Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Election – A Few More Things to Consider”

October 30, 2020

 

“Extreme intolerance has now replaced the liberal notion of 

negotiated compromise that is the sine quo non of democracy.”

                                                                                                                                Andrew A. Michta

                                                                                                                                Dean, College of International Studies

                                                                                                                                George C. Marshall European Center

                                                                                                                                Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany

                                                                                                                                Op-ed, Wall Street Journal, 10-27-20

 

The election will be over in four days, though the results may not be known for a while. This is written to raise questions, which give credence to the importance of this election.

 

The strongest case for Joe Biden is that he will (or so he claims) return the country to normalcy – whatever that is – and bring civility back to the White House. God knows, today’s politics do not appear normal and even Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters would hesitate to affix the adjective “civil” when describing the 45^th President. Calling Vice President Biden “sleepy Joe,” and referring to the Speaker of the House as “crazy Nancy” would not endear Mr. Trump to Emily Post. But is he alone? Was it polite for Mr. Biden to tell the black radio host Charlamagne, “If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black!”? Was it gracious for the Speaker to tear up the President’s State of the Union speech on live TV? Civility is absent in Washington. Should that be blamed on Trump or do its roots extend further back? Could anyone describe Joe Biden’s behavior as civil, when as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1980s, he interrogated Robert Bork, claiming his America was “…a land where women are forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors…” or what about his “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas? Was Senate Majority leader Harry Reid deferential (or even wise) to eliminate the filibuster, as it applied to judicial appointments, in November 2013? A decision regretted four years later. 

 

And what is normal behavior? Is it normal to not acknowledge the results of an election, as numerous politicians did in joining the Trump “resistance” in January 2017? Have the looting, riots and killings in cities across the nation, in response to the horrific death of George Lloyd at the hands of a policeman, been normal? Was the refusal to accept the findings of the Mueller investigation, after three years and the expenditure of thirty to forty million taxpayer dollars normal? Was it normal for a sitting U.S. Vice President to allow his son to trade on his name with foreign nationals? Was it normal for the nation’s intelligence agencies to try to sabotage a duly elected President? Was it normal for the New York Times’ writer-at-large, Jim Rutenberg to admit, as he did in August 2016, that they (the Times) could not be “objective” when covering Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump?  Would it be normal, should Democrats take the Senate and the Presidency, to then try to “pack” the Supreme Court and/or attempt to make Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. states? 

 

There are other points to consider: Is the nihilism implicit in cancel culture, and which is rampant in our schools and universities, something average Americans want? Do we want the segregation that stems from identity politics? Are we ready to embrace the Socialism of the far Left? Will the New York Times 1619 Project replace the story of our founding in our public schools? And what about Black Lives Matter? Their lives have long mattered, as have all lives. Are the words expressed in our Declaration of Independence and in the Gettysburg Address to be discarded, along with statues of Jefferson and Lincoln that have already been destroyed? Should we ignore the long path toward racial equality over which our nation has traveled, beginning with Lincoln and furthered by Democrat President Harry Truman when he integrated the Armed Forces in July 1948? It received an assist with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which stated that separate schools for whites and blacks are unconstitutional and inherently unequal. And it was abetted by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower when he sent the 101^st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, to integrate the city’s all-white Central High School. Did not the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 help the cause? 

 

Should we not allow inner-city children and their parents to have choice, as do wealthy elites, when it comes to schools, through vouchers or charters? The Country has achieved energy independence for the first time in decades. Do we want to return to dependence on Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia? Is it healthy when three technology companies, from whom 70% of Americans get their news, genuflect to the same political ideology? I don’t pretend to have an answer, but I am sure if the shoe were on the other foot, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi would be up in arms. 

 

And what about the pandemic. In truth, what would Biden have done differently? Mr. Trump was faced with a novel virus, the first of its kind in a hundred years. On January 30, Mr. Trump declared a national public health emergency. On that same day, he barred entry into the U.S. by foreign nationals who had recently visited China, a decision Mr. Biden said was xenophobic. Four weeks later, on February 24^th, Nancy Pelosi visited San Francisco’s China Town: “Come, because precautions have been taken. The city is on top of the situation.” Because of its novelty, the handling of the Virus was experimental, on-the-job training if you will. Operation Warp Speed has been a success. A partnership between components of HHS, CDC, BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) and the DOD and private companies, it was introduced on May 15, its purpose is to accelerate the development of products and services to combat COVID-19, while maintaining protocols of safety and efficacy. Could the overall situation have been handled better? Perhaps. Monday morning quarterbacks can always find something they would have done differently. but the President had to balance the pandemic with the need to keep the economy alive. Now, we look forward to a bright spring, hopefully not a “dark winter.”     

 

With the prospect for peace in the Middle East more viable than ever, should we abandon Jerusalem and return to regional instability?  Should we permit China to resume its practice of stealing American technology, its unfair trade practices and its building of military bases on man-made islands in the South China Sea? Should we permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapon? Should not Europe be made to pay their fair share for defense? Should we remove the newly-erected missile defense system in Poland?

