RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-universally-bad-idea-1540147422?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=pop&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Bad ideas just won’t die. Ronald Reagan’s goal was to “leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” But they keep coming back, albeit in different forms. Of today’s bad ideas—from net neutrality to open curriculum and living wages—the most dangerous is the universal basic income.

For twisted reasons, Silicon Valley, the embodiment of meritocracy and incentives, thinks universal basic income will be the next great economic force. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is helping to fund a UBI pilot program in Stockton, Calif. He even wrote a book about the idea—something about 1%-ers paying money via tax credits—hardly original.

He’s not alone. Barack Obama has recently expressed interest in the idea. So have Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Marc Benioff and others in Silicon Valley. Why? I figure it’s their misplaced guilt about patriarchal dominance over workers displaced by automation. That’s a triple crown of bad excuses.
Photo: iStock/Getty Images

The enthusiasm seems infectious. In July, Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar told the Intercept, “We need to start having a conversation about automation and a regulatory framework so that if jobs simply go away, what are we going to do with the workforce?” It wasn’t a long chat. This summer, Mr. Pawar introduced legislation for a pilot program that would give $500 a month to 1,000 families. Think of it as a new version of walking-around money. Never mind that Chicago can’t even afford to fund its public-employee pensions. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-reason-they-hate-trump-1540148467

Every big U.S. election is interesting, but the coming midterms are fascinating for a reason most commentators forget to mention: The Democrats have no issues. The economy is booming and America’s international position is strong. In foreign affairs, the U.S. has remembered in the nick of time what Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared.

The contrast with the Obama years must be painful for any honest leftist. For future generations, the Kavanaugh fight will stand as a marker of the Democratic Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, the flashing red light on the dashboard that says “Empty.” The left is beaten.

This has happened before, in the 1980s and ’90s and early 2000s, but then the financial crisis arrived to save liberalism from certain destruction. Today leftists pray that Robert Mueller will put on his Superman outfit and save them again.

For now, though, the left’s only issue is “We hate Trump.” This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America. The implications are important, and painful.

Not that every leftist hates America. But the leftists I know do hate Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable. Worst of all, he has no ideology except getting the job done. His goals are to do the task before him, not be pushed around, and otherwise to enjoy life. In short, he is a typical American—except exaggerated, because he has no constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents.

In 2010, Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of “the ruling class” back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a “cold civil war.” Now he applies the “logic of revolution” to our current political scene.https://americanmind.org/essays/our-revolutions-logic/

The primary objective of any people who find themselves in the throes of a revolution is to find ways of diverting its logic from its worst conclusions.

Prior to the 2016 election I explained (After The Republic) how America had already “stepped over the threshold of a revolution,” that it was “difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate how it might end.” Regardless of who won the election, its sentiments’ growing “volume and intensity” would empower politicians on all sides sure to make us nostalgic for Donald Trump’s and Hilary Clinton’s moderation. Having begun, this revolution would follow its own logic.

What follows dissects that logic. It has unfolded faster than foreseen. Its sentiments’ spiraling volume and intensity have eliminated any possibility of “stepping back.”

The Democratic Party and the millions it represents having refused to accept 2016’s results; having used their positions of power in government and society to prevent the winners from exercising the powers earned by election; declaring in vehement words and violent deeds the illegitimacy, morbidity, even criminality, of persons and ideas contrary to themselves; bet that this “resistance” would so energize their constituencies, so depress their opponents,’ that subsequent elections would prove 2016 to have been an anomaly and further confirm their primacy in America. The 2018 Congressional elections are that strategy’s first major test.

Regardless of these elections’ outcome, however, this “resistance” has strengthened and accelerated the existing revolutionary spiral. We begin with a primer on such spirals, on the logic of mutual hate that drives them, and on their consequences; move to a general description of our evolution’s driving logic, describe the 2016 elections as the revolutionary spiral’s first turn and the “resistance” thereto as the second. Then we examine how the “resistance” affects the other side, and how this logic might drive our revolution’s subsequent turns.

