The death rattle of Western civilization

In Britain, quoting Winston Churchill can get you hauled off to the hoosegow:

A candidate in the European elections was arrested on suspicion of racial harrassment after quoting a passage about Islam, written by Winston Churchill, during a campaign speech.

Paul Weston, chairman of the party Liberty GB, made the address on the steps of Winchester Guildhall, in Hampshire on Saturday.

A member of the public took offence at the quote, taken from Churchill's The River War and called police.

The passage from the book, written by the wartime Prime Minister and first published in 1899, focuses on Churchill's observations about Islam while serving during the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of the Sudan.

Mr Weston told his audience: 'Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. 

'Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. 

'No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.'

Police officers arrested Mr Weston, mid-speech, for failing to comply with their request to move on under the powers of a dispersal order made against him.

He was further arrested on suspicion of religious or racial harrassment.

So many layers of wrong in this.

Cat's out of the bag on the dim view Freedom-Haters take of the American people

Great column by Gov. Bobby Jindal on some examples of how the FHers quite clearly view us as the cattle-masses:

The level of sheer arrogance in that response [by a Treasury official at a House Ways and Means committee hearing, in which he spoke of FHer-care's individual mandate as "protection"] boggles the mind. A Treasury spokesman later publicly disclosed the Obama administration's official position: The federal government, namely the IRS, is requiring all individuals to purchase insurance to "protect" the American people from themselves.

Lest anyone think this attitude comes from anywhere other than the very top of the Obama administration, take the President's own comments last October. In a speech in Bostonat the peak of the controversy surrounding insurance cancellations, the President repeatedly derided canceled plans as "substandard ... cut-rate plans that don't offer real financial protection." And he didn't just insult the plans themselves, he insulted the people who purchased them: "A lot of people thought they were buying coverage, and it turned out to be not so good."

In other words, if you like your current plan, you're delusional—or a dimwit.

The President soon backtracked, and unilaterally waived portions of the bill he signed into law, allowing some individuals to keep their plans, temporarily. But while the President expressed regret for having engaged in what Politifact dubbed the "Lie of the Year," he has not once apologized for the arrogant and patronizing attitude underpinning the entire controversy—one in which the President believes that he and his bureaucrats know better than everyday Americans.

Sadly, this attitude does not just pervade Washington liberals; it's also right at home in my state of Louisiana.

In 2012, the executive director of a state teachers' union claimed that school scholarship programs wouldn't work, because low-income parents could not make decisions about their children's education, saying they "have no clue."

These comments perfectly illustrate the left's double standards. Both President Barack Obama and Eric Holder—the attorney general who filed suit to impede our scholarship program but lied to Congress about it last month—choose to educate their children at elite Washington schools costing more than $35,000 per year.

But if Americans of more modest financial means—whose annual income may be dwarfed by the tuition fees President Obama easily pays for his daughters—want their children to escape failing schools, or buy the health plan they want, the left exclaims: "Oh no, we can't let you do that."

That's exactly how The Nation magazine reacted to the health care alternative I recently endorsed. Responding to the plan's new incentives giving individuals more choices and insurance options, its analysts claimed that "most people are not informed well enough (sic) to make the right choices about which plan to buy, what it covers, what it will cost them, and especially how to decide what care to seek." That's what The Nation considers an "epic fail:" allowing the "ignorant" American people to pick their own health care options. 

You can't hit your own backside with a yardstick and need government to lead you around by the nose.  That's the progressive take on the human being.

Proclaiming outright to China and North Korea that we're weak

Those cuts to our military that Hagel announced a while back will have repercussions:

Defense cuts have helped shrink the number of available carriers, alarming GOP lawmakers who are fighting the Pentagon’s plan to permanently cut the number of U.S. carriers to 10.

They argue not having a carrier in the region for months at a time will send a signal of U.S. weakness, as China seeks to make territorial claims against several U.S. allies over the South China Sea.

“Symbolically, the worst thing we could do around the globe is to take one of those carriers out,” Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) told defense reporters on Tuesday. “We really need two or three carriers there.”

According to Forbes and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), there will not be a carrier in the region for about 130 days next year, between when the USS George Washington leaves its base in Japan, and when its replacement, the USS Ronald Reagan, arrives there.

They argue this would leave the U.S. with fewer options to respond to flare-ups.

Navy spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Nicholas Sherrouse said the Navy’s presence in the region would not be diminished. He said that, at “at any given time, there are 80 ships and submarines, 140 aircraft, and approximately 40,000 sailors and Marines in the region.”

Still, the U.S. would not be able to use a carrier if a show of force is needed against China or North Korea, or if a natural disaster strikes, which lawmakers say is a concern for U.S. Pacific Command chief Navy Adm. Samuel Locklear III. 

“He can’t do what he needs to do with 11 carriers. He sure couldn’t do it with 10 carriers,” Forbes said.

“He said whenever things flare up, he likes to send an aircraft carrier, and that sends a strong message. If you don’t have an aircraft carrier to send, you know, what do you do?” McKeon said earlier this month. 

To those who would say that sequestration is a major factor in this, I say, "Fine.  Then let's talk about privatizing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and getting rid of Freedom-Hater-care, so we have some money to see to our strategic security needs."

At Dartmouth, you'd better be sensitive to every layer of demographic implication

Because if you're not, someone from an officially designated aggrieved group will raise hell:

The Ivy League school’s Greek community decided to cancel an upcoming fiesta-themed, charity fundraiser after a student complained that the event was culturally and racially offensive.

