RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Ignorance is the bane of civilized society. It is inexcusable in a country with free high schools. In a manifestation of cancel culture, mobs tear down statues of yesteryear’s heroes. I wonder: what is gained by destroying historical artifacts? Where is the curiosity expressed by Washington Irving in Sketchbook almost two hundred years ago? “I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievements.”[1] Should we rename army bases in a moment of exuberant zeal, or would it be wiser to debate the issue when heads are cooler? Are past wrongs righted when relegated to the ash heap of ignorance? Can we assume we have reached perfection where our descendants will find nothing wrong in today’s actions? Would those whose bravery stems from being part of a mob tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus have had the courage of the Italian navigator to sail across an infinite sea to an unknown land?

History must be considered in context and with perspective. It is impossible for us to judge the behavior of our forefathers based on today’s moral standards, just as it will be unfair to us for our descendants to mock our actions today based on values a hundred years hence. Should we ignore Columbus because he is now pilloried as a racist, more than five hundred years after his voyage of discovery? Should we disregard Thomas Jefferson, and the words he wrote about self-evident truths and of how all men were created equal with unalienable rights, because he kept slaves? Cannot we admire the former and criticize the latter?

The cultural war is perhaps most pronounced in the Washington D.C. environs, where 283,000 federal bureaucrats work. They are joined by about 14,000 staffers for the 535 Congressmen and Senators. Lobbyists comprise another 11,600 people. Added to the mix are thousands who work in media. In all, they make up almost 20% of the metro areas workforce. These are highly paid people who live in four of the nation’s five wealthiest counties – Howard (MD) and Loudon, Fairfax, and Arlington, all in Virginia. It is a self-contained culture where most jobs are based on who you know. Once hired, they are ensconced, moving from agency to lobbyist firm to agency. But as Richard Grenell, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany and ex-acting Director of National Intelligence, recently noted, the D.C. culture is autonomous, where there is “no outside thought, there’s no perspective.” While forty million Americans lost their jobs due to a state-mandated shut-down of the economy, these people kept theirs, even when told to stay home – most paid from our tax dollars. The contrast to the rest of the country is startling. It was this narcissistic cocoon that Donald Trump threatened to dismantle in 2016 when he pledged to “drain the swamp.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/13/expert_models__fear__stress_pandemic_143428.html

“It’s the science, the science, the science, not politics.” This from leaders calling for the continuation of the shutdown. It is “the science” they say they’re responding to when they tell us how to live every moment of our waking lives. It is the science that tells citizens in Michigan not to buy seeds, not to take their boats out on the lake. It is lifesaving not to go to church. It is lifesaving to wear masks even when you are walking in the park. It is lifesaving to stay six feet apart. Listen up. We, your leaders, have no choice. It’s the science. And remember, if you don’t listen to us, it’s death, and more death, everywhere death.

Apparently, our science-induced leadership has a formula to solve the virus pandemic: Science + (or x) Fear = The Virus Cure. In other words, shut down the economy. Again, there was no choice. Lives were at stake.

Here is what John Kay of the Financial Times has written about science: “The objective of science is not an agreement on a course of action but the pursuit of truth. … Science is a matter of evidence. … The route to knowledge is transparency. … The route to truth is the pluralistic expression of conflicting views. … There is no room in the process for any notion of scientific consensus.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/scott_adams_has_had_a_brilliant_insight_about_the_demand_for_reparations.html

Whenever Democrats push race to the forefront of the news, reparations pop up. The theory is that, because their forebearers were kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in America, blacks will never catch up economically to whites. It doesn’t matter that there are no slaves or slaveowners today; that most whites are not descended from slaveowners; or that racism impoverished, rather than enriched the South.

Scott Adams’ brilliant insight cuts through all this: The comparison isn’t between black wealth and white wealth in America. Instead, the comparison must be the difference between black’s average net worth in America versus black’s average net worth in Africa. After all, the act of stealing blacks from Africa is the “but for cause” of all wrongs done to blacks.

Adams imagines a neutral space alien calculating reparations. He informs earthlings that black versus white net worth in America isn’t the correct calculation:

“If I’m going to calculate the, let’s say, the theft from the black community, if you were to measure the theft — let’s say just theft – that this slavery was. In other words, you stole the productive part of their lives, etc., and you used it for yourself. So here’s the number I need: I need how does the average economic situation for the average black person in this country and then, to compare it, I want to compare it to the average life of a black African.:

And you say, “What?”

When will there be a March to Support Law-Abiding Police Officers?

