RUTHFULLY YOURS

In January, when negotiations over the fate of 800,000 DACA recipients broke down, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blamed the impasse on the alleged racism of President Trump and his senior advisers.

“Last night the president put forth a plan,” Pelosi told the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “Let me just say what I said last night, that plan is a campaign to make America white again.” This was not only an obvious lie, but a spectacularly brazen one, since Trump’s announced plan would provide a path to citizenship not only for the illegal aliens who had benefited from President Obama’s constitutionally suspect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, all of whom are nonwhite, but for a million additional illegals, mainly from Latin America, who are also mainly nonwhite.

Trump’s general immigration plan seeks to move to a merit-based system, which would give priority to immigrants who can contribute needed skills to the country and would have a reasonable chance of success once they arrived. Giving priority to English speakers would enhance the ability of new arrivals to assimilate and succeed. To oppose such a plan on the grounds Pelosi does, one would have to believe that nonwhite immigrants don’t have skills or don’t speak English. Anti-Trump reporter Jim Acosta made the latter insinuation on CNN. He said Trump wanted only immigrants from majority-white countries like “England and Australia.” In fact, English is the official language in more than 57 countries, including such nonwhite countries as Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Botswana, as well as Caribbean nations like Jamaica and Guyana.

Pelosi’s malicious accusation was even more disconnected from reality, since Trump has never proposed excluding or expelling populations based on race, which would be the only way to “make America white again” (whatever that might mean). Yet this denial of obvious facts in order to gin up a racial indictment of what otherwise would be seen as patriotic policies has become the ever-present theme of the Democrats’ attacks on Trump’s presidency. These attacks began with his first statement on immigration during the opening presidential primary debate. At that time, speaking specifically of people crossing the border illegally, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

When the human experience is simplistically divided into two worlds, then things increasingly do not easily fit.

Specifically, what happens when the number of victims begins to outnumber the pool of oppressors? At that point can the oppressed become victims of the oppressed?

The following news stories illustrate the increasingly incoherent world of the aggrieved and their aggressors:

Item: Nancy Pelosi is on a tour to blast the new tax reform and reduction law, whose savings often will result in $1,000 or more per annum to families. The law already had encouraged private enterprise bonuses to employees due to employer savings. Pelosi habitually scoffs that such savings are “crumbs.” At a recent speech, after she intoned that income inequality would be exacerbated, a woman in the audience shouted out, “How much are you worth, Nancy?”

Fair question. She and her husband, a developer and property investor (with apparently good connections within the bureaucracy of federal construction, land sales, and property acquisitions) are worth over $100 million. They own more than one multimillion-dollar home. And soon the Pelosis are likely to pay tens of thousands of dollars more in California property and income taxes that are no longer fully deductible under the new law that she so energetically despises.

Could that banal fact explain why Pelosi is so heated about a reform that gives the middle class more take-home pay, and will create more jobs and bonuses from the private sector—partly at the expense of blue-state, high-income professionals like herself?

From this teachable moment, we could conclude that progressivism is so often promoted by the very rich. They are best positioned to game the system and seek exemption through virtue-signaling about the poor. The Pelosis of our postmodern world assume that they are not to be subject to the ramification of their ideologies (she dismissed the rude questioning without answering). And they so often exhibit a peculiar contempt for the working middle classes. The latter are clueless, in need of guidance, and supposedly deluded by the promise of “crumbs”—given their lack of education and sophistication, and the absence of the romance accorded to the distant poor. How did we ever get to a point where a progressive politician on the barricades, worth $100 million, lectures the middle class that their extra $200-300 a month are crumbs?

Albert Einstein’s unsurpassed prowess in physics needs no introduction, but lesser known is that his creative genius and curiosity extended beyond the realm of relativity and photoelectrics into tinkering and inventing. Over his life, Einstein filed patents for a range of innovative products.

The first, and most successful, of his exploits was a refrigerator. In the 1920s, nascent refrigerators used highly toxic, corrosive, or flammable compounds like sulfur dioxide or methyl formate as refrigerants. When passed through tubes and chambers while being pressurized and depressurized, these chemicals could efficiently cool a target chamber. However, moving them around required motors, and thus moving parts, which were subject to breaking down or leaking. When Einstein read a news article about an entire family in Berlin who died in their sleep by breathing in leaking refrigerant fumes, he resolved to do something about it.

He and his colleague Leo Szilard thus spent the early 1930s designing a refrigerator that utilized calmer chemicals – butane, ammonia and water – as well as an ingenious electromagnetic pump. The system required no internal moving parts and was completely sealed. All it needed was an external heat source in the form of a contained natural gas flame.

