RUTHFULLY YOURS

As readers know, I have a low regard for conspiracy theories, mainly because the reasons the world is going to hell are pretty much staring us in the face. But I can’t honestly blame anyone following the Las Vegas massacre story from taking refuge in any conspiracy theory, no matter how wild and zany. Almost a fortnight from the moment when 58 people were gunned down at a country-music festival, officialdom has so bungled the case that almost every single one of the most basic facts about the act are up for grabs.

As I had cause to remark over a week ago, I dislike the contamination of police press conferences by various politicians and bureaucrats all indulging in an orgy of mutual self-congratulation. But, in this case, the self-congratulation is entirely unwarranted. From the beginning this seemed an unusual crime that didn’t seem to line up with any other mass shooting by a nutter who flips. It has only gotten weirder in the days since.

Earlier this week whichever branch of the Keystone Kops is running this show (apparently the Feds) completely reversed their timeline of the case. Previously we were told that Mandalay Bay security guard Jesus Campos had gone up to the 32nd floor to investigate an “open-door” alert and was a hero because his intervention had distracted the perp from killing even more people – and fortunately, even as Mr Campos was taking a bullet in his leg, the cops were already pounding up the stairs.

We’re now told that that timeline was, in fact, back to front. Instead, Jesus Campos was investigating the door alert before the massacre even began. At 9.59pm, Paddock responded to Mr Campos’ arrival by emptying 200 rounds into the 32nd floor corridor. Which seems a tad excessive. Paddock then apparently took a leisurely six-minute break before going over to the window and beginning his massacre. Which seems a tad excessively relaxed. What was he doing? Having a nice cup of tea? Calling down to room service? Your guess is as good as the coppers’.

But, at any rate, it seems someone else was on the scene – maintenance man Stephen Schuck, who was also forced to take cover from those 200 rounds:

As Mr Schuck says above, when the shooting began, he used his radio to call in what was happening – including the precise location of the room from which the shots were coming. That was six minutes before Paddock began firing on the crowd. So in theory the police could have gotten there in time to prevent, if not all, then many or most of the deaths at the concert.

But they didn’t. Instead, Paddock fired on the crowd for ten minutes and then, despite having apparently prepared for a siege, decided to call a halt and shoot himself.

The Mandalay Bay resort is now disputing the police’s revised timeline. They say that officers were already in the building when Campos radioed in that he was shot and, within 40 seconds, both police and hotel security were on the 32nd floor.

So that’s three timelines.

Today we—or, rather, the remaining sane among us—commemorate the anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. The official holiday was Monday, disconnected from the actual date of Columbus’s discovery and, as some would now have it, even from the actual event. Today we are called upon to disavow Columbus and all his works and to deny that any good came of his efforts. We are called, instead, to castigate ourselves and celebrate “Indigenous People’s Day” as if, in so doing, we can remove or negate historical sins by obsessing over them and refusing to see the good in the past.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/12/the-good-the-bad-and-the-better-in-our-history/

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark,” a scientist marries a beautiful young woman who has a birthmark on her cheek. Despite her being a good and loving wife, he finds himself bothered by the mark and devises a procedure to get rid of it. As the young wife undergoes the procedure, the birthmark does indeed begin to fade. Unfortunately, however, as it fades she dies. The lesson is clear—human perfection is unattainable and the effort to achieve it through human will can lead to worsen the circumstances at the root of our imperfection.

It may not seem an exact analogy but this story always comes to mind as I read about efforts to tear down monuments, first of Confederate figures and war dead, now broadening to statues honoring Jefferson, Columbus, and other great but flawed men. If ever there was a slippery slope, this is it, for evidently even Lincoln is being targeted for what are supposed to be his politically incorrect views on race. But history is the product of many interwoven threads—pull one, and you are liable to unravel others, even some that you really need for the strength of the overall fabric.

Here’s another inexact but instructive analogy, from the histories of the two countries that occupy the island of Hispaniola, discovered (to European eyes) by Columbus, and colonized in different waves by both the Spanish and the French. The Spanish colony became the Dominican Republic while the French colony became Haiti.

As they moved toward independence, the two colonies took exactly the opposite routes. The Dominicans looked to their Spanish heritage and preserved what was useful in European culture. The Haitians, on the other hand, more or less following the totalitarian impulse of the French Revolution, destroyed everything that their colonizers had built—the entire infrastructure including roads, bridges, and machinery—and looked to a kind of indigenous identity for their model of liberation. This divergent history is reflected even in the names of the two countries.

