Sometimes, when I look at my children, I say to myself, 'Lillian, you should have remained a virgin.'
- Lillian Carter (mother of Jimmy Carter)
By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one,
you'll become a philosopher.
you'll become a philosopher.
- Socrates
I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
- Groucho Marx
My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe.
- Jimmy Durante
Until I was thirteen, I thought my name was SHUT UP.
- Joe Namath
https://www.youtube.com/embed/
And
https://youtu.be/bOMksnSaAJ4?
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We have just returned from a wonderful visit to a hidden jewel of a museum in Cartersville, Ga. (about 32 miles north of Atlanta on U.S 75.)
Several years ago, I took a group to see and experience the Booth Western Art Museum. It was founded by a group of Capitalists who sold a business and used a significant part of the proceeds to give back to their community. The board had always been interested in Western Art and decided it was time to build a museum devoted to their love.
Booth has grown from a small museum and collection to one of our country's fine museum devoted to Western Art and Culture. We were Charter Members some 15 years ago and are amazed at what the Director, Seth Hopkins, and his outstanding and energetic staff, have accomplished.
The purpose of this visit was to participate in the 3rd Sweet Tea exhibit of Western Art from collectors of same throughout the South. We were approached by two of the Museum's Staff and were asked would we be willing to loan them works from our own collection and they selected three which were displayed among some 80 plus objects loaned by some 40 plus collectors.
Five contemporary artists also displayed their work and were present to not only discuss their life as artists but to give their thoughts on the future of Western Art. (Booth Western Art Museum.com)
Another of our dear friends had donated a magnificent wooden sculpture but were unable to join us because of Hurricane Irma.
I began collecting in 1954 when I was in service and stationed in Orleans, France. I purchased some 5 pieces of art never paying more than $14 for any one (the Franc was then 350 to a dollar of Scrip.)
I/we have been collecting ever since and though our collection is eclectic and unfocused every piece we own has a story and, thus, a special meaning.
I am going to investigate doing one more art tour either next year or the year thereafter, so anyone interested in joining please let me know. My thinking is to see Kennesaw University's new museum, then The Booth and finally The State Museum (GMOA) which resides on the Univ. of Ga's Campus in Athens.
One last comment about Western Art which is unique to America. If one has had the opportunity to visit The West, grew up during the era when Western Movies were in vogue and many of our finest actors/actresses became famous for the roles they played you can only lament the fact that we no longer produce movies devoted to "how the West was one." The reason is partly because of politics and the politically correct desire to bury our history and partly because cars replaced horses and though we continue to eat beef the romantic and exceedingly harsh life of the wrangler and cattle herder no longer has a place in our consciousness. There are o books, TV programs or the like to raise our awareness. Americans are ignorant of our nation's history and are more interested in pulling down our history, running from and/or apologizing for it.
There is no doubt America went West and did so on the backs of "Native Americans." I know of few nations that were able to develop without engaging in imposed trauma on others. Now that we have become civilized we simply threaten with nuclear weapons.
I believe The West , in retrospect, was a saner period
I will leave it at that.
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Stand in line with Bernie? No thanks! (See 1 below.)
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Europe needs to stand in front of a mirror and ask itself a question. (See 2 below.)
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This Governor saw the light. (See 3 below.)
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$70,000 plus a year and for what? (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)Bernie Interviews Canadian doctor about single-payer. She tells him all about their year-long wait times
The future Bernie wants.
Bernie has a podcast. It's long, it's tedious, and it's incredibly boring. It's really more an endurance test than a radio show. I’m pretty sure it was one of thing things the US Army played at ear-splitting volumes to drive Noriega out of the Vatican embassy back in '89.
I might be wrong about that last point, but the rest is dead-on. Bernie's podcast is awful.
Recently, he decided it would be a good idea to interview a Canadian doctor about the Great White North's healthcare system. It is, after all, Bernie's fever-dream to enact the same scheme here in the United States.
If he was hoping she would debunk those "lies" and "half-truths" about horrible wait times north of the border, he was surely disappointed.
Watch, as she details the "unacceptable" wait times Canadians must endure: https://youtu.be/oQP7XvxQpRU
The response above raises a couple of big questions.
The first one is: Who decides what constitutes a "serious" or "urgent" condition? Earlier today, I told you about the NHS, where "urgent" might simply be another way of saying "better off dead." Do we really trust the government - which will, without question, be desperate to downplay the severity of illnesses to minimize cost?
