RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Truth or Consequences was a long-running American game show, originally hosted by Ralph Edwards. If the contestant could not complete the “truth” portion there would be “consequences,” generally an embarrassing stunt. In 1950, Ralph Edwards announced he would host a show from the first town that changed its name to Truth and Consequences. On April Fool’s Day 1950, the town of Hot Spring, New Mexico voted to become Truth and Consequences.

“Quid est veritas?”, asked Pilate of Jesus. To Christians, truth is the word of God, for whom His son Jesus bore witness. For Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the “central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” while the “central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

The United States is a multi-racial and multi-ethnic country. We are White, Black, Native American, Asian, Hispanic and Pacific Islanders. According to the U.S. Census, 350 languages are spoken in the U.S. We identify as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and multiple other religions. We come (or came) from most every country in the world. Yet, despite those differences in heritage, as Americans we have fundamental interests in common. We live under a Constitution that consumes only forty-one pages, at least in my copy – a Constitution that restrains rather than enables government. We live in a country where liberty is prized above all else; where fundamental rights are guaranteed. under the rule of law. We have a government comprised of three co-equal branches, and a military to safeguard us from foreign enemies. We have police forces to carry out our state and local laws. And we have a judicial system to assure laws are adjudicated fairly and equitably, and to protect us from those in government, be they politicians, bureaucrats or police who use power for their own purposes.

https://www.steynonline.com/10312/the-case-of-the-topless-taioseach

Across the Irish Sea, the London press continues its frothing over lockdown breaches by Dominic Cummings. If you’ve never heard of him, he’s Boris Johnson’s Rasputin. I don’t know him, although a few years back I took his wife Mary (a great-granddaughter or some such of the fourth Earl Grey, Governor General of Canada) to a John McCain campaign event preceded by a burger at the Littleton Diner in New Hampshire. But her hubby’s rise to Fleet Street hate figure has largely passed me by: the media bigwigs regard Cummings as Boris’s brain, and loathe him for Brexit and for December’s Tory landslide. Then came the lockdown, and the perfect cudgel: a few weeks back, Mr and Mrs Cummings felt the Covid coming on and, concerned about who’d be around to care for the kid, decided to take their four-year-old autistic son to stay with his grandparents a hundred-and-thirty miles away.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/01/quelling-insurrection/

EXCERPT

But what is going on now has transcended Floyd’s death. What started in Minneapolis and has spread to other cities is no longer a “protest.” Rioting, arson, and looting are not protesting injustice. It is no longer about race. It is no longer about civil rights. It has become insurrection, pure and simple.

The insurrectionists may use Floyd’s death as a fig leaf for their actions but their actions are an affront to the rule of law, upon which republican government rests. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It does not protect rioting, arson, and looting. It does not protect mob rule, which as Abraham Lincoln warned in his Lyceum Speech of 1838, is the very antithesis of republican government.

Section 4 of Article IV of the Constitution reads: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.” Today, domestic violence threatens the very foundations of republican government.

The United States is a federal republic, which means that the first line of defense against insurrection is the government of the various states. But if governors are unable or unwilling to quell domestic insurrection, the federal government has the responsibility to act.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/01/no-trump-should-not-rescue-cities-again/

When looters threatened to bring their mayhem and destruction from the city of Chicago to my suburb on Sunday, our town’s leadership acted quickly. Snow plows were used to block access to the major shopping mall and big-box outlets; police SUVs and undercover cars patrolled heavily-traveled streets carrying cops with riot gear. Stores and restaurants, which had just reopened on Friday after a nearly three-month shutdown, closed again. Suspicious cars congregating in vacant parking lots adjacent to strip malls were hustled away.

Our police chief—Tim McCarthy, the secret service agent who took a bullet for Ronald Reagan in 1981 and saved the president’s life—could be heard on the police scanner calmly managing a multifaceted operation to keep people and property safe. While cities across the country, including the nation’s capital, continued to burn, my suburb of 58,000 residents, like many throughout the Chicagoland area, was unharmed.

Why? Because our law enforcement officers knew they had the support of our political leadership and the residents. Further, people were prepared to defend their businesses and families if necessary.