The Dominican Republic is the largest economy in the Central American and Caribbean region and has a thriving tourist industry. Haiti is, well, Haiti. It is desperately poor—the perennial object of global charity that never seems to address its multiple problems, and it operates, if one can call it that, with a per capita income perhaps one eighth that of the DR.

In tearing down statues and monuments, rather than seeking to understand the history and culture behind their erection, sifting through the good, the bad, and the ugly of the past, radical activists may gain temporary satisfaction but may also be dismantling the interwoven strands of meaning that support our freedom, prosperity, and national unity. Every culture, including those of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, has blood on its hands. After all, Cain, the first murderer, was also the founder of the first city, and by extension, the first civilization.

You don’t have to be a Southern apologist to say that the Civil War was fought for a complexity of reasons. Slavery amounted to the foremost and final reason, yes, but there was also love of home, a sense of place, a belief in duty, and a fierce independence. Some of these qualities remain part of our cultural infrastructure today and we are foolish to dismiss them or to wish them away. Comparisons of the South to Nazi Germany are inept, inapt, and intellectually irresponsible.

In addition, all the monuments are part of the history of a relatively short and successful civil war. We shouldn’t slight this. Not every country has had this outcome. Some civil wars go on for decades, as in Angola, and sometimes the evil side wins, as in Vietnam, the latter with the help of our New Left. Korea is still divided. In some countries, like present day Yemen, there may not even be a better side. England suffered through nine years of civil wars, and decades more of turmoil before parliamentary rule could be definitively established. And in the process they had to behead a king, always a messy business fraught with unseen consequences. The Northern Irish have had to tolerate outright thugs and murderers sharing power as part of the Good Friday agreement that ended their “Troubles,” and in Russia, the Bolshevik victory in the civil war that followed the October Revolution eventually culminated in forced labor, mass purges, and state-enforced famine. Likewise in China.

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened the United States for eight years presenting his crippling community organizing tactics and strategies as altruistic when in fact they were designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democratic Party and its ongoing “resistance” movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy American democracy from within and replace it with socialism.

Radical socialist Saul Alinsky wrote his 1971 manual Rules for Radicals to instruct future generations of radical community organizers in effective tactics to transform a capitalist state into a socialist state. Obama became the quintessential community organizer.

In May 1966, The Nation published an article written by Alinsky’s contemporaries Columbia sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Piven. “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” described the tactics necessary to destroy capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with unsustainable demands that push society into social chaos and economic collapse. Cloward and Piven took a termite approach to destruction that collapses structures from the inside out. They specifically targeted the U.S. public welfare system to instigate a crisis that would collapse welfare and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income.

David Horowitz explains that Alinsky and his followers deliberately “organize their power bases without naming the end game, without declaring a specific future they want to achieve – socialism, communism, or anarchy. Without committing themselves to concrete principles or a specific future they organize exclusively to build a power base which they can use to destroy the existing society and its economic system.” David Horowitz has identified the humanitarian hoax of community organizing with great precision.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy used poverty as the weapon of destruction that would collapse America and replace the government with their idealized totalitarian Marxist model. They succeeded in bankrupting New York City for a time but there was not enough pressure to destroy the economy of the country. Supplying additional pressure required Barack Obama’s particular skill set.

The Cloward-Piven experiment in New York City revealed the weakness of their strategy. Community organizing provided insufficient economic pressure – success required ideological politicians and a colluding media willing to disinform the public to be successful. 21st century politics has embraced the expanded 3-step Cloward-Piven Strategy which includes gun control advocacy to eliminate any serious resistance to the effort.

Step 1 – Politicians must overburden governmental/social institutions to the breaking point.

Step 2 – Politicians must incite social chaos through divisive policies to make the country ungovernable.

Step 3 – Politicians must disarm the public so that they cannot oppose the leftist totalitarian state that will follow.

Left-wing liberal European leaders and America under Obama added uncontrolled immigration with divisive immigration policies to both overload their respective welfare systems and create social chaos. Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief spent eight years implementing the expanded Cloward-Piven strategy of economic chaos. In 2007 there were 26 million recipients of food stamps – by 2015 there were 47 million. Obama’s open border policies and calls for amnesty flooded the country with illegal immigrants further straining the system and creating economic chaos. Illegal aliens overload our welfare system, cost American taxpayers a whopping $116 BILLION, and rob legal citizens of their jobs. Obama’s executive orders created extraordinary divisiveness by importing a population of immigrants with hostile cultural norms including jihadi terrorists.

Republicans are still trying to defuse the ticking Obama Care bomb without blowing themselves up, and on Thursday the GOP cut the first wire: President Trump signed an executive order that could begin to revive private insurance markets. More to the point, Americans may start to have more choices at a lower cost.