 

This list does not pretend to cover all areas, and everyone will have different things to considers. But they point to the fact that this election is important, in ways beyond the two men running. What kind of a country do we want for our children, grandchildren and all those yet to be born? Tolerance of intolerance, whether on the left or the right, is never the answer. We need debate and discussion – civilly, if possible. Nor can we forget our heritage that dates back to the earliest settlers, and which was forged in a War for Independence and, seventy-four years later, in a Civil War. It is a heritage of which to be proud and that today includes all races, ethnicities and religions – people who came to these shores and this place on sailing ships, steam ships, planes and on foot. They came for a better future. They came to become Americans, not hyphenated Americans. That is something to celebrate.

"Tales from the Ant World," Edward O. Wilson

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.wtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“Tales from the Ant World,” Edward O. Wilson

October 27, 2020

 

“The love of nature is a form of religion, and naturalists serve as its clergy.”

                                                                                                                                Edward O. Wilson (1929-)

                                                                                                                                Tales from the Ant World, 2020

 

Wandering along paths through the fields and woods where we live, I am more of a flaneur than a naturalist. I agree with Henry David Thoreau: “All nature is doing her best each moment to make us well – she exists for no other end.” My mind wanders in sync with my feet. I witness a bird and its nest, watch a turtle eyeing me, gaze at a tree in full bloom, look down at an ant hustling along with purpose. 

 

Edward O. Wilson, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929, is professor emeritus at Harvard where he specialized in myrmecology for the past sixty-eight years. This is his thirty-fifth book, two of which have won Pulitzer prizes, four of which I have read. 

 

Professor Wilson concludes this one at the beginning. “Where did ants originate? When? And perhaps even, why?” He says they emerged from wasp ancestors during the Cretaceous period, approximately ninety million years ago. But this story begins in Alabama where, as a teenager in Decatur, along the Tennessee River, Wilson decided upon a life as a naturalist, with a specialty in ants. His family moved often, which he admits was tough on an adolescent: “Where I found it difficult to make new friends…I turned instead to natural habitats to find a reliably familiar environment.”

 

There are over 15,000 species of ants, with perhaps as many yet undiscovered. They exist almost everywhere, from the top of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington to deep into caves in Trinidad. “…ants are as mean as they have to be in order to protect their home. No more, no less.” They are eusocial, meaning they live in a society “formed by means of altruism and advanced degrees of cooperation.”  Ants are matriarchal, as male ants have one purpose – to inseminate the queen. Armies, workers, food-scavengers and scouts are all females. Ants are practical, assigning the most dangerous jobs to the oldest. The fastest ones are found in open, hot plains of eastern and southern Africa; the slowest in tropical forests in Central and South America. They are prolific. The colonies of attine leafcutters are immense, “in fact among the largest known in the whole world of social insects.” Professor Wilson adds: “The mother queen, when inseminated by several males during the nuptial flight, receives 200 to 300 million sperm cells…She pays out sperm cells one by one…during her lifetime of ten to fifteen years. In this time, she gives birth to as many as 150 million to 200 million workers…”

 

One wonders – Does nature have a master plan? Does each species have a specific role to play? It seems so. In writing about leafcutter ants and of the environmental blessings they bring to Brazil’s rainforests and savannahs, Professor Wilson notes: “…they create unique ecosystems and increase biodiversity for habitats as a whole.” His advice when you see ants in your kitchen: “Watch where you step.”

 

At 91, Edward O. Wilson has not stopped. He plans to travel to Mozambique to find a live Melissotarsus, one of the “physically strangest ants in the world.” In his thirst for knowledge, Professor Wilson is an inspiration to us all. And his book is both educational and good fun.

"The Election - Trump, A Man for this Season"

                                                                 Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Election – Trump, A Man for this Season”

October 24, 2020

 

“This suggests one way to frame the coming election: as a contest between a man, Trump

who believes America is good and a man, Biden who is controlled by a movement that 

believes America is bad. I do not think it is any more complicated than that.”

                                                                                                                                Thomas Klingenstein

                                                                                                                                Chairman, Claremont Institute

                                                                                                                                Speech, October 13, 2020

 

Robert Bolt’s play A Man for all Seasons premiered in London on July 1, 1960. It was based on the life of Sir Thomas More, who is remembered for his fealty to his conscience at the cost of his life. More, as Lord High Chancellor of England, opposed the Protestant Reformation; so, when Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who failed to deliver him a son, annulled so he could marry Anne Boleyn, Sir Thomas More refused to grant the annulment. Bolt saw More as the ultimate man of conscience, a man who remained true to himself and his beliefs. The title of the play came from the writings of one of More’s contemporaries, Robert Whittington, who described More as a “man of an angel’s wit and singular learning…a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes…A man for all seasons.”

