RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Webster’s defines common sense as “sound and prudent judgement, based on a simple perception of the situation or facts.” Lucretia Peabody Hale’s The Peterkin Papers provides fictions best (and most amusing) examples of common sense – with the “Lady from Philadelphia” offering obvious solutions to what seem insurmountable obstacles to the Peterkin family.

A year ago, I wrote an essay regretting the loss of common sense in the political realm: “Common Sense – Where has it Gone?” (September 29, 2021). It was a lament, without answer.

Now, three disparate events remind me that common sense remains AWOL: First, I have been re-reading a 1999 collection of essays by Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates. The book speaks to the loss of common sense in political, social, and cultural realms. Second, Queen Elizabeth’s death was a reminder of the importance of personal traits like common sense, stability, tradition, and personal virtue, which Western culture has replaced with silliness, variability, ignorance, and social virtues. And third, a eulogy for Common Sense was recently sent me. I had seen it before, but it is worth re-reading.

Sowell’s book, published in 1999, was prophetic, as conditions he then wrote about remain with us – racism, declines in education standards, hyperbole over man-caused climate change, the advocacy for socialism and the criticism of capitalism in the West, and political extremism. Sowell is a realist who relies on facts and who cares little for sentiment. His observations reflect his intolerance for the idiocy of most politicians. In an essay titled “From Marxism to the Market,” he wrote: “The rhetoric of socialism may be inspiring, but the actual record is dismal.” In another, “The Multiculturalism Cult,” he wrote of how real people around the world do not “celebrate diversity;” they “pick and choose which of their own cultural features they want to keep and which they want to dump…” In a third, “Life is Culturally Biased,” he noted: “As limited human beings, we must make our choices among the alternatives actually available.” A fourth essay, “Anti-Elitism in Education:” “…you cannot let everyone go to Stuyvesant (where Sowell went in the late 1940s) without its ceasing to be the kind of school that makes them want to go there.” That the problems he wrote of so long ago have only worsened is a sad commentary on our social, cultural, and political life.

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/the-governments-war-on-transparency

Originally published in The Wall Street Journal Weekend edition, Section A, Page A9, September 17, 2022 as a paid editorial.

Dear Mr. and Ms. Taxpayer Voter,

Federal spending is out of control and they don’t want you to know about it. The fiscal irresponsibility of your elected officials and bureaucrats has taken the federal debt to levels not seen since World War II. With no end in sight.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) redacted 350,000 federal executive agency employee names from our FOIA request (2021)—roughly $30 billion in compensation. In the last year of the Obama administration, only 2,367 names were redacted. OPM stated, “For those instances where data element are not released, they are being withheld under FOIA Exemption 6… the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

The Federal Reserve has 23,000 employees. They gave us the salaries of only 367 executives. They stated, “Releasing the names and specific salary information for all employees would not shed any further light on the Board’s performance of its statutory duties.” They told us that a database of their expenditures, a checkbook, does not exist. “Staff searched Board records and made suitable inquiries with knowledgeable staff but did not locate the information you seek.” This from our country’s central bank! 23,000 employees! No database of expenditures!

The Vice President refused to give us any information. They claimed, “The Office of Vice President is not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.” One would think the Vice President would want you, taxpaying voters, to know how she spent your tax dollars. Not so. Why?

The U.S. Postal Service refused to produce line-by-line checkbook expenditures. They stated that doing so would expose their “trade secrets.” It is hard to imagine Federal Express or UPS benefitting from the USPS’s money-losing “trade secrets.” USPS also refuses to produce bonuses paid.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/majority-of-americans-more-concerned-with-socialist-left-than-maga-republicans-poll/

Fifty-five percent of Americans are more concerned about the “Socialist Left” than they are about “MAGA Republicans,” according to a new Harvard-CAPS Harris poll.

The poll asked respondents: “Are you more concerned about the Socialist left in America and the power they are gaining or more afraid of MAGA Republicans and the power they are getting?”

Just 45 percent of respondents said they are more concerned with “MAGA Republicans.”

The poll also asked voters: “Do you think there are tens of millions of dangerous MAGA Republicans backing violence and trying to overthrow the constitution or is that a gross exaggeration and distortion?”

Most voters (54 percent) believe the number of “dangerous MAGA Republicans” is “grossly exaggerated.” Forty-six percent said there are tens of millions of dangerous MAGA Republicans, including 73 percent of Democrats, 20 percent of Republicans and 42 percent of independents.

The poll was conducted September 7 and 8, one week after President Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia saying former president Donald Trump and the ‘MAGA Republicans’ represent “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/biden-is-blind-to-our-inflationary-spiral/?itm_campaign=headline-testing-biden-is-blind-to-our-

The president could have prevented this crisis by being the ‘adult’ he always claims to be. Instead, he’s still pretending it’s not a crisis at all.

On the cardinal matter of inflation, Joe Biden is lost, and does not want to be found; he is blind, but does not want to see. Asked on last night’s 60 Minutes what he had to offer in response to the news that “last Tuesday, the annual inflation rate came in at 8.3 percent,” “the stock market nosedived,” and people continued to be “shocked by their grocery bills,” Biden raised his eyebrows and demurred. It’s important, he said defiantly, to “put this in perspective.” That “perspective”? That, per the most recent inflation numbers, the problem is “up just an inch — hardly at all. . . . It hasn’t spiked.” Suppressing a grimace, Biden’s interviewer, Scott Pelley, suggested that a broader “perspective” than the last month might perhaps be more useful to the viewers. “It’s the highest inflation rate, Mr. President, in 40 years,” Pelley said.

’Tis but a scratch!

It is clear from the president’s public pronouncements that he has not yet grasped the scale of the disaster that is unfolding before his eyes.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/?author=503a7965e4b0b543ed24305c

The latest endlessly recurring mantra of Democratic politicians and press is that some position articulated by the opposition is a threat to “our Democracy.”

I suppose that those words must resonate with some people, or otherwise they would not be so endlessly repeated. Of course the statement is fundamentally wrong, because we don’t actually have a “Democracy,” but rather a Constitutional Republic.

Having a Democracy would mean that a 50.1% voting majority can do whatever it wants to the hated 49.9%, including locking the 49.9% permanently out of power. The whole idea of the Constitutional Republic is to keep that from happening, and our Constitution puts multiple institutions in place to prevent a temporary slight majority from seizing permanent power for itself.

Most of the current railing about threats to “our Democracy” turns out, on examination, to represent nothing more than dissatisfaction with the fact that we have a Constitutional Republic rather than a Democracy. Understanding the distinction between Democracy and our Constitutional Republic is the key to distinguishing the real threats to our system of government from the nonsense filling the media every day.

This post considers a recent example of one of the real threats, which has received almost no press coverage.

Over in Europe, and particularly in those countries in the vanguard of the green energy transition, the enormous costs of this folly have begun to hit home. In the UK, average annual consumer energy bills were scheduled to rise as of October 1 to £3549/year, from only £1138/year just a year ago. (The figure may now get reduced somewhat by means of massive government subsidies, which only conceal, but do not obviate, the disastrous cost increases.) Germany’s regulated consumer gas bills are scheduled for an average annual increase on October 1 of about 480 euros, about 13%, from an already high 3568 euros.