RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/opinion-

Put aside the natural aversion to the Davos billionaires. Capitalism is the only system which can continually reduce poverty and increase overall prosperity. Yes, capitalism creates very rich people, but capitalism won’t work its wonders without very rich people.

The new star of the (increasingly radical) Democratic Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attends a symposium on 21 January where she is asked if it is moral to have “a world that allows for billionaires.” She replies it is not, adding that “a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.” By the way, before I look at the morality of having billionaires, ringworm is a common fungal infection that can strike anyone and is easily treated with antifungal creams obtainable inexpensively from any local pharmacy. The clunky machinery of public health is not required.

In the blink of an eye Ms Ocasio-Cortez has become sufficiently celebrated to be referred to as “AOC”; like, say, FDR, LBJ or JFK. Fortunately for America she is only twenty-nine years old and therefore can’t run for the presidency. A recent poll found that 74% of Democrats would consider voting for her were she to run. The rational mind boggles.

The lady is on the extreme end of the callow scale. This is an excuse of sorts for her saying that the world will end in twelve years unless something is done about climate change and for espousing naive socialist nostrums through her Green New Deal, GND to those in the know. But what about the supposed adults who support her?

Surely there is now no doubt. There has been a secular decline in the intelligence and common sense of those who identify as progressives; and, to boot, in their common decency. Witness the Kavanaugh ordeal and the despicable attack on the Covington kids, as just two examples of many. But I digress. Back to billionaires.

swtotd.blogspot.com

Mainstream media has gone from a trusted source of unbiased news to proselytizing for the political Left or Right, but mostly the Left. Opinions, which were once relegated to the editorial page, have migrated to the front page and became “news”. The reader is left unsure as to what is fact, what is fake and what is opinion. It is a trend that has accelerated as social media has gone mainstream. We have become two camps, divided by a hatred that grows ever bitter. Like the Biblical Joshua, we warily approach those we don’t know: “Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?”

Compounding the problem has been an abundance of data. In 1982, Buckminster Fuller introduced the Knowledge Doubling Curve. He noted that knowledge doubled every hundred years until 1900, when a linear growth in knowledge transitioned to exponential growth. By 1945 knowledge was doubling every twenty-five years. Today, estimates are that it doubles every twelve months. The curve will steepen. But wisdom does not stay pace with knowledge. We no longer question assumptions or listen to contrary opinions. We read and hear what supports our views. Thus, we grow apart. Political correctness and identity politics have hardened positions. A tsunami of information is not all that inundates our lives. As we grow older, we are encouraged to stay active, to fill every hour – play tennis, golf, learn to paint, travel abroad, attend an aerobics class, and check Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for ephemeral messages. We are told health and longevity depend on it. But that leaves too little time to think, to read, or to take a solitary walk and quietly ponder issues that have perplexed man for centuries. Idleness need not be idle.

The above serves as a prelude to a month that did not take time to smell the roses – except for those furloughed by a shut-down government. It was that, with all its consequences – intended and unintended – which monopolized domestic news, while a hesitant and bumbled Brexit dominated international news. The vagaries, inefficiencies and pitfalls of democracies served to delight schadenfreude-infected autocracies, like Russia and China? But what person who has ever tasted the sweetness of liberty would not prefer the imperfections of a Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi or Theresa May to the efficient but brutal Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping? Would those in Turkestan, Somalia or Guatemala prefer to live in socialist Russia, China and Venezuela, or in capitalist Japan, Switzerland and the United States? When we complain and demonstrate against our democratic institutions, we should be reminded of Martin Luther King, whose January 15th birth we celebrated on the 21st. He was a man who battled oppression and fought for love and understanding. In 1967, a year before he was assassinated, King spoke: “Let us be dissatisfied, until that day when nobody will shout ‘White Power!’ – when nobody will shout ‘Black Power!’ – but everyone will talk about God’s power and human power.” His wish of fifty years ago remains just that, a wish.

https://spectator.us/jim-acostas-book/

Exclusive! * Exclusive! * Exclusive!

