RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-kissingers-record-on-israel-renders-him-unfit-to-speak-at-jewish-conference/

The Jewish Leadership Conference has invited Henry Kissinger to be featured speaker at its November conference in New York.

That Kissinger was invited to speak at the “Jews And Conservatism 3rd Annual Conference” is especially alarming because we now know that while Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fighting against the notorious Zionism-Is-Racism resolution at the United Nations, Kissinger was battling against Moynihan.

The ongoing question of Kissinger’s record on Israel and Jewish affairs should have precluded his selection as speaker, but his behind-the-scenes fight against Moynihan, especially considering the recent and explosive growth of support for BDS, which utilizes the racism charge to legitimize its anti-Israel crusade, should leave no question that the Jewish Leadership Conference has seriously erred.

Kissinger’s war against Moynihan, is detailed in Prof. Gil Troy’s book, “Moynihan’s Moment, America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism.” A professor of history at McGill University, Troy is a political centrist, a widely-respected commentator on Jewish affairs and scholar. Troy keynoted the American Zionist Movement’s Biennial Assembly in March 2019.

Kissinger’s pressure on Israel not to strike first on the eve of the Yom Kippur War is well known. So are his 10-day stalling of U.S. arms shipments so that Israel would be — as he put it —  “a little bloodied,” his cut-off of U.S. weapons to Israel during the “reassessment” in 1975, and his relentless campaign to undermine Soviet Jewry and the Jackson Amendment.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/peter-smith/2019/10/trumperman-and-the-joker-legions/

BIFF! BOFF! BAM! WACK! THWACK! POW! KAPOW! KRUNCH! WHAM! ZAP! OOOFF! Devotees of Adam West’s Batman will recognise these vivid descriptions, among others, of blows landed on the villains by the crime-fighting duo. I am not sure that Mike Pence quite fits the mould of Burt Ward’s Robin but (HOLY EMULATION!) he comes close enough. Trump, however, is surely the archetypal Batman. Flawed but heroic.

Faster in print than the NYTimes, more powerful than a Clinton, able to build tall buildings before breakfast. They’d like to impeach him here and impeach him there, those Dems they try to impeach him everywhere.

Sorry, I have totally mixed comic book and literary heroes. But, let’s face it, take your pick, Trump is a superhero of one description or another. Making America Great Again, slapping down Dems as he bats away yet the latest fake exposé. Achievements already too long to count, here’s a (very) attenuated accounting.

# Taking the unemployment rate to a fifty-year low and combining that, at last, with rising wages

# Taking unemployment among blacks and Hispanics to record lows

# Performing the impossible miracle (according to Obama) of bringing back hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs

# Reducing those needing food stamps by some 7 million

# Replacing the job-killing NAFTA with the USMCA (if Pelosi would only bring it to the floor)

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/is-america-entering-a-dark-age/

Many of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks.

Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers’ monumental palaces that were still standing around. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions.

We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.

Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?

Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up. The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno — and not yet a foot of track laid.

Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system?

California’s roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/has-the-time-come-to-put-down-lawlessness-insurrection-and-rebellion/

In 1347 a London resident by the name of Roger the Raker plunged through the rotting floorboards of his house into a makeshift latrine and drowned in his own accumulated excrement. As historian Martyn Whittock informs us, “One major problem in the Middle Ages was sewage disposal,” with many householders forced to dig cesspools in their cellars, or pipe their ordure “into the unused cellars of unwary neighbours,” to accommodate the overflowing waste, practices which sealed poor Roger’s fate. Medieval sewage provides a compelling metaphor for the dubious political sanitation issue of our own times, and especially for the ideological filth voided by the American Left on the social, cultural and political landscape of the nation.

Any decent and impartial observer can see that leftist and corporate America has come to resemble a cloacal bog of lies, corruption, slander, censorship, entitlements and violence, a veritable “swamp” as it has been aptly called. What commentator Diana Sitek writing in American Thinker calls “the entitlement to depravity embedded in the Left’s social justice dogma” is both massive and unrelenting. The media, the academy, the entertainment industry, Big Tech, the Democrat Party, and the “Deep State” are profoundly engaged in a networked alliance to overturn the results of a lawful election and subvert a legitimate and effective presidency. President Trump has vowed to “drain the swamp” but it is moot whether a single individual, regardless of the power of high office, with little in the way of institutional support — and despite his strength of character and resolve — can thwart what is nothing less than an ongoing political putsch.

The attempt to impeach the president on no reasonable or substantial grounds is merely another frantic yet tenacious effort by the coup-obsessed Left to unravel the fabric of a constitutional republic. This is plainly the purpose behind the Democrat’s infamous Green New Deal inspired by the U.N.’s Agendas 21 and 2030 which, under the guise of sustainable development, lay out a plan for the punitive regulation of reliable energy sources, the elimination of private property, redistribution of personal wealth, restriction of due process and, of course, the diminishment of American dynamism and prestige. It is a program that perfectly encapsulates the overarching agenda of the political Left, namely, a protracted war on the free enterprise system and the emasculation of the Constitution of the United States, to be accomplished under the stewardship of a plutocratic elite.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-8-is-it-possible-for-the-united

Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the news cycle seems to have shifted away from IMPEACHMENT!!! and over to TRUMP IS ABANDONING OUR KURDISH ALLIES IN SYRIA TO A CERTAIN SLAUGHTER!!!!

On Sunday the Trump administration announced plans to withdraw most or all U.S. troops from the Northeastern part of Syria. There are currently about a thousand U.S. troops in the area, working with allied Kurdish forces.

Within hours, the official talking point — that Trump was abandoning the Kurds to be slaughtered by Turkish forces, and thereby sending a dangerous message to all U.S. allies everywhere — had taken universal hold.

From the Washington Post: “Trump abandoning Kurdish partners in Syria sends a chilling message to every other American ally. . . . President Trump’s erratic foreign policy gives allies good reason to doubt America will follow through on its security commitment.”

From the New York Times: “The Kurdish forces in the area, part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., have been the most reliable American allies in the region for years, a critical element in recapturing territory once controlled by the Islamic State.”

From Business Insider: “Trump’s decision to abandon the Kurds in Syria sends a dangerous message to US allies around the world.”

Even a collection of Republican Congresspeople got in on the act of accusing President Trump of abandoning one of our best allies.