RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/artist_couple_sue_texas_city_for_unconstitutional_restrictions_on_murals_.html

Is a complaint that the colors of a mural on a private property are too bright valid?  Can it prompt a city to impose broad-brush restrictions on murals?  Waller, northwest of Houston, Texas, has done just that.  Its Mural Ordinance #609 sets into law arbitrary aesthetic and commercial preferences, thus violating free speech – deeply embedded in American identity and enshrined in the First Amendment.

The ordinance has also destroyed the $225,000 contract that brought Brad Smith and his wife Kay Ray-Smith to the city of around 3,000 people last year.  Brad, 61, has been painting murals since his teenage years.  Kay took up art as a healing process.  Their works have adorned walls in Burleson, Waco, Denison, Wynnewood, and other places in Texas and elsewhere.  Their firm Tilt Vision was contracted by Finishes Solutions to create 13 murals for its buildings in Waller.  They completed three, but the ordinance effectively bans any more so the contract was suspended indefinitely.  They have since had no new leads or contracts in Waller.

The artist couple are fighting back with a federal civil rights lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.  They are being represented pro bono by the Pacific Legal Foundation, whose attorneys say the ordinance is unconstitutional and not only violates the First Amendment but also deprives the Smiths and other artists of their livelihood and the opportunity to revitalize communities.

The Smiths say they met Mayor Danny Marburger and some city council members even before they got the contract, reassuring the officials that their murals stayed clear of controversy.  “My murals make people smile,” Brad told Houston Public Media.  Indeed, they usually cover wholesome, all-American themes – patriots and war heroes, smalltown scenes, cityscapes, country roads, skies and clouds, and so on.

According to the Pacific Legal Foundation, someone apparently complained that the colors of this particular mural were too bright. 

https://mailchi.mp/009f641f40e3/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-59783?e=0c8ccf8e98

POWER OF THE PURSE: U.S. HOUSE BLOCKS EPA SPENDING ON WEAPONRY USING OPENTHEBOOKS REPORT

This week, the U.S. House started voting on appropriations bills for federal agencies.
On Thursday, Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL) introduced an amendment to stop the EPA from using ANY funds to grow their already-huge cache of guns, bullets, and military-style equipment. 
“To me, this sounds like we’re arming a SEAL team,” Palmer told colleagues. “The difference is a SEAL team can explain why they need these things; the EPA cannot!”  
The amendment passed along with the EPA budget. This is an example of lawmakers using our research to make real-world changes.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/jamaal-bowman-is-transforming-into-a-memorably-dumb-recurring-sitcom-character/

A confession: I just assume that anyone as attuned as I am to the ongoing carnival of trolls that is Trump/Biden–era Washington must also be a fan of weird, bleak satire. You can’t do this job without a healthy sense of the absurd, at least not without having your spirit crushed. And I’m coming to realize over time that many of the keenest observers of American politics have become in their own way art critics as well, as one must be in an era of performative nonsense.

So what I’ve come to appreciate about New York congressman Jamaal Bowman is how he has played so predictably to a script, slowly morphing into an entertainingly dense bit player whose intermittent appearances in the news always promise a memorably dumb episode in our politics, like Tim Whateley the dentist converting to Judaism for the jokes on Seinfeld or George Santos showing up to sheepishly reveal a competitive Brazilian drag performance alias. He doesn’t dominate the narrative insufferably, like Matt Gaetz — the smug, prat-faced Wesley Crusher of Congress, forever inserting himself into random narratives as a useless B-story for 15 minutes of time-wasting. Instead you can rely on Bowman to pop up every now and then, get caught saying and/or doing something refreshingly funny in its hopelessly flat-footed stupidity, then disappear backstage again into what threatens to be a marvelously entertaining Democratic primary race this spring.

