Win Argument Become A Racist. Chamberlain or Churcrhill, Truman or Obama . Debra's New Book.

You decide (see link below.):

/www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/magazine/how-arafat-eluded-israels-assassination-machine.html?emc=edit_ta_20180123&nl=top-stories&nlid=49448408&ref=cta

And

https://youtu.be/cRoAZxH_xgc
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I responded to a LTE in the local paper written by a sometime tennis partner/friend. He suggested Schumer  had been lied to be Trump and had scored a victory regarding the vote to keep the government open.  I disagreed with him and a dear friend and fellow memo reader, to whom I sent a blind copy of my LTE, replied a follows:

"Dick,

You hit the nail on the head showing how the six-man bi-partisan deal presented to the President by Graham/Schumer, et. al., was simply an end run around the president’s three pillars of a deal. He had said the would sign any deal they brought to him provided it had the three pillars of his plan. Later that night, they brought him a “deal” that contained the Democrat’s proposals (read demands) and left out all three of Trump’s pillars. They claimed the agreement they brought to Trump was a bipartisan agreement and thus expected the President would sign off on it. Well, it was indeed a bipartisan deal but contained NONE of the President’s wishes. Small wonder he turned it down. Schumer, in his press conference that night per his customary lying persona, blamed the turn down completely on the President reneging on his commitment forgetting, altogether, to mention the deal they had brought to him was nothing like what they had promised. Lindsey Graham was the usual RINO in this play and any further attempt to involve him in negotiating a deal should be DOA. Remember his role in the financial bailout several years ago when the “gang of eight” who wrote the first draft of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 (one of which was Graham and I think McCain, Schumer and Flake were also part of that gang) sought to by-pass all Republican ideas and favor all of the Democrats ideas. Republicans shot that down also. Why the Republicans continue to deal with Graham is beyond me. He is a rat in rat’s clothing, in my untutored view.

E-"

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My oldest daughter, Debra, grandmother of our first great granddaughter has written a book which will be published Feb.1.  The book is about the diversity of "Jewish Faces" around the world.  This is a link to her book: https://store.behrmanhouse.com/index.php/blog/post/we-are-jewish-faces-mirrors-today-s-diverse-reality/?utm_source=Behrman+House+News&utm_campaign=df5275d232-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3888b8f654-df5275d232-306648097

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Would it not be nice if we could put this bureaucrat in a Xerox Machine, copy him and then spread him throughout government.  This is an absolute must read.  Mulvaney is right on and totally understands the responsibility he and his agency has to those who pay their salaries and who depend upon them to serve according to Mulvaney's view and philosophy. (See 1 below.)
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Surrender  and/or be destroyed or prepare to destroy. That is the option we face with respect to N Korea and/or Iran.  Chamberlain or Churchill/ Truman or Obama?  Which will it be? (See 2 below.)
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America, the safe zone country? (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)

The CFPB Has Pushed Its Last Envelope

We will exercise our power with humility and prudence to enforce the law faithfully.

By 

Mick Mulvaney

When I arrived at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November, I told employees that despite what they might have heard, I had no intention of shutting down the bureau. As members of the executive branch, we are charged with faithfully executing the law. The law mandates that we enforce consumer-protection laws, and we will continue to do so under my watch.

At the same time, I explained that things would be different under new leadership. Then I read a quote from my predecessor, Richard Cordray, that highlighted how he ran the bureau: “We wanted to send a message: There’s a new cop on the beat. . . . Pushing the envelope is a loaded phrase, but that’s absolutely what we did.” I’ve seen similar language elsewhere. It’s fair to say that the bureau’s previous governing philosophy was to “push the envelope” aggressively, under the assumption that we were the good guys and the financial-service industry was the bad guys.

That is going to be different. That entire governing philosophy of pushing the envelope frightens me a little. We are government employees, and we work for the people. That means everyone: those who use credit cards and those who provide the credit; those who take out loans and those who make them; those who buy cars and those who sell them. All of those people are part of what makes this country great, and all of them deserve to be treated fairly by their government. There is a reason Lady Justice wears a blindfold and carries a balance scale along with her sword.

It is not appropriate for any government entity to “push the envelope” when it comes into conflict with our citizens. We have the power to do damage to people that could linger for years and cost them their jobs, their savings and their homes. If the CFPB loses a court case because we “pushed too hard,” we simply move on to the next matter. But where do those we charged go to get their time, their money and their good names back? If a company closes its doors under the weight of a multiyear Civil Investigative Demand, we still have jobs at CFPB. But what about the workers who are laid off as a result?

There will absolutely be times when circumstances require us to take dramatic action to protect consumers. At those times, I expect us to be vigorous in our enforcement of the law. But bringing the full weight of the federal government down on the necks of the people we serve should be something that we do only reluctantly, and only when all other attempts at resolution have failed.

