RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Reno is the editor of the religious journal First Things. He was formerly a professor of theology and ethics at Creighton University.

Easter stalks Passover. They arrive together every spring, like the daffodils and magnolia blossoms. This year, Easter Sunday falls as the eight-day Jewish festival nears its end. Over the years, I have come to see that Christianity’s most important day recapitulates Passover. Both holidays face head-on the daunting power of death—and both announce God’s greater power of life.

In March, my wife, who is Jewish, was on the phone, herding her parents, uncles, brothers and cousins. “No, it’s not Tuesday. The first night of Passover is on Monday this year.” She made arrangements for the Seder, the festive meal with a traditional liturgy that retells the familiar story of the Exodus. Emails and texts were exchanged to sort out who would bring what, and this past Monday night we sang and recited the age-old prayers and set out a cup for Elijah, the harbinger of the messianic era. We ended, as always, with the declaration: “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Now, just a few days later, the holiest days of the year for Christians are under way. As the solitary Catholic in my Jewish household, I’m planning to head to church on Saturday night for the Easter Vigil—where I’ll be celebrating Passover once again……

Put in Christian terms: The Passover Seder recalls and celebrates the resurrection of the people of Israel.

Today we tend to think of slavery strictly as an injustice, which of course it is, and some modern Seders treat the Passover as the triumph of justice over oppression. But this is not the traditional view. In the ancient world, slavery was not just a hardship for individuals but a kind of communal death. An enslaved nation can survive for a time, perhaps, but they have no future. A people in bondage is slowly crushed and extinguished.

The notion of slavery as a form of death is accentuated in the story told in the Passover Seder. The small clan descended from Abraham settles in Egypt. They are fruitful and multiply, becoming numerous and mighty. The glow of life in the people of Israel arouses Egyptian resentment. Set upon and subjugated, they are ground down by hard labor and harsh oppression. But the descendants of Abraham call out to God—and he raises them up out of slavery, parts the Red Sea, and delivers them from Pharaoh’s murderous anger.

Judaism is realistic. Passover does not promote a dreamy optimism or cheery confidence that God will keep everything neat and nice. Even the chosen people are vulnerable to oppression and murderous hatred. There’s room in Passover for Auschwitz.

In the story of Exodus, the Israelites make it through the split waters of the Red Sea to dry land. But they are not simply safe. God releases the waters, and Pharaoh’s army is destroyed.
So it is at the Easter Vigil. A chant known as the Exultet announces that the darkness shall not triumph. “Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her.” With a haunting refrain, the ancient song links Passover to Easter: “This is the night,” we are told, “when once you led our forbearers, Israel’s children, from slavery in Egypt and made them pass dry-shod through the Red Sea.” And “this is the night when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.”
We were not made for death. The Almighty delivers his people. He unlocks the prison of darkness and shatters the power of death. This is the meaning of Easter, the Christian Passover.
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Much has been made of Donald Trump’s decision to retain ownership of his businesses during his presidency. Earlier this year a group of law professors and prominent attorneys filed a lawsuit in New York federal court that called into question the constitutionality of this decision. The suit argues that the Trump Organization’s hotel rentals to a Chinese state-owned bank—along with royalties on “The Apprentice” from state television in countries such as Vietnam—violate the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.

Mr. Trump is not the first president to have business dealings with foreigners. That was actually George Washington, whose conduct in office has been a model for every president.

By the 1790s, Washington was wealthy primarily because of real estate—renting and selling his vast holdings. When Washington became president he did not sell his farm and estates. Rather, his nephew George Augustine Washington managed them while Washington remained involved. As with Mr. Trump’s hotels, Washington’s renters or purchasers could include foreigners.

The president received constant reports from his nephew and subsequent managers and wrote to them weekly. His letters could run 10 pages, with granular instructions on what to buy, sell and plant. This wasn’t an anomaly: Thomas Jefferson, the third president, also continued to supervise his business while holding the nation’s highest office. This belies the notion that the Constitution limits a president’s management of, or benefit from, his existing business ventures.

The new view of the Emoluments Clause advanced against Mr. Trump is that any pecuniary advantage constitutes a forbidden “emolument.” That would mean Washington and Jefferson would have had to ensure that no U.S. or foreign official stood on the other side of any transaction. Yet neither president, despite their close supervision, appears to have taken any such steps to curtail who they did business with.

