RUTHFULLY YOURS

Handshakes all around when Obamacare is replaced, but for seniors on Medicare nothing has changed for the better. During the Reagan administration a major change occurred for those on Medicare. Previously, seniors could purchase additional “major medical” insurance which would pay those expenses not covered by Medicare which set the reimbursement fees for doctors of all specialties.

However, under Ronald Reagan, the schedules for reimbursement to the physicians was set as the bar for all “medigap” an “major medical” plans.

To simplify: Let us say a doctor charges $850.00 for a procedure including the services of an anesthesiologist. An actuary in Washington working for the government decides that $475.00 is the “acceptable” fee and the doctor is paid 80% of the acceptable fee which comes to $380.00. The “medigap” insurance is tied to that number and only will add the 20 percent deducted by Medicare which is $95.00. The doctor is then forced to accept the fee that Medicare has set and cannot negotiate with the patients or he will lose participation in Medicare.

For this reason, throughout the country, doctors are not accepting Medicare insurance.

This is a form of price controls that the government uses, and even if a senior accepts the facts and fee for service, Medicare insurance is still deducted from the monthly social security checks.

With the new healthcare bill will this still remain? Stay tuned. rsk

Dear President Trump,

You are embarking on a ruinous path that bedeviled all American Presidents since Richard Nixon, whose Secretary of State William Rogers proposed the “Rogers Plan” Plan of 1969-namely, the ahistorical and strategically wrong suggestion that a territorial compromise by Israel would bring peace between Israel and the Arabs.

All these plans given their imprimatur by Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama, ignored the faith driven Jihads against Israel which followed the Camp David Treaty, by which 92% of all territory won by Israel in 1967, including the entire Sinai Peninsula and its Israel built airfields and thriving towns were ceded; the Olso and Wye “Accords”which surrendered control of Jewish towns and shrines to the Arabs, including Hebron, the locus of the Jewish faith and East Jerusalem; the withdrawal from Gaza where Arab hate driven rampages destroyed homes and farms and agricultural equipment purchased for them by American philanthropists.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry, reports that since September 13, 2015, Palestinian Arab assailants have carried out 1,754 stabbing attacks, 113 attempted stabbings, 143 shootings; 58 vehicular ramming attacks, and one bus bombing. Forty-eight people were killed in these attacks and 713 injured, including four Palestinians.

The fingerprints on all these crimes are those of Mahmoud Abbas who names streets, monuments, and buildings for those who commit these attacks, supports their families with hefty financial rewards, and promotes vicious hatred of Jews in textbooks, sermons and speeches in Arabic while fancy dancing peace talk for his English speaking advocates.

You greet this terrorist and call him “a partner for peace.”

With respect for your office and in the hope that you will fulfill the promises that led me to vote for you, I remind you that there is no art in making a deal with a monster. rsk

British hospitals report an average of fifteen cases of female genital mutilation each day, yet despite the practice being illegal since 1984 there have been no successful prosecutions. Where are the feminists on this and other issues such as forced marriages and ‘honour’ killings? Nowhere, it seems.
“Islam is the world’s most feminist religion,” the Australian Muslim woman Yassmin Abdel-Magied claimed on the ABC’s Q&A on February 13. Her controversial thesis has been shot down as ridiculous by conservative writers and politicians across the nation. However, her claim that Islam is “the most feminist” of all religions is not entirely wrong, if one considers it through the lens of a particular variant of radical feminist ideology—cultural feminism.

Abdel-Magied’s observation about women under Islam is typical of cultural feminists who demand that individual members of “societal cultures” be endowed “with meaningful ways to live across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres”. Since cultural identity is said to play a more pervasive role in the lives of certain minority groups, cultural feminists argue that the individual members of such groups should be accorded special rights (privileges) lest their minority status be endangered by the dominant culture. Any criticism of cultural or religious practices—including female genital mutilation and forced marriage—is summarily dismissed as a form of “colonialist imperialism”, one which is disrespectful of the more deep-seated traditions of non-majoritarian ethnic and religious groups.

