RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The main question here should be: Given Islam’s 14 00 year, rapacious, murderous rampage among Muslims themselves (the Sunnis vs. the Shi’ites and various Islamic sub-groups) and against the West, why would anyone want to save it as a “great” faith? Given Islam’s sociopathic and nihilist nature, how can it be called “great”?

Recently, a leading, pro-Brexit, and articulate critic of the European Union confessed that he has “faith”: Faith in what? In the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful Deity. To judge by the encounters I’ve had with Christians (I do not have many discussions with Jews or Muslims on the subject of God), faith for people is a form of unquestionable certitude – almost synonymous with certainty – as an emotional means of knowing the truth about God etc. thanks to their unexamined feelings. Too likely their faith in the existence or condition of something not in the real world undercuts their profession of being reality-oriented. “I know that capitalism works and sets men free and that Britain can only become stronger if it leaves the EU.” How does he know that? Is his epistemology and metaphysics poisoned by faith? The mental compartmentalization of his faith and the real, of the provable or demonstratable of the real versus the unprovable, makes his fealty to reality untenable.

The position of most people is: “What else is there but faith in the Almighty, in miracles, in God’s goodness, and the sublime imperative handed down by God to treat all men as brothers? God created the universe, and everything. Sure, reason has its place in man’s existence but it must keep to its place – we’re not saying that doing the Hokey Pokey will start a car’s engine, in lieu of simply turning the ignition key – however , that is the limit of reason, logic, and of what we call cause and effect. Reason and reality are not substitutes for faith,” they aver with fervor. “The evidence of the senses and reason should not be the paramount measures of authentic knowledge.” So, they say; if the emotion is real and strong enough, so must be the object of that emotion.

An unexamined, spontaneous emotional appraisal is a dangerous thing. If one feels that something is true or right, then it must be true or right. What often stuns me is to meet someone who is otherwise completely rational and reality-oriented and then to hear him admit, in passing or unintentionally, that he believes in a Deity, or in a lucky rabbit’s foot. Faith in the reality of the non-existent and unprovable, to say nothing of the acceptance as “divine” handwork of the contradictory a (such as the destructive handiwork of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions), becomes a substitute for knowledge.

Emotions are not causeless, rootless, or inexplicable. Love is not blind. Nor is hate. Even indifference to an artwork, a person, or thing, as a pre-conceptual appraisal, has an emotional base. An emotion is partly a physiological response to one’s values, or to non-values, to likes or dislikes, to attractions or fear. It is closely linked to the excitation of the nervous system, in various states and strengths, depending on the appraisal of the value seen and responded to; but it is a value one is responding to. It just does not well up within one, causelessly; the cause must be discovered and examined because it always has one. Rational introspection is a key to “knowing” whether or not one’s appraisal of a person or thing is correct or anchored in reality.

Democrats, in their role as opponents of President Trump, have taken to calling themselves “the resistance.” But I was startled a few days ago when a thoughtful, much-admired conservative commentator used the same term on TV—casually, as if “the resistance” was just the obvious term. Everyone is saying it. It’s no accident that the left runs American culture. The right is too obsessed with mere mechanics—poll numbers and vote counts—to look up.

“Resistance” is unacceptable in referring to the Trump opposition because, obviously, it suggests the Resistance—against the Nazis in occupied France. Many young people are too ignorant to recognize the term, but that hardly matters. The press uses it constantly. So when a young innocent finally does encounter the genuine French Resistance, he will think, “Aha, just like the resistance to Trump!” And that’s all the left wants: a mild but continuous cultural breeze murmuring in every American ear that opposing Trump is noble and glorious. Vive la Résistance!

This abuse of “the resistance” happens everywhere. Many Republicans hate Mr. Trump and love to denounce him—which lets them show their integrity and, sometimes, a less-praiseworthy attribute too.

Many intellectuals think Mr. Trump is vulgar. That includes conservatives. They think he’s a peasant and talks like one. Every time he opens his mouth, all they hear is a small-time Queens operator who struck it big but has never had a proper education, and embarrasses the country wherever he goes, whatever he says. It never dawns on them that the president can’t stand them any more than they can stand him. Yet they expect him to treat them with respectful courtesy if he ever runs into them—as he should, and on the whole does. Conceivably they should treat him the same way.

Conservatives regret the collapse of authority, dignity and a certain due formality in the way Americans treat each other. They are right to complain when any president diminishes his office. Mr. Trump ought to think more seriously about what he owes the great men among his predecessors, and the office itself. But it’s not clear that commentators make things any better when they treat the president himself like a third-rate clown.

