RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272514/money-doesnt-stink-bruce-thornton

In his biographies of the Roman emperors, Suetonius describes a conversation between Vespasian and his son Titus, who disapproved of his father taxing the urine that tanners and other industries collected from public restrooms: “When Titus found fault with him for contriving a tax upon public conveniences, [Vespasian] held a piece of money from the first payment to his son’s nose, asking whether its odor was offensive to him. When Titus said ‘No,’ he replied, ‘Yet it comes from urine.’”

This sentiment has been summarized in the proverb, “Money doesn’t stink.” Currency, in other words, is morally neutral. Its buying power is the same no matter how good or evil its users or creators. As such the market cannot create on its own virtues or morals or any good other than profit.

This wisdom is often forgotten by those, like Karl Marx and today’s well-heeled socialists, who criticize free market capitalism for the social disorders that in fact mostly derive from the free choices of individuals, and an intrusive, technocratic federal government that has displaced and marginalized civil society––especially families and churches––and weakened the virtues they once taught and reinforced.

A monologue by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson set off a debate over the obligation of businesses to care about the welfare of their fellow citizens, and the impact of their products on society’s morals and happiness. But the responses of both sides miss the true culprit–– the corroding effects of secularism, the two-centuries-long intellectual movement that has tried to do without God, and replace Him with government.

Carlson starts by exposing Mitt Romney’s hypocrisy in criticizing the economic populist Donald Trump for his “character.” After all, Carlson argues, Romney made a fortune as a buccaneer capitalist who bought companies, sucked them dry of assets, then left them to wither and die. He is part of an economic system and a government whose bipartisan goal is to “make the world safe for bankers.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/the-inherent-racism-of-identity-politics/

That only white people can be guilty of racism is preposterous. Most people are aware of non-white people vilifying other ethnic groups in racial terms. Why is this not racism? Why should the perpetrators not be held as accountable? Doesn’t it imply an inability to take responsibility — a racist presumption if ever there was one?

Identity politics racist? How can that be, you might ask. After all, is not the pursuit of “racial justice” part of the very essence of identity politics? Surely all those warriors for social justice who so prodigiously level charges of racism against others could not themselves be guilty of this offence? They wouldn’t embrace a racist ideology, would they?

Sad to say, yes they would, at least if we adopt what until recently was the standard, commonsense understanding of the terms race and racism. On these understandings, a person’s race referred to certain heritable, unalterable and visible features, like skin colour, that might indicate ancestry tracing back to a particular geographical region. A racist was someone who was inclined to think ill of, or to discriminate against, a person or group solely because of such characteristics.

Towards the end of the last century it became generally accepted in societies like ours that racism so defined was both morally odious and profoundly irrational. The classic expression of this was Martin Luther King’s great civil rights speech of 1963 in which he looked forward to a day when his children would be judged by “the content of their character”, not the colour of their skin.

The basic sentiment here, shared by most people across the ideological spectrum, and certainly those who considered themselves left-wing and progressive, was that race was something we should aspire to transcend. People must not be judged according to visible surface features that reflect trivial genetic variations. We should see each other as, first and foremost, members of a common humanity, free agents possessing certain inalienable rights.

So what has changed? A great deal, as it happens, with the wide embrace of the ideology of identity politics in Western societies, and its wholesale incorporation into the worldview of those who consider themselves left-wing or progressive. On this view, we are essentially defined not by our humanity but by our race, gender or other identity category, or some intersecting set of identities.

The notion of a post-racial future is now considered an ideological heresy by the academic high-priestesses and priests of the identitarian ideology. These ideologues are nowadays absolutely obsessed about race. They strive constantly to heighten racial awareness and to perpetuate rather than resolve racial grievances. The Enlightenment vision of a common humanity is now distinctly passé, as even the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm lamented in a speech in 1996.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/watergate-by-any-other-name/

Our familiarity with the Obama-Trump surveillance scandal has bred indifference.