Above all, cultural feminism advocates that special consideration must be given not just for the legal status of individual women in Western societies, but also for the position of individuals belonging to minority groups. Since the alleged deprivation experienced by certain minority groups is regarded primarily as a result of “white male oppression”, cultural feminists generally support state-imposed measures which attempt to correct “past injustices” in the workplace and other spheres of social activity.

From a human-rights perspective, however, there are serious problems with the ideology of cultural feminism. By prioritising collective rights at the expense of the basic rights of the individual, cultural feminists risk themselves justifying the ill-treatment of individual women, both within and outside Western societies.

The New York Times has a new op-ed contributor named Marwan Barghouti. His op-ed “Why We Are on Hunger Strike in Israel’s Prisons”– is a screed to make Thomas Friedman proud.
The Times described Barghouti as a “Palestinian leader and parliamentarian.”
Oops! The Times somehow forgot to mention that Marwan Barghouti is a terrorist serial killer whose savagery earned him five life sentences. It’s like describing Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer, as a “culinary innovator.”
The New York Times must like the name Barghouti. Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the BDS movement and author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights is also a favored contributor. In a January 2014 op-ed he explained “Why Israel Fears the Boycott” listing the usual litany of lies and accusations. In May 2015 he wrote an op-ed “Israeli Extremism Will Encourage Global Boycott” quoting a poll by J Street to bolster his bias. On March 16th, 2017 in a letter to the editor, he compares BDS to the civil rights movement, quotes a questionable Brookings Institute poll on American support for sanctions against Israel, and spells out the agenda of BDS:
“Since its inception in 2005 by the Palestinian grass-roots civil society coalition, B.D.S. has consistently called for ending Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; granting full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are discriminated against by dozens of laws; and recognizing the United Nations-stipulated right of Palestinian refugees to return to lands from which they were forcibly displaced during Israel’s establishment in 1948.” He could have said it in one sentence: BDS calls for the end of Israel….period! And has anyone told him that Gaza is not “occupied” since 2005?
Other mainstream papers contribute to anti-Israel bias by ignoring relevant stories.
To paraphrase George Berkeley about a tree falling in the woods, if the media doesn’t report it, did it happen?
In France, on April 3, an Orthodox Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, a doctor aged 66, was thrown out of a window to her death by an African neighbor who shouted “Allahu akbar!” The mainstream media ignored it.
On April 21 a speeding car driven by an Arab rammed into a bus stop at the Gush Etzion bus stop injuring an elderly man. The Gush Etzion spokesperson said the incident marks the second such attack in the last month. Earlier this month, Sgt. Elchai Teharlev was killed in a car ramming attack while guarding a bus stop just outside the West Bank settlement of Ofra.
The mainstream media ignored these events. Maybe they did not happen? CONTINUE AT SITE

Europe owes everything to the beneficence of America, which was even prepared to sign up for mutually-assured destruction in its protection. When Trump accuses such generosity’s recipients of ingratitude the only surprise is that the complaint was so long in coming.
Out of despair, insight. A comment from a despairing American friend of mine suddenly helped me to understand Donald Trump and his context. “If Thomas Jefferson had foreseen Donald Trump,” he said, “he would have told his fellow revolutionaries that they must stop fighting immediately and make peace terms with George III.” There was further gloom. “Trouble is, and despite Jefferson, the Enlightenment only had shallow roots in the United States.” Thus an intellectual blue-stater, more influenced by Hollywood than he would ever acknowledge, looks down on the plain people of middle America: the Donald Trump electorate.

Forgetting Donald Trump for a moment, my friend was right, more so than he realises, about the long-term failure of the Enlightenment. Which, in turn, was partly responsible for the thirty-year failure of Western policy which threatens us with decline. If the West’s will to power and ability to exercise power are gone beyond recall, then anarchy and destruction loom over the entire planet.

