Nidra is my dear friend- a fascinating woman and brilliant writer….rsk
* Nidra Poller (Paris) https://youtu.be/wHky3gPi0oA
Writer Nidra Poller discusses hanging out with James Baldwin and other African-American writers and musicians in 1970s Paris, the origins of the name Nidra, how her Japanese partner introduced her to Israel, and the position of women in the modern world.
www.swtotd.blogspot.com
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
George Orwell
Statues and monuments are erected not just to honor an individual but as reminders we did not just appear, that we descend not just from our parents and grandparents but from a past and a culture that gave rise to the country in which we live. Despite nihilist messages from Black Lives Matter (BLM), we in America are fortunate. Most nations are not as free as this and none have seen so many “rags to riches” stories. Much of the world lives under totalitarian regimes, and the fact that global poverty has shrunk is (largely) due to the creative genius, entrepreneurial spirit and generosity of Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently Tweeted, “America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you.”
Evolution is a slow process. Life, according to most scientists, began about four billion years ago, primates about a hundred million years ago and humanoids perhaps twenty million years ago. Over the millennia, evolution provided natural selection that allowed our ancestors to survive and gave us inherited traits that permitted us to develop as individuals. It took millions of years for man to live communally and even longer to reach the age of Enlightenment, when concepts of self-government, rule of law, equal justice and individual liberty emerged. Throughout most of history, man fought – generally over land or religion. Today, we are indebted, in terms of liberty, democracy and markets to men like Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Galileo, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and Adam Smith. Their ideas, many based on the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans, developed in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The United States Constitution, when adopted in 1788, served as their laboratory. We are still being tested.
https://spectator.us/rioters-rentiers-democratic-city/
It was inevitable that the wave of destructive rioting and looting that has swept through cities that are almost all governed by progressive Democrats, triggered initially by outrage over the sickening death in police custody of George Floyd, would be compared to the American urban riots of earlier generations. But the parallels miss profound differences in the underlying economic and social dynamics.
The Detroit and Newark riots of 1967 and the Los Angeles riot of 1992, for example, took place in cities suffering from the effects of deindustrialization. Los Angeles is not often thought of as a major manufacturing center, but Southern California had a flourishing aerospace industry that went into decline following the Cold War. The children and grandchildren of prosperous industrial workers found themselves stranded in urban regions whose economies shriveled as manufacturing shut down or moved elsewhere.
The violent riots that have taken place in cities like New York are quite different. Most of the cities that are being trashed by opportunistic looters, leftist radicals and criminal gangs lost significant manufacturing long ago. Some of them, like Washington, DC, were never industrial centers. These post-industrial cities are centers of finance like New York, tech like San Francisco, or government like Washington, not centers of physical production, most of which in the 21st century takes place on cheap land on the outskirts of cities or in rural areas.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/26/north-portland-looks-like-war-zone-after-antifa-allowed-to-rampage-for-hours/
Parts of Portland Oregon look like a “war zone” after a mob of about 200 antifa militants went on a destructive rampage late Thursday night into early Friday morning.
While the police stood by and watched, according to Portland-based journalist Andy Ngo, the antifa rioters tried to set up an “autonomous zone” outside the Portland Police North Precinct using barricades and stolen property.
“They’re occupying the space & trying to recreate another autonomous zone like the one they did outside Ted Wheeler’s condo,” he reported on Twitter. “A separate mob is demonstrating downtown.”
Throughout the early morning hours, the agitators started fires, smashed windows, looted and vandalized buildings. Militants also broke into a bank and also set fire to the Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct, according to Oregon Live.
After the antifa militants fired mortars and paintballs at officers, resulting in multiple injuries, Portland police finally administered CS gas to disperse them, KATU News reporter Dan McCarthy reported. Only four people were arrested.
The radicals were allowed to do an extensive amount of property damage before they were shut down.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/27/a-coup-against-our-institutions/
Matthew Spalding, a scholar of the Constitution and dean of Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C., has written an important essay on the troubling possibility that the treatment of General Michael Flynn by the Obama administration and, later, by holdovers in the FBI, the Justice Department, and the CIA, represents not just a personal disaster for Flynn—who was, for a week or so, President Trump’s national security advisor—but also a brewing constitutional crisis for the United States.
Many commentators, myself included, have described the whole “Donald-Trump-was-a-Russian-Asset” caper as the biggest political scandal in U.S. history. We were ridiculed or condemned by the Left and the NeverTrump fraternity alleged to be on the Right for saying that, but time has proven us right. We were right, too, that this scandal was less a “hoax,” as it was sometimes called, than an attempted, if slow-motion, coup. It was an attempted coup because it aimed to disrupt the peaceful transition of presidential power from one administration, and one party, to another.
