RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-manchins-voting-compromise-11624401491?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Senate Democrats tried and failed Tuesday to move their version of H.R.1, the bill to impose a federal election code on all 50 states. That 800-page travesty was doomed once West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin came out against it. But now Democrats are rallying around Plan B, which is based on a three-page memo circulated by Mr. Manchin’s office.

It’s a curious document. The preamble insists that any voting bill “must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together.” But then it suggests an H.R.1 “compromise” that is no bipartisan kumbaya. As Republican leader Mitch McConnell said last week in ruling out Mr. Manchin’s wish list, it still involves “an assault on the fundamental idea that states, not the federal government, should decide how to run their own elections.”

To start, Mr. Manchin’s memo suggests mandating “at least 15 consecutive days of early voting.” Yet one prominent Democratic opponent of H.R.1., New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, has objected that his state’s constitution dates to 1783, and it “requires that a voter must be present” on Election Day unless “absent from the town or city, or physically disabled.” Yet New Hampshire, he added, has had “the third highest voter turnout in the country for each of the last four presidential elections.”

The Manchin memo proposes that Congress “ban partisan gerrymandering and use computer models.” It’s not clear precisely what Mr. Manchin has in mind, but skeptics will rightly see this as a plan to turn an overtly political process into a covertly political one that would be controlled by unaccountable technocrats.

https://www.city-journal.org/cornell-black-hole-class-racializes-astronomy

“Seeing specters of racism everywhere, the racial avengers are tearing down every institution associated with Western civilization, simply because of its “whiteness.” Science had stood as a guard against such metaphorical, magical thinking. Bit by bit, it is succumbing.”

Physicists at MIT and SUNY Stony Brook recently announced findings that the total surface area of two black holes was maintained after the two entities merged. While this research was a welcome confirmation of both Stephen Hawking’s work and the theory of general relativity, it failed to address a crucial matter: what were its racial implications?

That is a lacuna that an astronomy course at Cornell University aims to prevent. “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos” asks the question, “Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness?” Anyone familiar with academia’s racial monomania knows the answer: of course there is! Though “conventional wisdom,” according to the catalog description of “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos,” holds that the “‘black’ in black holes has nothing to do with race,” astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri know better.

Battaglia and Vaziri puncture the “conventional wisdom” by drawing on theorists such as Emory University English professor Michelle Wright. Wright’s book, The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, invokes “Newton’s laws of motion and gravity” and “theoretical particle physics” to “subvert racist assumptions about Blackness.” The Cornell course also studies music by Sun Ra and Outkast to “conjure blackness through cosmological themes.”

https://unherd.com/2021/06/the-death-of-american-patriotism/?=refinnar

America was invented in 1828 by the lexicographer Noah Webster. Politically of course, the United States had already stumbled into existence. But Webster’s dictionary, published that year, contained a new superglue to hold the whole enterprise together. Not a new language, as some had demanded, but still: new words for the new world. “Skunk,” “squash,” “psychology,” “chowder,” “Americanize,” and “penmanship.” Honour became honor. Though to Webster’s disappointment and for reasons that are lost to history, soup was not to be soop.

And now the whole glorious project of uniting the states might be entering its final stages. I hope, and think, they will pull back from the brink as they did in 1968, that sweaty year of assassinations and street fighting. But it’s possible the United States is heading for the rocks.

The end-times thinking goes like this. The Republican party — only partially committed now to free and fair elections — will probably take back the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections in 2022. It has a good chance of taking the Senate too. If Donald Trump were to run in 2024 and lose, he could do then what he failed to do last time: use raw power and congressional poodles to get statewide votes annulled or altered and even electoral college decisions over-ruled.

The army might object or might not. Either way it would not be pretty. There could be a coup. Worse in many ways than the civil war because neither side would win. It would be the end of Webster’s unifying project.

One of the tasks that Americans must set themselves in the (quite short) space of time there is to come to terms with all this is to focus anew on the things that draw them together — or at least to analyse and address the things that have carved them apart. The ever-brilliant writer George Packer sets an example with his new book, Last Best Hope (out 1st July). In it, he sets out the divisions in a manner that invites reconciliation — or an effort towards it, at least.

One of Packer’s most telling points is simple but devastating. The people doing well in modern America have lost sight of the need for this task to be undertaken at all. They fail, in the modern age, to grasp the need for national myths and identities that can unite nations. “Smart Americans,” Packer says, “are uneasy with patriotism. It’s an unpleasant relic of a more primitive time, like cigarette smoke or dog racing.”

https://unherd.com/2021/06/the-battle-between-the-two-americas/

In recent history, the United States has arguably never been so divided — but not in the way you might think. Yes, the country has been split by the culture wars, with their polarising focus on race and gender. But behind the scenes, another conflict has been brewing; shaped by the economics of class, it has created two Americas increasingly in conflict.

The First America is made up of the highly educated and affluent, who have already managed to recover their pandemic-depleted incomes. Its biggest winners, though, have been large tech firms — notably Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google — who together have added more than two and a half trillion dollars to their valuation since 2019, and last year enjoyed record breaking profits.

In contrast, the Second America, made up of the working and private-sector middle classes, has been devastated by the pandemic, with more than half of small businesses unlikely to fully recover. Meanwhile, the expanding serf class, many of whom were employed in small businesses, has become increasingly dependent on handouts from Washington and bloated state governments, so much so that it has made little sense for many to go back to work.