The Cycle and Us

Corcyra’s revolution in 427 BC, the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War, is a paradigm of revolutionary logic. Thucydides tells us that the citizens’ divisions had been of the garden-variety economic kind. Its Assembly had taken an ordinary vote on an ordinary measure. But the vote’s losers, refusing to accept political defeat, brought criminal charges against their opponents’ leader. By thus criminalizing differences over public policy, by using political power to hurt their opponents, they gave the revolutionary spiral its first turn. The spiral might have stopped when the accused was acquitted. But, he, instead of letting bygones be bygones, convinced the assembly to fine those who had brought the charges. After all, they had to be taught not to do such things again. The assembly approved the fine. But the second use of political power to hurt opponents gave the revolutionary spiral its second turn. Had the original wrongdoers paid up, the problem might have ended right there. Instead, outraged, they gave it the third push, bursting into the Assembly and murdering him. That ended all private haven from political strife. Civil war spiraled into mutual destruction, until the city was well-nigh depopulated.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/weve-grown-accustomed-to-trump-1539815943

It’s hard to prove intangibles, harder still when they are in motion, like October clouds, moving rapidly across millions of minds.

One obvious but neglected intangible is worth noticing in the weeks before the elections: The country—consciously or unconsciously—has gotten used to Donald Trump. Twenty-one months into his administration, Mr. Trump has been processed, or half-processed—even subtly domesticated—by the large, complicated American mind, which is improvisational and on the whole incoherent except in moments of national crisis.

Even progressives to whom he is a monster treat him now as, at least, a familiar monster, another of the many disruptive, destructive realities of the 21st century. Life is a matter of learning to live with monsters. Mr. Trump hasn’t destroyed the world yet, as his enemies predicted he would.

In fact, life goes on, much for the better in many neighborhoods. To progressives this is disconcerting—anticlimactic. The market is up. Unemployment is way down. North and South Korea are talking. The Mueller thing goes on and on, but who knows about that? It’s off the screen for the moment.

These days, you only rarely see those psychiatric manifestoes on Facebook and Twitter claiming that the man is psychotic or infantile. They were common in the first year of Mr. Trump’s presidency but the diagnosis loses its force when a voter reflects how psychotic and infantile the culture itself has become. Mr. Trump’s peculiarities don’t seem unusual when compared with the extreme bizarreness, not to say pathology, that is routine on the left.

People get used to the strangest things, once the novelty has passed. Same-sex marriage, a preposterous idea not long ago, is almost everywhere accepted. The world adjusts to new conditions and factors in the Kabuki of opposition and ridicule. A monster may become a cartoon—the Tasmanian Devil. Alec Baldwin’s (never quite accurate) impersonation on “Saturday Night Live” has become part of the Trump routine now. People laugh, or they don’t laugh, but either way, they get up Sunday morning and go about their lives.

Among progressives, contempt for Mr. Trump is an article of faith and hardly worth mentioning anymore at a dinner party. If you are dining with like-minded people, it’s boring to go on and on about the president; if those around the table disagree about him, it seems best to avoid politics altogether.

Americans have given up trying to persuade one another, I suspect. Either their adrenaline is spent, or else they know from experience how dangerous the Trump-stirred passions are—how deeply enraged friends may become at friends, what carnage the spasms of emotion may cause. One tires of politics as road rage. Plenty of people remain almost crazy with anger, and the country’s political and cultural forces overall remain centrifugal, driving people to extremes. Yet civilizing and mitigating countercurrents are at work beneath the surface.

