RUTHFULLY YOURS

Does this not describe the administration of Barak Obama? His eight-year tenure in the White House has been nothing less than a “train of abuses and usurpations,” abuses of the office of president and usurpations of Congressional authority. His “Object” has always been to reduce Americans under absolute Despotism.

“…A long train of abuses and usurpations….”

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, in detailing the numerous charges against King George III, that “…mankind are disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Does this not describe the administration of Barak Obama? His eight-year tenure in the White House has been nothing less than a “train of abuses and usurpations,” abuses of the office of president and usurpations of Congressional authority. His “Object” has always been to reduce Americans under absolute Despotism.

In 1920, H.L. Mencken made some observations that have proven to be prescient and not altogether irrelevant to the character of today’s Social Justice Warriors, aspiring collectivists, and nation transformers:

“No doubt my distaste for democracy as a political theory is…a defect that is a good deal less in the theory than in myself. In this case it is very probably my incapacity for envy….The fact that John D. Rockefeller had more money than I have is as uninteresting to me as the fact that he believed in total immersion and wore detachable cuffs.

“Thus I am never envious, and so it is impossible for me to feel any sympathy for men who are. Per corollary, it is impossible for me to get any glow out of such hallucinations as democracy and Puritanism, for if you pump envy out of them you empty them of their life blood: they are all immovably grounded upon the inferior man’s hatred of the man who is having a better time. There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and the impulse is to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness – to bring him down to the miserable level of the ‘good’ men, i.e., of stupid, cowardly and chronically unhappy men. And there is only one sound argument for democracy, that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men…and the most heinous offense for him is to prove it.

“…Such an attitude is palpably impossible to a democrat. His distinguishing mark is the fact that he always attacks his opponents, not just with open arms, but also with snorts and objurations – that he is always filled with moral indignation – that he is incapable of imagining honor in an antagonist, and hence incapable of it himself….”*

Olivia Pierson’s Western Values Defended: A Primer, is just what its title says it is, a primer for those unread in what those values are that need to be upheld and defended. It is a short book, just a general survey of the Western values that are rooted in ancient Greece but which came to fruition in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. It is only 71 pages long, but it is loaded with ideas which most people are not familiar with.

An Amazon review best describes Pierson’s opus: “Olivia Pierson is the author of To Love Wisdom – Gateway to the Heroic for the Young – is an introduction to philosophy for young people aged 10-13 and Western Values Defended: A Primer – a punchy and relevant overview of the greatest gems of Western civilization, and how they came to define the daily character of individual liberty in the West. She writes about politics, history and culture on her website oliviapierson.org. A reader wrote, “An exceptionally well-written defense of Western liberal philosophy and culture! At a time when Western values are overwhelmingly menaced, Ms. Pierson systematically explains just what Western values are, and why they’re so overwhelmingly important. The West today is massively under assault from the forces of socialism and religion, and Ms. Pierson persuasively and passionately explains how we all can — and must! — fight back against the horrifically threatening darkness.”

For any well-read adult who is conversant in the issues covered by Pierson, her book is “old news.” What they must remember is that it is an introduction to those issues. It would make an incomparable text book in elementary and high school as an antidote to the government-mandated multicultural pap being taught in schools today (at least in the U.S.). She introduces the issues in an elegant, compelling style, one which “old hands” on the subjects will find attractive and informative (I learned a few things about some of the issues I’d not encountered elsewhere). It was difficult for me to choose my favorite chapters in Western Values Defended: “Religious Tolerance” (which includes a moving and much-earned tribute to Hypatia of Alexandria, horridly martyred by early Christians because of her mind), “The Emancipation of Women and Sexual Freedom,” “Freedom of Speech and the Press,” “A Commitment to Scientific Inquiry,” or “Capitalism and Innovation.”

David Pryce-Jones’ writings span over five decades. Over that time, he has produced a series of books chronicling unusual lives with implausible loyalties and the destructive and self-destructive movements which attracted them.