An advance excerpt of the forthcoming tell-all memoir from the battle lines of America under siege by the world’s bravest investigative journalist, Jim Acosta.

‘Will the president tell the truth?’ I generally like to start with questions like that because, at a time when American is occupied by the spirit of Donald Trump, it always throws his spokesmen off base.

It’s asking questions like that that made me Chief White House Correspondent for CNN. It’s a big job. But it’s the job I was born for.

Some people have a sense of destiny. I guess I am one. I have always been known for my courageous truth-telling. It’s one reason my colleagues in the press corps idolize me. You can tell that because they always fall silent and look at me with a mixture of awe and envy when I enter the press room at the White House.

I have been going to White House press conferences for many years. I get to sit near the front because of my seniority and reputation for asking brave, hard-hitting questions, and because I am Chief White House Correspondent for CNN. One of my most famous performances — it will probably make the Oxford Book of Quotations — was when I reminded Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s chief speech writer that the Statute of Liberty says ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.’ That was early in Donald Trump’s reign when he was first trying to close America’s borders to brown and black people, whom he does not like.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/28/against-trump-

Three years ago this month, National Review published its controversial and now infamous entreaty, “Against Trump.” The issue was singularly devoted to making a case against Donald Trump’s then surging primary candidacy; it featured a roster of notable conservative influencers explaining why the brash Manhattan billionaire posed a dire threat to conservatism.

Exactly three years later, the magazine’s online version issued an apology for its early condemnation of Covington Catholic High School students, who, while attending the March for Life in Washington D.C., became the innocent victims of a social media ambush orchestrated and executed by the Left. Some conservative commentators who had contributed to the “Against Trump” issue quietly deleted their tweets criticizing the teens, without apology.

The irony surrounding the coincidence of the dates of those two circumstances might be considered either karma, comeuppance, or both. And it once again highlighted why Donald Trump is in the White House and Jeb Bush isn’t, and why Trump—and none of the self-proclaimed conservatives who opined in the pages of National Review three years ago—now is considered the standard bearer of American conservatism. When the Left attacks, the Right caves.

When Christian teenagers attending an event to support a cause that represents the heart of the conservative movement needed immediate and unflinching protection from a leftist mob, the self-appointed guardians of conservatism failed. Their mockery of “He Fights!” only exposes how they will not—or when they do fight they often pick the wrong battles, and how they find the whole business of political warfare beneath them—unless, of course, they can punch down at a target on their own side.

Don’t take my word for it. Here is a direct quote from that “Against Trump” issue: “[Trump’s] obsession is with ‘winning,’ regardless of the means—a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on government power.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/the_potomac_twostep_will_no_one_stand_up_to_the_corruption_in_the_fbi_doj_and_cia.html

For nearly ten years now, Americans who have been paying attention have known that our government has become corrupt, that its premier institutions were weaponized by the Obama administration to the point that we have become something of a police state or banana republic. This is not to say there was no corruption previous to Obama. As Sidney Powell addresses in her book License to Lie, the current special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his amoral, ruthless right-hand man, Andrew Weismann, had already been practicing their prosecutions of personal destruction for decades. In the 1980s, Mueller sent four men to prison who he knew were innocent. He did it to protect a confidential informant. Two of them died in prison. The lawsuits filed cost taxpayers $100M. That trial was connected to the murderous mafia hit man Whitey Bulger, who was finally caught after sixteen years. He died in prison in 2018. Was he murdered to protect Mueller?

There was the total destruction of Enron, and then came the obliteration of Enron’s accounting firm, Arthur Andersen. Those prosecutions were run much as Mueller and Weismann are running their current job assignment. Mueller successfully ruined both companies, costing thousands of people their jobs and sending nonviolent people to prison, sometimes to solitary confinement like what he did with Paul Manafort. Fortunately, but too little, too late, nearly all of the guilty verdicts they managed to elicit from juries were overturned by the Supreme Court in both cases.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/
overturning unpopular Supreme Court decisions.

