RUTHFULLY YOURS

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:

Why is everyone surprised by the media’s infatuation with Kim Yo Jung, the sister of North Korea’s tyrant Kim Jong un? Anna Wintour, garmenta and fashionista and editor of Vogue magazine which advertises $20,000 pocket books, and supporter of Hillary Clinton once published a paean to the bride of mass murderer Bashar al Assad, entitled “Rose of the Desert.” The column failed to mention the thorns – mass killings, gassing, torturing of civilians which are standard issue atrocities committed by her hubby.

Here is just a snippet of adulation:

“Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic-the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. ”

A few weeks later, the article and all references to it were removed from Vogue’s website without explanation.

Four companies dominate our daily lives unlike any other in human history: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. We love our nifty phones and just-a-click-away services, but these behemoths enjoy unfettered economic domination and hoard riches on a scale not seen since the monopolies of the gilded age. The only logical conclusion? We must bust up big tech.

I’ve benefited enormously from big tech. Prophet, the consulting firm I cofounded in 1992, helped companies navigate a new landscape being reshaped by Google. Red Envelope, the upscale e-commerce company I cofounded in 1997, never would have made it out of the crib if Amazon hadn’t ignited the market’s interest in e-commerce. More recently, L2, which I founded in 2010, was born from the mobile and social waves as companies needed a way to benchmark their performance on new platforms.

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The benefits of big tech have accrued for me on another level as well. In my investment portfolio, the appreciation of Amazon and Apple stock restored economic security to my household after being run over in the Great Recession. Finally, Amazon is now the largest recruiter of students from the brand-strategy and digital-marketing courses I teach at NYU Stern School of Business. These firms have been great partners, clients, investments, and recruiters. And the sum of two decades of experience with, and study of, these companies leads me to a singular conclusion: It’s time to break up big tech.

Over the past decade, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—or, as I call them, “the Four”—have aggregated more economic value and influence than nearly any other commercial entity in history. Together, they have a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion (the GDP of France), a staggering 24 percent share of the S&P 500 Top 50, close to the value of every stock traded on the Nasdaq in 2001.

How big are they? Consider that Amazon, with a market cap of $591 billion, is worth more to the stock market than Walmart, Costco, T. J. Maxx, Target, Ross, Best Buy, Ulta, Kohl’s, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Saks/Lord & Taylor, Dillard’s, JCPenney, and Sears combined.

The brouhaha regarding Poland’s new law is misunderstood. Poland’s defenders explain that it is all a matter of semantics. What are referred to as the “Polish death camps” were really German/Nazi camps. The correction is fair enough. But correcting a phrase leads so many Polish defenders to air-brush the complicity of Polish anti-Semites in aiding the Nazis. Oh yes…of course there were exceptions…noble people hid and helped Jews at great risk to their lives. But the majority did not and the word “Żyd”- Polish for Jew was an invective and curse.

My parents were Polish, and I speak Polish but I prefer to focus on present antisemitism hounding the Jews throughout Europe and in the entire Arab world, but to call the Polish history of brutal anti-Semitism “revisionist history, plagiarism and slander” is outrageous. My parents left Poland in 1930 because of the anti-Semitism that flourished long before the Nazi invasion. Of my family that remained- grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – all were herded into the ghetto, and killed along with millions of “Zyds” with the undeniable indifference or outright collusion of the Poles. As usual it is blamed on economics:

Exhibit A: Today on Frontpage it is explained thus:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269267/polands-new-law-criminalizing-speech-about-danusha-v-goska

“It’s undeniable that in interwar Poland, that is, between the end of WW I in 1918 and the onset of WW II in 1939, anti-Semitism flourished. The interwar period, for complicated historical reasons, saw one of the worst outbreaks of anti-Semitism in Poland’s history. Interwar anti-Semitism was largely predicated on economic grievances. Jews had occupied the middleman minority caste. Most Poles were impoverished peasants. They wanted to own shops and study to become doctors and lawyers. For some, not all Poles, these honorable ambitions veered into the dark, twisted path of anti-Semitism.”

What a pathetic explanation and excuse. rsk