“As a Mexican-born, United States-raised, first-generation woman of color, it was sadly unsurprising that a culturally-themed party was seen as a casual venture for such a privileged institution such as Dartmouth,” wrote Daniela Hernandez, a student at the “privileged institution.”

Ms. Hernandez got hotter than a red chili pepper after the Alpha Phi sorority and the Phi Delta fraternity decided to host a “Phiesta” to raise money for cardiac care. Get it? “Phiesta.” Clever, right? Our good friends at the website Campus Reformalerted me to the story.

The Greeks were prepared to throw one heck of a party – complete with virgin Pina Coladas, strawberry daiquiris, chips and salsa, homemade guacamole and burritos.

I’m not sure if it was the guacamole or the burritos that sent Ms. Hernandez into a dither –but she fired off a letter to all sorts of Dartmouth bigwigs – including the person in charge of the “Office of Pluralism and Leadership” (that’s the office in charge of inclusion and diversity).

“There are various problematic structures and ideologies regarding a Cinco de Mayo-inspired event and I am sure that we, as a Dartmouth community, could learn from the extensive literature written about the Americanization of Cinco de Mayo and its construction as a drinking holiday in the United States, cultural appropriate and the inappropriate usage of cultural clothing, and the exploitation of groups of people and cultures for the sake of business opportunities,” she wrote in an email that appeared in the student newspaper.

And, yes, the fraternities and sororities caved.  And publicly puked all over themselves with great genuflection:

“We take these concerns very seriously,” student Courtney Wong told The Dartmouth. “And we want to make sure that we respect the diversity of the broader community.”
And then there’s this from Greek Taylor Cathcart: “We felt that the possibility of offending even one member of the Dartmouth community was not worth the potential benefits of having the fundraiser.”
Such hurt. Such anguish over beans and cheese wrapped in a flour tortilla.
Alysson Satterlund, the director of the Office of Pluralism and Leadership, explained the college’s position.
“Events that mock and marginalize others certainly do not reflect our Principle of Community and do not reflect values of inclusion, respect and a care for others,” she told the newspaper.

Sweet Lord, lady. They wanted to serve chips and salsa – not perform a Mexican hat dance. 

Another demonstration of the truism that the push for "diversity" is really about circumscribing freedom ever more tightly.

Some interesting dots to connect

How did Ben Rhodes get his security official gig?  After all, as Joel Pollack at Breitbart points out, he had "no prior national security or expertise."

Now it appears that he is the key to the Benghazi talking points.

His brother is the head of CBS News, and we know what reporter, who had done a fair amount of focusing on Benghazi, recently left that organization.

Ed Lasky at The American Thinker spells it out:

For years I have wondered why Rhodes had achieved such influence with Obama-given a clear lack of qualification to serve any role in the upper reaches of government. Now we know it is not sycophancy alone that worked for him. Nor is it just the fact that his brother heads CBS News (which recently par ted company with Sharyl Attkisson following her persistent investigative reporting on Benghazi).  It goes beyond those factors: he will do his boss’s bidding, hiding information, manipulating the facts, distract people: the truth and the American people be damned.

Undoubtedly he shared Hillary Clinton’s view: what difference, at this point, does it make?

This was all about making sure that the episode did not erode the Most Equal Comrade's grip on power.

WaPo editorial board unimpressed with MEC's latest sanctions on Russia

Once in a while, that paper has a moment of clarity.  Such is the case today:

 New U.S. sanctions announced Monday fall well short of the steps that senior officials threatened when the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine began three weeks ago.

No wonder that, even as he announced them, Mr. Obama expressed skepticism that they would work. “We don’t expect there to be an immediate change in Russia’s policy,” a top aide told reporters. This official acknowledged that the United States could take steps that would impose “severe damage on the Russian economy” but was holding them back. The obvious question is: Why would the United States not aim to bring about an immediate change in Russian behavior that includes sponsorship of murder, torture and hostage-taking?

It looks to the editorial board like

 . . . the U.S. sanctions policy is “calibrated” less toward rescuing Ukraine than toward avoiding steps that would ruffle feathers in Brussels or set back U.S. economic growth in an election year.

Those are understandable motives, but they ought to be trumped by the imperative of standing unambiguously against the first forcible change of borders in Europe since World War II. By choosing not to use the economic weapons at his disposal and broadcasting that restraint to the world, Mr. Obama is telling Mr. Putin as well as other potential aggressors that they continue to have little to fear from the United States. 

But, according to the Most Equal Comrade, post-America doesn't deserve to assume a leadership role on the world stage, because imperfections  dot its history.

And so the world moves past its civilizational peak and into a more brutish age.

A just-wow statistic about the cost of post-America's freedom-hatred

We all know that the FHer regime depends for its ongoing viability on a vast army of point-headed bureaucrats micro-managing every aspect of our lives.

How much does it cost to maintain this army?

After years of rapid growth during the Obama administration, the cost of federal regulations is now bigger than the entire economies of all but nine countries in the world.

That's according to the latest annual report on the regulatory state issued by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, titled "Ten Thousand Commandments."

Compiling reports of compliance costs from various government agencies and outside sources, author Clyde Wayne Crews found that the "regulation tax" imposed on the economy now tops $1.86 trillion.

By comparison, Canada's entire GDP is $1.82 trillion. India's is $1.84 trillion.

The problem, Crews notes, is that the combined cost of this "tax" never shows up anywhere in the federal budget — or any other official report — even though it is now bigger than individual and corporate income taxes combined.

