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COWARDICE A LA CARTE: EDWARD CLINE

Posted By on August 8th, 2020

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/08/cowardice-la-carte.html

cowardice

: lack of courage or firmness of purpose

Synonyms

cowardliness, 
cravenness, 
dastardliness, 
gutlessness, 
poltroonery, 
pusillanimity, 
spinelessness

High Noon

I never mind all the political “Red Scare” info surrounding “High Noon” (released 1952), nor the conflicts between Carl Forman and  Fred Zinnemann, the associate producers. What fascinates me about the film is not the gun fights, but rather the variety of  expressions of cowardice and of the betrayal of Will Kane, (played by Gary Cooper ) the marshal of the town of Hadleyville in the Arizona Territory, as he prepares to face a gang of killers who arrive to kill him. He can find no one willing to be deputized to help him face the gang. He experiences hostility, indifference, and hatred,

The cowardice evokes  for me the current cowardice of Americans who are willing to submit to the COVID-19 panic and are willing to don face masks and buckle into “social distancing” in their behavior. They are willing to wear face masks even during their personal, one-on-one  encounters.

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Seth Rich Case Blown Wide Open, Judge Makes Shocking Move Mark Megahan

Posted By on August 8th, 2020

http://newshourfirst.com/2020/08/07/breaking-seth-rich-case-blown-wide-open-judge-makes-shocking-move/

The Seth Rich case just got a fresh breath of life this week as a judge made a shocking request of the British government. Beltway pundits are jumping for joy because they think this is the crack in the lid which will blow the Deep State cover right off the whole can of worms.
 
Way back in the mists of time, on May 16, 2017, Fox news published a story then quickly retracted it. Fox claimed, at the time, that Seth Rich was the one who leaked emails to Wikileaks, not the Russians. The source they relied on backed down when he got a cease and desist order from the family. His parents cried foul and sued Fox News for intentionally inflicting emotional distress on them by “slandering” their murdered son.
 

It seems the only way to get to the bottom of it and decide whether the article was a “sham” as the Rich family claims, or “substantially true” as Fox News insists, is to ask Julian Assange. Federal Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn started the ball rolling to do exactly that. Fox news is the side which needs the evidence but the judge was the one required to make the formal request. “Mr. Assange, as founder of WikiLeaks, is exceptionally suited to provide testimony that will be highly relevant to these issues. Therefore, Fox News, by and through this letter of request issued by the District Court, is formally requesting the testimony of Mr. Assange for use at trial.”

Judge Netburn sent a formal Hague Convention request for testimony from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Many beltway insiders are convinced Assange’s testimony will blow the case “wide open and finally provide answers concerning the unsolved murder.” Assange has always denied he got the emails from Russia and also has hinted that the DNC employee was the real leaker. Right after the material was released, Seth Rich was killed in what police call a robbery, “even though his wallet, phone, jewelry and other valuables were not taken.

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Convergence: Pandemic Amid the Seventh Crisis Bob MacGuffie and Antony Stark

Posted By on August 8th, 2020

http://www.independentsentinel.com/convergence-pandemic-amid-the-seventh-crisis/

As the events precipitated by the Pandemic have unfolded over the past six months, their impact on our culture, the economy, and politics have converged with a Seventh Crisis already underway in America.

Why is this the seventh crisis?  In their 1997 book, “The Fourth Turning” demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe view Anglo-American history through a generational lens.  Their compelling account organizes Anglo-American history into seven repeating cycles starting in the fifteenth century.

Referring to historical cycles as a “saeculum,” they use a Roman term that basically covers a long human life, say eighty to one hundred years.  As the generations are born, mature, age and pass, they give each saeculum a seasonal and cyclical quality.  The authors note many recurring patterns over the ages giving each saeculum a repeating seasonal pattern.  Their study and organization of history along these recurring cycles has informed the names they have applied to identify each of the phases: the High, the Awakening, the Unraveling, the Crisis.

They have also distinguished four generations by the phase into which each was born:

Prophets born in a High, Nomads in an Awakening, Heroes in an Unraveling and Artists in a Crisis.  As each saeculum proceeds, the dominant characteristics of each generation are formed by the forces at play specific to the saeculum phase within which it is born.  By examining the seven saecula from 1435 onward, the authors make a compelling case that man’s nature as forged by generation, drives history through amazingly similar cycles.  The book examines the twentieth century’s conclusion of the sixth “Great Power” and seventh “Millennial” saecula and their generations in detail.  They illuminate the “Unraveling” of the 1920s leading to the “Crisis” of the ‘30s, which climaxed with WWII.