In recent years, the world has been turned upside down. Old assumptions and old certainties no longer work. This means that there are no grounds for Western geopolitical self-confidence. At the beginning of the 1990s, we were invited to hail the new world order and the end of history. How hollow those phrases sound now. If they are ever recalled to mind, it is with bitter irony. Forget optimistic slogans: we are now in the era of the unknown unknowns.

Yet none of this is Donald Trump’s fault. The President is dramatising the problems, not creating them. He had no hand in the West’s failures in the Middle East. He did not create the threats to American jobs and living standards from automation, robotisation and globalisation. He is not responsible for the immigration pressures from the huddled masses in poor countries. He cannot be blamed for the failure of the European single currency, or for the West’s inability to reach a post-Cold War modus vivendi with Russia. Men who regard themselves as much wiser than Mr Trump and who have the academic credentials to prove it, if not necessarily the record of practical successes, ought to scrutinise their own motives. They clearly have an aesthetic objection to a Trump presidency: that is understandable. “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Washington to be born.” Yet it may also be that they are angry with him because he is forcing them to confront their own failure.

This failure is not always blameworthy. Some of the challenges which face the West may be beyond the capacity of anyone to surmount, even Donald Trump. In the meantime, Mr Trump is at least forcing them onto the agenda. The wiser men usually prefer not to think about the insolubles, rather as the Eloi tried to ignore the Morlocks. But even if he might seem to resemble a Morlock, Mr Trump is a great stimulator of thought. Not just thought; action too. On at least three problems, he might even be able to rescue the West from some of the Enlightenment’s minor failures.

My gloomy friend seemed to take it for granted that even if his fellow Americans had not been worthy to receive the message, the Enlightenment had been successful in Europe. That, alas, is untrue. If one considers its high expectations, it has failed. This failure has been associated with the most tragic period in human history and may well lead to the destruction of the human race. But it should all have been so different. For countless millennia, and despite great cultural achievements, much of human life was a wretched business: nothing but the animal struggle for food, warmth and sex at a slightly higher technological level. Countless numbers of individual lives were a cry of pain.

Patriotism in the White House, in any other era, would not have been anything out of the ordinary. In the America of managerialism and ‘global governance’, not to mention identity politics, Trump’s patriotism plunges the chattering classes into fits of frothing indignation.
The rise and rise of Donald J. Trump is a revolution. While today’s leftists would call it a counter-revolution, we might all agree that the 2015-16 populist-nationalist insurrection, which swept President Trump to power, falls outside the category of business as usual. For the anti-Trump camp, from Hollywood celebrities to Obama holdouts in the Deep State, Trump’s inauguration represents the moral equivalent of January 30, 1933.

The short-lived Journal of American Greatness and now the quarterly journal American Affairs provide a counterpoint to this Antifa (anti-fascist) narrative. An integral aspect of this nascent Trumpist intelligentsia is a high regard for James Burnham (above), a founding editor of the National Review and the author of such formative works as The Managerial Revolution (1941), The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943), The Struggle for the World (1947) and Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964).

When Burnham died in 1987, President Reagan described him as “one of those principally responsible for the great intellectual odyssey of our century—the journey away from totalitarian statism and towards the uplifting doctrines of freedom”. Not everyone shared Ronald Reagan’s admiration. Old-style Leftists reviled Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians because these books repudiated their fantasy that socialism—that is to say, a classless people’s community—would emerge out of the ruins of capitalism. Trotskyists broke with Burnham (and vice versa) for his refusal to accept that Stalin’s Russia somehow remained a workers’ state, albeit a deformed or degenerated one. Communist apologists, in turn, were aghast at Burnham’s mid-war denunciation of the Soviet Union as “the most extreme totalitarian dictatorship in history”. Coming in the midst of the Swinging Sixties, the central thesis of Suicide of the West—that the real role of American-style liberalism is “to permit Western civilisation to be reconciled to its dissolution”—garnered few friends on the progressive side of politics.