Familiarity, it is said, breeds contempt. It also breeds indifference. For almost three years now, the intelligence services and police apparatus of the deep state have worked tirelessly to undermine Donald Trump. Beginning sometime in the late winter of 2016, when Trump’s presidential campaign was showing unexpected signs of strength, John Brennan—the Communist-voting apparatchik turned media mouthpiece whom it pleased Barack Obama to appoint as director of the CIA—began ringing alarm bells about Trump’s possible relations with the Kremlin. His concern was based on two things. One was a report, spurious as it turned out, about “contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians.” The other was that brittle sense of entitlement, fired by paranoia, that membership in the higher echelons of the deep state’s nomenklatura breeds.

Brennan convened a “working group” at CIA headquarters that included Peter Strzok, the disgraced FBI agent who was head of counter-intelligence, and James Clapper, then director of national intelligence (now, like Brennan, another mouthpiece for the left-wing media), in order to stymie Trump’s campaign. It was Brennan, too, who first alerted James Comey, the disgraced former director of the F.B.I., to the fantasy of possible “collusion” between the Trump Campaign and “the Russians.”

Then came the infamous “Steele Dossier,” the agglomeration of malicious gossip about Trump that was surreptitiously commissioned by and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. This fantastical piece of “opposition research” was essentially the sole warrant for opening secret FISA investigations against Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign advisor, and others.

All this provided sensational pabulum for the anti-Trump press, who spent countless hours peeling back the complex, hypertrophied onion that the CIA, the FBI, and various figures within the Obama administration had built up to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump without quite seeming to target Trump himself.

Mirabile ditctu, it didn’t work. Still, it was impossible that Trump could actually win the election. Nancy Pelosi told us that we could “take it to the bank” that Donald Trump was not going to be president. Many other politicians and talking heads made fools of themselves emitting similar pseudo-certainties right up to the afternoon and early evening of election day.

Yesterday I went to a performance of the world premiere of an opera with music composed by Ted Rosenthal, a respected jazz pianist, author and composer, with libretto and lyrics by Ted and Leslie Rosenthal and additional lyrics by Barry Singer, E.M. Lewis and Edward Einhorn. My friend Sheila W. concurred that the work, presented by the New York City Opera at the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage is a masterpiece based on a true story.

The libretto centers on a trove of letters from a mother left behind in Germany in 1938, by a young Jew who came to America- Erich Rosenthal – the composer’s father. Erich is a cold and distant father who does not reveal anything of his past to his children, as he copes with grief and loss and guilt at his failed efforts to rescue his abandoned family. The letters from his mother stopped abruptly in 1942 when she and her neighbors and family left for the death camp Sobibor.

The music, some jazz, some operatic was performed by a wonderful and brilliant cast, interspersed with haunting and devastating flashback scenes of the horrors of the impending genocide. The broken father, nearing death, ponders about his family :”Who will remember them when I am gone?”

Thanks to this magnificent opus, they will be remembered. I came home and looked at pictures of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins- all killed in Poland and recited their names to myself….rsk

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/13/the-game-

Americans always have been prone to reinventing themselves.

We now live in an age of radical social construction—a sort of expansive update on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American notion of becoming anyone one pleases.

One common denominator, however, seems to govern today’s endless search for some sort of authenticity: a careerist effort to separate oneself from the assumed dominate and victimizing majority of white heterosexual and often Christian males.

Ironically, the quest for a superficial separation from the majority comes at a time when the majority has never been so committed to the promise of the Declaration of Independence and when equal opportunity has become a reality rather than an abstract ideal.

Yet in our new binary society, we all have a choice to be seen either as victims or victimizers. And thus we make the necessary adjustments for the often more lucrative and careerist choice.

Victim Chic
At the most buffoonish, sometimes activists simply construct identities out of whole cloth. Ward Churchill did that pretty well, when he fabricated a Native American persona and parlayed it into a faculty billet at the University of Colorado that was otherwise unattainable for such a mediocrity with pseudo-credentials.