As a result, "policymakers find it easier to impose regulatory costs relative to undertaking more government spending," Crews notes, "because of the lack of disclosure and accountability for regulatory costs."

And dig this:

Last year, regulators issued 3,659 rules. That's equal to one new rule every 2 1/2 hours of every day, or nearly two federal rules issued every business hour.
In 2013, there were 51 regulatory rules written for each law passed, which the CEI says is a measure of how much power Congress has delegated to unelected regulators. This "Unconstitutionality Index" — as the CEI calls it — averaged 34 under Obama, nearly twice the average rate during the George W. Bush years.
The Obama administration has had 42% more "economically significant" rules in the pipeline, on average, each year than the Bush administration.

Because the cattle-masses can't be trusted to eke out their own destinies.  And Gaia forbid that they prosper.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

Today's poster child for freedom-hatred is Ed Markey:

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey wants to empower an obscure federal agency to begin scouring the Internet, TV and radio for speech it finds threatening — a plan met with jeers from defenders of the First Amendment. Here we add one more incredulous voice to the chorus.

The “Hate Crime Reporting Act of 2014” presents a frankly chilling proposition. The spookily-named National Telecommunications and Information Administration (what, you’ve never heard of it?) would be required to submit a report to Congress on “the use of telecommunications” “to advocate and encourage violent acts and the commission of crimes of hate.”

Using its own judgment to determine what qualifies as impermissible speech, the new government hall monitors would then recommend steps for Congress to take that are “appropriate and necessary to address such use of telecommunications.” Now, those recs must be “consistent with the First Amendment,” the bill says — and Markey insists.

But prosecutors already have the authority to prosecute threats. And for the life of us we can’t fathom any further government limit on Internet postings or talk radio callers that could be structured to protect an American’s right to free expression. Neither can the experts.

“This proposed legislation is worse than merely silly. It is dangerous,” civil liberties lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate said. “It is not up to Sen. Markey, nor to the federal government, to define for a free people what speech is, and is not, acceptable.”

Well, now we know of another regime agency that ought to be dismantled yet this morning.

Secretary Global Test's disgusting view of Israel

On Holocaust Memorial Day, he said this to a gathering of world leaders:

If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday. 

Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to the Jewish state. Kerry's use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America—and it could attract unwanted attention in Israel, as well.

Not only is he delusional in his belief that there is some kind of negotiating partner for Israel in the search for "peace," he goes all Jimmy Carter on Israel for merely seeing to its security interests.

The Most Equal Comrade went even further in Malaysia

Yesterday, I posted about the MEC's remark that, just like Malaysia the US "still had work to do" in the area of human rights.

That was disgusting enough, but he actually got more specific - and played the race card.

Get a load of this vile dog vomit:

While traveling in Malaysia, no less, Barack Obama condemned the entire United States for the racist comments caught on tape by LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

Obama told his Malaysian audience the US still wrestles with legacy of slavery? Really?

“The United States continues to wrestle with a legacy of race and slavery and segregation. That’s still there. The vestiges of discrimination… You’re going to continue to see this percolate up every so often.”

This is what we're up against in the war for America's soul

Trying to "solve" the "problem" of inequality is like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall

Ben Domenech at The Federalist on why focusing on inequality is a silly distraction from life's real concerns:

If you’re not an economist, you may know inequality of outcome by another term: life. In any society, what you earn over the course of your life is unequal to others and ought to be unequal to others because you are not others, you are you. Your earnings will be unequal to that of others, because you are a different person with different skills and different work ethic and different priorities. In a free society, these earnings will be largely due to your own knowledge, your own work ethic, and the quality of what you produce. In an unfree society, it will be due to who you know.

Read the whole thing.

The fruits of planned irrelevance - today's edition

The Kim regime in North Korea calls South Korean Park Geun-hye "a prostitute at the hands of pimp Obama."

Because it's so important to be "diverse," doncha know

Colonel Allen West projects a laser onto the truth that Western fluff brains will not gaze upon:

According to a report by Pamela Engel writing for Business Insider, “Earlier this month, late at night, insurgents (aka Islamic terrorists) captured more than 200 teenage girls from a school in northern Nigeria, an area of the country that has been infiltrated by the terror group (aka Islamic terrorists) Boko Haram. Its aim is to stop Westernization and create an Islamic state ruled by sharia law, a strict religious code of living. Nigeria’s population is about half Muslim and half Christian. The extremists believe that northern Nigeria has been taken over by corrupt “false Muslims.”

Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sinful,” has been terrorizing Nigeria for about a decade. The anti-West Islamist group is opposed to educating women because its version of sharia law calls for them to be in the home raising children and caring for their husbands.

I’d love to see all the news reports confirming their assertions and allegations. Seems every time I turn around, I read about Boko Haram attacking Christians.

Well, once again, do we hear anything from that champion of women’s rights, Sandra Fluke? Heck, if we in America can allow these Muslim Brotherhood affiliated groups like Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to demean and denigrate someone such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali — are we doing any better than Nigeria?

No, we'd rather believe in fairy tales like "gender fluidity" and "climate change" and being a "welcoming community" than face the hard truths that fiercely determined people who have a notion of God that is as twisted as has ever come down the pike plot incessantly to murder us all in our beds.  And enslave any women who happen to survive what they deliver to us.

A nation that hates itself is doomed

The Minneapolis city council voted to change the name of Columbus Day to something else.

Here's something for your council to vote on:  How about taking your stinking excuse for an American city to some other universe, you Western civilization-destroyers?

