RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/de-blasio-thrivenyc-mental-health-plan?utm_source=Bigger+Apple&utm_campaign=
DJ Jaffe is author of Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill, executive director of Mental Illness Policy Org. and an adjunct fellow at Manhattan Institute.

Mayor de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray, who serves as his mental-wellness czar, just announced an additional goal for ThriveNYC, their signature $850 million, multiyear mental-health plan: “Reach People with the Highest Needs.” One might think that that priority would have been part of the original plan. In any case, it’s a hollow promise: a close reading of the 2020–2022 ThriveNYC spending plan and “Progress Report” makes it clear that the de Blasio administration will continue to send money to ineffective programs, while giving short shrift to programs that reduce homelessness, arrests, and incarceration of the seriously mentally ill. The mayor and his wife justify the continuing ThriveNYC boondoggle by reporting meaningless and misleading statistics.

Over the last four years, de Blasio and McCray regularly insisted that ThriveNYC was helping the seriously mentally ill. In 2019, McCray told an incredulous city council that 100 percent of ThriveNYC’s funds are used for the seriously ill. The real figure is well short of that mark. New York City Council Speaker Cory Johnson says that only 13 percent of the program’s funds go to the seriously mentally ill. Gary Belkin, the program’s first director, pegged the figure at 19 percent; Susan Herman, ThriveNYC’s current head, says that in 2022 it will go up to 26 percent. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/some_people_take_tranquilizers_for_anxiety_but_not_bill_clinton.html

In an upcoming Hulu production about Hillary, Bill Clinton reveals the reason he used the Oval Office for unseemly conduct with Monica Lewinsky.

Many of us vividly remember 1998, when Bill Clinton shook his finger at Americans while earnestly declaiming, “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman” (commonly remembered as, “I did not have sex with that woman”). That statement was a lie. Although stopping short of actual sexual intercourse, Bill Clinton had all sorts of sexual relations with the much-younger Monica Lewinsky. It was inexcusably sordid and, worse, Clinton used the Oval Office for these escapades.

Twenty-two years later, Bill is finally explaining what drove him to defile the Oval Office in this way, and his explanation is a doozy: He was stressed.

Bill Clinton claims that his affair with Monica Lewinsky was one of the ‘things I did to manage my anxieties’. 

The former President suggests, in an explosive documentary seen by DailyMailTV,  that he had the fling with the ex-White House intern while he was in office because it helped with his own issues.

Bill reveals that at the time he met Lewinsky the pressure of the job made him feel like a boxer who had done 30 rounds and he looked at Lewinsky as ‘something that will take your mind off it for a while’.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/485687-chief-justice-john-roberts-heading-down-collision-course-with-himself

One of my favorite stories about Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is from one of his train trips to Washington. Holmes forgot his ticket but the train conductor reassured him, “Do not worry about your ticket. We all know who you are. When you get to your destination, you can find it and just mail it to us.” Holmes responded, “My dear man, the problem is not my ticket. The problem is, where am I going?”

Chief Justice John Roberts may have the same uncertainty this week as he finds himself on track to two decisions that will define him and the court. Once heralded as a reliable conservative, Roberts became the swing vote with the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Now conservatives are unsure if Roberts will deliver or deflect a coup de grâce with decisions on ObamaCare and abortion. In both cases, he will grapple with his previous views that would push him to vote for decisions with sweeping impacts. For a chief justice who gets sticker shock at such moments, Roberts may find himself evading his prior self in shaping the future court.

Affordable Care Act

The Supreme Court earlier this week accepted an appeal from various states that are controlled by Democrats who seek the reversal of lower courts striking down the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act. In 2012, Roberts saved ObamaCare as the fifth vote in the case of National Federation of Independent Business v. Kathleen Sebelius. In my view, it was one of his weakest opinions as chief justice.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/hendry-bruce-hendry/

I think it’s fair to say that America is the best place in the world for the average citizen to live and that it’s the best time in the history of the world to live in America as a black person, as a woman or as a homosexual.

In a religion there are shared values and shared mythologies. In a religion, if somebody challenges any of the orthodoxies they are attacked personally. Religions stay together because of these shared values and because, if you want to continue to be accepted by your group, you cannot challenge these shared values and mythologies. Progressives behave this way.

Religious people indoctrinate their children to believe in their orthodoxy, and we can easily observe that if you start the indoctrination early enough it will last a lifetime. Democrats have taken over our educational system from kindergarten to university and that kind of religious, socialist, indoctrination is going on, right now, in our schools.

Curiosity should be a community value but it is actually a community threat to those in power. Curious people who challenge religious ideas are not met with a kindly response but instead are met with an attack that is personal. By silencing those with different opinions, either by enforcing politically correct speech or verbally attacking the person that is trying to express a different opinion, you win the argument. This is basic strategy for Democrats. 