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Was Booker T. Washington Too White? Harold F. Callahan

Posted By on August 8th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/08/was-booker-t-washington-too-white/

According to the Washington Post, on May 31, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture’s “Talking about Race” portal published a graphic of “Some Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States.” As reported by Thomas DiLorenzo, it characterized “most U.S. white people most of the time” as including “self-reliance, independence, merit, competitiveness, belief in equality under the law, protection of property rights, ability to speak and write plain English, avoidance of conflict, politeness, Christianity, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the work ethic, associating ‘pay’ with work, the scientific method, respect for authority, planning for the future (i.e., savings, delayed gratification), and belief in the traditional nuclear family.”

As people started noticing the claims that such characteristics represented whiteness, rather than what Frederic Hess and R.J. Martin termed “intellectual and personal traits that promote personal and civic success – in the U.S. or anywhere else,” it created enough controversy that the graphic was taken down last month, leaving many unanswered questions in its wake.

However, that graphic helped me understand something that has puzzled me for a long time. That something is that every Black History Month, which annually promotes many role models for imitation, gives such short shrift to Booker T. Washington. While my research has led me to conclude that he was an exemplar of the moral means to success – self-improvement that benefits others as well through voluntary arrangements – apparently that makes him “too white” to emulate today. But that is a hard conclusion to defend.  

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Iran: China’s Newest Colony? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on August 8th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16309/iran-china-colony

The deal is a clear win for China; the $400 billion will be invested over 25 years, which is a small amount of money for the second-largest economy in the world. China will also have full authority over Iran’s islands, gain access to Iran’s oil at a highly discounted rate and increase its influence and presence in almost every sector of Iranian industry, including telecommunications, energy, ports, railways, and banking. China, incidentally, is the world’s largest importer of oil.

Even some of Iran’s politicians and state-owned newspapers have begun criticizing the deal. A headline in the Iranian newspaper Arman-e Melli, for example, surprisingly criticized the government: “Iran is not Kenya or Sri Lanka (to be colonized by China).”

The ruling mullahs are selling off the country to China, just as some African governments did. Beijing appears more than happy to make deals with dictators, ignore their human rights abuses and plunder their nations to advance its own global hegemonic ambitions.

A slogan in which Iran’s ruling mullahs have taken pride since they came to power in 1979 is: “Neither East nor West.” The Iranian regime has long boasted about its independence from both Western and Eastern powers. A new secret deal with China, however, appears to be giving Beijing significant control over Iran.

The 25-year secret deal, which looks like a colonial agreement, grants China significant rights over the nation’s resources. Leaked information reveals that one of its terms is that China will be investing nearly $400 billion in Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemicals industries. In return, China will get priority to bid on any new project in Iran that is linked to these sectors. China will also receive a 12% discount and it can delay payments by up to two years. China will also be able to pay in any currency it chooses. It is also estimated that, in total, China will receive discounts of nearly 32%.

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Bad medicine: Fauci’s HCQ Waterloo By Monica Showalter

Posted By on August 8th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/bad_medicine_on_hcq_faucis_waterloo.html

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been hailed in the press as the nation’s top infectious disease expert.  He’s been feted with presidential honors and high praise for his medical acumen.  His policy disagreements with President Trump, supposedly as the voice of “science,” have made him a hero on the left.  Such laurels and the implied power conveyed have led to some weird side-effects — such as his image featured on ladies’ underwear and declarations that he’s the sexiest man alive.

But it’s about time this idol topples, based on this summary about Fauci’s startlingly bad medicine and bad medical policy on COVID, which has in fact cost thousands of lives.  And yes, he is very specifically to blame. 

Virologist Steven Hatfill, writing in RealClearPolitics, summed up just how disastrous Fauci has been for America’s COVID response, based on Fauci’s suppression of evidence about hydroxychloroquine, the safest and most effective treatment for COVID based on all reputable studies, and the political power he’s used to halt its treatment even as the rest of the world got well from the inexpensive medication’s use.

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To mask or not to mask? By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on August 8th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/to_mask_or_not_to_mask_.html

Americans are being urged to, forced to, guilted into, and bullied into wearing masks. If we don’t wear masks, Democrats smugly tell us, we’re selfish killers who have no regard for the life and safety of others. But is that true? It turns out that the science about masks is anything but settled – and that masks come with some significant downsides.

Even as Fauci the Hypocrite says masks for thee but not for me, serious scientific authorities are moving in the other direction. Holland’s scientific community holds that masks don’t help and could hurt:

‘Face masks in public places are not necessary, based on all the current evidence,’ said Coen Berends, spokesman for the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. ‘There is no benefit and there may even be negative impact.’

