RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/meuse-argonne-americas-biggest-battle-100-later/

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive of 1918 was the largest battle ever fought by Americans.

One hundred years ago this morning, at 5:30 a.m. Central European Time, the 1.2 million–man American Expeditionary Force launched all of its available combat strength into the largest and arguably the bloodiest battle in American history: the six-week Meuse-Argonne offensive that continued through the armistice at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The horrific and protracted battle brought a decisive end to the first war in which Americans fought on European soil. Though it was filled with then-famous incidents and notable Americans, the ordeal of the Meuse-Argonne is far less remembered today than Gettysburg, Normandy, Yorktown, Okinawa, or New Orleans. We should keep that memory alive, as it tells us a lot about the America of 1918 and the century that followed.

Amateurs at War
Even the name, “American Expeditionary Force,” speaks to a different era. The armies of America’s wars before 1941 came into being to fight a specific war, and disbanded at the end, leaving their names behind as monuments: the Continental Army, the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the Tennessee. The professionalized, permanent army and Marine Corps were tiny then; the Army in 1917 was less than 150,000 men, compared to some 11 million Germans under arms and 8 million Frenchmen, and ranked as the world’s 17th-largest army. Only after the Second World War would the United States develop what Dwight Eisenhower termed our “military-industrial complex.” Americans had put the world’s most formidable fighting forces in the field against each other in the 1860s but had mostly forgotten the arts of war by 1917, when about 14,000 Americans (two-thirds the size of the Continental Army in mid 1776) were all that could be put in the field in France.

The Marine Corps would do much to build its legend at Belleau Wood in June 1918, and would fight again at St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne under the command of Major General John Lejeune (namesake of North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune), but a small, elite force like the Marines cannot alone conquer a battlefield as vast and densely soldiered as the Western Front. And America’s industrial might was not the decisive factor it would be in the 1940s, when mechanized warfare ruled the battlefield; the American Army Air Service was not a notably effective factor in the battle, and many of the American tanks were borrowed from the French. It was the freshly recruited, still-amateur “Doughboys” of the Army, manning rifles, machine guns, and artillery, who made up the bulk of the estimated 600,000 men committed to the initial assault at H-hour on September 26. The six-week struggle would be the first and, as it turned out, the last time the AEF was fully committed to battle.

Who would have thought that in my dotage, I would suffer from gender dysphoria. No! not what you think. The word “dysphoria” is defined thus: “a state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life.”-It’s a state of unease and anxiety-the opposite of euphoria. In my case it is provoked by the behavior of women- in the academy, in journalism and in Congress.

I am ashamed to share the gender with ninnies like Gillibrand, Hirono, Feinstein, Waters, McCaskill, Harris, the harridans of “The View” and those who judge and convict without evidence; who call a Kangaroo court a “fair hearing” ; who have blurred the difference between dirty talk and real sexual harassment.

#Me no! rsk

https://www.city-journal.org/kavanaugh-feminist-narcissism-16188.html

If Supreme Court Justice William Brennan were posthumously discovered to have aggressively groped a girl once in high school, should that fact discredit his landmark opinions expanding press freedom, legal protections for criminal defendants, and voting and welfare rights? Would it have been better for the country, from a liberal perspective, if Brennan’s judicial career had been derailed from the start? What about Justice John Marshall Harlan, whose groundbreaking 1896 dissent from the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson declared that the Constitution was “color-blind” and rejected state-sponsored segregation? If Harlan had once jumped on a girl as a 17-year-old, should that one-time outbreak of boorish adolescent male hormones efface his contributions as a public thinker?

The Democratic response to the allegation that three and a half decades ago, Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh assaulted a girl during a pool party bears many hallmarks of campus culture, from the admonition that “survivors” should always be believed to the claim that the veracity of the accusation matters less than the history of white-male privilege. But the most significant import from academic feminism is the idea that a long-ago, never-repeated incident of adolescent sexual misbehavior (assuming that the assault happened as described, which Kavanaugh has categorically denied) should trump a lifetime record of serious legal thought and government service. (Now, a new allegation, reported by The New Yorker, that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a Yale classmate at a party—though the New York Times regarded the evidence as too flimsy to publish—has ramped up outrage to the point that feminists are demanding that the Ford hearings they had called for be cancelled.) The feminist nostrum that the personal is political is being weaponized to subordinate the public realm of ideas to the private realm of sexual relations—all, ironically, in the service of a highly political end: preventing a judicial conservative from being seated on the high court. The domain of Eros and the domain of public action are, however, in most cases distinct. If it turned out that James Madison had groped his domestics, it would be absurd to discard the constitutional separation of powers on that ground. Madison’s political insights are more important to civilization than any hypothetical chauvinist indiscretions.

(The ongoing eclipse of political and diplomatic history follows a similar impulse: supplanting what is seen as a too-male realm of ideas and action in favor of the history of identity-based, “marginalized” groups, defined above all by race and sex, whose direct contributions to the evolution of political thought was until recently modest at best.)