In my office you can find a copy of “A Man for All Seasons,” about the life of St. Thomas More. My favorite passage is an exchange between the famous lawyer and his son-in-law, who encouraged More to arrest a man for simply being “bad.” His response is one of the most concise and articulate defenses of the rule of law in history:

“This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast—man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down . . . do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake.”

Put another way: If you push the envelope now in pursuit of your mission, what’s to stop someone else—with a different mission, perhaps—from pushing that envelope against you tomorrow?

What does all of this mean for how we will operate at the bureau? Simply put, we will review everything we do, from investigations to lawsuits and everything in between.

When it comes to enforcement, we will focus on quantifiable and unavoidable harm to the consumer. If we find that it exists, you can count on us to pursue the appropriate remedies vigorously. If it doesn’t, we won’t go looking for excuses to bring lawsuits.

On regulation, it seems that the people we regulate should have the right to know what the rules are before being charged with breaking them. This means more formal rule making and less regulation by enforcement.

And we will be prioritizing. In 2016, almost a third of the complaints into this office related to debt collection. Only 0.9% related to prepaid cards and 2% to payday lending. Data like that should, and will, guide our actions.

Speaking of data, the Dodd-Frank Act, which established the CFPB, requires us to “consider the potential costs and benefits to consumers and covered persons.” To me, that means quantitative analysis should drive our decisions. And while qualitative analysis certainly can play a role, it should not be to the exclusion of measurable “costs and benefits.” There will be a lot more math in our future.

I intend to exercise our statutory authority to enforce the laws of this nation. I intend to execute the statutory mandate of the bureau to protect consumers. But we will no longer go beyond that mandate. If Congress wants us to do more than it set forth in the Dodd-Frank Act, it can change the law.

The CFPB has a new mission: We will exercise, with humility and prudence, the almost unparalleled power Congress has bestowed on us to enforce the law faithfully in furtherance of our mandate. But we go no further. The days of aggressively “pushing the envelope” are over.

Mr. Mulvaney is director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This article is adapted from a Jan. 24 memo to CFPB staff.

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2) The Case for Tactical U.S. Nukes

‘It’s best not to mess with us,’ Putin has said. ‘Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.’ 

By Matthew Kroenig

The Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review isn’t yet public, but it is already under political fire. After a draft of the document leaked last week, critics were horrified that it proposed the U.S. build “new” nuclear weapons. Some even suggested that a push to expand America’s nuclear capabilities is of a piece with President Trump’s reckless personality that risks getting us all killed in a nuclear war.

By Matthew Kroenig

These criticisms are misguided. America’s nuclear weapons have underwritten international peace and stability for more than 70 years. As the world enters a second nuclear age, the U.S. needs to strengthen its posture accordingly to protect itself and its allies.

North Korea is the nuclear threat in the news, but Russia may pose an even bigger strategic challenge. As Moscow has turned aggressive, intervening in Ukraine and Syria, its strategy has come to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons. In the event of a major war with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, even one that Russia starts, its plans call for “de-escalatory” nuclear strikes. That is, Vladimir Putin would order limited nuclear attacks early, so as to frighten the U.S. into ending the conflict on terms favorable to Moscow.

Russia backs this strategy with thousands of tactical nuclear weapons designed for battlefield use. Many have yields under one kiloton, or less than a tenth that of the Hiroshima bomb. They include esoteric munitions like nuclear torpedoes and depth charges. Moscow is also building a ground-launched cruise missile that violates the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Imagine this scenario: Much like it did in Ukraine, Russia invades Estonia. The U.S. comes to the defense of its NATO ally, but as American troops flow forward, Russia uses a tactical nuclear weapon on a U.S. carrier group in the Baltic Sea, killing a few thousand. If you were president, how would you respond?

The strategy is meant to force a choice, as Henry Kissinger put it decades ago, between “suicide and surrender.” The U.S., which lacks commensurate tactical nuclear weapons, could retaliate with one of its big ballistic missiles or strategic bombers, risking a full-scale nuclear exchange and a global holocaust. Or the U.S. could back down, losing the war and shredding the credibility of its defense commitments.

Even if this scenario never materializes, Moscow can use a threat of limited nuclear war to coerce NATO. “It’s best not to mess with us,” Mr. Putin said at the height of the crisis over Ukraine. “Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.”

The way out of this “suicide or surrender” dilemma is for the U.S. to have its own strategy for limited nuclear strikes. Mr. Putin must know that using one or two low-yield weapons is not a path to victory but a way to guarantee that one, two or three such weapons will be coming right back at him. The point is not to fight a limited nuclear war, but the opposite: to deter Mr. Putin from going down this path in the first place.