These are dangerous times: The percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a liberal democracy is plummeting, everywhere from the United States to the Netherlands. Support for autocratic alternatives to democracy is especially high among young people. In 1788, Madison wrote that the best argument for adopting a Bill of Rights would be its influence on public opinion. As “the political truths” declared in the Bill of Rights “become incorporated with the national sentiment,” he concluded, they would “counteract the impulses of interest and passion.” Today, passion has gotten the better of us. The preservation of the republic urgently requires imparting constitutional principles to a new generation and reviving Madisonian reason in an impetuous world.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series that attempts to answer the question: Is democracy dying?

James Madison traveled to Philadelphia in 1787 with Athens on his mind. He had spent the year before the Constitutional Convention reading two trunkfuls of books on the history of failed democracies, sent to him from Paris by Thomas Jefferson. Madison was determined, in drafting the Constitution, to avoid the fate of those “ancient and modern confederacies,” which he believed had succumbed to rule by demagogues and mobs.

Madison’s reading convinced him that direct democracies—such as the assembly in Athens, where 6,000 citizens were required for a quorum—unleashed populist passions that overcame the cool, deliberative reason prized above all by Enlightenment thinkers. “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason,” he argued in The Federalist Papers, the essays he wrote (along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) to build support for the ratification of the Constitution. “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Madison and Hamilton believed that Athenian citizens had been swayed by crude and ambitious politicians who had played on their emotions. The demagogue Cleon was said to have seduced the assembly into being more hawkish toward Athens’s opponents in the Peloponnesian War, and even the reformer Solon canceled debts and debased the currency. In Madison’s view, history seemed to be repeating itself in America. After the Revolutionary War, he had observed in Massachusetts “a rage for paper money, for abolition of debts, for an equal division of property.” That populist rage had led to Shays’s Rebellion, which pitted a band of debtors against their creditors.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/government-shutdown-reveals-much-of-federal-government-irrelevant/

So much of government in Washington is nonessential.

One of the lessons of the Trump–Pelosi standoff on border security is that government shutdowns are a foolish way to resolve partisan disputes.

But the other lesson may be far more important. The partial shutdown, with agencies such as the Transportation, Agriculture, and State Departments, as well as other independent agencies, closed for business, demonstrated how irrelevant so much of our $4 trillion government is to the everyday lives of Americans.

As I traveled over the last several weeks to Florida, California, and many states in between, and asked people what they thought of the shutdown, many said they didn’t even know the government was shut down for more than a month. Their everyday lives were disrupted or inconvenienced only, if at all, in a trivial way. It turns out there are countless Americans who don’t watch CNN or MSNBC and so didn’t learn about the supposed horrors of agency closures.

This was a particularly painless shutdown for the average taxpayer because the essential activities of government were mostly unaffected. Seniors got their social-security checks. The military was protecting us. We got through the airports with minimal delays — until the last week when some TSA officials and air-traffic controllers weren’t on the job.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/28/35-days-without-eeoc-illustrate-shut-forever/

On a quiet evening in 2016, Jose the night supervisor was tickled by a funny animal meme. He printed the picture and taped it to the office fridge. The next morning, when Jackie the day supervisor arrived, she took one look and proclaimed the picture “racist.”

Coworkers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds argued over whether the meme had some hidden racial meaning. Certainly, Jose was horrified to discover that he had offended anyone. After a quick consultation with Human Resources, the picture was tossed, and everyone went back to work.

