RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/30/low-characters-in-ludicrous-situations/

Reflecting on the unfolding disaster that is our social and political life in the United States during the consulship of Biden, I cannot help but think of Aristotle’s description of the structure of Greek tragedy. Obviously, the parallels are not exact. For one thing, tragedy as Aristotle understood it was a quick affair, its action over within a single day. Our national tragedy, by contrast, seems to lumber on indefinitely. 

Then there is the question of the character of the protagonist. Aristotle’s chap is “a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.” Sound like Joe Biden? Almost, maybe, but not really. Rudy Giuliani was not talking through his hat when he invoked the specter of the “Biden crime family,” as the words “laptop,” “China,” and “10 percent for the big guy” remind us. 

There are many other differences between tragedy in Aristotle’s sense and the disaster we are suffering through. Still, when I think about the development Aristotle traces from ἁμαρτία (the tragic flaw) through ἀναγνώρισις (recognition) to περιπέτεια (the sudden reversal of fortune) to καταστροφή, the “catastrophe” that ties up the loose ends and consummates the action, I think “We’re somewhere on that road,” though exactly where is hard to say. Have we achieved the enlightenment of recognition yet? I am not at all sure about that. 

Signs of the sudden reversal of fortune are all around us, though evidence of any impending catharsis (κάθαρσις) is exceedingly meager. Why? Perhaps it’s because the emotions through which the purgation is supposed to take place are not yet fully present and accounted for. Aristotle said that the emotions of pity (ἔλεος) and fear (φόβος) are the motors of tragic fulfillment. My sense is that there is plenty of fear abroad. Pity? Not so much. (Although, thinking about it, maybe there is plenty of pity around us, too. “Pity,” Aristotle says in the Rhetoric, “may be defined as a feeling of pain at an apparent evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves . . . and moreover to befall us soon.”) 

At the end of the day, though, I wonder whether we’re caught in a tragedy at all. I have no doubt that we are hurtling towards a catastrophe (in the Greek sense) that will be, well, catastrophic (in the modern sense). But Aristotle insists that tragedy is about grave matters and noble characters. Comedy, he says, is about low or mean characters and trades in the ludicrous or ridiculous. Isn’t that where we are now? Have we embarked on a new genre, featuring low characters in ludicrous situations who ultimately come, and bring everyone around them, to a disastrous end? Or perhaps it is not so new, but is just the “dark” or “black” comedy that elite opinion, which likes to smirk but hates happy endings, so loves to wallow in? 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/bidens_weird_weekend_in_rome.html

Biden’s weekend in Rome took on an increasingly surreal quality as the weekend progressed. The weirdness started on Saturday when he arrived with an 85-car entourage to attend a G20 summit that was purportedly focused on “climate change” (or, more likely, focused on using climate change to increase political power), followed by Biden’s marginalized status for the group photo op. By Sunday, Biden missed an important photo op, claimed he was playing elevator games, used a reference to Mussolini while in Rome, may have been a COVID carrier when he met with the Pope, and had an ugly rumor following him.

After almost vanishing from Saturday’s photo op, Biden vanished entirely from Sunday’s photo op at Rome’s famous Trevi fountain. There they all were, tossing coins in the fountain to placate pagan gods (and hoping that Gaia heard their pleas regarding climate change) but, unlike yesterday, when a “Where’s Waldo” style search eventually located Biden, this time he was nowhere to be seen:

The White House offered no excuse (so far as I know) for Biden’s absence.

So, he missed a photo op. That’s a “whatever,” right? Maybe, but how do we explain the other strange stuff?

There’s the footage of Biden introducing Secretary of State Blinken. The first thing you’ll notice is Biden’s barely-there delivery, as if he’s someone who doesn’t speak English and is reading the words phonetically. But what really caught everyone’s attention was that reference to getting the trains to run on time.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/ibram_x_kendi_just_gave_away_the_con.html
Not only did he undermine the theories that have made him famous but he also outed himself as a “transphobe.”

Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers) has made a name for himself as an “anti-racist” activist, which is an Orwellian way of saying that his entire career is based upon arguing that America is a systemically racist country and that all White Americans are complicit. However, in a tweet that he swiftly deleted, Kendi effectively acknowledged that power in America lies with racial minorities, not with Whites. Oh, and he’s a transphobe.

Kendi’s breakout best-seller, How To Be An Antiracist, is on every Critical Race Theory reading list, whether in America’s K-12 schools, its colleges (some of which have made it mandatory), its corporations, or the American military. In 2019, Kendi wrote an essay for The Atlantic claiming, as all race hustlers do, that America’s real founding was 1619, when the British brought slaves to America’s shores:

Her name was Angela, one of the first known Africans in British North America.

His name was John, the first known antiblack racist in colonial America.

In 1619, this black woman and white man—what they embody—arrived months apart in 12-year-old Virginia, the first of the 13 British colonies that became the United States. Angela was the original embodiment of enslavement, of survival, of the 400-year African American struggle to survive, to be free of racism. John was the original embodiment of elite white male power, of the democracy of racists, of its 400-year struggle to survive, to be free of anti-racism.

And there you have the whole systemic racism theory in full. Of course, even ardent leftists, if honest, concede that this is all an ahistorical lie.

