There are those out there who bemoan the decreased readership of newspapers. They may wonder why, but one glaring reason is that if you have read one of the major metro newspapers, you have read them all about politics, international relations, Congress, or any other topic of national interest. Why? Because a dull gray cloak of uniformity has engulfed the traditional press as monolithic cadres of new “journalists” are spewed forth by monolithic university professors. It is no secret that well over 95% of university professors favor the party of the left and contribute to it in every election cycle. So too, the students they teach learn to either toe and accept the party line or they will face a very lonely future.

The results of that gray cloak of uniformity can be seen in the report from the Columbia School of Journalism’s scathing report on the actions of the New York Times reporting of the Russian collusion story. Sloppy reporting, lack of fact checking, partisan prejudices, favoritism, and the desire to snuggle up to politized governmental agencies led to inaccurate reporting and a national herd mentality of other major city journals.

The link below will provide you with a brief but biting overview of the failings of the New York Times. Despite the sloppy reporting, the paper was able to capture another Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Russia election hoax. Having no shame, the Times has kept the prize but then what did one expect of the paper which accepted the Pulitzer as they helped to cover up the slaughter of six million Ukrainians thanks to their star reporter, Walter Duranty?

Newspapers should begin to do a bit of self-examination and realize that with all the competition in the real world, they need to offer a better-quality product rather than being a publishing mattress for the political forces they favor.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/06/columbia_journalism_review_russiagate_post-mortem_is_a_good_start_148821.html

Several years ago, before Mr. Trump became President Trump, Peggy Noonan wrote a very good article called, Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected to explain to those who oppose Trump, the cause of his rise. Ms. Noonan, hardly an admirer of Trump, pointed out that those who oppose Trump were in the process of going through the five stages of grief but were still stuck between steps four and five. His opponents could not understand how anyone could support this crude man when his faults were so evident to “everyone.”

The gist of her argument was that there were two groups in America, the protected and the unprotected. The protected held the best jobs, lived in the best neighborhoods with the best schools and the finest police protection. They wrote the rules and made sure that the rules were slanted in their favor. They were the captains of industry, especially the new tech industry; they were the faceless bureaucrats who had secure jobs protected not only by civil service rules, but by powerful unions who contributed to the politicians who depended on their campaign funds to remain in positions of power far removed from the “little” people, often called taxpayers.

The unprotected were the mirror image of the protected only in reverse. The unprotected lived from day to day, struggled to pay huge college bills, increased taxes and fees, inflation, etc. The key driver of the unprotected that gave such a boost to Trump was migration which according to Ms. Noonan, was based on the realization that, “Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you.” Thus, the unprotected had to face the impact of immigration while the protected were sheltered from the reality of their decisions.

While the article was good, it did leave out a couple of items which were important. The first is that her article seemed to imply that the numerical difference between the protected and unprotected was minor; in reality, the unprotected realize that it is more of an imbalance somewhere in the range of the 1% vs. the 99%. Such an imbalance makes the unprotected realize that the game can never change unless something radical happens. That radical change was Trump. He spoke their language, he knew how the game was played (although not as much as he thought), and he offered simple solutions to the fears of the unprotected.

The other area where she missed the boat, through no fault of her own, was the idea that no one in power was going to answer the problem of illegal immigration. Trump did so even though he had to fight the process for years of his administration. The proof of his success we see today, and we have seen it for three years in an out-of-control border put in place the first day of the Biden administration via Executive Orders. The unprotected see illegal immigrants sheltered, fed, and tolerated while their own children are forced into virtual classes and their tax dollars are diverted from local police protection and local service to benefit the illegals.

Today, the protected are still, after spending tens of millions of dollars in hearings, lawsuits, and special investigators asking how is it that Trump is still standing. Perhaps, just perhaps it is because they themselves are so blind to their own arrogance and hypocrisy. Their policies, however well-meaning, run contrary to the history of humanity and human nature. The unprotected remember that despite all of Trump’s faults, there were better times when he stood against the protected. That is his strength.

How about some common sense about Race?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-shelby-steele-on-affirmative-action-sweetly-insidious-fd38cf4d?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

One of my favorite birthdays presents this year was a beautiful wooden box containing five different Davidoff cigars, each different but all being the size of a Robusto. Normally if I hit a “home run” in my business, or I have a great month, I indulge myself with a single Davidoff, so these five cigars offer me a real opportunity to smoke and compare. With that in mind I shall provide a little review of each cigar.

