RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/music-review-billy-joel-madison-square-garden/

Now 70, Billy Joel has all of the swagger & sangfroid of late-period Frank Sinatra.

H e is 70, and expansive across the midsection, and with his shaved head he could be a barroom bouncer. There is a line running up from his right eye into his forehead. That eye looks like it took a punch, or maybe it’s just being squeezed by the years. Billy Joel used to race around the stage in tennis shoes, sometimes jumping up on his grand piano. “Don’t take any s*** from anyone!” would be his Long Island valedictory at the end of an evening. Now he limits his movements, spends nearly the entire evening seated at the piano, which is on a turntable that does a half-turn once in a while. He brought on a surprise guest — “the world’s greatest violinist!” Itzhak Perlman added his beautiful violin to two numbers. Perlman is 74. We’re none of us as young as we used to be.

So: Let’s party? The crowd was non-young on February 20 at Joel’s 118th Madison Square Garden concert, but 40,000 creaky knees got a workout beneath that giant sports-style banner in the rafters (currently reading JOEL 118) up there with the Knicks and Rangers jerseys. Joel spoke for all of us who are old but feisty: “Last time I was here they hit my house!” he cried at the top of the show. “They knew I wasn’t home, so . . .” Joel was referring to the strange break-in at his Centre Island, Long Island estate (14.6 acres) the weekend of January 25. The burglars didn’t steal anything; they merely damaged several specimens of Joel’s prized motorcycle collection. Who breaks into a man’s home and beats up on his bikes? “This time I got dogs, I got guns, I got everything,” Joel said. “I hope they come back.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/balkanized-democrats-bruce-thornton/

The slogan of “diversity” has always contained a fundamental incoherence. On the surface, the variety of identities expressed mainly in cosmetic differences hides deeper, more contentious variations ignored by diversicrats and their media champions. Chanting “diversity is our strength,” the purveyors of “rainbow coalitions” forget that diversity can also be a weakness despite the conformity of their public “woke” political aims. The contentious Democrat presidential primaries have exposed these fissures that are threatening the Left’s aim of retaking presidency.

Start with the obvious division within the party: That between Bernie Sanders and a DNC establishment that believes, probably correctly, that a cranky socialist village explainer is electorally radioactive. Bernie and his passionate Bros have already been primed by the 2016 primary to suspect the party establishment of “moderate” squishes, who are plotting to promote plutocrat Michael Bloomberg and his billions as the candidate, or to rig the convention once again. Whether Bernie is the candidate or not, this conflict will leave a lot of bad blood that will weaken the party in the general election.

The permanent threat to “rainbow” diversity, however, is social and economic class. All the Democrat primary front-runners are rich one-percenters, with the exception of Mayor Pete, who languishes among the top ten percent of earners.  And all the candidates this cycle have been political insiders, senators mostly, and are festooned with gilt-edged university and professional credentials. Especially during televised debates, this graphic privilege is an embarrassment to a party that touts diversity and its strengths, and styles itself as the party of the working class and dispossessed. And what’s so “transformational” about rich and university credentialed people wielding power? Since the days of Julius Caesar, ambitious elites have championed the plebeians in order to aggrandize their own power and privilege.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/25/artificial-unintelligence/

When an artificial intelligence clearly fails, like a chatbot that starts making racist remarks or an autopilot that flies an aircraft into the ground, its designers shut it down. America’s 17 intelligence agencies are like that failed chatbot and autopilot.

The president should ground the 17 intelligence agencies until they can be reformed and proven safe.

Think about it like an ant farm. A blank layer of sand sits between two plates of clear plastic. Introduce the ants, and each following their own ant agenda, the ants construct a maze of purposeful tunnels and activity—a colony.

No individual ant understands the colony, but each runs its simple routine. Taken as a whole, however, the ants produce a complex system of functional outputs.

In the human brain, 86 billion neurons interact according to the agendas of the individual neurons. Exactly how no one knows, but this produces the intelligent outputs of a human being.

In the field of artificial intelligence, a “neural network” works similarly. A web of computational nodes runs simple algorithms to process inputs and to generate additional sub-inputs to other nodes, generating complex outputs that reflect deep learning. No individual node itself is capable of intelligence, but taken together their routines synthesize intelligent output.

Institutional organizations, bureaucracies, have an artificial intelligence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-make-bloomberg-th

Poor Democrats. As if they don’t already have enough trouble, they also happen to be lashed to political correctness. How firmly lashed we learned at last week’s presidential debate, in which candidates competed over who is the most PC.

This came out emphatically in the attacks on Michael Bloomberg. He was vulnerable on the two major political-correctness fronts: race and the treatment of women. Nearly everyone on the debate stage took a moment out to spit upon Mr. Bloomberg for his stop-and-frisk policy while mayor of New York. That the policy seemed to work, radically reducing the number of murders in New York, mattered little beside what the other candidates took to be its inherent and loathsome racism. The logic, apparently, is that it is better to live in a murderous city than a racist one. One of the hallmarks of political correctness is that words matter more than deeds.