But we shouldn’t expect more from Kendi, for he’s not the brightest bulb in the box. Watch him struggle to explain what’s constitute racism. It’s embarrassing but also really funny:

Of course, Kendi could have stood there picking his nose and he would have been feted, because he’s saying what leftists long to hear. Dividing America along racial lines is the perfect way to break this country and lead it into the glorious new morning of socialism.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/11/15/cackling-kamala/#slide-1

Observations on a political albatross

Mayday, Code Red, and SOS! As fires bust out everywhere on the Hindenburg of vice presidents, Democrats are sending out dire cries of emergency, not via radio but using their own signaling systems: Politico and Axios and the Washington Post. “How do you solve a problem like Kamala?” the Democrats who demanded a woman of color on the 2020 presidential ticket are asking themselves. Who would have guessed that, as a moss-brained 78-year-old president stumbles around aimlessly through half a dozen crises of his own making, the Halloween screams in the Democratic Party are mostly about the president’s heir apparent?

Kamala Harris is a heartbeat away from becoming the first woman president, the first Asian president, the first woman-of-color president. Big wins all around, right? So why are the Democrats so nervous? They appear to be on the verge of calling in the Henry Wallace treatment and dumping Harris before Joe Biden runs for president again, this time with the election weeks before his 82nd birthday, in 2024. “People think she’s f***ing up, maybe she shouldn’t be the heir apparent,” one Democratic operative told Axios. White House aides use earthy language like “sh**show” to describe Harris’s “poorly managed” office. It’s “an abusive environment,” a staffer “with direct knowledge” told Politico, adding, “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like sh**.”

What if Biden should decline to run for reelection as an octogenarian? Harris, as his lady in waiting, would almost have to be the party’s designated successor because she is black and female. To replace her, according to the party’s prevailing thought codes and its media enablers, would be racist and sexist. Yet the prospect of riding into battle behind Kamala Harris’s generalship has every Dem in D.C. reaching for the Maalox, if not the Ativan or maybe the hemlock.

Dems including “many current senior administration figures,” says Axios, do not think she could beat any potential foe, from Lord Voldemort to Ernst Stavro Blofeld to Donald Trump. If the options facing the American voter on a future ballot turn out to be “Kamala Harris” and “Literally Anyone Else,” Harris is going to be not just an underdog but a longshot. She’s a lady whose trademark gambit — the deranged cackle, which she Jokerishly emits anytime she can’t answer a question — makes Hillary Clinton seem as lovable as a litter of golden-retriever puppies. Unlike Hillary, Harris does not make people feel sorry for her for having been ritually humiliated in her marriage to an intern-abusing lech. Unlike Hillary, Harris doesn’t make people think “She earned it” or “She paid her dues.” Madam Cankles looks like a redoubtable candidate compared to Madam Cackles.

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2021/10/31/highly-vaccinated-vermont-has-spiking-covid-cases-what-happened-n425959

When the vaccines first began to roll out on a national scale early this year, the state of Vermont was one of the earliest leaders in volunteering to be jabbed. The state quickly established itself as one of the early adopters and is now ranked as the most highly vaccinated in the nation. At this point, the state boasts a rate of just shy of 80% who have received at least one shot, with the majority of the remainder being made up of children who only just became eligible.

There are a variety of reasons they were able to do this, both anecdotal and statistically supportable. First, the state only has a population of 623,000, largely condensed into a few major population centers, so it wasn’t hard to set up pods for everyone. Also, no matter how controversial it may be to say this, Vermont is one of the whitest states in the nation (92.5% white, 1.32% Black, 1.3% Hispanic). Vaccine hesitancy in America has typically been highest among minorities, so they had less of that to contend with. On top of that, they tend to have a fairly socialist population that doesn’t mind having the government tell them what to do. (They keep electing Bernie Sanders to every imaginable office he likes, so what do you expect?)

So with such a high rate of supposedly immunized residents, why are they having a spike in COVID cases? Granted, it’s not much of a spike compared to more densely populated areas. On October 16 they recorded 342 new cases and two deaths. But still, their numbers are trending in the wrong direction as we make our way through autumn. What gives? According to a report this weekend from the Boston Globe, Vermont may be a “victim of its own success.” They rushed to get vaccinated early and now that may be coming back to bite them.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-democrats-failing-sell-agenda-american-people-poll/story?id=80877850

Negotiations on the infrastructure and social program bills have consumed Capitol Hill for months. Still, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll out Sunday finds Democrats are failing to sell the legislation to the public, who are broadly unaware of what is in the spending packages or skeptical they would help people like themselves, or the economy, if signed into law.

President Joe Biden was unable to secure a legislative win before departing on his second foreign trip since taking office, even after he laid out a framework for the package focused on social programs and climate change around which he believes Democrats can rally. He pitched that package, which no longer includes paid family and medical leave or free community college, as a “historic economic” opportunity on Thursday, but this poll reflects the continued confusion and intraparty mistrust over these bills.

Although a majority (55%) of the public is following news about the negotiations at least somewhat closely, about 7 in 10 (69%) Americans said they know just some or little to nothing about what’s in both bills. Fewer than half (31%) said they know a great deal or good amount. Despite Republicans having sat on the sidelines while the White House works exclusively with congressional Democrats to get both bills to the president’s desk, the lack of knowledge extends across all parties.

Americans also do not feel like these bills would help them or the U.S. economy if they become law.