 

Donald Trump is not a man “for all seasons,” but he is, in my opinion, a man for this season, at this point in our history. We know his negatives: His character is faulty. He is an egoist, braggart and often vengeful. He is overly sensitive to insults and has little patience. His speech makes one wince. But Mr. Trump is an unabashed patriot who believes that, fundamentally, America is good, while his opponents are equally vocal, in emphasizing how America has been a force for evil. He, alone among Washington’s smug political class, has had the fortitude to stand up to what has become Washington’s “swamp,” a quagmire that has lured those that want the security of a federally funded job, with an income above the national average and the influence and power that accompanies such jobs. As well, too many elected officials have gone to Washington, not to serve the public’s interest but to gain the notoriety to profit from a book or to make contacts that allow them to join a lobbyist firm upon retirement – in short, to become rich. Nobody wants a system where a poor person cannot run for political office, but the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. A Senator or Representative makes more than double the median household income in the Washington metropolitan area, which itself is 25% above the national average. The median net worth of a member of Congress is more than ten times the median net worth of the typical American. Healthcare and retirement benefits are substantially higher than those received by average Americans. And a compromised politician cannot serve the best interests of the American people.

 

Is it any wonder that Mr. Trump has raised the ire of so many whose livelihoods could be at risk? If Mr. Trump has his way some government agencies could be shut down and others moved out of the D. C. metropolitan area. Abroad, Mr. Trump achieved a rapprochement in the Middle East that had evaded professional policy experts for decades. He moved our embassy to Jerusalem, caused our NATO partners to up their share of defense spending and withdrew the U.S. from the UN Human Rights Council, which “makes a mockery of human rights,” as Ambassador Nikki Haley said. He took on China, imposed sanctions on Russian leaders, released the U.S. from the Iranian nuclear deal and removed the U.S. from the toothless and expensive Paris Accord. He came to Washington as a political outsider. Despite almost four years in the White House, he remains an outsider, which threatens those who see Washington as their own private feeding trough, a place where they can exercise political, economic and personal power. Donald Trump is like the little boy who saw that the emperor was naked, that corruption was rampant. The most recent example has been the Biden revelations – trading access for dollars. But Mr. Trump loves his country and he recognizes that its institutions of family, church, history and tradition are under attack. There are numerous issues over which reasonable people can disagree – the economy, COVID-19, the judiciary, education, taxes, regulation, national defense, healthcare, climate, the environment, immigration, foreign policy, guns, right-to-life – but we should be united on the issue of liberty, freedoms to speak, write and assemble, and of the right to live freely within the confines of a just society based on the rule of law. And, we should be able to trust those who run our government.

 

Democrats and others on the left have raised the specter of an imperial Trump Presidency. They have reported on his canoodling with dictators and tyrants, cited his waving from the balcony of the White House, upon his release from Walter Read Hospital. (Of course, no mention was made of the fact that every President has been photographed from that same spot.) Yet, as Mollie Hemingway recently wrote: “Donald Trump is one of the very few executives in the entire world who has not taken advantage of the latest global pandemic as an excuse to seize control.” Mr. Trump, as a true federalist, left most decisions to the states. It has been governors, usually Democrat governors, who have violated Americans’ Constitutional rights, in closing schools and businesses for weeks and months, banning family gatherings at weddings and funerals, inciting fear and destroying opportunities for those unable to work from home.

 

Every four years we are told that this election is the most critical of our lifetimes – “destined to change the shape of our nation,” as Chris Wallace proclaims in an ad. This one, however, is unique: Intersectionality, identity politics, victimization, racial grievance, political correctness, multiculturalism and sanctuary cities have come to define the Democratic Party. They have encompassed the radical views of academics, TV talking heads and opinion writers, all of whom are removed, by their jobs and lifestyles, from the hardships of everyday life for middleclass Americans. “Mr. Biden,” as Daniel Henninger wrote in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, “has made a Faustian bargain with his party’s activist left…putting the U.S. on a fast track toward income confiscation and ‘distributive justice’.”  The Democratic Party has recruited wealthy, “woke” apologists from Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall street. In so doing, they abandoned working people who had comprised their ranks, people with ‘bourgeoise values’ that do not comport with today’s “wokeness.” If black lives really mattered to Progressives, would not school choice be encouraged in inner cities? In an interview with Tunku Varadarajan of the Wall Street Journal a week ago, Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute said: “Wokeness is a force that undermines the middle class, and you couldn’t have had wokeness without an elite contempt for values of the middle class.”

 

On October 13, Thomas Klingenstein gave a speech at the Claremont Institute, titled “A Man versus A Movement.” He explained why he believes this election to be the most consequential since 1860 and why President Trump is the man most uniquely suited to the moment. He spoke of how this is an election between a man who believes America to be inherently good and a movement based on the idea that America is intrinsically bad. It is the difference between those who believe our founding was in 1776 and those who place our founding in 1619. “Our way of life,” spoke Mr. Klingenstein, “…is based on individual rights, the rule of law, and a shared understanding of the common good. This way of life values hard work, self-reliance, volunteerism, patriotism and so on. In this way of life there are no hyphenated Americans. We are all just Americans. Colorblindness is our aspiration.” In dividing people between black and white, privileged and disadvantaged, oppressors and oppressed, those on the Left sound like Old Testament evangelists preaching that the iniquity of the fathers will be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations.

 

To the extent that systemic racism exists, it is in those institutions, universities and workplaces that abide by actions that favor one group over another – Asian over Hispanic, Black over White, Hispanic over Black, Black over Asian or White over all others. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, in Parents v. Seattle School District 1: “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” In his speech, Mr. Klingenstein added: “If Americans are systemically anything, it is a systemic commitment to freedom and equal rights for all.”

