RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/9853/once-more-into-the-fogged-bottom

Yesterday I caught a bit of the impeachment theatre en route to a lunchtime speaking engagement. To be honest, if they’d come round and performed it live in my hotel room, I’d still have fled. If universally respected eminent lifelong career foreign-service bigshots Bill Taylor and George Kent are Adam Schiff’s star witnesses, their chief purpose seems to be to get Democrats pining for the charisma of Bill de Blasio and the self-effacement of John Kerry.

In a functioning system, the head of the government sets foreign policy and the diplomats enact it. So naturally there’s not a chance of that in Washington. When Taylor and Kent whine that there seemed to be a “shadow foreign policy”, the shadow is theirs; they spent a day testifying that everything had been going ticketty-boo for decades just as they’d always done things – and then Trump came along and took a different view. Oh, my! Anyone would think that, as Barack Obama once proposed, “elections have consequences”.

First up was George Kent, the “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Europe and the Caucasus”. He warmed up the crowd with some extensive biographical material about the “nearly sixty years” of George Kents (I believe he’s George III or some such) who have “chosen” to endow America with the blessings of their “public service”. It didn’t help that he wore a bow tie. Eventually he stopped talking about himself and started talking about Ukraine:

Our strategic aim for the entirety of my foreign service career is not possible without a Ukraine whole, free, and at peace, including Crimea and Donbas, territories currently occupied by Russia.

Crimea is, of course, familiar to anyone who’s read “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do or die…

Or, in the case of low-level diplomats who’ve never had a single conversation with the President, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or tender their resignations after first ensuring that their pensions won’t be affected. Instead:

Into the valley of the SCIF
Rode the six hundred hearsay witnesses…

As I said, any Tom, Dick or Harry can bandy Crimea, but it takes a career striped-pants Foggy Bottom public servant to toss in “Donbas” with gay abandon. It would have been interesting to see whether Adam Schiff or anyone else in the room could have found Donbas on a map. The odds of pinning the tail on the Donbas blindfolded are better. It’s bordered to the north, east and south-east by Russia, so it’s akin to the Russian foreign ministry regarding northern Mexico as a vital national-security interest of Moscow’s.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/politics/antisemitism-europe-corbyn.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

DPS Note:

It has got to be pretty bad and likely to get a lot worse if the NY Times is willing to publish an acknowledgment that some Muslims and lots of left wing politicians (here and abroad) hate Jews and aren’t shy about saying so.

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Two years ago, a 27-year-old man named Kobili Traoré walked into the Paris apartment of a 65-year-old kindergarten teacher named Sarah Halimi. Mr. Traoré beat Ms. Halimi and stabbed her. According to witnesses, he called her a demon and a dirty Jew. He shouted, “Allahu akbar,” then threw Ms. Halimi’s battered body out of her third-story apartment window.

This is what Mr. Traoré told prosecutors: “I felt persecuted. When I saw the Torah and a chandelier in her home I felt oppressed. I saw her face transforming.”

One would think that this would be an open-and-shut hate crime. It was the coldblooded murder of a woman in her own home for the sin of being a Jew. But French prosecutors decided to drop murder charges against Mr. Traoré because he … had smoked cannabis.

If France’s betrayal of Sarah Halimi is shocking to you, perhaps you haven’t been paying much attention to what by now can be described as a moral calamity sweeping the West of which her story is only the clearest example. A crisis, I hasten to add, that’s perhaps less known because it has been largely overlooked by the mainstream press.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/where-have-all-the-alphas-gone/

For some time now I have watched the immensely popular HGTV as a window on the culture—a large picture window letting in “lots of natural light,” as the rather silly and predictable house hunters are fond of saying—providing a cameo on the conventions of middle-class society. One notices, with few exceptions, that the wives tend to be voluble and bossy; they speak first, far more often, more insistently and more authoritatively. Their needs and desires are clearly predominant. The husbands, for their part, are mostly bland and subservient, almost leguminous in comparison, generally deferring to their wives with only the occasional mewl of protest.