David Horowitz’s observation that progressivism is a religion explains a lot for me. Every society/culture in recorded history has had a religion. It’s the glue of shared values and shared mythologies that keeps the group together. Look at it this way. A religion needs three elements:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/progressive-big-lies-bruce-thornton/

The “big lie” was Adolf Hitler’s term in Mein Kampf  for the propaganda tactic of telling a lie so “colossal” that nobody would believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Far from being specific to Nazism, this technique of political persuasion has been to varying degrees universal. These days, the masters of the “big lie” are the Leftists and those progressives who, addled by Trumpophobia, regularly promulgate whoppers that today’s internet can easily discredit.

Of course, from the Russian collusion fabrication to the Ukraine “quid pro quo,” the Dems have publicized numerous lies and distortions of facts. Now they’re at it again with hysterical attacks on Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. During the last debate, Mike Bloomberg charge that Trump “defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t have the organization we need,” a lie seconded by Joe Biden who added, “He cut the funding for the entire effort.” As the New York Post, commented, “It’s a lie that can only sow fear: The CDC budget is higher than when Trump took office. Same for the National Institutes of Health. And top career officials from both have been working with the White House for weeks to direct the US response.” This lie was so “colossal” that the AP––which was so skewed toward Democrats during Obama’s tenure that wags said AP stood for “administration’s press”–– ran a headline that read, “AP FACT CHECK: Democrats distort coronavirus readiness.”

This penchant for accepting lies as truth, however, has warped the minds of Leftists both hard and soft ever since New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty lied about Stalin’s engineered famines in the 1930s. They have accepted the Marxist, as in Groucho, stance “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” One of the best examples is Bernie Sanders’ stubborn, unapologetic support for vicious totalitarian regimes like the Castro cartel in Cuba, based on a variation of the fascist excuse that Mussolini “made the trains run on time” combined with the old proverb favored by communists, and used in print by Duranty, that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/globalization-bleeding/#slide-1

When we become citizens of the world, that is, citizens of everyplace, then we end up citizens of utopia. That is, as citizens of οὐ τόπος — of “no place.”

The recurring dream — or nightmare — of being a ‘citizen of the world’

By the early 21st century, cosmopolitans were gushing that high-tech, instant communications, transnational agencies and agreements, free-flowing capital, international corporations, and a new eerily uniform global elite had, finally, made nationalism, borders, and even the nation-state itself all irrelevant. Nationalism was apparently relegated to dustbin of history, as we hit peak Socratic citizen-of-the-worldism.

There were always two flaws to these adolescent giddy reports from world-bestriding New York Times op-ed journalists about win-win globalization, with their praise of gleaming airports and superior high-speed rail in what was otherwise Communist China, or accounts of flying first-class on Qatar Airlines was heavenly compared with backward United or American Airlines.

Nothing New under the Sun
One, globalization was not the end of history. It is a recurrent, cyclical, and at best morally neutral phenomenon that has always, at least in relative terms, waxed and waned over the past 2,500 years of civilization — although recent transcontinentalism carries greater consequences in the era of electronic interconnectedness.

By a.d. 200, there was a globalized Roman world of 2 million square miles, stretching from Hadrian’s Wall to the Persian Gulf, and from the Rhine to the Atlas Mountains. Like frogs around the pond of Mare Nostrum, all official business was conducted in Latin or, increasingly in the East, Greek. A Roman citizen could enjoy habeas corpus from Bithynia to the Atlantic. Thousands of small towns were marked by fora and agorae, colonnades, and basilicas. While multiracial and non-Italian, otherwise uniformly equipped and trained legions secured the vast borders. It was quite an achievement of providing aqueducts, security, and property rights to 70 million disparate peoples, but it was no longer really the earlier Roman Republic of the Scipios, either.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15020/imported-antisemitism-supporters

A 2014 survey of antisemitism by the US Anti-Defamation League covered 100 countries. It found that all the countries in the top 10 most antisemitic locations were in the Middle East or north Africa region, with an overall figure of 73%. The West Bank and Gaza came at the top, with 93% of Palestinians expressing antisemitic views.

The 1988 Covenant (Mithaq) of Jeremy Corbyn’s good friends (and Israel’s enemies)… could not be more religious in nature…. “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” Note that they say they are fighting “Jews”, not “Israelis”.

In the end, the only thing that can oppose it will be a renewal of a secular reform that once had a deep impact in many Muslim countries only to falter after the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. Without that, peace may never return to the Middle East.

On March 6, 2019, Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission launched a probe into claims that the country’s Labour Party, currently led by the lifelong Trotskyite Jeremy Corbyn, is “institutionally anti-Semitic”.

We are all too familiar with the development that the conflation of antisemitism and antizionism may be found today within politics.[1] Challenging this distortion remains a priority in Western countries. Fortunately, as recent events within Britain’s Labour Party have shown, many constituents are rejecting the overt antisemitism and anti-Israel extremism of the groups who have often underhandedly taken control of their party.[2]

It increasingly seems as if one source of antisemitism — as shown by more than one survey in Europe and in the United States — is that there often seems to be widespread antisemitism within Muslim communities (here, here and here).

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.