 

The United States has not served as a beacon for the world’s poor and oppressed because it is inherently evil. Anyone who has studied history knows that no nation has done more than the U.S. to spread freedom, give people hope and lift them from poverty. As well, the U.S. does not sit on its laurels; it constantly strives to improve itself. The history of the United States is one of a nation never satisfied, but it is one that honors its families, history and traditions. Differences of opinion are healthy. Debate and discussion help us move forward. When debate is stifled, as it has been in some of our colleges and universities, we suffer. When media only tells one side of the side of a story, we suffer. On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln spoke before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring from amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot., we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Following his election victory in 2016, Donald Trump was not accorded respect by those he defeated. A few members of Congress boycotted his inaugural. Attempts were made to undermine his administration by way of an investigation into an alleged collusion with his campaign and Russia, a collusion that, in fact, originated in the Clinton Camp and was abetted by the Obama Administration, the FBI and the CIA. A three-year investigation by Robert Mueller found no collusion. The Speaker of the House tore up her State of the Union message on live TV. Mr. Trump was impeached for a phone call with the Ukrainian President when, in fact, the real corruption had been between the Biden family and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. Opposing parties are healthy, but political corruption is a rot that must be eviscerated.

 

Suspicions that Joe Biden’s son Hunter had leveraged his father’s name gained credibility when Tony Bobulinski, a former Navy veteran, institutional investor and business partner of Hunter Biden, disclosed details of Sinohawk Holdings, a venture between the Biden family and CEFC China Energy, a Shanghai-based conglomerate, since gone bankrupt. Bobulinski had been hired as CEO of Sinohawk Holdings. Mr. Bobulinski, in a televised news conference last Thursday, said he had had an hour-long meeting with Mr. Biden on May 2, 2017, which is at odds with Joe Biden’s claim he knew nothing of his son’s business involvements. The FBI has brought Bobulinski in for questioning. Will they pressure him into not testifying before Senator Ron Johnson’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee?

 

Elections do not provide the voter a choice between the perfect and the imperfect, so voters seek the candidate and policies that best align with their opinions. Both candidates have character flaws – Trump, in ways we all know and that have been widely publicized by a media that detests him; Biden, in ways we have come to know more recently: the Biden family, leveraging access in exchange for financial gain, which could certainly affect foreign policy, and the gradual, but obvious, mental decline, which means his time in office may be shorter than that of William Henry Harrison. Mainstream media blames his periodic verbal incoherence on a childhood stutter, something not noticeable during his years in the Senate and as Vice President. Voters who pull the lever for Biden will actually be voting for Kamala Harris, who in 2019 had the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate. One cannot help but suspect that the Democratic National Committee is using Biden as a Trojan Horse to get Harris into the White House. Is the country ready for the radicalization of its economy and government? I think not. Is Mr. Trump a man for all seasons? I also think not. But I do believe he is the man for this season, for this time, which is why he will receive my vote on November 3.

"Great Society," Amity Schlaes

 Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“Great Society,” Amity Schlaes

October 21, 2020

 

“Economies, it turned out, were like humans. They made choices.

The U.S. economy was choosing to stay away from high-cost cities like St. Louis.”

                                                                                                                                Amity Schlaes

                                                                                                                                Great Society

 

By the time John Kennedy became President, The Depression was a distant memory and World War II had been over for over fifteen years. Americans were prospering. Theys felt good about themselves. They were admired by friends and feared by enemies. But, as happens once prosperity becomes common, people don’t seem to care or understand the role capitalism plays in eliminating poverty and making lives comfortable and happy. They don’t understand that nothing moves in straight lines – GDP growth, stock market performance, human emotions, or views of liberty. In the 1960s, the compounded rate for the Dow Jones Industrial Averages (DJIA) was 4.9% – all in the first half of the decade – and in the ensuing decade, the DJIA lost eight percent. What happened in the ‘60s, and its effect on subsequent decades, is the subject of this well-researched history of the period from the summer of 1960 to the summer of 1972. 

 

On January 20, 1961, a 43-year-old John F. Kennedy became the youngest U.S. President since Theodore Roosevelt. In his inaugural he focused on the Country’s strength and the meaning of freedom: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Americans were confident. In May of that same year, Kennedy announced a goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Yet the Cold War persisted, poverty had not been vanquished and civil rights were not equally shared. Convinced of a need to stop the spread of Communism got us entangled in Vietnam. Concern for those living in penury led to the War on Poverty. Disquiet about equality and fairness were behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A decade that began on a high note, exemplified in Kennedy’s inaugural, ended with Nixon taking the nation off the gold standard on August 15, 1971. The years between witnessed a growth in national debt, a declining Dollar, student riots, and the assassination of a President, a civil rights leader and a U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate.