As the country sees the spectacle of anti-cop rants and total disrespect for the badge, I am reminded of the 1925 piece by William Faulkner titled “The Cop.”  It is way past due to hearken back to the time when, as a young lad, he would desire to

… be a patrolman; in a blue coat and swinging a casual stick and with a silver shield on my breast, I would pace the streets away with the measured beat of my footsteps.  What to compare with this grandeur?  To be the idol and fear of the lads, to be looked upon with respect by even grown people; to be the personification of bravery and the despair of criminals.

What a different time and place.  Almost a century ago, most folks understood the danger that police faced and had a respect for the thin blue line that protected them from criminals and murderers.

Fast-forward, and can we really be surprised at the anger and dismay expressed by New York police boss Michael O’Meara as he declares, “Nobody talks about all the police officers that were killed in the last week in the United States of America and there were a number of them.”

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-2019/no-need-to-plead-guilty/

“Tempting though it is to just sit back and allow the left to self-harm, we shouldn’t do that. Racial politics is so ugly, and so fundamentally dangerous, as we know from the history of the twentieth century, that we have to expose concepts like “white privilege” for the toxic nonsense that they are. Those of us who live in Britain and America – among the least racist, most tolerant societies on earth – have a duty to stand up to this tsunami of gobbledygook before it sweeps us all away.”

The concept of “white privilege” is some-times credited to the African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois, but the phrase didn’t enter the lexicon until it was used in a 1989 paper by the feminist academic Peggy McIntosh. “As a white person, I realised I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage,” she wrote in “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” With the American accent very firmly on “white” rather than “privilege” or any other aspect of class which British ears would so much more readily hear.

Not only is McIntosh white, she is, by any measure, astonishingly privileged. She grew up in an affluent suburb of New Jersey where the median income was four times the national average, and her father, who was a high-ranking scientist at Bell Laboratories, owned patents in several valuable electronic inventions.

After attending Radcliffe, UCL and Harvard, where she earned a PhD, Peggy married Dr Kenneth McIntosh, the son of a Columbia professor. According to William Ray, a Canadian journalist who wrote about her for the online magazine Quillette last year: “Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since.”

But when McIntosh writes about her “privilege” she doesn’t mean in this conventional, upper-class sense. Rather, she is referring to the advantages she enjoys in virtue of being white and which, in her view, all white people share. The “knapsack” she unpacks isn’t a $1,000 Burberry backpack of the kind Peggy and Kenneth might take on a hike in the Adirondacks. No, it’s a bag full of useful things that all white people carry with them, regardless of how disadvantaged their upbringing.

Given the success of Indians across the Anglosphere, it would make more sense to talk about “brown privilege”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/the-centre-cannot-hold/

While published in 1919 the lines from Y.B.Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’ have never been more insightful and apt.  Yeat’s writes of a time when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” and in the same poem “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.

Like the China-virus that has swept the world, causing death, disease and economic and financial collapse, Western societies are also facing an virulent infection represented by a rainbow alliance of radical, cultural-left theories ranging from postmodernism and deconstructionism to LGBTIQ+, post-colonial and radical gender and feminist theories.

As a result of the Black Lives Matter campaign millions around the world have illegally marched and demonstrated, risking infection by the China-virus and causing untold violence, harm and social unrest. Chanting meaningless slogans condemning white supremacism and police violence the millions involved ignore the reality, as noted by the Wall Street Journal’s Heather MacDonald, that in America “a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be killed by a black man than an unarmed black man is to be killed by a police officer”. 

It’s also a fact that African-Americans commit more crimes than white Amercians.  MacDonald writes that in 2018 “African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population”.

In Australia, as argued by the Aboriginal academic at the Australian Catholic University Anthony Dillion, the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody is also overstated and, as a result, other more pressing issues are ignored.  As examples Dillion cites “homelessness, poor health, violence and unemployment”. 

Never mentioned by those condemning white supremacism are the unacceptable high levels of domestic violence, especially against women, where even though Aborigines represent about 3 per cent of the population; they represent 23 per cent of intimate-partner homicide victims.

The mindless and knee-jerk attacks against the British author J.K. Rowlings for  daring to state the obvious — that gender and sexuality are binary and a man who transgenders wanting to be a woman will always be a man — also illustrates how politically correct ideology now dominates. Rowlings joins a long list of others vilified and attacked on social media, including the Australians Germain Greer and Barry Humphries plus the Americans Camille Paglia and the tennis great Martina Navratilova for being “transphobic”.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24252/stand-up-america-american-privilege-is-colorblind  http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

Get off your knees and stand up America! Americans stopped kneeling to tyranny in 1776.  