The first one is the Aniversario Special R which is a 50 x 4 7/8” Robusto. Here are the main points:

1. Very even smoke with a fine white ash.
2. I would compare it to a Chardonay wine; basic, safe, and mild. This is a good cigar for a first-time smoker who has never smoked before.
3. Smoke time, about 45 minutes.
4. You might want to have a roach clip nearby as it is so smooth that you will smoke it to the very end.

This series was launched in 1986 as part of the birthday celebration for Zino Davidoff’s 80^th birthday. It has a light brown wrapper which indicates the strength of the cigar. Like all Davidoff’s, it is expensive, running in the $30-36 range so it is not a cigar to be smoked unless you are ready to enjoy the excellence of the smoke. Is it worth it? Comparing it to a Chardonay wine should give you a good idea of the answer. Lucky would be the first-time smoker who was offered this cigar, but personally, I would offer a novice a less expensive treat. No sense getting spoiled when there are other options available.

There is a scene in the movie “Patton” where he is standing as a mass of tanks, trucks and men roll past him toward battle.  As that might fleet of metal giants roll past, he says to himself, “God forgive me, but I love this”.  By this, he means the feeling of power, the sheer force of the military as it goes to meet the enemy.  But how did that mass of steel come to be?  How did all those men manage to be housed, trained, fed, clothed and armed.  This book tells part of the story; it is a story of the might of the United States, a country late to the war and how it mobilizes its resources to provide the materials for victory.

In a mass of charts, graphs and columns of numbers, as well as an excellent overview of campaigns from the steppes of the Soviet Union, to the Atlantic Ocean, to the vastness of the Pacific, Ellis overwhelms the reader with the productivity of the American system.  The materials which overwhelmed the Germans and Japanese did not spring from the earth overnight and the strategies which finally provided victory were not designed to end a world war quickly.  Unlike the Germans, where centralization and local power struggles stifled production, the U.S. managed to harness the individuality of the average American in a patriotic and profitable way to go to war.  The Germans thought they could win, the Japanese hoped for a stalemate, but the Americans knew they could win based on their individual contribution to the war. 

In the end, logistics won out.  While the average Japanese soldier or sailor went to war with four pounds of logistics to back him up, the American went to war with four thousand pounds of logistical support.  While Hitler laughed when FDR said the U.S. could produce 50,000 airplanes a year, in 1944 the U.S. produced over 91,000 aircraft. But it was not enough to produce those planes, not enough to produce nine times the trucks that the Germans could produce, not enough to produce two to 10 times as many tanks or artillery pieces as the enemy; no, you had to keep they maintained.  While the Japanese were able to put into the air 150 planes, the U.S. was able to put up over 1500.  The Japanese had a total throughout the war of some 35,000 flying personnel (not all pilots) while the U.S. by 1944 had graduate 226,000 pilots alone and nearly 1,000,000 mechanics for all the armed forces.  In the end, the Axis powers were swamped beneath a flood of men and material that they could not hope to match.

The one weak point of the book is that it does not explain how a nation which entered the war with an army about the same size as that of Belgium (the United States), was able to produce all those tanks, planes, ships, etc., when the lead time is normally eighteen months to switch production. This is especially true today with our leaders tell us that orders for munitions from our allies, such as Taiwan will take two to three years to fulfill. How is it that we do not have the ability to equal the effort of the Second World War? Has our manufacturing base been so degraded? Do we lack the techincal or financial expertise? If so, given the means available to those who oppose us, are we unable or unwilling to shift priorities to provide the protection to our homeland in these dire times?  That story, exciting is told in Freedoms Forge; it is the story of capitalists like Henry Ford, Henry Kaiser and Bill Knudsen.  Taken together these two books create the story of the might of the American system even during the time of the Great Depression.  If you are prepared to be astounded by the force of Ellis’ numbers, Brute Force is an outstanding read.  Even if you are not, it is inspiriting as it shows what is possible in a free society when there is strong and united leadership.

I recently re-read an old article from the WSJ on the Magna Carta, the document which Lord Denning said was “the greatest document of all time, the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the state.”  I thought that the following was really inspiration and worthy of remembering:

“Liberty and property; how naturally those words tripped, as a unitary concept, from the tongues of America’s Founders. These were men who had been shaped in the English tradition and they saw parliamentary government not as an expression of majority rule, but as a guarantor of individual freedom. How different was the Continental tradition, born 13 years later with the French Revolution, which saw elected assemblies as the embodiment of what Rousseau called the “general will” of the people.

In that difference, we may discern explanation of why the Anglosphere resisted the chronic bouts of authoritarianism to which most other Western countries were prone. We who speak this language have always seen the defense of freedom as the duty of our representatives and so, by implication, of those who elect them. Liberty and democracy, in our tradition, are not balanced against each other; they are yoked together.