I’d love for him to be a more eloquent, elegant speaker. But if I had to choose between deeds and delivery, it wouldn’t be hard. Many conservative intellectuals insist that Mr. Trump’s wrong policies are what they dislike. So what if he has restarted the large pipeline projects, scrapped many statist regulations, appointed a fine cabinet and a first-rate Supreme Court justice, asked NATO countries to pay what they owe, re-established solid relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, signaled an inclination to use troops in Afghanistan to win and not merely cover our retreat, led us out of the Paris climate accord, plans to increase military spending (granted, not enough), is trying to get rid of ObamaCare to the extent possible, proposed to lower taxes significantly and revamp immigration policy and enforcement? What has he done lately?

Conservative thinkers should recall that they helped create President Trump. They never blasted President Obama as he deserved. Mr. Obama’s policies punished the economy and made the country and its international standing worse year by year; his patronizing arrogance drove people crazy. He was the perfect embodiment of a one-term president. The tea-party outbreak of 2009-10 made it clear where he was headed. History will record that the press saved him. Naturally the mainstream press loved him, but too many conservative commentators never felt equal to taking him on. They had every reason to point out repeatedly that Mr. Obama was the worst president since Jimmy Carter, surrounded by a left-wing cabinet and advisers, hostile to Israel, crazed regarding Iran, and even less competent to deal with the issues than Mr. Carter was—which is saying plenty. CONTINUE AT SITE

By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research

As a young man coming from a left-wing pedigree, I embraced a liberal agenda which included most notably, a belief in Israel as a bastion of socialism and democracy. In the 1950’s a good progressive was a good Zionist.

Oh, how the world has changed. Now a progressive has moved 180 degrees to anti-Zionist position. As one wag put it, the Left is now the congenial home of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. One of the leaders of the progressive left recently said, “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

Linda Sarsour, the leader of the Woman’s March in Washington and a commencement speaker at the City University of New York clearly embodies the new spirit on the Left. She has praised Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, once anathema to liberals. She has honored Embrased Rasmesh Odeh, a terrorist murderer. She has spoken in favor of Sharia finance.

What is truly remarkable, and to some degree ideologically shattering, is that the New York Times wrote a fawning profile about this woman who challenges all liberal principles. She had the audacity to say that “the vagina of Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be taken away,” the same Ayaan who has worked so hard to promote women’s rights throughout the Muslim world. Yet the ADL defends Sarsour.

For the Left, Zionism has promoted Islamophobia – a false critique from the standpoint of Islamists. As a consequence, anti-Semitism is rendered a virtue, as a way to discourage negative sentiment about Islam. Yet even when the evidence of anti-Semitism is incontrovertible, the Left contends anti-Semitism is a figment of an hysterical, oversensitive imagination. For the most part, Jews are being systematically written out of the progressive agenda, even though they were responsible for that agenda in the first place. But why quibble.

On July 4, 1776 our young nation declared independence from England with the immortal words:

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness……”

Nine years later our magnificent founding fathers held the Constitutional Convention from May 25th, 1787 until September 17th of that year which concluded with what I call “The Torah” of our democracy, namely the Constitution whose preamble reads:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The first ten amendments were proposed by Congress in 1789, at their first session and became a part of the Constitution December 15, 1791, and are known as the Bill of Rights.

For a little perspective on the magnitude of these events, in June of 1793 until August 1, 1974 France was subjected to a “reign of terror” – thousands of death sentences and bloody executions for opposition to the Revolution. In England public executions attracted large crowds of spectators, including tots, until 1868.

America remains a more perfect union and we retain the rights formulated in the First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petitition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

And the irony is that those who take every measure promised in the foregoing, are now doing their best to violate real liberalism and democracy. But, our great nation will prevail. Happy birthday to America the best land of all…..rsk

The fluid-gendered-progressive world order has no use for ancient or modern myths of marriage, family, religion or the idea of ‘a man and a woman’. Consider the word ‘heterosexual’, which the academy has recast as ‘heteronormative’, as if we are sufferers of some category of paraphilia.

The phone rang. It was the psychiatrist, who was interrupting my lunchbreak with an update on a referred patient. I listened and sensed frustration in his voice.

“Your patient really drained me,” he sighed. “Her endogenous depression had stabilised but she’s going downhill again and all because of what her daughter brought home from school.”

The cause of the patient’s depressive relapse and the psychiatrist’s angst is the teacher of the daughter of the patient. The daughter’s new sex-education instructor had been telling the class that penises and vaginas don’t determine gender any more. The children were told that sexuality is what you make it. Yes! That’s what a teacher told a class of teenyboppers, schoolgirls going through the menarche, the most impressionable time of their lives …

“I went after that teacher on the net,” he continued, “and it seems that this person has some sort of borderline gender disorder which doesn’t appear in the DSM, maybe because the compilers of the DSM-5 couldn’t agree on whether they were dealing with a dysfunction, a misfortune, or a lifestyle. Nevertheless, this indistinctly gendered person whose anatomically ambiguous pudendum predisposes to idiosyncratic supratentorial symptomatology is accredited to take classes of pubescent schoolgirls and instruct them on their nascent sexuality, notwithstanding the muddled sexuality of the instructor.”

On hearing all that, my first thought was: What a lark it must be to be a psychiatrist and to have carte blanche to go fossicking about in the medical clouds. But then I realised that his poking about up there was not a happy romp, because he scampered back down to earth to deliver a blistering analysis of the ruinous impact that Progress was having on the Human Condition.

“Free floating anxiety, reactive depression and hysteria are rampant!” he yelled into the phone, and after catching half a breath: “It’s like a medieval plague!” He explained: “But the carriers of today’s epidemic are the dismal Marxist rats that have washed up into our universities from the rotten hulk of communism … legions of progressive ideologues have infiltrated and infested all the institutions of higher learning, they are brainwashing our uncritical youth and they are turning them into compliant PC teacher warriors like the one that is screwing up our patient through her daughter!”

That’s a very harsh analysis, Maurice. You make it sound as if the university has become a health hazard. Could it be that the teacher has been misunderstood because of poor communication?

“Teaching is about good and proper communication,” he insisted. “This person is talking sex to little kids in newspeak. In our day a school leaver needed a good pass mark to make it into a teachers’ college to learn how to teach—in English. These days a university will admit anybody from an open field of applicants and drum into her (occasionally it’s a he) gender studies, post-Freudian evolutionary psychology and all sorts of reconstituted neo-Marxist claptrap. The academics marinate her grey matter in social-science slime, season it with the latest teaching fads, and when she’s demonstrated a satisfactory level of Orwellian fluency, they send her out to teach. In this case, fashionable fantasies of sexual liberation at a school near Marrickville.”

That’s where that Christian community got spooked by the speed with which the Safe Schools caper came galloping up from Melbourne.

“Yes, sexologists from some social engineering university in Victoria started trickling their fluid-gender theory into the school just after a Stranger Danger campaign had passed through the district. No surprise then that the parents became wary about strangers interfering with their children or that they panicked when the kids started bringing home pearls like: ‘Sexual orientation is written in the DNA but sexual preference is written in the wind …’

“That’s what prompted your referral of the frantic mother. She unloaded onto me how the parent group rallied against the Safe Schools caper, how they were debunked by the teachers, ignored by the media and forced to abandon their protest. So now we have an anxious, depressed and hysterical mother to deal with.”

Gender dysphoria robs a mother of her daughter.

The migration crisis that has been central to the European political drama since 2014 is rapidly changing. You can see signs of change everywhere, from subtle intensifications of bureaucratic language to an increasing frankness about what the migration crisis has done to Europe’s nations and societies. It also shows up in the numbers. The overall rate of migration into Europe is starting to decline, but the number of migrants who are dying in their attempt is going up. But you can see it most of all in the willingness of European leaders to tell the truth.

Just in the past ten days, you can see a shift. European Council president Donald Tusk admitted that most of the people coming in have no right to do so: “In most of the cases, and that is actually the case on the central Mediterranean route, we’re talking clearly and manifestly about economic migrants.” He added, “They get to Europe illegally, they do not have any documents which would allow them to enter the European soil.” In other words, these primarily aren’t refugees fleeing war, they’re economic migrants, who are coming in to countries along the southern Mediterranean that already suffer massive unemployment.

The reality is sinking in within the member states as well. Aydan Ozoguz, the German commissioner for immigration, refugees, and integration, admitted this week that three-quarters of the refugees Germany took in recently will still be unemployed in five years.