Just kidding! Jackie decided to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Her claim: unlawful, hostile work environment and harassment, based on an ambiguous picture posted for less than 24 hours. Meanwhile, the ordeal for my client—the company employing Jose, Jackie, and their co-workers—continues to this day.
The Mission of the EEOC

More than half a century ago, as part of his Great Society speech President Lyndon Johnson pledged to end racial injustice. Shortly afterwards, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, creating the EEOC. The EEOC is tasked with enforcing federal laws prohibiting workplace discrimination. Officially protected categories include race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, arguably gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age (40 or older), disability, and genetic information. The EEOC also protects employees who make complaints about unlawful discrimination.

https://www.city-journal.org/covington-nick-sandmann-masculinity

For centuries, people have stared at the Mona Lisa, pondering, quizzical, trying to make sense of the expression on her face. In the last few days, millions of people around the world have similarly scrutinized the image of Nick Sandmann, a now-famous junior at Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, as he encountered Nathan Phillips in front of the Lincoln Memorial on January 18.

The story that first went around was that Sandmann and his fellow students, who had attended the March for Life last Friday and were waiting for their bus back home, had encircled, threatened, and insulted Phillips, a Native American activist who had served in the military.

The Covington students, all boys, many of them wearing “Make America Great Again” caps, were instantly demonized. But video evidence later showed that the boys were innocent—quite remarkably and impressively innocent, in fact. Over the course of more than an hour, they were confronted, first, by a fanatical group of religious bigots, the Black Hebrew Israelites (who claim to be the real Jews), who pelted them with racist and homophobic abuse, to which the Kentucky boys, quite admirably, refused to reply; and, second, by Phillips, who, accompanied by a handful of hangers-on, got in their faces, chanting, banging a drum, and telling them to go back to Europe because they had no business in America, which belonged to Native Americans. As Phillips marched through the crowd of boys, all parted except for Sandmann, who silently met Phillips’s gaze.

Reactions to Sandmann’s expression poured out from every corner. Many people described him as sneering. Rosie O’Donnell was one of several who called him “smug.” Since he is white, his expression was interpreted, by the kind of people who are determined to interpret such things in such ways, as the condescending reaction of a privileged young straight white male toward a much older representative of a minority group, who was supposedly carrying out a sacred ritual.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/26/a-better-guide

Some expert in Bayesian probability ought to come up with an algorithm that would enable us to determine which of the multifarious daily outrages are going to catch on and, as the internet has taught us to say, “go viral.” Remember that hysterical (I do not mean “funny”) Yale student who was videoed screaming at the (as the title then was) master of her college at Yale because his wife had suggested the college had no business policing students’ Halloween costumes? That was an instant sensation and (I am happy to say) helped popularize the term “crybullies,” meaning the timid yet vicious creatures who, nurturing a hyperactive sense of grievance, seek to weaponize their coveted if generally make-believe status as victims.

But why that episode? Every day, or at least every week or two, there are equally outrageous examples of moralistic hysteria that, even if they are widely reported, die a quiet death as the news cycle buries every yesterday beneath the importunate clamoring of now, now, now . . .

I do not have an answer to this question. I merely note the puzzling fact and repeat my wish for the haruspex who can plumb the entrails of this beast and tell us if it is slouching towards notoriety.

Kavanaughesque In Its Viciousness
When I wrote about the now-infamous Covington Boys incident last Sunday, I had no idea that it would become the most sensational story of the week. I wrote before seeing the longer video of the incident but, even so, thought that the cataract of abuse that the boys were subjected to was way over the top. I acknowledged, “of all human passions, the passion of moral self-righteousness is the most delicious,” but went on to observe that “the problem is, the people who are the objects of our indignation often present a more complicated reality than we first assume.”

So, of course, it turned out to be with the boys from Covington Catholic. The boys did not approach or taunt the drum-beating fake-Vietnam-vet creep of an Indian activist Nathan Phillips. On the contrary, he waded in among them, obnoxiously taunting them while my new favorite group of wackos, the Black Hebrew Israelites, hurled a variety of racist and sexual slurs at the high school students as they waited for a bus to whisk them back to Kentucky after their participation in the annual pro-life March for Life.