Dagny and Blake's mom and dad become Morticia and Gomez (A second posting.)
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Max becomes a man!
Blake and Dagny love to dress up in different get up's and another view of the west by a friend of mine.
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The memo after this is going to focus on three topics exclusively and thus I might not be posting other memos for a few days as I work on this one; I will focus on some very informative articles in the most recent Naval War College Review, my perception of who Trump is and why the haters either do not want to know or why they cannot know/understand him and finally some market thoughts.
Meanwhile, I am also working on a first week in May time to reschedule a visit from Zeto which is closer to the election and thus, should be a more propitious time.
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A relative and fellow memo reader sent this regarding Trump and the impeachment process:
Impeachment as a remedy here...not sure.
If high crimes included simple moral depravity, many of this President’s acts would likely qualify, as would those of FDR when he turned away the more than 900 Jewish passengers of the M.S. St. Louis or Truman when he dropped a first and then a second atom bomb on Japanese civilian populations to bring US troops home. And, yet war based decisions involving moral depravity have seemingly always been left to the Executive alone. The War Powers Act seemingly extended the principle. And, while this may not be wise given human implications, the question may not be as much one of crimes against this nation, in as much as one of crimes against people of other nations. For these, I’m unsure whether there is a good answer beyond a more rigorous system of checks and balances. The stakes are often high when a President makes a decision of this sort, and there will inevitably be mistakes, regrets and losses of life that attach. The Turkey/Kurd decision likely fits here. It’s depraved but a decision seemingly well within the President’s war power discretion.
What’s rich about the Trump-Biden bit is that it involves an entirely different kind of morally depraved calculation. Leveraging the office (including aid) for personal favors is the type of everyday bad behavior that fat cats like Trump and Biden have been getting away with for decades. DC is likely filled with many such bad behaving officials. Trump ran on a platform that said so. Maybe it takes one to know one? Likely not.
Yet, whether this is the type of conduct that the impeachment tool was meant for...I’m less sure. The issue touches on a systemic problem that Trump names the swamp. I’ll call it the Buckley v Valeo effect. When you put people into office based on fundraising abilities, maybe this is the result. Trump and Biden are likely mere symptoms of a widespread “just a little bit here and there” corruption problem. Irrespective, the only people who lose in all of this are the same ones who always do. Both Trump and Biden will be fine. Folks like them always are. J---"
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WAPO and NYT's have lost their moorings. Hatred causes many bizarre reactions. I do not make this up I just post it. (See 1 below.)
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An analysis of why Gantz needs to bend and come together with Likud and disregard the pressure to isolate Bibi.
Israel and Bibi's problems somewhat resemble our own, in that pig headed politicians care more about themselves than the nation. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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It is about time to start fighting back.
"Hundreds of Jewish Students Walk Out in Protest as University of Illinois Student Senate Passes Resolution Denying Link Between Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism By Caleb Galaraga" (See 3 below.)
https://www.algemeiner.com/
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Dick
Dick
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1)
Top Headlines for Sunday, October 27th, 2019
WaPo Obit Reframes Father Of Brutal Terror Group As ‘Austere Religious Scholar’ - Read More
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2)
It’s Time to Break Up the Blue&White Bloc Party
By Joe Settler
I was surprised by Lahav Harkov’s political analysis in this weekend’s Jerusalem Post, “Will Gantz be able to break up Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc?”
Her analysis of the situation is that if the right-wing bloc doesn’t break up then we’re headed for another election.
“But if the [right-wing] bloc doesn’t break up, we’re almost guaranteed to have a third election – if not immediately, then very soon, because a minority government is not built to last.”
The only other option Harkov seriously considers is that the Blue&White party will show some flexibility with their more extremist positions.
“Something has to give. It could be that Blue and White will back down, whether on its insistence that it will not sit with Netanyahu while his legal troubles still loom, or on its call for a “secular unity government.”
But there is another bloc party that Harkov is ignoring, the forced marriage between the troika of Benny Gantz, Gabi Ashkenazi and Moshe Yaalon (which in of itself is yet another bloc party: Resilience, Telem and Ashkenazi) and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party.
The Blue&White alliance won 33 seats, but looking at the individual parties that make up this bloc, Gantz’s Israel Resilience party has only 14 seats, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party has 13 seats, Moshe Ya’alon’s party has 5 seats, and Gabi Ashkenazi’s independent party has only 1 seat.
Breakdown of the Blue&White alliance:
Benny Gantz:14,
Yair Lapid:13,
Moshe Ya’alon: 5,
Gabi Ashkenazi: 1.
Most Israeli political analysts believe that it has been Yair Lapid that forced Gantz to turn down every offer made by Netanyahu. It is certainly Yair Lapid who is the major roadblock for Gantz’s troika to sit in a coalition with the religious parties.
Harkov suggests that the Likud party is the one that needs to break away (or is most likely to break away) from the right-wing bloc, to allow Gantz to form a government, otherwise it’s new elections for all.
“The Likud is the most likely to break away from the bloc, because in the end it has the most to lose from it. The party has only two paths to remaining in power.”
