RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”

Productive vs. Parasitical Societies

Daniel Greenfield, writing as Sultan Knish, penned an excellent and perceptive essay, “The Rationing Society.” My chief problem with the essay is in the choice of the terms “production society” and “rationing society,” which misdirect attention from the fundamental issues. Mr. Greenfield’s focus in the essay is the mechanics of wealth distribution in a “rationing society,” at least of such wealth would remain in an economy crippled by controls. I have selected a few of Greenfield’s statements to throw some light on their validity.

The best literary depiction of a dystopian or “rationing society” or polity is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Regardless of the value of Orwell’s perceptive insights into the means and ends of totalitarianism – and they are many and spot-on – his basic conception of a functioning totalitarian regime was flawed. A “production society” means free minds, minds free to innovate and sustain a technological or industrial civilization, free to act, and free to trade and to move about and assemble with others or not. A “rationing society” depends on the very attribute in men it wishes to leash or exterminate: free minds free to act.

Orwell’s other famous novel, the parable Animal Farm, was merely an attack by a “democratic socialist” on Stalin’s regime. Stalin and Soviet Russia lost many supporters in the West on the occasion of the Non-Aggression Pact signed by Stalin and Hitler in 1939. But when Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia, its Western supporters hurried back into the fold.

A rationing or authoritarian society seeks to freeze things in a state of stagnation, the better to control things and everyone, but even a technologically stagnant society still needs minds that can sustain it. This is an implicit confession that the state is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. A rationing society will put a premium on the competence to even repair a telescreen or a “Floating Fortress” or weaponry or manufacture razor blades. A free, independent mind is such a society’s primary enemy. The result of leashing or punishing it is the impoverishment of nearly everyone but the entrenched political class – and then collapse.

Until the collapse occurs, competent minds able to prop up dwindling products such as shoes and razor blades and food which must now be rationed, until the assembly lines halt, raw materials become scare, and the stockpiles are depleted. The minds that could have replaced them will have been snuffed out, or, as happens in Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, those minds will finally have gone on strike and disappeared. Rand noted in The New Intellectual:

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Renaissance Woman Ann Marie Murrell, the Editor-in Chief of PolitiChicks.com and the co-author of the new book, What Women Really Want.

Ann-Marie was joined by Shillman Journalism Fellow Daniel Greenfield, who came on the show to discuss “ISIS Rising,” analyzing Obama’s policy of fighting terrorists by arming terrorists.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/daniel-greenfield-on-isis-rising-on-the-glazov-gang/

Jihadi violence serves not only to advance the terrorist’s delusion of immortality, but also to add, however perversely, an apparent and desperately needed erotic satisfaction, using religion as the justification.

Persuasive promises of immortality — the desperate hope to live forever — underlie virtually all major religions.

Washington and Jerusalem should finally address what needs to be done in addition to military remediation — reinforcing efforts to convince these terrorists that their expected martyrdom is ultimately just an elaborate fiction.

Even after witnessing several beheadings and mass executions, American and Western strategists dealing with Jihadist terror still miss the key point. Whatever the particular terrorist group of the moment — the Islamic State [IS or ISIS], Hamas, al-Qaeda, or some other kindred terror organization — the core struggle is never really about territory, geography, or democracy. Always — in Iraq, Afghanistan Syria, or Gaza — this enemy seeks something far more important and compelling. In essence, Jihadi violence serves not only to advance the terrorist’s delusion of immortality, but also to add, however perversely, an apparent and desperately needed erotic satisfaction, using religion as the justification.This core point is not difficult to understand. Persuasive promises of immortality — the desperate hope to live forever — underlie virtually all major religions. Yet this point remains neglected or misunderstood in Washington, Jerusalem, and all other Western capitals.

The Jihadi terrorist claims to “love death,” but in his or her mind, that “suicide” is anything but final. Ironically, these Islamist terrorists aim to conquer mortality by “killing themselves.” The would-be killer has been promised that death will represent just a trivial and momentary inconvenience, a minor detour on just one more glorious “martyr’s” fiery trajectory toward a life everlasting, in Paradise.

