RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.asiatimes.com/

I didn’t say that Boeing is arrogant. I said they have their noses in the air.Jokes aside, l’Affaire Boeing is a watershed. President Trump is under pressure to circle the wagons around one of America’s flagship industrial companies, among other reasons because China will exploit the crisis to promote its new entry into the civil aircraft market. He should ignore the legions of industry lobbyists and their Hallelujah chorus at the Pentagon, and take the opportunity to clean out the swamp in America’s military industry.By now the whole world knows what pilots and aerospace engineers have known all along: Boeing stuck big modern engines on a 1950s airframe design, which made the 737 Max inherently unstable, with a tendency to go nose up and stall. It used a software kluge to compensate but didn’t retrain pilots in the new aircraft in order to speed sales.

What culpability the company bears is a matter for the lawyers to sort out. Norwegian Air won’t be the last airline to demand compensation from Boeing for lost revenues while the 737 Max fleet is grounded.The 737 Max scandal is a disaster for the United States, and it couldn’t have happened at a more delicate moment. China’s aircraft manufacturer COMAC already has nearly 1,000 orders for its C919 twin-engine passenger jet, designed to compete with the 737 Max as well as the Airbus 320. Not only has the prestige of American industry been tarnished, but the credibility of its air safety regulators, the Federal Aviation Authority and the National Transportation Safety Board, is compromised.President Trump should remember Winston Churchill’s advice never to waste a crisis, and use the full power of his office to hold Boeing accountable for cutting corners and withholding key information. That’s the right thing to do as a matter of sheer political expediency – Americans want their leaders to stand up to industry corruption – but it’s also a strategic opportunity.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“Those who would give up essential liberty, to obtain a little safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

“There is nothing which I dread so much as the division of the Republic into two great parties,each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This,in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” John Adams (1735-1826)

If one were to draw a spectrum of our politics, it would have, on the far right, Libertarians who believe in minimal government and, on the far left, a Social Welfare State comprised of those who believe that government’s primary responsibility is to care for all the needs of all its people. Most of us reside somewhere between those two poles. If we go beyond both extremes, the spectrum becomes circular, as both end in autocracies.

The natural tendency for any organism is to grow, which it does until it stops and dies. That is true for elephants, sparrows, snails, man and Maple trees. It is also true for businesses, non-profits, partnerships and, unfortunately, governments. Growth in government should be tethered to increases in population and reasonable services, without letting it expand to the point it destroys the society it was created to serve. For a government bureaucrat running a department, aspiration is natural. They request new funds, find new things to do and hire new people. They are not held to the profit and loss demands of for-profit businesses. Compounding the problem has been the expansion of the “deep state,” which is defined as networks of power within the bureaucracies and agencies of government, people not accountable to voters. There are an estimated three million federal non-elected, non-military, civil service workers in the U.S. It is not in the career interests of department managers to eliminate or even reduce their number of employees. And government salaries are among the nation’s strongest, so that the three richest counties in the U.S. – Loudon (VA), Howard (MD) and Fairfax (VA) – are Washington suburbs. The trick is how do we get government to reduce costs and slow its growth, while keeping alive its promise of liberty and prosperity?  

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/opinion/is

Like most places, America has always had potent strains of anti-Semitism — crude and polished, K.K.K. and country club. But unlike many places, we have always had important strains of philo-Semitism as well; there is a long American tradition, with both Protestant and Enlightenment roots, of really liking Judaism and the Jews.

And so the story of the Jews in post-World War II America is the story, not just of anti-Semitism’s marginalization, but of philo-Semitism’s triumph. Jewish Americans weren’t just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

For American philo-Semites, the Jewish experience wasn’t just one minority experience among many, but a signal and elevated case. The outsize success of Jewish intellectuals and scientists and artists and businessmen and activists was an especially good thing, a unique proof of American exceptionalism — because ours was the one country where a people so long persecuted could not only survive but triumph. And attacks on Jewish success and influence, like attacks on the state of Israel, were treated as particularly dangerous, particularly un-American, because they threatened to undo this great achievement, and return the Jews to their historic state of constant threat and peril.