[snip]

[The Outbreak Management Team] believes they detract from a clear three-pronged message that has kept deaths from coronavirus down to less than half the rate in Britain: wash hands regularly, maintain social distancing of 1.5 metres and stay at home if suffering any symptoms.

The one exception outside of the medical frontline has been on public transport, where masks are mandatory on the basis it is difficult to stay apart on crowded buses, ferries and trains.

[snip]

‘The evidence for them is contradictory. In general, we think you must be careful with face masks because they can give a false sense of security. People think they’re immune from disease or stop social distancing. That is very negative.’

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Kick the ‘1619 Project’ Out of Schools The federal government is more than justified in preventing students, parents, and teachers from being subjected to anti-American “history.” By David Randall

Posted By on August 8th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/07/kick-the-1619-project-out-of-schools/

America needs to get the “1619 Project” curriculum out of its schools. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has introduced a new bill that would go a long way toward that goal—the Saving American History Act of 2020 (SAHA 2020).

The New York Times introduced The “1619 Project” last August. The “1619 Project” mainstreamed the anti-American ideology of a new generation of woke activists, who have graduated from college radicalism to careers in progressive institutions such as the Times. The “1619 Project” seeks to rewrite American history with the claim that it is based on slavery and oppression, rather than on liberty and democracy, in order to delegitimize the American republic. 

The “1619 Project” claims to be “revisionist” history—but many of the best scholars of American history swiftly demonstrated that it was nothing more than a shabby, fact-free polemic. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning mastermind of the “1619 Project,” recently admitted that the effort never had a historical basis—and never even intended to be history. 

“I’ve always said that the ‘1619 Project’ is not a history,” Hannah-Jones said in a series of tweets. “It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.”

Nevertheless, the “1619 Project” has had a profound impact on America’s schools. 

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Barr’s Dilemma: How to Get Politics Out of the Justice Department By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on August 7th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/08/24/barrs-dilemma-how-to-get-politics-out-of-the-justice-department/#slide-1

The Democrats’ case against the attorney general is wildly distorted

Attorney General William P. Barr has a dilemma: how to purge federal law enforcement of the politicization that has left its reputation in tatters, while simultaneously ensuring accountability in one of modern history’s most politically combustible criminal probes.

That probe, conducted at Barr’s direction by John Durham, the United States Attorney for Connecticut, is scrutinizing the origins and predication of what even the attorney general has taken to calling “Russiagate.” This is the “investigation of the investigators,” focusing on the Obama administration’s — in particular, the FBI’s — counterintelligence and criminal investigations into claimed suspicions of Trump “collusion” with Russia. Based on rank hearsay and speculation, much of it sourced to the Hillary Clinton campaign and since discredited, Obama officials developed a theory that Donald Trump had been complicit in the Kremlin’s hacking of Democratic Party emails. The Kremlin’s supposed goal was to snatch the 2016 presidential election from the heavily favored Hillary Clinton and force Trump, under threat of blackmail, to do Vladimir Putin’s bidding in the Oval Office.

Durham’s probe has drawn the rapt attention of our mercurial president, who, in familiar Trumpian understatement, describes the Obama gambit as “treason.” Ditto for the restive Trump base, which longs for the Democrats’ comeuppance after a three-year “witch hunt,” first by the FBI and then by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. With Election Day less than three months away, Barr has indicated that decisions about whether criminal charges should be filed are imminent.

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Hidin’ Biden’s basement convention Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 7th, 2020

https://spectator.us/hidin-biden-basement-mental-fitness-convention/

Not everyone appreciates the extent to which the Democrats pushing Joe Biden for president are students of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

For those of you who think low, let me say straight away that I am not thinking of Coleridge’s penchant for laudanum. No, I am thinking of that other goad to fantasy, Coleridge’s idea, articulated in his book Biographia Literaria (1817), of ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’. (But speaking of thinking low, if we enlarge our gaze to encompass Joe himself, we might also trespass upon the subject of plagiarism. Coleridge cribbed wantonly from the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling just as Joe did from Neil Kinnock and others. Indeed, Joe Biden’s relationship to the truth, especially the truth about his own achievements has always been tenuous.)

Coleridge thought that the human ability to withhold incredulity was an engine to defeat implausibility by marshaling the seductive blandishments of the imagination — more or less what Pooh-Bah had in mind when he spoke of mere ‘corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative’.

So what about Joe Biden’s ‘big right arm’, wither his ‘snickersnee’? It’s not surprising that Joe has decided to forgo the trip to Milwaukee for the Democratic National Convention ‘due to coronavirus concerns’. Instead, he will address the convention, and presumably accept his party’s nomination, from his bunker (what some call his basement) in Delaware.