 

Ms. Schlaes begins each of the twelve chapters with three statistics: Guns and butter, as a percent of GDP, and the DJIA price. Despite Vietnam, guns as a percent declined from 9% to 7%, while butter rose from 4.5% to 7.1%. The DJIA began at 679 and ended at 898. (However, the DJIA finished 1965 at 969, and it would be 1982 before the Averages closed consistently above 1000.) President Johnson told students at Swarthmore College in May 1964, a scaled-up government was the answer to problems of the ‘60s. Ms. Schlaes quotes him: “The truth is, far from crushing the individual, government at its best liberates him from the enslaving forces of his environment.” Twenty-two years later, President Reagan gave us the other side, in his nine scariest words: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

 

We are introduced to some of the main characters of the period, “the best and the brightest on the home front:” William McChesney Martin, Arthur Burns, Pat Moynihan, Sargent Shriver, George Romney and Walter Reuther. “Fending off incursions of the federal government…wittingly or unwittingly” were mayors like Sam Yorty of Los Angeles and John Daley of Chicago and governors like Ronald Reagan of California and John Connally of Texas. We spend time with Martin Luther King, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, all of whom died for the cause of civil rights. And we get to know Tom Haydn, the radical activist who founded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and who later married Jane Fonda. About Haydn, Ms. Schlaes writes: “Socialism was a goal, Haydn saw, that attracted many people, even – especially – when they knew little about it.” We meet businessmen, like Lemuel Boulware of General Electric who worked to curtail the influence of unions, and Gordon Moore of Fairchild Semiconductor, about whom she wrote: “The rule that nothing could proceed without a government client seemed immutable to the maverick engineers.” We witness the Gulf of Tonkin attack and ensuing Resolution and the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, signed into law in August 1964.

 

We learn of well-intentioned programs like the Fair Housing Act, which had the unintended consequence of destroying neighborhoods and splitting up families. When Robert Moses wanted to tear up Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, he ran into resident Jane Jacobs: “Hudson Street enchanted her…the street was always busy. Locals emerged from their doorways, shopped in the dime stores, and, most important, looked after one another.” High rises and highways destroy a neighborhood’s sense of camaraderie.

 

Like much of what government does, final costs bore no relationship to original estimates: The Vietnam war cost $843.6 Billion, equal to 1967’s total GDP. Medicaid cost three times its estimate. By the end of the decade, New York’s welfare payments alone, at $2 billion, were double the “once huge-sounding budget for the War on Poverty.” The Office of Economic Opportunity began, in 1964, with 400 lawyers and a budget of $4 million, by 1970 had 2,000 lawyers and a budget of $58 million. The author quotes British socialist Beatrice Webb, that automatically distributed money was likely “to encourage malingering and a disinclination to work.” The Courts were changing. “In 1970, the courts were supplanting the legislative bodies, with judges themselves ‘legislating’ via constitutional fiat.”

 

There were those like Governor Reagan of California who foresaw the problem of government largesse: In December 1970, Reagan told the press: “I believe government is supposed to promote the general welfare. I don’t believe it is supposed to provide it.”

 

Government is necessary, else anarchy reigns, for men are not angels, as James Madison wrote in Federalist 51. But government cannot answer all problems. It does not have X-ray vision to see around corners or into men’s souls. The “invisible hand” of free markets has always been more efficient than the planned economy of Socialism. That is the lesson of Amity Schlaes book. It is a lesson for today. People in government in the 1960s were, for the most part, good and well intentioned. They wanted to prevent the spread of Communism. They wanted to eradicate poverty. They wanted to integrate society. They wanted a “great society.” But they did not listen to people on the ground. Most important, they lacked wisdom. They could not (or would not) see the consequences of what they did. They did not foresee Kent State, It was not their plan to destroy neighborhoods or break up families, yet, that is what happened. Impersonal, high-rise apartments destroyed neighborhoods and distanced people from neighbors. Children brought up in father-less homes suffered the consequences of fragmented families. In this age of COVID-19, when once again many want to see government’s role increase, this is a timely book that shows the folly that can happen when Washington’s elite ignore the people’s voice.

 

 

"The Public's Right to Know"

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Public’s Right to Know”

October 17, 2020

 

“Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be
brought under its control. Wherever the cause of liberty is making its way, one of
its highest accomplishments is the guarantee of the freedom of the press.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)

Address – American Society of Newspaper Editors

Washington, D.C., January 17, 1925

 

For the past ten or more years, I have posted my essays on a blog run by Google. It had always been easy to do; traffic on the Blog was generally slow. It was a way to preserve my essays (besides the paper copies and the ones stored in the cloud and on my hard drive), and as a means to access them by subject through the internet. In recent months, the number of “hits” on my Blog has risen to the range of four to six thousand a month – not a lot in this age we live in, but enough so that Google apparently decided that posting and editing should be more onerous. I have not been blocked, but access for me has become more difficult.

 

A few days ago, Twitter and Facebook blocked access to a story in the New York Post that showed an e-mail from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, to Hunter Biden, a new board member. The e-mail, dated April 17, 2015, thanked Hunter Biden for an introduction to his father, indicating a meeting had taken place between Vice President Biden and Mr. Pozharskyi. Mr. Biden has denied such a meeting took place. The Senate Homeland Security Committee, led by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) is “in the process of validating the information,” as Senator Johnson told the Wall Street Journal. As well, Twitter locked the personal account of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, because she had linked to the Post’s story.