Rachel Dolezal, recently charged with welfare fraud, became Spokane chapter president of the NAACP by falsely claiming she was African-American.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for years leveraged old family yarns about a high-cheekbone, Native American heritage into Harvard’s first authentically Native American law professor. Her self-invention was much more likely a route to advancement than more dreary publication, better teaching, or just being Elizabeth Warren, middle-aged white female scholar.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/george-soros-and-the-cult-of-death/

The Financial Times has selected George Soros as its Person of the Year. According to the paper, this choice was made both as a reflection of his achievements and for the values he represents:

He is the standard bearer of liberal democracy and open society… For more than three decades, Mr Soros has used philanthropy to battle against authoritarianism, racism and intolerance. Through his long commitment to openness, media freedom and human rights, he has attracted the wrath of authoritarian regimes and, increasingly, the national populists who continue to gain ground, particularly in Europe.

Reading this nonsense has prompted me to revisit Soros after almost a decade. In reality this “philanthropist” is a monster who has been promoting—relentlessly—the Western world’s political, moral and biological decay. Philanthropy used to be defined as “love to mankind; benevolence toward the whole human family; universal good will; desire and readiness to do good to all men.” Through his Open Society Institute and its vast network of affiliates, George Soros has provided extensive financial and lobbying support for groups that advocate lifestyles and causes that are invariably destructive, or outright repellant.

Soros promotes the legalization of hard drugs. He insists on the need to accept that “substance abuse is endemic in most societies.” It was tangibly thanks to his intervention that the terms “medicalization” and “non-violent drug offender” have entered public discourse.

In 1994 Soros—a self-professed atheist—launched his Project Death in America (PDIA) and provided $15 million in its initial funding. His mother, a member of the pro-suicide Hemlock Society, killed herself, and that Soros mentioned unsympathetically his dying father’s clinging on to life for too long. PDIA supports physician-assisted suicide and works “to begin forming a network of doctors that will eventually reach into one-fourth of America’s hospitals” and, in a chilling turn of phrase, lead to “the creation of innovative models of care and the development of new curricula on dying.”

Soros is an enthusiastic promoter of open immigration and a contributor to groups advocating amnesty and special rights for immigrants, including National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Law Center, National Immigration Forum, and dozens of others. He also promotes the preservation and expansion of public welfare, and in late 1996 he created the Emma Lazarus Fund that has given millions in grants to nonprofit legal services groups that undermine provisions of the welfare legislation ending immigrant entitlements.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272483/unprincipled-principles-never-trumpers-daniel-greenfield

The Weekly Standard was once dubbed, the “neo-conservative bible”. If it was ever the bible of neo-conservatives, it’s now the Koran of the anti-war radical left. Its new incarnation The Bulwark, is a project of Defending Democracy Together which is funded by Pierre Omidyar, the French-Iranian Silicon Valley billionaire behind The Intercept, and also providing funding to The Nation and Mother Jones.

It’s hard to imagine two sets of worldviews further apart than those which once separated the two movements. The ability of the godfather of the anti-war left to essentially take over a faction that stood for everything he opposed has much to say about the state of conservatism and the principles debate.

President Trump agilely co-opted the popular part of Republican national defense politics, defeating enemies and killing terrorists, supporting Israel and opposing Iran, while discarding the unpopular parts, nation-building and democracy promotion. Some Republican opponents of Trump made it very clear that they valued the unpopular parts more than the popular ones, and may have even viewed the popular parts as a way to sneak in the unpopular parts through the policy back door.

The Washington Post’s Never Trumper caucus, Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot, ceded the Iran Deal and Israel to Trump, reversing old positions and disposing of old allies, while hysterically attacking Trump as a man of bad character. “Trump’s character fall short,” Rubin recently wrote in another of her columns. Max Boot claims that conservatism means a “respect for character”. But the very people who can’t stop lecturing us about character and principles have proven that they have neither character nor principles.

What character do these characters have?

Never Trumpers invoked their principles to oppose Trump. But their principles have led to them taking cash from a serial funder of assaults on national security in the name of defending national security. The “bible of neo-conservatism” now shares a funding source with a platform for Edward Snowden, not to mention every possible defense of Islamic terrorism, the Iran Deal and assorted bursts of anti-Semitism.