Most other countries have fallen for, or at least fallen to, dictators. Many during the 20th century, had popular communist parties or fascist parties or both. The Anglosphere, unusually, retained a consensus behind liberal capitalism.

This is not because of any special property in our geography or our genes, but because of our constitutional arrangements. They work because, starting with Magna Carta, they have made the defense of freedom everyone’s responsibility. Americans, like Britons, have inherited their freedoms from past generation and should not look to any external agent for their perpetuation. The defense of liberty is your job and mine. It is up to us to keep intact the freedoms we inherited from our parents and to pass them on securely to our children.”

There are those who believe that we need a “living Constitution,” more open to changes based on the moods, whims, and foibles of the lowest common denominator. Let us hope that we do not overthrow our proven vehicle for untried and fashionable experimentation.

I hope you enjoyed the points above. Thank you.

In September 2018 while giving a speech at the United Nations, President Trump pointed to the German delegation and noted their on their reliance on Russian energy; their response was to laugh and afterwards take the president to task for making such an outrageous statement. At the same time, President Trump openly questioned why the U.S. was providing at least seventy-five percent of the budget for NATO while only three countries were meeting their promised military contribution of two percent of GDP.

Fast forward to 2023 and with a commanding lead in the Republican race for the presidential nomination, reports from Europe focus on the danger of a Trump presidency. Will Trump pull the U.S. from NATO? Will he cut U.S. aid to Ukraine? Magazines in the U.S. and talk shows spend their entire time proclaiming the dangers of a second term for Trump.

The reality is that the Europeans and others should thank Trump for his hard-liner stance as it forced the Europeans to face the reality of their failures with their own militaries. From minimal maintenance of equipment, to discarding technologies needed to supply their own militaries to having to rent tanks from a neighboring nation as the borrowing nation does not have a single tank of their own, the Europeans have spent over seventy-five years living under the security umbrella provided at huge expense by the American public. Their slow response to his prodding at least gave them a small start when their world collapsed under the cut from Russian energy and the third invasion of Ukraine.

The linked article outlines the failure of the Western European states to face their primary responsibility to their citizens; to ensure national security. Central and Eastern European states who suffered under half a century of Soviet brutality applauded Trump as they had experienced the nightmare of Communism. At the same time Western European states built up a welfare system that discouraged work and cemented in place programs which are not sustainable. In fact, at the current pace, it will be Poland which will provide the protection for a weak Germany for the foreseeable future.

Will Trump still question the need for the U.S. to stay in NATO? No one knows for sure, but if the Europeans, especially the Western nations, do not break their word again and fulfill their promises, then perhaps Trump will see that the U.S. is not involved in another of our terrible foreign policy deals. The addition of responsible states such as Finland and Sweden will help to keep the Western European states in line during the struggles ahead not only with Russia, but with China and Iran.

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/alarm-nato-weak-military-empty-arsenals-europe-a72b23f4?page=1

A second read for me (first was in 2006) and even more timely than then. Crichton who wrote numerous excellent novels based on “science” (he was an MD) makes it clear that he was skeptical of the concept of man’s impact on climate change.  It would be nice if those who believe in man’s impact were to read this book, but that is asking far too much of those who embrace that religion, I mean theory (sorry, I do not accept it as fact either).

The novel moves quickly and has numerous charts and graphs showing both sides of the debate which makes for an interesting addition to the story. In the novel, a major environmental group works to create huge disasters to prove their point about the environment. One of the problems, however, is that they plan to cash in on each disaster and use them to increase their capitalization. The leaders of the group of lawyers (hard to believe) are merely using others to feather their own nests, manufacturing events and causes.

In the book, several interesting questions and facts are raised, such as:

1. Why is it that when a scientist releases a study against man’s impact, and if he is paid by an oil company, etc., his study is bias, but when a counter study is released by a scientist paid by an environmental disaster group is released, it is not viewed in the same way.  Does anyone who is paid ever release a study which goes against the hand that feeds them?
2. Are the oceans rising? Yes, and they have been for about 10,000 years, so how can it be blamed on humanity?
3. When the UN formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the late 1980’s, their statement that there was “a discernable human influence” on climate was generate after the scientist went home and was contrary to the document the scientist had signed during the conference.
4. Scientists and others make silly statements such as Paul Ehrlich’s prediction that 50% of all species would be extinct by the year 2000. Yet no one knows the exact number of species; estimates range to from 3,000,000 to 100,000,000 so how can Ehrlich be given any print space with such a silly statement.
5. Back in 1998 a court overturned the EPAs findings on second hand smoke as the EPA violated its own guidelines in order to come up with a slanted finding; yet despite that finding which was not disputed by the EPA, laws across the country have been passed and we still hear that 50,000 people a year die from this “problem”.