Our country vehemently rejects submission and adamantly rejects white supremacy AND black supremacy. Racial pandering and prostrating is un-American. It is reverse discrimination and political exploitation of the black community by race-baiting Democrats. Law-abiding Americans, black and white, want equality and ordered liberty. Freedom and equality is a colorblind American privilege. 

Rioting and anarchy never lead to peace – they are the precursors of tyranny. Costumed, kneeling Nancy Pelosi and her globalist handlers are deliberately fomenting racial divisiveness, social chaos, and anarchy in their bid to make America ungovernable and defeat President Trump in November. Chaos is the Democrat party political strategy and the preferred political strategy of tyrants. This is how it works.

Tyranny is a binary social structure of rulers and the ruled. The ruling masters, monarchs, oligarchs, emperors, and dictators all consider the subjects they rule to be property. Not in America! In America we belong to ourselves. It is a privilege to be an American citizen and to live in a society where individual rights, upward mobility, and private property create a robust middle class that supports freedom. Equal opportunity, not equal outcome, is the privilege and guarantee of equality in America.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/11/democrats-not-republicans-protect-dirty-cops/

Abuse and inequality—at the hands of American law enforcement—comes in all forms.

The death of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer has been condemned broadly—by everyone from the Republican president and leaders of both parties to Americans of every color, religion, and partisan affiliation.

The nation now is engulfed in a heated and inarguably dangerous debate about “systemic racism.” Every aspect of the nation’s law enforcement apparatus, activists insist, is the framework that enables this alleged travesty.

“Many Americans . . . do not see these levers of power as protecting them, or even representing them,” U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a June 6 statement. “And rightfully so. The same offices that can be used for good, can and have been used to oppress. That must change.”

Calls for police reform and accountability are happening on a bipartisan basis. That has not been the case, however, when it comes to Obamagate. Democrats, led by the forked-tongue Schiff, have spent the past three years defending, even justifying, unprecedented abuses by the nation’s top law enforcement chiefs related to their targeting of Donald Trump, his associates, and his family members.

The Trump-related victims of James Comey’s FBI may not be black, they  were unfairly targeted nevertheless. It was not race that motivated their persecutors, nor was it any actual suspected wrongdoing. They were targeted because of their political views.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/08/be-courageous-stand-firm-america-we-do-not-kneel/

Americans didn’t kneel to British tyranny, Nazi fascism, or Soviet communism. We won’t kneel for a collective guilt movement that’s gone off the rails.

Those who live in the far north in author George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels live by one principle: “We do not kneel.” They call themselves the “Free Folk.”

That used to be a label that was proudly worn by all Americans. But a still-too-unquestioned movement pushing guilt-by-associated-skin-tone has begun to undo one of this nation’s bedrock ideals.

The kneeling phenomenon demanded by the radical left in the wake of George Floyd’s death—and embraced by those guilted into submission—creates a two-tiered social stratification of “kneelers” and “those who refuse to bend the knee” that’s wholly un-American.

Mobs resulting from years of citizens saturated in “critical race theory” and grievance studies have pressured far too many into believing they bear guilt for the past sins of others. Now they kneel in fealty to that false reality or are exiled from society.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/11/yes-lets-defund-the-police-at-the-epa/

Democrats have met the enemy, and it is the police. Well, not all police. They love the heavily armed federal police at agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

Just days after George Floyd died in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department, Democrats managed to compile a sweeping police reform bill that would, among other things, limit “qualified immunity” of police officers, lower the limits on what constitutes excessive force, create a national registry of police misconduct, bar the use of “no-knock” arrest warrants, and limit the transfer of military equipment to police departments.

Meanwhile, Democrats around the country have been talking about defunding the police, with some proposing to shift resources from law enforcement to social services.

But none has proposed imposing similar restrictions on federal officers. And no Democrat is talking about defunding them.

Even some on the left have noticed this disparity. The leftist Slate.com published an article last week complaining that “while Democrats seek to rein in local law enforcement, they have given the most powerful and least accountable police force in the country a free pass.”

The writer was referring to Customs and Border Patrol agents, another bête noir of the left. But the CBP is often dealing with violent lawbreakers.

What’s the excuse for federal agencies such as the EPA, Food and Drug Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Education, and National Institute of Standards and Technology to be purchasing military-grade equipment?

A 2016 study by Open the Books found that from 2006 to 2014, more than 60 federal agencies spent a total of $1.5 billion on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment. The EPA alone spent more than $3 million on such weaponry.