RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

This essay was inspired by a persistent, evolutionary change in American attitudes toward Socialism and Capitalism. A Roper/Fortune Survey this past May found 43% of Americans believe Socialism would be good for the Country – a frightening conclusion for anyone who understands history. The second inspiration came from a John Steel Gordon op-ed written for the October 19-20, 2019 edition of the Wall Street Journal, “How Steam and Chips Remade the World,” in which he wrote of the world-changing effects of James Watt’s perfection of the steam engine in 1769 and the development of the Microprocessor in 1971 by Ted Hoff, a young scientist at Intel. His essay is testament to the benefits of free-market capitalism.

The basic principle of profits seems to be misunderstood by legions of young people, as well as veterans of the political scene who speak in grandiloquent terms of equality, while trying to secure for themselves positions of personal power. Their motives are selfish, not altruistic. Without profits, no company stakeholder is satisfied – not workers, customers, community, taxing authorities or shareholders, Bankrupt businesses help no one, other than a few bankruptcy lawyers.

Mr. Gordon’s words struck home, in part because with age comes reflection of things as they once were and as they now are, and of what the future holds – of how much better are our lives than those of our ancestors. My grandparents saw changes their parents could not have envisioned – the automobile, elevators, flight, radio, the automated assembly line, the modern flush toilet, television, the atomic bomb, polio vaccine, interstate highways. My parents saw changes their parents could never have envisioned – commercial jet travel, ATMs, personal computers, CT Scans and MRI machines, artificial hearts. And I have seen changes my parents never saw – the internet, self-driving cars, smart phones, robotic surgeries, social media, laser eye surgery. My point is not to list all technological advances, but to show how much and how exciting and how productive change has been in the past two hundred years. I wonder as to what changes my children and grandchildren will see that I shall not – advantages we cannot even envision. All of these improvements to our lives are a consequence of individuals and private businesses seeking profits. Now I worry that this dynamism will be brought to an end by those who advocate for the federalization of company charters and for a greater role of government in our lives, for example the concept of a government mandated emphasis on “stakeholders,” not shareholders. Keep in mind as well, every American worker who has a retirement plan has a stake in the private ownership of public companies. Do we really want to destroy the capital markets?

https://www.dailywire.com/news/1998-remarks-from-biden-surface-after-he-attacks-trumps-lynching-remarks?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=102319-news&utm_campaign=position3

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden was quick to attack President Donald Trump on Tuesday after Trump referred to impeachment as a “lynching,” which is the same term that Biden used in 1998 to describe the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton.

“So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights,” Trump tweeted. “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN!”

Biden responded: “Impeachment is not ‘lynching,’ it is part of our Constitution. Our country has a dark, shameful history with lynching, and to even think about making this comparison is abhorrent. It’s despicable.”

In an appearance on CNN in October 1998, however, Biden referred to the Clinton impeachment as a “partisan lynching,” saying:

Even if the President should be impeached, history is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching or whether or not it was something that in fact met the standard, the very high bar, that was set by the founders as to what constituted an impeachable offense.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/opinion/technology-shut-off.html?rref=collecti
24 Hours Without My Phone I recommend a tech shabbat. By David Leonhardt

In 2008, Tiffany Shlain’s father, Leonard, was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she began to change her use of technology when the two of them were together. “Some days he would have only one good hour,” she later wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “and I didn’t want to be distracted when I was with him, so I’d turn off my cellphone.”

Eventually, Shlain, a filmmaker, extended the idea into a full day without screen use. She called it a tech shabbat — after the Jewish day of rest — and she has written several articles and a recent book, called “24/6,” about the idea.

“The digital revolution has blurred the lines between time on and time off, and time off is disappearing,” she wrote in The Boston Globe. “As for our leisure time, we’ve created a culture in which we’re still ‘working’ while we play: needing to photograph every moment, then crafting witty posts of our ‘fun, relaxing activities’ on Instagram, then obsessively checking responses. We can barely catch our breath in the tsunami of personal and work digital input, which results in us not being truly present for any of it.”

This weekend, I gave Shlain’s idea a try — and I highly recommend it. My family and I turned off our cellphones and laptops on Friday night and didn’t turn them back on until Sunday morning. We made an exception for television: The baseball playoffs are going on, and watching a game as a family feels different from staring at an individual phone screen.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-power-to-subpoena-trumps-tax-returns-is/90878/

What a cornucopia of constitutional questions will be opened up in federal appeals court at New York tomorrow. That’s when President Trump will get the first hearing in his appeal of a ruling that his tax returns must be handed over in a criminal probe being pursued by the district attorney of New York County. The case is so hot — such a teaching moment — that it’s going to be aired on C-Span.