That sounds pretty dramatic, I know—aren’t “coups” things that happen in South American banana republics, not the United States? But as I wrote in May 2019, “coup”
accurately expresses the deliberate effort by actors in the Obama Administration, including by President Obama himself, to assure Hillary Clinton’s victory by destroying the reputation of Donald Trump. “Most Presidents leave office,” the commentator L. J. Keith recently wrote, “and essentially step back from public life. Not Barack Obama. Shellshocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and Clinton set in motion a series of events that will forever tar his presidency, and decimate the concept of a peaceful transition of power.”
I returned to Keith’s point last September, noting that “the Obama administration’s actions threatened not just Trump and his presidency, but the very processes and protocols by which the peaceful transition of power has been effected in the United States.”
This troubling truth is Spalding’s theme, and he brings together the threads of the argument in masterly fashion.
https://pjmedia.com/culture/ed-driscoll/2020/06/26/mr-jones-walter-duranty-n580824
Having linked at Instapundit to a couple of reviews of the new film about the journalist who first went on the record about the Soviet Union’s terror famine in Ukraine in 1933, titled Mr. Jones, I bit the bullet and purchased it from Amazon Prime Video. I wanted to like this film so, so much, given that it focuses on a subject that Hollywood moviemakers have avoided for decades. And while Mr. Jones has many excellent moments, it also has several scenes that ultimately work against it as a film.
But it’s a very noble failure. The man in the title is real-life Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935), played by James Norton. But he’s really not what makes Mr. Jones so important a film. That person is the now infamous Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ man in Moscow, Stalin’s stenographer, played by Peter Sarsgaard. Previously, Sarsgaard co-starred in another film about a leftwing fabulist run amok, Shattered Glass, playing the editor of the New Republic’s Stephen Glass.
In 1932, Duranty won a Pulitzer for his lies that, as Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1919, the Soviet Union and its capital-C-Communism was “the future, and it worked.”
It didn’t. And the Times, which apparently now sees the Soviet Union as some sort of extended experiment in free love under Premier Austin Powers, has yet to return the Pulitzer.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/it_turns_out_that_putting_homeless_people_in_luxury_hotels_in_san_francisco_isnt_such_a_good_idea.html
Who could have predicted that serious problems would follow upon housing homeless people — often with criminal backgrounds, drug problems, and mental health issues — in San Francisco luxury hotels? Actually, it looks like the city officials responsible for making this decision predicted it, because they have kept the practice confidential. Erica Sandburg writes an eyebrow-raising report in City Journal:
One recent morning a disheveled, visibly disturbed man ran frantically around the lobby of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, the historic and elegant property located at the crest of tony Nob Hill. As one of San Francisco’s designated Front-Line Worker Housing (FLWH) hotels, it’s reserved for health-care and public-safety employees working on Covid-19 related matters. But San Francisco is surreptitiously placing homeless people in luxury hotels by designating them as emergency front-line workers, a term that the broader community understands to mean doctors, nurses, and similar professionals.
“Do I look scary to you?” the man demanded. “They’re trying to evict me because I wanted more towels but I’m homeless! They called the cops on me.” He dashed out the door and around the grand circular entrance, where two police officers attempted to resolve the situation. Soon a cab pulled up and an inebriated couple emerged, holding full plastic trash bags. They fought, screaming at each other until the woman entered the lobby and her partner lit a meth pipe in the garage area. More “front-line workers.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/then_they_came_for_jesus.html
In the Theater of the Absurd that passes today for Western culture, the issue of complexion is paramount. It now appears that “white” is bad, pale skin a sign of endemic bigotry, race hatred and colonial violence. Iconoclasm has become all the rage, quite literally. Statues and representations that connote the alabaster heresy have become anathema and must be torn down, toppled or replaced by more acceptable versions of cultural appropriateness and politically correct convictions. Cultural, political and religious emblems and symbols that betoken “whiteness” must be rinsed clean of their chromatic aberrations or cast into the wells of oblivion.
The chorus of righteous vituperation against the existence of a “white Jesus” is only the latest instance of such prejudice. No less an arbiter of religious taste than the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has just joined the campaign to scour and sublimate effigies of Jesus long in place in the interests of universal justice. The Daily Mail has a fairly good coverage of his comments that he would be reviewing statues at Canterbury Cathedral, urging the West “to reconsider its prevailing mindset that Jesus was white,” and determining whether all the monuments “should be there.” The statues “need[ ] to be put in context. Some will have to come down.”