The book is filled with information that should make most people question the idea that humanity has even a minor impact on global change. As the book points out, “at any moment there are 1500 electrical storms across the planet. Eleven lightning bolts strike the ground each second. A tornado tears across the surface every six hours. And every four days, a giant cyclonic storm, hundreds of miles in diameter spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land.”  And, if we look at the disasters we have achieved (such as how Yellow Stone Park has still not recovered from our management during the first years we decided to “save” the area), we have far to go to understand the world we live in.

There is one other interesting theory in the book which he titles the PLM (political-legal-media) powerhouse which has supplanted Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. The function of the PLM is to create fear; we live in the richest nation in history, with unlimited food, freedom to travel, options and choices, education, etc. and yet people are afraid for the future. If people have fears, it is an opportunity for those who manage the PLM to profit and gain more control and power. An interesting concept.

Given the recent farcial COP28 orgy of food, drink and private jets, this old book is amazingly timely. There is much in this book to get one thinking and I recommend it as a follow-up to your summer reading.

Political movements are always evolving out of necessity. That is because each movement as it gains adherents gains strength and those new adherents have their own ideas of how that movement’s goals should be as they grow. This means that the basic tenants of the movement will gradually be altered, even ignored; the original purity will disappear to be replaced by the internal conflict caused by growth and success. Additionally, if that movement has any success and achieving its’ goals, it will produce new demands/ideas or wither and die.  Life is movement and as Napoleon realized that he needed new wars to stay in power, so to do movements need new goals. If they do not, the bureaucracy of that movement will be out of work. There is no movement that has ever decided to dissolve itself because it has achieved all its’ goals. Thus, new demands and as we can see with the “Progressive” Left, there is no end to causes and wrongs that must be addressed.

The article linked below points out that at a certain point, a movement may grasp onto any excuse to exist. This is amazingly easy for movements on the left as they have no moral guideposts. If one believes that all morality can be found withing oneself, then ten different people will have ten different moral guideposts and who can say which is “right” or “wrong”? In fact, if you are on the left you cannot question any moral guidepost or else you are reactionary, unenlightened, etc. Eventually the lunatic fringe, which exists on both the Left and Right, becomes the driving force and the rest of the movement is dragged along. This means that if you are a moderate on the left, you cannot condemn the most extreme elements of the left and thus you support by your silence, their most crazy, foolish, and ignorant demands.

Thus, the title of the post and article, Has Hitler Won on the Left? The article is by Carl Trueman a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/12/has-hitler-won-on-the-left

Once upon a time, it was easy to see what any special interest group felt about any given matter, especially a matter which was of fundamental importance to the membership of that group.  Not so today when the key word of many organizations is to obfuscate.  Some of the worse examples of obfuscation comes from many women’s organizations concerning the hundreds of rapes and torture of women during the murderous rampage of Hamas in Israel in October.  For some reasons numerous women’s groups downplay or ignore the video and physical proof of the abuse of women as they claim that rape as a weapon of war is wrong, but they fear to name the perpetrators such as Hamas.  Why have women’s groups who were so self-righteous during the MeToo movement, and the hearings of Justice Kavanaugh become so mealy mouthed about crimes against women on a huge scale?

It may be because numerous women’s groups have drifted so far to the left that they are afraid or unable to face the actions of their fellow travelers.  If that is the case, if they are unable to condemn outright human butchery, then perhaps it is time for ordinary members of said organizations to withdraw their support.  If major donors to universities can withhold their financial support due to blatant antisemitism, it should not be a problem for the average woman or man to withhold financial support to women’s groups who are not willing to stand up for monumental injustice.

Of course, the betrayal of women by “women’s groups” is nothing new.  They have sold out to the trans movement by not standing shoulder to shoulder with actual women as countless scholarships, awards, and opportunities are being taken by women by trans men.  Unable to adequately compete against their biological equals, trans men show their bravery by competing against physically smaller actual females.

If feminism is to ever be taken seriously, the organizations who wear the cloak of feminism must stand up against the real physical crimes against women.  If they do not, they should not be surprised when they are ignored in the future.

Please copy the link below and add it to you search bar for an article which points out the hypocrisy of many women’s groups.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/assaulting-women-is-the-new-feminism/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_campaign=31f153926d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_12_12_05_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_57e32c1dad-31f153926d-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&mc_cid=31f153926d&mc_eid=2456f6f4f5