Promoting the deconstruction of gender roles, as modern feminism urges, works to divorce women from their intrinsic natures—a very unhappy outcome. Worst of all, it creates one more wedge issue suitable for the further aggrandisement of government power.

In December 2016 a special episode of the BBC hit Sherlock reprised in cinemaplexes across the United States. “The Abominable Bride” had had its silver-screen debut eleven months earlier, but popular appeal induced the distributor Fathom Events to bring it back. Although primarily designed for Sherlock’s fan base, the show’s defining conceit, Holmes and Watson in modern dress, was suspended. Instead, the plot warped back to the London of Arthur Conan Doyle, where a succession of cads and bounders have been murdered by what seems a vengeful female ghost. Initially stumped, Sherlock consults his brother, Mycroft, who enigmatically confides that the perpetrators compose an invisible army, found everywhere, who cannot be resisted because “they are right”. Thus guided, Holmes eventually discovers a congregation of hooded feminists in a ruined abbey, plotting the murder of their nastiest victimisers. The drama never quite concludes—it’s but a drugged fantasy of the modern Holmes interrupted by anxious friends—yet there’s no doubt of the heroic status of the homicidal assembly. They’re true social justice warriors, if a bit avant la lettre.

While it never is, or has to be, made explicit, the episode’s moral premise, one that now saturates Western consciousness, is that women rate among the great victims of human history. Certainly none in the audience I joined seemed at all uncomfortable with it. And why should they be? It’s the core message of contemporary feminism, affirmed by politicians, the media and, most especially, our socially engaged professoriate. The latter, in fact, have “theorised” it in the now fabled formula of “race, gender and class”. Settled wisdom in the university, and holy writ for women’s studies, the formula is meant to link women with serfs, slaves and other forms of immiserated labour. Off-campus progressives embrace the equivalence as well—the unity and moral authority of their victims’ coalition demanding no less. Without it the recurrent political trope of a “war on women” would appear as risible as that of a war on cat fanciers.

So, is the formula valid?

Clearly not—at least if one is willing to use evolution’s scorecard in assessing winners and losers. Evolution’s bottom line is reproductive success, how many offspring are produced and, of these, how many themselves survive to reproduction. Prospectively it determines the size of an individual’s contribution to future gene pools. Retrospectively it suggests the degree of wellbeing an individual has likely experienced—wellbeing having much to do with succeeding at what comes naturally.

In defending an aide accused of wife beating, President Trump asked, “Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” Alas, without defending all such claims, the president has a point that allegation often translates into culpability without an adherence to due process.It is fair to say that without due process, arbitrary judgment would prevail. The presumption behind this legal provision is that the state must respect the legal rights of the individual and guarantee that no accused is punished without an orderly and adequate procedure that is applicable uniformly in all cases.

With an epidemic of sexual harassment cases, due process is very often honored only in the breach. What this means, of course, is that the legal justification for punishment is dubious, even when warranted. British legal precedent passed this provision on to the New World, where it has been refined and ensconced. However, for many who have been victimized, legal machinery works too slowly and cumbersomely to generate the justice being sought.

Yet it would be a monumental mistake to assume due process can be eliminated or down graded. Kangaroo Courts relied on admission of guilt after punishment was meted out. In fact, the system of law this nation has enjoyed would be imperiled by any diminution in due process procedures.

“…nor shall any State deprive any person of life,liberty or property, without due process of law…”

14th Amendment U.S. Constitution Ratified July 9, 1868

“People’s lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused – life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?” So Tweeted President Trump, following the resignation of White House staff secretary Rob Porter. That the Tweet may have been self-serving and that there is a discrepancy as to when the White House was notified by the FBI of Mr. Porter’s alleged mistreatment of his two wives does not negate the importance of Mr. Trump’s observation. While the Left immediately jumped on the Tweet as confirmation that the President had declared war on #MeToo and women in general, someone had stood up for the accused. Due process – the concept of innocence until proven guilty – is embedded in our Constitution and is at the heart of our judicial system.

Dozens of alleged victims of harassment and worse have emerged, since revelations about Harvey Weinstein first appeared in The New York Times last October. The media has tried and convicted the accused in their pages and on air. I do not doubt that many, if not most, of those accused are, in fact, guilty. Many men take advantage of vulnerable women. And some women submit to unwanted passes when they are scared or feel it is to their advantage. The world is competitive, and people do what they must to succeed, whether in school, sports, on the stage or in the office. Predators lurk. Such behavior reflects today’s culture – that nothing is more important than winning.