 

The excuse given by Twitter, with more than a whiff of hypocrisy, was that the story the New York Post published was based on private information about another individual without permission. Twitter had no problem publishing the New York Times leaked (or hacked) tax returns of President Trump, despite no permission. Nor did Twitter or Facebook ever “fact-check” the Trump-Russian collusion story, which went on for three years, and turned out to be fake. One would think that news about Mr. Biden and his family, just as news about Mr. Trump and his family, would be in the public domain. After all, both men are running for President. Why are conservatives not offered the same latitude as progressives? One answer might lie in relations between big tech and the Biden campaign. At least three individuals who have ties to Silicon Valley (and the Obama administration) sit on the Biden campaign committee: Avril Haines who worked for the data mining company Palantir; Antony Blinken, a co-founder and lobbyist for WestExec, where he acted as a go-between between the Department of Defense and Silicon Valley companies like Google; and Cynthia Hogan, former vice president for public policy and government affairs at Apple. 

 

Nevertheless, to keep the public in the dark regarding news of political candidates is censorship. There are only two reasons for suppressing information: one, you don’t trust the public with the data, or, two, you think the public is imbecilic. Fact checking is legitimate, but when “fact checking” means canceling facts or opinions that are at odds with a preferred narrative, we approach the realm of George Orwell’s “Thought Police.” If “big tech” governs what we write or say, what will be the fate of minority opinions? Facebook and Twitter, as Michael Dougherty wrote in National Review are “the most powerful media companies on earth.” Voters have a right to know if, as Vice President, Mr. Biden paved the way for his son Hunter to reap millions of dollars from Ukraine, China and Russia. Is it not possible that such information could be used to blackmail Mr. Biden should he be elected President? As the Wall Street Journal opined on Friday in their lead editorial, “…a free society cannot survive if its people are not committed to it…”  

 

Throughout American history slanted news has been a constant, but with 24-hour news and ubiquitous internet connection, it is important we understand the biases of those we read and to whom we listen. In terms of our rights to know, the risk we face is not a dearth of information but a surfeit of propaganda pretending to be news. We should all listen, watch and read skeptically. It is when we take as gospel the eloquent words on the page or believe without questioning the mellifluous voices on TV, we are likely to be snookered. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times from 1935 to 1961, once wrote: “Freedom of the press, or, to be more precise, the benefit of freedom of the press, belongs to everyone – to the citizens as well as the publisher…The crux is not the publisher’s ‘freedom to print’; it is rather the citizen’s ‘right to know’”  If only his heirs felt the same! Unfortunately, opinions on the frontpage of today’s New York Times masquerade as news. And we now have tech executives determining what and what not we read and see. With the left dominating the media, the power they have is overwhelming. When they and politicians march to the same drummer we have cause for alarm, reminding one of Mussolini’s description of fascism: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” 

 

A democracy cannot survive without an informed citizenry. Newspapers, radio and television were our sole source of information through the 1980s. The internet changed that. Daily newspaper circulation in 2018 was 28.6 million, down 55% from a peak in 1984 of 63.3 million. In contrast, 87 million people follow President Trump on Twitter. The three broadcast stations and the three main cable networks have a combined evening news audience of about eighteen million. Most people get their news in ways unknown to my parents’ generation. Statista claims there are 275 million smart phones in the U.S. There are about 225 million Americans with Facebook accounts and 48 million with Twitter accounts[1]. A 2019 Pew Research study suggested 43% of Americans get news through Facebook, 21% from YouTube and 12% from Twitter. The power a small number of tech companies have over the dissemination of news is astonishing, not to mention the influence they have on behavior. When they, in concert, favor one candidate or one political Party, we risk becoming a one-Party nation. The Founders created a republic, not a democracy, for the reason they wanted to ensure minority rights were protected.

 

It is disturbing to a commentator like me, with a small following of a couple of thousand, to be harassed if even in a minor way, because of what it says about our society and culture. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, but I do hope everyone agrees that I have a right to my opinions. “Our liberty,” said Thomas Jefferson, “depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited, without being lost.” Whenever and wherever suppression of the news appears, it should be shouted down. The public has a right to know.

"Common Sense & COVID-19"

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Common Sense & COVID-19”

October 15, 2020

 

“Common sense is seeing things as they are,
and doing things as they ought to be.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

 

A desire for more power for themselves and the state, identity politics and unadulterated hatred for Mr. Trump, have driven common sense into the nether regions of the progressive mind. The Oxford English Dictionary defines common sense as “good sense and sound judgement in practical matters.” It is, as Harriet Beecher Stowe put it, “seeing things as they are,” not as we might like them to be. It is, according to Thomas Edison, an imperative quality: “The three essentials to achieve anything are: first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.” A lack of common sense infects all issues, from the economy, to climate, to the Senate Judiciary Committee. It is the effect of a lack of common sense regarding COVID-19 and reactions to it that concerns this essay. 