According to a spokesperson for Canterbury Cathedral, “All of the Cathedral’s items are being reviewed to ensure that any connected with slavery, colonialism or contentious figures from other historic periods are… presented in a way that avoids any sense of aggrandisement.” This would go some way to “acknowledging any associated oppression, exploitation, injustice and suffering connected with these objects.” Such monuments would thus be cleansed of their destructive impact and allow aggrieved and dissenting voices to be heard.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16166/christians-butchered
“The atrocities against Christians have gone unchecked and risen to alarming apogee with the country’s security forces and concerned political actors looking the other way or colluding with the Jihadists.” — The Nigerian Voice, May 14, 2020
Earlier this year, Christian Solidarity International issued a “Genocide Warning for Christians in Nigeria.”
“This [using a church as a personal toilet] is only the latest incident … [I]t has become extremely common for Greek Orthodox Churches to be vandalised and attacked by illegal immigrants on Lesvos…. As a deeply religious society, these attacks on churches are shocking to the Greek people and calls to question whether these illegal immigrants seeking a new life in Europe are willing to integrate and conform to the norms and values of their new countries.” — Greek City Times, May 16, 2020.
The following are among the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of May 2020:
The Slaughter of Christians
Nigeria: From January 2020 to mid-May 2020, Muslim terrorists massacred at least 620 Christians (470 by Fulani herdsmen and 150 by Boko Haram). According to a May 14 report:
“Militant Fulani Herdsmen and Boko Haram … have intensified their anti-Christian violence … with hacking to death in the past four months and half of 2020 of no fewer than 620 defenseless Christians, and wanton burning or destruction of their centers of worship and learning. The atrocities against Christians have gone unchecked and risen to alarming apogee with the country’s security forces and concerned political actors looking the other way or colluding with the Jihadists. Houses burnt or destroyed during the period are in their hundreds; likewise dozens of Christian worship and learning centers.”
The report further states that, since 2009, “not less than 32,000 Christians have been butchered to death by the country’s main Jihadists.”
Earlier this year, Christian Solidarity International issued a “Genocide Warning for Christians in Nigeria,” in response to the “rising tide of violence directed against Nigerian Christians and others classified as ‘infidels’ by Islamist militants…” More recently, in a May statement, the Christian Rights Agenda, another human rights group, expressed concern for “the seeming silence of Nigeria’s President, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, who as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces has not only failed to protect the Christian communities but has remained silent over these killings. To date, no Fulani herdsmen have been arrested and prosecuted over the killings, a development that has helped to embolden them.” It is worth noting that Buhari himself is a Fulani Muslim.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16154/iraq-turkish-airstrikes
“On June 20, they even bombed the safe spot where the other villagers could go.” — Athra Kado, Assyrian rights advocate in Alqosh, Iraq, to Gatestone.
“We have been informed by the Turkish forces that ‘we’ll bomb whenever we want to’… But nobody seems to be concerned about our struggles or wants to help us.” — Younan Youkhanna, Assyrian journalist in Challik, Iraq, which is affected by Turkish bombings.
Turkey’s Defense Ministry announced on June 17 that the country had “launched a military operation against the PKK” (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) in northern Iraq after carrying out a series of airstrikes. Turkey has named its assaults “Operation Claw-Eagle” and “Operation Claw-Tiger,” the Turkish government-funded Anadolu Agency reported.
The Yazidi and Assyrian Christian communities in the area had already been terrorized when they were targeted in a genocidal attack by the Islamic State (ISIS) beginning in 2014.
The Yazidi and Assyrian natives of the area have expressed their condemnation of the bombings.
On June 16, the Free Yezidi Foundation (FYF) issued a statement, in which it “condemns in strongest terms the Turkish airstrikes conducted in Sinjar, Iraq.”
“In 2014, Daesh (ISIS) terrorists swept through vast areas in Syria and Iraq, committing genocide against the ethno-religious minority Yezidi community in Sinjar. Yezidis have been displaced since that time and are slowly beginning to return back to their areas of origin. These airstrikes, in violation of Iraqi sovereignty, heighten the risk to Yezidi civilians and jeopardize the safe, voluntary return of a fragile and severely traumatized minority population…
“Now, the recent airstrikes conducted by Turkey have not only endangered the lives of Yezidis in Sinjar but have also dimmed the prospect of the return of civilians to their areas of origin. This places further hardship upon the more than 300,000 displaced Yezidis living in grim conditions in IDP camps.”
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