RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2018/12/18/confessions-of-a-soulless

I became friends with Jamie when I was 13, a few years after my family fled the Soviet Union and settled in what was then one of the most diverse neighborhoods of south Brooklyn. When we first met, Jamie (not his real name) told me that he was a genius—that his Catholic school teachers said so after he wrote a poem about vaginas and read it aloud in front of the whole class. He told me he wanted to be “an author.” In the 1990s, our street was a spontaneous symphony of the working poor, a place where kids bonded by trading ethnic insults in a dozen languages. I had mastered this crude local vernacular. Jamie’s ability to step outside of our street language, speak freely and dream about something larger was transfixing.

Unlike Jamie, I churned through the city’s public schools without attracting much notice. My teachers did not seek genius. In high school, they were too busy keeping us from killing each other. I learned nothing and barely graduated. After Jamie went off to a university in Manhattan, we lost touch. I attended a local public college and came out with degrees in Business and Philosophy, graduating shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The business major was a concession to my immigrant parents. But Wall Street was in ruins. And philosophy obviously wasn’t much help. I worked a string of odd jobs, ultimately landing a writing gig for a consumer magazine that paid less than what I’d earned parking cars.

In 2009, I joined Facebook and looked up Jamie online. He had graduated from a prestigious Master of Fine Arts program in fiction. He also was awarded a coveted fellowship that came with a brief mention in one of the country’s finest literary magazines. He was married, and had a toddler son. Though surprised at first, he seemed happy to hear from me.

I was eager to catch up. We hadn’t spoken or seen each other in more than a decade. But the conversation invariably steered itself toward our young new president, Barack Obama. I’d voted for him and felt a swell of emotion when he spoke at his 2008 inauguration. Like Jamie, Obama was bi-racial, raised by his white mother, with a penchant for rhetorical flight.

Jamie and I would speak on the phone, discussing how refreshing it was to finally have a man of eloquence and grace in the White House. We railed against obstructionist Republicans who undermined Obama—like Joe Wilson, who shouted “you lie!” during the 2009 State of the Union address. We were living in momentous times. At last, the nation had elected its first black president, and Jamie and I were friends again.

The big news from their respective sides of the Atlantic was the sentencing of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and the confidence vote in UK PM Theresa May. Neither party merited the final score.

I would find the standard operating procedure of US federal justice – squeeze till you squeal – utterly repugnant even if it were not so selectively applied. Me on October 19th 2016:

Comey’s FBI is hopelessly corrupted – and certainly more corrupt than J Edgar Hoover’s FBI…

That was months, and in some cases years, before the revelations about Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page et al. Michael Cohen is a sleazy shyster even by the standards of his grim trade, but the issue is the ability of the feds to get you on something once they decide it’s in their interest to do so. Which is not the hallmark of any real justice system.

~In that respect, the more interesting federal prosecution in the news yesterday was an under-reported story out of New Jersey. Per The North Jersey Record:

Feds: NJ woman forced Sri Lankan woman to marry her, enslaved her for 9 years

On a dreadful rainy night this past Thursday, I trudged to Carnegie Hall to hear the magnificent “Messiah” composed by George Friedrich Handel in 1741 performed by “The Masterwork Chorus and Orchestra.” Since I was in high school I have never missed a holiday season performance even if I had to sit on uncomfortable wooden pews in churches or in 1969 when I was nine months pregnant and stood during an entire 137 minute performance.

In William Congreve’s play “The Mourning Bride” (1697) the first line states ” Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.”

Truer word were never spoken. I went home in driving rain humming “And He shall reign forever and ever.”rsk

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272319/pull-out-syria-and-afghanistan-use-money-build-daniel-greenfield

When President Trump first dispatched the first 2,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border, there was a loud outcry. And now that he’s pulling 2,000 troops out of Syria, there’s more outrage.

But where do 2,000 soldiers belong more, in Syria or on our own border? When it comes to deploying troops on the border, the media is quick to rush out and inform us that it will cost $182 million. But no calculators are in sight when 2,000 troops are deployed in enemy territory thousands of miles away.

Are we spending $600 billion on national defense to protect Syria or to defend the United States? Are young men and women volunteering to risk their lives to defend their country or someone else’s?

The government faces a shutdown over Trump’s call for $5 billion for a wall. Meanwhile the $8.6 billion we’ve spent on “humanitarian assistance” in Syria has never been challenged. Operation Inherent Resolve in Syria and Iraq was budgeted at $15.3 billion for FY2019. But that $5 billion can’t be found.

$2.2 billion was diverted from counterterrorism to arm and train Syrian Jihadis, some of whom were Muslim Brotherhood while others joined up with Al Qaeda. Some of the Jihadis we funded in Syria even ended up fighting each other. Still others turned our weapons over to ISIS. And many ran away.

We had $500 million to spend on training Syrian Jihadis in 2018, but nobody can find $5 billion to build a wall and keep Jihadis out of our country.

There was outrage when the Trump administration diverted $200 million for cross-border stabilization efforts… in Syria. That’s more than the $182 million the first 2,000 troops sent to the border cost. If Congress really can’t find $5 billion in an accounting error somewhere to build the wall, then it can find the money by withdrawing from Syria and using the cash we were going to spend on an RPG for Abdul.