It is a different story with conservatives, of course, but still complicated. During James Burnham’s lifetime his work was widely read and, in the case of the Cold War, highly consequential. Many of the ideas he articulated in The Struggle for the World were already in circulation as early as 1944. He had identified guerrilla skirmishes in Greece, a power vacuum opening up in Eastern Europe, and the Chiang Kai-Shek-Mao Zedong standoff as the early stages of a global conflagration entirely distinct from the Second World War. Winston Churchill would have been aware of Burnham’s thinking before he delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech on March 5, 1946.

Despite this, and his key role in the National Review for a lengthy period, Burnham was rarely a source of political debate in the decades after his death. In 2002, for instance, Roger Kimball wrote an appreciative essay but feared that not even a new biography by Daniel Kelly would rescue James Burnham from relative obscurity:

But in this world, the combination of Burnham’s ferocious intellectual independence and unclubbable heterodoxy long ago consigned him to the unglamorous limbo that established opinion reserves for those who challenge its pieties too forcefully.

A “general renaissance” did not appear to be on the cards—until the momentous events of 2016, that is. In October last year, the anti-Trump conservative Matthew Continetti, editor of the Washington Free Beacon, spoke of the need:

“to rehabilitate Burnham’s vision of a conservative-tinged Establishment capable of permeating the managerial society and gradually directing it in a prudential, reflective, virtuous manner respectful of both freedom and tradition.”

Jeet Heer, a senior editor for the New Republic, lambasted Continetti for “holding up Burnham as an alternative to Trumpism, portraying him as an advocate of a measured, brainy, and pragmatic right-wing politics that seeks to shape elite institutions rather than to take populist delight in burning it all down”. Heer, who writes a bi-weekly column with headings such as “Steve Bannon is Turning Trump into an Ethno-Nationalist Ideologue” and “Donald Trump is the Bizarro Noam Chomsky”, appears to have contracted a particularly virulent strain of Trumpophobia. That said, Heer might be right to argue that Burnham is not “an alternative to Trumpism” and, if anything, “a precursor to Trump”.

Red/blue, conservative/liberal, and Republican/Democrat mark traditional American divides. But one fault line is not so 50/50 — that of the contemporary hard progressive movement versus traditional politics, values, and customs.

The entire menu of race, class, and gender identity politics, lead-from-behind foreign policy, political correctness, and radical environmentalism so far have not won over most Americans.

Proof of that fact are the serial reliance of their supporters on deception, and the erosion of language on campus and in politics and the media. The progressive movement requires both deceit and euphemism to mask its apparently unpopular agenda.

What the Benghazi scandal, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, and the Iran Deal all had in common was their reliance on ruse. If the White House and its allies had told the whole truth about all these incidents, Americans probably would have widely rejected the ideological premises that framed them.

In the case of Benghazi, most Americans would not fault an obscure video for causing scripted rioting and death at an American consulate and CIA annex. They would hardly believe that a policy of maintaining deliberately thin security at U.S. facilities would encourage reciprocal local good will in the Middle East. They would not agree that holding back American rescue forces was a wise move likely to forestall an international confrontation or escalation.

In other words, Americans wanted their consulate in Benghazi well fortified and protected from seasoned terrorists, and they favored rapid deployment of maximum relief forces in times of crises — but, unfortunately, these were not the agendas of the Obama administration. So, to disguise that unpleasant reality, Americans were treated to Susan Rice’s yarns about a spontaneous, unexpected riot that was prompted by a right-wing video, and endangered Americans far beyond the reach of U.S. military help.