How can one ever hope to counter such a seductive promise? How can any promise compete with the incomparable promise of immortality?

Happy, healthy, challenging and rewarding new year!

1. Rosh Hashanah is a universal, stock-taking, renewal and hopeful holiday, celebrated on the 6th day of The Creation, which produced the first human being, Adam.

2. Rosh means, in Hebrew, “beginning,” “first,” “head,” “chief.” The Hebrew spelling of Rosh (ראש) is the root of the Hebrew word for Genesis (בראשית), which is the first word in the Bible. Just like The Creation, so should the New Year and our own actions, be a thoughtful – and not a hasty – process.

3. Rosh Hashanah is celebrated at the beginning of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, which means beginning/Genesis in ancient Akkadian. The Hebrew spelling of Tishrei (תשרי) is included in the spelling of Genesis (בראשית).

4. Rosh Hashanah is also referred to as “Ha’rat Olam” (the pregnancy of the world), and it’s prayers highlight motherhood, optimism and the pregnancies of Sarah and Rachel, the Matriarchs, and Hannah, who gave birth to Isaac, Joseph & Benjamin and the Prophet Samuel respectively. Sarah (שרה, the root of the Hebrew word, Israel, ישראל) and Hannah (חנה, the root of the Hebrew words Pardon, Amnesty and Merciful, חנינה, חנון) were two of the seven Jewish Prophetesses: Sarah, Miriam, Hannah, Deborah, Huldah, Abigail, Esther. Hannah’s prayer has become a role-model for God-heeded-prayers which are recited by the “non-privileged”.

Noah – who led the rebirth of humanity/world – also features in Rosh Hashanah prayers.

5. Rosh Hashanah underlines human fallibility, humility, soul-searching, responsibility (as a precondition to the realization of opportunity), renewal/rebirth, memory (lessons of history) and the need for systematic education.

6. The Shofar (ritual horn) is blown on Rosh Hashanah as a wake-up call to mend human behavior. Rosh Hashanah is also called “Yom Te’roo’ah” (the day of blowing the Shofar). Shofar (שופר) is a derivative of the Hebrew word for enhancement/improvement (שפור), which is constantly expected of human beings. It requires humility, symbolized by the Shofar, which is bent and is not supposed to be decorated.

While the Middle East burns and tens of thousands of corpses pile up in Syria and Iraq, Jewish residence anywhere beyond the 1949 armistice lines –– in eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank, transfixes the attention of foreign governments. Just recall the Obama Administration saying nothing when, in March 2010, the Palestinian Authority (PA) named a public square in Ramallah in honor of blood-soaked terrorist Dalal Mughrabi –– but condemned Israel for announcing a program of building Jewish homes in eastern Jerusalem the day before.

Now, Israel has designated 988 acres in the Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem as state land, leading the Obama Administration to condemn this “settlement announcement” as “counterproductive to … a negotiated two-state solution with the Palestinians.”

Meanwhile, Obama’s “blocking back,” the faux “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street organization, has gone still further, urging President Obama in the pages of the Los Angeles Times to start calling Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines “illegal.”

There is some relevant history here. In 2011, President Obama vetoed a UN Security Council resolution making this false declaration –– although that was only after he unsuccessfully attempted have the U.N. Security Council baselessly call them “illegitimate.”

Clearly, J Street is trying to push the President in a direction he’d like to go but can’t, due to legal and factual hurdles that would cost him politically to straddle, but which J Street would like to ameliorate.

Factually and legally unsound, J Street’s agitprop on this issue is simply designed to isolate and increase pressure on Israel, not defend the cause of peace that is actually unthreatened by this Israeli administrative action.

The Etzion bloc was home to substantial Jewish communities even before Israel was created. It’s widely accepted that it would be incorporated into Israel in any feasible peace treaty, should one emerge one day.

Even an anti-Israel partisan like former President Jimmy Carter has publicly stated regarding the Jewish communities in the Etzion bloc that this “area is not one I ever envision being abandoned or changed over into Palestinian territory.’