The second is: Bernie's guest suggests that "organizing the delivery system" is the problem, not the fact that government (taxpayers) pays for it. Ask yourself, do you trust the U.S. government - a body that ran the VA, the post office, and social security straight into the ground - to have an "organized delivery system" that will work for healthcare?
Any thinking person who knows the history of federal organization, planning, and implementation in the United States should conclude that this doctor has just offered a dismal best-case scenario for Americans under single-payer.
The reality will probably far worse. After all, Bernie famously thinks "breadlines are a good thing," so why should healthcare be any different?
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2)
Two recent decisions by European official bodies indicate that the answer to the question posed in the title of this article may be “yes”.
2)
Does Europe Have a Death Wish?
Two recent decisions by European official bodies indicate that the answer to the question posed in the title of this article may be “yes”.
The court of the European Union has ruled that no member country has the right to close its borders to illegal immigrants if doing that is contrary to EU policy. I can’t think of anything the court could have done that would be more likely to trigger more withdrawals from the Union.
Every member country knew that by joining the EU it would be giving up part of its sovereignty, but the primordial duty of any government is to protect the state and its citizens, and if a member country is denied the fulfillment of that duty it will have no choice but to refuse to accept that ruling, and if necessary, withdraw from the Union. Poland and Hungary have already declared that they will not recognize the ruling and it remains to be seen if other countries will follow suit and, if they do, what the bureaucrats in Brussels will do about it.
In the meantime, the official electoral body in Germany has declared that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is eligible to run candidates in the upcoming elections for the Bundestag. This is a decision that borders on the psychotic.
The PFLP is a terrorist organization that does not and never has had anything whatever to do with Germany or its institutions. For the PFLP to apply for the right to run candidates in the German elections is a clear indication that it expects to get the votes of legal Muslim voters in Germany, as well as any illegal voters who can get away with it. Given that political correctness in Germany has reached avalanche proportions, many election officials might be intimidated into allowing such illegal voting. For the PFLP to get into the Bundestag would be a stunning propaganda victory for Islamists of all stripes.
Retired Lieutenant-Colonel Dr Mordechai Kedar of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) at Bar-Ilan University in Israel has published a paper demonstrating that once some semblance of peace has been imposed in Syria, the Alawite leadership is unlikely to permit any substantial number of Sunni refugees to re-enter the country from Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan. Meanwhile, those countries will refuse to let them integrate into their societies, just as they and other countries of the region have refused to allow the Arabs who fled newly independent Israel in 1948-49 or their descendants to integrate.
This situation will encourage the continuation of mass attempts to infiltrate Europe by whatever means possible, which in turn will alienate even further those countries that refuse to be overwhelmed by them. It will also exacerbate extremist political movements in Europe.
Taken together, along with such other developments as the spread of sharia law and of areas of Muslim dominance in some European cities, the decisions on the part of the electoral authorities in Germany and the EU court can only hasten the disintegration of Europe, which indeed would probably be diagnosed by a Freudian psychiatrist as having a death wish.
If such insanities are not opposed firmly and effectively by political, economic and social leaders in the subcontinent, the future is indeed bleak. In such a case, who will gain?
Not the US, which is undergoing its own crises and withdrawing from much of its once-dominant world leadership. Russia? Perhaps, and President Vladimir Putin is certainly working to that end, but he rules a country weak economically and financially and with a major demographic crisis.
China? Though the country has established naval bases in the Indian Ocean (Gwadar) and the entrance to the Red Sea (Djibouti) and Chinese warships have entered the Mediterranean for the first time in its multi-millennial history, but it still seems a very unlikely development.
If the pending power vacuum is filled by no one, the result will be chaos, and if that happens, the Europeans will have no one to blame but themselves.
This commentary was published by Asia Times, on September 13, 2017.
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3) A Former Democrat Rises in Trump Country
Missouri’s governor talks about his journey to the right, his fights with the unions, and his experience as a Navy SEAL
Jefferson City, Mo.
A few years ago, Eric Greitens was a Democrat—not that you’d know it from his first eight months as the hard-charging Republican governor of Missouri. A Rhodes scholar and former Navy SEAL, Mr. Greitens has pursued an unexpectedly muscular conservative agenda, enacting free-market reforms and gleefully going toe-to-toe with unions. While the GOP in Washington seems bent on squandering its legislative and executive power, Mr. Greitens, 43, illustrates how Republicans in many states are intent on making the most of theirs.