Nor are the purveyors of political correctness notable for self-examination. Thus Bernie Sanders, a mere millionaire with the utmost contempt for billionaires, blithely called Mr. Bloomberg a racist. Sen. Sanders apparently forgot that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union at a time when it was still murdering its own citizens and sending them to gulags. He apparently also forgot that he long approved of the cruel and stunting regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Sanders was one of those people Lenin called “useful idiots,” dupes of a murderous regime. Is a useful idiot in a position to call another man racist? Perhaps, since there is nothing politically incorrect about being a useful idiot, whereas a racist is clearly beyond the pale.

https://www.voteherut2020.com/ ]

His hometown newspaper calls him “Seattle’s Jeremiah.” An Israeli publication once hailed him as “Jewry’s premier polemicist.” After half a century fighting for Israel and the Jewish people in the trenches of the literary world, Edward Alexander is in yet another battle—as a candidate on the Herut list in the current U.S. elections for the World Zionist Congress. Alexander grew up in the heavily-Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The “most vivid and satisfying memory” of his childhood occurred in May 1948, when he was eleven years old. It involved Brooklyn Dodgers star Jackie Robinson, whom he and his boyhood pals regarded as “the greatest man in the world,” and David Ben-Gurion who was “a close second to Robinson in our esteem.” “These two heroic figures came together for me almost magically when I heard Robinson address a block party to celebrate Israel’s independence,” Alexander recalled.

“I consider myself lucky,” he wrote, “never to have been disillusioned about what my parents taught me: that both men symbolized the belated righting of ancient historical wrongs, that Robinson was indeed a uniquely courageous figure and that the birth of Israel just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry was one of the greatest affirmations of life ever made by a martyred people…” After earning his bachelor’s degree in English literature at Columbia, Alexander completed his master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. That was where he met his future wife, Leah. She, too, was a scholar of English literature and her senior thesis, on Henry James, was published as a book. Leah passed away in 2017.

The young couple settled in Seattle in 1960, where Alexander became professor of English at the University of Washington and, later, the first chairman of the school’s Jewish Studies program. Alexander’s academic career began in conventional fashion, teaching a full load of courses and authoring books that were well-regarded in his field although they did not attract the attention of the wider public. He wrote volumes about such noted 18th-century literary figures as Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill as well as more recent giants, including Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. But the UN’s infamous Zionism-is-racism resolution and the rise of the Soviet Jewry protest movement in the 1970s inspired the Alexanders to dive head first into the world of Jewish controversy. In 1976, Edward and Leah traveled to the Soviet Union to assist refuseniks.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In the summer of 1961, after my sophomore year in college, I worked in the smelter of Canada’s Falconbridge Nickel Mines just outside of Sudbury, Ontario. There were a number of Canadian students – all men – working in the mine that summer. On weekends, we would head into Sudbury to have a few beers and otherwise relax. One evening, fortified with libations, we attended a student union debate. The subject:“Resolved: I Would Rather be Dead than Red,” a common debate topic at the time. At the debates’ conclusion, members of the audience were asked if they would like to come up and speak, first for the affirmative and later for the negative. Having enjoyed debate in school and with vocal cords loosened with a couple of Molson Ales, I approached the dais and gave my reasons in the two minutes of allotted time. A few other students did as well. Then the moderator asked who would speak for the negative. At first no one rose, so again I approached the dais, this time to applause, to offer my opposing views.

The idea of debating two sides of an issue was always good training. Aristotle is alleged to have said that “it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” I would go further and claim that if one does not understand an opponent’s position, then there is no possibility of reaching compromise. We have entered a twilight zone where biases are so extreme that we no longer communicate but talk over one another. Institutions, like family, church (or, at least, traditional Christian churches) and community organizations are in decline. They have been replaced by groups like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #Resistance, #MAGA and social media, which give participants a chance to gather on like-minded platforms but offer little opportunity to witness or appreciate opposing views.

Unlike Swedes, French, Chinese or Japanese, we are Americans by choice, a choice that was either ours or that of our forefathers. While a typical Swede or Chinese can be imagined, a typical American cannot. We are too diverse.

https://spectator.org/to-fully-comprehend-trump-an-insight-into-the-jargon-of-nycs-inner-boroughs/

DPS NOTE: “Yes, he doesn’t speak the way Ivy league college graduates do. Yes, he is closer to Groucho Marx than he is to Cornell West. But if you give it a try and listen to what he means as opposed to how he expresses it, I think you’ll have a better grasp of why so many Americans like him. You can remain adamantly opposed to his political agenda but maybe you can give yourself a break and save some of your apparent need to hate for people who deserve it – like the Mullahs in Iran, or Chairman Xi in China, or Tsar Putin in Russia, or Kim Jong-un in North Korea. ”