One piece of this week’s order directs the Labor Department to “consider expanding access” to Association Health Plans, which would allow small businesses to team up to offer insurance. The purpose is to let trade groups form insurance risk pools across state lines and enjoy economies of scale. Many large companies are freed from state and some federal benefit mandates and operate under a law known as Erisa. Smaller businesses deserve similar flexibility.

More association plans might start to reverse the decline in small business coverage, and a White House fact sheet notes that the share of workers at small firms with employer coverage has dropped to about one-third in 2017 from almost half in 2010.

The order also seeks to expand the flexibility and use of health-reimbursement arrangements, which allow employers to pay back employees for health-care expenses with pretax dollars. This could be a step toward equalizing the tax treatment for smaller businesses that don’t offer coverage and thus don’t qualify for the subsidy known as the employer tax exclusion.

A third part of the order directs cabinet agencies to consider new rules on short-term insurance plans, which the Obama Administration restricted for the mortal sin of popularity. The plans traditionally could run for a year and often cover catastrophic events with relatively broad networks of doctors and hospitals. This can be a lifeline for folks between jobs.

But an Obama rule that took effect earlier this year limited the duration of the plans to 90 days. ObamaCare’s central planners hated that so many people were choosing the short-term options that can cost a third of standard plans. The Obama Administration said short-term plans don’t qualify as “minimum essential coverage” under ObamaCare, though it sure beats the risks of going without insurance.

The short-term market has historically been minuscule, but perhaps demand will be higher now given that average ObamaCare premiums have increased dramatically since 2013. One unknown is how many insurers will participate or what coverage will be included. Presumably the Administration will certify the plans as compliant with ObamaCare’s coverage mandate, though the executive order doesn’t say.

ObamaCare’s defenders are calling all of this “sabotage” and warning about “adverse selection,” in which a more robust individual market will siphon off the healthy customers that prop up ObamaCare’s exchanges. They predict a death spiral of higher premiums for the sick or elderly left on the exchanges.

Almost a half-century ago, in 1968, the United States seemed to be falling apart.

The Vietnam War, a bitter and close presidential election, antiwar protests, racial riots, political assassinations, terrorism, and a recession looming on the horizon left the country divided between a loud radical minority and a silent conservative majority.

The United States avoided a civil war. But America suffered a collective psychological depression, civil unrest, defeat in Vietnam, and assorted disasters for the next decade — until the election of a once-polarizing Ronald Reagan ushered in five consecutive presidential terms of relative bipartisan calm and prosperity from 1981 to 2001.

It appears as if 2017 might be another 1968. Recent traumatic hurricanes seem to reflect the country’s human turmoil.

After the polarizing Obama presidency and the contested election of Donald Trump, the country is once again split in two. But this time the divide is far deeper, both ideologically and geographically — and more 50/50, with the two liberal coasts pitted against red-state America in between.

Century-old mute stone statues are torn down in the dead of night, apparently on the theory that by attacking the Confederate dead, the lives of the living might improve.

All the old standbys of American life seem to be eroding. The National Football League is imploding as it devolves into a political circus. Multimillionaire players refuse to stand for the national anthem, turning off millions of fans whose former loyalties paid their salaries.

Politics — or rather a progressive hatred of the provocative Donald Trump — permeates almost every nook and cranny of popular culture.

The new allegiance of the media, late-night television, stand-up comedy, Hollywood, professional sports, and universities is committed to liberal sermonizing. Politically correct obscenity and vulgarity among celebrities and entertainers are a substitute for talent, even as Hollywood is wracked by sexual-harassment scandals and other perversities.

The smears “racist,” “fascist,” “white privilege,” and “Nazi” — like “Commie” of the 1950s — are so overused as to become meaningless. There is now less free speech on campus than during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.

As was the case in 1968, the world abroad is also falling apart.

The European Union, model of the future, is unraveling. The EU has been paralyzed by the exit of Great Britain, the divide between Spain and Catalonia, the bankruptcy of Mediterranean nation members, insidious terrorist attacks in major European cities, and the onslaught of millions of immigrants — mostly young, male, and Muslim — from the war-torn Middle East. Germany is once again becoming imperious, but this time insidiously by means other than arms.

The Daily Wire recently posted a short, satirical video (since removed) mocking those who gleefully take offense at the most imperceptible of slights. In this case, that we celebrate Columbus Day (and not, as they would prefer, “Indigenous Peoples Day”).https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/11/conservatives-need-to-stop-indulging-leftist-narratives/

The video depicted Native Americans savagely killing one another and cannibalizing the dead. Columbus then arrives and brings enlightenment, peace, and material progress. It closes with two columns which list achievements: one for the natives up until the arrival of Columbus and one for the continent following the introduction of Western civilization by Columbus and those who followed him. The natives’ list is quite short and comprised mainly of some trivialities (and some horrors), while the post-Columbus list is quite lengthy and boasts much more impressive civilizational content.

