RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

March is when we move from winter to spring. We had days with temperatures in the single digits and others when the thermometer approached seventy. Mark Twain once wrote about spring, “I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.” Perhaps we weren’t that extreme, though it did snow here in southeastern Connecticut on the third full day of spring. And there were days when Robins must have thought they came north too early. March is when the clocks advance by an hour – an anachronism from a time when family farms were ubiquitous, and more daylight hours were important. In 1920, 27% of the U.S. population lived on farms. Today, 2% do. So, why do we still change our clocks?

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The month blossomed with news, if not with flora. A terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand; the release of the long-anticipated Mueller report; the fatal crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia; the fifteenth (or was it the sixteenth?) announced candidacy for the Democrat nomination for President; Brexit; a college admissions scandal that rocked Hollywood, Wall Street, law firms and some of our top universities; Nicolás Maduro gained traction in Venezuela, with help from China and especially Russia, while Juan Guaidó’s wife Fabiana Rosales visited the White House; President Trump acknowledged the reality of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and he issued his first veto (sustained) over Wall funding; the ISIS Caliphate in Syria was defeated; China enlisted a deeply indebted Italy into its Belt and Road Initiative; friends in high places, and hatred for Trump convinced the Cook County State’s Attorney to drop charges against Jussie Smollett for a feigned racial attack.

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Three events during the month said much about modern American culture – none of it positive, which should give us pause. The first was the revelation uncovered in the college admissions scandal, a scandal that said a lot about the values of so-called elites – how they lied and cheated to get their children into top colleges.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/30/the-peoples-sovereignty-is-the-found

Although I don’t believe I have ever seen so many errors in such a short essay, the principal error in Mark Pulliam’s response to my recent piece, “Don’t Read the Constitution the Way Robert Bork Did” is this: If one claims to adhere to the original intentions of the Founders, one must first understand those intentions. In that effort, Pulliam fails in every respect.

Beginning with the question of natural law and the Declaration of Independence and moving in all directions from there, Pulliam presents a blinkered understanding of the purposes and meaning of our Constitution. There is not a single prominent American Founder—not Madison, Hamilton, Adams, Mason, Randolph, Wilson or any of a host of others—who did not believe that the Declaration served as the authoritative source of the Constitution’s authority. Miss this point and you cannot understand the original intent of the Constitution.

Pulliam cites Justice Scalia as an authority. However much we may praise many of the conclusions Scalia reached on the bench, it remains that Scalia, unlike Justice Thomas, was a positivist—saying on one occasion that if the majority voted to legalize abortion, then it should be legal. Thomas, however, realizes that according to natural law principles, abortion is a violation of the natural right to life that is expressly protected by the Constitution. In the face of Thomas’ argument, Pulliam collapses: natural law—“whatever that is.” Is it really so difficult!

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/mueller-report-collusion-debate-inflated-talking-points/

Both sides are peddling inflated talking points.

‘There was absolutely no collusion!”

“Are you kidding? There was a boatload of collusion!”

I’ve been doing legal analysis in hotly contested cases, including political cases, for about 35 years. By now, I should be used to the insidious word games, as well as the confusion inherent when people imprecisely use ambiguous words because they don’t know any better. Yet it seems like it has never been worse than it is now.

That’s because I’m spoiled. I spent the first couple of decades in the confines of a top-tier judicial system. In legal proceedings, a judge is there to make sure no one plays fast and loose with language. As a young prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, I was very fortunate that my cases were assigned to exceptional judges, who made it their business to mind the court record.

At the time, I didn’t appreciate how valuable that was — judges interrupting the testimony, even if there had been no objection, to clarify what a lawyer or witness meant by some loaded word planted in a question or uttered in an answer. But by the end of the trial, in the transcript that would ultimately be reviewed by appellate courts, there was no way a fuzzy term, such as “collusion,” would be permitted to muddy the waters. Everyone understood what it meant, and didn’t mean, within the four corners of the case.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-3-29-the-russia-hoax-should-we-all-now-just-move-on

A week ago today, the issuance of the Mueller Report finally popped the long-inflating bubble of the Trump/Russia collusion hoax. After thousands of excited and breathless press reports and cable news segments over two-plus years (“new bombshell,” “the walls are closing in,” “impeachment,” etc.), it turned out that there was nothing there. So is there any point in wasting any more time on this? Why don’t we all just move on?