So why the furor? It’s not as if the designation changes the land’s pre-existing status. Since the days of the British Palestine Mandate, the land in question has always been classed as public land. Its designation as ‘state land’ merely reaffirms this, following exhaustive investigation to ascertain that such a designation was not in conflict with any private property rights.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/daniel-greenfield-on-isis-rising-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

Daniel Greenfield on “ISIS Rising” — on The Glazov Gang

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Renaissance Woman Ann Marie Murrell, the Editor-in Chief of PolitiChicks.com and the co-author of the new book, What Women Really Want.

Ann-Marie was joined by Shillman Journalism Fellow Daniel Greenfield, who came on the show to discuss “ISIS Rising,” analyzing Obama’s policy of fighting terrorists by arming terrorists.

Don’t miss it!

The First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia described the reforms which resulted in the Prague Spring as “socialism with a human face.” The New York Times calls Madam Secretary, CBS’s extremely expensive prime time contribution to the Hillary campaign, “Hillary with a human face.”

A network series can cost between $3 and $4 million an episode. Assuming that Madam Secretary runs even one season, instead of being canceled ignominiously like Commander in Chief, the 2005 attempt at giving Hillary a human face, it will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million.

That’s double the $46 million that Hillary’s campaign spent on TV ads against Obama and it gives the Hillary 2016 campaign over 20 hours of prime time network unpaid ad space. If the series lasts long enough to run through the whole campaign that will double to $200 million. But the Hillary 2016 campaign is expected to cost around $2 billion. CBS’s $100 million donation is only a drop in a big bucket.

There’s more than a whiff of Kim Jong-Il, Stalin and Saddam Hussein about needing so many actors to portray a current politician. But Madam Secretary reeks of political insecurity. A similar series about Obama would have been worshipful. Madam Secretary is nervously revisionist. It’s desperately trying to glue an appealing human face over the Hillary mask that Hillary Clinton wears over her real face.

Hillary won’t be able to get anyone to play Hillary Clinton once she actually runs for office. Lori McCreary, the executive producer of Madam Secretary, said that she was inspired to create the $100 million Hillary infomercial by watching the Benghazi hearings. Her obvious unspoken thought was that the scene of Hillary doing her best Khrushchev imitation while self-righteously covering up the brutal murder of four Americans would have gone much better if someone else had been playing Hillary.

Hillary isn’t very good at playing Hillary the way that Obama was at playing Obama. The Obama character was a charming rogue who could always find the right put down to dismiss criticisms of his inexperience and extremism. No one could have played the fake Obama better than the real Obama.

Hillary’s liberal supporters wish that she could play the Hillary of their imagination as well as Obama portrayed their imaginary Obama. Two years before the Hillary campaign, they recruited Geena Davis to be Hillary’s human face in Commander in Chief. Now they know that they can’t count on more than a season of Hillary TV so they waited this long to debut Tea Leoni as Hillary in Madam Secretary.

AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING LIKE JOHNNY ONE NOTE, I REMIND YOU THAT RAEL ISAAC LAID THE REAL AGENDA OF THE PSEUDO ENVIRONMENTALISTS OUT IN HER ESSENTIAL BOOK:
Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming is Bankrupting the Western World (New, Revised… by Rael Jean Isaac (Nov 25, 2013)

THIS IS A GOOD COLUMN BY RICK MORAN

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/09/21/thousands-march-in-new-york-to-end-industrialized-civilization/?print=1
Thousands March in New York to End Industrialized Civilization By Rick Moran…..

Well, maybe they’re not really marching to end industrialized civilization. But given all the monumental exaggeration and hyperbole of which they are guilty, perhaps I can be excused a few small liberties while describing their goals.

Tens of thousands of marchers from all over the world came to New York City to protest inaction on climate change. A “wake up call” they are calling it. In fact, at 12:58 Eastern time, there was to be a moment of silence followed by “a blare of noise — a symbolic sounding of the alarm on climate change — from horns, whistles and cellphone alarms. More than 20 marching bands and tolling church bells were expected contribute to the cacophony.”

A perfect way to sum up the march: a lot of noise signifying nothing.