The video is meant to be inflammatory. It is, after all, responding in kind to those who are inflammatory themselves. Those who seek continuously to divide us along racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines—those who desire the obliteration of our collective historical memory and to replace it with politically correct fictions—deserve to be called out for their subversive activity and bizarre worldview.

Is the video reductive? Of course! But so is the Left’s preferred approach to race (i.e., all white people are a plague, and all non-whites are their sainted victims). Did Columbus’ arrival result in some serious evils? Sure (even if many of them were unforeseeable and unintentional tragedies, such as the spreading of disease and misunderstandings resulting from cultural barriers). Can any serious person contend, however, that, on balance, the arrival of Columbus on this continent was a bad thing?

Doubtful, and I think that’s a project doomed to failure. Just look around.

So why did the video evince such panicky, overwrought denunciations from some corners of the Right—and even a groveling apology from Mr. Ben “facts don’t care about your feelings” Shapiro himself?

Because the only thing that a “mainstream conservative” enjoys more than fulminating impotently after losing an election to a Democrat is trying desperately to win the approval of those same Democrats after losing to them. Conservatives love being cheap dates for Democrats.

The “mainstream conservative,” therefore, gets an unalloyed thrill—not unlike the thrill that once ran up Chris Matthews’ leg—from viciously attacking alleged “bigots” on his own side. Why does he do this?

Because he has bought into the Left’s game. He has accepted their warped, destructive, and cynical way of thinking about race, and he is eager to demonstrate his own personal separation from it and, thus, to signal his virtue. He believes that he has a duty to atone for the supposed racial sins of his tribe, announced infallibly by the Left’s religion: Social Justice. How to atone? By screaming, like a dutiful drone, “Racist!” whenever a progressive would.

For the past year, conservative writer Warner Todd Huston’s home in Chicago has been under attack by vandals in what looks like an attempt to intimidate him.

Huston is a feature writer for Breitbart News and has written articles for RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, YoungConservatives.com, and a host of other conservative news sites — including his own website, Publius Forum.

The vandalism started off small. Early this year, an Army flag was pulled off his flag staff and left ripped and in pieces on his lawn.

A few weeks later, the flag he replaced it with was stolen. Next, his garage door was egged.

Then it escalated: “On the night of July 1, the U.S. Army flag that I fly in honor of my son who is in the service was scorched and on it was written in marker ‘die dogs’,” Huston wrote at Publius Forum.

After that, he filed a police report “just to be on the safe side.”

On September 24, his garage door was egged again, and someone wrote “racist” on one of the metal panels.

Huston then filed a second police report.

Late last week, Huston says, the vandalism escalated dramatically.

Huston described what happened at Publius Forum:

At about 1 AM or so on Saturday morning, I was awakened by a noise outside my home. I can’t really say what the noise was as it woke me from a deep sleep. It was just a shout that awoke me. I looked at my window and saw what struck me as a strange light outside. So, I went to the front door…

And saw my car interior on fire…

The surface of my passenger seat was set aflame and the entire interior of the car destroyed. Fortunately it isn’t a new car (it’s a 1999 Oldsmobile 88). But unfortunately, because it is so old I never put it on comprehensive coverage leaving it only at liability coverage. So, insurance won’t cover this destruction and I am now without a car.

Naturally the police became involved, but they say they won’t classify it as arson because they don’t have any evidence to show for it. A plastic pop bottle and cap was left inside by who ever did this. It smelled of gas to me.

Police wondered if I smoked in the car. I don’t smoke cigarettes and only occasionally smoke a cigar but NEVER in a car. If you’ve ever smoked a cigar you know that doing so in a car is a messy, ashy endeavor. I don’t do it. So, there is nothing that should have set my car on fire 7 hours after I last drove it. Also, it was the surface of the seats that went up in flames. Nothing electrical any where near the burn zone.

Chicago is home to many far-left groups, but these attempts to intimidate Huston could also be the work of a “lone wolf” extremist. Or it could be punks in the neighborhood who don’t like his politics.

As a conservative journalist, Huston writes about a variety of subjects important to conservatives such as Islam and immigration. PJ Media asked him if he has written anything about antifa in recent months. He replied: “Sure have.”