At stake, increasingly, is the future of America as an aspirational country. Traditionally, the growing gap between the rich and the other classes would be fodder for a Left-wing bonfire, but the progressive Left now gets much of its funding from the corporate elite, notably Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The oligarchy not only funded Biden’s campaign, but, particularly in the case of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, leant critical support to boost the November electoral turnout.

Taking on the oligarchy, therefore, has not been Biden’s priority, at least to date. Rather than focus on traditional working-class concerns, he has been swept up by the cultural memes of the HR departments, newsrooms and faculty lounges. The results have been all too predictable: draconian energy policies, the racialisation of education and support for public sector unions, the one arguably working-class bastion for the Democrats.

https://dianebederman.com/what-do-cancel-culture-and-the-islamophobiaindustry

What do Cancel Culture and the #IslamophobiaIndustry have in common? An unholy alliance in their desire to destroy Western culture and the Judeo/Christian ethic upon which it stands, by bullying us into obedience and silence. They both try to silence objections by screaming racism when you disagree with their world view. In both ideologies, there is no acceptance of the teaching that all people are born with equal intrinsic value and all life is sacred. Together Cancel Culture and Islamophobia will destroy freedom.

Just recently, an Imam in London, Ontario, while sharing his shock at the death of four Muslims at the hands of a 20 year old home-schooled Christian white boy, driving a truck, blamed the Jews in Israel.  I can’t think of another group of people who would do such a thing. Not event today’s Nazis. Why would they do this?

Their hate for the Jews for not accepting Allah.  Their hate for the Jews for bringing in an ethic that turned away from honour/shame –the foundation of Islam. The wrath of Allah be upon the Jews.

Islamophobia means the irrational fear of Islam. Fine. Except there is nothing irrational about fearing an ideology that calls for your death. Machiavelli taught us that.

Hadith narrated by Abi Hurira (Imam Abu Hurairah):

“The last hour won’t come before the Muslims would fight the Jews and the Muslims will kill them so Jews would hide behind rocks and trees. Then the rocks and tree would call: oh Muslim, oh servant of God! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only “Gharkad” tree, it is of Jews’ trees.”

What is a Hadith: As the second source of authority in Islam, hadith complements the Qur’an and provides the most extensive source for Islamic law. The ultimate understanding of the Qur’an depends upon the context of Muhammad’s life and the ways in which he demonstrated and applied its message.

Who is Abi Hurira: He was one of the companions of Islamic prophet Muhammad and, according to Sunni Islam, the most prolific narrator of hadith. He is credited with narrating at least 5,374 hadith.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/to-rescue-a-nation/

Restoring America requires dedicated citizens to re-found our Republic.

Peoples become nations by following those who lead them to worship the same God or idols, and to act habitually as they do. The Greeks called these habits “ethics.” These change for good and ill as prominent persons change, or develop new ways of life, or foreign influences impose themselves. The general population tends to follow. Plato and Aristotle led subsequent generations to note that peoples tend to take on their leaders’ character.

Some see such changes as betrayal. If these alienate a large enough proportion of people, the body politic itself loses the capacity to act as a whole. Enough disarticulation, and the body politic ceases to exist for practical purposes. Serious changes, regardless of their sources, lead some to want a resetting the country on what they regard as its proper basis—or outright resuscitation.

Machiavelli wrote that doing that amounts to re-founding a nation, and that this is considerably more difficult than founding one in the first place.

What does it take to re-found a nation? The question is lively for twenty-first century Americans because the changes that have taken place in the bipartisan ruling class that controls nearly all our institutions have explicitly denied and denigrated what had made America itself. Today’s ruling class leads and even forces Americans to act, speak, and think as if all that they had thought good were bad, and vice versa. Almost as if a vengeful power had conquered the country. At least half the country yearns for some kind of rescue.

Though history does not lack examples of nations rescued and refounded, most rescues involve overthrowing the dominion of foreigners rather than of mutated ruling classes. But as the Book of Exodus shows, the removal of foreign influence is almost always much less than half the battle. Reference to foreign oppression is often a necessary, but always an insufficient factor.  Charles de Gaulle’s success against the Germans was not enough to overcome resistance to his efforts to restore France’s corrupt body politic. Without a foreign focus however, refounding can only be a civil war of variable temperatures. Abraham Lincoln’s failure to avoid the Civil War is as clear an example as there is.

Machiavelli’s near equation of reform with re-founding mostly abstracts from the fact that, for nations and regimes founded on and tailored for the people’s characteristics, repeating something like the founding is not possible once these have changed. Peoples are far less malleable than regimes.

On the one hand, successive generations of Romans were able to re-set Rome more or less on the basis on which Romulus had set it by killing his brother, Remus, who had trespassed on what became the Urbe’s fundamental law: war against outsiders. Successive Fathers of the Fatherland reaffirmed that law. And when Cleomenes judged that Sparta’s ephors had violated Lycurgus’s constitution, he deftly re-established it by killing the ephors and their followers. The Soviet regime’s fundamental law was the Communist General Secretary’s murderous discipline of the Party, which suffused society with fearful uncertainty. When Mikhail Gorbachev tried to rescue tyranny from the feudalism into which it had fallen under Brezhnev, he might well have succeeded had he been willing to kill as Lenin and Stalin had done.

Doubtless, rescuing disrespected constitutions has always required and will always require undoing any number of enemies.