As might be expected, the New York Times is all over the story:

With drums and tubas, banners and floats, the People’s Climate March turned Columbus Circle, where the march began just before 11:30 a.m., into a colorful tableau. The demonstrators represented a broad coalition of ages, races, geographic locales and interests, with union members, religious leaders, scientists, politicians and students joining the procession.

“I’m here because I really feel that every major social movement in this country has come when people get together,” said Carol Sutton of Norwalk, Conn., the president of a teachers’ union. “It begins in the streets.”

Most Americans, if they think about our role in World War I at all, likely think we entered the conflict too late to claim much credit, or maybe they think our intervention was discreditable. Some might say we had no compelling national interest to enter the Great War; or worse, our intervention allowed Britain and France to force on Germany an unjust, punitive peace that made inevitable the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party. Had we stayed out of the war, they might argue, the Europeans would have been compelled to make a reasonable, negotiated peace, and postwar animosity would have been lessened.

Americans are easily forgetful of history, but we should not forget the First World War or our far from discreditable role in it. American intervention was decisive in the Anglo-French victory, a victory that deserves celebrating.

The war shaped the lives of some of America’s greatest soldiers and statesmen — including George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Harry Truman — and was hugely consequential. Without exaggeration one can say that it was the war that made the modern world.

It was the war that set the boundaries of the modern Middle East out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. It was the war that saw the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had held together Mitteleuropa. It was a war that rewarded nationalism, which, perversely, had been the war’s original cause. It was the war that ended the Second Reich in Germany and witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It was a war that moved into the skies and under the seas. Men were set alight with flamethrowers and choked by poison gas. Infantry officers wore wristwatches to coordinate attacks. Trench coats became a military fashion accessory. And a Europe that could still see angels hovering over battlefields in 1914 was shell-shocked by 1919, full of doubts about the old chivalric ideals, prey to callow superstitions and pagan political movements.

It was the apparent collapse of the old ideals that helps explain what has become the popular view of the First World War — that it was a senseless, stupid struggle, the ultimate charnel house, the watchword for the obscenity and absurdity of war. The casualty lists were indeed horribly long. The victory that was won was indeed horribly mismanaged. But such casualty lists were inevitable in a modern war of European empires; and the mismanagement of the peace was not the soldier’s folly.

‘He is at once God and their intimate friend,” wrote journalist Martha Gellhorn back in the 1930s of President Franklin Roosevelt. The quote comes from The Roosevelts, the new Ken Burns documentary that PBS airs this month. But the term “documentary” doesn’t do The Roosevelts justice. “Extravaganza” is more like it: In not one but 14 lavish hours, the series covers two great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, who served in the first decade of the last century, and Franklin Roosevelt, who led our nation through the Great Depression and to victory in World War II. In his use of the plural, Burns correctly includes a third Roosevelt: Eleanor, who as first lady also affected policy, along with her spouse.

The contention of The Roosevelts is a plausible one: that this New York family altered the presidency forever, converting the office from a near-ceremonial post into one of near-regal responsibility for domestic policy. The Roosevelts both favored active progressivism and denied that any other presidential posture could do the trick. What “26” and “32” hoped, as one of the commenters in the film, George F. Will, notes, was that “the role of the central government from now on [would be] to secure the well-being of the American people.”

The Roosevelts got what they wanted. With the partial exception of Ronald Reagan, no chief executive since has dared to suggest that the economy might simply run itself. As the years have passed, the demand for progressive reform and federal oversight has only increased, especially when financial markets have turned. Citizens now expect, even demand, economic rescue from any chief executive. To demur and call for a reduced presidency would be to invite ridicule or worse.

The Roosevelts commences by establishing a pathetic picture of the presidency pre-Roosevelt: a timid office in which passive politicians served through “mere negation,” as Theodore Roosevelt referred to it, busying themselves with post-office oversight and coming out to lead as chief executive only for war. Then came the fateful day anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot William McKinley and his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, came to the office. “Get action” was the new president’s motto. The change in style first became apparent at the White House: The Roosevelts and their six children did not so much move in as occupy the place in a loud clatter of toys and ponies.