RUTHFULLY YOURS

Having annexed Crimea as well as swaths of eastern Ukraine and Georgia, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin casts a menacing eye at the Baltics. His new favorite ally, Iran, violated President Obama’s ballyhooed nuclear arms deal before the ink was dry, testing a new class of intermediate-range ballistic missiles designed to be tipped with the very nuclear warheads the mullahs deny coveting. Meanwhile, China flouts international law by constructing artificial islands to bolster its aggressive South China Sea territorial claims. In Europe, a Middle Eastern diaspora wreaks havoc on the continent, exploiting its generous laws on immigration and travel between countries while overrunning communities with Muslim settlers notoriously resistant to Western assimilation.

Rarely in modern history has the inadequacy of law to manage the jungle that is international relations been more starkly illustrated. Yet, according to the United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, it is precisely law, as divined by judges, that can tame our tempestuous times. That the judiciary is the institution least competent and least politically accountable for the task is evidently no more an obstacle than the impotence of law itself.

Appointed to the High Court by President Bill Clinton twenty-one years ago, Justice Breyer has been a stalwart liberal—which is to say, a political “progressive” on a court that is increasingly political. He is refreshing nonetheless, even for those of us who recoil from his ideological bent, for his willingness to depart from the Court’s custom of avoiding public debate. Like his colleague and philosophical counterpart Justice Antonin Scalia, Breyer is a frequent public speaker and occasional author on jurisprudential approaches to contemporary challenges. His newest book is The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities.1

It is one of history’s cheekier pranks that the first architect ever to appear on television was that thirty-year-old prodigy with the movie-star face, Albert Speer. Nazi Germany was the first country to introduce television broadcasting, just in time to cover the 1935 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. If you search for it, you can watch a short clip as Speer drives his convertible into his newly enlarged rally grounds, banters with a reporter, and then speeds off with a jaunty Hitler salute.

Of course the world knows Speer from an entirely different media appearance. This was his testimony at the Nuremberg trials, where he dramatically accepted full personal responsibility for Nazi war crimes, the only one of the accused to do so. His subdued, humble demeanor could not have contrasted more with the evasiveness, self-justification, and unconcealed haughtiness of his co-defendants. It was literally the performance of his life, and it saved him from certain execution. Having stepped into the role of “the good Nazi,” Speer never relinquished it. Upon serving his twenty-year sentence, he published a series of fascinating though self-serving memoirs, beginning with Inside the Third Reich (1970). Through it all he played the part of the naïve and innocent artist, who was guilty of nothing more than letting his childlike eagerness to build overwhelm his good judgment and moral sensibility.

That pose is no longer tenable. Archival finds in Germany and elsewhere have shown that Speer could not have been ignorant of the Nazi extermination camps, as he claimed, but was involved in finicky detail with their construction and operation. Although these finds caused a sensation in Germany a decade ago, it is only now that we have a comprehensive treatment in English, Martin Kitchen’s Speer: Hitler’s Architect.1 As an architectural biography, it does not altogether satisfy. What is the relationship between Speer’s architecture and Nazi ideology? Is one permitted to speak about his work in aesthetic terms? If not, why not? Only in passing do these questions divert Kitchen, who is much more interested in Speer the war criminal than Speer the architect. And that he was a war criminal, right up to his elbows, there can be no doubt. Hitler’s Architect makes a persuasive case that Speer’s escape from the gallows at Nuremberg must count as one of the last great crimes of the war.

Albert Speer (1905–1981) was born in Mannheim, Germany, the son and grandson of architects. Pushed by his father to study architecture, he studied first in Karlsruhe, then Munich, but he only became serious after he transferred to Berlin. There he applied to study with Hans Poelzig, the brilliant expressionist architect of Weimar Germany, who rejected Speer as an inferior draftsman. Disappointed, he turned to the man who was Poelzig’s polar opposite, Heinrich Tessenow, a reform-minded architect with a love of simple, clear volumes and neoclassical clarity—the ultimate basis of Nazi architecture. Speer, who all his life knew how to ingratiate himself, sufficiently impressed Tessenow to become his teaching assistant.

Marco Rubio is leading the “Endorsement Primary” by a huge margin, but many are hard-pressed to name any of the Florida senator’s concrete accomplishments. While his record in the Senate may be scarce, Rubio has an impressive slate of achievements from his days in the Florida House, and these show what kind of conservative he would be in the Oval Office.

Rubio pushed many reforms, from limiting eminent domain to expanding school choice and education options for high-demand/high-skill jobs. His leadership also helped streamline Florida’s laws and even helped privatize toll roads.

“As speaker and in earlier leadership positions in the Florida House, Rubio demonstrated a willingness to delegate to focus on his strengths, communicating and negotiating,” National Review’s Jim Geraghty writes.

Donald Trump likes to say that Rubio has never hired anyone, and that may be true in the private sector. But in government, Rubio has much experience doing what presidents do: delegating.

One Hundred Ideas

When Rubio became speaker of the Florida House of Representatives in 2006, he gave every member of the group a book titled 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. Rubio asked his fellow representatives to fill the books with ideas from constituents. This step may have been “flashy,” but it represented a governing philosophy — to involve voters and other legislators as much as possible.

