RUTHFULLY YOURS

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is yet again expanding the scope of his off-the-rails investigation into the Left’s wacky Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theory by examining financial transactions even vaguely related to Russia involving President Trump’s businesses and those of his associates, Bloomberg News reports.

Honest observers recognize that with the election of Donald Trump, the longtime Russophiles of the morally flexible Left flipped on their traditional friends in Moscow faster than you can say Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or Operation Barbarossa. Ignoring its own history of rampant seditious collaboration with Russia, the Left has now managed to convince many that any past or present connection a Republican has or had to Russia, however trivial, is somehow now retroactively evidence of treason against the United States.

There is still no evidence that Trump covered up a crime, or even that there was an underlying crime to be concealed but that hasn’t stopped the Left’s witch-hunt from growing and the goalposts from being shifted.

Remember that it was just a month ago as the bizarre collusion allegations got stuck in the mud that Mueller expanded his investigation to include allegations that Trump tried to obstruct justice by firing FBI Director James B. Comey on May 9. The claim is that Trump did this to end Comey’s investigation into National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s ties to Russia. Of course, as Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz has pointed out repeatedly, the president has authority under the Constitution to fire the FBI director for any reason or no reason at all. Comey himself has freely acknowledged he served at the pleasure of the president.

That said, “FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development in New York with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008,” Bloomberg reported an anonymous source saying.

The report continues, elaborating that:

Mueller’s team is looking at the Trump SoHo hotel condominium development, which was a licensing deal with Bayrock Capital LLC. In 2010, the former finance director of Bayrock filed a lawsuit claiming the firm structured transactions in fraudulent ways to evade taxes. Bayrock was a key source of capital for Trump projects, including Trump SoHo.

The 2013 Miss Universe pageant is of interest because a prominent Moscow developer, Aras Agalarov, paid $20 million to bring the beauty spectacle there. About a third of that sum went to Trump in the form of a licensing fee, according to Forbes magazine. At the event, Trump met Herman Gref, chief executive of Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank PJSC. Agalarov’s son, Emin, helped broker a meeting last year between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer [i.e. Natalia Veselnitskaya] who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

Another significant financial transaction involved a Palm Beach, Florida, estate Trump purchased in 2004 for $41 million, after its previous owner lost it in bankruptcy. In March of 2008, after the real-estate bubble had begun losing air, Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the property for $95 million.

As part of their investigation, Mueller’s team has issued subpoenas to banks and filed requests for bank records to foreign lenders under mutual legal-assistance treaties, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.

In addition, a federal money-laundering probe of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has reportedly been subsumed into the larger investigation headed by Mueller. Mueller’s office is also reportedly looking at Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s tenure as vice chairman of the Bank of Cyprus and at presidential advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s efforts to obtain financing for his family’s real estate investments.

Newt Gingrich said yesterday that Mueller “has so many conflicts of interest it’s almost an absurdity,” but all of this seems above-board to Bloomberg.

“The Justice Department’s May 17 order to Mueller,” the media outlet reports, “instructs him to investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign’ as well as ‘any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,’ suggesting a relatively broad mandate.”

Trump lawyer John Dowd disagrees. He said examining the president’s business dealings should be out-of-bounds for Mueller.

Speech policing in the United States, often called “political correctness,” has inspired much resentment and concern along with advocacy. Right now only its advocates have an action plan—which is to institutionalize PC on university campuses through the appointment of administrators responsible for developing and enforcing policies to control expression. Those who object to political correctness are less organized and largely lack a coherent idea of it as a unified phenomenon. But they apparently stumbled into one successful response to it in the presidential victory of Donald Trump. Although Trump has no policy proposals that touch upon political correctness per se, his willingness to occasionally violate its sensibilities, and to openly denounce some of its advocates in the media, certainly won him many votes among proud Deplorables. https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/20/indoctrinationism-ideology-speech-policing/

What’s In a Name?
Some commentators have even suggested that PC was the single most important factor separating Trump from his Republican rivals, and that it needs to be seen as a central issue in contemporary American politics. David Gelernter made such an argument in early 2016 and suggested that the real gravity of “political correctness” and its significance to voters have been obscured and minimized by the term itself. I think he’s right. “PC,” like “man-caused disaster,” is a gift to the enemy it is supposed to name.

Since most people don’t know or care about the historical origin of the term “political correctness,” the best way to grasp what it conveys in today’s discourse is to examine its constituent semantic elements. “Correctness” refers to a judgment that some form of expression is subject to approval or not; “political” refers to the standard according to which this judgment is rendered. “Political correctness” therefore implies that politics and speech are separate realms, and that speech is subordinate to politics. Restrictions on speech seem less serious than jobs, health care, racism, and other intrinsically political matters.