The Party of Lawlessness

But that is not the case in many urban areas, big and small, across the country. Police have been ordered to stand down; there was no plan or preparation as the thugs advanced. (The police chief of Raleigh, North Carolina said she would “not put an officer in harm’s way to protect the property inside a building.”)

The same Democrats who just a few weeks ago threatened beach walkers, churchgoers, and other disobedient social distancers are giving a wink and a nod to arsonists, looters, and attempted murderers.

Democrats belong to the party of lawlessness—and by law, I mean rules that have been subjected to a recorded vote by elected officials, not CDC guidance on mask-wearing. Open borders, empty jails, voting rights for noncitizens, uncollected debt are just a few features of their anarchist utopia. No wonder Democratic politicians only give lip service in condemning the looters; they share a mutual contempt for the ideals on which the country was founded and a common mission to fundamentally transform the country and all its institutions to yield to their America-hating point of view.

Why, then, should we be compelled to rescue them as violence continues? Why should we not watch in smug satisfaction as they are hoisted with their own petard? Of course, it tugs at the heartstrings to see shop owners in Minneapolis weep at their looted livelihood. Yes, innocent children are caught in the fray. But this is the culture Democrats not only created but want to put on steroids after the 2020 election.

The people who live in American cities—a mix of very wealthy whites and low-income minorities is the common demographic—elected far left political leadership and not by a slim margin. Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, won in 2017 with 57 percent of the vote by defeating another Democrat. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney won last year with more than 80 percent of the vote; ditto for Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Republicans don’t even bother to run. This is the story in nearly every city in America.

To flip the script: you bought it, you broke it.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/the-economics-of-civil-unrest/

Economics doesn’t explain everything. Heartbreakingly high rates of incarceration, illegitimacy, disease and poverty among black Americans are tinder waiting for a spark like the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd in police custody. “What the great French sociologist Emil Durkheim called “anomic suicide” is the Great Plague of our times. Self-destructive behavior in the form of opioid addiction, alcoholism, and violent behavior is destroying the lives of large parts of the US population,” I wrote in this space March 30. 

Nonetheless economics does tell us something, and the chart below gives context to the riots which have wracked American cities during the past several days.

Thirty years ago the United States had twice as many workers in factories than in restaurants, hotels and other leisure and hospitality businesses. Over those 30 years the number of manufacturing workers fell by about half and leisure-and-hospitality employment doubled.  Then came Covid-19, and all the employment gains of the past 30 years evaporated in two months (these are April data, and the picture has worsened since then).

Minority workers in the United States benefited from an employment boom during the Trump Administration, and black unemployment fell to just 5.8%, the lowest level in American history, thanks in large measure to the availability of low-skilled service industry jobs. These jobs disappeared the fastest and are least likely to come back in the foreseeable future, as Americans save more of their income and avoid crowded public places like restaurants.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/70895-the-foundation-racket-2020-06-01

If there is a foundation that isn’t corrupt, that isn’t just a way for rich people to lower their tax rate by pretending the foundation is a charity and not simply a way to inflate certain people’s political influence, I don’t believe I’ve heard of it.

The most famous of them are the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Clinton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Foundation and, not satisfied with just one, George Soros has number of them under the umbrella of the Open Society Foundations.

What each of them has in common is none of their missions is to improve life for Americans; in the case of the Clintons, it’s to enrich themselves. With the others, it’s to destroy the sovereignty of nations, particularly the United States, and to bring about a globalist society.

As rotten an idea is that in general terms, it becomes even worse when you realize that, at least so far as Bill Gates is concerned, that society should be overseen by the Communist Party of China.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/30/kneelers-and-submitters/

The country is burning, thanks largely to those who uncritically have swallowed whole the neo-Marxist propaganda of the neo-liberal order.

As brutal as the death of George Floyd appears to have been—and it does appear brutal—nothing that has followed from it will lead to justice for Floyd or more justice generally. It’s all just rage for gratification’s sake—a distraction. Our problem isn’t one of racism; our problem is that we demand rulers and protectors, and then we are surprised when they turn around and kneel on our necks. 