The Kavanaugh confirmation fight clarified many Republican minds in advance of the midterm elections. It half-reconciled even many Never Trumpers to a president who has been so little to their moral or aesthetic taste. They have been driven toward Donald Trump by the Jacobin performance of the left, starting with the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and spilling into the streets among the Maxine Waters and George Soros Brigades. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Dems and their obedient media are in a snit about Kanye West’s proximity to President Trump. Hmmm. However, when the controversial rapper Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr. known as “Common” who glorified police killers and sang about burning President George W. Bush, was invited to the Obama White House they were only mildly perturbed. President Barack Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney defended “Common” by stating that in his “poetry reading” he had a broader message.

Or, how about Obama’s invitation to the rapper Jay-Z? As Humberto Fontova pointed out:

“But for inviting a rapper who identified with Che Guevara a Stalinist mass-murderer who denounced President Obama’s co-citizens as, “hyenas fit only for extermination!” and who openly craved to incinerate millions of them with a surprise nuclear attack….well, not much. Such is the news cycle. ”

For the record:

“I’m like Che Guevara with a bling on!” (Jay-Z in his Black Album)

I will be on vacation….rsk

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13084/brett-kavanaugh-nomination

One can have complete sympathy for someone who underwent the trauma of experiencing attempted sexual assault, but the fishy timing and discrepancies of this reported incident make it hard not to ask what unprovable and undefendable allegations will the next character assassin toss out. Hard-drug use? Child abuse? How pervasive and surreal are such fact-challenged defamations going to get?
According to a report by Congressman Louie Gohmert, Senator Ted Stevens “was not only completely innocent of the manufactured case against him, he was an honest and honorable man. Under Director Mueller’s overriding supervision, the wrongdoer who helped manufacture the case stayed on and the whistleblower was punished.”
Back where I come from, officials investigate crimes that can be named and that have occurred; they do not go around trying to manufacture them. Back where I come from, officials investigate crimes to discover who committed them; they do not investigate people to see if they can come up with one.
I come from America. It is a nice place to visit, but it is a really great place to live. One day I hope to live there again. A good way to make that day come sooner is to end the government’s framing people, and presumptions of guilt. Ending politically motivated prosecutions, criminal conspiracies to overthrow a duly elected president, and ending criminal abuse of power might also help.

Was it the junior prom or just a high-school party? Was Christine Blasey Ford, who says she was the victim of Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault, 15 or 16 years old at the time? Were there four boys present during the incident, as in the notes of Blasey Ford’s therapist, or two, as she says now? Did Kavanaugh’s friend, Mark Judge, who strongly denies the incident, participate? Was it even Kavanaugh who participated, or perhaps someone who looked like him? Why did the alleged victim wait 35 years (or was it 36) to come forward? Why did Senator Dianne Feinstein refer the complaint to the FBI, which has no jurisdiction?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271538/nobody-believes-all-women-daniel-greenfield

fter Christine Blasey Ford’s confused testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Bumble took out full page ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in its trademark black, white and yellow, “Believe Women”.

Probably not a good idea with a dating app accused by some users of fooling them with fake profiles.

Nobody believes all women. The Democrats certainly don’t. Just ask the two women who accused Keith Ellison, the DNC’s number two, of domestic abuse. A Minnesota poll showed that 42% of Republicans believed Ellison’s latest accuser, while only 5% of Democrats did. 71% of Minnesota Democrats didn’t think Al Franken should resign even when the line of accusers stretched out the door and then some.

Democrats are more likely to believe female accusers in the abstract, not when they have political skin in the game. That’s why fewer Democrats were willing to believe the allegations against Al Franken than against Bill Clinton, even though there were far more Franken witnesses and even a photo. Bill Clinton was yesterday’s news, while Franken, like Ellison, was a current progressive champion.

The willingness of more Democrats to believe Bill Clinton’s accusers isn’t evolution, it’s hypocrisy.

Democrats covered for Bill Clinton as long as the Clintons were a viable political dynasty. Only when Hillary went down in flames, and Bill Clinton seemed to spend most of his time playing with balloons, was it safe to start believing the same women they had been ridiculing and demeaning all these years.

