RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/democratic-socialist-government-it-even-legal-jason-d-hill/

When I first applied for US citizenship and subsequently became a United States citizen, there was a question on the qualifying exam that asked if I had ever been a member of the communist party or had ever advanced the ideas of communism. As a committed conservative Democrat at the time (I am now a committed conservative independent) the question caused me no turmoil. I answered: NO to both. It was a disqualifying question. It seemed uncontroversial to me. Communism and the ideals of the American commitment to freedom, liberty, property rights, individualism and free market capitalism were philosophical and political antipodes. If I had answered yes to those questions, I would properly have been deemed an enemy of the state and regarded as unqualified to become a naturalized American citizen, not on political grounds — but, fundamentally, on moral ones.

The right to regard oneself as an end in oneself, the right to carve out a conception of the good life for oneself independent of government interference, the right to voluntarily deal with others (or not) by means of one’s own independent judgment and, further, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of personal happiness — are indelibly constitutive features of our American system of government and socio-political ways of life.

The right to also create unlimited wealth that is a material application of a value produced by one’s mind — and tangibly ratified and endorsed by consumer support — is protected by the traditional American system. When I produce something tangible and I manifest it in the world, and it is rewarded by others, I know that this is a function of the application of my values and rational faculty to the problems of human survival that others have rewarded me for.

So when the Democratic Socialist Congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, says we have enough billionaires, I know she is placing a moratorium on the precondition for wealth creation: the stupendous creativity of the human mind, and, therefore, a strike against the mind and the human brain.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/interview-part-i-swedish-author-johan-norberg-on-the-devastating-impact-of-socialism-and-what-it-could-cost-the-u-s?itm_source=parsely-api?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=021520-news&utm_campaign=position3

Frank Camp February 14th, 2020
With the success of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has come the rise in notoriety and popularity of so-called Democratic socialism in the United States.

According to a 2019 Gallup survey, 43% of Americans said that “some form of socialism [would] be a good thing” for the United States. Regardless of whether or not Americans fully understand what “socialism” means, they appear to support it in some way nonetheless.

Because of this development, I thought it would be vital to speak with Swedish author Johan Norberg, an historian of ideas and CATO Institute fellow, who has written such books as “In Defense of Global Capitalism” and “Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future,” among others.

His documentary film, “Sweden, Lessons for America?” hit the airwaves in 2018, and can be rented or purchased on Amazon and iTunes, and is available for free on YouTube.

In part one of this two-part interview, Norberg discusses socialism as a philosophy, the rise and fall of Sweden due to its experimentation with socialist ideas, the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders and what that means for the United States, and how even voluntary “libertarian” experiments in socialism have failed.

DW: There are a lot of people who cite the so-called “Nordic model” when advocating for socialism or “democratic socialism.” Is Sweden a socialist nation? And if it’s not, why do people seem to think it is?

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“You’re a racist!” The words stung. At first, I was upset and mystified. The word racist is defined by Webster as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human behavior and the racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” I could not understand the vitriol that prompted the accusation. I do not (and did not) believe I am racist, nor do I think I am misogynistic, anti-Semitic or xenophobic. While this incident occurred three years ago, I had not belittled Blacks by urging them to be dependent on an all-caring government. I have never implied they could not make it on their own; in fact, I have suggested they could and would – that aspiration was half the battle. I have never denied Asian-Americans admission to America’s most prestigious universities, simply because they were Asians, nor have I ever supported Boycott and Divest Sanctions (BADS) against Israel, just because the Jewish people wish to defend a homeland that dates back 2000 years And I never persuaded a young intern to perform oral sex in my office.

I am certainly no paragon of virtue. But all I had done was to write words in support of Mr. Trump’s attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to “drain the swamp,” a quagmire of corrupt politicians, crony capitalists and bureaucratic administrators who feed off the public teat. I had had the temerity to defy teachers’ unions, when writing in support of school choice for inner-city children. I had provoked the anger of the “woke” by supporting the “stop, question and frisk” policy in cities where crime is a constant menace for minorities.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/dems-dont-realize-how-much-impeachment-hurts-them/?utm_source=ntnlreview&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=amconswap

Would you trust the nation to the people the Democratic party has become? Because that is the question Democrats have thrust into the minds of voters. As they have said many times, this was always more about America than it was about Trump.

We are watching the pathetic ending to one of the most pathetic periods in American politics. All the smoking guns have been firing blanks.

Following one of the most childish tantrums of denial ever recorded, Democrats set about destroying the Trump presidency in its crib; a WaPo headline from January 20, 2017 – Inauguration Day itself – exclaimed “The Campaign to Impeach President Trump has Begun.” The opening gambit was going to be Emoluments, including rent paid by the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China for its space in Trump Tower in New York.