Fault Lines
David Pryce-Jones, Criterion Books, New York, 2015, 364 pp., US$25.00

On the question of the underlying motif uniting such diverse individuals as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Unity Mitford and Cyril Connolly, and such varied subjects as the Hungarian Revolt, Paris in the Third Reich, the Arab world and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pryce-Jones said this in an interview with me more than 20 years ago: “I’m fascinated with the question – why do people do the very strange things they do?”

I and doubtless others have wondered how he came upon this fascination. Now, with his autobiography before them, readers will find their wait for an answer to that question well worth it. Pryce-Jones has given us a vivid yet understated portrait of the rarefied world into which he was born in Vienna in 1936, a world of country estates, lavish apartments on broad boulevards and liveried servants – and what happened to it.

It was his great-grandfather, the prominent entrepreneur Gustav Springer, who coined the advice, “Buy to the sound of cannons and sell to the sound of violins,” (often wrongly attributed to one of the Rothschilds – to whom Pryce-Jones is also connected). Wise choices of this kind led his forbears to accumulate a fortune and enter the Continent’s aristocracy. The offspring of an unlikely match between a British man of letters from a landed Welsh family, Alan Pryce-Jones, and a Jewish heiress, Thérèse (‘Poppy’) Fould-Springer, Pryce-Jones grew up in Royaumont, a home adjacent to a famed Cistercian abbey laid waste by the French Revolution.

Before the hyperventilating begins, let me stipulate that neither President Obama or Hillary Clinton ever sat down with Islamic State chieftain Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and signed the articles of incorporation. But were it not for their actions and inactions in facilitating a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, creating a vacuum ISIS would gladly fill, the terrorist groups’ caliphate arguably would not exist.

Trump now says he was merely being sarcastic when he said it:

Donald Trump charged President Barack Obama on Wednesday with being the founder of the Islamic State during a campaign rally in Florida.”In many respects, you know, they honor President Obama,” Trump said during a campaign stop in Fort Lauderdale. “He is the founder of ISIS.”Last week, his campaign tried to draw financial links between the Clinton Foundation and the terror group. Wednesday, he called Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton the group’s “co-founder.”

Trump has long accused Obama and Clinton for pursuing Middle East policies that created a power vacuum in Iraq that was exploited by Islamic State. He had criticized Obama for announcing he would yank U.S. troops out of Iraq, which Obama critics believe created the instability in which extremist groups thrive.

No more calls, we have a winner. Sarcasm or not, he is on the money. ISIS would not be the threat it is today were it not for the policies of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They should at least rate an honorable mention. The fact is that President Obama, who famously dismissed ISIS as a “JV team”, ignored the intelligence reports of the rise of the Islamic State and the danger it posed. As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized, Obama’s later promise to “degrade and destroy” ISIS was an empty threat by a President who could have destroyed ISIS in the cradle but didn’t:

Degrade? Degrading has been the foreign policy of a president who recently said that he didn’t have a strategy yet for dealing with the Islamic State’s butchery after watching it train and prepare for a year in its Syrian base before its “sudden” expansion into Iraq.

A former Pentagon official told Fox News that Obama received specific intelligence in daily briefings about the Islamic State’s rise. The information was said to be “granular” in detail, laying out IS’ intentions and capabilities for at least a year before it seized big chunks of Iraqi territory and started beheading Americans.

Obama’s indifference to the briefings was an issue during the 2012 campaign, when former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen observed that Obama personally attended only 44% of them. Obama’s perceived lack of interest in a terror war, which he claimed was won prior to the Benghazi attack, mirrors his reported lack of interest in the rise of the Islamic State.

The fact is President Obama willfully snatched defeat from the Iraq victory of President George W. Bush. The Islamic State’s capture of Ramadi was a long way from the purple fingers Iraqi women held aloft in the country’s first free and democratic elections:

The head of the national security division at the Justice Department was among the agency’s senior officials who objected to paying Iran hundreds of millions of dollars in cash at the same time that Tehran was releasing American prisoners, according to people familiar with the discussions.