Like any solid character arc, this one begins a few episodes back, back near the end of Season 2 of the 118th Congress, when (as viewers will recall) Kevin McCarthy got unceremoniously axed from the show. Since National Review doesn’t do clickbait “episode guides,” I’ll just remind everyone that — spoiler alert — the day before McCarthy got decapitated as speaker of the House in an ending that perfectly mirrored the first season of Game of Thrones (most viewers were surprised, but I had already read the book), Jamaal Bowman yanked a fire alarm in the Cannon Building in order to delay a vote on a 45-day temporary debt-ceiling increase. As he had been caught on camera, his left-wing partisans then resorted to a delightfully mounting series of get-me-across-pitch defenses: He was confused! He was late to a vote! (He ran out of gas! He had a flat tire! He didn’t have enough money for cab fare! His tux didn’t come back from the cleaners!)

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/03/poll-most-americans-believe-ai-will-lead-to-more-misinformation-in-2024/

A new poll released on Friday shows that a majority of Americans believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to more misinformation being spread on the Internet during the 2024 presidential election.

According to The Hill, the poll from AP-NORC and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy found that 58% of Americans believe AI will lead to an increase in election misinformation. Among respondents who said they have “heard a lot or some about AI” 61% believed in the threat of more misinformation.

When asked about possible actions to combat the misuse of AI, 66% said they support the federal government banning AI-generated images from being used in political ads. Among those 66%, 78% were Democrats and 66% were Republicans.

When asked if the government should ban all AI-generated content from political ads, 54% of Americans said yes. On another question, 65% said they support technology companies and social media platforms explicitly labeling AI-generated content as such, with another 60% saying they support social media companies banning AI-generated images that are false or misleading.

The poll featured a sample size of 1,017 Americans, and was conducted between October 19th and October 23rd.

The rise of AI has begun to draw the attention of elected officials, with Joe Biden issuing an executive order on Monday aimed at addressing concerns regarding AI, from national security to threats to American labor. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate is set to hold a forum focusing on AI and its impact on elections.

The use of AI-generated images has already impacted several campaigns in the 2024 cycle. The presidential campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) was widely criticized after its official “DeSantis War Room” account posted a video that included several fake, AI-generated images of President Trump and Anthony Fauci embracing.

https://worldisraelnews.com/israeli-flag-torched-flyers-for-captive-israelis-trampled-at-pro-palestine-rally-in-new-york/?utm_source=

Demonstrators trample posters of Israelis held captive by Hamas during protest in New York City.

Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters clashed on the streets of New York Thursday evening, outside the offices of the chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY).

Hurling insults at pro-Israeli demonstrators, a number of pro-Palestinian protesters tore down posters of Israelis held captive by the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip, and trampled flyers of Israelis reported missing since the October 7th Hamas invasion of southwestern Israel.

One of the pro-Palestinian protesters set an Israeli flag on fire, while a pro-Israeli demonstrator attempted to carry the flag off, before being kicked by a protester wearing a Keffiyeh.

The New York Police Department arrested one person for disorderly conduct.

A number of anti-Israel demonstrations on and around college campuses in the U.S. have led to harassment of Jewish students and even violent attacks on pro-Israel demonstrators.

At Harvard, a Jewish student was mobbed by anti-Israel protesters, including the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/03/would-the-woke-movement-please-hurry-up-and-die-already/

In recent weeks, we’ve seen a number of pundits, columns, and articles predict the imminent demise of the odious and anti-American “woke” movement. As Shakespeare once said, ” ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” But if woke is indeed passing on, it sure is taking its time.

What do we mean by “woke”? It’s the extreme-left mindset encouraged by the “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” movement, the ugly offspring of Marxism and critical race theory. Its intent is all-inclusive, covering the entirety of culture, social interactions, and commerce. Indeed, the movement’s ultimate goal is to plant a permanent flag of ideological conquest in your brain so you’ll be frightened to transgress even a little bit of the thought boundaries they’ve set for you.

It’s working.

From once-sensible cops in Britain tearing down posters of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas, to Hollywood’s awful woke remakes of classic entertainment, to drag queens parading in children’s classrooms and events, to our own woke military, “woke” now seems culturally pervasive, almost inescapable.

It’s a sick, inhumane, and ultra-Orwellian mindset that is being served daily to our children via the forced feeding tube of public education, which is now run not by local boards but by ultra-woke teachers’ unions and allied radicals. Hollywood and social media, with their pervasive censorship cultures, double down on the thought control.