A day after taking office in January, Mr. Greitens signed an executive order to freeze pending state regulations. It also required agencies to review rules already on the books to ensure not only that they are “essential to the health, safety, or welfare of Missouri residents” but that they pass a cost-benefit test. In July he assented to a law overriding St. Louis’s $10-an-hour minimum wage. “This increase in the minimum wage might read pretty on paper, but it doesn’t work in practice,” he said at the time. “Government imposes an arbitrary wage, and small businesses either have to cut people’s hours or let them go.”
Mr. Greitens’s most contentious actions have challenged union power. His Democratic predecessor, Gov. Jay Nixon, repeatedly vetoed right-to-work legislation, under which workers can’t be forced to join a union as a condition of employment. Mr. Greitens signed a right-to-work bill within a month of his inauguration.
During a 75-minute interview at the governor’s mansion, Mr. Greitens explains that his inspiration came from another Midwestern state. “I read Mitch Daniels’s book, ‘Keeping the Republic,’ several times” before running for office, he says. The former Indiana governor’s 2011 paean to fiscal discipline and personal responsibility provided an example, as did the right-to-work law Mr. Daniels signed in 2012. “Look at the data,” Mr. Greitens says. “Indiana became a right-to-work state, and today Indiana has more private-sector union members than before . . . because it was good for the economy.”
Not surprisingly, the unions don’t share that view. They formed a group called We Are Missouri, which last month turned in more than 300,000 signatures—only about 100,000 were required—to force a referendum on right to work. If Missouri’s secretary of state certifies the names, right to work will go before voters in 2018—and the law will remain on hold until then. The tactic has succeeded before: In 2011 a referendum campaign styled We Are Ohio defeated Gov. John Kasich’s collective-bargaining reforms for public employees.
Mr. Greitens launched another salvo at the unions in May. He signed a law banning so-called project labor agreements, which require that all workers hired under a given government contract be paid union wages. In a move calculated for confrontation, Mr. Greitens invited Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker —whose 2011 collective-bargaining reforms stuck, unlike Mr. Kasich’s—to attend a bill-signing ceremony in a St. Louis suburb. The unions and their Democratic allies got the message. “Eric Greitens is rubbing salt in the wounds of working families by celebrating another attack on their paychecks,” said Missouri’s Democratic chairman, Stephen Webber.
Mr. Greitens is unruffled by the criticism. “I think that you’ve got to take action that actually helps people,” he says. “We know that we’re always going to get criticized and we recognize that there are certain liberal media institutions in the state of Missouri that will always see whatever we do in the worst possible light.” But the economic data, he insists, tell a different story: “Since I’ve been in office, Missouri has been outpacing the nation in job growth. Missouri has moved up nine places in the ranking of best states to do business. We’ve got more jobs in Missouri than ever before.”
What explains his appetite for bare-knuckle fights with the unions? More to the point, how did a lifelong Democrat announce he was switching parties the year before the 2016 election, run as a gun-toting conservative, win a Republican primary against three veteran officeholders, and—in his first try for public office—defeat a sitting state attorney general on the November ballot?
Mr. Greitens’s critics—Republican and Democratic alike—have implied it was mere opportunism. During last year’s campaign a Kansas City Star reporter suggested Mr. Greitens was “an ideological weather vane” whose “conservative bona fides” were in question. His evolution has matched the state’s. Missouri was a longtime presidential bellwether—carried by the winner of every election between 1960 and 2004—but has shifted Republican in the past decade. Donald Trump won here by 18.5 points.
Mr. Greitens’s explanation? “My parents were both Democrats and I grew up as a Democrat,” he says. “Basically I was told that the Democrats were the party that cared about people. I liked people and I cared about them, so I was a Democrat.”
His politics began shifting rightward while he was in college, he says, after an encounter with a Bosnian refugee during a trip to the Balkans in 1994: “This guy says to me, ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re here. I appreciate that there’s a roof over my head and that there’s food for my kids and that there’s a kindergarten for them . . . but if people really cared about us, they’d also be willing to help to protect us.’ ”
That, he says, led to the realization, that “if you care about people, then you’re willing to act not just with compassion, but you’re also willing to act with courage.” In January 2001, ink not yet dry on his Oxford doctorate, he enrolled in the Navy’s Officer Candidate School. By 9/11 he was training to become a SEAL. Then he served four overseas deployments—in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, the Horn of Africa, and Iraq. In the Philippines he commanded a detachment of 20 men on two 82-foot Mark V special operations craft patrolling the waters of the Sulu Archipelago in support of Filipino marines battling the Islamic terrorists of Abu Sayyaf. In Iraq, he was in charge of an “al-Qaeda-targeting cell.”