“We discovered Columbus, lost on our shores, sick, destitute, and wrapped in rags. We nourished him to health, and the rest is history,” Lakota activist Bill Means told Minnesota Public Radio News.

“He represents the mascot of American colonialism in the western hemisphere. And so it is time that we change a myth of history.”

City officials renamed the government holiday Indigenous Peoples Day, a move that drew cheers from Native American residents in attendance even though City Council President Barbara Johnson mentioned that some of her Italian-American constituents would be offended by “the city’s snub of the Genoa-born explorer.”

The second Monday in October will remain a day off for select workers in Minneapolis.

-

Seriously, I have always enjoyed my visits to Minneapolis, but I think I've visited there for the last time.

"The Obama administration has opened up another front in which it is losing to Russia'

Scott Johnson at Power Line on the ridiculousness and impotence of the State Department's Jen Psaki's "hashtag diplomacy."

Blowing the whistle on the ideological bullies at the heart of Green-ism

Robert Stavins, head of the environmental economics program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says politicians from various countries with a vested interest in a certain set of IPCC conclusions breathed down the necks of the scientists who drafted that body's report:

A top US academic has dramatically revealed how government officials forced him to change a hugely influential scientific report on climate change to suit their own interests. 

Harvard professor Robert Stavins electrified the worldwide debate on climate change on Friday by sensationally publishing a letter online in which he spelled out the astonishing interference.

He said the officials, representing ‘all the main countries and regions of the world’ insisted on the changes in a late-night meeting at a Berlin conference centre two weeks ago.

Three quarters of the original version of the document ended up being deleted.

Prof Stavins claimed the intervention amounted to a serious ‘conflict of interest’ between scientists and governments. His revelation is significant because it is rare for climate change experts to publicly question the process behind the compilation of reports on the subject.

Prof Stavins, Harvard’s Professor of Business and Government, was one of two ‘co-ordinating lead authors’ of a key report published by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) earlier this month. 

His chapter of the 2,000-page original report concerned ways countries can co-operate to reduce carbon emissions.

IPCC reports are supposed to be scrupulously independent as they give scientific advice to governments around the world to help them shape energy policies – which in turn affect subsidies and domestic power bills.

Could it be any more clear what this is really about?

The Most Equal Comrade outdoes himself in Malaysia

Like me, you may have to read his remark a couple of times to let it sink in that he really said this.  I know we've had bowing to emperors and princes, accepting the Chomsky book from Chavez, the outreach-to-the-Muslim-world speech in Cairo, and the "just-like-Greeks-think-Greece-is-exceptional" remark, but this one is just jaw-droppingly over the top:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think the prime minister is the first to acknowledge that Malaysia still has got some work to do, just like the United States, by the way, has some work to do on these issues. Human Rights Watch probably has a list of things they think we should be doing as a government. And, you know, I am going to be constantly committed to making sure that these issues get raised in a constructive way. 

Human Rights Watch as some kind of arbiter of America's moral health?

The Ayatollah Khameni heard that.  Putin heard that.  Maduro heard that.  Assad heard that.  Haniyeh and Abbas heard that.  Kim heard it.

It is clear beyond dispute that the MEC is actively seeking to diminish America's stature on the world stage, and that he's either not too bright or he's mentally ill.  He may want to "fundamentally transform" this nation, but others are going to do the transforming - perhaps into a land dotted with incinerated cities - due to the weakness he so gleefully projects.

Barack Obama is the enemy of every human being who cherishes freedom and America.  We are at war with him, his regime and his party.

If you're really concerned with wealth inequality, here's how to ameliorate it

Kevin Williamson at NRO joins the list of those chiming in on the Piketty book.

He says that rather than the global tax Piketty proposes, if one is interested in doing something about wealth inequality (which doesn't much interest Williamson, nor me; it's actually a constant of the human condition rather than a burning issue), reform Social Security:

Professor Piketty estimates that the return on capital over the coming decades will be between 4 percent and 5 percent; historical returns to equity investments run about 7 percent, but let’s be conservative and split Professor Piketty’s estimate, assuming a 4.5 percent return. And in keeping with the first theorem of English-major math, let’s replace that 12.4 percent Social Security tax with a poet-friendly 10 percent. Investing 10 percent of your income at a 4.5 percent return over the course of a 45-year working life produces a higher income in retirement than you enjoyed in your working life, regardless of your income level. It’s true if you make $10 an hour or $10,000 an hour. Example: Assume you make the modest sum of $20,000 a year and never get a raise. You invest $2,000 a year at 4.5 percent for 45 years and end up with just over $300,000, which, taking the most risk-averse course, can be converted into an annuity paying $1,800 a month, more than you made in your job. In fact, by the end of your working life, the returns on your investment — just the returns — would add up to about 70 percent of your salary. Start working a few years earlier or work a few years more, and the numbers are even better, enough to have a substantially higher income in retirement than you had when working.

Professor Piketty rejects such investments, citing the volatility of investment income. (As several critics have pointed out, he gives scant consideration to the risk of holding capital when considering the question of inequality, which is odd: Returns on investments are the payment one receives for bearing risk.) He writes: “For a person of sufficient means who can wait ten or twenty years before taking her profits, the return on capital is indeed quite attractive.” And it’s even more attractive at 45 years or 50 years, which is precisely what we should be encouraging.

But, of course, there's nothing in a scenario like that for the grievance hucksters.

Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome is getting just as dangerous for America as out-and-out freedom-hatred

I really, really have to wonder why some federal legislators bother calling themselves Republicans.

What informs their worldview?  How the hell are they defining conservatism?