Additionally, since politics in the United States involves a plurality of parties, and freedom of expression is protected by the First Amendment, a “political” judgment about speech will strike many intuitively as merely an annoyance, subject to automatic contestation by rival parties, and without means of enforcement. This does not sound like a threat to the norms of our republican government, or even a consequential infringement on anybody’s rights as a citizen.

An “Ism” Breeding in Our Baseboards
Nevertheless, many people now realize that minimizing the problem called “political correctness” is wrong. We need to remove the distraction of a term that makes a serious problem seem trivial or even humorous. Speech policing would be better, but it lacks a critical feature.

For the speech policing we now confront is actually the centerpiece of a nascent ideology. While in the past leftist regimes used speech policing as an instrument to support agendas like solidarity with oppressed classes, the putatively oppressed classes are now instruments that the left uses as pretexts to expand speech policing. This ideology of speech policing I propose to call Indoctrinationism.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at this point has busted pretty much every move in his effort to rally 50 votes for an Obama Care replacement. He’s listened. He’s negotiated. He’s encouraged. He’s cajoled. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Months later, still lacking a majority, the time has come for the Kentucky Republican to execute the final, clarifying move. It’s time for Mr. McConnell to make this all about his self-interested members.

Up to now, this exercise has been about trying to improve health care and the federal fisc. The House bill isn’t perfect—no bill ever is—but it amounts to the biggest entitlement reform in history. It repeals crushing taxes. It dramatically cuts spending. And it begins the process of stabilizing the individual health-care market and expanding consumer freedom.

None of this is good enough for a handful of senators, so now it’s time to make this exercise all about them. Mr. McConnell should make clear that the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party stands ready to make good on its repeal-and-replace campaign promise—and that it would have done so already were it not for a cynical or egotistic few. It’s time for some very public accountability.

That rests in Mr. McConnell giving his caucus a drop-dead date to broker a compromise, after which he will proceed to bring up the House bill. And any Republican who votes against moving forward, “a motion to proceed,” will forever be known as the Republican who saved ObamaCare. The Republican who voted to throw billions more taxpayer dollars at failing entitlement programs and collapsing insurance markets. The Republican who abandoned struggling American families. The Republican who voted against a tax cut and spending reductions. The Republican who made Chuck Schumer’s year.

And that’s only a short list of the real-world accountability. That vote might also provide home-state voters a new, eye-opening means to account for the character of their senators. Few things drive conservative voters battier than phony politicians, those who say one thing and do another to avoid hard choices.

Nearly every Senate Republican is on record having voted to repeal ObamaCare—back when they knew that President Obama’s veto made the vote consequence-free. And to be crystal clear, any senator who now votes against simply proceeding to debate is doing so for just one reason: To again avoid consequences, to again avoid accountability. CONTINUE AT SITE

Those who would never stoop to paint their own houses gladly expend far more energy sweating at the gym. During the decline in physical-labor jobs over the last 50 years, an entire compensating industry has grown up around physical fitness. As modern work becomes less physical, requiring hours at a desk or some sort of immobile standing, the fitness center has replaced the drudgery of the field, the mine, and the forest as a means to exercise the body each day. A forbidding array of exercise bikes and StairMasters not only works the body; it also reinforces the modern, scientifically backed conviction that physical fitness promotes general wellness, mental acuity, and perhaps longevity. A new slang has entered the Western vocabulary, from “abs,” “glutes,” and “cardio” to “ripped” and “toned” to describe the ideal results of daily exercise: a look of chiseled fitness. The ideal is much different from the appearance of the pipe fitter and welder of the past, whose protruding bellies and girth were not necessarily incongruous with physical strength and stamina incurred from daily physical labor.

Yet the modern idea of “working out” by no means denotes that someone is laboring at a physical task, except for wisely keeping fit. Our idea of exercising, then, is not quite the Odyssean notion of being equally adept in craftiness and brawn—the ability to build a raft or lead men into battle—or versatile in outfoxing sexy sirens and ramming poles through the heads of dull-witted huge monsters. We are more like Alcibiades, whose high life and gifts for political craft and oratory were balanced by his studied Olympic training and sponsorship of chariotry.