One notes, too, the lack of genuine taste, the utter preoccupation with trivialities, and the cloying banality of conversation among the often obese participants. They are obviously hewing to script, but the ideas, habits, physical attributes, speech patterns, attitudes and expectations on display are close enough to the cultural norm to seem authentic. People recognize themselves and their aspirations in these TV episodes. Although the self-indulgence and broadly decorticate behavior one observes is certainly off-putting, the absence of gender parity, in favor of the wives, is perhaps the most conspicuous quality that affirms itself.

One might dismiss these observations as making too much of a mere reality TV show, but HGTV does let in a lot of natural light on a culture grown flaccid and critically disoriented. The ascendancy of the now-dominant, rule-giving female and the attendant decline of the proud and assertive male is the order of the day. The male essence is not a privilege but a fact of nature—that is, when nature is allowed to take its course. Yet, everywhere we look men are surrendering their right to be men—to be strong, confident, honest, unashamed and productive. I do not blame the vindictive and self-righteous feminists for the debacle. I blame the men who have allowed a social disaster to come to pass. We now see the gradual disappearance, or at least the alarming paucity, of alpha males in the social mix accompanied by the rising tide of beta males—apologists for their “toxic” nature, Michael Kimmel types— who are complicit with the feminist agenda.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 and moved to its present location on Fifth Avenue ten years later. It has benefited from the work of many illustrious architects from the 19th century on – all adding to the elegance and majesty of America’s premiere neo-classical palace of Art. Its collections are priceless, ranging from ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Assyrian, Chinese and many other cultures to contemporary painting and sculpture with an emphasis on international presentation of art in all its myriad forms.

Each season, the museum publishes a brochure called What’s On that features descriptions of the temporary exhibitions as well as gallery talks, tours, concerts, talks by the artists, conversations with curators and art historians It’s an excellent way to get acquainted with activities you might not know about and parts of the vast museum you might never have visited. It undoubtedly has an international mailing to members and patrons and perhaps an even broader audience online; as such it represents the grandeur and diversity of the museum itself.

In the current Winter brochure, there is a description of the Great Hall Commission which consists of two monumental paintings by Kent Monkman, a Cree artist, which will be on view in the Great Hall from December to April. According to the brochure “Central to his work are themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience, and he often enlists his gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being, to challenge notions of history and indigenous peoples.” I’m not sure who wrote this but it sounds a lot like a sophomoric college student majoring in Gender Studies. In the Welcome article on the first page of the brochure, the new director of the Met, Max Hollein, had this to say about the artist: “His two monumental paintings are the latest in a series of contemporary commissions in which we invite artists to create new works inspired by the Met collection. Monkman’s themes of migrations and displacement, provocatively expressed with the help of his alter-ego, Miss Chief, disrupt our notions of history while recalling iconic American and European works.” You will notice that he left out Miss Chief’s name, a wise decision to overrule either the artist’s own words or those of his agent or the decision of a trendy-wannabe editor of What’s On.

In another location, The Museum of Sex for example, Monkman’s feeble attempt at humor or p.c. obedience might not stand out, but at the Met, it sounds as silly and crude as a child shouting curse words at church. It rings shallow and hollow under the rubric of the pinnacle of American Culture. Whoever allowed it to remain has cheapened the dignity of the Met and sadly, unlike an inappropriate comment that is spoken, this one will stand out in black print for five months. Sic transit gloria mundi………

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Slavery is the worst kind of bondage where the individual has no rights and is treated as chattel. It disappeared in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863: “…that all persons held as slave are, and henceforward shall be free.” However, enfranchisement came slowly. It was not until the 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920 that women were able to vote. And it was only on August 6, 1965 that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which enforced the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution that had been adopted in 1870. It would be another year before poll taxes – a uniform tax on all individuals regardless of financial means, the payment of which was required in order to register to vote – would be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections.

Nevertheless, there are other forms of dependency, not as cruel or degrading as slavery but nonetheless demeaning and inhibiting, like addiction to drugs, alcohol or even social media. And there are forms of dependency that chain individuals to a business, a movement or a state. It is dependency on the state, and all that entails, that concerns this essay.

The elected Washington politician who served because he or she wanted to improve the condition of his or her constituents is a species at risk of extinction. Certainly, there are exceptions, but they have become rare, as the benefits of power, fame and money have grown more ubiquitous for those who serve in Congress. Also, among endangered species is the individual who once traveled to Washington, accepting less pay and longer hours, because he was on a noble enterprise to help fellow citizens. But, with an expanded administrative state, he has become a supercilious, egocentric bureaucrat seeking the monetary and retirement benefits now due a public sector worker.