Having realized that they have no principles, Never Trumpers spend less time speaking of principles and more about character. Having ceded their principles, they’ll be damned if they cede character.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/women-dont-belong-in-combat-units-11547411638

The Obama-era policy of integrating women into ground combat units is a misguided social experiment that threatens military readiness and wastes resources in the service of a political agenda. The next defense secretary should end it.

In September 2015 the Marine Corps released a study comparing the performance of gender-integrated and male-only infantry units in simulated combat. The all-male teams greatly outperformed the integrated teams, whether on shooting, surmounting obstacles or evacuating casualties. Female Marines were injured at more than six times the rate of men during preliminary training—unsurprising, since men’s higher testosterone levels produce stronger bones and muscles. Even the fittest women (which the study participants were) must work at maximal physical capacity when carrying a 100-pound pack or repeatedly loading heavy shells into a cannon.

Ignoring the Marine study, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened all combat roles to women in December 2015. Rather than requiring new female combat recruits to meet the same physical standards as men, the military began crafting “gender neutral” standards in the hope that more women would qualify. Previously, women had been admitted to noncombat specialties under lower strength and endurance requirements.

Only two women have passed the Marine Corps’s fabled infantry-officer training course out of the three dozen who have tried. Most wash out in the combat endurance test, administered on day one. Participants hike miles while carrying combat loads of 80 pounds or more, climb 20-foot ropes multiple times, and scale an 8-foot barrier. The purpose of the test is to ensure that officers can hump their own equipment and still arrive at a battleground mentally and physically capable of leading troops. Most female aspirants couldn’t pass the test, so the Marines changed it from a pass/fail requirement to an unscored exercise with no bearing on the candidate’s ultimate evaluation. The weapons-company hike during the IOC is now “gender neutral,” meaning that officers can hand their pack to a buddy if they get tired, rather than carrying it for the course’s full 10 miles.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“Contemporary politics is driven by a quest for equal recognition by groups that have been marginalized by their societies. But the desire for equal protection can easily slide over with a demand for recognition of the groups supereority Francis Fukuyama (1952-)

Identity Politics is antithetical to everything for which America stands. It elevates the group as it diminishes the personal. It assumes we stay within the boundaries prescribed by the tribe and not wander off as individual warriors. It creates divisiveness, as it pits gay against straight, black against white and “elites” against “deplorables.” It encourages victimization rather than fostering responsibility. Membership in a tribe carries more weight than intellectual curiosity. Tribalism composes the script, a narrative that must be obeyed. Independent thinkers are condemned. Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin – as an Asian woman, an eligible tribal member – put it this way: “Minority conservatives hold a place of utter contempt in the minds of unhinged liberals, who can never accept the radical concept of a person who is rejecting identity politics.” Identity Politics do not reflect an evolutionary process; they are the invention of politicians who find it easier to herd a flock than a sheep.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13536/donald-trump-gary-cooper

President Obama posed as a defender of human rights but refused to lift a finger to help Iranians rising for democracy and Syrians fighting for dignity. President Trump is being castigated for something which he might do but hasn’t done yet, while many of his predecessors actually did.

Gary Cooper had a choice: Stand and fight or jump into the cabriolet where his new bride was waiting to start their honeymoon trip.

Unwittingly, perhaps, and in his unorthodox way, Trump may have invited Americans to also contemplate the choice they have.

Like some of his other quick-tweet decisions, President Donald Trump’s announcement, last month, on troop withdrawal from Syria, triggered a tsunami of instant-coffee comment, most of it adverse.

Ardent advocates of global retreat by the United States feigned anger because Trump was doing what their darling Barack Obama dared not contemplate. Dyed-in-the-wool isolationists hailed the tweet as the start of a return to the Monroe Doctrine, while pathological Trump-haters labeled it as another example of his supposed subservience to Vladimir Putin.

Had everyone waited a little bit longer, the storm-raising tweet may have looked different in the manner that a hologram seems different from different angles.

If a week is a long time in politics, a month must be four times longer. So, what does the quick-tweet “decision” look like now?