This history supplies one way to understand the stakes in the controversy over Ilhan Omar, the Muslim congresswoman who keeps using anti-Semitic clichés in her criticisms of the American-Israeli relationship. The part of the American left that’s defending her, or at least mitigating her offense and accusing her conservative critics of bad faith, doesn’t see itself as defending Jew-hatred, and since many of those defenders are Jewish — including the arguable front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders — it’s reasonable to take them at their word.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ilhan-omar-cant-break-the-u-s-israel-bond-11552345065

To ask whether freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar was being anti-Semitic or merely inartful when she suggested U.S. support for Israel is driven by moneyed interests (“It’s all about the Benjamins baby”) and Americans who owe “allegiance to a foreign country” is a waste of time. Ms. Omar is a gifted and ambitious politician who thinks Jew-baiting will help her career; the question is not whether she is a nice person but whether she is a significant one. Does her appearance on the political stage herald a substantial change in American politics—either a renewed anti-Semitism or a diminished U.S.-Israel alliance?

The answer at this point is that Ms. Omar’s notoriety is more sizzle than steak. Politically, her election doesn’t mean very much. That the congressional district Keith Ellison represented for six terms chose Ms. Omar to replace him hardly represents a political earthquake. Mr. Ellison had ties to the Nation of Islam and a strongly anti-Israel record. Voters in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District have tolerated these sentiments for some time.

Democratic Party luminaries like Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer supported Mr. Ellison in his 2017 bid to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee (he ultimately became deputy). Even before Ms. Omar, the party has been more interested in reaching an accommodation with militantly anti-Israel politics than in driving it out of the party.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273109/jewish-americans-and-democratic-party-time-go-bruce-bawer

On Saturday, Roger L. Simon lamented at PJ Media that anti-Semitism is once again becoming respectable – or at least acceptable – across the Western world, and that this time around the Jew-haters are predominantly Muslims and leftists. Among the more prominent new standard bearers of this old hatred, noted Simon, are our two recently elected Muslim congresswomen, who, he quite reasonably surmised, “were likely inculcated at an early age, as were too many Muslim children, with the belief that Jews only (pace Darwin) were the descendants of pigs and apes and should be wiped from the Earth.” Simon argued that in the face of the Democratic Party establishment’s shameful readiness to excuse – or at least relativize – these women’s Jew-hatred, as demonstrated by its feeble response last week to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s fondness for vile anti-Semitic tropes, it’s about time for American Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom have long been loyal Democrats, to pack their bags and check out.

Alas, I’m afraid it’ll take more than a little Der Stürmer-type rhetoric by Muslim Democrats to budge True Believers whose weekly religious devotions consist not of attending shul but of soaking in the Sunday New York Times, that secular Torah. No devout adherent of the Gospel according to Sulzberger would jump ship, after all, as long as all-knowing guru Paul “I won the Nobel Prize” Krugman can write, as he did last Thursday, that “only one brand of antisemitism scares me — and it’s not on the left.” I wonder what Natan Sharansky has to say about that.

On Friday, for her part, Krugman’s fellow Times oracle Michelle Goldberg offered this bit of Solomonic wisdom: “I assume Omar has been reckless rather than malicious.” And what, pray tell, is that assumption based on? Definitely not a familiarity with the Koran. Goldberg went on: “As one of the first two Muslim women in Congress — and the first to wear a hijab — Omar has been subject to a terrifying campaign of racist vilification.” How remarkable that, almost eighteen years after 9/11, you can still get away with deep-sixing Islamic ideology – and the symbolic significance of the hijab – by pretending that Islam is a race. Goldberg concluded: “Omar needs to do better, but right now there’s still only one political party in America that is a safe place for hate.” Of course, Goldberg meant the GOP, because in today’s Democratic lexicon, hate no longer means hate – it means a refusal to honor the current victim-group hierarchy, which places Muslims at the very top and, ignoring not only the Holocaust but the whole history of Jewish suffering, places Jews at or near the bottom, if not eliminating them from the picture entirely.

“It is important to remember that capitalism has been the greatest driver of prosperity and opportunity the world has ever known.”   On October 8, 2016

A. DONALD TRUMP
B. ELIZABETH WARREN
C. CORY BOOKER
D.BETO O’ROURKE
E.KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND
F. NONE OF THE ABOVE

IF your answer was E….you are right. It was Barack Obama in an essay “The Way Ahead” https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/10/08/the-way-ahead?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/the_way_ahead

https://quillette.com/2019/03/09/progressivism

The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity—and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.
~Niall Ferguson

I was wrong.