But the demand to derail the Kavanaugh nomination is particularly ab

https://www.city-journal.org/due-process-for-brett-kavanaugh-16192.html

Nobody in the United States Senate knows whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers are telling the truth. And yet, quite a few of its members—all Democrats—have already decided that they are telling the truth. Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, for example, have declared that they believe the allegations of Professor Christine Blasey Ford, though she has yet to testify. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii insists that Ford “needs to be believed,” and that men need to “just shut up and step up.”

Oddly enough, the same Democratic politicians who seem to have made up their minds about the matter are the very ones calling for a “full investigation” into Ford’s accusations, as well as those of Kavanaugh’s former Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez. This should set off alarms for anyone concerned about the old-fashioned notion of due process—that is, the procedural fairness that Anglo-American law guarantees to those accused of crimes.

The hallmark of due process is the presumption of innocence. Imagine a judge who announces—before the trial even begins—that he thinks that the accused is lying. Defense counsel would rightly demand that the judge recuse himself. But no recusal has been offered by those senators who would sit in judgment on the Supreme Court nominee.

Because every defendant is presumed innocent, due process also requires that one’s accusers bear the burden of proof. Today, however, this tradition has been turned on its head, with politicians and commentators on the left asserting that the burden is on Kavanaugh—and any other man accused of sexual misconduct—to disprove the accusations against them. Blumenthal, for example, tweets that Kavanaugh has “a responsibility to come forward with evidence to rebut” Ramirez’s accusations of sexual assault. Anita Hill, the law school professor who accused Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearings, has argued that Kavanaugh bears the burden of disproving Ford’s allegations.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

This column is a follow-up of my “Amazon Bans Cline” column, in which I emulate Jeff Bezos’s fictional announcement that he is banning all my books from the Amazon sales platform. Now I link the ongoing, all-too-real farce of Brett Kavanaugh’s Judiciary nomination hearing to a fictional inquest in the Cyrus Skeen series, set mostly in San Mateo, California, in 1927. In this story, Inquest, a local assistant district attorney tries to pin a manslaughter charge on Skeen. The similarities between Skeen’s inquest, about whether or not he murdered a criminal, and Kavanaugh’s confirmation circus, are too similar to ignore.
Definition of inquest

1a : a judicial or official inquiry or examination especially before a jury a coroner’s inquest

b : a body of people (such as a jury) assembled to hold such an inquiry

c : the finding of the jury upon such inquiry or the document recording it

A succinct definition from Wikipedia is:

An inquest is a judicial inquiry in common law jurisdictions, particularly one held to determine the cause of a person’s death. Conducted by a judge, jury, or government official, an inquest may or may not require an autopsy carried out by a coroner or medical examiner. Generally, inquests are conducted only when deaths are sudden or unexplained.

The inquest in San Mateo was focused on the deceased Josephus Kringal. The Foreword to my novel reads:

Struggling to make a success of his detective agency, Skeen finds himself the target of an ambitious local assistant district attorney after an inquest is held surrounding the death of a criminal Skeen had tried to subdue and have him arrested; but the criminal resisted and chose to fight, resulting in the criminal’s death.

Skeen may be charged with manslaughter. The inquest is ended, over the medical examiner’s objections, with the assistant district attorney attempting to charge Skeen with manslaughter and demanding that he be arraigned on the charge. It is early February 1927. This is the twenty-seventh Cyrus Skeen detective novel. Skeen reflects on a case from earlier in his detective career, shortly after he had set up shop in San Francisco as a private detective.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/feminisms-male-enablers/

It is hard not to feel a certain Schadenfreude for that community of men in the universities and professions who are feminism’s enablers, “femimen,” as we may call them. These “white knights” have jumped on the feminist bandwagon in an access of estrogen complicity, for a number of parallel reasons: career prospects, self-doubt, cultural acquiescence, fear of exclusion, docility of character, self-promotion, or sexual advantage. Some may even regard themselves as “survivors.” I give three notable instances of the pathology at work.

Michael Kimmel is the founder of the journal Men and Masculinities, the voice of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook, author of many popular books, and a committed feminist. His Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, described in his university bio as “a comparative study of the extreme right, White Supremacists, and neo-Nazis in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia,” has acquired near-legendary status. His reputation in the field of gender studies is immense and, until recently, untouchable. Now, Kimmel has himself been accused of sexual harassment, a case of a strenuous advocate for women’s rights hoist on his own petard.

So far as I can tell, Kimmel is an unabashed and self-aggrandizing careerist who has never understood the lives of working men. He has thrived on his university authority, popular books and speaking engagements touting the need for understanding of and sensitivity to the plight of women on the part of men enslaved to their own raw and turbulent masculinity. Though he assumes the mantle of enlightened fairness, I regard him as a fraud who has done much harm in promoting the social and cultural dysfunction from which we now suffer. There is a kind of poetic justice in his recent troubles. Naturally, Kimmel immediately played the apology card and lobbied for survival by wishing to “make amends to those who believe I have injured them.” The creepy and patently insincere mawkishness of this star feminist is par for the course. Kimmel is not to be pitied, nor is the feminist sorority to be pardoned. They are equally complicit in acts of malfeasance.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-left-is-consumed-with-hate-1537723198

Even before President Trump’s election, hatred had begun to emerge on the American left—counterintuitively, as an assertion of guilelessness and moral superiority. At the Women’s March in Washington the weekend after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the pop star Madonna said, “I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House.” Here hatred was a vanity, a braggadocio meant to signal her innocence of the sort of evil that, in her mind, the White House represented. (She later said the comment was “taken wildly out of context.”)