After three years, it looks like that attempt finally reached its end game, failure, one gray afternoon. On Friday the Senate brought impeachment proceedings to their effective conclusion, declaring the witnesses already called before the House were to be the last. The formal vote to acquit Trump is scheduled as an anti-climax for Wednesday.

It has been ugly and mean. Using the entire apparatus of the American intelligence community, operating fully outside the law, Democrats declared the President of the United States a Russian spy. They forced gentlemen to explain to their elderly mothers what a pee tape was. We had to hear over dinner about Trump’s sexual peccadilloes and look deeper into Stormy Daniel’s cleavage than our own political souls. They made expedient heroes out of small, dishonest men like Michael Avenatti, John Brennan, and James Comey for perceived political gain. 

Shame on you, Democrats.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/marx-didnt-distinguish-between-communism-and-socialism-why-should-we_3225448.html

When President Donald Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he believes the Democrats’ frontrunner, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), is a communist, the president clarified, “You could say socialist,” but then again, “I think of Bernie sort of as a socialist but far beyond a socialist.”

As the pundits trip over poli-sci-class definitions, my question is, what’s the difference?

As far as freedom-lovers go, safeguarding our liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, there is none. To be sure, communists and socialists argue and split hairs. They fight and break heads. But they also work together and destroy liberty because they all travel to the same soul-crushing destination of collectivism.

What anti-communists need to know is that communists and socialists—and “democratic socialists,” Fabians, progressives, Alinskyites (not to mention most Democrats and an awful lot of Republicans)—believe in the same centrally planned, varyingly totalitarian vision for America that our Founding Fathers would have had to declare independence from all over again.

To that point of ideological convergence, here are a couple of clarifying quotations from recognized experts—one, from the anti-communist camp; the other, from the communist camp.

https://www.city-journal.org/viral-epidemics-coronavirus

Over the past century, as globalization accelerated, viral epidemics have become a serious threat to humanity. In 1918, the Spanish flu killed about 50 million people around the world. The average age of victims was 20, and many died within a day. A comparable flu struck Mexico in 2009, infecting at least 1 million victims. This time, the average victim age was 40. Such flus or pneumonias, different from ordinary seasonal flus, kill the young rather than the elderly. Youth lack natural immunity because of their limited exposure to viruses.

These epidemics are becoming recurrent, too, and emerging more quickly. They’re especially prevalent in China, which has experienced remarkable growth since the turn of the century. In 2003, a pneumonia epidemic, SARS, infected thousands in China before reaching Canada and the United States. At the time, the SARS story paralyzed media, but even today, we don’t know how many people succumbed to the virus, because Chinese authorities hid the evidence.

Now China’s latest epidemic, the coronavirus, is causing anxiety worldwide while remaining largely a mystery. Coronavirus typically spreads between animals and humans, the illness leaping from one to the other, mutating and becoming deadlier as it evolves. The latest mutation originated somewhere in China’s Wuhan region, home to vast chicken and pig farms, where dubious hygienic conditions prevail amid a large population. But now the virus has traveled, as did previous epidemics. The Spanish Flu, for example, likely started on a U.S. chicken farm and then traveled by ship. It took one infected sailor, going from port to port, to create a global pandemic. But the risk is even greater today, with airline traffic making the globalization of a virus almost immediate.  

When a new virus emerges, it takes months to create a vaccine for treatment. In the interim, only time and isolation can manage infection rates. Nor is there any remedy other than medicines that ease symptoms. The highly respected French epidemiologist Robert Sebag told me that, judging from past experience, it’s conceivable that up to 15 percent of those who contract the Wuhan virus could die. Chinese officials, though conceding that the virus is highly contagious (and more so than SARS), maintain that the more likely figure is 3.5 percent. This is, of course, largely guesswork for the time being. The only effective measure against the virus at this point is to isolate the sick to control contagion. But the source remains unknown, making management difficult; and not enough Chinese doctors exist—and not all are competent—to contain an illness spreading from city markets to the countryside.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/why-impeachment-failed/

House Democrats rushed through a botched process and then complained bitterly and endlessly that Senate Republicans wouldn’t do their work for them.

Unless more incriminating evidence emerges to dramatically alter public perception, the impeachment trial of Donald Trump is effectively over.

It’s comforting, no doubt, to believe that Trump has survived this entire debacle because he possesses a tighter hold on his party than Barack Obama or George W. Bush or any other contemporary president did. But while partisanship might be corrosive, it’s also the norm. In truth, Trump, often because of his own actions, has likely engendered less loyalty than the average president, not more.