One reason for our disdain for labor today is that the more physical work recedes in the twenty-first century, the more life superficially appears to get better, even for the vestigial muscular classes. Cheap cell phones, video games, the Internet, social media, and labor-saving appliances all make life easier and suggest that even more and better benefits are on the horizon. Formerly backbreaking industries, from the growing of almonds to the building of cars, are increasingly mechanized, using fewer but more skilled operators; in the future, this work might be all but robotized, without much human agency at all.

Anyone who has spot-welded or harvested almonds with a mallet and canvas has no regrets in seeing the disappearance of such rote drudgery, from the view of both the laborer and the consumer, who benefits from the cheaper prices brought on by labor-saving devices. But as we continue on this trajectory, initiated in the Industrial Revolution, from less demanding physical work to rare physical work, is something lost? Something only poorly approximated by greater leisure time, non-muscular jobs, and contrived physical exercise?

Until the early nineteenth century, hard work—agricultural work, for most of the population—was bifurcated: working as a slave, serf, or hired hand for someone else was the unfortunate lot of the accursed. In popular lore, hired or coerced labor led nowhere but to premature old age, illness, accident, poverty, and an early death. So the once-popular Edwin Markham, in his iconic “The Man with the Hoe,” laments the exploited toiler: “Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time’s tragedy is in the aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed.” Physical work was not just hard and dirty; it was also done for someone else. In contrast with physical work for wages (what the aristocratic Greeks deprecated as banausia), voices of the agrarian tradition—from the seventh-century BC Greek poet Hesiod to the romantic paeans of the farmer voiced by aristocratic landowners such as Thomas Jefferson and later by the Southern agrarians—praised the yeoman and the homesteader. Ostensibly, the owner-operator calibrated his own drudgery by his own self-interest and profits; and in theory, at least, he controlled the conditions of his own physical exploitation.

Politicians still give lip service to the “entrepreneur” who gets up at 5 AM to open his bakery and goes home long after his employees have quit at 6 PM (akin to what Hesiod praised as “work with work upon work”). But Donald Trump was the first politician in recent memory to refer to working people with the first-person plural possessive pronoun of endearment—“our miners” and “our farmers,” as if physical work was still critical and honored. Otherwise, most of popular culture promotes the idea of a bachelor’s degree as the first stepping-stone of the cognitive elite on the path toward professional and graduate schools, certification and degree branding, interning, and ending up largely physically inactive but inordinately well compensated and intellectually and psychologically fulfilled. So inured are we to the ideal of a cursus honorum that we don’t even need to mention that it is an obvious means to escape a supposedly limited life of laying tile or overhauling transmissions.

Yet talk long enough to the most accomplished academics, lawyers, and CEOs—who also tend to be the most conscientious about biking, jogging, and weightlifting (obesity is mostly an epidemic of the poor and lower middle classes)—and more often than not, they will brag about a long-ago college summer job waiting tables or an internship repairing hiking trails. They might praise the granite-counter installer who redid their kitchen, or offer an anecdote about the time they helped the tree-trimmer haul limbs from the backyard out to the trailer at the curb. There seems a human instinct to want to do physical work. We moderns want to be able to say that we have some residual firsthand familiarity with drudgery—or at least share our admiration for muscular labor when one sees the positive results of physical craftsmanship, or even the smallest physical alteration of the natural environment.

Anyone who has spot-welded has no regrets in seeing the disappearance of such rote drudgery.

The proliferation of hard-work reality-television programming reflects this apparent need, if only vicariously. Indeed, the more we have become immobile, urbanized, and distanced from hard work, the more we tune in to watch reality television’s assorted truckers, loggers, farmers, fishermen, drillers, and rail engineers. Usually, these supposed “losers” are filmed in rough physical landscapes of Alaska, Wyoming, Colorado, or out at sea, where they sweat, grunt, smoke, and swear as they toil to bring us our seafood, wood floors, arugula, and high-performance gasoline. The subtext of these shows is that the human dinosaurs who do such work are as tough and wild as the environment in which they labor.

In a society that supposedly despises menial jobs, the television ratings for such programs suggest that lots of Americans enjoy watching people of action who work with their hands, even if (or perhaps because) they are sometimes overweight, unkempt, and coarse. Mike Rowe became a media celebrity for his Discovery Channel reality series Dirty Jobs, in which he not only tried but also enjoyed said jobs—to the delight of viewers.