One letter written by Washington deserves great attention in the current debate. On Dec. 12, 1793, Washington wrote to Arthur Young, an officer of the U.K. Board of Agriculture, an entity newly created and funded by Parliament at the initiative of William Pitt. The president asked for Young’s help in renting out his Mount Vernon lands to secure an income for his retirement. Not finding customers in America, he wondered if Young, with his agricultural connections, could find and organize some would-be farmers in his home country and send them over.

Washington noted that the land would surely increase in value because of its close proximity to what would become the nation’s capital in 1800. Large public-works projects were taking place—a circumstance over which he had some control.

Such a direct business solicitation of a foreigner with foreign government ties would surely lead to cries of constitutional breach if Mr. Trump did it. But the emoluments restriction only applies to benefits from “foreign states,” and what entities count as parts of a “foreign state” for these purposes remains fuzzy. CONTINUE AT SITE

Anna Wintour, world famous garmentologist, Hillaryac and Obama supporter is editor of Vogue Magazine.

In 2011 the magazine tucked among its ad pages featuring $20,000.00 pocketbooks and other expensive must have accessories, a column praising Asma-al Assad, the wife of Bashar al Assad titled “A Rose in the Desert.”

Here is what the article said about 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. ”

Rather Vague on Syria wouldn’t you say?????rsk

Last year, President Obama assured the world that “we are living in the most peaceful, prosperous, and progressive era in human history,” and that “the world has never been less violent.”

Translated, those statements meant that active foreign-policy volcanoes in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and the Middle East would probably not blow up on what little was left of Obama’s watch.

Obama is the U.S. version of Stanley Baldwin, the suave, three-time British prime minister of the 1920s and 1930s. Baldwin’s last tenure (1935–1937) coincided with the rapid rise of aggressive German, Italian, and Japanese Fascism.

Baldwin was a passionate spokesman for disarmament. He helped organize peace conferences. He tirelessly lectured on the need for pacifism. He basked in the praise of his good intentions.

Baldwin assured Fascists that he was not rearming Britain. Instead, he preached that the deadly new weapons of the 20th century made war so unthinkable that it would be almost impossible for it to break out.

Baldwin left office when the world was still relatively quiet. But his appeasement and pacifism had sown the seeds for a global conflagration soon to come.

Obama, the Nobel peace laureate and former president, resembles Baldwin. Both seemed to believe that war breaks out only because of misunderstandings that reflect honest differences. Therefore, tensions between aggressors and their targets can be remedied by more talk, international agreements, goodwill, and concessions.

Ideas such as strategic deterrence were apparently considered by both Baldwin and Obama to be Neanderthal, judging from Baldwin’s naÏve efforts to ask Hitler not to rearm or annex territory, and Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy and his pledge never to “do stupid sh**” abroad.

Obama issued various empty deadlines to Iran to cease enriching uranium before concluding a 2015 deal that allowed the Iranians to continue working their centrifuges.

Aggressors clearly assumed that Obama’s assurances were green lights to further their own agendas without consequences.

Iran routinely threatened U.S. Navy ships, even taking ten American sailors into custody early last year. Obama issued various empty deadlines to Iran to cease enriching uranium before concluding a 2015 deal that allowed the Iranians to continue working their centrifuges. Iran was freed from crippling economic sanctions. And Iran quietly received $400 million in cash (in the dead of night) for the release of American hostages.

The final report of the Senate’s “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” revealed that U.S.-stationed Saudi intelligence officers, who provided assistance to the hijackers ahead of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, were in direct contact with senior members of the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

During the Taliban regime in Kabul, the Brotherhood had training camps in Afghanistan for Kashmiri militants fighting against India and Central Asian states.

In his inaugural address on January 20, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to “unite the civilized world against… and eradicate radical Islamic terrorism.” So far, however, the administration in Washington, like its predecessors, has done little to rein in one of the key sources of this growing global phenomenon — the Muslim Brotherhood.

Founded by Sheikh Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood does not always openly advocate violence. But its main agenda is to establish a worldwide Islamic Caliphate by way of the sword. As its motto reads: “The Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our wish.”The Brotherhood’s hostility towards the United States has been clear. It not only backed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but founded al Qaeda, nineteen of whose operatives perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.

The final report of the Senate’s “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” — released in December 2002 — revealed that U.S.-stationed Saudi intelligence officers, who provided assistance to the hijackers ahead of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, were in direct contact with senior members of the American branch of the Brotherhood.