You won’t be surprised that many voices in the media are already advocating for that. At the New York Times, they had barely made it to Tuesday when the lead front page article, headlined “Trump, Citing ‘Evil Deeds,’ Turns Wrath on His Critics,” started pushing for Trump to “drop the subject,” citing the precedents of Reagan and Clinton:

[Trump’s] approach [of seeking retribution against his critics], if it lasts, contrasts with those of other presidents who survived major scandals. After the Iran-contra affair, President Ronald Reagan happily dropped the subject and focused on arms control talks with the Soviet Union and other issues. After being acquitted at his Senate impeachment trial, President Bill Clinton was just as eager to move on to Social Security and other initiatives.

Less expected, perhaps, was the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the same day from long-time G.W. Bush advisor Karl Rove, with the headline “Move On From Robert Mueller, Mr. President.” That article’s gist was captured in its sub-headline, “Obsessing over the investigation’s origins isn’t the way to win over swing voters.” Rove urges Trump to switch his attention to focusing on a positive message, including the strong economy.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22503/what-siegfried-roy-forgot

Siegried & Roy were illusionists whose famous Las Vegas act with Bengal tigers thrilled audiences at the Mirage Resort and Casino for thirteen years. Their daredevil performance was predicated on the technique of “affection conditioning” in which Roy bonded rather than trained the animals. The method required raising tiger cubs from birth and sleeping with them until they were a year old. Roy described the experience saying, “When an animal gives you its trust, you feel like you have been given the most beautiful gift in the world.”

On October 3, 2003 Roy Cohn’s prized cat, 380 lb Montecore, sunk its teeth into Roy’s neck and dragged him offstage before a horrified audience.

Roy faithfully insisted that Montecore was just trying to protect him. Other experts had a more realistic view of the attack. Kay Rosaire, head of the Big Cat Encounter in Florida at the time said, “They’re predators, so who can really know what goes on in their minds? Even though they are raised in captivity and they love us, sometimes their natural instincts just take over.”

Trying to tame the wildness of a Bengal tiger for entertainment denies the predatory nature of the animal. So it is with the Muslim Brotherhood in America

THERE WILL BE NO POSTINGS UNTIL MARCH 30, 2019

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22477/it-time-to-kiss

The familiar acronym KISS, “keep it simple stupid,” began as a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s according to Wikipedia. “The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

The current maelstrom created by Fox News suspending Judge Jeanine Pirro over a question she posed concerning the symbolism of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab can best be understood using the KISS principle.

Mohammed, the 7th century prophet and founder of Islam, believed himself to be the messenger of the one and only god Allah. Mohammed believed that all people should honor Allah and only Allah. This was and continues to be the foundational premise of Islamic expansionism and its desire to establish a worldwide caliphate to make the whole world Muslim – including the United States. Islam is a replacement theology.

Islam has been at war with competing ideologies since the time of Mohammed but war is expensive. The Islamic movement’s fortunes waxed and waned over the centuries until oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Saudi Arabia in 1938. A seismic shift in geopolitical power took place and the oil rich Muslim nations were able to pursue their expansionist dreams of an Islamic caliphate once again.

https://www.providencejournal.com/opinion/20190319/my-turn-mackubin-thomas-owens-ignoring-socialisms-countless-corpses

An old joke goes like this: Q. What did socialists use before candles? A. Electricity.

I’m sure the people of Venezuela aren’t laughing. But as the people of this once-prosperous country scrounge for food in trash bags and go without electricity and running water, some in our own country seriously sing the praises of socialism. Allegedly well-educated individuals remain on the socialism bandwagon even as Venezuela circles the drain.

