RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/new_yorks_big_brother_has_gone_bananas.html

In reading the New York State travel advisory, I am reminded of one of my favorite scenes from a Woody Allen movie, this one from Bananas.  Having ascended to power, the dictatorial rebel leader Esposito announces his new rules for San Marcos:

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. … In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now…16 years old!

Woody’s character Fielding Mellish cracks, “What’s the Spanish word for straitjacket?”  The Spanish word is camisa de fuerza.  The Swedish word is tvångströja.  In any language, Gov. Andrew Cuomo surely needs one.  It is bad enough that he is running the state by executive order.  Worse is that the orders are nuts.  If Woody Allen were to make a comic version of 1984, he could model “Big Brother” on Andrew Cuomo.

Last week, I flew into Buffalo.  It was my first flight this year into New York, a state in which I have owned a summer cottage for the last 30 years.  Coming from Missouri, a state on New York’s travel advisory, I had to fill out a two-sided form promising that I would quarantine in place for 14 days.  As if.

Missouri has had about 25 COVID-19 deaths per 100,00 people.  New York has had about 165.  In the western part of Missouri where I live, the rate is considerably lower.  No matter.  By some perverse calculation, my return to New York threatened to put the state’s residents at some elevated risk.

To visit my own cottage, I had to promise not to be in public or otherwise leave the quarters that they have identified as “suitable.”  These “quarters” — how quaint — had to have “separate bathroom facilities for each individual or family group.”  More than that, I had to have “access to a sink with soap and water, and paper towels.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/28/the-fatal-attraction-of-faction/

So far, 2020 has been a dystopian nightmare from George Washington’s perspective. He was once “first in war, first in peace, and first in the minds of his countrymen,” as Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee eulogized him. But now statues of Washington are being toppled, damaged and defaced.

Our first president, who paid careful attention to setting precedents that might allow America not to only survive, but to “live long and prosper,” would find such acts nearly a mirror image of his hopes for what could make our experiment in liberty last. How do we know? Just look at his emphatic warnings to do everything possible to avoid the violence of faction in his 1796 farewell address in contrast to the violence of faction that has played out on our city streets.  

Washington offered “sentiments which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all-important to the permanency of your felicity as a people.” In particular, he insisted that we keep “indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest.”

One of the expedients of party to acquire influence … is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other[s]. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/28/is-the-coronavirus-crisis-finally-over/

Much of America has been in some phase or another of a lockdown since the middle of March. Most of us want to know when we can return to normal. But the officials who have cooped us up, shut down businesses, ruined personal finances, outlawed gatherings, and created an environment of fear won’t tell us when we’ll be free of their grip. To call our situation discouraging is to understate the case.

Numbers from the Centers for Disease Control’s most recently posted data set are reason for optimism, though. The chart below shows the most current figures available, through the week of Aug. 15.

The blue bars that indicate overall weekly deaths, which have been inflated due to COVID-19 fatalities, have almost converged with the roughly horizontal line that shows the average expected number of deaths. The two are the closest they have been since March 21, right after the pandemic lockdowns. Based on the trend, we should expect the bars and the baseline to fully converge when the newest data set is released next week. In other words, back to normal.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/open-letter-julia-louis-dreyfus-bruce-bawer/

Dear Julia,

To begin with, though I found Watching Ellie stunningly bad, though The New Adventures of Old Christine left a bad taste in my mouth, and though I’ve never been able to get into Veep (which feels to me hopelessly derivative of better one-camera comedy series like Curb Your Enthusiasm), I still have a residual fondness of you based on your performance as Elaine in Seinfeld. So I was dismayed to learn that you were lending your talents to the fourth and final night of this year’s Democratic National Convention. And sure enough, even as the rioters and vandals and anarchists were destroying Portland, Oregon, and other cities under the twin banners of Black Lives Matter and Antifa – the former of which the Democratic Party openly celebrates and the latter of which they refuse to condemn – there you were on our screens, as big as life, flashing a bright smile and acting as if absolutely none of these horrors were taking place.