For four years, polling has documented that the president’s strongest support demographic is America’s Orthodox Jews. The support runs between 70 percent in radical Los Angeles to 90 percent most everywhere else. This has been documented hereand here and here and here and here. Although much of that support stems from a deep affinity with his stands on the whole gamut of traditional American cultural and social issues, an underestimated factor is that community’s natural acquaintance with Borscht Belt humor. Those who “get” that humor know precisely how to understand Trump, what to take seriously, what to brush off, and what deeper messages to take away from his speeches and tweets. Those who do not get the style and nuance end up completely misunderstanding him and then attacking him for communicating thoughts he never contemplated.

As is manifest from Trump’s yuuuuge crowds from Alabama to Iowa to everywhere else he goes, one does not have to be from 1950s Borscht Belt New York or of Orthodox Jewish orientation to “get” him. All it takes is an open mind and a sense of humor from a time in the not-so-distant past when people could joke about things and could say ridiculous and absurd things without being taken so literally and without being hunted down by the PC police.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/for_ilhan_omar_the_best_defense_is_always____antisemitism.html

On Thursday, Britain’s Daily Mail ran a story that America’s media has refused to cover: the strong evidence that Ilhan Omar married her own brother, Ahmed Elmi, in order to commit immigration and student loan fraud. Omar’s first response was precisely what everyone expected: She claimed anti-Muslim hate speech.

By Friday, though, Omar had escalated her rhetoric, not directly but by proxy. She retweeted a post from Humans 4 Human Rights asserting that any challenge to Omar is a Zionist conspiracy.

Reading through the site, it’s apparent that the people behind it are from the Jeremy Corbyn left. It calls Boris Johnson a “rich men’s lapdog,” and inveigles against the “BLATANT UGLY FACTS of the SLEAZY SCHEMING foundation & agenda of #BREXIT, pushed & supported by the WHITE PRIVILEGED CORPORATE BANKSTERHOOD, #UK’s elite #RulingClass, whose only aim is to get richer and damn the ordinary poor f***ks, the #BRITISH #PEOPLE.” It warns that, in a post-Brexit UK, “children . . . the sick, vulnerable and homeless” won’t survive.

The site doesn’t like Trump, calling his administration a “kakistocracy” (rule by bad people), and it hates and fears Jews. On the subject of a “Free Palestine,” it states that “‘Antisemitism’ is the weapon of choice for Psychological Warfare to silence all of us who demand a #FreePalestine!” The one thing it really loves is Ilhan Omar

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/a_whiny_meghan_markle_retreats_when_the_queen_bans_her_use_of_the_royal_name.html

On Tuesday, news broke that the Queen had banned Prince Harry and Meghan Markle from marketing the “Sussex Royal” brand. Friday morning, another story broke, saying that Meghan was whining about this because she and Harry had already invested money in selling themselves. Also on Friday, the Queen won and Meghan backed down.

Queen Elizabeth comes from a generation that holds that you can’t eat your cake and have it. In other words, when you make choices, you have to take both the benefit and the burden of that choice.

Meghan Markle, on the other hand, is a child of the Veruca Salt generation. For those who are not fans of the classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie, Veruca is the spoiled brat who sings “I Want It Now.” Although Veruca gets her comeuppance, too many people have bought into the Veruca Salt theory that the world is hers for the taking:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-hollywood-legend-talks-politics-11582311359?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

‘Many years ago,” Clint Eastwood says—drawing close to me as if to share a secret—“I was in Las Vegas.” The Hollywood actor and director was staying at a hotel owned by Steve Wynn, the casino billionaire. “Steve called me up in the room and said, ‘Do you want to go play golf? We’re going out with Trump.’ I said, ‘Who?’ and Steve said, ‘Trump. You know Trump?’ ”

So Messrs. Eastwood and Wynn ventured out for a morning on the course with Donald Trump. “It was funny,” Mr. Eastwood says, “because every time I was together with Steve”—with the future president out of earshot—“he would say, ‘You know, Trump is doing those damn casinos. He’s going to lose his ass.’ ” And when Mr. Wynn couldn’t hear, “Trump would say, ‘You know, Steve is going to do this big hotel. He’s going to land right on his ass. There are too many hotels now.’ ”

Back and forth the dissing went for hours, Mr. Eastwood recalls: “Together, they were great friends, but separately they were giving each other a hard time. I don’t know how much tongue-in-cheek was in all of that, but it was very amusing for me, the lone guy.”

Mr. Eastwood relates this story over a frugal lunch, in response to my asking for his thoughts on Mr. Trump. We’re seated outdoors at the Tehama Golf Club, which he owns, with views of Carmel Valley and the Monterey Peninsula, among the most expensive slivers of real estate in America.