I've wondered about this Cathy McMorris Rodgers ever since she gave that milquetoast Pub response to the Most Equal Comrade's SOTU address.  Now she confirms for me, with her pronouncement that the basic framework of Freedom-Hater-care is likely here to stay and that the focus should be on "reforming the exchanges."

Then there's Boehner's address to the Middletown Rotary Club in which he mocked Pub colleagues who are against dealing with immigration policy this year.  He didn't just mention it in passing; he got quite theatrical about it.

Would it be too much to ask him to focus on pressuring the MEC, Eric Holder, Jeh Johnson et al to uniformly enforce current immigration laws?  Hasn't the speaker even glancingly considered the argument -the absolutely correct argument - that amnesty for illegal aliens would swell the rolls of FHer voters and destroy the party in which he is such a prominent figure?


It's almost pointless to bring up John McCain's latest spewing of accommodationist sludge - coming right out for amnesty and expressing a desire to see a law enshrining it named after Ted Kennedy - but it is indeed necessary because it shows just how dangerous a figure he is.

Being a writer, I'm generally curious about what motivates people and how they come by their core philosophies.   I understand the various types of people who embrace leftism fairly well, I think.  And I certainly understand those who stand for three-pillar (free markets, foreign policy based on an accurate understanding of history, Judeo-Christian morality) conservatism - because I'm one of them.

But these people who go through the bother of carving a period out of their lives to vie for the opportunity to ostensibly represent conservatives in government and then behave on the basis of a complete muddle instead of a consistent worldview still baffle me.

Maybe one has to actually be in their position, balancing the inputs from back in the district, the media, colleagues both within their party and across the aisle, and lobbying pressures to fully understand it.

But then why can some go into that milieu and remain true to what they started out claiming to be about?

I don't know if I'll come to a decent understanding of what makes those afflicted with RGS tick, but I know it's a secondary exercise to the main task at hand - defeating them.  That's every bit as important as defeating our self-proclaimed enemies, the Freedom-Haters.

It's come to this

Hagel can't get Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu to take his calls.

Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters Friday that Mr. Hagel has been trying to communicate with Russian officials but has yet to hear back from Mr. Shoigu or anyone else. Pentagon officials have reached out to Russia on Mr. Hagel’s behalf within the past 24 hours, according to Col. Warren.

“We have made it clear to the Russians that Secretary Hagel is available for a phone call at any time,” he said. “We have reached out to them and made it very to them that he is willing to speak to his counterpart there at any time.”

The fruits of planned irrelevance.

Well, let's hope so

We all reacted in horror a few weeks ago at stories coming out of the UK about aborted people serving as heating fuel in hospitals.

Then, a couple of days ago, stories about the same thing going on in Oregon surfaced.

According to the Associated Press, pro-life Marion County commissioners Sam Brentano and Janet Carlson said they were horrified to learn that the Marion County Resource Recovery Facility in Brooks might be burning aborted babies to generate power.

“We’re going to get [to] the bottom of it,” Carlson said. “I want to know who knew, when they knew, how long they had known this was going on.”

Brentano observed nevertheless that the county’s ordinance that sets limits on what can be accepted at the waste-to-energy plant allows for all human tissue.

“No rule or law has been broken, but there’s an ethical standard that’s been broken,” hesaid.

Nick Hallett of Breitbart London had previously reported in March that 15,500 aborted babies were incinerated to provide power for Britain’s NHS hospitals. The Department of Health subsequently banned the practice.

The Oregon incinerator is a partnership between the county and Covanta, a New Jersey-based company that operates energy-from-waste power generation plants. The Marion County plant reportedly processes 550 tons of municipal solid waste each day, with only a small portion coming from medical facilities. The plant sells the power to Portland General Electric.

Jill Stueck, a Covanta spokeswoman, said the company is cooperating with the order to suspend, and that it does not seek out the aborted babies as waste to burn.

“No one is saying bring us fetal tissue,” said Stueck.

Kristy Anderson, spokeswoman with the British Columbia Health Ministry, said regional health authorities have a contract with waste management firm Stericycle, which sends biomedical waste, including aborted babies, cancerous tissue, and amputated limbs to the Oregon facility.

Stericycle, which is based in Lake Forest, Illinois, has been harshly criticized by pro-life groups because of its practice of disposing of aborted babies collected from abortion clinics. Stericycle officials did not return phone calls from AP seeking comment.

That we ever came close to this point as a society is so horrifying I don't know how to proceed as a citizen of it.  This is not the country I grew up in

Musical interlude - today's edition

Yes, there is a certain frequent LITD commenter who will fairly quickly chime in along the lines of "You do realize this is about the leviathan state's attempt to circumscribe the individual human being's right to tend to his consciousness as he or she see fit, don't you?"  And I do.  And it's for that reason that I don't get militant about drug policy one way or the other.  This gets into even touchier areas than health care policy debates.



In any event, for some reason lately, I've been revisiting this 1970s ensemble.  I'm a ware that their manager, Sandy Pearlman, was a bit of a huckster and wanted them to put forth this kind of cosmically dark image, but clearly, unless the songs had been less well-composed - and they are indeed well-composed - and the recorded performances less deftly executed, they would not have resurfaced on the radar screen of the likes of me in 2014.  Expert verse-and-refrain craftsmanship, snazzy - and I don't mean over-the-top exercises in excess testosterone runoff, but rather "that's not the kind of phrase I would have thought to put there"-type guitar phrases -  licks, usually just a few bars, as a way of winding up a particular passage.