Tonight Jewish families all over the world will retell the story of the Exodus from bondage and oppression in Egypt and the beginning of the journey to Israel-the Promised Land. There is more to the inspiring story. It was on this journey that Moses gave the Ten Commandments, revealed by God, to his people. The Decalogue, as they are known, provide the obligations for a decent life: to worship God, keep the Sabbath, honor parents, reject murder, adultery, the bearing of false witness, theft, and envy.

Most people do their best to follow these commandments. Except for the Second Commandment which invokes: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” It has been roughly translated to mean “Thou shalt not worship false idols.”

Modern false idols do not take the shape of golden calves, but cults and liberal cant that people worship with equal fervor. The very people who deride Creationism continue to worship at the altar of man-made global warming, despite the glaring absence of scientific evidence.

They have instituted orthodox political correctness in lieu of honest debate and diversity; they have actively banned depictions of the Ten Commandments from schools, state houses and local courts. Most perverse of all, they use reference to the Commandments to justify their abandonment and slander of Israel.

In spite of this as in the ancient tale of the Haggadah when the Red Sea miraculously parted so that Moses could lead our people from Egypt, today Israel’s steel hulled Naval vessels part the sea to defend the most humane, most decent, most accomplished democracy in the Middle East.

And tonight, my ladle will part the soup to fetch the matzah balls.

Happy Passover to all….rsk

Robert M Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist and historian of psychiatry. He has written biographies of the Melbourne psychiatrist Reg Ellery and New Zealand psychiatrist Mary Barkas

For those who care deeply about the profession and its goal to treat genuinely debilitating conditions, the state of the profession is cause for deep dismay. Needed is nothing less than a thorough review of the framework in which psychiatry operates, plus a clear plan for its future.

Psychiatry, it must be said, is at an all-time low, the culmination of a steady slide since the Eighties. Its practitioners have little to be excited about, and that hardly does much for patients. If we look back on history – something about which psychiatry is notoriously lax – the closest analogy would be the Thirties, when there were a number of biological treatments but, in truth, they were hardly successful cures (ECT was a notable exception). Cynicism ruled supreme until the Fifties, when a golden age of psychopharmacology started.

Several issues can be indicted for the current desuetude. The first is the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM) which, in the eyes of some critics, has become the Mein Kampf of the discipline. Started, like so many things that go wrong, with the best of intentions, it has given the world an American-based classification of ‘disorders’ (no one is allowed to have a disease or illness now) derived from in-house committees subject to intense political, social and personality processes. The result has not been pretty.

Conditions that were determined by 150 years of careful psychiatric observation have been put through a bureaucratic grinder that killed off paraphrenia and Asperger’s syndrome, seriously messed up depression and inflicted such etymological nightmares as Late Luteal Phase Dysphoria Disorder (aka premenstrual syndrome). By putting everything in a neat pocket manual and providing a tick-box list for every disorder, the DSM made instant diagnosis a reality for professionals, if not the less skilled who wanted to get in on the mental health business. So much for the lengthy and careful psychiatric examination! Add to all this the appetite of a voracious legal profession for new “conditions” that might provide pretexts to sue and, with one thing and another, we are where we are today.

Then there are the drugs. It seems, a new product is launched on the market every day, judging by the journal ads, the glossy flyers in the mail and the bevvies of pert and perky sales reps who come calling with their latest brochures. The problem is that the new drugs are all variations on a theme. Antidepressants, antipsychotics and sedatives have not changed for decades; the only real difference is in the side effects.

A particularly egregious practice is the use of the so-called “atypical antipsychotics” as a kind of psychiatric penicillin. They are prescribed now for just about any disorder, regardless what other drugs are used. Their effect is to produce an emotional flattening. This can be considered something of an improvement, but hardly a cure. Add to this the most spectacular side effect is weight gain, turning skeletal figures into Michelin men and women in a few weeks. Journals are full of articles about the metabolic syndrome produced by these drugs.

It cannot be said that the public image of psychiatry is in the ascent. The disclosure that some prominent researchers have their hands deeply in the drug companies’ pockets is less than a good look. Add to this that psychiatry’s mandate – its exclusive control of the designated illnesses – is fragmenting to an unprecedented degree. There have always been turf wars with neurology and psychology, but they were but kindergarten squabbles compared with the present situation. Witness the disparate agencies which have not just a foot, but an arm and a leg, in invading (and, in the process, facilitating) the raging epidemics of autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder ADHD (another user-friendly acronym that says as much as its hides). The best example is the widespread use of stimulant drugs to control behaviour in children. Add to that all the adult cases and you get some idea of the mess. Future generations will not thank us for this unwanted legacy.