 

We have always lived in a politicized world, but we now live in one made more pervasive by the advent of the internet and social media. Attitudes toward masks have become flashpoints in the battle against COVID-19. It is said that opinions regarding masks differentiate Democrats from Republicans. Perhaps, but it sounds too simplistic. I do believe, however, that one can distinguish the individual who abrogates rational behavior to a political narrative. A friend wears a mask when driving alone in his car, but unlike many on the left he is honest as to his reason. He admits the purpose is to send a signal that he cares – not to protect himself or others against the virus – but a sign of his righteousness. But he ignores risks to his health; for, no matter how “woke” he may feel, we all need the fresh air an open car window provides. Dr. Margarite Griesz-Brisson, a German Consultant Neurologist and Neurophysiologist is quoted: “We know that the human brain is very sensitive to oxygen deprivation. There are nerve cells, for example, in the hippocampus that can’t be longer than three minutes without oxygen – they cannot survive.” It is an opinion that resonates common sense. Yet, Mr. Trump is ridiculed for removing his mask, when ten or twenty feet from others, while Mr. Biden has spoken of imposing a nation-wide mask-wearing mandate.

 

Believing it helps Mr. Biden, mainstream media highlights the number of COVID-19 infections in the U.S. and compare them unfavorably with the rest of the world. They ignore an inconvenient perspective – a higher number of tests per thousand people yields a higher number of positive cases. The U.S. has been testing 2.87 people per thousand, while Canada, France and Germany are testing a third fewer. More tests generate more confirmed cases. Hospitalizations, a more important number, get little attention probably because those numbers are down by two thirds since a bump in July, despite more people testing positive. And positivity rates likely do not indicate the extent of the spread. Most officials argue the number of 7.5 million Americans having tested positive for COVID-19 is likely off by 90%, suggesting the real number is closer to 75 million, with the vast majority being asymptomatic.  

 

The Left prefers draconian “lockdowns” to a system that, first, protects the vulnerable and then, with commonsensical safeguards, opens the economy. Their priority, as explained by Mr. Biden, is to defeat the virus before addressing the economy. It is an elitist attitude that assumes everyone can either work from home, can live for a year without an income, or assumes taxpayers will make up the difference, oblivious to the fact the economy has been stunted. As Dr. Scott Atlas said, a “lockdown is a luxury of the rich.” It is a policy that has forced school closings and encouraged remote learning, despite the fact that, for school-age children, the virus is no more dangerous than the flu. The policy has been especially harmful to the nation’s most needy. Nearly 100,000 U.S. businesses, mostly small ones, have gone bankrupt. While the labor participation rate has improved since April, it is still down almost two percentage points from before the pandemic, which means there are still three million fewer people employed than at year end 2019. Lockdowns have unintended consequences. For example, in my state of Connecticut, domestic violence shelters are running at 150% of capacity, requiring victims to be placed in hotels.

 

The Left claims to “follow the science,” yet the science they follow is one that accords only with their political views. When the science is at odds with their predetermined narrative, it is rejected. The Great Barrington Declaration is a case in point. It is a treatise prepared by three epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford: Doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, respectively. Joel Achenbach, writing for the Associated Press, referred to them as “maverick scientists,” a comment that says more about Mr. Achenbach than it does about the three doctors. The doctors urge adoption of what they term “focused protection” of the vulnerable, while publicly acknowledging the increasing evidence that “current lockdowns are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” and that “keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.” The paper has been signed by over 30,000 doctors and scientists around the world. The Left’s denial of the group’s authenticity is based on the fact that the research was underwritten by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank in part funded by the “hated” Koch family. Science is never fixed; it is always a work-in-progress.

 

Common sense says listen to all sides, then form your decisions. In my case, it means wearing a mask when inside and around strangers, or outside if people come within six or ten feet. I wash my hands, often and carefully. I avoid crowded venues and socially distance. I use sanitizers. Most importantly, I try to employ common sense and try not to be fearful. If you are not infected and you know the same is true of those with you, i.e. your family, a mask is unnecessary. When outside, alone and in the fresh air, a mask does more harm than good, as we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. The idea that a mask mandate should be imposed is ridiculous, harmful and serves no purpose other than to fire up a partisan divide. There has been no such talk of mandating surgical gloves, yet when I pump gas or go into a supermarket, I wear them, because my judgement tells me it makes sense. Public policy should assure protection of the vulnerable, but it should also be cognizant of the harmful psychological effects of loneliness; it should let students return to schools and allow the economy to sensibly reopen. We should be fully aware of and never forget the unintended consequences of public policies gone awry.   

 

A lack of common sense is manifest across our culture and society. It could be seen last year when 181 CEOs of U.S. companies, desirous to be “woke,” committed to “stakeholder capitalism, a “collective creed of workers, customers, communities, climate and country,” as Andy Kessler wrote in The Wall Street Journal. The term “stakeholder capitalism” stirs the emotional loins but is redundant. Businesses that do not treat its workers well, keep customers happy, pay taxes, and heed rules and regulations will be out of business. That’s the way markets work. It is common sense. Milton Friedman’s advice of a half a century ago remains applicable: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” If it does, workers, customers and the community thrive. If it does not, they do not. A lack of common sense can be seen in the adamancy of climate advocates who claim anyone who questions their advocacy is a “denier.”