After returning stateside in the mid-2000s, Mr. Greitens started a security consulting business and founded The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that helps veterans readjust to civilian life. The organization’s success gave Mr. Greitens a national profile. He wrote two best-selling books, 2011’s “The Heart and the Fist” and 2015’s “Resilience.” In 2013 Time magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
With his star on the rise, Mr. Greitens entertained the advances of Missouri Democrats who wanted him to run for Congress. All the while, he says, his politics were evolving. He announced his party switch in a July 2015 op-ed at FoxNews.com. “I was raised to stand up for the little guy, for working families and the middle class,” he wrote. “If I thought the Democratic Party had the right ideas to do that, I’d still be one of them. But they don’t.”
The change in his thinking, he says, grew out of experience more than philosophy: “Seeing what it took to actually start a business, while at the same time working with all of these other veterans who are trying to start businesses, just gave me a very practical sense of what it means to deal with burdensome regulations.” He didn’t know policy, so he turned to think tanks. “I read things that are put out by the Manhattan Institute. I read things that are put out by the American Enterprise Institute. I also read things that are put out by left-leaning organizations,” he says. “I think that it’s important to see what works.”
Last month Mr. Greitens traveled to Springfield, in the state’s southwest, to greet President Trump, who was in town stumping for tax reform. Unlike in many states, Mr. Trump did better in Missouri than other Republicans running statewide, beating Mr. Greitens’s vote total by more than 150,000. A recent SurveyMonkey poll gives the president a respectable 50% approval rating in the Show Me State.
When I ask Mr. Greitens if he has a good relationship with Mr. Trump, he grins broadly and doesn’t quite answer. “The president, on multiple occasions, has been great to Missouri,” he offers. He cites a February incident in which vandals desecrated a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis. Mr. Greitens, who is Jewish, organized an interfaith initiative to restore the damaged headstones. The president called the next day to thank him, the governor recalls, for “standing up to anti-Semitism” and “bringing people together.”
Isn’t that a contrast with Mr. Trump’s initial equivocation last month after white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Va.? Mr. Greitens is quick to condemn that rally. “I grew up in this household where we always talked about, ‘Never again. Never again,’ ” the governor says. “You have to be willing to stand up and fight and defend people.” But he declines to criticize the president directly, observing only that in a crisis, it’s important for a leader “to send a very clear and strong message.”
He faults his predecessor, Gov. Nixon, for failing to do so in 2014 when riots erupted in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. “The great tragedy of Ferguson,” Mr. Greitens says, “was that if you had had a leader who had shown up with any kind of command presence and courage and calm and clarity, we could have had peace by the second night.” Mr. Greitens’s time as a SEAL taught him how to assess whether a tense situation is about to spin out of control: “What you saw in Ferguson was a complete abandonment of the situation by our political leadership.”
Same with the 2015 disruptions on the University of Missouri’s flagship Columbia campus. The Mizzou administration, Mr. Greitens says bluntly, “was too willing . . . to appease the left.” There was “a failure to act,” as in Ferguson. “One of the things that I’ve found in everything that I’ve done: People want leaders to create a sense of direction and to lead and to act,” he says, “and they know that we will never get everything perfectly right, but they want us to lead.”
While Mr. Greitens is conservative, he isn’t always predictable. When I ask his opinion of Mr. Trump’s proposal to ban transgender military service members, he opposes it vigorously. “The military is not a place for us to have culture wars,” he says. “The No. 1 criteria that we should be looking at for every person who joins the military is, ‘Can they close with and kill the enemy in close-quarters battle?’ ”
Then last month Mr. Greitens earned praise from opponents of capital punishment when he stayed the scheduled execution of Marcellus Williams. A DNA test had raised serious doubt about whether Mr. Williams had in fact killed Felicia Gayle, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who was stabbed at home in 1998. Mr. Greitens says he’s not against the death penalty but views it as “the ultimate irrevocable punishment.” A board of inquiry will now review the evidence against Mr. Williams and make a recommendation. “Ultimately, it’ll be my decision,” the governor says, “and I will make it.”