But the Likud and its right-wing bloc aren’t the source of the problem nor should they break up.
Israelis who voted for the religious parties fully intended that Netanyahu be their candidate for Prime Minister, and these constant attempts to subvert the will of the voter in every which way is unfair and undemocratic.
Not to mention, all these attempts to isolate Netanyahu from his long-time allies is a rather transparent ploy and I am surprised that Harkov, of all journalists, is falling for it.
On the other hand, if the Blue &White alliance, which shares only one common interest of “Just Not Bibi,” and not even that strong of a common interest (as some members are willing to sit with Netanyahu), were to break up their unnatural union, then Gantz and perhaps Yaalon and Ashkenazi would be able to join Netanyahu’s government as senior ministers.
The unnatural alliance between Gantz and Lapid is preventing the formation of a government and may bring about new elections.
It would be a stable government with a clear majority, led by an experienced leader with proven and qualified leadership skills – and better represent the will of the people.
Meanwhile, Benny Gantz , an inexperienced political neophyte, could finally gain some experience, and we, the electorate, could finally learn if Gantz is even qualified for the job, at minimal risk to our country.
2a) Netanyahu: Chief of Staff’s Warnings of
Approaching War with Iran Not a Spin
By David Israel
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said that his own and IDF chief of staff Aviv Kochavi’s recent remarks regarding a possible military confrontation with enemies north and south were not a spin, and that the security situation compels Israel to have a wide unity government.
Speaking at the opening of the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said that the Middle East is again undergoing a jolt, and that Iraq, Lebanon and Syria are turbulent.
“We see what is happening in the Middle East,” the PM told his assembled ministers. “The Middle East is again in upheaval. Lebanon, Iraq and Syria are in turmoil and Iran is running amok through these areas. We know that the force that has served us up until now must continue to strengthen in the face of all these phenomena. This requires tough decisions. What the Chief-of-Staff and I have said is not spin; it reflects the reality of present challenges and those of the near future.
“We must make tough decisions that require a government with broad shoulders, hence the importance of forming a broad national unity government. This is not a political question, but a national and security question of the highest order. I hope that we can advance this goal in the coming days. This was my goal immediately after the elections and it remains our goal. This is what the State of Israel needs now.”
Netanyahu thanked the soldiers that had served under him in the IDF, known as the “Bibi Team,” for their gifts—all of them books—on the occasion of his 70th birthday, and related: “I have started reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower. It describes England in 1897, Queen Victoria’s 60th year, a great parade in London. England ruled one-quarter of the world, the largest empire in human history. Riders from dozens of countries in this empire participated in the parade. Everything crumbled a few decades later. There are many reasons, but one reason is clear, they relied on the successes of the past, and from the position of the greatest empire in the world, they declined and declined and, of course, were hit very hard.”
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3) Universities Breed Anger, Ignorance, and
Ingratitude
What do widely diverse crises such as declining demography, increasing indebtedness, Generation Z’s indifference to religion and patriotism, static rates of home ownership, and a national epidemic of ignorance about American history and traditions all have in common?
In a word, 21st-century higher education.
A pernicious cycle begins even before a student enrolls. A typical college-admission application is loaded with questions to the high-school applicant about gender, equality, and bias rather than about math, language, or science achievements. How have you suffered rather than what you know and wish to learn seems more important for admission. The therapeutic mindset preps the student to consider himself a victim of cosmic forces, past and present, despite belonging to the richest, most leisured, and most technologically advanced generation in history. Without a shred of gratitude, the young student learns to blame his ancestors for what he is told is wrong in his life, without noticing how the dead made sure that almost everything around him would be an improvement over 2,500 years of Western history.
Once admitted, students take classes from faculty who, polls reveal, are roughly 90 percent liberal. According to one recent survey, Democrat professors on average outnumber Republican faculty by a 12-to-1 ratio on the nation’s supposedly diverse campuses. But such political asymmetries are magnified by a certain progressive messianic self-righteousness that turns the lectern into the pulpit, the captive class into a congregation. The rare conservative professor is more resigned to the tragedy of the universe and, in live-and-let-live fashion, vacates the campus arena to the left-wing gladiators who wish to slay any perceived heterodoxy.
Campus activism has replaced the old university creed of disinterested inquiry. Students are starting to resemble military recruits in boot camp, prepping to become hardened social-justice warriors on the frontlines of America’s new wars over climate change, gun control, abortion, and identity politics. In Camp Yale or Duke Social Warrior Base, they learn just enough about purported historical oppression to make them dangerous, as they topple statues, demand the renaming of streets and buildings, and swarm professors deemed politically incorrect.
No wonder that certain issues — abortion, global warming, illegal immigration — are mostly off-limits to campus disagreement. Safe spaces, racial theme houses, and censorship have replaced the 1960s ideals of unfettered free speech and racial and ethnic integration and assimilation. Today’s students often combine the worst traits of bullying and cowardice. They are quite ready as a mob to dish it out against unorthodox individuals, and yet they’re suddenly quite vulnerable and childlike when warned to lighten up about Halloween costumes or a passage in Huckleberry Finn. The 19-year-old student is suddenly sexually mature, a Bohemian, a cosmopolitês when appetites call — only to revert to Victorian prudery and furor upon discovering that callousness, hurt, and rejection are tragically integral to crude promiscuity and sexual congress without love.