Similarly, Rubio gave more power and responsibility to state House leaders when he became speaker. He let members of his leadership team decide which representatives would chair committees, and he let committee chairs skip the subcommittee step on important legislation. Committees were given broad leeway in how to prioritize different concerns with the money they were allocated.

BOOM BUST BOOM

Directed by Terry Jones, Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and the Monty Python graphics loons

Here is a suitable companion piece to the exceptional film The Big Short, which should have won Best Picture from many points of view. Not only did Big Short illuminate the precursor rumblings of the housing crash of 2008, using quirky characters and mounting excitement as the viewer realized he was sympathizing with these boiler room guys who were riding the crescendo of disaster to clean up, but it was a fast-moving, appropriately clever script that kept you glued, and it was all a story most people did not know — unlike the well-bruited tale told in the otherwise excellent Spotlight.

After all, everyone knew of the Boston priest sexual abuses of children. As opposed to the fact that few people — even now — understand what went down with the burst bubble of unsecured mortgages-a-go-go instigated by the Clintonian forced order to make mortgages “more democratic.” So the underemployed, the irresponsible, the assetless, the no-down-payment people all had their shot at owning homes they could not, in the end, afford.

I rarely recommend adult films to those underage, but this film to my mind, and other reviewers expressed a similar thought, is imperative viewing for college, even high school and the older elementary school child. It should be mandatory even in assisted living communities, too, because the elderly are often gulled by the unscrupulous customer service associates of the investment houses, chop shops and brokerages.

It makes lucid argument for a familiarity with what has been called “irrational exuberance” in markets, and the filmmakers make exorbitantly fabulous use of the Monty Python iconic graphics and sound tools to bring home the carefully edited and compiled remarks of top financiers, economists, bankers, actors and journalists.

This is a fitting companion piece to the noteworthy, but sophisticated offering of The Big Short. Together, these two form an irresistible case for investment sanity, consumer awareness of risk, banking responsibility, and fiduciary gravitas.

BBB goes back to the 17th century Dutch tulip craze to the present, in typically kicky Python graphics that rise and fall, drop off and explode. They outline the South Seas ticket fad. They go through the periodic boom bubbles, what one well-known pooh-bah called “irrational exuberance,” that precedes devastating busts. The Great Crash of ’29 comes in, with illustrations and clips of homeless soup lines and tattered families, followed by the 2008 collapse of uncollateralized debt obligations, mortgages sold by banks across Europe as well as the U.S.

Comedy bits, vox pops, lively commentary and B/W illustration that come to life, and a stew of financial experts like journalists John Cassidy and Paul Masson, Bank of England’s Chief Economist Andy Haldane, and Nobelists Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller and even a female or two.

One wonderful, whimsical, but fascinating segment takes place on Monkey Island, where a sociologist studies the monkey inhabitants of the island for what their irrational behavior sheds on the irrationalities of human beings.

A spectacular offering. The audience of hard-bitten New York reviewers sat rapt and riveted to the screen — and afterwards, they actually applauded the film, so amazingly clever, yet absolutely unmistakably factual …and sane.

It bypasses the wages of lecture, and is fun, evoking laughter often. It presents nibblets from beloved cartoons like “South Park”, the animatronic and muppet figures are extrapolative enough not to implicate the personae they represent, and the likes of Alan Greenspan and his 40-year run of wrongness gets a sharp drubbing from the Krugmans, Terry Joneses and John Cusacks. Bernanke puts in a B/W appearance here and there.

Knowing what this film communicates, one wonders whether the film ought instead to have been titled BUST BOOM BUST… the writers don’t see crashes and collapses as anything but predictably normal, whenever people get too cozy with ever-escalating prices, financial placidity while forgetting the attendant risks in all investments, and overreach.

Whatever happens next Oscar time, they should create a new category for BBB to sweep the golden statuettes off that shelf.

BEN SHAPIRO; DONALD TRUMP IS A LIAR

http://www.dailywire.com/videos/3733/ben-shapiro-donald-trump-liar-ben-shapiro

JOHN OLIVER’S TAKEDOWN

https://www.youtube.com/embed/DnpO_RTSNmQ?autoplay=1

Is the GOP now the Gone Old Party? Donald Goldenlock’s book “The Art of the Deal” only reveals how the lout inherited money from his father the real entrepreneur, and went on to “negotiate” by suing, bullying, deceiving, and bending rules in real estate.

How a vain, boastful, narcissistic, serial adulterer, liar, know nothing, con man got as far as he has in the political arena will be the subject of many columns and books.rsk

Israel, object of libels, boycotts, nuclear threats, academic opprobrium, biased media…the list could go on forever…..is an amazing nation. Every week my e-pal Michael Ordman send me a list of their incredible achievements in medicine, science, economy, global outreach, humane project….again, the list goes on. What a country- from seedless papayas, to undercover teams to help in Syria, aid in California’s drought struggle, bird conservation, high tech and wireless technologies, radar…..the list goes on and on.

Please take a moment to peruse the good news from Israel blog: http://www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

It is the best antidote to all the horrible news from campuses, the State Department, the Eurotrash anti-Semitism, and the biased “calumnists.”
P.S. Read about Egypt’s new ambassador to Israel….‘Happy and proud’ to be here, Egypt’s first ambassador since 2012 presents credentials

http://www.timesofisrael.com/egypts-new-envoy-to-israel-im-very-happy-and-proud-to-be-here/