The Public Broadcasting Service’s signature series This Old House and its later spin-off shows on cable television made physical work seem especially hip. Yuppies and upwardly mobile young urban couples during off-hours put on old clothes, strapped on leather tool belts, and took up sledgehammers to knock down walls and break up concrete to remodel older homes into their own dream-gentrified Victorians. Apparently, they had a blast getting dirty and using their muscles while slowly turning decaying structures into renovated palaces. Again, the subtext of This Old House was that doing a lot of physical labor in remodeling something decrepit into something beautiful was rewarding—and preferable to contracting the hard labor out to experts.

What is it about physical work, in its supposed eleventh hour within a rapidly changing Western culture, that still intrigues us?

Physical work remains the foundation for twenty-first-century sophistication and complexity. Investors may know the oil trade better than oil drillers, but buying and selling based on intimate knowledge of Indonesian politics or the nature of the American automobile market are still predicated on someone’s knowing how to feed down steel casing to follow the drill bit. If there is no one to pump oil, there is nothing to sell. Selling plums to Japan is not the same as pruning a plum tree. Both aspects of the oil and plum industries are critical to their success, but the commercial tasks are cerebral and secondary, the physical ones elemental and primary.

This story was co-published with NPR’s Shots blog.

The box of prescription drugs had been forgotten in a back closet of a retail pharmacy for so long that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Most were 30 to 40 years past their expiration dates — possibly toxic, probably worthless.

But to Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, the cache was an opportunity to answer an enduring question about the actual shelf life of drugs: Could these drugs from the bell-bottom era still be potent?

Cantrell called Roy Gerona, a University of California, San Francisco, researcher who specializes in analyzing chemicals. Gerona had grown up in the Philippines and had seen people recover from sickness by taking expired drugs with no apparent ill effects.

“This was very cool,” Gerona says. “Who gets the chance of analyzing drugs that have been in storage for more than 30 years?”

The age of the drugs might have been bizarre, but the question the researchers wanted to answer wasn’t. Pharmacies across the country — in major medical centers and in neighborhood strip malls — routinely toss out tons of scarce and potentially valuable prescription drugs when they hit their expiration dates.

Gerona and Cantrell, a pharmacist and toxicologist, knew that the term “expiration date” was a misnomer. The dates on drug labels are simply the point up to which the Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical companies guarantee their effectiveness, typically at two or three years. But the dates don’t necessarily mean they’re ineffective immediately after they “expire” — just that there’s no incentive for drugmakers to study whether they could still be usable.

ProPublica has been researching why the U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world. One answer, broadly, is waste — some of it buried in practices that the medical establishment and the rest of us take for granted. We’ve documented how hospitals often discard pricey new supplies, how nursing homes trash valuable medications after patients pass away or move out, and how drug companies create expensive combinations of cheap drugs. Experts estimate such squandering eats up about $765 billion a year — as much as a quarter of all the country’s health care spending.

Experts say the United States might be squandering a quarter of the money spent on health care. That’s an estimated $765 billion a year. Do you believe you’ve encountered this waste? Tell us.

What if the system is destroying drugs that are technically “expired” but could still be safely used?

In his lab, Gerona ran tests on the decades-old drugs, including some now defunct brands such as the diet pills Obocell (once pitched to doctors with a portly figurine called “Mr. Obocell”) and Bamadex. Overall, the bottles contained 14 different compounds, including antihistamines, pain relievers and stimulants. All the drugs tested were in their original sealed containers.

The findings surprised both researchers: A dozen of the 14 compounds were still as potent as they were when they were manufactured, some at almost 100 percent of their labeled concentrations.

“Lo and behold,” Cantrell says, “The active ingredients are pretty darn stable.”

Cantrell and Gerona knew their findings had big implications. Perhaps no area of health care has provoked as much anger in recent years as prescription drugs. The news media is rife with stories of medications priced out of reach or of shortages of crucial drugs, sometimes because producing them is no longer profitable.

Tossing such drugs when they expire is doubly hard. One pharmacist at Newton-Wellesley Hospital outside Boston says the 240-bed facility is able to return some expired drugs for credit, but had to destroy about $200,000 worth last year. A commentary in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings cited similar losses at the nearby Tufts Medical Center. Play that out at hospitals across the country and the tab is significant: about $800 million per year. And that doesn’t include the costs of expired drugs at long-term care pharmacies, retail pharmacies and in consumer medicine cabinets.

After Cantrell and Gerona published their findings in Archives of Internal Medicine in 2012, some readers accused them of being irresponsible and advising patients that it was OK to take expired drugs. Cantrell says they weren’t recommending the use of expired medication, just reviewing the arbitrary way the dates are set.

“Refining our prescription drug dating process could save billions,” he says.