Tomorrow is called “President’s Day” but it is still called George Washington Day by the government as established in 1885 to occur on the third Monday of February. He was our first President who served from 1789 to 1797.

Two famous quotes are:
“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.”
My favorite quotes are in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island written on August 21, 1790:

“…….The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship……

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support…..

May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy…..”

I have been around guns my entire adult life. My father, my brother and my husband- gentle, kind and peaceful gentlemen- all owned guns. I spent many evenings before a fireplace in Connecticut cleaning, oiling and polishing handguns.

Each tragedy begets screeching about guns from both sides in the debate. A dear and scholarly friend- a physician, master carpenter and conservative sent me the following note which is a fair appraisal:

“Another awful day of carnage at the hands of an unstable young man wielding an automatic rifle. I’m all for protecting the Constitution, but when the writers penned the Second Amendment, fire arms were muzzle loaders that required three stages of ramming home powder, then wadding, and then the ball. No one envisioned even an all in one bullet comprising all three that could go directly into the breach of the weapon, much less automatic rapid-firing weapons with 30 round clips. AR-15s are military weapons used for killing humans in battle.

There is no reason for such weapons to be available for purchase by consumers other than the armed forces and law enforcement. With all due respect to the rights of hunters, why should such a weapon be used for hunting? Is the hunter fearful that the deer might shoot back if the first shot misses its mark and therefore needs to get off multiple rounds quickly to be certain the animal is dispatched? Background checks on buyers are certainly necessary but do not come into play on the secondary market where people with clean records purchasing guns make a profit when re-selling to folks who might not qualify as a gun buyer.

The issue can be dealt with while preserving the Second Amendment rights as envisioned by the founding fathers. I do not hunt, but my friends that do would give up the sport if their prowess was so bad as to require an automatic, big clip weapon.” M.M.M.D.

Last week Senator Rand Paul briefly shut the government down in protest of the $500 billion spending bill recently signed by the president. This latest binge will by 2027 increase to $800 billion the already $300 billion we currently spend on servicing the $20 trillion national debt. And that projected increase assumes interest rates at 3.5%. The debt-driving deficits are again approaching $1 trillion a year, meaning the debt will continue to expand beyond 100% of GDP, reaching $30 trillion in a decade.

But like Troy’s Cassandra, who for ten years accurately predicted the city’s destruction, Senator Paul was no more successful at alerting people to the coming calamity. Nor are any of the other fiscal hawks likely to do so either. The majority of citizens and politicians have no interest in our looming fiscal disaster, for they have become used to thinking that entitlements are “rights.”

The fiscal problem is one of simple mathematics. We spend much more than we take in from tax-paying citizens, which leads to more and more borrowing to make up the shortfall. And we have made promises to the people––Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid––that we have not funded adequately, and that now account for nearly two-thirds of the annual budget. Social Security alone has unfunded liabilities of about $34 trillion, and that’s not as bad as Medicare’s $49 trillion. Worse yet, every day 10,000 Baby Boomers retire, meaning the beneficiaries will continue to expand. And right behind the Boomers are the 66 million Millennials. We’re looking at decades and decades of relentlessly increasing expenditures and the borrowing required to pay for them.

Most of the “solutions” to this problem are preposterous, functioning mainly as a political narcotic to numb the voters’ minds. The left thinks that raising taxes on the “rich” will generate enough money to fund these programs, even though confiscating all the wealth of America’s billionaires couldn’t fund the whole government for one year. The right thinks cutting taxes will create economic growth that will generate enough funds to put us in the black. But we can’t tax or grow our way out of this problem. Half the voters don’t pay federal taxes, nor do payroll deductions cover the whole bill for the average retiree, who will take more in benefits from Social Security and Medicaid than he paid for. Economic growth indeed increases revenues, but we typically spend the extra money instead of saving it so we can pay future bills or reduce the debt.

On Monday evening, I joined Tucker Carlson to discuss Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s evidence-free analysis of the last election, and say a few words on the new Obama presidential portrait. On the last point I had a few cheap cracks ready re the extra finger Obama’s chosen artist has given him (see right). That makes eleven digits, which oddly enough is as many as the national debt had under him. [See Timothy McDonnell’s important note below.] Etc. But Tucker chose to move on to Justice Ginsburg, and to be honest any reasonably competent person can do his own shtick re the Obama portraiture, so you don’t need mine.

As to judges moonlighting as pundits, what with one thing and another, I was less tolerant of this latest and most prominent example of America’s hideously politicized judiciary than I might have been. Click below to watch: