RUTHFULLY YOURS

Eek!! A new scandal! Collusion! Treason! blah, blah blah…..Knickers are in a knot and petticoats are drawn. The Never Trumpers and the maybe Trumpers who have colluded with the media have run like hungry dogs to fake bones.
The ones that really get my goat are Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who have reached trade-in status and rise to new lows with each manufactured mini “scandal” to denounce the President. Add to them the “conservative” pundits that join the howling.
My message to them: Get over it jerks. What you cannot abide is that the American public and the President they elected are smarter than all of you. rsk

This is in response of criticism to our article “Economy of Mass Prosperity,” published by the Washington Times in June, which advocates privatization of the nation’s infrastructure.

It is almost a cliché to suggest America is a divided nation. There is a split among many blacks and whites; rich and poor. But the fundamental difference is between those who have learned from history, convinced that socialism is too extreme for the American psyche, and the other that clandestinely believes that socialism, in fact, has already arrived and is making sure that America can no longer live without it.

he socialists declared three primary points:

a. Capitalism is not capable of mass prosperity.

b. Privatizing infrastructure will make every road/bridge/rail crossing in America a never-ending toll booth.

c. Privatization will further contribute to economic inequality.

The argument that capitalism is not capable of mass prosperity is so ludicrous that even the arch-foe of capitalism, Karl Marx, disagreed. And Marx did not just disagree, he wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

“The bourgeoisie [capitalists] has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, or Gothic cathedrals. The bourgeoisie draws all nations into civilization. It has created enormous cities and thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarcely one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”

Since those words were written 150 years ago, free-market capitalism proved to be an endeavor with no end. It has undergone the Second Industrial Revolution and is in the process of a third, the Digital Revolution, which, with the introduction of advanced technologies, computers and the Internet, continues opening up entirely new vistas creating wealth and prosperity for all.

The concern that privatization will make every road/bridge/rail crossing in America a never-ending toll booth ignores the reality. The never-ending toll booth is already here. The infrastructure owners, the state and local governments, have been treating infrastructure as a revenue stream. Being a monopoly, they are in a position to manipulate supply and demand to justify the imperative of constantly raising taxes (property, gasoline and other general local taxes), user fees and tolls, ostensibly for building and maintaining highways while neglecting the assets’ maintenance and repair. The nation’s decaying infrastructure is a direct consequence of the product being sold regardless of quality and costs.

Anyone traveling the New Jersey-Manhattan corridor has experienced the effects of the state monopoly, spending endless hours in traffic and paying exorbitant tolls every few miles.

And there is no greater symbol of government monopolistic power than the Washington Bridge, built in the 1930s with taxpayer money. Its owner, the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, charges $15 for each trip, collecting $1.5 billion annually. In any other circumstance, with this revenue it would be easy to warrant constructing another bridge to relieve transportation congestion.

Something with which we can agree – a nexus of hatred swirls around our nation, with President Trump as its axis. One side blames Mr. Trump; the other, his attackers. It’s unhealthy. “Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers all wrongs,” is a line from Proverbs. Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural and facing the dissolution of the Union and years of war, spoke of the “better angels of our nature,” when he said, “We are not enemies, but friends.” For four years, his words proved too optimistic, as 620,000 American soldiers were slain between the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865. Mr. Lincoln did not live to see it, but our “better angels” did prevail.

The Bible teaches that love is more powerful than hatred, and perhaps it is. But hatred is more unifying. In Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck wrote: “I asked,” ‘anyone know any Russians around here?’ And he went all out and laughed. ‘Course not. That’s why they’re valuable. Nobody can find fault with you if you take out after the Russians.’” Hatred unites us, which is what Steinbeck was positing – societies need someone to hate. In 1960, the Cold War was at its peak; fear of and loathing for Communism helped bring us together. Today, we live disunited, and our hatred has become for one another. It has been that way for a few years, but growing worst. We have lost confidence in and respect for our Western values. We no longer see ourselves as a force for good. What has gone wrong?

Mr. Trump may be the focal point, but he was not the catalyst for today’s self-hatred. That is something more deeply rooted. A compendium of universal values has replaced our Western ones. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, historian Allen Guelzo said that the nation is more split than at any time since the Civil War. Some would argue that the late 1960s and early 1970s were as disruptive. But Professor Guelzo noted that some of today’s differences have long and deep roots. The Whigs (predecessors of Republicans) proposed a society that would be economically diverse, but culturally uniform – precursor to today’s free-market capitalism and nativism; while Democrats preferred economic uniformity, with greater tolerance for cultural and moral diversity – fore-runner of today’s statism and multiculturalism.