John Carlin, a Senate-confirmed administration appointee, raised concerns when the State Department notified Justice officials of its plan to deliver to Iran a planeful of cash, saying it would be viewed as a ransom payment, these people said. A number of other high-ranking Justice officials voiced similar concerns as the negotiations proceeded, they said.

The U.S. paid Iran $400 million in cash on Jan. 17 as part of a larger $1.7 billion settlement of a failed 1979 arms deal between the U.S. and Iran that was announced that day. Also on that day, Iran released four detained Americans in exchange for the U.S.’s releasing from prison—or dropping charges against—Iranians charged with violating sanctions laws. U.S. officials have said the swap was agreed upon in separate talks.

The objection of senior Justice Department officials was that Iranian officials were likely to view the $400 million payment as ransom, thereby undercutting a longstanding U.S. policy that the government doesn’t pay ransom for American hostages, these people said. The policy is based on a concern that paying ransom could encourage more Americans to become targets for hostage-takers.

Mr. Carlin, as head of the division in charge of counterterrorism and intelligence, is one of the highest-profile figures at the department. That he and other senior figures raised alarms underscores how much pushback the State Department proposal provoked.

Since The Wall Street Journal earlier this month reported details of the cash shipment—stacks of euros, Swiss francs and other currencies stacked on wooden pallets—and the Justice Department officials’ objections, administration officials have defended the payment.

At a press conference last week, President Barack Obama described the controversy as the “manufacturing of outrage in a story that we disclosed in January,’’ when the U.S. settled a number of outstanding issues with Iran.

He added, “We do not pay ransom for hostages.”

In his remarks, the president didn’t mention the objections raised by his own appointees within the Justice Department, where, according to people familiar with the discussions, many officials raised alarms that the timing of the cash payment would look like ransom.

White House and State Department officials ultimately decided to proceed with the $400 million cash payment despite the Justice officials’ objections. CONTINUE AT SITE

American defense contractor Raytheon and Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems who work together developing Israel’s Iron Dome-the highly-acclaimed mobile air defense system that has become critical to Israel’s national security-are now collaborating on an American prototype.

The U.S. version of the missile system would help protect U.S. forces in advanced combat positions around the world from a variety of threats including cruise missiles, rockets and UAV’s.

A 2015 trademark filing by Raytheon lists the “SkyHunter,” described as a ground-based missile interceptor system with a guided missile that has electro-optic sensors and adjustable steering fins to track and destroy incoming enemy rockets, missiles, artillery and mortars.

Raytheon is the world’s largest manufacturer of guided missiles and works with Israel’s State-owned Rafael providing key components for Israel’s highly-versatile electro-optic Tamir interceptor missile.

In April, the U.S. successfully tested a modified Tamir missile from a Multi-Missile Launcher (MML) at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico successfully intercepting a target drone.

The missile system is one of several under consideration by the U.S. Army, though the production costs and successful track record would make a Raytheon/Rafael produced system an ideal proposition for the U.S., Yosi Druker, vice president and head of the air superiority systems sector at Rafael told Sightline’s Defense News.

The missiles would be built in the U.S., rendered compatible for American military standards and “100 percent Raytheon,” said Druker, who added that intelligence sharing would be vital and another valuable asset to the project.

The great American humorists have something in common: hatred.

H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain both could be uproariously funny and charming — and Twain could be tender from time to time, though Mencken could not or would not — but at the bottom of each man’s deep well of humor was a brackish and sour reserve of hatred, for this country, for its institutions, and for its people. Neither man could forgive Americans for being provincial, backward, bigoted, anti-intellectual, floridly religious, or for any of the other real or imagined defects located in the American character.

Historical context matters, of course. As Edmund Burke said, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” Twain was born in 1835, and there was much that was detestable in the America of Tom Sawyer. Mencken, at the age of nine, read Huckleberry Finn and experienced a literary and intellectual awakening — “the most stupendous event in my life,” he called it — and followed a similar path. Both men were cranks: Twain with his premonitions and parapsychology, Mencken with his “Prejudices” and his evangelical atheism. He might have been referring to himself when he wrote: “There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.”