The curricula in the social sciences and humanities are largely politicized. Culture, history, and literature are often taught through the binary lenses of victims and victimizers, as a deductive zero-sum melodrama. There is little allowance for tragedy, irony, and paradox or simply the complexities of the human experience. That preexisting slavery, imperialism, and atrocity were as common in the New World, Asia, and Africa as in Europe is rarely mentioned in the boilerplate campus indictment of the West. The reason that the Aztecs were in Mexico and Central America rather than Madrid was not that they were morally superior. Nor was it that they lacked imperial impulse. Rather, they lacked ocean-going technology, sophisticated maritime navigation, gunpowder, horses, steel, and a military tradition dating back to Rome. So they confined their genocidal sacrifices and imperial conquests to their neighbors on the Mexican peninsula.
Stranger still, the actual structure of the university is as reactionary as its governing ideology is radical.
In a society where almost no one has lifetime job security, professors take for granted archaic ideas of tenure as a modern career birthright. Yet they seem reluctant to extend such costly indulgences to other part-time instructors who are less fortunate.
The dirty little secret on campuses is that a legion of exploited, temporary lecturers, usually without multiyear contracts, are paid far less than tenured professors — often to teach the same classes. In short, an entire caste of low-paid faculty who lack the perks and benefits of their liberal permanent superiors subsidize thousands of colleges and their supposedly liberal agendas. The academic mentality is to feel angst about the distant plight of the would-be illegal immigrant waiting to cross the border; the angst is a sort of medieval penance for ignoring the exploited lecturer under one’s nose who indirectly supports the perks of the tenured.
Progressive college administrators, in the abstract, love unions and collective bargainers as long as they stay off campus and far away from their own exploited teachers. Tenure was originally designed to protect the sometimes unorthodox and even heretical views of the faculty. Today, however, professors who preach “diversity” in lockstep do not want to hear diverse ideas and values, among either students or faculty. Tenure has become not protection for against-the-grain expression but a merit badge for the party faithful coming up through the ranks. Try giving a public lecture on campus about the ill effects of abortion, the inconsistencies of global-warming advocacy, respect for the Second Amendment, or skepticism over identity politics. The result would be a student version of the Jacobin Reign of Terror.
The federal government guarantees student loans to pay skyrocketing tuition and room and board. That guarantee has empowered crony-capitalist universities to hike their annual costs far above the rate of inflation — without much worry over what happens to their customers when and if they graduate.
Elsewhere in the real world, buyers receive guarantees when they pay for services. Consumers are appraised of the risks of taking out high-risk loans. But most colleges and universities are exempt from such oversight. At first, students don’t seem to object — at least when they are in school and still mesmerized by luxury apartments, latte bars, Club Med fitness centers, and dreams of six-figure salaries upon graduation as payback for their progressive fides. Apparently, campuses have adopted the logic of car dealers who jack up the prices of their autos at buying time with all sorts of hip, extra accessories that hypnotize consumers into taking out multiyear loans to purchase luxury models beyond their means.
Eighteen-year-olds entering college are seldom warned by campus financial officers exactly how long their debt obligations will last — or which majors are likely to lead to better salaries after graduation. None are given itemized bills that are broken down to show where their money is going. Many who will remain in debt for years might have wished to know how much they paid for the vast swamp of non-teaching facilitators and high-paid administrators.
Colleges today can never assure students that after graduation they will at least test higher on the standardized tests than when they entered. If colleges could do that, they’d long ago have required exit examinations to boast of their success. Instead, the higher-education industry insists that almost any baccalaureate degree is a good deal, without worrying about how much it costs or whether their brand certifies any real knowledge. Again, the logic is that of consumer branding — as we see with Coca-Cola, Nike, and Google — in which status rather than cost-benefit efficacy is purchased. Does anyone believe that a graduating senior of tony Harvard, Yale, or Stanford knows more than a counterpart at Hillsdale or St. John’s?
The net result is a current generation that owes $1.6 trillion in college loans to the federal government. And that debt is now affecting the entire country, including those who never went to college, who as taxpayers eventually may be asked to forgive some if not all the debt. An entire generation of Americans has costly degrees; many cannot use them to find well-paying jobs, and they increasingly forgo or delay marriage, child-rearing, and buying a car or home until their mid-twenties or thirties. All that pretty much sums up the profile of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street adherents — or the environmental-studies major who is shocked that a skilled electrician makes three times more than he does.
Colleges are turning out woke and broke graduates. They are not up to ensuring the country that they will pass on to the next generation an America that’s as prosperous, secure, and ethical as what they inherited and have so often faulted.
Ignorance, arrogance, and ingratitude are now the brands of the undergraduate experience. No wonder a once duly honored institution, higher education, is now either the butt of jokes or cynically seen as a credentialing factory.
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson
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