You know, if I hadn’t seen the unending denial and resistance of those in Britain who are dead against Britain’s exit from the European Union and want to stop it even now, I’d never have believed the extent and nature of the unremitting attempts to delegitimise and unseat in some way President Donald Trump.

Even so, I find those attempts hard to credit. A truly titanic struggle is going on in Washington DC by Trump’s opponents to destroy him – and by Trump himself to fight them off. So far he hasn’t done very well, mainly because… well, he hasn’t yet managed to see off his foes.

Trump has been dogged by persistent claims that he or his campaign team or his circle had alarmingly close connections to President Putin’s Russia. This McCarthyite red scare has been quite something to behold, coming as it has from the left which until now defined itself by its principled opposition to such red-baiting.

But let’s put that particular irony to one side. The fact is that, despite all the heat and noise about this, nothing at all has been found to link the Trump circle improperly to the Russians. The former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who endorsed Hillary Clinton and previously called Donald Trump a dupe of Russia, has said: “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.”

You don’t say. But the spark that has become a little flame is evidence that links the Obama administration to improper and possibly even illegal activity in trying to use intelligence-surveillance information against Trump and his circle. Trump claimed that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower shortly before last November’s presidential election. This claim was immediately scorned and held up as yet more proof that Trump lived in a world of alternative reality.

Then something rather extraordinary happened. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, said he had received information from an intelligence whistleblower that members of the intelligence community “incidentally collected” communications from the Trump transition team during legal surveillance operations of foreign targets. This, said Nunes, produced “dozens” of reports which eventually unmasked several individuals’ identities and were “widely disseminated”.

Nunes was promptly accused of Republican partisanship and protecting Trump, particularly since he told the President of this development before telling his committee – although he also said he had told the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, before briefing the President.

The Democrats’ frenzied calls for Nunes to recuse himself as a result increased still further when it emerged that he had met his shadowy source on the White House estate. Proof positive, cried the Democrats, that Nunes had been caught red-handed. Really? Was it ever likely that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee would expose himself to the obvious risk that peddling false information from a tainted source like that would inevitably become known and end his career?

In Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” a soothsayer confronts Caesar: “Beware the Ides of March,” he warns. In 44BC, the Ides foretold the death of Caesar. In 2017, they portended a difficult month, domestically and globally. Creating further mistrust among already polarized Americans has been a rash of “fake” news, which I define as not just news that is blatantly false, but news that is based on innuendos and half-truths. One example: A week ago, a column in The New York Times carried the headline, “Amid ‘Trump Effect,’ Fear: 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applications.” It was half true. The survey found that 39% of responding institutions did see a decline in applications, but 35% saw an increase and 26% had no change.

The allegation that Putin interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump is predicated on the likelihood that Russia did try to interfere in the election. It should not surprise us. Interference in elections is something competing nations do. However, the implication that Putin would have preferred Trump, an untested politician and a man characterized as volatile, stupid and xenophobic, is nonsensical. It is unlikely he would have preferred Mr. Trump to Mrs. Clinton, a woman he knows – and perhaps dislikes – but who he had been able to use for his benefit. Think of Russian ties to the Clinton Foundation and Russian purchase of U.S. uranium assets, with help from the Clintons. Consider the Podesta brothers. It makes no sense that Putin would have preferred the unknown to the known.

The assertion by Mr. Trump that Obama wiretapped him has been met with derision and disbelief. While it appears far-fetched, intercepted communications among the Trump transition team were uncovered in an investigation into links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald Trump, at least according to an article in The New York Times by Michael Schmidt, Matthew Rosenberg, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo on January 19, 2017. The article begins: “American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications…into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump.” Further on, they add, “One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided by the [Obama] White House.” Are we now witnessing the uncovering of a massive ‘cover-up’?

In 2013, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid detonated the nuclear option for all judicial nominations, other than for the Supreme Court. Would it be surprising if current Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell invokes the nuclear option for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch if Democrats filibuster? Polarization has poisoned our politics. It has made us less civil. Would Republicans treat an incoming Democrat President, in four years or eight years, with dignity or with disdain?