For a long time, I considered the loose collection of ideas and assumptions I will call “progressivism” to be a regrettable but mostly tolerable side effect of affluence. This quasi-ideology—espoused by prominent progressives from the academy and Vox to Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren—holds that, inter alia: (1) All demographic groups are roughly equal on all socially valued traits; (2) racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry are ubiquitous; (3) almost all demographic disparities are caused by unfair discrimination; (4) diversity is an unalloyed good; and (5) there are many bigots who stand in the way of social progress, but eventually history will redeem the noble and we will inhabit a just society.

Wealth frees a person from immediate survival concerns and therefore increases the importance of symbolic identities. And this, coupled with youth’s natural affinity for rebellion, almost inevitably leads to at least a passing phase of identity-based radicalism. So while others sounded the tocsin, proclaiming this a grave threat to social sanity, I remained skeptical. Of course, I agreed that social justice ideologies were often odious and possibly pernicious, especially inside the elite institutions where they most rapidly proliferated; but, I also thought that alarmism about the problem was equally unhelpful, diverting limited cognitive resources from more constructive activities.

However, I am no longer skeptical. I have come to believe that the hostility to the West embedded in this kind of thinking and activism is a serious and growing problem. It is therefore critical that we understand the motives that drive it and the conditions that enable it, and that we challenge its erroneous assumptions and persuade others of its corrosiveness, preferably without alienating those who find it appealing but are also willing to listen to reasonable objections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h5iv6sECGU&feature=youtu.be

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22437/selling-socialism-to-america

Socialism is a tough sell to Americans who evaluate ideas based on facts and a remarkably easy sell to Americans who evaluate ideas based on feelings. The adult world of facts is a foreign land to the infantilized world of feelings where low-info millennial voters currently dwell. The heated political battle between Americanism and Socialism parallels the battle between parents and their children who refuse to grow up emotionally and leave the nest.

Becoming an emotional adult requires embracing a fact based cause-and-effect view of the world that rejects the fantasies of childhood. “No Johnny, you cannot fly like a bird even though you really really really want to.” What happens if Johnny insists that he can fly and takes a confident leap from a tall building?

Socialism and Johnny have a lot in common – both insist they can do what objective reality proves they cannot do.

So, what is the problem?

America is being challenged by a Peter Pan generation that refuses to grow up and lives in a world of subjective reality where feelings rather than facts determine public policy. Their fragile selves require enforced political correctness and safe spaces to protect them from unwelcome facts and opposing ideas. Johnny climbs to the top of a tall building because he “feels” like a bird – he refuses to accept the fact that he is a human being and cannot fly. Human beings have limitations just like Socialism does.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/06/the-

Fifty years ago, the United States was facing crises and unrest on multiple fronts. Some predicted that internal chaos and revolution would unravel the nation.

The 1969 Vietnam War protests on the UC Berkeley campus turned so violent that National Guard helicopters indiscriminately sprayed tear gas on student demonstrators. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of major cities as part of the “Moratorium to the End the War in Vietnam.” In Washington, D.C., about a half-million protesters marched to the White House.

Native American demonstrators took over the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and stayed there for 19 months, declaring it their own sovereign space.

In November 1969, the American public was exposed to grotesque photos of the My Lai Massacre, which had occurred the year before. The nation was stunned that American troops in Vietnam had shot innocent women and children. My Lai heated up the already hot national debate over whether the Vietnam War was either moral or winnable.

Meanwhile, the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven, involving the supposed organizers of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, roiled the nation. The courtroom drama involving radical defendants such as Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin descended into a national circus, as the battle between leftists and the establishment went from the streets to the courtroom.

It was also the year of the Woodstock music festival. More than 400,000 thrill-seekers showed up on a small farm in the Catskill Mountains in August 1969 to celebrate three days of “peace and music.” Footage of free love and free drugs at Woodstock shocked half the country but resonated with the other half, which viewed the festival as much-needed liberation for an uptight nation.