RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is one of history’s cheekier pranks that the first architect ever to appear on television was that thirty-year-old prodigy with the movie-star face, Albert Speer. Nazi Germany was the first country to introduce television broadcasting, just in time to cover the 1935 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. If you search for it, you can watch a short clip as Speer drives his convertible into his newly enlarged rally grounds, banters with a reporter, and then speeds off with a jaunty Hitler salute.

Of course the world knows Speer from an entirely different media appearance. This was his testimony at the Nuremberg trials, where he dramatically accepted full personal responsibility for Nazi war crimes, the only one of the accused to do so. His subdued, humble demeanor could not have contrasted more with the evasiveness, self-justification, and unconcealed haughtiness of his co-defendants. It was literally the performance of his life, and it saved him from certain execution. Having stepped into the role of “the good Nazi,” Speer never relinquished it. Upon serving his twenty-year sentence, he published a series of fascinating though self-serving memoirs, beginning with Inside the Third Reich (1970). Through it all he played the part of the naïve and innocent artist, who was guilty of nothing more than letting his childlike eagerness to build overwhelm his good judgment and moral sensibility.

That pose is no longer tenable. Archival finds in Germany and elsewhere have shown that Speer could not have been ignorant of the Nazi extermination camps, as he claimed, but was involved in finicky detail with their construction and operation. Although these finds caused a sensation in Germany a decade ago, it is only now that we have a comprehensive treatment in English, Martin Kitchen’s Speer: Hitler’s Architect.1 As an architectural biography, it does not altogether satisfy. What is the relationship between Speer’s architecture and Nazi ideology? Is one permitted to speak about his work in aesthetic terms? If not, why not? Only in passing do these questions divert Kitchen, who is much more interested in Speer the war criminal than Speer the architect. And that he was a war criminal, right up to his elbows, there can be no doubt. Hitler’s Architect makes a persuasive case that Speer’s escape from the gallows at Nuremberg must count as one of the last great crimes of the war.

Albert Speer (1905–1981) was born in Mannheim, Germany, the son and grandson of architects. Pushed by his father to study architecture, he studied first in Karlsruhe, then Munich, but he only became serious after he transferred to Berlin. There he applied to study with Hans Poelzig, the brilliant expressionist architect of Weimar Germany, who rejected Speer as an inferior draftsman. Disappointed, he turned to the man who was Poelzig’s polar opposite, Heinrich Tessenow, a reform-minded architect with a love of simple, clear volumes and neoclassical clarity—the ultimate basis of Nazi architecture. Speer, who all his life knew how to ingratiate himself, sufficiently impressed Tessenow to become his teaching assistant.

Marco Rubio is leading the “Endorsement Primary” by a huge margin, but many are hard-pressed to name any of the Florida senator’s concrete accomplishments. While his record in the Senate may be scarce, Rubio has an impressive slate of achievements from his days in the Florida House, and these show what kind of conservative he would be in the Oval Office.

Rubio pushed many reforms, from limiting eminent domain to expanding school choice and education options for high-demand/high-skill jobs. His leadership also helped streamline Florida’s laws and even helped privatize toll roads.

“As speaker and in earlier leadership positions in the Florida House, Rubio demonstrated a willingness to delegate to focus on his strengths, communicating and negotiating,” National Review’s Jim Geraghty writes.

Donald Trump likes to say that Rubio has never hired anyone, and that may be true in the private sector. But in government, Rubio has much experience doing what presidents do: delegating.

One Hundred Ideas

When Rubio became speaker of the Florida House of Representatives in 2006, he gave every member of the group a book titled 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. Rubio asked his fellow representatives to fill the books with ideas from constituents. This step may have been “flashy,” but it represented a governing philosophy — to involve voters and other legislators as much as possible.

Similarly, Rubio gave more power and responsibility to state House leaders when he became speaker. He let members of his leadership team decide which representatives would chair committees, and he let committee chairs skip the subcommittee step on important legislation. Committees were given broad leeway in how to prioritize different concerns with the money they were allocated.

BOOM BUST BOOM

Directed by Terry Jones, Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and the Monty Python graphics loons

Here is a suitable companion piece to the exceptional film The Big Short, which should have won Best Picture from many points of view. Not only did Big Short illuminate the precursor rumblings of the housing crash of 2008, using quirky characters and mounting excitement as the viewer realized he was sympathizing with these boiler room guys who were riding the crescendo of disaster to clean up, but it was a fast-moving, appropriately clever script that kept you glued, and it was all a story most people did not know — unlike the well-bruited tale told in the otherwise excellent Spotlight.

