RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13489/political-debate

The European Union, too, is clearly on the decline. Despite Pollyannish talk of creating a European army and closer ties among member states, the EU has lost much of its original appeal and faces fissiparous challenges of which the so-called Brexit is one early example. I believe that the only way for the EU to survive, let alone prosper, is to recast itself as a club of nation-states rather than a substitute for them.

Another significant trend concerns the virtual collapse of almost all political parties across the globe. Within the year now ending, a number of mostly new parties forced their ways into the center of power in several European countries notably Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Holland and Sweden. Interestingly, the more ideological a party is, the more vulnerable it is to the current trend of decline in party politics. This is why virtually all Communist and nationalist parties have either disappeared or been reduced to a shadow of their past glory.

The massive development of cyberspace has given single-issue politics an unexpected boost. Today, almost anyone anywhere in the word could create his or her own echo-chamber around a pet subject. Here, the aim is to fight for one’s difference with as much passion as possible.That trend is in contrast with another trend, promoted by the traditional, or mainstream media, offering a uniform narrative of events. Turn on any TV or radio channel and go through almost any newspaper and you will be surprised by how they all say the same thing about what is going on.

As the year 2018 draws to a close, what are the trends that it highlighted in political life?

The first trend represents a growing global disaffection with international organizations to the benefit of the traditional nation-state. Supporters of the status quo regard that trend as an upsurge of populism and judge it as a setback for human progress whatever that means.

Today it is not the United Nations alone that is reduced to a backseat driver on key issues of international life. Its many tentacles, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, too, have been reduced to a shadow of their past glory. In the 1990s, the two outfits held sway on the economies of more than 80 countries across the globe with a mixture of ideology and credit injection. Today, however, they are reduced to cheer-leading or name-calling from the ringside.

The European Union, too, is clearly on the decline. Despite Pollyannish talk of creating a European army and closer ties among member states, the EU has lost much of its original appeal and faces fissiparous challenges of which the so-called Brexit is one early example. I believe that the only way for the EU to survive, let alone prosper, is to recast itself as a club of nation-states rather than a substitute for them.

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/12/27/isaac-

In many ways, the world may seem more like 1984 today than it did in 1984.Electronic surveillance of our every keystroke. Shifting international alliances. Authoritarian risings. Fake News!

The dystopian world that George Orwell imagined 35 years before the year 1984 seems closer to today’s reality than it did in his 1949 book’s namesake year.

But on Dec. 31, 1983 — as the world was about to ring in that Orwellian year — another noted author took a crack at predicting what the world would look like a further 35 years hence, in 2019. And how well science fiction writer Isaac Asimov did in that Toronto Star special can now be examined as that year dawns.

Asimov — who died in 1992 — predicated all his New Year’s Eve forecasts on the assumption that the world could avert a nuclear war in the coming decades. And even as the intervening Cold War thaw appears to be refreezing — with a new nuclear arms race in the offing — our species did manage to avoid annihilation.

Thus we survive to gauge the accuracy of Asimov’s predictions in his other two essay themes: computerization and space utilization.

And it appears he was no Nostradamus.

For example, while he did predict there would be a space station up and running by 2019, planning for that international effort had been underway for years by the time of his writing.

Outside of some unmanned probes, however, the station was as far afield as humans would venture into the heavens over the next three and a half decades. And his fanciful visions of large mining projects on the moon — let alone the massive, orbiting structures they’d provide materials for — seem loony in hindsight.

On computers, he was equally hit-and-miss, says York University computer scientist Zbigniew Statchniak.

To be fair, Statchniak says, computing was advancing at such a speed as 1984 dawned that predicting where it might go would have been next to impossible.

“Having said that,” he adds, “I think he got easy things right and difficult things wrong.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/kavanaughs-trial-by-ordeal-burning-truth-in-effigy/

The news from Washington is that 85-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the lionised liberal so often depicted as the Supreme Court’s heroic bulwark against Trumpism, has lung cancer. When the time comes, will it be possible to find a replacement prepared to face the Jacobin accusations and evidence-free slanders heaped on a blameless man?

The smearing of US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was hardball politics at its most disingenuous. The stakes were unambiguous. The Democrats and their supporters wanted to delay and derail his nomination. The tactic was to wait till the end of the regular nomination hearing and then leak an accusation that the judge was guilty of sexual misconduct. Base politics for sure, but Democrats had tried twice before to derail a Supreme Court nomination with confected allegations. So the ploy was not surprising. Republicans kept their nerve. They patiently navigated three weeks of brutal character assassination of a major public figure with a spotless track record.[1] In the course of those days the Democrats attempted to turn the supplementary Senate Judiciary Committee hearing into a show trial. As that unfolded, the very nature of “Brett Kavanaugh” changed. He was transformed from a nominee for America’s highest court into a symbol of America’s political division.

