RUTHFULLY YOURS

Elections are coming. Hold the Senators’ feet to the fire on the Iran deal. Remember that all the Senators of both parties, with the noble exception of Senator Tom Cotton, enabled the Iran deal when they voted for the Cardin/Corker bill in May 2015, which gave Obama a fig leaf. Although the bill promised tougher sanctions, it was a sham which cleared the path for the Iran deal travesty.

Andrew McCarthy explains it all:
Distorting the Iran-Deal Bill By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/11/obama-iran-deal-corker-bill/
rsk

Where to start? The phrase “unfettered power,” to which I will return, may put you in mind of Lord Acton’s famous observation that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But the context of Acton’s mot was grand politics. “Great men,” he went on to say, “are almost always bad men.”

What we see in the present case—the case of the hall-of-mirrors, matryoshka-doll-like investigation tirelessly pursued by Robert Mueller and his band of merry Democratic prosecutors—is not grand but shabby.

In just a week, we will have reached the first anniversary of what threatens to be an interminable investigation of—what? It’s hard to keep track. Is it charges dating back to 2005 of bank fraud against Paul Manafort, who was briefly Donald Trump’s campaign manager? Or does it have to do with a taxi business in which Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, is involved? It’s hard to say.

Mission Creep
Robert Mueller’s original marching orders authorized him to look into “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” That was the main thing. Acting Attorney General (as he was then) Rod Rosenstein also added that Mueller was authorized to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise [my emphasis] directly from the investigation” as well as “any other matters within the scope” of the governing statute.

That was last May. In August, Rosenstein issued another memo. I would like to tell you what it says, but can only give you the most general sense because, in the version released to the public, most of it is blacked out—“redacted,” to use the term of art that has replaced “collusion” as the political word du jour. Someday I hope to see a communication from the Justice Department or our intelligence services that is 100 percent redacted. The memo was released, just not the words on the memo.

“The sexual revolution stripped young women of the social support they need to play gatekeeper, just as it deprived men of a positive vision, or even a reason, for self-restraint. Recognizing those losses is where any reformation has to start.”

Last fall, as the first #MeToo scandals scrolled across the cable news chyron, I happened to be reading Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s superb new biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. As Hagan describes the magazine’s early years in the 1960s, just about everyone on the staff—male and female—was having sex with everyone else, under and on top of desks, on the boss’s sofa, wherever the mood struck them. Hagan quotes one writer claiming that Wenner told him that “he had slept with everyone who had worked for him.” Compared with Wenner and the early Rolling Stone crowd, Harvey Weinstein was a wanker.

Did the women of Rolling Stone consent to the goings-on at what today would be regarded as an illegal den of workplace harassment? They appeared to. In the company’s bathroom, women employees scribbled graffiti ranking male staffers for their sexual performance—not, as they do on college campuses today, the names of rapists in their midst. Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, was known to judge job seekers by “whether a candidate was attracted to her” and, in some cases, to test the depth of their ardor personally. Photographer Annie Leibovitz, who made her name at Rolling Stone, routinely slept with her subjects and was rumored to have had threesomes with the Wenners.

Different as they seem, there’s a direct line between that revolutionary time and our own enraged, post-Weinstein moment. What started out as a clear-cut protest against workplace harassment has mutated into a far-reaching counterrevolution—a revolt against the combustible contradictions that the sexual revolution set in motion 60-odd years ago.

Exhilarated by the sudden freedom from the restrictive sexual morals of their mid-century childhoods and overflowing with youthful, and often chemically enhanced, animal spirits, countercultural kids like those at Rolling Stone gave little thought to the possible risks of their momentous experiment in sexual liberation. History is filled with social schemes, many cruel, some more lenient, designed to protect women and girls from sexually predatory males, as well as from their own risky but more discriminating desires: everything from codes of chivalry to chaperones, from burkas to single-sex dorms, from courtship rituals to romantic love.

I admit that I am absolutely unfamiliar with the music of Kanye West. But I also suspect that Mr. West is unaware of how his latest comments on slavery actually echo the interpretations of slavery that permeate Jewish classical texts.