Pull up a chair, we say. That’s certainly what we’re going to do. Particularly because the liberals are laughing at the president and carrying on about how no one is above the law. The problem there is that the law — the Constitution is a law, after all — doles out a number of immunities. Like the fact that members of congress are privileged from arrest when they are traveling to or from a sitting of the legislature.

Plus, for anything said on the floor of either house, no member of Congress may be questioned in any other place. In everyday lingo, it means that for anything our legislators say at work, they can’t be sued or prosecuted in federal, state, municipal court, or the United Nations. What would an ordinary mortal — a newspaperman, say — give for such dispensation? Is Congress above the law? No, that is the law.

What is so newsworthy about this case — known as Trump v. Vance, the latter being the Manhattan d.a. — is that it represents the first time in the history of America “that a county prosecutor has subjected the President of the United States to criminal process.” That’s the way it’s put in the president’s opening brief. Think of it. For more than 200 years, prosecutors have resisted temptation, until Mr. Vance.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/like_him_or_not_trump_is_uniquely_suited_for_such_a_time_as_this.html

With the constant drumbeat from the mainstream media, Democrats now hope that the whirlwind in Washington of the so-called impeachment investigation will spread so much smoke that people won’t be able to see what’s going on, except to subliminally conclude that with all that smoke around Donald Trump, there must be a fire, and that it’ll die down with his removal from office.  

In fact, President Trump has so much smoke around him because history has thrust on him the role of American firefighter-in-chief charged with extinguishing corruption in government and in the media, as well as fighting a myriad of other smoldering battles — from protecting the nation’s sovereignty and borders and redressing unfair trade deals and cost-sharing of military defense alliances to promoting policies to secure energy independence and drive economic growth, with a particular passion to deliver opportunity for those at the bottom.   

With a second term, Trump is likely to become a historically consequential political realignment leader — what Andrew Jackson was to the Democrats and Abraham Lincoln was to the Republicans.  He has already broadened the base of the Republican Party, and with a little more political jujitsu he can easily make more inroads and gain support from minorities and other constituencies who feel they’ve been neglected, or worse — have been used as political pawns by the Democrat Party elites, election cycle after election cycle.  

The United States is absolutely unique in human history being founded on two bedrock tenets.   First, the American people are endowed with unalienable individual rights that come from God and not the state — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, along with privacy rights, due process and a presumption of innocence.  Secondly, the legitimacy of the American government established by the Constitution comes solely from the will of the people determined by their choice through elections. States and districts choose their senators and representatives by popular vote, but the chief executive — the President — is elected by an Electoral College system, with electors being proportionally equal to each state’s number of U.S. House Representatives plus one for each of its two U.S. senators. The Founders’ wisdom regarding a need for an Electoral College thus established a blueprint for a governing a large and diverse country by balancing the preferences and will of the people living in sparsely populated states with the different priorities of densely populated states and urban areas that typically have a greater concentration of government dependency and welfare — and the sort of patronage and political corruption that comes with that.   

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/10/20/new-york-times-readers-offer-vicious-responses-to-articles-by-israelis/?utm_content=blog1&utm_medium=daily_email&utm_campaign=email&utm_source=internal/

In at least two recent cases, articles in The New York Times by Israeli authors were greeted by responses from Times readers who insisted that a Jewish state should not exist.

The Times published a page of letters to the editor in response to my former Forwardcolleague Hillel Halkin’s review of Bari Weiss’s book about antisemitism. One of the letters comes from Wayne Price of the Bronx, who insists, “There should be no Jewish state, no Christian state, no Muslim state, no Hindu state, and not even an officially atheist state. If such a view leads to a rejection of Zionism, then so be it. Democratic anti-Zionism is not antisemitic.”

Why the Times considers this view worthy of print publication is a mystery to me, particularly because while no one is working to wipe Vatican City or Saudi Arabia off the map, the Jews of Israel are regularly the target of eliminationist rhetoric from a nation with a nuclear weapons program. Because Jews are not only members of a religion but also of a people, the letter-writer’s sentence is like saying there should be no French state, no Greek state, no Italian state. Mr. Price doesn’t explain how he’d assure the physical safety of Jews in the absence of a Jewish state. The historical record on that front isn’t exactly encouraging.

The Times also published 262 online comments in response to an op-ed by Micah Goodman, the Israeli author, teacher, and institution-builder.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/18/breaking-the-administrative-state/

There can only be one winner in the struggle between the president and the permanent bureaucracy if America has any hope of the republic surviving.

Everyone who knows American history understands that what we are experiencing today was almost inevitable. The Russia-collusion hoax, Ukraine-gate, Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation circus, all of the non-stop, relentless attacks on Donald Trump and his administration from the day he was sworn in were bound to happen.

The political moment we are living through is not the usual one. This is more than the corporate leftist media and Democratic attacks to which we’ve become accustomed against any Republican, including the usual tripe about how Bush or (pick a name) is a Nazi and the election of said Republican signals the end of days. This with Trump is about so much more.