A part of Kavanaugh’s trial by ordeal was simple political payback. Kavanaugh had worked under Ken Starr at the Office of Independent Counsel investigating legal matters related to Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct. Kavanaugh’s appointment as a Circuit Judge to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was blocked by Democrats for three years during the George W. Bush presidency.[2] The Kavanaugh imbroglio, though, turned out to be much more than just opportunistic payback. The two weeks of attempted trashing of Kavanaugh’s life and reputation tapped a much deeper vein in American life. A tsunami of protest, pressure, intimidation, bluster, stunts, grandstanding, demagoguery, defamation and table-thumping erupted across much of left-leaning America, leaving moderates and conservatives shocked.

At a certain point the Kavanaugh hearing stopped being about him. Instead it become a reckoning of the broader America society with itself, in particular a reckoning about the nature of truth. The Democrats put truth on trial. The result was disturbing. The Kavanaugh ordeal revealed that long-observed and once keenly-held notions of evidentiary truth have been rejected by a substantial minority of Americans, many of them in the vocal professional-managerial elite.[3] Evidentiary truth means that an allegation or claim that we make about serious matters needs to be backed up with compelling facts and independent observations before it can be accepted.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

In today’s Times a letter to the editor appears from Letty Cotton Pogrebin regarding the accusations of anti-Semitism in the Women’s March: “Since the first Women’s March in 2017, a number of feminist intermediaries have tried to help bridge the organizers’ ideological and political gaps, with scant success. Until all of us understand that anti-racism and anti-Semitism are the same toxic madness split at the root, and until we embrace intersectionality, without defining any woman out, our struggle against sexism and racism will be hobbled by our squabbles with one another.” When I googled Letty’s name with different combinations of women’s march/anti-Semitism, only one article surfaced written in March 2017, a few months after the first march. Here’s what Letty said then: “When it comes to Israel and Palestine, I’m with Nancy Kaufman, CEO of the National Council of Jewish women, who says she’ll work with anyone except those who reject Israel’s right to exist. This winter she (Kaufman) met in advance with organizers of the Women’s March on Washington to ensure that message would be ‘pro-something, not anti-Israel.’ She received assurances that the march would focus on the issues NCJJW cares about – women’s health, reproductive justice, immigration, children and families, economic equality, voting rights, misogyny and bigotry. The Washington March did all that and more based on its core commitment to intersectionality, the belief that forms of oppression are linked and must be confronted simultaneously. Given today’s vitriolic political environment, intersectionality is not just a galvanizing theory, it’s an organizing tool. (Moment magazine, 3/6/17

Before the first march took place, co-organizer Linda Sarsour, an American woman who identifies as Palestinian and wears a hijab to proclaim that, made it clear that “no feminist could be a Zionist,” that as a woman of color, she could not invite Zionist women to march with other females because they support a colonial, oppressive regime – Israel. Co-organizer Tamika Mallory joined with Black Lives Matter to also protest the inclusion of any Zionist and both women were ardent supporters of infamous anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan as well as the BDS movement which aims to destroy Israel economically and culturally and ostracize that country from the community of nations. As for intersectionality, it notoriously excludes Jewish groups from participation, considering them among the “privileged white” as opposed to the oppressed people of color. Sarsour’s comments before the first march were made on national t.v. – not hidden in a private e-mail. At the time of the first march, no Jewish leader spoke out to caution Jewish women about supporting a movement organized with anti-Semitic intent. In New York, some religious leaders were proudly marching alongside members of their congregations whom they urged to participate. In New York, feminist Letty remained silent and subsequently endorsed the march despite all contrary evidence that anti-Semitism had been removed from its fundamental charter.

It took a year before actress Alyssa Milano, a founder of the MeToo movement, came forward and announced that she would not join the 2019 march unless the organizers repudiated their adulation of Lewis Farrakhan and their own anti-Semitic comments. That made news and suddenly other voices were heard, though it wasn’t until Dec 28th that Letty’s letter appeared, particularly odd since she had written about anti-Semitism in the women’s movement as early as June, 1982. (Ms Magazine) Letty, along with other religious, community and political leaders, needs to do more soul-searching as to why so many Jews who are outspoken about Islamophobia, racism and misogyny and other headings of the liberal agenda – waited until after the Pittsburgh massacre to focus on the clear and blatant message of Jew hatred behind the Women’s March.

I just read one of the most honest pieces of self-indictment ever written at Medium.com. I just read one of the scariest pieces of self-indictment at Medium.com. These two articles were one and the same and they define the complete arrogance of the Progressive movement; a movement which has now turned full-blown Fascist.