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3955/Doomsdays-of-the-Endgame-Part-1.aspx

This week, the towering anti-communist dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was laid to rest in a London cemetery. In Washington, American democracy threw dirt on itself.

Impervious to the irony, the Democrats of the House of Representatives staged another fake impeachment “show trial” in its coup like no other to thwart the anti-communist will of the American electorate that sent Donald Trump to the White House. 

The battle is not drawn in such terms; they have been taken from us. But to understand the desperate, unceasing efforts to unseat President Trump requires a longer lens on recents events, one that can focus on over a century of what Whittaker Chambers described as “the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation.” Chambers was writing in the 1950s, when the socialist “New Deal” was only two decades old. In 2016, six decades past Chambers, as the socialist ice cap had all but completely smothered our democratic republic, Donald Trump won the presidency. With his agenda to save America by restoring the nation-state, President Trump became a one-man counter-revolutionary army.

The revolutionaries within — leading figures in what is known as “the Swamp” — responded as true Marxists do: by any means necessary. And why not? Their ideological roots in varieties of Marxism are documented in my short book, The Red Thread. The dangers they pose in these endstages of our democratic republic cannot be overstated. That makes Election 2020 our D-Day for re-taking our Swamp-occupied continent. Maybe the second time around, a wiser, battle-tested counter-revoutionary Trump will call in reserves who actually support him. This is precisely what our deeply embedded and powerful communistic enemies, confronting this unexpected American “insurgency,” fear more than anything.  

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/americas-drift-toward-feudalism/

America’s emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a dramatic break from the past. The United States came on the scene with only vestiges of the old European feudal order—mostly in the plantation economy of the Deep South. There was no hereditary nobility, no national church, and, thanks to George Washington’s modesty, no royal authority. At least among whites, there was also far less poverty in America, compared to Europe’s in­tense, intractable, multigenerational poverty. In contrast, as Jeffer­son noted in 1814, America had fewer “paupers,” and the bulk of the pop­ulation was “fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to la­bor moderately and raise their families.”

Yet in recent decades this country, along with many other liberal democracies, has begun to show signs of growing feudalization. This trend has been most pronounced in the economy, where income growth has skewed dramatically towards the ultrarich, creating a ruling financial and now tech oligarchy. This is a global phenomenon: starting in the 1970s, upward mobility for middle and working classes across all advanced economies began to stall, while the prospects for the upper classes rose dramatically.

The fading prospects for the new generation are all too obvious. Once upon a time, when the boomers entered adulthood, they en­tered an ascendant middle class. According to a recent study by the St. Louis Fed, their successors, the millennials, are in danger of be­coming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation.

This generational shift will shape our future economic, political, and social order. About 90 percent of those born in 1940 grew up to experience higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project. This proportion was only 50 percent among those born in the 1980s, and the chances of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has declined by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. Corporate CEOs used to boast of starting out in the mailroom. There will not be many of those stories in the future.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/thanks-private-property/

Families will argue this Thanksgiving.Such arguments have a long tradition.

The Pilgrims had clashing ideas about how to organize their settlement in the New World. The resolution of that debate made the first Thanksgiving possible.

The Pilgrims were religious, united by faith and a powerful desire to start anew, away from religious persecution in the Old World. Each member of the community professed a desire to labor together, on behalf of the whole settlement.

In other words: socialism.

But when they tried that, the Pilgrims almost starved.

Their collective farming — the whole community deciding when and how much to plant, when to harvest, who would do the work — was an inefficient disaster.

“By the spring,” Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote in his diary, “our food stores were used up and people grew weak and thin. Some swelled with hunger… So they began to think how … they might not still thus languish in misery.”

His answer: divide the commune into parcels and assign each Pilgrim family its own property. As Bradford put it, they “set corn every man for his own particular. … Assigned every family a parcel of land.”

Private property protects us from what economists call the tragedy of the commons. The “commons” is a shared resource. That means it’s really owned by no one, and no one person has much incentive to protect it or develop it.

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