no choice. Lives were at stake.

Here is what John Kay of the Financial Times has written about science: “The objective of science is not an agreement on a course of action but the pursuit of truth. … Science is a matter of evidence. … The route to knowledge is transparency. … The route to truth is the pluralistic expression of conflicting views. … There is no room in the process for any notion of scientific consensus.”