RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over the past 10 or so years, I’ve followed the writings of author Joan Swirsky. Although we’re separated by many miles, many States and have never met face to face, we’ve established an e-mail and telephone friendship.

A few months ago, Joan told me that she was completing her new book about a subject that is relevant to every human being on the planet. I asked if she’d like me to interview her as soon as the book was published. That day has, finally, arrived. The book is out! The interview below is Joan’s in-depth discussion on her book and a few other subjects that should be of interest to all.

BIO: Joan Swirsky is the the recipient of numerous Long Island Press Awards, has written health, science and feature articles for The New York Times Long Island section for over 20 years, as well as for many regional and national publications. A former obstetrical nurse, Lamaze teacher and psychotherapist, Joan is the book-and-lyric writer of four musicals, one of which, “Oh Baby!” – about three couples facing parenthood – was produced in New York City in 1983.

Joan is a clinical nurse specialist (R.N., M.S., C.S., C.E.) and NY-State-certified psychotherapist. She was awarded a Nurse of Distinction Award by the New York State Legislature in 1991, received the Master’s Faculty Leadership Award from Adelphi University, and is a member of Sigma Theta Tau Nursing Honor Society.

She was also the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of REVOLUTION -The Journal of Nurse Empowerment from 1990 to 1995. The national quarterly magazine received First Prize for Editorial Excellence from the prestigious national media Folio Awards in 1994. In addition, for 15 years, she was the founding editor of The Caucus Current, a monthly magazine on conservative Jewish political issues.

For 15 years, Joan wrote a monthly column on pregnancy and childbirth for Newsday’s Parents & Children Magazine and for Long Island Parent. She was also a political writer for Newsmax.com and Newsmax Magazine. To this day, she writes for numerous conservative websites.

It was almost comforting to hear the Republican candidates try to outdo each other on Saturday night, saying they’d pour money on the problems of our military to solve them. As if that solution ever worked. One of the biggest problems we have is that we’re doing some really dumb things.

Some are so dumb it beggars the imagination. Other things are so costly — and dumb — that they are going to beggar the Pentagon budget for decades. We’re buying the wrong stuff.

Three examples prove this theory. First is President Obama’s recent executive order to the Army directing it on how to buy a rifle to replace the old M-16. Second is the continued machinations of the Air Force and Navy to justify buying the combat-ineffective F-35. And third is the Navy’s insistence on buying more of the Littoral Combat Ships (“LCSs,” aka the “little crappy ship”) which can’t survive in combat.

As my pal Rowan Scarborough reported last week in the Washington Times, Obama issued a January executive order directing the Army to design the needed replacement for the M-16 rifle (and the derivative M-4 carbine, which is famous for its malfunctions) not to make it more lethal but to make it safer. That is, less likely to accidentally discharge and to make it harder for an “unauthorized” person to fire the weapon.

his was an interesting panel on the Obama administration’s foolish ideas of trying to make a friend out of Iran’s Islamic Republic.

https://philosproject.org/obama-iranian-nuclear-agreement/

“It’s a fiasco,” Hudson Institute analyst Michael Doran said bluntly, as he assessedPresident Barack Obama and his Iran policy. Doran and his fellow panelists at the Hudson Institute presented the stark dangers involved in the administration’s naïve hopes that Iran’s Islamic Republic can reform and become a reliable Middle East regional partner for a weakening America.

According to Doran, officials in the Obama Administration “believe that they are domesticating the Iranians; that they are showing them that a partnership is possible and elevating those more pragmatic and defensive elements in Iranian society.” He argued that, as it confronts a volatile Middle East, the Obama Administration is “looking at this mess stretching from Baghdad to Beirut and it looks over at Teheran and it sees a big, stable country that behind closed doors talks the language of regional stability. [The administration] thinks, ‘Wow. If we could just incorporate the Iranians into the security architecture, then they will work with us to stabilize the region.’”

Guiding the president and his advisors is a “deep aspect of American thinking about international politics to believe in the gradual, moderating influence of international markets.” Doran added that the administration officials “want to create conditions in Iran that will bring about the same kind of change of calculus” that has made China leery of confronting its major trading partner, America. Those individuals have argued that – as with a post-Marxist China – no Iranian leaders really believe in the Islamic “revolutionary rhetoric” left over from the 1979 revolution.

While Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif and other Iranians “present themselves to the Americans as consummate players of realpolitik,” Doran pointed out that in reality, the Islamic Republic remains a radical danger. The Islamic Republic leaders have specified that they desire an international revolution in the Middle East, “in the sense that they want the American-dominated system that existed to disappear, and a new system [to arise] in which they are the central player. The Iranians play this game of being both the arsonist and the fireman in Middle East conflicts, and develop instruments to blow things up. And they tell you, ‘If you work with us we won’t blow it up.’”

Leftist movements begin with rebellion and end with conformity. No Utopian movement can tolerate rebels for long because there is no room for dissent in paradise. An ideal society, the goal of leftist political movements, not only has no room for war, racism, greed and all the other evils the conformist paradises of the left hope to eliminate, it also has no room for disagreement.

The perfect society and its perfect ideology are also the perfect tyranny. Against this Utopian collectivism, which promises paradise and delivers a prison, is the traditionalist rebel who finds virtue in the acknowledgement of human flaws rather than in the unthinking pursuit of an unchanging perfection.

The traditionalist rebel is not seeking perfection, but humanity. He is a skeptical idealist who is interested in character rather than movements. He is above all else an individualist with an instinctive distrust of any movement that requires him to abandon his rights for the greater good.

The traditionalist rebel is the snake in the liberal Eden because he does not have faith in the noble motives of the bureaucratic activists who claim to be the gods of this Eden. He knows enough of human nature to reject the fallacy that the right ideology makes men so righteous that they can be trusted with absolute power without absolute corruption following in their wake. He knows that socialists have not risen above the crimes of selfish self interest that they condemn mankind for.

The Hebrew Bible is shaped by two extended portraits, of Moses and David. Of the two stories, Moses’ is better known, but the narrative of David is more psychologically complex and dramatically vivid. As they divide the great mountains (Sinai and Zion) and two dominant terrains (desert and land) between them, Moses and David represent, respectively, the giving of the law and the attaining of ultimate redemption through the line of the Messiah.

The story of David is less familiar, partly due to its placement in the book of Samuel instead of the Pentateuch. David’s story is intricate, incident-packed, and follows several different strands. Fascinating in all its parts, it requires some thought and time to weave it together. In some ways, therefore, David’s life is ripe for a novel. Skillful novels unfurl complicated stories and run a strong narrative line through them, helping the reader to understand their shape. Novels can also alter or supplement the original to help the reader understand its essential shape. Here, in Geraldine Brooks’s skillful and eloquent account of the life of David, rather than hint at the apparent hostility David’s brothers bear him, she has one of them accuse him of bestiality. There is no warrant for this in the biblical text, but it certainly does fix the animosity in the reader’s mind.

Last week publishers, copyright experts and other supporters filed amicus briefs petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the copyright-infringement case against Google brought by the Authors Guild. The court’s decision will determine how and whether the rights and livelihood of writers are protected in the future.

If you type, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” into Google’s search box, the text and author will be identified for you in a matter of seconds. This is not because Google has ranks of English majors waiting at the ready, but because, over a decade ago, Google made an agreement with a number of great libraries to make digital copies of every book they owned.

In 2004 Google sent its moving vans to the libraries and carted off some 20 million books. It copied them all, including books in copyright and books not covered by copyright. It asked no authors or publishers for permission, and it offered no compensation for their use—although in compensation to the libraries Google gave them digital copies of the scanned books.

The Authors Guild challenged what Google was doing in Authors Guild v. Google, the copyright-infringement case first brought in 2005 and recently decided on appeal to the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. In October the court ruled that Google was protected by the doctrine of fair use when it copied the books—partly because it only made limited samples from copyright material available to the public, and partly because the court found that making the books available to an electronic search was “transformative.”

“For the modern narcissist, refugees are the gift that just keeps on giving. In an age where nobody does much smiting of innocents (except for the nothing-to-do-with-Islam Islamic State), opportunities for the superlative differentiation of one’s enlightened self from evil brothers and sisters are thin on the ground. It seemed so easy in those halcyon Grade Five days to imagine you, personally, would never knowingly have given small pox or syphilis to an immune-naive native, released a cane toad into the bush or sentenced some starving tatterdemalion to transportation for stealing a loaf of bread. Virtue comes easy when there is no need to prove itself.”

In addition to their other perks and privileges, our political class and its Twitter camp followers enjoy the right to spray their virtue at will upon the public stage. And why shouldn’t they put their goodness on display? It is always someone else expected to pick up the tab.
Listening to the disappointments of your workaday narcissists throws up a few common utterances. The following phrases capture the nub of the problem:

“Well, after all I did for…” “I’m very sensitive and I get hurt very easily”“I feel like I’m always give, give, giving…”;

and much more like this, inevitably:“I was always, repeat always, there for Julie but she was just never there for me.”

For older readers, this apparent confusion about collecting Julie from life’s bus stop has nothing to do with a faulty GPS or daylight saving. “There“, is a mythical emotional “space”, as the current parlance would describe it, (for space think Fairyland, not Star Trek), where a sort of psychic symbiosis is the panacea for all of life’s troubles. The twin vanities of the narcissist are contained within these trite banalities: self-righteousness and the regret that others are failing their moral obligation to fuel the self-proclaimed victim’s ego, to do as wished and re-pay the aggrieved individual’s generosity with the full measure of interest demanded.

If narcissism is the fantasy of becoming ‘big’ to cope with the reality of being ‘small’ in the scale of the world, the invention of social media has plonked obscenely large helpings of ‘big’ social issues on the bain marie of our self esteem. For instance, only a matter of twenty years ago, the closest you could get to the modern phenomenon of ‘virtue signaling’, which teachers once knew simply as showing off, was the chance to read aloud to Grade 5 classmates your social studies project on Truganini or the crown of thorns starfish. But now, with one fell tweet, the entire world can hear how desperately you would like to see the Crown of Thorns stopped from puncturing the hulls of the refugee boats, not to mention flying Truganini from Manus Island for a medically safe abortion.

Spike Lee and other black actors are demanding more racial or ethnic “diversity” in film, especially in films that win Oscars.

Affirmative Action in Film

Spike Lee and other black actors are demanding more racial or ethnic “diversity” in film, especially in films that win Oscars, regardless of whether or not anyone wants to see them or their films, or even if the films in which “minorities” appear deserve an Oscar or any kind of recognition.

What Lee and other claimants of entitlements want is much like anti-smokers demanding that all restaurants and bars be made smoke-free by law. That is, for the government to favor their voting bloc or pressure group and to “socialize” private property and private associations. To “socialize” private property and private associations, however, is to seize them. Or, compare that with Muslims demanding that supermarkets create a special section for halal food products.

What no one seems to understand is that affirmative action in film – which is what #OscarsSoWhite is demanding – will mean affirmative action in literature. Most films today are based on novels or on adaptations from novels (mostly bad adaptations, and a handful of decent ones). Or on film scripts. “Diversity” in employment has always been linked to political correctness in speech and even in imagery. One can see it in television and print advertisement. It also means “rationing” casting parts to blacks and other minorities. It means forced social associations.

It means the collectivization of artistic and moral values based on race, gender, and even disabilities.

There is a minor character in Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel, Atlas Shrugged, which, among other things, chronicles the destruction of America at the hands of statists, egalitarians, career parasites (politicians and bureaucrats), and other looters-by-law. The character is Ralph Eubank, a failed writer who nonetheless has political pull in Washington.

Over the past 15 years, Plan Colombia and other U.S. assistance have helped transform Colombia from a country ravaged by drug cartels and terrorist insurgents to the more prosperous and secure society it is today. It has helped turn Colombians once terrorized by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) into a strong people that have weakened this narco-terrorist organization, and brought it to the negotiating table on its knees. It has helped turn a country with a corrupt and unreliable judiciary into a place with growing confidence that justice will be served for those who violate laws.

Although these realities today may seem like they were inevitable all along, we should never take them for granted nor should we allow these hard-fought gains to be eroded. We should also never forget the Colombian and American military and civilian lives that have been lost along the way.

However, it is too early to declare complete victory. President Juan Manuel Santos, who visited Washington this week, is currently engaged in peace talks with the FARC, a three-year process that is supposed to culminate in an agreement by March 23. At that point, the Colombian people have been promised the final say through a national referendum, which should clearly state all of the terms of the agreement so that Colombians know exactly what has been agreed to by both President Santos and the FARC.

Many Colombians doubt the FARC’s intentions to abide by the terms of any peace agreement, and I share many of their concerns because of the group’s history of criminality, duplicity, broken ceasefires, and terrorism that has rightly earned it a designation by the U.S. government as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

For example, even at this late stage in the negotiations, it’s unclear whether FARC guerrilla leaders will be allowed to participate in the political process while serving a prison sentence, if they will disarm and surrender their weapons, if they will cease all drug trafficking, and what kind of accountability there will be for human-rights violations. There has also been concerning talk about returning to Colombia FARC officials who are currently in U.S. prisons for their crimes and for the U.S. to stop seeking to bring to justice FARC members who have violated U.S. laws; given President Obama’s penchant for flawed prisoner-exchange deals, I have little confidence in his ability to do the right thing in this case either.

Obama’s long game is a complete restructuring of the balance of power in the region—but with what results?

The administration of President Barack Obama seldom missed an opportunity to insist that the alternative to the Iran nuclear deal was a war with Iran, a prospect that has now presumably been kicked further down the road. Middle Easterners are not so lucky: They get to fight their wars with Iran right now.

Where America stands on the question of the wars that Iran is fueling across the Middle East has been obscured to some extent by outdated expectations, diplomatic niceties, and deliberate smoke-screens. But it would be wrong to take pro forma statements about America’s alliances with old friends like Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, or Israel at anything like face value. The first thing the Obama Administration did following the recent burning of the Saudi embassy and consulate in Iran by a state-sponsored mob was not to condemn this assault on a longtime U.S. ally. Rather, the White House immediately launched a media campaign pushing the message that the problem was actually Saudi Arabia, and, as anonymous U.S. officials suggested on background, maybe it was time to reconsider America’s regional alliances.