Here is the bitter truth: those now-fired cops in Minnesota almost assuredly will get off. One has been charged with third degree murder and manslaughter, but the odds are still good that he will walk in the end. Cops kill innocent people from time to time, and it rarely has anything to do with race. It is usually incompetence or general thuggery on the part of those police. And when they do it, they dance the dance: get charged with murder, get acquitted, and return to work. 

In this case, the lawyer will probably portray the killer as stupid but not guilty to avoid the worse image of being malicious. His defense almost assuredly will be connected to bureaucratic jargon about police training and police protocol. There is a fine line between making an honest mistake and being negligent, we’ll be told, and his lawyer only needs to convince a jury that there is a reasonable possibility he tried to follow his training to protect his fellow officers.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/05/30/george-floyd-protests-ag-barr-blames-anarchic-and-leftist-groups/5291926002/

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr said violent protests that have erupted after the death of George Floyd appear to be organized by “anarchic” and “far left extremist groups” pursuing their own aims. 

Addressing “rioting” in many cities, Barr said, “the voices of peaceful protest are being hijacked by violent radical elements.”

“Groups of outside radicals and agitators are exploiting the situation to pursue their own separate and violent agenda,” he said. “In many places, it appears the violence is planned, organized and driven by anarchic and…far left extremist groups using Antifa-like tactics.”

Barr said many are traveling from outside states to join protests.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/hydroxychloroquine_me_and_the_great_divide.html

I took hydroxychloroquine for two years.  A long time ago as a visiting cancer surgeon in Asia, in Thailand, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh.  From 1987 to 1990.  Malaria is rife there.  I took it for prophylaxis, 400 milligrams once a week for two years.  Never had any trouble.  It was inexpensive and effective.  I started it two weeks before and was supposed to continue it through my stay and four weeks after returning.  But I stopped it after two years.  I was worried about potential side effects of which there are many, as with all drugs right down to Tylenol and aspirin.  These, however, are rare.  At a certain point, I was prepared to take my chances with mosquitoes and plasmodium, and so I stopped. 

Chloroquine, the precursor of HCQ, was invented by Bayer in 1934.  Hydroxychloroquine was developed during World War II as a safer, synthetic alternative and approved for medical use in the U.S. in 1955.  The World Health Organization considers it an essential medicine, among the safest and most effective medicines, a staple of any healthcare system.  In 2017, US doctors prescribed it 5 million times, the 128th most commonly prescribed drug in the country.  There have been hundreds of millions of prescriptions worldwide since its inception.  It is one of the cheapest and best drugs in the world and has saved millions of lives.  Doctors also prescribe it for Lupus and Rheumatoid arthritis patients who may consume it for their lifetimes with few or no ill effects. 

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

The dictionary definition of a lockdown  is the confining of prisoners to their cells, as following a riot or other disturbance:

Will Americans return to living normal lives, or take the time to umlearn the Coronavirus imperatives and behave as the State wants them to behave – that is, by being controlled and living by and for the State’s sake and purposes? There is some evidence that they are discarding all the “new normal” rules. Protests have occurred at state capitals, while citizens have assembled in parks and at beaches.. Some judicial findings have declared the lockdowns and “stay at home” orders have  violated  people’s Constitutional rights. It will take some time to unlearn the miasma of behaving as the virus commands people to act. Tp behave according to State imperatives seems to occur automatically when people act without thinking.

Outside my residence I see groups of ten or so people not wearing masks[passing by bu as a herd at a “safe”  six feet distance from each other, for no particular reason other than to conform to the “new norm,” lest they are berated by a passerby going in the opposite ditection. These are not people who will question anything. The “new norm” being compliant and obedient, not standing out with an independent minds. Many states in the U.S. have issued decrees  which too many people are willing to obey lest they are harassed by the new  tyrants. And many countries, as well. Particularly Britain, Germany, France, and Spain, and Australia.   One country exemplifies how it can descend into lockdown tyranny in the blink of an eye, New Zealand. A contact sent  me the discouraging news of how its prime minister, Jacinda Ardern,   took the defining step of enforcing a mandatory lockdown of the whole country, oblivious to the rights and freedoms New Zealanders enjoyed before.