No, instead of acknowledging the madness in the streets, you stood there, describing yourself as “a loyal union member, a passionate climate activist, and a patriotic Democrat,” heaping hyperbolic praise on Michelle Obama (“joking” that her speech had been so spectacular that there’d be a fifth convention night on which it would be re-run “on a loop”) and Kamala “Lock-‘Em-Up” Harris (“She was fabulous!” you gushed), and implying, with a breathtakingly irresponsible gag about Putin, that the disgusting lies about Trump-Russia collusion, now known to have been concocted by crooked leaders of the Obama Administration in what may turn out to be the most scandalous top-down betrayal of the U.S. Constitution on record, were, in fact, true.

Then there was that special moment that you led up to with this ardent declamation:

Here’s the big question. How much of your time and energy are you willing to devote to elect Joe Biden?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/what-is-the-violence-in-american-cities-all-about/

The point of the mob is to destroy what it cannot create.

It is hard to tell what the current revolutionary violence in our major cities is all about.

So far, hundreds of police have been injured, dozens of people have been killed, and we have seen billions of dollars in property and collateral damage.

Ostensibly, many of the summer demonstrations were in protest over the gruesome detention and death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody on May 25.

Yet three months later, few of those trying to burn down a Portland police precinct — with police barricaded inside — or looting the high-end boutiques of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, or indiscriminately beating up innocent pedestrians, appear to be driven by Floyd’s death.

Apologists argue that the perfect-storm furor of June, July, and August was the dividend of a collective six-month fear over the COVID-19 pandemic that has, as of this writing, killed nearly 180,000 Americans.

The unprecedented national quarantine and the sudden, self-generated recession of a once-booming economy certainly added to the tensions.

Millions of youths were sequestered in their apartments and basements, unemployed, without school, and worried over their career prospects. Many simply wanted to vent their rage at the world and almost everything in it.

The media romanticized the “summer of love” unrest and downplayed the violence. Newspapers ran bizarre photo essays on the chic garb at the protests — umbrellas, leaf blowers, wooden shields, armor, and colored bike helmets.

https://worldisraelnews.com/the-dean-of-americas-intellectual-pro-israel-defenders-has-died/

Edward Alexander, the Jewish scholar and author who passed away last week at age 84, was called “Seattle’s Jeremiah” by his hometown newspaper. An Israeli publication once hailed him as “Jewry’s premier polemicist.” For more than half a century, Alexander fought for Israel and the Jewish people in the trenches of the battlefield of ideas.

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.

https://pjmedia.com/election/megan-fox/2020/08/25/guilfoylechallenge-people-are-reenacting-kimberly-guilfoyles-bombastic-speech-and-its-hilarious-n840534

Kimberly Guilfoyle set the internet aflame after her extremely loud speech at the Republican National Convention. She screeched and flailed her arms over what would have been good content, but which was mostly lost under a jarring presentation. Let’s give her credit for launching some great laughs, though. All press is good press, so if you’ve made the world laugh, you’ve at least put the spotlight on the RNC, which has definitely been more exciting than the Democrat snooze-telethon to raise awareness about Trump Derangement Syndrome that we watched last week.

Twitter users have started using #GuilfoyleChallenge and posting videos of themselves imitating Guilfoyle’s big moment… at the top of their voices. I’m not going to lie: it’s hilarious.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com/

“Our American heritage is threatened as much by our own indifference,as it is by the most unscrupulous office or the most powerful foreign threat. The future of this Republic is in the hands of the American voter.”

Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)

The ability to vote is a privilege, as well as a responsibility. It should not be denied any eligible individual, nor should it be granted to any non-citizen. Voters should learn all they can about candidates and their policies. To paraphrase Sy Syms’ ads from the 1980s, democracy depends on an educated electorate. “The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all,” said John F. Kennedy.