Just a year ago, pundits were holding out that Europe would find economic salvation in the “warm bodies” crossing the Mediterranean. It was an argument that never made sense, given the millions of unemployed but educated youth already in the European Union. Instead of a new round of guest workers, Germany has added hundreds of thousands of new dependents on the state, most with few job skills and no language preparation. The latter problem now taxes police departments, whoich have to find Pashto translators to investigate crimes such as the murder of Muslims for apostasy.

For years, Australia’s government had told the EU that they would have to look at Australia’s model for successful border enforcement. EU officials dismissed this, often with criticism of Australia’s approach. But earlier this year, just as Australian prime minister Tony Abbott had predicted, EU officials came to Australia for help.

On Friday, the European Union member states agreed to restrict visas for foreign countries that refuse to take back their own nationals who do not qualify as refugees.

Germany’s deal with Turkey, along with the enforcement position of Viktor Orban’s Hungary (which Germany still pretends to deplore) has mostly closed the land route into Europe through the Middle East – but now the Libyan coast is the main source of migration. The EU’s President Tusk described a 26 percent rise in the number of migrants arriving in Italy from Europe over the Mediterranean.

But it may finally be dawning on Europe’s elites that their attempts to rescue people at sea are endangering migrants as often as saving them. Migrants hoping for a European rescue are put on inflatable rafts (or worse) and launched off the coast of Tripoli. They make about one-sixth of the journey toward Sicily, and sometimes even less. Once they cross out of Libyan waters they enter what is commonly known as the “Search and Rescue” Zone or just “SAR Zone.” They then signal their distress and get European rides the rest of the way — or they collapse and capsize and the migrants drown. Over the weekend, the Irish navy, and its ship LÉ Eithne, took more than 700 migrants. The composition tells you the nature of the migration: a score of children, some pregnant women . . . and over 500 adult males.

Loyalty is generally a force for good, as it was in La Résistance, in 1940-44 France; but it can be a force for discord, as it is in The Resistance, in 2016-17 United States. In 1940s France, loyalty kept spirits high and helped achieve liberation from Nazi occupiers and Vichy collaborators. Today’s partisan advocacy for The Resistance has as its goal the destruction of Mr. Trump’s Presidency. Advocacy, however, should not be confused with loyalty. The latter implies an allegiance, to a nation – we pledge allegiance to our flag – a group, an individual or an idea – our Constitution. On the other hand, one who advocates does so for myriad reasons, perhaps out of loyalty or a desire to help, or possibly for personal gain or even vengeance.

Most of us are loyal in more ways than one. Loyalty is ubiquitous, but oft-changing in terms of to whom or to what to be loyal. Regardless, Webster’s describes loyalty as “unswerving in allegiance.” A soldier is loyal to his comrades, promising to leave no man behind. General George Marshall once said, “I can’t expect loyalty from the army if I do not give it.” “For God, king and country,” is a toast given by loyal officers of the British Empire. Dogs have unconditional loyalty for their masters. School and college homecomings are attended by alums loyal to their alma maters. Loyalty is the faithful allegiance to a nation, leader, cause, group, family or person. It is what prompts donations to schools, colleges, museums, churches and symphony halls. It can be as harmless as rooting for one’s college football team, or as malignant as the loyalty demanded by despots like Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong-un and Fidel Castro.

Literature abounds with examples of loyalty: Virgil’s Aeneas would not leave his father Anchises behind, when he and his son Ascanius left Troy. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were loyal to one another. Shakespeare wrote of Desdemona’s loyalty to Othello, a fidelity that killed her. In Anthony Trollope’s “Framley Parsonage,” it was Reverend Mark Robarts’ misplaced loyalty that got him in trouble, Huck Finn was loyal to Jim, which saved the latter from being re-sold into slavery. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves project a dependent and devoted loyalty between a bumbling master and an omniscient servant. E.B. White’s Charlotte, was loyal to the animals in Mr. Arable’s barn, especially to Wilbur.

“Loyalty” in the corporate sector has withered. (I put loyalty in quotes because it was largely dependent on material comforts, not the typical allegiance to family, friends and soldiers.) Nevertheless, it wasn’t uncommon for one hired in the 1950s and ‘60s to expect their first job would be their last. Unions prospered, and health care and defined-benefit pension plans gave security to employees. But, by the mid 1980s things began to change. Corporate raiders, in the form of “green-mailers,” saw bloated companies, inefficiently run, so ripe for picking. Taking large equity positions, they forced managements to take on debt to buy them out, or to pay special dividends. Consequences included: the abandonment of unions, a move away from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans, and an increase in disruptive technologies. Today, government employees have that same sense of self-satisfaction that corporate employees did forty years earlier – well-paying jobs, generous benefits, job security. But, government inefficiencies, burgeoning deficits, and bloated balance sheets will bring a day of reckoning.