Mr. Greitens is the nation’s second-youngest governor, after 42-year-old Chris Sununu of New Hampshire. If he survives what is sure to be an unrelenting union assault on his 2020 re-election, Mr. Greitens will be only 50 when term limits require him to leave the governor’s mansion in 2025. What comes after? Mr. Greitens is too disciplined to bite. “There are certain times I think in your life where you feel like you’re in exactly the right place at the right time,” he says. “I love doing this job.”
Mr. Hennessey is an associate editorial features editor at the Journal.
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4) What’s the Point of a Liberal Education? Don’t Ask the Ivy League
Few top colleges explain their purpose to students. They want to talk gender and inequality instead.
By Peter Berkowitz
American colleges and universities should be bastions of self-knowledge and self-criticism, simply because they exist to teach people how to think. But in recent years America’s campuses seem to have abandoned this tradition. Worse, the meager course offerings on the topic of liberal education tend to reinforce misunderstandings about its character and content.
I reviewed the course listings at five top private universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Yale; six high-ranking public research universities: UC Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia; and five distinguished liberal arts colleges: Amherst, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Wellesley and Williams.
Few of the liberal arts and sciences faculty at these schools offer courses that explore the origins, structure, substance and aims of the education that they supposedly deliver. Instead they provide a smattering of classes on hot-button topics in higher education such as multiculturalism, inequality, gender and immigration. This is no trivial oversight, as the quality of American freedom depends on the quality of Americans’ education about freedom.
A tiny number of elective classes on the curriculum’s periphery—taught for the most part by part-time professors—approach the heart of the matter. Harvard presents a few freshman seminars on the history of the university and issues in higher education. One called “What Is College and What Is It For?” addresses “what constitutes a liberal arts education.” Michigan offers a first-year seminar that considers a university education’s purpose. In Stanford’s freshman program “Thinking Matters,” students examine the relation between the university’s pursuit of knowledge and its pursuit of justice.
Not one political science department at the 16 top schools I reviewed offers a course on liberal education. Isolated offerings concerning the topic are taught in Williams’s philosophy and English departments, as well as in Education Studies at Yale and American Studies at Stanford. Meantime, Princeton, Wellesley and the Universities of North Carolina and Virginia teach their own history.
Overall, the pickings for courses on liberal education are slim. And they tend to reinforce the politicization that afflicts higher education by focusing on the extent to which education advances social justice.
Don’t expect to find much guidance on liberal education in the mission statements of leading American colleges and universities. They contain inflated language about diversity, inclusion and building a better world through social transformation. Missing are instructive pronouncements about what constitutes an educated person or on the virtues of mind and character that underlie reasoned inquiry, the advance of understanding, and the pursuit of truth. Instruction on the ideas, norms and procedures that constitute communities of free men and women devoted to research and study are also scarce to nonexistent.
Hope should not be pinned on colleges and universities to reform themselves. Perhaps a university president or provost who prioritizes recovering liberal education will emerge, but progressive ideology remains deeply entrenched in administrations and faculty. Tenured professors want to reproduce their sensibilities in their successors, and huge endowments insulate the best universities from market forces that could align their programs with the promise of liberal education.
Major impetus for reform must come from outside the academy. Legislative initiatives designed to impel public universities to honor their First Amendment obligations, like the Goldwater Institute’s model bill for state legislatures, might also spur private universities to reinvigorate their commitments to free speech. And educational entrepreneurs could develop alternative accrediting companies.
Private donors and foundations should further establish special faculty-driven programs in the humanities and social sciences like the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard, the James Madison Program at Princeton, and the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. These programs teach neglected ideas and books that form an essential part of the Western tradition of freedom.
Student-run organizations like the Federalist Society at law schools and the Alexander Hamilton Society, which focuses on foreign affairs and national security, are other good vehicles for educating students in freedom. They do well at staging debates on complex issues.
Philanthropic organizations—such as the Hertog Foundation, for which I teach—should continue to develop independent gap-year, summer and postgraduate programs providing students with a taste of the great books, the American constitutional tradition, and diplomatic and military history.
It is consistent with the tradition of freedom in which liberal education is rooted to rely on the private sector to lead a reform movement on and off campus. These small steps move us closer to restoring liberal education and equipping members of the next generation with the ability to think for themselves.
Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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