When the people, later to be called Jews, were originally slaves in the land of Egypt, they were known as Hebrews and were considered the property of Egypt. After their release from bondage, they became Israelites. After three months of traveling toward the Promised Land, they received the Decalogue and it is here that they are introduced to “the fundamental and astounding idea” of freedom. As Rabbi Ben Zion Spitz, Chief Rabbi of Uruguay explains

God introduces to the world an entirely different concept of ‘slavery.’ It is a temporary condition. A Jewish man, out of luck and resources (typically because he stole something and then couldn’t repay), becomes an indentured servant for six years. He must be treated well and cared for. He must have a quality of life equal to that of his master. However, if he becomes comfortable with his servitude and his master, he can request to stay on longer. The Torah [Bible] prescribes that in such a case the master takes this slave to the doorpost and pierces the slave’s ear by the doorpost, marking him, branding him as a slave until the Jubilee year, when all slaves are freed, all men of Israel reclaim their ancestral lands.

This ear piercing is meant to signify that even though the newly freed people heard the First Statement (often called the First Commandment), they simply refused to listen to its incredibly revolutionary message. G-d freed them but they must be exquisitely careful not to become enslaved again and they must never make slaves of others. Thus, the piercing indicated that they refused to acknowledge that “man is meant to live free and not be the slave of any other human being.”

Once on a visit to Ariel, our host, a determined Jewish resident, told me that the happiest days of his life are those on which babies are born.

In today’s postings, please read:
“Israel’s Demographic Miracle:Birthrates are falling across the world, especially in developed nations—except in one. How did mainstream, middle-class Israelis start having children again, and what does it mean?”
Genesis 1:28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply……”
rsk

“Cohn argues that the prophets who transformed oppression and disorientation into a murderous quest against one whole category of people were the true precursors of the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century. Communists no less than Nazis, he observed, have been obsessed by the vision of a prodigious “final, decisive struggle” in which a “chosen people” will destroy a world tyranny and thereby inaugurate a new epoch in world history. “As in the Nazi apocalypse the Aryan race was to purify the earth by annihilating the Jewish race, so in the Communist apocalypse the bourgeoisie was to be exterminated by the proletariat … a secularised version of a phantasy that is many centuries old.” Cohn finds little difficulty in tracing a disconcerting resemblance between the sermons of the medieval prophets and the speeches of their twentieth-century successors.”

……When the likes of Noam Chomsky set the agenda, anyone who imagines the ‘progressive’ Left of today’s intellectual class is morally worthier or intellectually loftier than the lunatic prophets of medieval Europe needs to think again.

And if we are going to take a moral position on this—and I think we should—we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.
—Noam Chomsky, discussing the slaughter of landlords in Vietnam, Forum on Vietnam War, New York, December 1967

__________________________

A reader asked if Quadrant was going to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the radical student movement of the Sixties that culminated in the mass demonstrations in Paris of May 1968. Believing that, like the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution in October 2017, there was nothing to celebrate, I didn’t give the suggestion much thought at the time. Rather than anything positive, the political and cultural legacies of May 1968 are almost all negative: anti-Americanism, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, anti-humanism, anti-religion, anti-male feminism. In their place, the best the era could advocate was adolescent hedonism: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. At its worst were the views of radicals like Noam Chomsky above, who could conjure up a “moral position” to support the killing of all the landlords in Vietnam. Most of the influences that have so diminished Western culture in the last fifty years derive from the 1960s.

On reflection, however, I recalled that, even as I and most of my generation of 1960s undergraduates eagerly absorbed the fashionable mind-sets of the day, some of us also read a small number of books that warned us there was little new under the Sixties sun, and most of its social experiments had been tried many times before and always ended in disaster.

Is there no limit to the demands of political correctness, the burden of hypothetical solutions to imaginary problems, and the detachment from empirical reality that can be imposed on a society? Here, a list of questions whose answers would be obvious were they not being obscured.

Why do we facilitate the largescale ongoing immigration of refugees from failed states with no assessment of the outcomes? In particular, it would seem worth trying to better understand the effect of a common factor for almost all of the failed states, which is the nature of the culture they share and how this may be affecting the successful assimilation of these immigrants.

Why is there such a political obsession in Australia with climate change and carbon emissions when no recent extremes of climate are outside the bounds of earlier natural variability, when the claimed warming trend is less than the margin of error in measurement and when this is the only developed economy in which the level of natural uptake exceeds the emissions. As Australia is a net carbon sink, why are we not then receiving credits from other nations who are large net emitters?