It’s difficult to recall a single Democratic senator throwing anything but hosannas Obama’s way, which allowed the former president to ride his high horse from one scandalous attack on the Constitution to the next. In 1998, not a single Democrat voted to convict Bill Clinton, who had engaged in wrongdoing for wholly self-serving reasons, despite the GOP’s case being methodical and incriminating. Attempting to impeach a president for lying under oath to a federal grand jury in a sexual-harassment case in an effort to obstruct justice was, as Alan Dershowitz and many others argued, “sexual McCarthyism.” Few Democrats, though, claimed Clinton was innocent, because no one could credibly offer that defense; they merely reasoned that the punishment was too severe for what amounted to a piddling crime.

http://politicalmavens.com/

In a country reeling from the uptick in violence such as school shootings, cop-killings, anti-semitic, anti-Christian and racist massacres, not to mention the daily news reports of random street and subway stabbings, slashings and shootings – the NYTimes chose to offer this as its front page article on the impeachment :
(2/2/20): “Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to foresee the lesson of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. ‘When you strike at a king,’ Emerson said, ‘ you must kill him.” This advice, quoted by the Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker sounds very similar to that issued by various Islamic religious leaders who have urged their followers to kills Jews anywhere they find them, using any implements at their disposal, particularly knives and large trucks Unfortunately, it resembles some of what Black Lives Matter urges on its followers with signs hailing “Kill the Pigs.”

The quote was originally a response to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s request to Emerson to critique the paper he was writing about Plato for the course he was taking as a Harvard undergraduate Emerson, obviously concerned about the loose ends Holmes had left in the paper, gave the young student some strong metaphoric advice: Plato was the king and though Holmes had struck him, he had not successfully completed his arguments against him.

Seen in the newspaper which has blamed most of the divisiveness in our society on Trump’s “racist rhetoric,” this little known quote, completely out of context, can be seen as an inflammatory invitation to the deranged malcontents in a lawless and dangerous society, one which also increasingly has trouble parsing the meaning and intent of metaphor.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Since time immemorial, a perfect society has been a dream. In the “Book of Revelations,” a thousand, golden, peaceful years are promised, when Christ returns to reign before the final judgment day. In 1516, Thomas More coined the word “Utopia” that he incorporated into the title of his classic work, in which he described perfect conditions on the island of Utopia. In 1620, Pilgrims came to the “New World,” in search of a “city on a hill,” a society under God’s guiding hand. Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts was founded by the transcendentalist and former Unitarian minister, George Ripley in 1841. It was to be an egalitarian, self-sufficient community with no distinction between intellectual and manual labor. While FDR’s New Deal was a response to the Great Depression, the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson was an attempt to banish poverty and let equality rule. The belief that man could live as brothers in peace has long been a promise of idealists, swindlers, fraudsters, charlatans and politicians – or do I repeat myself?

The word ‘inequality’ evokes emotion. Webster defines equality as the “quality or state of being equal.” When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…,” he was not implying that all persons are equal in talents, or that outcomes should be equal. He was saying we are equal in those natural rights granted by God. Under the Constitution, we are equal in our right to assemble and to speak freely; we are equal in our rights under and before the law, and we are equal in our right to vote.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-30-two-reasons-why-continuing-a-little-with-impeachment-might-not-be-such-a-bad-thing

As of this writing it looks like the impeachment farce in the Senate may end as early as tomorrow. The Democrats’ “more witnesses” gambit appears to be fizzling out — although that is not a certainty until the vote is taken. I suppose that ending this thing is for the better. However, I do have a couple of reasons why having it continue for at least a little while longer may not be so bad.

The first is that there is an obvious witness for the President’s side to call, someone whose testimony could be the first real “bombshell” in this whole matter. No, it is not Joe or Hunter Biden. I have seen the Bidens mentioned dozens of times as potential witnesses to be called by the President, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. As indefensible as the Bidens’ conduct in Ukraine may be, calling them as witnesses would likely turn into a net negative for the President. As a general matter, if you can avoid it, you never want to call a well-prepared hostile witness who is devoted to defeating your case. When you start questioning such witnesses, they will almost certainly follow the strategy of ignoring whatever questions you may ask and delivering pre-prepared self-serving monologues justifying their own position. Rarely will a judge give you any meaningful relief to get the testimony focused on what you want.

The President’s counsel calling Joe or Hunter Biden would be like the House managers seeking to call the President himself, or somebody like William Barr or Mike Pompeo. Those people are just not going to say anything unfavorable to the President if they can possibly avoid it. Instead you call people like Alexander Vindman and Marie Yovanovich. People who think that their stellar performance in office has been ignored. Even better, people (like Yovanovich) who have been fired by your target, and maybe have also been insulted by your target and have a powerful motive to use their testimony to get revenge.