Unfortunately, the U.S. lacks the tactical nuclear weapons needed to make this strategy credible. Unlike Russia, America dismantled most of them at the end of the Cold War. A couple of hundred gravity bombs remain, but they would need to be delivered by aircraft that have little chance of penetrating Russia’s sophisticated air defenses.

What the U.S. needs is other options: low-yield nuclear cruise missiles or ballistic missiles that can be launched by submarines. This is exactly what the draft Nuclear Posture Review calls for.

Since Russia already has similar capabilities and more, building these systems would hardly start an arms race. Besides, the U.S. had submarine-launched nuclear cruise missiles as recently as 2010, when President Obama retired them.

It would be nice if the U.S. could dismantle its nuclear arsenal altogether. But as long as the world is filled with aggressive nuclear-armed adversaries, America needs to maintain a potent deterrence.

Mr. Kroenig, a professor of government at Georgetown and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, is author of “The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy,” out Feb. 22 from Oxford University Press.

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3) When the whole country becomes a campus safe space

By George F. Will Opinion writer

It cannot be a sign of social health that the number of tweets per day worldwide exploded from 5,000 in 2007 to 500 million six years later. And this might be related, by a few degrees of separation, to the fact that whereas in the 1992 presidential election more than one-third of America’s 3,113 counties or their equivalents had a single-digit margin of victory, in the 2016 presidential election, fewer than 10 percent did. And to the fact that in 2016, 1,196 counties — about 2.5 times the average over the preceding 20 years — were decided by margins larger than 50 percent. All of which are perhaps related to rising skepticism, without scientific warrant, about the safety of vaccinations and genetically modified foods. And to the fact that newspaper subscriptions have declined about 38 percent in the past 20 years. And that between 1974 and 2016, the percentage of Americans who said they spent significant time with a neighbor declined from 30 percent to 19 percent.

These developments and others worry two of the virtuoso worriers at the Rand Corp., the research institution now celebrating its 70th birthday. Michael D. Rich, Rand’s president, and his colleague Jennifer Kavanagh, are not feeling celebratory in their 255-page report “Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life.” They suggest that the public’s mental bandwidth is being stressed by today’s torrent of information pouring from the Internet, social media, cable television and talk radio, all of which might be producing — partly because the media’s audience has difficulty sorting fact from opinions — a net subtraction from the public’s stock of truth and trust.

The authors discern four trends inimical to fact-based discourse and policymaking: increasing disagreement about facts and the interpretation of them (e.g., “the fact that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States”); the blurring of the line between fact and opinion ; the increasing quantity of opinion relative to facts; and declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information . The volume and velocity of the information flow, combined with the new ability to curate a la carte information menus, erode society’s assumption of a shared set of facts. They also deepen the human proclivity for “confirmation bias” and “motivated reasoning” — people inhabiting information silos, seeking and receiving only congenial facts.

Gerrymandering, “assortative mating” (people from the same socio-cultural backgrounds marrying each other), geographic segregation of the like-minded — all these are both causes and effects of living in echo chambers, which produces polarization. Furthermore, when, on social media and elsewhere, filters and gatekeepers are dispensed with, barriers to entry into public discourse become negligible, so being intemperate or ignorant — or both, in the service of partisanship — is not a barrier, and toxic digital subcultures proliferate. Kavanagh and Rich say that not only do new media technologies exacerbate cognitive biases, but also they promote “the permeation of partisanship throughout the media landscape. ” They dryly say, “When the length of news broadcasts increased from two to 24 hours per day, there was not a 12-fold increase in the amount of reported facts.”

Kavanagh and Rich are earnest social scientists with a lengthy list of policy dentistry to combat truth decay. Their suggestions range from the anodyne (schools that teach critical reasoning; imagine that) to the appalling (“public money to support long-form and investigative journalism”). But their main purpose is, appropriately, to suggest research projects that will yield facts about the consequences of the new media and intellectual landscape. Unfortunately, truth decay also spreads because campuses have become safe spaces for dime-store Nietzscheans (there are no facts, only interpretations), and what happens on campuses does not stay on campuses.

Also, there is simple mendacity: Social justice warriors at Google probably think they are clever and heroic in saying that Lincoln was a member not of the Republican Party but of the National Union Party (the name the national Republican Party, but not most state parties, chose for the exigencies of the wartime 1864 election).

We should regret only unjust distrust; distrust of the untrustworthy is healthy. Considering the preceding 50 years, from the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, through Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction, and “if you like your health care plan you can keep it,” a default position of suspicion is defensible. And consumers of media products should remember Jerry Seinfeld’s oblique skepticism: “It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.

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