 

Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, in a letter to his son, wrote: “A weak mind with no common sense magnifies trifling things and cannot receive great ones.” Those words characterize progressives intent on abandoning rational discourse for the sake of a narrative that serves their desires – more power for themselves and the state.

"The Way We Live Now," Anthony Trollope

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

“The Way We Live Now,” Anthony Trollope

October 10, 2020

 

“Rank squanders money; trade makes it;
and then trade purchases rank by re-gilding its splendour.”
The Way We live Now, 1875

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

 

As a satirist (mild would be the operative adjective), Trollope was fascinated with the trappings of wealth and the advantages and disadvantagess of rank and privilege, the Church of England and the Houses of Parliament. But he recognized the limits of satire as it applies to truth. In his posthumously published autobiography, he wrote: “The spirit which produces the satire is honest enough, but the very desire which moves the satirist to do his work energetically makes him dishonest.” In this novel, through sacrifice and redemption of his several characters, he explores differences between story and substance, fable and truth.

 

While there is no single hero or heroine in this novel, Augustus Melmotte, a financier of unknown origin and of dubious (but assumed substantial) means, dominates much of the story: “The more arrogant he became, the more vulgar he was.” Besides Melmotte, the other major characters are the Carbury’s. Early on, Trollope called this his ‘Carbury novel.’ The family consists of a mother, her two children and a cousin. The mother, Lady Matilda Carbury: “If there was anything that she could not forgive in life it was romance.” Her son, Sir Felix, whose beauty and profligacy are stressed: “He never read. Thinking was altogether beyond him. And he had never done a day’s work in his life…He could play cards; and could amuse himself with women – the lower the culture of the women, the better the amusement.” The daughter, Henrietta (Hetta), who “had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter.” While Lady Carbury and her children live in London. another branch – the senior branch – is represented by cousin Roger Carbury, of Carbury Hall, in Suffolk: “But then, dear Roger was old-fashioned, and knew nothing of people as they are now. He lived in a world, which though slow, had been good in its way, but which, whether bad or good, had now passed away.” Roger, in his 40s, is deeply in love with his comely cousin Henrietta, a passion not reciprocated.

 

Melmotte, had arrived in London from the continent, amidst rumors of fraud and scandal, with his wife and daughter Marie, the latter plays an important role. Lady Carbury, who had been married at eighteen to Sir Patrick, a man twenty-six years her senior and who treated her poorly, was widowed when we meet her. She encourages her foolish and dissipated son to marry Marie for the wealth she is said to possess.

 

Characters and places, too numerous to mention, are introduced. But one of the beauties of reading Trollope are the bits of wisdom that percolate through his work: The Bishop of Elmham dining with Roger Carbury: “I think that men on the whole do live better lives than they did a hundred years ago. There is a wider spirit of justice abroad., more of mercy from one to another, a more lively charity, and if less of religious enthusiasm, less also of superstition.” On election day – when he is a candidate for Parliament and his crime has been uncovered – Melmotte visits the committee room: “It is so hard not to tumble into Scylla when you are avoiding Charybdis.” Sir Felix feeling sorry for himself: “Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done him.” And then there is a lesson to us all, including our federal, state and local governments: “…the necessity of so living that the income might always be more than sufficient for the wants of the household.” 

 

In the voice of Lady Carbury as she speaks to her publisher Mr. Alf, Trollope writes of concerns of all writers: “When the mind is attuned to it, one is tempted to think that it is all so good. One cries at one’s own pathos, laughs at one’s own humour, and is lost in one’s own sagacity and knowledge…But then comes the reversed picture, the other side of the coin. On a sudden everything becomes flat, tedious and unnatural…I was sure that there was my monument…today I feel it to be only too heavy for a gravestone.” Sitting alone, after receiving a modest check from her publisher, she quotes Byron:

 

“Oh Amos Cottle, for a moment think

What meagre profits spread from pen and ink.”

 

Trollope covers more territory than in most of his novels. We meet the rustic farmer John Crumb and Ruby Ruggles, who had been enticed by Sir Felix, but who finally consents to become Crumb’s wife. We get to know two Americans: Winfred Hurtle, who once had a relationship with Paul Montague (who later marries Henrietta Carbury), and Hamilton Fisker, the American partner of Melmotte in the South Central and Pacific Railway. We spend long evenings at the Beargarden Club with Sir Felix, Lord Nidderdale, Adolphus (Dolly) Longestaffe Lord Grasslough, Miles Grendell and others. We are witness to anti-Semitism in the refusal of Georgiana Longstaffe’s parents to allow her to marry the wealthy and worthy Mr. Brehgert. We attend a ball in Grosvenor Square and a dinner with the Emperor of China, hosted by Mr. Melmotte, and we watch the lives of lovers fall apart and then come together. 

 

The book is long (754 pages in the copy I read), but its length extends its pleasures – the deceptions and lies, the anger the reader has for Sir Felix, the concern for his mother who is unable to face the truth of her son; the honor of Roger Carbury and the dishonor of Mr. Melmotte; the determination of Marie Melmotte and Winifred Hurtle; and the endearing love of Henrietta for Paul Montague. And so much more. The story stays with you long after the book has been shelved.