The debunking mentality is prevalent in both men’s writing, a genuine fervor to knock the United States and its people down a peg or two. For Twain, America was slavery and the oppression of African Americans. For Mencken, the representative American experience was the Scopes trial, with its greasy Christian fundamentalists and arguments designed to appeal to the “prehensile moron,” his description of the typical American farmer. The debunking mind is typical of the American Left, which feels itself compelled to rewrite every episode in history in such a way as to put black hats on the heads of any and all American heroes: Jefferson? Slave-owning rapist. Lincoln? Not really all that enlightened on race. Saving the world from the Nazis? Sure, but what about the internment of the Japanese? Etc. “It was wonderful to find America,” Twain wrote. “But it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”

In high school, I had a very left-wing American history teacher who was a teachers’-union activist (a very lonely position in Lubbock, Texas, where the existence of such unions was hardly acknowledged) for whom the entirety of the great American story was slavery, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the Great Depression, and the momentary heroism of the New Deal (we were not far from New Deal, Texas), with the great arc of American history concluding on the steps of Central High School in Little Rock on September 23, 1957. It was, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, very important to her — plainly urgent to her — that the American story be one of disappointment, betrayal, and falling short of our founding ideals.

Much of this phenomenon isn’t about how one sees society but how one sees one’s self. Literary men invent literary characters, and very often the first and most important literary character a writer invents is himself. Samuel Clemens cared a great deal more about money and the friendship of titled nobility than Mark Twain ever would, and Mencken was in real life subject to the sort of crude superstitions and pseudoscience that Mencken the public figure would have mocked. The great modern example of this was Molly Ivins, a California native raised in a mansion in the tony Houston neighborhood of River Oaks, who liked to take her private-school friends sailing on her oil-executive father’s yacht, who somehow managed to acquire a ridiculous “Texas” accent found nowhere in Texas and reinvent herself as a backporch-sittin’ champion of the common man, a redneck liberal.

The chief interest of Molly Ivins’s writing about Texas is that it demonstrates how little she actually understood the state, or the Union to which it belongs. As with Twain and Mencken, Ivins’s America would always be backward and corrupt, with Washington run by bribe-paying lobbyists (a lazy writer, she inevitably referred to them as “lobsters” — having thought that funny once, she made a habit of it) and a motley collection of fools and miscreants either too feeble or too greedy to do the right thing, defined as whatever was moving Molly Ivins at any particular moment.

Mencken lived in horror of the American people, “who put the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding beside Friedrich Barbarossa and Charlemagne, and hold the Supreme Court to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and belong ardently to every Rotary Club, Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Saloon League, and choke with emotion when the band plays ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’” Much of that horror was imaginary, and still is. But we must have horror, especially in politics. How else to justify present and familiar horror except but by reference to a greater horror? In this year’s election, each candidate’s partisans already have been reduced to making the argument that while their own candidate might be awful, the other candidate is literally akin to Adolf Hitler. Yesterday, I heard both from Clinton supporters and Trump supporters that the other one would usher in Third Reich U.S.A. “Don’t tell yourself that it can’t happen here,” one wrote.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was designated a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984. That move came several years after Iran had seized American hostages while demanding $24 billion in cash and gold to be paid into a Muslim bank for their release.

The total, according to Secretary of State Muskie, came out to $480 million per hostage.

Carter eventually reached a deal to release billions to Iran while Muskie claimed that the ransom payment meant that “the United States emerged stronger and Iran emerged weaker.” Such counterintuitive arguments have become a staple of Obama rhetoric which insists that appeasing terrorists somehow weakens them and strengthens us.

Muskie also said the deal would “not to make any arrangement to encourage terrorism in the future”.

That of course was not true. Paying out ransom to terrorists only encourages more terrorism. While the hostages were freed, the terror tactic never went away.

