RUTHFULLY YOURS

At Geneva-based UN Watch, the invaluable Hillel Neuer reminds us that the head of the Advisory Commission for the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) is none other than Syria. That bit of UN depravity, together with a recent visit to Washington, D.C. by UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Pierre Krahenbuhl, suggest it is high time to revisit the curious matter of why UNRWA these days maintains an office in Washington.

You remember UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, a.k.a. the UN outfit with schools in Gaza that have doubled as rocket depots for terrorists attacking Israel. Opened in 1950 as a temporary jobs and aid program for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA has become an ever-expanding fixture of the UN and the Middle East, a de facto patron of Hamas in Gaza, and welfare-dispenser for what is today a population of some 5 million “registered Palestinian refugees” — a project that down the generations has helped foster both a Palestinian culture of grievance and dependency, and money and jobs for UNRWA itself. At the UN, all other refugees come under the aegis of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which seeks to resettle them. Only the Palestinians have a dedicated agency that has turned refugee status into a bizarre form of hereditary entitlement.

It’s bad enough that UNRWA is still operating in the Middle East. But what’s it doing with an office in, of all places, Washington? UNRWA already fields an office right up the thruway, at the UN’s massive headquarters in New York. Why the need for yet another, in Washington?

Washington is not a city known for large populations of those Palestinian refugees UNRWA is supposed to be helping. But Washington is the conduit through which billions of American taxpayer dollars flow annually to various operations of the UN, including hundreds of millions to UNRWA — appropriated by Congress and dispensed by the State Department.

But, it seems more is always preferred.

In 2011 UNRWA opened an office in downtown Washington, choosing a venue located conveniently between the State Department and Capitol Hill. This office does not service “registered Palestinian refugees.” It represents UNRWA’s interests in Washington, and reports on Washington’s doings to UNRWA. It has been staffed since early days by two Americans, both steeped in the ways of Washington: Chris McGrath, a former aide to Sen. Harry Reid, and Matthew Reynolds, who previously worked as an assistant secretary for legislative affairs in the State Department.

The academic left and its idiocies pollute our intellectual environment, their near-unreadable nonsense restricting debate to the ever-censored essence of politically correct pedantry, as a genuinely great mind explains in an invaluable new book, ‘Fools, Frauds and Firebrands’
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands

by Roger Scruton
Bloomsbury, 2015, 304 pages, $35

You should read this book. No one else will tell you this, so I will. There has hardly been a more important book published over the past twelve months. If you sincerely wish to understand the times in which you live, there is no book like it. In describing it I will not be able to do it justice, since it provides a complex outline of the intellectual world that continues to promote the ideas of the Left, as inane and destructive as they are. But if you are to understand where these ideas come from, and why they continue to persist, you must read this book. There is no substitute anywhere that I know of. Read it.

The book has a specific purpose. It is to provide a way of escape to students who are caught up in various versions of a modern humanities course, where they are fed an endless mind-numbing postmodernist gruel. The book goes through the various manifestations of the modern Left to explain their idiocies and unravel the Newspeak in which they are encoded. But the book does more. It opens up to those of us who are only vaguely aware of the ways in which the humanities are now taught, our own entry into the depths of a problem most of us are, at best, only dimly aware of.

To use my own education as an example, I am not unaware of the forms of the postmodernism that surround us in the academic world. I meet it in the occasional seminar and come across it in various papers and presentations. Parts of it are almost common core, such as Thomas Kuhn’s notion that science is nothing other than what scientists do, and that the notion of something called “truth” is an entity impossible to discover. But it goes farther, to argue that truth is relative, that there is more than one way to skin an empirical fact. It goes farther still, and argues that even the facts we think we know are merely the product of the ideological world in which we have been raised. And it takes that one extra step to argue that to transcend our own bourgeois outlook, it is necessary to see the world liberated from our own limited backgrounds and instead, see things through the lens of Marxist thought.

Nothing is more embarrassing to watch than a suitor pursuing unrequited love. There’s no thrill in such romance. Every bouquet of long-stemmed roses and every box of candy Barack Obama sends to Havana is returned with a demand for roses with longer stems and a bigger box of candy.

Over the past year, President Obama has removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, re-established diplomatic relations and opened an embassy in Havana, and now Mr. Obama announces that he will be the first American president to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years. He’ll no doubt shave extra close for Fidel’s anticipated kiss.
There have been good reasons for previous presidents to withhold the prestige of a state visit. The Castro alliance with the Soviet Union produced a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from the Florida coast. For those 13 days the world held its breath in fear of World War III. The Castro regime has since attempted to subvert democratic governments throughout the Hemisphere and organized cabals against the United States.

Mr. Obama’s attempts at romance continued this week when the White House sent to Congress legislation to maintain restrictions on American civilian ships entering Cuban waters. The bill arrived on Capitol Hill on the 20th anniversary of the day the Cuban air force shot down a civilian rescue plane over international waters, a plane operated by an American relief organization called Brothers to the Rescue. The pilots were trying to locate and rescue Cubans fleeing prison or death in Cuba.

“These are the same waters that have witnessed record numbers of Cubans risking their lives to reach freedom because of the oppression they are facing under the Castro regime, a regime that has found an ally in President Obama,” says Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican.

(CNSNews.com) – Asked on Monday if Islamic State terrorists are carrying out a campaign of genocide against Syria’s Christians, White House Spokesman Josh Earnest said the word genocide “involves a very specific legal determination that has, at this point, not been reached.”

He condemned the terrorists’ “willingness to target religious minorities, including Christians.”

Earnest noted that the Obama administration has long expressed its concerns over ISIS/ISIL’s “slaughter” of religious minorities in Iraq and Syria.

“You’ll recall, at the very beginning of the military campaign against ISIL, at the–some of the first actions that were ordered by President Obama, by the United States military were to protect Yazidi religious minorities that were essentially cornered on Mount Sinjar by ISIL fighters. We took those strikes to clear a path so that those religious minorities could be rescued.

“So we have long been concerned by the way that–that ISIL attempts to target religious minorities.

“We also know that they target Christians in the area, too. In that region of the world, Christians are a religious minority, and we certainly have been concerned–you know, that’s one of the many reasons that we’re concerned with ISIL and their tactics, which is that it’s an affront to our values as a country to see people attacked, singled out or slaughtered based on their religious beliefs.”

The reporter asked Earnest, “But you’re not prepared to use the word ‘genocide’ yet in this situation?”

“The — my understanding is the use of that word involves a very specific legal determination that has, at this point, not been reached. But we’ve been quite candid and direct, exactly, about how — how ISIL’s tactics are worthy of the kind of international, robust response that the international community is leading. And those tactics include a willingness to target religious minorities, including Christians.”

As CNSNews.com recently reported, Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress last week that he is having an “additional evaluation” done to help him determine whether the systematic murder of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East should be declared “genocide.”

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.