In this article, titled Intolerant Liberals by Tucker FitzGerald (love the capitalized ‘G’ in Fitzgerald, it’s so painfully hip) he professes to explain to everyone that people who identify as Conservatives are completely miss-reading Progressives. He states clearly that, “We have no interest in everyone getting treated the same. We have no interest in giving all ideas equal airtime. We have no interest in ‘tolerating’ all beliefs.”

Indeed, Mr. Fitzgerald – with a capital ‘G’ – has it right when he says Conservatives have Progressives pegged incorrectly. Progressives aren’t “progressive” at all. They are Fascists.

In speaking from his pedestal of arrogance, he posits an example of “true equality” in saying that the election of a female President of the United States would mean nothing but a drop in the bucket. In Fitzgerald’s eye (and evidently those of his Fascist brethren, as well) he believes true equality can only happen in the instance of the presidency after 45 women are elected, consecutively, to the office.

Evidently, Mr. Fitzgerald’s testicles reside in the bottom of his girlfriend’s woMan-wallet.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/26/democratic-socialism-or-social

Back in August, Jacobin journalist Meagan Day declared that “democratic socialists want to end capitalism.” The subtitle of her article in Vox explaining the movement explicitly stated: “It’s not just New Deal liberalism.” There is some disagreement about this on the Left. Kyle Kulinski, an independent media commentator and co-founder of the Justice Democrats, supports democratic socialist candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Justice Democrats endorse a myriad of candidates who do not take large donor capital, many of them sharing endorsement with the DSA. Nevertheless, Kulinski rejects the “post-capitalist” approach to democratic socialism, and holds that “so many people now describe themselves as ‘democratic socialists’ and they do not support a post-capitalist philosophy.

In the clip above, Kulinski argues that there is a fundamental confusion of labels—politicians whose policies are entirely in line with Nordic social democracy are defining themselves as democratic socialists. He places the blame for this confusion on Bernie Sanders, who, despite a career of never praising actual socialism, has been lumped in with Venezuela and a post-capitalist ideology. If Bernie had labelled himself correctly, Kulinski maintains, the current confusion over democratic socialism and social democracy would not exist.

DSA co-chair Joseph Schwartz was quoted in a 2015 PolitiFact article litigating the difference between democratic socialism and the Nordic model: “When Bernie is asked, ‘Are you a socialist?’ he doesn’t deny it, and he immediately talks about Scandinavia. He uses [democratic socialism and social democracy] interchangeably. But if you look at his history, he knows the distinction.” A Quillette article published in March and entitled “The Falsity of the Sanders Venezuela Meme,” also observes that Sanders, uniquely among left intellectuals, has never expressed support for the Venezuelan model of politics: “There is no record of Sanders sponsoring or co-sponsoring any symbolic motion which praises the ‘achievements’ or policies of Hugo Chavez,” as well as a quote from Sanders during the Presidential primary, emblematic of his career: “When I talk about democratic socialism, I’m not looking at Venezuela. I’m not looking at Cuba. I’m looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/swine-before-pearls-the-lefts

‘Tis the season to be … quoting spurious scriptural interpretations in support of open-borders immigration policies. Baby Jesus was a refugee, don’t you know? A simple slogan for simple minds, it cannot withstand the slightest scrutiny. Yet year after year, that is what we are loudly and insistently told.

It’s become quite fashionable with the advent of social media for amateur theologians to posture as experts on Christian living, doctrine and to even claim confidence of what the historical Jesus Christ would support or oppose. Ironically, many personally reject any authority or validity of Scripture in their personal lives – it’s just something they pretend has authority when they ignorantly assume it supports their position.

The most common example by far people who quote the first two words of Matthew 7, “Judge not”, without reading the rest of that very chapter, which teaches Christians how to judge righteously, looking beneath the surface of every issue, identify the root by the fruit while discriminating against metaphorical pigs, dogs and wolves in sheep’s clothing and rebuking oppressors. Far from not judging, there’s an awful lot of good judgement required, not to mention self-examination.

I was advised by a good friend with whom I almost always agree, that I should include more columns criticizing the withdrawal of our troops from Syria. I did below. However, they only hardened my support for troop withdrawal.

First: Jewish “leaders” are opposed? As I recall they were not uniformly opposed to Obama’s disastrous and scurrilous appeasement of the mullahs in the infamous Iran deal.

Second: Israel is “nervous” that the removal of 2000 American soldiers will embolden Iran, Turkey and Syrian jihadists. Now, I am hawkish on Israel- very hawkish on a hawkish Israel with defense forces that do not rely-never- on any foreign guarantees for the security of the nation. Am I to believe that the presence of 2000 United States troops is necessary for Israel’s defense?