The woke indoctrination may begin in elementary school, but it continues and intensifies at the college level. Young Americans have never been so disenchanted with their country, its culture, and its shimmering promise of a better life and liberty than they are today. All thanks to the woke movement, now firmly in control of higher education.

But in case you’re wondering, this is an old script, nothing new at all. Former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin reportedly put it this way: “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

We’re pretty sure it’s real because we found it in “Inspiring Quotes.” Hey, nothing is more inspiring than your children being brainwashed by a communist tyrant, right? The far-left wokesters clearly learned from Lenin. And, just like communism, woke seeks to become a secular religion, replacing all the old ones.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-hamas-won-hearts-and-minds-on-the-american-left-1abafc2f?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Support for Hamas on college campuses and in city streets has shocked Americans. But we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s the fruit of an influence campaign dating back at least 30 years.

In October 1993, the Federal Bureau of Investigation wiretapped a Philadelphia hotel room where a dozen senior Hamas members—some of them U.S.-based—had gathered. The men had called the meeting weeks after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. For days they debated how to sabotage the agreement and generate support for Hamas among American Muslims, the political class and wider society. They correctly foresaw that the U.S. government would designate Hamas a terrorist organization and agreed on a strategy to frame the conflict in religious terms for Muslims while using more-palatable frames for non-Muslim Americans. They plotted to create an array of mainstream organizations to conduct this dual-track work.

“Let’s not hoist a large Islamic flag, and let’s not be barbaric-talking,” one of the participants said. “We will remain a front so that if the [terror designation] happens, we will benefit from the new developments instead of having all of our organizations classified and exposed.”

“I swear by Allah that war is deception,” another said. “Deceive, camouflage, pretend that you’re leaving while you’re walking that way.”

Thirty years later, this strategy has proved effective. Widespread support for Hamas’s barbaric actions on Oct. 7 didn’t come out of thin air. Several things gave life to the phenomenon—from the identification of Israel with “white privilege” to old-fashioned anti-Semitism—but the terror group’s networks in the U.S. and Europe played a key role.

Now run largely by Western-born activists, these networks understand how politics and media narratives work in the West. They frame the conflict in religious terms to local Muslim communities, labeling Israelis as “infidels” and evoking hadiths about the killing of Jews. On college campuses those same networks use the language of postcolonial theory to tar the Israelis as “European settlers.” Unsurprisingly, a few days ago, a Hamas leader told a Vice.com journalist that “the same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by [Israel] against the Palestinians”—a comparison tailored to the ears of Western progressives.

https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/p/utopian-thinking-lll?r=2k6p0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

“It was exhilarating, It was exhilarating, it was energizing.”

-Russel Rickford, Cornell, Associate Professor of History on learning of Hamas atrocities.

In earlier essays we have warned of the threat posed by Utopian ideas and ideologies. These generally involve the attempt at transformation and perfection of human nature. From Rousseau to the present, utopians view human nature as innocent, malleable and corrupted by social institutions. When those institutions are torn down by revolutionaries we can regain Paradise Lost where innocence will once again prevail. Regrettably the route to this utopia requires the elimination of millions who insist on holding on to an imperfect reality. Still that’s an acceptable cost to the utopian ideologue.

In this essay we will focus on an unacknowledged aspect of Utopian thinking—psychosexual perversion, in the form of sado-masochism, and particularly the sadistic pleasures of child murder.

In mankind’s long climb out of chaos and barbarism, the Old Testament is of primal significance. In Genesis G-d, the father, separates light from darkness, separates species of plants from each other and divides the animals into separate species. G-d divides man from woman and children from adults and forbids the hybridization of seeds, animals and plants. Parents are parents, children are children, animate and inanimate differ. The principle of separation and division is the means of bringing order out of chaos. This principle also underlies the incest prohibition and the prohibition of perversions. It clarifies and creates order. The book of Genesis is based entirely on the principle of separation and differentiation. These principles became the basis of our civilizational reality. However, there has always been pushback against this difficult reality. The pushback can be found in the perversions, all of which contain elements of sadism that appeal to the perverse longings universally present.