Many of us live in one-party states. A consequence is that if one is registered with the “out” party, there is a tendency to feel one’s vote will not matter, for example a Democrat in Wyoming or a Republican in San Francisco or New York City. Trends in voter registration suggest dissatisfaction with both parties. Twenty years ago, 30% of all voters were registered as Independents (up from 20% in 1960), today that number is 40%, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in May 2020. Nevertheless, not voting should never be one’s decision. “Nobody will ever deprive the American people the right to vote,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt, “except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.” And we should vote based on knowledge and reason, not inanity and emotion. Voting should be convenient and simple and should protect against fraud.

The presence of COVID-19 has many skeptical of being anyplace where crowds gather, including polling stations. One proposed alternative is to send ballots to every registered voter. There are about 153 million registered voters in the U.S. There are approximately 140,000 polling stations. Tracking legal voters is not easy. Every year, approximately 14% of the population – roughly 21 million voters – moves; another 1.5 million die and a similar number attain voting age. Keeping accurate records is a formidable task, which is why, historically, people have gone to their local polling stations to vote. Three states – Colorado, Oregon and Washington – have instituted a system to vote by mail, and their experience lends credibility to the viability of the process, but all three have been doing so for several years, ten years in the case of Colorado and twenty years for Oregon. Nevertheless, to take the process national will not be easy. “But running a vote-by-mail election is surprisingly complicated, and there’s a lot of room for things to go wrong. Validating and counting a deluge of posted ballots in an open and accountable way presents a major challenge, one that only half a dozen states are fully prepared for,” so ran an article in the August 9th edition of The Oregonian. In close elections, unintentional errors are viewed with mistrust.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/get-your-lives-oxford-professor-says-people-have-become-overly-frightened-covid-19

Even though BoJo’s system of localized COVID-19 measures seems to be working, the unrelenting hysteria peddled by the British press has left millions of Britons traumatized.

Now, Carl Heneghan, a professor of Evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, is calling for the government to intervene and “proactively reassure” his young students that the coronavirus won’t kill them if they contract it.

He said exaggerated fears of the virus have led to “people going about their daily lives misunderstanding and overestimating their risk,” something with which many Americans can probably empathize.

And as parts of north Manchester remain on ‘partial lockdown’, the professor said introducing local lockdowns could do more harm than good by forcing people into their homes, potentially infecting other vulnerable people who live with them, especially as the temperature drops.

Professor Heneghan’s work has led to a lowering of the official death toll after he revealed COVID-19 deaths were being counted even if someone had subsequently died of other causes.

As we learn more about the virus, the pandemic could end up no worse than a bad flu season, the professor said, with a touch of hyperbole.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/_a_revolution_in_sensibility__and_what_to_do_about_it.html

The virus of collectivism has taken hold among the young, and equality of personal opportunity has yielded to equality of forced outcome.

For many Americans, the enemy is the conservative patrimony of individual agency, traditional marriage, competitive achievement, historical memory, freedom of thought, expression and peaceful assembly, and the morality of public reciprocity. The handshake has been replaced by the clenched fist, a communist salute and emblem adopted by BLM. The virus of collectivism has taken hold among the young, and equality of personal opportunity has yielded to equality of forced outcome.

This is no less than a revolution of sensibility, aggressively promoted by the big digital platforms and the open sewer of social media where the scourge of rampant vigilantism, infantilism run amok and mob justice has infected the entire culture and eroded the principle of legal justice by the politics of indiscriminate revenge for evils real and imagined. Twitter, of course, has now become the major conduit for the neural filth of the nation to disgorge into the mainstream.

The responsible and literate individual is gradually disappearing into a featureless mass. The mob and its movers prevail. The result is an epidemic of iconoclasm (destruction of images and statues), antinomianism (rejection of laws and customs), and the degradation of rational thought. America’s foreign enemies and competitors can scarcely contain themselves as they watch the country implode, a pervasive leftist fifth column doing their work for them.