And there's an earthiness to the storyline of the lyrics that nicely bounces off the more black-and-white, M.C. Escher-esque geometric, stark, very-much-squared-off vibe the band was obviously aiming for.  There's a certain point on the rightie spectrum that provides a home to the outlaws of American culture who are so outlaw that they no longer find themselves welcome in their former dens. Think Dennis Hopper, Kelsey Grammer, David Mamet.



I'm certainly not saying anyone who has ever been in the BOC would proclaim any kind of alignment with the Weltanschauung of anyone enumerated above, but it provides an invitation to look at our basic relations with one another in situations such as depicted in this song.  When one party in a human interaction is representing the state, and that party is there on business, you'd best have your wits about you.

Why I haven't blogged about the Bundy cattle standoff

It was clear from the get-go that this was no hill for righties to die on.  Bundy didn't have a legal leg to stand on.  If a story involves sensational trappings such as armed government agencies surrounding some location, the lines had better be very clear.  That's usually not the case.

But just listening to the guy over the past couple of weeks gave me a pretty strong indication that there was a bit of yay-hoo-ism to his worldview, and now that's been pretty much confirmed.

Bibi chimes in on the Hamas - PA pact

Tells the PA that if it goes ahead with this reconciliation with the Iran-backed terrorist group, there is no longer even a remote chance of "peace" talks.

The vulgar depths to which Illinois Freedom-Haters will take identity politics

Neil Steinberg, in an opinion piece for the Chicago Sun-Times, compared black Republicans - of which  gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner is one - to WWII-era Jews who collaborated with Nazis.

Current Governor Pat Quinn got behind that assertion.

They will tolerate no deviating from their orthodoxy.

The fruits of planned decline

Russia seems to be sending a pretty clear signal regarding how it views the current state of world-stage dynamics:

In an appearance on Russia Today's "Sophie & Co," Russian Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov attacked the United States claiming it regularly goes back on the foreign policy deals that have been made on Syria Iran and the Ukraine. 

"They try not to deliver what they promised," Lavrov said. 

In the interview Lavrov also aggressively challenged the Untied States standing as the lone global superpower. 

"Well I already said this is not about the Ukraine," he added. "Ukraine is just one manifestation of the Americans unwillingness to yield in the geopolitical fight. Americans are not ready to admit they cannot run the show in each and every part of the globe from Washington alone. And they cannot oppose [sic] their ready made solutions on everyone." 

When a hungry bear smells weakness, your entrails just may wind up as its lunch.

The sure sign that a Freedom-Hater has run out of intellectual gas

The most recent comment from someone I've been having a Facebook snit with today in a thread under a post about climate.  Further up the thread, I posted a number of links you've seen here in posts in the "environment policy" category.  Links having to do with economic dislocation, discrediting of the IPCC, arctic ice levels and the like.

It finally deteriorated to this:

Barney, poor dumb Barney, you are quite simply a pompous moron. Someone perfectly content to seek out knowledge as long as it only agrees with your preconceived opinion. But you know what? I'm not going to have to worry about you because you're out of date. People like you are expired. You're views on life and the world are archaic and based on feelings rather than facts. You're nothing more than a protesting worm on the verge of being eaten up by the birds of knowledge around you and soon you will be nothing more than white stains on statues and cars. Your future is bird shit, Barney. And the nice thing about bird shit is it comes right off with a good car wash. And if you don't get my metaphor then let me put it simply: You'll be dead soon and and we won't be dragged down anymore by your ignorance and out of date beliefs. We will evolve and move on

Peace, love, tofu and sprouts to you, too, pal.

Have we reached the point where it's no longer far-fetched to propose dismantling the IRS?

It's clearly an agency out of control:

More than 2,800 Internal Revenue Service employees who recently had been disciplined received performance bonuses totaling more than $2.8 million between Oct. 1, 2010 and Dec. 31, 2012, a government audit found.

The misconduct ranged from failure to pay taxes to misuse of government travel cards, violation of official-conduct standards and fraud, according to the report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The discipline included written reprimands, suspensions and even removal. The oversight agency said some of the conduct issues might have occurred after an employee earned a bonus.

While the IRS doesn't prohibit bonuses, "providing awards to employees with conduct issues, especially the failure to pay taxes owed to the federal government, appears to be in conflict with the IRS's charge of ensuring the integrity of the system of tax administration," the report said.

For fiscal 2012, the IRS gave bonuses to about two-thirds of its 98,000 employees. Some lawmakers have been critical of the practice.

The report identified nearly 1,200 employees with tax issues or official-conduct violations during the period who received a total of $1.1 million in monetary bonuses, and about 11,000 hours of time off. One employee who was suspended for 10 days in September 2011 received a $1,300 performance award in August 2012, the report said.

The IRS generally doesn't consider conduct issues when administering bonuses, officials told the watchdog office.

For employees represented by the IRS union, the contract specifically states that disciplinary investigations or actions generally won't preclude a performance bonus.

Did you get that?  The damn thing is unionized, and its union protects its members from having "conduct issues" considered "when administering bonuses."

Has there ever been an emptier suit than the H-Word Creature?

There's been another one of those situations in which a respondent is unable to answer the simple question, "What of substance has she ever done?"

Associated Press reporter Matt Lee pushed State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki to name one “tangible achievement” from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2010 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review before fibnally giving up in frustration when Psaki couldn't name even one.

“Off the top of your head, can you just identify one tangible achievement that the last QDDR resulted in?” Lee asked the spokeswoman.

“Well, Matt, obviously it’s an extensive, expansive topic“ 

“So, no,” Lee interrupted.