The French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet Smirgel enlarged the definition of perversion to include, not just unusual sexual behavior but also modes of thought. Perversion of thought expresses the wish to overturn reality, the laws of nature including the distinction between male and female, established by the God of the Old Testament- the “paternal order.” These wishes may remain private, or may be expressed in literature and movies, but they can also find expression in ideologies that motivate sado-masochistic acting out, like the torture, rape  and murder of children. Civilized people are horrified by child murder; it attacks the most fundamental creative element of reality—the parent-child connection by which new, unique human individuals are created and nurtured. It is a demonic attack on the paternal universe defined in Genesis. Hamas killers relished forcing parents to watch helplessly as they slaughtered their offspring. Like the rape of women and children these were acts of sadism committed by young death loving men. The pleasure of these killers, the orgastic thrill was so intense they memorialized it in videos which they proudly made for the world to see. And yes, the torture porn has already found its audience, to such an extent that Israel is trying not to have the videos widely seen. Many, many enjoy the sight of babies beheaded and being burned to death in ovens just as was done by Hamas predecessors in Nazi camps. No doubt they will be masturbating to those images. The Marquis de Sade often made clear in his writings that he was attacking the God of the Old Testament and celebrating the pleasures of a return to chaos. For Hamas, children and parents are no different; they are both ‘colonists” and the killers are happily Satanic. So too, civilians are no different than soldiers and therefore can be killed. Unlike the pre civilizational sadists, Israel does try to differentiate between civilians and soldiers, though their enemies make that very difficult. This is crucial because our individual humanity can be attacked and destroyed by an ideology that places group identity above the individual. If a baby can have its gender “assigned” and re assigned, then an individual baby can be dehumanized as a “colonist”—tortured and murdered.

Chasseguet Smirgel argued that torture, rape and bodily mutilation originate in a megalomanic wish to rebel against and overturn reality. I would add that the murder of children is the supreme expression of the sadistic wish to destroy our civilizational reality and replace it with chaos,  It is not just Israel under attack but all who value individual life and freedom. Hopefully we can mobilize strength to win as we did against the Nazis. Let Israel, on our behalf, ‘bare the iron hand.’

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-crisis-of-the-west-revisited-self-flagellation-and-the-great-liberal-death-wish/

This crisis is nothing new.

From Sydney to London to untold numbers of American college campuses, we hear incendiary cries for destroying the Jewish state, for a new Jihad or Holy War, all in the name of an ostensibly noble and just “anti-colonialist” struggle. Tens of thousands march in major European cities, and with frenzied glee defend the indefensible. “From the river to the sea,” the mob of Islamists, Palestinians, activists, and radicals cry, shamelessly announcing their own genocidal sympathies and intent.

The “crisis of the West” is nothing new. In 1949, the political philosopher Leo Strauss lamented that the main currents of social science in the United States, and in the Western world more broadly, could not understand tyranny for what it was since they were blindly committed to the absurd position that “facts” had nothing to do with “values.” He added that a social science that could not speak reasonably, and forcefully, about the evil that is tyranny (especially in its modern ideological forms) was no better than a medical science that could not name and describe cancer. In the following decade, Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt brought the full arsenal of political philosophy to bear on the “novel” form of tyranny that was totalitarianism and, in the process, lamented the indulgence of so many intellectuals toward it.

In 1964, James Burnham published a still potent and relevant book called The Suicide of the West, where he took aim at Western self-hatred, romanticism about what would soon be called the Third World (some of which came to resemble “Caliban’s kingdoms” in the striking and provocative words of Paul Johnson in Modern Times), and the degeneration of a once noble and hardy liberalism into rank sentimentality, free-floating compassion, and a suicidal preference for our murderous and tyrannical enemies over our sometimes imperfect friends and even our own country and civilization.

By 1970, the great English writer and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge could write with eloquence and biting wit about “The Great Liberal Death Wish” in a seminal 1970 essay by that name. Muggeridge saw in the decayed liberal mind a perverse preference for nihilistic self-flagellation that led to the systematic “depreciating and deprecating” of “every aspect of our Western way of life.”