T’WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS AND ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE
THE GOP LAME DUCKS DID NOTHING BUT GROUSE
THEY ANALYZED AND GROANED AND COMPLAINED PLENTY
WITH VISIONS OF BIGGER LOSSES IN TWENTY TWENTY.

I TOSSED AND I TURNED WITH INTERRUPTED SLEEP
WITH NIGHTMARES OF DEMS WITH AGENDAS TO KEEP.
WHEN OUT ON THE LAWN THERE AROSE SUCH A CLATTER
I SPRANG FROM MY BED TO SEE WHAT WAS THE MATTER.

AN ANTI TRUMP RODEO WAS FORMING A LINE
NADLER, SCHUMER AND COMEY RODE IN ON SWINE
MUELLER WAS GALLOPING ON A HORNED STEER
HOLDING A RAT AT THE END OF HIS SPEAR.

BERNIE, BIDEN AND CORY TROTTED ON ASSES PAINTED BLUE
BETO, KAMALA AND GILLIBRAND SAYING #ME TOO!
A HUMAN CARAVAN HOISTING FLAGS OF DISPARATE NATIONS
SHOUTED AND FLAUNTED THEIR VOTER REGISTRATIONS.

THE CHAOTIC SCENE ALMOST MADE ME SCREAM
WHEN I AWOKE FROM THE TERRIBLE DREAM.
TOO LATE FOR SLUMBER I SAT UP AND REFLECTED
ON THE MANY GOOD POLICIES THAT TRUMP EFFECTED.

FAKE NEWS, CLIMATE FRAUD AND OBAMACARE TANKED
MORE JOBS, FEWER TAXES AND MORE INCOME BANKED.
IN TRADE WITH CANADA AND CHINA TRUMP HELD THE FORT
AND KAVANAUGH AND GORSUCH JOINED THE COURT.

ON NATIONAL SPEECH HE BECAME A DEFENDER
OF HE AND SHE AND REAL PRONOUNS OF GENDER
WHILE MERKEL, MACRON AND TERESA FACE DOOM
OPTIMISM AND PRIDE GREET OUR ENERGY BOOM.

WITH SINCERE HOPE THAT ONLY GOOD DREAMS COME TRUE
I WISH YOU A HAPPY NOEL AND A GREAT NEW YEAR TOO.
RUTH KING

Two thousand troops? Only two thousand troops can stabilize, bring peace, destroy Isis, defend the Kurds, and inhibit Iran and Turkey in a sea of tribal and religious wars? I think Trump is right.

We have a volunteer national army. Why risk the life of a single soldier for no real gain? If war is declared against Isis then let full military power destroy them. Remove the ridiculous and politically correct “Rules of Engagement” that endanger our troops and punish those who flout them in self defense.

And finally, stop pussyfooting and name the enemy. They are not “militants” or “combatants”- they are faith driven Jihadist barbarians who hate Western values and are committed to murder the infidels and establish Sharia laws wherever they alight and gain strength. rsk

https://quillette.com/2018/12/20/feminisms

Reading the news stories about #MeToo and sexual harassment, and the barrage of social media posts that accompanied these headlines, I became saddened but also increasingly frustrated. It wasn’t the reports of men behaving badly that angered me, but the despair that seemed to be the expected response to these stories, and the helplessness that my female friends appeared to attach to femininity itself that I found troubling.

The unintended and painful irony of recent feminism’s preoccupation with overcoming male oppression has been to place men at the centre of female identity. This makes the feminine experience something like an echo; women’s voices seem to be little more than a response, or a rebuttal, to men’s voices, which are taken to be primarily an instrument of patriarchal oppression. But, in my own experience, men aren’t interested in maintaining power and control over women—they simply don’t see women as a group that they are oppressing, or that they would like to oppress.

We hear a lot about “male privilege” but historically it has been the “privilege” of men to make their way in the hard world in order to first win a woman’s affections, and then support the family structure financially. We might call this “patriarchy,” but this term isn’t the synonym for misogyny that contemporary progressive political culture seems to think it is. (One has to appreciate the misplaced sincerity of many of my university students who roundly condemn The Patriarchy, while driving their father’s Toyota to campus every day, and using his savings to pay for their tuition. Not infrequently it occurs to me that the people who are most vocal against The Patriarchy are those who have benefited from it the most.)

A further concern I have with the message and tone of contemporary feminism is that women have evidently forgotten that we have power over men as a result of the fact that we’re women—men adore us, and almost all their efforts at work or at home or in social settings, are made to win our approval, if not our admiration. In short, I am bewildered by the fact that in a culture in which The Patriarchy has never had less power over women, women seem to want to attribute to it a greater power than men in fact have, thereby confining women to a position of victimhood and powerlessness.

Victim status holds its own form of power, of course, but this nurtures resentment which is always utterly joyless. Curiously, mainstream feminism seems designed to perpetuate the story of male power and oppression: feminists seem to need it as an antagonist against which to define themselves.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/alice-walker-anti-semitism-the-left-lends-cover/

Ignoring anti-Semitic actions or comments depending on the perpetrator’s ethnicity or background allows hatred of Jews to spread.