Why is there a massive drive for wind and solar power when they require three to four times more installed generating capacity than they deliver and, at current levels, are providing only about 10% of baseload demand at already exorbitant cost with increasingly difficult load management problems? Especially, when the full baseload capacity of conventional power is still required to provide backup for the highly erratic alternative power and it must then be running inefficiently in standby mode much of the time

Why the phobia about nuclear power when we have the largest reserves in the world, ideal conditions for it and, with current technology, can enjoy the cheapest, most reliable, safest and cleanest power of all? Better still, we also have vast areas of the most remote, geologically stable and driest places to store any waste.

Why do we ban the clearing of native vegetation and increasingly hamstring our farmers and graziers with myriad environmental costs, restrictions and demands? We used to have an abundance of some of the least expensive high-quality food in the world. Now we have some of the most expensive with increasing dependence on imports.

Do our eco-saviours have no awareness that ecology is above all holistic and that what we do not get in one place only shifts the effect to somewhere else?

Why is it that Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea et al. are always having to impose gross violations of human rights and subject their populations to severe deprivations for some higher purpose which remains permanently in the future? Might there not in fact be some fundamental fallacy in collectivist philosophy that renders freedom, prosperity and equality permanently unattainable?

Why is it that so many of those who profess such great concern over threats to the environment greet any evidence that something may not be as bad as they fear with anger and rejection, never with hopeful interest? Might it be that their real commitment is not to nature but, to displaying their virtue and pleasuring themselves with a delicious sense of self-righteousness?

Mr. Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, was a U.S. senator from 2005-15. He is a Manhattan Institute fellow.

Here’s a simple idea to help lower health-care costs: publish prices. A bipartisan group of state lawmakers in Colorado is pushing a bill to do precisely that. The Comprehensive Health Care Billing Transparency Act would allow Coloradans to see the true price of any health service they use—exams, procedures, prescriptions—before they undertake treatment.

If passed, the legislation would mandate that hospitals and other facilities disclose the base fees they charge for specific services “before applying any discounts, rebates, or other charge adjustment mechanisms.” Every bill sent to a patient would need to include an itemized list, which would allow patients to see if a service had been marked up. By making such information available upfront, the legislation would reintroduce competition to Colorado’s opaque health-care markets.

The bill is the brainchild of Denver businessman David Silverstein, who made news last year when he suggested that consumers stop paying their medical bills until providers show how they arrived at the prices being charged. Mr. Silverstein is the founder of BrokenHealthcare.org, a nonprofit that hopes other states will follow Colorado’s lead in legislating greater health-care transparency.

As profound a change as the Colorado bill represents, all it really would do is let consumers deal with health care the way they do any other product or service. Think about it: When you want to buy a car, you shop around, comparing the quality and price of competing models and the offerings at different dealerships. The same is true for practically everything else Americans buy: refrigerators, houses, office supplies, washing machines, computers, and on and on.

“President Trump’s peace through strength policies are working and bringing peace to the Korean peninsula. We can think of no one more deserving of the Committee’s recognition in 2019 than President Trump for his tireless work to bring peace to our world.” — 18 Members of the US Congress to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, May 2, 2018.

US President Donald Trump was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by a group of 18 members of Congress. In a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, dated May 2, Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.) and 17 other House lawmakers — including Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Diane Black (R-Tenn.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) — wrote that Trump has worked “tirelessly to apply maximum pressure to North Korea to end its illicit weapons programs and bring peace to the region.”

The letter further stated that the Trump administration

“successfully united the international community, including China, to impose one of the most successful international sanctions regimes in history. The sanctions have decimated the North Korean economy and have been largely credited for bringing North Korea to the negotiating table. Although North Korea has evaded demands from the international community to cease its aggression for decades, President Trump’s peace through strength policies are working and bringing peace to the Korean peninsula. We can think of no one more deserving of the Committee’s recognition in 2019 than President Trump for his tireless work to bring peace to our world.”

Although the letter constituted a formal nomination, it was not the first suggestion that Trump might, or should, win a Nobel Peace Prize. On May 1 — mere days after an historic summit between Moon and North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un, during which the two leaders vowed to work toward “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula — Moon was quoted by a Blue House official as saying, “President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. What we need is only peace.”

As she walked the red carpet of the White House Correspondents’ dinner on April 30, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was asked by a Pajamas Media reporter whether Trump would be eligible for a Nobel Peace Prize in the event that North Korea actually agrees to denuclearize, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) replied:

“We’re a long way from that, but let’s see. There’s always an opportunity for a president of the United States to qualify. Let’s see how it goes.”

Pelosi and other Trump detractors are in an uncomfortable position where the Nobel Peace Prize is concerned. Former US President Barack Obama was awarded the prize in 2009, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”