Lee persisted to no avail, never receiving an adequate answer.

Finally, said Psaki, “I am certain that those who were here at the time who worked hard on that effort could point out one.”

Ah, but what difference does it make? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

"Let's make more capitalists"

Look for nauseating praise for French economist Thomas Picketty's new book Capitalism in the 21st Century from any quarters in your life where you know Freedom-Haters lurk.  All the predictable founts of FHer punditry are swooning over it.

Cato Institute scholar Michael Tanner, writing at NRO, has a great counter-proposal to Picketty's redistributive prescription for the nagging aspect of the human condition known as inequality:

Piketty takes the evilness of inequality as a given, ignoring the broader question of whether the same conditions that lead to growing wealth at the top of the pyramid also improve material well-being for those at the bottom. In other words, does it matter if some people become super-rich as long as we reduce poverty along the way? Which matters more, equality or prosperity?

To cite just one example, Piketty devotes considerable effort to criticizing the rise of inequality in China over the past three decades as it has adopted market-oriented policies. But he largely glosses over the way those policies have lifted millions and millions of people out of poverty.

Piketty’s proposed “solutions” are equally problematic. He seems to believe that “confiscatory taxes” (his term) can be imposed without changing incentives or discouraging innovation and wealth creation. Piketty’s solutions would undoubtedly yield a more equal society, but also one that was remarkably poorer.

Still, Piketty makes some important points. In particular, he notes correctly that returns on capital nearly always exceed the return on labor. With capital held by a relatively narrow group, therefore, rising inequality is inevitable. Moreover, with the wealthy able to pass capital on to their heirs, that inequality will be perpetuated and even extended over generations.

One wonders why, then, Piketty’s fans ignore the obvious answer to this problem. Instead of attacking capital and capitalism, why not expand the number of people who participate in the benefits of having capital? In other words, let’s make more capitalists.

Tanner goes on to cite FHer Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose problem with privately-owned 401(k)s is that they're subject to the ups and downs of the stock market.  Tanner points out that what she fails to include in her argument is that, as the Chilean example demonstrates, enabling ordinary citizens to participate in the ownership of a nation's ever-froward-looking use of capital has a hell of a higher rate of return than a play-like investment program like Social Security.

Of course, FHers have no control in a scenario in which smart, free grownups are in charge of their own destinies.

A good SCOTUS ruling, but lacking the finality it should have established

The majority of the justices did the right thing in upholding Michigan's ban on affirmative action, but it would have been nice to see a resolute quashing of the notion that race still has some role to play in public policy.  As John Podhoretz observes in the New York Post today:

And yet the court’s majority (in various configurations) continues to say there are increasingly vague and undefined circumstances in which race can and should “play a factor,” circumstances that prevent it from declaring the entire kit and caboodle of affirmative action unconstitutional.

In 2003, in another ruling on the University of Michigan, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor declared that affirmative action should have an end date — say, 25 years from 2003. In doing so, she implicitly acknowledged that the policy offends elementary fairness — else why end it at all?

And the dissenting opinion of Sotomayor makes it clear why electing Freedom-Hater presidents is a bad idea.  You get Supreme Court justices who go in for that Progressive view of the Constitution, in which it must be interpreted in subjective ways that reflect sociocultural conditions in a given moment of the nation's life:

While the Constitution “does not guarantee minority groups victory in the political process,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “it does guarantee them meaningful and equal access to that process. It guarantees that the majority may not win by stacking the political process against minority groups permanently.”

 Actually the Constitution doesn't say a thing about "minority groups."  The whole struggle of originalists (count me in) has been to perfect the actual practice of the Constitutional principle of equality of anyone and everyone before the law.

Then there are the stats on the harm done to those who are inadequately prepared for the level of academic rigor at certain schools but are admitted anyway - but that's a subject for another day.

This one was about two things: the above-mentioned absence of race-consciousness in the Constitution as established by the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, and the rights of states to decide matters fraught with sociocultural considerations - without federal interference.

Continue reading the main story

The fruits of patty-cake - today's edition

Iran, emboldened by years of being appeased by its sworn enemy the West, is refusing to pull its choice for UN ambassador, former terrorist Hamid Aboutalebi.  

Oh, sheesh, look who else has been disinvited from speaking at a university

Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, from speaking at Azusa Pacific University.

An email from your president, Jon Wallace, to my employer, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), said “Given the lateness of the semester and the full record of Dr. Murray’s scholarship, I realized we needed more time to prepare for a visit and postponed Wednesday’s conversation.” This, about an appearance that has been planned for months. I also understand from another faculty member that he and the provost were afraid of “hurting our faculty and students of color.”

You’re at college, right? Being at college is supposed to mean thinking for yourselves, right? Okay, then do it. Don’t be satisfied with links to websites that specialize in libeling people. Lose the secondary sources. Explore for yourself the “full range” of my scholarship and find out what it is that I’ve written or said that would hurt your faculty or students of color. It’s not hard. In fact, you can do it without moving from your chair if you’re in front of your computer.

You don’t have to buy my books. Instead, go to my web page at AEI. There you will find the full texts of dozens of articles I’ve written for the last quarter-century. Browse through them. Will you find anything that is controversial? That people disagree with? Yes, because (hang on to your hats) scholarship usually means writing about things on which people disagree.

The jackbooted grievance mongers will not tolerate any campus speakers who aren't "sensitive."