For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle. “America was never that great,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently said. For radical groups like Black Lives Matter, hatred of America is a theme of identity, a display of racial pride.

For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes. Certain leaders of the left—Rep. Maxine Waters comes to mind—are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to think of hatred as power itself.

How did the American left—conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world—become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s, when America finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. That acceptance changed America forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy.

The genius of the left in the ’60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it. Thus the labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the left. This is how the left put itself in charge of America’s moral legitimacy. The left, not the right—not conservatism—would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.

This bestowed enormous political and cultural power on the American left, and led to the greatest array of government-sponsored social programs in history—at an expense, by some estimates, of more than $22 trillion. But for the left to wield this power, there had to be a great menace to fight against—a tenacious menace that kept America uncertain of its legitimacy, afraid for its good name.

1. US-Israel special ties are accentuated by Columbus Day (October 8, 2018), which is always celebrated around Sukkot (September 24-30, 2018). According to “Columbus Then and Now” (Miles Davidson, 1997, p. 268), Columbus landed in America on Friday afternoon, October 12, 1492, the 21st day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, in the Jewish year 5235, on the 7th day of Sukkot, Hosha’na’ Rabbah – a day of special universal deliverance and miracles. Hosha’ (הושע) is “deliverance” in Hebrew, Na’ (נא) is the Hebrew word for “please” and Rabbah (רבה) is “The Sublime.” The numerical value of Na’ in Hebrew is 51 (נ – 50, א – 1), which corresponds to the celebration of Hoshaa’na’ Rabbah on the 51st day following Moses’ ascension up to Mt. Sinai.

2. Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles named after the first stop during the Exodus from Egypt, the town of Sukkota (סכותה) – Exodus 13:20-22 and Numbers 33:3-5.
It commemorates the transition of the Jewish people from bondage in Egypt to sovereignty in the Land of Israel; from nomadic life in the desert to permanence in the Promised Land; from oblivion to deliverance; and from the spiritual state-of-mind during the High Holidays to the mundane of the rest of the year. Sukkot aims at universal – not only Jewish – deliverance.

3. However, Sukkot is celebrated six month after Passover. According to the Jewish mystical Zohar (“Radiance” in Hebrew) – which was written by Rabbi Shimon bar-Yochai in the 2nd century and published by Moses de Leon in the 13th century – Sukkot commemorates the divine clouds of glory, which expressed the presence of God, sheltering the Jewish people throughout the Exodus until the return to the Land of Israel. The first appearance of the divine clouds of glory occurred in the first stop of the Exodus, Sukkota.

The holiday of Sukkot follows Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which reaffirm the faith in God’s moral and material supremacy. It is followed by the holiday of Simchat Torah – celebrated a day after Sukkot – which highlights the centrality of the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) in Jewish life. The Sukkot holiday represents a human effort to be worthy of the presence and benefits of the divine clouds of glory.

4. The Hebrew root of Sukkot stands for the key characteristics of the relationship between the Jewish people, the Jewish Homeland and faith in God. The Hebrew word Sukkah (סכה) means “wholeness” and “totality” (סכ), the “shelter” of the tabernacle (סכך), “to anoint” (סוך), “divine curtain/shelter” (מסך) and “attentiveness” (סכת).

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/20/are-we-on

Americans keep dividing into two hostile camps.

It seems the country is back to 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, rather than in 2018, during the greatest age of affluence, leisure and freedom in the history of civilization.

The ancient historian Thucydides called the civil discord that tore apart the fifth-century B.C. Greek city-states “stasis.” He saw stasis as a bitter civil war between the revolutionary masses and the traditionalist middle and upper classes.

Something like that ancient divide is now infecting every aspect of American life.

Americans increasingly are either proud of past U.S. traditions, ongoing reform, and current American exceptionalism, or they insist that the country was hopelessly flawed at its birth and must be radically reinvented to rectify its original sins.

No sphere of life is immune from the subsequent politicization: not movies, television, professional sports, late-night comedy or colleges. Even hurricanes are typically leveraged to advance political agendas.

What is causing America to turn differences into these bitter hatreds—and why now?

The internet and social media often descend into an electronic lynch mob. In a nanosecond, an insignificant local news story goes viral. Immediately hundreds of millions of people use it to drum up the evils or virtues of either progressivism or conservatism.

Anonymity is a force multiplier of these tensions. Fake online identities provide cover for ever greater extremism—on the logic that no one is ever called to account for his or her words.

Speed is also the enemy of common sense and restraint. Millions of bloggers rush to be the first to post their take on a news event, without much worry about whether it soon becomes a “fake news” moment of unsubstantiated gossip and fiction.