What accounts for this phenomenon? Why is socialism so popular with young people? Why did they rally to Bernie Sanders in 2016?

Why do they lionize Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party’s shiny new thing? AOC, as the press has dubbed her, graduated cum laude from Boston University with a degree in economics and international relations. I taught for a while at Boston University in the 1990s and got to know the late John Silber, BU’s president, who turned the school into an excellent institution. He must be spinning in his grave.

How could someone graduate from a well-respected university and be as ignorant of basic economics as this woman?

To answer this question, it is useful to look to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who in the early 20th century stressed the importance of “cultural hegemony” as the means of establishing the conditions for a Marxist revolution.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/03/15/new-zealand-the-barbarism-of-identity-politics/
EXCERPT

As we offer our solidarity, we also want to try to understand why things like this happen. Understandably, there has been a rush to locate this barbaric act within a broader political framework. Sadly, this has given rise to a speedy and ghoulish exploitation of the atrocity to make political mileage. Already observers are pinning the blame on certain right-wing commentators, or on the Western media more broadly, claiming that criticism of Muslim immigration or of Islam generates this kind of violent hatred. Already some are calling for clampdowns on Islamophobia and for the expunging from the internet of certain hard-right voices. It will strike many of us, especially those of us who are humanists, as perverse and disturbing that people would so swiftly use a bloody act to further their own narrow agendas of social control and censorship; that they would use a massacre almost as an exclamation point to their already existing demands for the demonisation and punishment of particular opinions. It is cynical and inhuman.

Furthermore, it feels wrong. To fold this barbarism into a narrative about a surging threat of white supremacy or even Islamophobia overlooks what feels terrifyingly mainstream about the ideas that appear to have energised and inspired this racist mass murderer – namely, the politics of identity. To read the killer’s alleged manifesto, as currently being covered by CNN, the New York Times and others, is to gain a horrible glimpse into the cultural fragmentation and racial paranoia unleashed by the relentless rise of identitarianism.

Increasingly, it feels like the New Zealand atrocity is what happens when the politics of identity, the reduction of everyone to cultural or racial creatures whose relationship with other cultural and racial cultures must be monitored and managed, comes to be the only game in public life.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/19/the-only-option-they-had-as-pseudo-conservatives/

“As if by prophecy, the next article the Bulwark posted was: “Is Socialism Really that Big of a Threat?”

It’s been a tough two years if you’re a post-Reagan era, Bush-flunky fake conservative.

Between America winning the Cold War and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the RINO-gravy-train had treated you well. Even if you were a former leftist, the “elite” of New York and Washington were happy to let you make a phony Damascene conversion to the side that won the ideological war of the 20th century, drop your questionable political past down the memory hole, and reinvent yourself as a lifelong Buckleyite.

You believed the rest of your life could consist of your collecting fat honoraria checks from both sides of the uniparty establishment. From AEI to Brookings, from CATO to the Council on Foreign Relations, you also milked a handful of gullible right-wing donors and bloviated your pedestrian “analysis” for the hosts of the cable shows you cared for the most—naturally, on CNN. This despite the fact that America really didn’t seem to care. At least not if we judge by the viewing statistics.

How anyone still talks about CNN at all is a question that continues to mystify me. Even CNN‘s “hottest” shows are mostly ignored by more than 99 percent of the U.S. population. On a good night, Anderson Cooper, can only garner 800,000 real viewers (as opposed to people trapped at an airport waiting to board a plane). That’s 0.25 percent of the population of our republic. Seriously guys, can’t we just ignore them? Back to the fakers.

For decades they planted themselves at publications such as National Review and the Weekly Standard which lost their viability as market products but nevertheless chugged along, read by a smaller and smaller group of believers and fellow-travelers, funded as they were by the same handful of well-meaning but credulous sugar-daddies. You know their names: Bill Kristol, Stephen Hays, Jennifer Rubin, Tom Nichols, to name but a few. Then on November 8, 2016, America fired them all.