The Sovereignty-Haters burrow deep into our national security apparatus

I questioned the wisdom of setting up a new bureaucracy - DHS - after 9/11 (the original one, not the one in Libya eleven years later).  It seemed to me that we had plenty of agencies and departments that could be given the task of protecting the homeland against jihadists.

Hell, DHS can't won't even protect us against having our borders routinely violated:

Tens of thousands of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally but don't have serious criminal records could be shielded from deportation under a policy change being weighed by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.

Even entering the US illegally multiple times under the new policy would not be considered deportation-worthy.

More on the supposedly robust state of Freedom-Hater-care

California tax preparers are getting paid a bounty by the regime to sign people up, and

the state's enrollees are having a hell of a time finding doctors.

Pretty much confirms that Rand Paul is not my 2016 prez candidate

Whenever discussion has turned to Rand Paul here or elsewhere, I've maintained that I wanted to be assured of daylight between his foreign-policy views and those of his father.

Alas, as Quin Hillyer shows in his piece at NRO today, there isn't an appreciable degree of such.  Rand has on various occasions demonstrated ideological kinship with the likes of Pat Buchanan and Cindy Sheehan.  Called Dick Cheney a war profiteer.  Attempted to equate advocacy for defense budgets sufficient for projecting global power as we have since 1945 as a zeal for preemption.  Is on record as saying a nuclear Iran could be contained.  "[A]ctually compared the remarkably humane American facility for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to the American mistreatment of blacks and Japanese."  Pooh-pooed the idea that jihadists were inside the US plotting terror.

He's another one of those frustrating libertarians who is so spot-on when it comes to economics and completely out to lunch on world-affairs issues.  He even hews fairly traditional on "social issues." (I'm not real fond of that term.)  

And so let's keep him where he is, where his Senate votes will further the cause of economic freedom but aren't likely to affect America's global role.

Just remember this when you hear some Freedom-Hater crow about FHer-care enrollment numbers

I've said here before that I wish I'd taken economics courses in college.  At the time, I was a stringy-haired, barefoot beatnik English major and thought I could learn all I needed to about econ by osmosis. But the older I get, the more the subject has moved front and center among my subjects of interests.

And I've also said that, given my formal academic background, tempered and improved upon by my reading some actual works by great economists, I've come up with my own first law of economics: The money has to come from somewhere.

It is the point that Charles Blahous of George Mason University's Mercatus Center is driving home in his piece about the costs of FHer-care:

Let’s walk through the salient features of this unfolding fiscal disaster:

An Expansion of Spending Commitments Comparable to Enacting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid: Our biggest fiscal problems today stem from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security costs rising well beyond original projections. The ACA was enacted even though these longstanding financing challenges have still not been met, and represents an additional expansion of federal commitments comparable to these other programs’ creations. CBO now estimates that the gross costs of the ACA’s coverage expansion will be $92 billion in FY2015, or about 0.5% of our total GDP of roughly $18 trillion. This far exceeds, even relative to today’s larger economy, the initial costs associated with the entirety of Social Security and Medicaid, and is comparable to the startup costs for all original parts of Medicare combined. Consider this: just five years after enactment the ACA will absorb more of our total economic output than Social Security did fully sixteen years after it was enacted.

Of course, after these initial rollouts, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid costs grew far faster than originally envisioned, sometimes due to subsequent legislation, sometimes due to unanticipated healthcare cost growth. It wouldn’t be surprising for either factor to affect the ACA, which would be even more problematic for reasons given below.
A Worse Fiscal Environment: The ACA was enacted when legislators knew, or should have known, that they inhabited a fiscal environment in which such extravagance was unaffordable. Deficits (and debt) are far higher today than when the other major entitlement programs were created; millions of baby boomer retirements are swelling expenditures arising from previously-enacted Social Security and Medicare law. Someday historians will puzzle over the thinking that induced legislators to embark on a vast new spending program at the very moment it could least be afforded.

Unraveling Finances: Where will the money come from to finance the ACA’s health exchange subsidies and Medicaid expansion? No one knows. We do know that the ACA’s financing mechanisms are already falling apart. The ACA’s much-reported website glitches and enrollment shortfalls had actually suggested an upside; if enrollment continued to fall short of previous projections, it was possible that some of the fiscal damage could be contained. But if enrollment has picked up as the law’s financing mechanisms disintegrate, the fiscal damage will be worse than anticipated. Consider the following:
CLASS: The ACA’s “CLASS” long-term care provisions were originally projected to generate $37 billion in net premiums through 2015 ($86 billion over ten years). CLASS was later suspended due to its long-term financial unworkability, meaning these revenues have not materialized and will not.
Employer/individual mandate penalties: These were supposed to have brought in $12 billion through 2015, $101 billion over the first ten years. Because the Obama Administration has repeatedly delayed their enforcement, to date they haven’t brought in much of anything. Some ACA advocates are even beginning to downplay the significance of possibly ditching these mandates altogether, though they were central to the law’s financing scheme.
Medicare Advantage: The ACA was supposed to be financed in part by cuts to Medicare Advantage (MA) totaling $31 billion through FY2015, $128 billion over the first ten years. The White House recently announced that planned MA cuts will not go into effect after all

Other controversial provisions: The ACA’s most controversial savings provisions – among them its ambitious Medicare provider payment reductions, the tax on so-called “Cadillac” health plans, and cost-saving decisions of the Independent Payment Advisory Board– have yet to be tested. Given that less-controversial provisions have failed to meet their savings targets, there is little basis for confidence that these more controversial ones will do so.  

 

Some may consider it gauche to mention these unpleasantries, but they loom nonetheless.