And maybe when Keith Ellison retires to practice corporate law or plant bombs in synagogues, the Democrats will finally come around to believing the women who have accused him of abusing them.

Local Democrats are also less likely to believe the women accusing their own politicians than national Democrats are. The left supports #BelieveAllWomen in the abstract, but not when it hits home.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/brett-kavanaugh-reader/

Only a lengthy and voluminously footnoted book could paint the full picture the judge’s ordeal on his way to the US Supreme Court. Nevertheless, what Roger Kimball, John Hinderaker and others have had to say sheds a grimly unflattering light on the tactics and motivations of his accusers.

In Quadrant‘s October issue, Hal G.P. Colebatch contributes the second installment of his two-parter on TDS — Trump Derangement Syndrome — and notes how hatred of this outsider president has drawn forth a venomous insanity wherever the Left prevails. “The Sydney Morning Herald in October, 2016, claimed that ‘Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler Have More in Common than Slogans‘,” Hal writes, adding that the globe-girdling hysteria on the Left has seen “the institutionalisation and acceptance of violence and lies.” If you scratch from the ledger of ‘progressive’ bullying the attempted massacre by a Bernie Sanders supporter of congressional Republicans training for a charity baseball game, an outrage seldom mentioned since in the manistream media, the most vile manifestation of the Left’s principle- and decency-free strategy has been the Borking of US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Below, a selection of the slanders and misrepresentations masquerading as commentary, interspersed with rebuttals the mainstream media has found it convenient to omit. In a better world you might have come across the facts on the ABC, rather than the by-rote Democratic Party talking points the national broadcaster serves up as news. And when an agent of accuracy does get a word in edgeways, the get the treatment accorded Judith Sloan on The Drum. Skip to the 40-minute mark of this video when Judith is repeatedly shouted down by the customary stacked panel. That’s the ABC’s idea of debate, just as this off-with-the-fairies polemic from a US contributor proceeds from the premise that Kavanaugh is the beast from Central Casting and must he held responsible for the ills inflicted on women. (…the image of Dr Ford, giving her testimony, now will accompany Mr Kavanaugh for the rest of his career. The image, in fact, is that of American women of her generation and everything that they have tried to become, and what they have had to endure to do so.)

Roger Kimball’s observations are especially worthwhile, but first a couple of cartoons that further the Democrats’ guilty-until-proven-innocent framing of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/10/04/on_the_question_of_judicial_temperament_138257.html

Last Thursday, we watched Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh vigorously defend himself against very serious charges of misconduct that he has consistently and unequivocally denied, and for which no corroboration seems to exist.

In the wake of that hearing, we began to hear murmurs, which then escalated into much louder criticisms, that Judge Kavanaugh lacks the necessary judicial temperament to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court.

From 1988 to 2006, I served as a district judge in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, becoming chief judge in 2000. Additionally, I have worked with many judges throughout my career, in private practice and in government service. So the concept of judicial temperament is not an abstraction for me, but one that I have had to give considerable thought to.

As it turns out, Judge Kavanaugh is not a newcomer to these concepts either. He had not one but two hearings to become an appellate judge on the D.C. Circuit. His first hearing was in 2004, but his nomination was initially filibustered by Senate Democrats for partisan reasons, based on his role in President George W. Bush’s administration. He was re-nominated and eventually confirmed in 2006, but not before being subjected to another round of intense partisan attacks.

With the bitter taste of partisan acrimony still in his mouth, Judge Kavanagh began his tenure on the D.C. Circuit — considered by some to be the second-most important court in the country. He has served in that role with distinction and earned widespread respect across the ideological spectrum. It was no surprise to those of us who know him that Elena Kagan invited him to teach at Harvard Law School when she was dean there; or that he was recently introduced to the Senate Judiciary Committee by leading feminist lawyer Lisa Blatt; or that he has been praised by leading legal liberals such as former Obama Solicitors General Don Verrilli and Neal Katyal.