James Piereson described it best this week at a conference co-sponsored by American Greatness and The New Criterion: we’re used to domestic politics, where the discussions are over the size of tax cuts, etc. What we are seeing today is vicious regime politics and a struggle over who is really in charge of this country’s governmental agencies. The duly elected president of the United States? Or players inside of that administrative state, along with their mouthpieces in the media?

None of these absurd fairytales of collusion were ever really about actual suspicions that Trump was somehow tied to Putin. (Though certainly many Americans bought the story.) The breathless nonstop reporting by the corporate leftist media can be explained by one of two possible causes either they are too stupid to understand what is actually taking place (a perfectly reasonable argument) or they are part and parcel of the attempted regime change from the start.

This is all about who truly decides.

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinon-why-are-jews-honoring-journalist-who-says-jews-control-white-house/

Giving an honor to somebody like Thomas Friedman, who slanders Israel and the American Jewish community, sends a message to all potential slanderers that Jews are fair game.

By Moshe Phillips, World Israel News

Next month Moment magazine will hold its “DC Gala & Awards Dinner” honoring four distinguished journalists. The presenters will be four prominent individuals.

How disappointing that one of the presenters they have chosen has publicly accused Jews of controlling the White House and paying off members of Congress. Especially considering Moment magazine is a Jewish publication originally co-founded by Elie Wiesel.

I’m referring to Thomas Friedman of The New York Times.

Friedman’s troubling record on Israel began during his years as a student at Brandeis University. In 1974, Yasser Arafat, gun holster on his hip, made his infamous first appearance at the United Nations. Jews in New York City organized a huge rally against him. Friedman and a handful of fellow-students signed an open letter denouncing the anti-Arafat rally.

https://www.city-journal.org/homelessness-tech-industry

Tech mogul Marc Benioff has been winning media accolades for his declaration that “capitalism, as we know it, is dead.” The billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce, a cloud-based customer-relations company, has launched an advertising blitz promoting his new book, Trailblazer, which calls for a “more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism,” as Benioff put it in a New York Times op-ed on Monday. This “new capitalism” would not “just take from society but truly give back and have a positive impact,” Benioff maintains.

Benioff’s belief that providing products to willing consumers “takes” from society is apparently shared by the 181 CEOs of the Business Roundtable, who rejected the traditional principle of corporate shareholder responsibility this August in favor of “stakeholder responsibility.” Benioff suggests that the Securities and Exchange Commission (or, as he put it in his Times op-ed, the Security and Exchange Commission) start requiring corporations to document how their actions affect this amorphous and infinitely expandable set of “stakeholders.”

Fortunately for anyone seeking to evaluate what the new capitalism might entail, Benioff has provided a concrete example of a CEO solving “social challenges”—the challenge in this case being San Francisco’s festering homeless problem. Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco and is the city’s biggest employer. In 2018, Benioff, in conjunction with San Francisco’s most fearsome advocacy group, the Coalition on Homelessness, put a new tax on the local ballot to double the taxpayer dollars already going to the city’s main homelessness agency. Proposition C would impose an extra 0.5 percent gross-receipts sales tax on companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue, raising an estimated $250 million to $300 million, all of which would be funneled into the homelessness-industrial complex.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rural-voters-pride-and-the-lefts-prejudice-11571263966

They’re at it again, trying to find the reasons rural Americans “vote against their own interests”—in this case why people out here still support President Trump (though folks I know are wavering). The question was classically formulated by Thomas Frank in his 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” But it’s an application of a basic human thought process.

I tell you my views. You disagree with me. I believe my opinion is the one every rational person would come to in an objective assessment of the facts. It’s irrational to disagree with me, especially because I went to a good college and you didn’t, and especially because you are working against your own interests as people like me define them. So what needs explaining is how you could be so irrational.

Sheer genetic redneck boneheadedness is a possibility. If I am feeling generous toward you, I’ll conclude that it isn’t your fault. You are being manipulated by malevolent forces—the surviving Koch brother, Fox News, the Russians, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed. Those are the targets I was aiming at in the first place—after all, who needs to grapple seriously with the views of ignorant, manipulated rubes? After I figure out how to fix Fox News, I can work on fixing you so that you vote according to your interests, as I enumerate them.

What’s missing from this analysis? Social-justice leftists understand the interests of nonrich people in purely material terms. A poor person who isn’t a strong advocate of food stamps or public housing is regarded as plainly irrational. There’s no accounting for intangible qualities such as self-respect, which a particular person or subculture might value highly. By contrast, progressives don’t regard it as irrational when a wealthy person favors high taxes or other policies that would hurt his bottom line. This account of what is and what isn’t in people’s interests, and who is and who isn’t rational, conveniently always militates toward the future to which progressives are already committed.