The compartmentalization of people into competing identity groups has eroded the political center and fed the fires of partisanship. Added to the conflagration has been the decline of what James Q. Wilson called a moral sense – the compass that guides us toward ethical norms and civil behavior. It is seen in shrinking church attendance, in the foundering of community groups that Harvard’s Robert Putnam has described. It shows up in the growth of PACs (political action committees), which use tax-advantaged dollars to promote issue-specific causes. We see it in the growth of life-time benefits for public employees, which crowd out public support for eleemosynary institutions that help the poor and disabled. It is abetted by an expanding sense of entitlement and dependency, with a concurrent drop in personal responsibility.

The Left looks upon Mr. Trump as a crude demagogue with autocratic tendencies, deserving of the press he gets. But that argument is fatuous. The Left has long treated their political opponents with supercilious disdain. Ronald Reagan was a dunce, a movie star with no grasp of domestic or international affairs. George W. Bush was stupid, the fortunate son of a distinguished family, a man who had drifted through prep school (Andover) and college (Yale), thanks to his heritage. President Reagan deftly deflected criticism with humor. Mr. Bush, a decent man, ignored the jabs. Donald Trump is different. He fights back. Is he thin-skinned, or is he fed up with the sanctimony and hypocrisy of the media and progressives, in the way they treat conservatives? I suspect the latter. While he targets the chattering classes with his Tweets, his audience is the forgotten men and women of middle America – those the elites from both Parties have ignored for years and whom Hillary Clinton referred to as “deplorable.”

While examples of hate can be seen on both the right and the left, it is in the intolerance of those claiming to be tolerant where hate is most insidious and where it can be most commonly found. Certainly, there are those on the right who oppose same sex marriage, who find insults to Christianity objectionable, and who question the ethics of late-term abortions. But most Americans cluster toward the center. They count on the bounty that government offers in terms of schools, highways, bridges, and aid to the elderly and the sick. They expect that those who cannot care for themselves will be cared for. They respect others, regardless of sex, politics, religion or race, and they expect to be respected in return. They abide by the Golden Rule of treating others as they would like to be treated. They have faith, and they believe in the rule of law. They recognize the impetuousness of youth, but expect college presidents and deans to act as adults. They don’t understand a culture that says a 16-year-old girl can be suspended for saying a prayer in school, but allows her to get an abortion without parental notification. They cannot understand politicians dividing people into identity groups – setting one group of Americans against another.

Those who philosophically disagree with me will say it is my bias, but it seems to me that the most heinous vitriol emanates from the left. They own our popular culture – from movies to music, from publishing to universities. Jacques Barzun, a French-American historian who was awarded medals of freedom by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, once wrote: “Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.” In our dealings with others, we should be governed not by fears of being politically incorrect, but by want of decency and respect. Many on the Right, including me, felt the policies of Mr. Obama were inimical to the concept of liberty. We argued our case, and we attacked those flaws in his character we saw epitomizing his failings. But, we never treated him the way the Left does Mr. Trump.

The media has long believed that authoritarians comes from the right, not the left. I would argue that extremism can come from either direction. Consider the last century, and the tyrants that arose out of Nazism and Communism? Neither group had any regard for human rights or liberty. Both killed millions of their own people. Their goal was power. Political extremism is not a continuum that stretches left and right. It is circular. Extremists meet on the opposite side of the circle from centrists.

Former President Jimmy Carter, whose “worst president” title is being challenged by the previous occupant of the White House has lost no time in criticizing President Donald Trump. In an interview with the New York Times on May 24th, 2016 he accused Donald Trump of tapping into “a reservoir of inherent racism.”

It is somewhat risible that he remains a tad silent after Trump’s triumph in Poland.

When Carter visited Poland in 1977 he had a translator, a freelance “linguist” hired by the State Department. This is what happened:

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150202-the-greatest-mistranslations-ever

“In a speech given during the US President’s 1977 visit to Poland, he appeared to express sexual desire for the then-Communist country. Or that’s what his interpreter said, anyway. It turned out Carter had said he wanted to learn about the Polish people’s ‘desires for the future’.

Earning a place in history, his interpreter also turned “I left the United States this morning” into “I left the United States, never to return”; according to Time magazine, even the innocent statement that Carter was happy to be in Poland became the claim that “he was happy to grasp at Poland’s private parts”.

Unsurprisingly, the President used a different interpreter when he gave a toast at a state banquet later in the same trip – but his woes didn’t end there. After delivering his first line, Carter paused, to be met with silence. After another line, he was again followed by silence. The new interpreter, who couldn’t understand the President’s English, had decided his best policy was to keep quiet. By the time Carter’s trip ended, he had become the punchline for many a Polish joke.”

“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.