After all, everyone knew of the Boston priest sexual abuses of children. As opposed to the fact that few people — even now — understand what went down with the burst bubble of unsecured mortgages-a-go-go instigated by the Clintonian forced order to make mortgages “more democratic.” So the underemployed, the irresponsible, the assetless, the no-down-payment people all had their shot at owning homes they could not, in the end, afford.

I rarely recommend adult films to those underage, but this film to my mind, and other reviewers expressed a similar thought, is imperative viewing for college, even high school and the older elementary school child. It should be mandatory even in assisted living communities, too, because the elderly are often gulled by the unscrupulous customer service associates of the investment houses, chop shops and brokerages.

It makes lucid argument for a familiarity with what has been called “irrational exuberance” in markets, and the filmmakers make exorbitantly fabulous use of the Monty Python iconic graphics and sound tools to bring home the carefully edited and compiled remarks of top financiers, economists, bankers, actors and journalists.

This is a fitting companion piece to the noteworthy, but sophisticated offering of The Big Short. Together, these two form an irresistible case for investment sanity, consumer awareness of risk, banking responsibility, and fiduciary gravitas.

BBB goes back to the 17th century Dutch tulip craze to the present, in typically kicky Python graphics that rise and fall, drop off and explode. They outline the South Seas ticket fad. They go through the periodic boom bubbles, what one well-known pooh-bah called “irrational exuberance,” that precedes devastating busts. The Great Crash of ’29 comes in, with illustrations and clips of homeless soup lines and tattered families, followed by the 2008 collapse of uncollateralized debt obligations, mortgages sold by banks across Europe as well as the U.S.

Comedy bits, vox pops, lively commentary and B/W illustration that come to life, and a stew of financial experts like journalists John Cassidy and Paul Masson, Bank of England’s Chief Economist Andy Haldane, and Nobelists Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller and even a female or two.

One wonderful, whimsical, but fascinating segment takes place on Monkey Island, where a sociologist studies the monkey inhabitants of the island for what their irrational behavior sheds on the irrationalities of human beings.

A spectacular offering. The audience of hard-bitten New York reviewers sat rapt and riveted to the screen — and afterwards, they actually applauded the film, so amazingly clever, yet absolutely unmistakably factual …and sane.

It bypasses the wages of lecture, and is fun, evoking laughter often. It presents nibblets from beloved cartoons like “South Park”, the animatronic and muppet figures are extrapolative enough not to implicate the personae they represent, and the likes of Alan Greenspan and his 40-year run of wrongness gets a sharp drubbing from the Krugmans, Terry Joneses and John Cusacks. Bernanke puts in a B/W appearance here and there.

Knowing what this film communicates, one wonders whether the film ought instead to have been titled BUST BOOM BUST… the writers don’t see crashes and collapses as anything but predictably normal, whenever people get too cozy with ever-escalating prices, financial placidity while forgetting the attendant risks in all investments, and overreach.

Whatever happens next Oscar time, they should create a new category for BBB to sweep the golden statuettes off that shelf.

BEN SHAPIRO; DONALD TRUMP IS A LIAR

http://www.dailywire.com/videos/3733/ben-shapiro-donald-trump-liar-ben-shapiro

JOHN OLIVER’S TAKEDOWN

https://www.youtube.com/embed/DnpO_RTSNmQ?autoplay=1

Is the GOP now the Gone Old Party? Donald Goldenlock’s book “The Art of the Deal” only reveals how the lout inherited money from his father the real entrepreneur, and went on to “negotiate” by suing, bullying, deceiving, and bending rules in real estate.

How a vain, boastful, narcissistic, serial adulterer, liar, know nothing, con man got as far as he has in the political arena will be the subject of many columns and books.rsk

Israel, object of libels, boycotts, nuclear threats, academic opprobrium, biased media…the list could go on forever…..is an amazing nation. Every week my e-pal Michael Ordman send me a list of their incredible achievements in medicine, science, economy, global outreach, humane project….again, the list goes on. What a country- from seedless papayas, to undercover teams to help in Syria, aid in California’s drought struggle, bird conservation, high tech and wireless technologies, radar…..the list goes on and on.