Loyalty to the nation had been questioned in the mid 1960s, when television brought the horrors of combat in Vietnam into living rooms. It became impossible to explain and justify long-term foreign policy goals to those watching sons, husbands and fathers being killed on camera. News, which in earlier wars had been censored or filtered, was given raw. Reporters became commentators. Many questioned whether war was ever worth the price paid. Those questions affected our concepts of patriotism and loyalty. Today, we cringe, as we should, when we read that President Trump demanded loyalty of those in his cabinet. But, we should remember that his request wasn’t novel, that most Presidents have asked for and received the same. Nevertheless, in free societies loyalty should be offered, not demanded.

A bill in New York’s city council would require the New York Police Department to reveal crucial details about every surveillance technology that the department uses to detect terrorism and crime. Ninety days before the NYPD intends to implement a new surveillance technology, it would have to post on the Internet a technical description of how the new tool works, and how the department plans to use it. The public would have 45 days to comment on the proposed technology; the police commissioner would then have 45 days to respond to the public comments before he could actually start using the new capacity. Existing technologies would also have to be retroactively submitted to public review.

Perhaps aware that this moment may not be ideal for promoting what would be, in effect, a terrorists’ manual on how to evade discovery in New York City, the bill’s supporters have hilariously taken to casting it as a pro-illegal alien, anti-Trump gesture. New York is a “sanctuary city, now in open resistance to the Trump administration,” two members of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in an op-ed advocating for the so-called Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act. (The Brennan Center wrote the POST Act for council members; the center has pushed similar bills across the country, including in Seattle and Oakland, two cities that have been particularly vulnerable to “anti-fascist” violence.) The city council press release claims that the bill “strengthens New York City’s commitment as a sanctuary city . . . as the Trump administration seeks to increase surveillance across America.”

In fact, the proposed law has nothing to do with New York’s deplorable status as a sanctuary city. Criminal illegal aliens avoid lawful deportation in New York because city and police officials release them back to the streets in defiance of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer requests, not because of sophisticated surveillance technologies. But though the bill would have no effect on the city’s campaign to thwart immigration enforcement, it would impede the city’s ability to stay one step ahead of terrorist planning. Memo to the council: counterterrorism is not a leisurely activity compatible with lengthy public review and administrative red tape. It requires nimbleness and speed in the face of a rapidly evolving threat. And disclosing to the enemy the extent of, and details about, your surveillance capacities provides an invaluable blueprint for foiling those capacities.

Supporters of the bill are playing the race card as well, claiming that the bill is necessary to counter the NYPD’s historic tendency to oppress minorities. The managing director of the Bronx Defenders claims, without evidence, that the NYPD has illegally surveilled Black Lives Matter activists. Council members Dan Garodnick and Vanessa Gibson argue that “Surveillance technology often has a disproportionate, harmful impact on communities of color.” This claim is ludicrous. The radiation detectors that ring the city looking for nuclear threats, say, or the network of public cameras that protect critical infrastructure and sensitive buildings, have no disproportionate impact on minorities or any other group, other than on someone looking to do the city harm.

Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, argued Monday that Trump should not face any criminal penalty just because he fired former FBI Director James Comey.

“The president of the United States should not be subject to criminal prosecution for merely exercising his constitutional authority,” he said on CNN.

“In the absence of any statute to the contrary, the president has the authority fire the director of the FBI, and the president has the power tell the director of the FBI who to investigate, who not to investigate,” he added.

Democrats have argued for months now that Trump fired Comey to disrupt the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election, which Democrats also say could show that Russia was colluding with Trump to bring down Clinton. Democrats admit there is no evidence of collusion so far, and recently have been arguing that Trump obstructed justice by encouraging Comey to drop the case.

But while Democrats have been saying Trump is trying to cover his tracks the way President Richard Nixon did, Dershowitz said the case is nothing like the Nixon coverup.

“This is not the Nixon case. This is the Bush case,” he said, referring to President George H.W. Bush’s pardon of former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger. Weinberger was thought to have information linking Bush to the Iran-Contra affair.

“Nobody suggested obstruction of justice” in that case, Dershowitz said.

Dershowitz added it makes no sense to expand obstruction of justice to cover “constitutionally authorized” actions by the president.