Sorry I remain unconvinced. And as for General Mattis- he was opposed to moving the United States embassy to Jerusalem; opposed to quashing the Iran deal; was opposed to the 2017 bombing of Syria in retaliation for Syrian chemical weapons attacks; opposed to leaving the G20 global climate fraud. Since it is a holiday I will say one nice thing about him. General Herbert Raymond McMaster was worse. rskrsk

https://spectator.us/adults-trump-childish/

What Malcolm said of the Thane of Cawdor — ‘nothing in his life/ Became him like the leaving it’ — cannot be said of General James Mattis’s leavetaking his position as Secretary of Defense.

Let me first say that General Mattis has long served his country with distinction, betraying immense care for the Marines and soldiers under his command as well as condign fierceness towards the enemies of civilization. As Secretary of Defense, he obliterated ISIS as a fighting force and has overseen the beginnings of a critical upgrade of America’s military infrastructure, which had been allowed to atrophy under the lead-from-behind posturing of Barack Obama.

Like President Trump, I liked the fact that Mattis’s nickname was ‘Mad Dog,’ though I understand he dislikes the soubriquet. After the America-last, apologize-first foreign policy of Obama, it was nice to have a Secretary of Defense with sufficient backbone to compliment the steeliness of a robust Commender-in-Chief such as Donald Trump.

At the same time, I remember several conservative friends expressing reservations about Mattis when his nomination for the post of SecDef was announced. He was, it was widely rumored, a Hillary supporter and, what’s more, his view of foreign policy was much more in line with the Bush-Obama species of moralism than Trump’s ‘we’ll-do-what’s-in-our-national-interest’ pragmatism.

So it was hardly surprising that rumors of Mattis’s imminent departure have circulated at least since last summer. As the Trump administration matured and the President’s policy of ‘America First’ (which does not, as POTUS perhaps neglects to point out frequently enough, mean ‘America Alone’) came increasingly on line in his foreign policy, it was inevitable that fissures between Mattis and Trump would open up.

Predictably, the neo-con fraternity has its collective knickers in a twist over Mattis’s announced departure. Max Boot, who is always good for a laugh these days, epitomized the angst in some recent tweets. ‘Jim Mattis is gone,’ he said in one. ‘God help America. And the world.’ But then it has been obvious for some time that for Max the criterion of a good decision is that it was not taken by Donald Trump.

It should also be said that that even if the President and his Secretary of Defense were in perfect accord about things, it is hardly surprising that a Secretary of Defense should leave after two years. Indeed, by the time he departs, at the end of February, Jim Mattis will have served longer than the last three Secretaries of Defense: Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, and Ash Carter.

The sad thing about Jim Mattis’s exit is his grandstanding, not to say petulant and immature, mode of departure. The letter announcing his resignation, circulated yesterday, is half bureaucratic boilerplate (‘I have been privileged to serve,’ ‘proud of the progress,’ etc., etc.).

But those nuggets are set in a jelly of snarky recrimination about how he, Jim Mattis, has always believed that our strength as a nation is ‘inextricably linked’ to our system of ‘alliance and partnerships.’ Further, he says we must treat our allies ‘with respect’ while remaining ‘resolute and unambiguous’ about ‘those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,’ e.g., Russia and China.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-not-steel-will-win-the-next-war-11545598669

The Trump administration this year imposed tariffs on steel, claiming that imports “threaten to impair the national security of the United States.” But the age is long past when steel was the most important input in a nation’s military arsenal. The modern military depends more on digital technology—semiconductor chips, sensors and software—than it does on steel.

The U.S. pioneered the technology that made today’s advanced weapon systems possible. But America’s competitive advantage in the digital economy is eroding at an alarming pace, along with its domestic high-tech manufacturing capacity. The majority of electronic systems first invented in the U.S. now are designed and made overseas, mainly in Asia. With few and dwindling exceptions, the U.S. no longer makes things like flat-panel displays, memory devices, light-emitting devices, lasers, imaging chips for digital cameras, and computer system packaging software.

As the manufacture of these component technologies has migrated offshore, so have many key systems suppliers. Intel is the only remaining U.S. company capable of fabricating high-density, high-performance computer chips in America. International Business Strategies estimates that investors are pouring $50 billion a year into advanced chip production facilities in Asia, more than 10 times the level of domestic spending. A state-of-the-art chip-fabrication plant can cost $20 billion to build and must be continuously upgraded.

The national-security implications of this industrial migration are dire. Without a domestic capability in critical electronic technologies, the U.S. may find itself unable to translate innovation into effective weaponry. Overseas supply chains are inherently insecure. Unless the manufacture of critical technology remains under domestic control, American systems are vulnerable to espionage and sabotage.