Still, Huston has no idea what is behind the vandalism. “I haven’t a clue who did it,” he said. “It has been a bit of a problem for most of the year. As to topics, you know me, I cover everything going on out there. I could have set off any number of people!!” CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump picked cybersecurity expert Kirstjen Nielsen to be the next Homeland Security secretary, putting a low-profile figure into a critical job after former Secretary John Kelly was named White House chief of staff.

Ms. Nielsen, 45 years old, was Mr. Kelly’s chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. She followed him to the White House, where she serves as principal deputy chief of staff, Mr. Kelly’s top aide. Her close relationship with Mr. Kelly was critical in the decision to name her to the post, people familiar with the selection said Wednesday.

Secretaries of homeland security have traditionally been high-profile figures, including former governors and, with Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general. That isn’t the case with Ms. Nielsen. But administration officials point to her wealth of experience in many issues the agency handles and note that she would be the first secretary to have worked at the agency before.

One downside, though, is she lacks the sort of experience communicating with the public that elected officials have, and that can be important in an emergency or in the case of a terror attack. Acting Secretary Elaine Duke, another nonpolitical homeland expert, ran into trouble for indelicate comments in response to a question about one of the recent hurricanes, for instance.

But Ms. Nielsen is well steeped in the issues that the agency deals with on a daily basis, from her service during the Trump and George W. Bush administrations.

She worked at the Transportation Security Administration and for the White House Homeland Security Council during the Bush years. She then worked in the private sector—at positions including the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University and the National Cybersecurity Center—before being brought into the Trump transition to help guide Mr. Kelly through his Senate confirmation process.

If confirmed by the Senate, she would succeed Ms. Duke, who was deputy secretary under Mr. Kelly and has been acting secretary since July.

DHS, created in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks, is a sprawling operation with responsibilities including immigration enforcement, disaster response, the Secret Service and U.S. border and airport security.

As such, Ms. Nielsen would be thrust to the forefront of some of the administration’s most controversial initiatives. Those include Mr. Trump’s effort to build a wall on the southwest border with Mexico, increase deportations of undocumented immigrants, enforce travel restrictions on people from targeted countries, and increase vetting of travelers to the U.S. She would also take over the Federal Emergency Management Agency at a time of intense recovery efforts following a series of damaging hurricanes.

The House has been working for months behind the scenes on the most significant improvement to commercial air travel in decades: Converting Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air-traffic control into an operation governed by pilots, airlines, controllers and other industry experts. This would be good news for the economy and the traveling public, if Republicans don’t wig out.

House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster’s legislation would set up a nonprofit entity that manages air-traffic operations, while FAA continues regulating safety and certifying equipment. Instead of taxes, the services would be funded by user fees. This arrangement has allowed Canada to lower levies by about one-third and manage routes and landings more efficiently. Canada’s air-traffic outfit even sells technology to other countries.

For years the Inspector General of the Transportation Department has been the official biographer of the FAA’s failures in overhauling radar technology that dates to World War II. The tales include tech updates that are billions over budget and a decade late. One microcosm: An IG report from 2014 noted that FAA had implemented 51 initiatives to boost controller productivity, improve best practices and cut costs. Only two produced discernible savings. Six increased costs, and no one can be sure what the other 43 did.

A version of Mr. Shuster’s plan stalled in the House last year amid objections from the general-aviation community, which is now trying to shoot down this year’s draft. Yet the bill exempts hobbyists from paying user fees and explicitly bans the air-traffic operation from restricting air space. GA outfits have also pumped specious national-security concerns, even as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has welcomed the spinoff.

One overwrought objection was that the bill would be a big business giveaway to major airlines, which would have had four representatives on the governing board. The revised bill grants airlines one seat and adds representation for cargo and regional airlines, as well as airports. Robert Poole, the intellectual force behind the idea who supported the first version, calls the new bill a “big improvement.”

Another concern is that rural airports will be closed or harmed, though the bill maintains subsidies for remote areas, which is lamentable if a political reality. A Reason Foundation report details how FAA after the 2013 budget showdown put a moratorium on new contract towers that can benefit small airports, which will never beat out JFK or San Francisco International for FAA dollars. Under a new arrangement, rural airports could explore technology like remote towers, which allow controllers to manage operations with sophisticated cameras and communication equipment.

Many of these complaints come from the unprotected class of Americans known as corporate-jet passengers. The National Business Aviation Association is opposing the bill even though it exempts business jets from paying more in fees. That dispensation is regrettable. If the proletariat sitting in steerage pays for air services, so should a CEO flying across the country for lunch. The irony is that corporate-jet users are the least price-sensitive passengers and put a high value on time. Wouldn’t many executives happily pay extra for a faster landing and shorter lines on the tarmac? NetJets to its credit seems to recognize these realities and endorsed the bill this month.