Ditto the Bowe Bergdahl caper, the American deserter on the Afghan front. Aside from the useful publicity of “bringing home” an American hostage, there was an implicit progressive subtext to both his earlier flight and eventual return: Young introspective soldiers are often troubled about their nation’s ambiguous role in the Middle East and so, understandably, sometimes err in their search for meaning. When they do, and when they perhaps “wander off,” the government has win-win resources to address their temporary lapse — in this case, killing two birds with one stone by downsizing the apparently repulsive Guantanamo Bay detention facility and returning punished-enough Taliban combatants to their families.

What Susan Rice (ostensibly the go-to consigliere in such deals) could not say is that the Obama administration released five dangerous terrorists in order to bring home one likely deserter, whose selfish AWOL behavior may have contributed over the years to the injury or even deaths of several American soldiers tasked with finding him. Instead, we got the lie that Bergdahl was a brave solider who served with honor and distinction and was captured in mediis rebus on the battlefield, with the implication that his personal odyssey inadvertently led to the bonus of returning in-limbo foreign detainees and reducing the population of an embarrassing gulag.

A few days ago, in a reply that showed a rare understanding of political realities, my 12-year-old grandson responded to a question from his 16-year-old brother: “Do you even know what Communism IS, George?” “Sure, I do. It’s when one man works two hours and another guy works fourteen hours and they both get paid the same!” George gets it! I wish more adults did as well.

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Global news dominated: Kim Jong-un continued to play chicken with the civilized world; Russian bombers, off Alaska, came within 30 miles of U.S. airspace; the U.S. dropped the “mother of all bombs” on ISIS holdouts in Nangarhar province in Afghanistan; in retaliation for a chemical attack by Assad forces, the U.S. fired cruise missiles onto a Syrian airbase; food riots broke out in Venezuela, as Socialism broke down. These events demonstrate how delicate is civilization’s balance. Keeping Humpty-Dumpty on the wall is the most important job of world leaders, especially the American President.

The most significant events during the month were rising tensions between North Korea and the civilized world. Kim Jong-un has nuclear weapons. He is developing missile programs, which threaten South Korea, Japan, the United States and dozens of other nations. President Trump spent time during the month with Kim’s sole patron, China’s President Xi Jinping. He may have had some effect. By month’s end, it was indicated that China had reduced coal purchases from North Korea. Two failed launches may be ascribed to North Korea’s ineptness, or to cyber interference on the part of the U.S. We don’t know. American Naval ships have been repositioned to the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. Mr. Trump, in a rare move, summoned all 100 Senators to the White House to discuss the situation. Missile defense should be front and center. A few South Koreans were reported to be upset with Mr. Trump’s declaration that it would be “appropriate” for them to pay for the missile defense system. But, after all, it is their hide that is in most immediate danger. (Last Saturday, Defense Secretary James Mattis said the U.S. would pay for the system.) Reality, as most South Koreans know, is that the U.S. is the only counter-balance to China.

BACK ON MONDAY MAY 1

I lost an entire family in the Holocaust- grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins all perished among the one in every three Jews in the world that were exterminated. My brother and I were born in Bolivia where my parents presciently went before the war. I read the speeches and sermons and editorials this event evokes, but for me there is only one answer. and that is unstinting support for the security and future of Israel.

Only three years after the end of the Holocaust Israel was reborn in the ancient homeland where the unbroken chain of Jewish survival in spite of oppression, dislocation, murder and genocide, was started in Hebron. In Europe the words “Shma Israel”…Hear oh Israel were the last words uttered by the martyred.

Israel heard and offered succor and rescue.

Today, I cringe when supporters of BDS or J Street or other serial bashers of Israel grow solemn at the mention of the Holocaust but are complicit in criticism and libels of Israel which weaken the Jewish State and by extension encourage violent anti-Semitism throughout the world…even in this wonderful corner of the Diaspora.

Damn their caterwauling tears and hypocrisy. The only memorial and answer to the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews is a safe Israel within the boundaries of the ancient homeland where there has been a Jewish presence from time immemorial. The rest is just commentary. rsk