This week, The New York Times Review of Books printed an interview with Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple. The interviewer asked Walker to list the books on her nightstand. Most were unobjectionable. One was not: a book titled And the Truth Shall Set You Free, by David Icke. Walker described the book thusly: “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.”

As Yair Rosenberg of Tablet noted, this is a bit of problem. As it turns out, Icke is a rabid anti-Semite, and And the Truth Shall Set You Free is a tome of vitriolic Jew-hating garbage. Rosenberg explains that in the book, “The word ‘Jewish’ appears 241 times, and the name ‘Rothschild’ is mentioned 374 times. These references are not compliments.” The book itself suggests that the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax tract written in the late 1800s, was indeed genuine.

The Times itself has received the lion’s share of the blame for Walker’s reference. But the more interesting question is why Walker herself has been able to escape censure. As Rosenberg points out, Walker has repeatedly praised Icke’s work, has written openly anti-Semitic poetry (“Simply follow the trail of ‘The / Talmud’ as its poison belatedly winds its way / Into our collective consciousness”), and has personally refused to allow The Color Purple to be translated into Hebrew. Yet she is still a well-respected member of the leftist intelligentsia.

https://quadrant.org.au/
Donald Trump Is a Good President One foreigner’s perspectiveBy Michel Houellebecq, John Cullen (Translator) https://harpers.org/archive/2019/01/donald-trump-is-a-good

Those who have read Michel Houellebecq’s memorable Submission, which Douglas Murray reviewed for Quadrant upon its release, will know the author as a remarkably independent thinker — a brave one, too, given his novel tells how France’s elite learns to stop worrying and love the Islamic takeover of their former country. Writing critically of Islam is dangerous, which perhaps explains why feminists in Australia and elsewhere get themselves histrionically upset about tampon taxes but utter not an adverse word about burkas, the veiling of young girls, patriarchal oppression, arranged marriages and genital mutilation.

Houellebecq’s courage turns out to by multi-faceted, as he has just published an essay on Donald Trump (“a good president”) that offers offers a unique perspective on the US president’s virtues, albeit garnished with a full measure of rather more typical Gallic sneers. A taste from Harper‘s:

… Trump is pursuing and amplifying the policy of disengagement initiated by Obama; this is very good news for the rest of the world.

The Americans are getting off our backs.

The Americans are letting us exist.

The Americans have stopped trying to spread democracy to the four corners of the globe. Besides, what democracy? Voting every four years to elect a head of state—is that democracy? In my view, there’s one country in the world (one country, not two) that enjoys partially democratic institutions, and that country isn’t the United States of America; it’s Switzerland. A country otherwise notable for its laudable policy of neutrality.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Recently, a granddaughter, a senior in high school, was asked to write an essay on morality and evolution. It was a subject that caught my imagination. Was not Jesus, who lived two thousand years ago, the most moral person ever? Can one argue we are more ethical today? Do our grandchildren have better manners than did our grandparents as children? How did a world that produced the Enlightenment, two hundred years later create a Hitler and a Stalin? Would anyone suggest that Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are more respectful of others, have higher ethical standards and are less narcissistic than George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison? It is hard not to conclude we have witnessed a reverse form of evolution, at least when it comes to morality

Evolution is a natural condition. Civilizations evolve, mostly for the better. Consider the buildings we live in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive. Technology has changed the way we communicate, how we shop and the care we provide the sick. We have sent men into space. We grow more crops on less acreage. Evolutionary forces have reduced poverty and extended life expectancy. Even laws and prisons have become less draconian. Government has evolved – from authoritarianism to democracy. According to the website www.ourworldindata.org/democracy, 13 million people lived in democracies in 1830, while 3.92 billion did in 2012. Additionally, racial segregation has been addressed and government care is provided the elderly and impoverished. There has been a downside. War has become more horrific. A small number of social media companies influence how we think; privacy issues have been raised, and the prospect of cyber-war fare has increased. Still, technology-driven evolutionary forces have given us much, including time. But have they made us more gracious and considerate? Has compassionate government made us more respectful, thoughtful and thankful?

Different people will offer different answers, but one possibility is what William McGurn recently called “The Crisis of Good Intentions,” reminding this reader of Milton Friedman: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than results.” In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Mr. McGurn noted that there are those who claim that capitalism is facing an existential crisis. He cited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“wild-west capitalism”), Thomas Pikety (“patrimonial capitalism”) and the Archbishop of Canterbury (the gig economy is “the reincarnation of an ancient evil”). These are people who see capitalism as pernicious and government as the genesis for equality and social good. Yet California, the most socialistic of U.S. states, has the greatest income inequality of any state. It has the highest poverty rate, as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which allows for differences in cost-of-living; yet, with 12% of the nation’s population, it is home to 24% of the nation’s billionaires. In his op-ed, William McGurn quoted Chapman University’s Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky: “California is creating a feudalized society, characterized by the ultra-rich, a diminishing middl