In 1989, Iran was still trying to blackmail President George H.W. Bush by offering to free yet more American hostages in exchange for around $12 billion in assets. The hostages had been seized by terrorist affiliates of Iran which by now had been on the state sponsor of terror list for nearly half a decade.

Carter’s ransom deal blatantly violated the law. His Treasury Department ordered banks to defy the courts which were addressing claims of damages by American companies. While he and his administration insisted that they were not paying ransom because it was Iran’s money (a familiar claim that has been repeated by Obama with his own ransom payment), that’s exactly what they were doing.

It’s how Iran saw it. It’s why Iran kept taking hostages and demanding ransoms.

Everybody is looking for defense dollars. The latest sleuth is Luke O’Brien, an Army “Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Fellow” at the National Defense University. He thinks he has found a $62 billion pot of cash if we just got rid of our land based ICBMs. The money could then be spent on more important conventional military needs.

It is true nuclear modernization of the USA deterrent force will cost $700 billion over the next 25 years according to a study done by the Center for Security and International Studies. At first glance that is a great deal of money. But it averages $28 billion a year for nearly 500 missiles, submarines and bombers, 5-12 types of warheads, the command and control associated with the force, and the nuclear laboratories and facilities supporting warhead production, safety and refurbishment.

This comes to 4.6% of the current defense budget and a projected ½ of 1% of the Federal budget in 2025 at the initial peak of modernization spending.

Now it is also true that to improve military readiness now and restore both our nuclear and conventional deterrent, we need more defense funding in the next five year defense plan, and certainly in the next decade. Otherwise we may end up with a hollow military much as we did at the end of the Carter administration. But killing ICBMs simply doesn’t solve either problem.

In the next ten years the nuclear platforms including nuclear capable bombers, land based missiles, and submarines will cost $135 billion. These funds are roughly divided between sustainment of old systems and modernization for new ones.

The ICBM sustainment is $15 billon while another $7 billion would be for modernization. A modest additional amount is also projected to be spent on ICBM warheads and new command and control systems bringing the total to around $24 billion for the next decade.

1. The 9th Day of Av (the 11th Jewish month) is the most calamitous day in Jewish history, first mentioned in the book of Zechariah 7:3. It is a day of fasting (one of four fast days connected to the destruction of Jerusalem), commemorating dramatic national catastrophes, in an attempt to benefit from history by learning from – rather than repeating – critical moral and strategic missteps. Forgetfulness feeds oblivion; remembrance breeds deliverance.

2. Major Jewish calamities are commemorated on the 9th Day of Av:
*The failed “Ten Spies/tribal presidents” – contrary to Joshua & Caleb – slandered the Land of Israel, preferring immediate convenience and conventional “wisdom” over faith and long term vision, thus prolonging the wandering in the desert for 40 years, before settling the Promised Land;
*The destruction of the First Temple and Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (586 BCE) resulted in the massacre of 100,000 Jews and a massive national exile;
*The destruction of the Second Temple and Jerusalem by Titus of Rome (70 CE) triggered the massacre of 1 million Jews and another massive national exile, aiming to annihilate Judaism and the Jewish people;
*The execution of the Ten Martyrs – ten leading rabbis – by the Roman Empire;
*The Bar Kokhbah Revolt was crushed with the killing of Bar Kokhbah, the fall of his headquarters in Beitar (135 CE), south of Jerusalem in Judea and Samaria, the plowing of Jerusalem, and the killing of 600,000 Jews by the Roman Empire;
*The pogroms of the First Crusade (1096-1099) massacred tens of thousands of Jews in Germany, France, Italy and Britain;
*The Jewish expulsion from Britain (1290);
*The Jewish expulsion from Spain (1492);
*The eruption of the First World War (1914);
*The beginning of the 1942 deportation of Warsaw Ghetto Jews to Treblinka extermination camp.

3. Napoleon was walking one night in the streets of Paris, hearing lamentations emanating from a synagogue. When told that the wailing commemorated the 586 BCE destruction of the First Jewish Temple in Jerusalem he stated: “People who solemnize ancient history are destined for a glorious future!”