Please take a moment to peruse the good news from Israel blog: http://www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

It is the best antidote to all the horrible news from campuses, the State Department, the Eurotrash anti-Semitism, and the biased “calumnists.”
P.S. Read about Egypt’s new ambassador to Israel….‘Happy and proud’ to be here, Egypt’s first ambassador since 2012 presents credentials

http://www.timesofisrael.com/egypts-new-envoy-to-israel-im-very-happy-and-proud-to-be-here/

Rich Lowry sums it up best:http://www.nationalreview.com/node/431947/print
The Coming Anti-Trump Onslaught
“If Trump romps to the nomination by mid-March, non-Trump Republicans will have lost to him in part through a lack of trying. That will never be true of the Democrats, who will gleefully and maliciously do the Trump vetting that the GOP race has, so far, been missing. ”

The anti-Trump onslaught is coming. Perhaps within weeks. Just not necessarily from Republicans. Almost as soon as Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee — which may be as early as March 15 — Democrats will surely start to churn out their negative ads. They will attack Trump’s credentials as a tribune of the little guy by focusing on a money-grubbing venture like Trump University, designed to extract as much cash as possible from people who thought they would learn something from the shell of a school.They will dissect his business record. They will fasten on his failed casinos and the bankruptcies he used to stiff creditors while maintaining a lavish lifestyle.They will fry him for hypocrisy on immigration by pointing out that Trump Tower was built by illegal Polish immigrants worked to the bone and that, according to news reports, illegal immigrants are helping build his new hotel in Washington.They will make the cheap threats he throws at anyone who crosses him a character and temperament issue. They will hound him about his unreleased tax returns. And, of course, they will use decades-worth of controversial statements to portray him as racist and sexist.

This will all be in the tradition of the early Democratic ad campaigns that successfully knee-capped Republican nominees in 1996 and 2012 (Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, respectively). A Democratic campaign to disqualify Trump would seek to make his unfavorable rating (already 60 percent with the general public) not merely alarming, but completely radioactive.

How will Trump fare against such ads? Maybe he will prove impervious to all such criticism, or maybe he will wilt under the assault. Who knows?

In this sense, Republicans are outsourcing the vetting of their front-runner to the other party. At this rate, they will make Trump their de facto standard-bearer in a little less than three weeks, never having run him through the paces of the painful testing that is usually inherent to the process.

Reeling from massive breach of federal personnel records, defense department to budgets $900m. for more defensive measures

US officials are still reeling from last year’s revelation that personal data from some 20 million federal employees, contractors and others had been hacked in a massive breach at the Office of Personnel Management.

The military worries about being targeted by an array of hackers, including national adversaries such as North Korea and non-sovereign players like the Islamic State group.

“Given the increasing severity and sophistication of the threats and challenges we’re seeing in cyberspace — ranging from (IS’s) pervasive online presence to the data breaches at the Office of Personnel Management –- the budget puts a priority on funding our cyber strategy,” Carter said in a written statement to the House Appropriations Committee.

The Pentagon will spend a total of $6.7 billion in the 2017 budget — up 15.5 percent from the previous year. In all, the Pentagon is projected to spend $34.6 billion over the coming five years.

What might be called “transnational progressivism” is the ideology for an age once thought not to need one. President Obama, for example, was hailed as ‘not a doctinaire liberal’ and ‘centrist and pragmatic’. The truth, as eight sorry years have shown, is very different
For more than half a century leading global thinkers have heralded the death of ideology. Beginning with Daniel Bell’s famous 1962 book The End of Ideology, prominent scholars have repeatedly maintained that the role of ideology was diminishing and the exercise of pragmatism ascending throughout the Western world. In The End of Ideology (listed by the Times Literary Supplement as among the “100 most influential non-fiction books since World War II”), Bell declared that the “ideological age has ended” in the West (although it would intensify in the developing world).

Bell argued that the rise of affluence and the advance of social modernisation had led to a broad consensus on political values and an exhaustion with grand ideological debates in the developed world. Bell’s thesis was amplified by leading American social scientists including Edward Shils and Seymour Martin Lipset.

Decades later Francis Fukuyama declared that with the collapse of communism we had reached “the end of history”, meaning the great ideological issues of politics (who should govern and why) had been solved. Although (small h) history in the sense of wars and political upheavals might continue for hundreds of years, (capital H) History in the Hegelian sense was over, because liberal democracy had triumphed in the realm of ideas. Fukuyama maintained liberal democracy was the ideological endpoint of humankind’s age-old quest for the best regime. In the future, even autocratic rulers would claim to be democratic or cite democracy as their end goal.

In January 2009 as Barack Obama was being inaugurated as President of the United States, David Brooks wrote in the New York Times that “Obama aims to realize the end of ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed in the early 1960s. He sees himself as a pragmatist, an empiricist.” Indeed, from the beginning of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign to the present, scores of books, essays and blogs have been marshalled to argue that Obama eschews ideology and embraces pragmatism. Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein (who served in the White House from 2009 to 2012) wrote that Obama was “not a doctrinaire liberal”, that “his skepticism about conventional ideological categories is principled”, and that, above all, he is an empirical pragmatist who understands that “real change requires consensus, learning, and accommodation”. The journalist Fareed Zakaria declared that “Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist”. Academics and public intellectuals compared Obama’s thought to the tradition of the pragmatist school of American philosophy embodied by Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey.