RUTHFULLY YOURS

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In a country reeling from the uptick in violence such as school shootings, cop-killings, anti-semitic, anti-Christian and racist massacres, not to mention the daily news reports of random street and subway stabbings, slashings and shootings – the NYTimes chose to offer this as its front page article on the impeachment :
(2/2/20): “Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to foresee the lesson of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. ‘When you strike at a king,’ Emerson said, ‘ you must kill him.” This advice, quoted by the Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker sounds very similar to that issued by various Islamic religious leaders who have urged their followers to kills Jews anywhere they find them, using any implements at their disposal, particularly knives and large trucks Unfortunately, it resembles some of what Black Lives Matter urges on its followers with signs hailing “Kill the Pigs.”

The quote was originally a response to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s request to Emerson to critique the paper he was writing about Plato for the course he was taking as a Harvard undergraduate Emerson, obviously concerned about the loose ends Holmes had left in the paper, gave the young student some strong metaphoric advice: Plato was the king and though Holmes had struck him, he had not successfully completed his arguments against him.

Seen in the newspaper which has blamed most of the divisiveness in our society on Trump’s “racist rhetoric,” this little known quote, completely out of context, can be seen as an inflammatory invitation to the deranged malcontents in a lawless and dangerous society, one which also increasingly has trouble parsing the meaning and intent of metaphor.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Since time immemorial, a perfect society has been a dream. In the “Book of Revelations,” a thousand, golden, peaceful years are promised, when Christ returns to reign before the final judgment day. In 1516, Thomas More coined the word “Utopia” that he incorporated into the title of his classic work, in which he described perfect conditions on the island of Utopia. In 1620, Pilgrims came to the “New World,” in search of a “city on a hill,” a society under God’s guiding hand. Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts was founded by the transcendentalist and former Unitarian minister, George Ripley in 1841. It was to be an egalitarian, self-sufficient community with no distinction between intellectual and manual labor. While FDR’s New Deal was a response to the Great Depression, the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson was an attempt to banish poverty and let equality rule. The belief that man could live as brothers in peace has long been a promise of idealists, swindlers, fraudsters, charlatans and politicians – or do I repeat myself?

The word ‘inequality’ evokes emotion. Webster defines equality as the “quality or state of being equal.” When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…,” he was not implying that all persons are equal in talents, or that outcomes should be equal. He was saying we are equal in those natural rights granted by God. Under the Constitution, we are equal in our right to assemble and to speak freely; we are equal in our rights under and before the law, and we are equal in our right to vote.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-30-two-reasons-why-continuing-a-little-with-impeachment-might-not-be-such-a-bad-thing

As of this writing it looks like the impeachment farce in the Senate may end as early as tomorrow. The Democrats’ “more witnesses” gambit appears to be fizzling out — although that is not a certainty until the vote is taken. I suppose that ending this thing is for the better. However, I do have a couple of reasons why having it continue for at least a little while longer may not be so bad.

The first is that there is an obvious witness for the President’s side to call, someone whose testimony could be the first real “bombshell” in this whole matter. No, it is not Joe or Hunter Biden. I have seen the Bidens mentioned dozens of times as potential witnesses to be called by the President, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. As indefensible as the Bidens’ conduct in Ukraine may be, calling them as witnesses would likely turn into a net negative for the President. As a general matter, if you can avoid it, you never want to call a well-prepared hostile witness who is devoted to defeating your case. When you start questioning such witnesses, they will almost certainly follow the strategy of ignoring whatever questions you may ask and delivering pre-prepared self-serving monologues justifying their own position. Rarely will a judge give you any meaningful relief to get the testimony focused on what you want.

The President’s counsel calling Joe or Hunter Biden would be like the House managers seeking to call the President himself, or somebody like William Barr or Mike Pompeo. Those people are just not going to say anything unfavorable to the President if they can possibly avoid it. Instead you call people like Alexander Vindman and Marie Yovanovich. People who think that their stellar performance in office has been ignored. Even better, people (like Yovanovich) who have been fired by your target, and maybe have also been insulted by your target and have a powerful motive to use their testimony to get revenge.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/winston-churchill-speaking-on-th

From Winston Churchill’s first election broadcast on June 4, 1945:

….there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. …liberty, in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism. …there is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus boss.

A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and aspects… could not afford opposition. Socialism is, in its essence, an attack upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.   

But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are shortsighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/01/we-may-never-see-his-like-again/

Greg Gutfeld is a conservative host on Fox News. He started off some years ago when Donald Trump was first elected as being something of a Trump sceptic. He has been won over. I think there are two ways to be won over, if you need be won over. First, consider Trump’s policies and his achievements.

To mention a few: lower business taxes; massive and continuing deregulation; 6.7 million new jobs created; unemployment rate down to 3.5 per cent; the lowest unemployment rate on record for African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans; real earnings up 2.5 per cent; poverty down; stock prices and home prices way up; energy sufficiency; the ISIS caliphate destroyed; the US embassy in Israel moved to Jerusalem; new trade deals negotiated with South Korea, Mexico, Canada and first-phase deals with Japan and China, with Europe and the UK to come; border security tightened; over 180 new (literalist) federal judges appointed and two supreme court justices; freeloading NATO countries heavied to pay more for their own defence; extracting the US from the flawed Iranian nuclear deal and imposing tough sanctions on Iran, opting out of the ineffective Paris (climate) Agreement designed to penalise Western industrial countries while giving those countries whose emissions are growing the fastest – China and India prominently – a free pass.

It would be possible to go on and on but my drift is clear. This is a presidency without precedent. He will go down as the most successful president ever, particularly if, as seems certain in view of the calibre of those jockeying to oppose him, he is given another four-year term. And all this, so far, while being continuously pelted with rotten eggs by the rampantly biased and dishonest media and being continually investigated for non-crimes, ending up with the current hollow impeachment trial.

The likes of him we have never seen before, unlike any previous president or political leader in the history of the world. And this provides a bridge into the second way to be won over by Trump.

He is a billionaire, the president and yet the common man. What you see is what you get. And how refreshing it is.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/01/29/an-action-plan-for-a-new-jewish-leadership/

The chickens have come home to roost. Years of neglect and misguided policies by mainstream Jewish leaders have helped enable a shocking surge of Jew-hatred in America. It is encouraging to see some concern and support from the public and media, and it is heartening to see the Jewish community come together. These are critical first steps. It is sad and frustrating that this required the hunting and murder of Jews.

There have been multiple analyses of the nature and extent of the failure of mainstream Jewish leaders. The community’s major donors need to recognize that they too have failed by their selection of academic, legal, social worker types or diplomats as leaders in a time of conflict. The times require “wartime” leaders who can develop a clear vision of the crisis and a plan of action for the future.

New leaders will have to jettison some of the fundamental premises of Jewish communal policies that have clearly failed. They will also need to pivot from their 100-year-old mission of gaining acceptance of Jews in American society to ensuring the safety of the community.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/01/the-postmodern-pursuit-of-global-governance/

Todd Huizinga was a United States diplomat from 1992 to 2012 and is now director of International Outreach at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is author of The New Totalitarian Temptation (Encounter Books). He gave this paper to the Danube Institute, Budapest, in November 2010

We in the West are now living in a world in which our political differences are no longer based, as they once were, on different perspectives within a shared worldview, but rather on diametrically opposed presuppositions about first things: what is good, what is true and what it means to be human. The premise of a basically unchanging human nature embedded in tradition, religion, community and family—a fundamental component of the Western worldview that has grounded individual freedom and self-government for centuries—no longer commands the general allegiance of Americans or Europeans.

Indeed, progressives are committed to a diametrically opposed view: a radically secularist vision of the virtually unlimited flexibility of human nature according to each person’s choice, essentially independent of traditional institutions and social relations. Every day we are witnessing the results: once freedom of choice—the right to choose—has been exalted above all else, there remain no meaningful limits on the social pressure and governmental power that are now wielded to impose “choice” on everyone, whether they want it or not.

This manifests itself primarily in two ways. First, in the increasing polarisation within the nations of the West, and the weakening of our democratic freedoms as the progressive ideology takes root in our societies; and second in the conflict between globalism and national sovereignty that is roiling the trans-Atlantic partnership as the struggle intensifies between the EU’s globalist vision and America’s traditional concern for sovereignty.

First, my home country. In the US, our system of self-government is based on the recognition that certain things are unchangeably true, and thus that government must respect these truths in order to be just. As the Declaration of Independence says:

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/01/23/heres-a-tipping-point-the-left-wants-you-to-ignore/

Recently, the majority of the world became middle class or rich thanks to capitalism.

In an interview this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complained that the Democratic Party wasn’t sufficiently leftist because it hasn’t embraced her style of socialism. “There are a lot of true believers that we can ‘capitalism’ our way out of poverty,” she complained. 

We doubt there are very many such believers remaining in the Democratic Party, given that 70% of those who identify as Democrats now have a positive view of socialism.

To the extent that there are any free market capitalists left in the Democratic Party, it’s possible that they are true believers because they’ve seen the data, which make it abundantly clear that capitalism has been the greatest anti-poverty program ever conceived by mankind.

The Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank in Washington, D.C., found that, “for the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty.”

The report – which came out more than a year ago – showed that more than 50% of the world’s population lived in households with enough discretionary income to be considered middle class or rich.

More specifically, it found that there were 3.59 billion people in the middle class in 2017, and 200 million who are rich. At the other end, there are 3.2 billion they classify as “vulnerable” and 630 million who are poor.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

At some point in the mid 1950s I attended a party at Dr. Edwin Land’s summer home in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I was fifteen and Dr. Land’s thirteen-year-old daughter was my girlfriend. I found myself listening to three or four learned men trying to define horse sense. There was no unanimity. Having grown up with horses, I knew they were not the most intelligent of animals, but I also knew they had enough sense to seek shelter when it rained and come to the barn when hungry for grain. They had (and have) common sense. Horse sense and common sense are born of the same mother, though I was too intimidated to say anything 65 years ago. Webster’s agrees. Horse sense is defined: “the ability to make good judgements.” W. C. Fields also agreed, when he said that “horse sense is a thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.” Besides providing a horse laugh, there is a lesson in that adage.

Coleridge was right. Wisdom is the exercise of common sense. Wisdom is rare, especially in politicians who choose political correctness (the world as they would like it to be, not as it is), identity politics (segregation over unity), and victimization (the passing of blame rather than the assuming of responsibility). Common sense bases judgements on empirical evidence, on “self-evident truths,” as Robert Curry wrote in his book Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World. Meanwhile, politicians appeal to emotions, not reason, for example getting attendees pumped at rallies, which common sense says is a reason not to allow early voting.

“Facts,” as John Adams is supposed to have said, “are stubborn things.”  Nobody in Washington seems to worry about deficit spending even in a period of economic growth, yet last year’s deficit of just under a trillion dollars is equal to $3,000 per person. The published national debt is an obligation of $80,000 for every man, woman and child in the nation. When one adds in the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security, per person debt rises to $380,000. Facts tell us that our population is aging – that the number of workers is shrinking, while the number of retirees is expanding. Yet, the six candidates for President in last week’s debate in Iowa were interested only in programs that would add to the deficit, add to the national debt and add to unfunded liabilities. Even the Republican Party, the party supposedly of thrift seems to care little about running a fiscally responsible administration. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss: “How did we get so stupid so soon?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/opinion/soleimani-iran-tom-cotton.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_200111?campaign_id=2&instance_id=15086&segment_id=20244&user_id=f4445f2c9e2a7b49fa5b6b8c48e997e2&regi_id=589455760111

Last week, our military and intelligence services brought justice to Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s terror mastermind. President Trump ordered General Suleimani’s killing after months of attacks on Americans by Iran’s proxy forces in Iraq. These attacks culminated in a rocket strike that killed an American and wounded others, then the attempted storming of our embassy in Baghdad. The first attack crossed the red line drawn by the president last summer — that if Iran harmed an American, it would face severe consequences. The president meant what he said, as Mr. Suleimani learned the hard way.

Mr. Suleimani’s killing was justified, legal and strategically sound. But the president’s critics swarmed as usual. After the embassy attack, a Democratic senator declared that the president had “rendered America impotent.” Some Democrats then pivoted after the Suleimani strike, calling him “reckless” and “dangerous.” Those are the words of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who also described Mr. Suleimani — the leader of a State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization plotting to kill American troops — as a “senior foreign military official.” Senator Bernie Sanders likened America’s killing of a terrorist on the battlefield to Vladimir Putin’s assassination of Russian political dissidents.

Some Democrats seem to feel a strange regret for the killing of a monster who specialized in killing Americans. The linguist his proxies killed on Dec. 27, Nawres Hamid, was merely his last victim out of more than 600 in Iraq since 2003. His forces have instigated attacks against our troops in Afghanistan. He plotted a (foiled) bombing in Washington, D.C., and attempted attacks on the soil of our European allies. He armed the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon with rockets to pummel the Jewish state of Israel. And he was greeted moments before his death by a terrorist responsible for the bombing of our embassy in Kuwait in 1983.

Some of the president’s critics will concede that Mr. Suleimani was an evil man, but many complain his killing was unlawful. Wrong again. He was a United States-designated terrorist commander. As I have been briefed, he was plotting further attacks against Americans at the time of his death. The authority granted to the president under Article II of the Constitution provides ample legal basis for this strike. Furthermore, those who accept the constitutionality of the War Powers Act should recall that Congress’s 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force very much remain in effect and clearly cover the Suleimani operation. This will be a relief to the Obama administration, which ordered hundreds of drone strikes using such a legal rationale.

American forces are in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government, and they have every right and authority to defend themselves. This legal act of self-defense was not only proportionate — it was targeted and brilliantly executed, causing essentially no collateral damage.

So the killing was justified and legally sound. It was also strategically sensible. If Iran’s anemic response on Tuesday is any indication, the Suleimani strike has already restored deterrence — and our troops in the region are safer for it. To put it simply, the ayatollahs are once again afraid of the United States because of this bold action, which is forcing them to recalculate their odds. In 2019 alone, Iran’s violent provocations included mining ships in the Strait of Hormuz, downing an American drone and threatening the global economy by striking Saudi oil facilities. President Trump chose restraint at the time but promised ferocious retaliation in the event of American casualties. The mullahs must have thought that he was bluffing. Now they’re compelled to face the reality of America’s vast overmatch of their forces.

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The weeks and months ahead will tell whether the Islamic Republic is successfully deterred — but it has been deterred in the past, for example, when Ronald Reagan sank much of the Iranian Navy in 1988. (It has never successfully been appeased, and President Barack Obama’s attempts to buy off Iran with his nuclear deal only fueled the regime’s imperialism and regional campaign of terror.) Iran is not 10-feet tall. In fact, it’s a weak, third-rate power.

Because of this administration’s maximum-pressure campaign, the regime manages an economy trapped in a deepening depression. To remain in power, it must mass murder its own people, which it did as recently as November. If maximum pressure is maintained, the ayatollahs will eventually face a choice between fundamentally changing their behavior or suffering economic and social collapse. They may also choose to lash out in a desperate bid to escape this logic, perhaps by making a break for a nuclear bomb. Such impulses must be deterred or, if recklessly pursued, halted with swift and firm action, as the president promised on Wednesday.

This tough-minded approach is not a distraction from America’s competition with more serious adversaries like China and Russia, who watch our actions closely in the Gulf for signs of commitment and resolve. Our long-term challenge with China, in particular, directly involves the Middle East’s energy resources, to which access remains critical for our allies in the Indo-Pacific, and indeed for China itself — regardless of important strides in America’s domestic energy production.

The future of our Iran policy is a critical part of our success in the global competition that will determine the character of this century and the safety of the American republic within it. And recent events have shown we are up to the task.