The rot really is this far advanced

Goddard College, self-descibed per its website as a "progressive liberal arts college located in rural Vermont," is featuring convicted Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal, nee Wesley Cook, as its commencement speaker.  His address is prerecorded from prison.

Does it get any more wrong than this?

Basic ontological truths about identity, genes, good and evil

Camille Paglia, writing at TIME, says that the recent Hannah Graham disappearance is illustrative of some fundamental facts about the human condition, if we'll look at what we're really seeing:

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. 

What are those illusions?  Basically, they come down to the core Leftist notion that human nature is really a product of class, race and gender dynamics (this last set actually being so) and therefore malleable and improvable.

The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.

One reason I love this essay is that she concludes it with a point I make often: civilization's fragility.

Sex crime springs from fantasy, hallucination, delusion, and obsession. A random young woman becomes the scapegoat for a regressive rage against female sexual power: “You made me do this.” Academic clichés about the “commodification” of women under capitalism make little sense here: It is women’s superior biological status as magical life-creator that is profaned and annihilated by the barbarism of sex crime.

Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature. 

That's why tinkering with civilization's basic institutions - or, in a lot of cases, drastically altering them - is a really dangerous game to play.

Inadequate to the task so far

The airstrikes aren't cutting it, according to a Syrian IS member:

In an exclusive interview with CNN, a Syrian ISIS fighter using the pseudonym Abu Talha said the militant group has been preparing for such attacks.
"We've been ready for this for some time," Abu Talha said. "We know that our bases are known because they're tracking us with radars and satellites, so we had backup locations."
He taunted the U.S.-led coalition that has been pummeling ISIS targets in Syria over the past week, including attacks on mobile oil refineries and vehicles.
"We have revenues other than oil. We have other avenues, and our finances are not going to stop just because of oil losses," the 28-year-old militant said.

"They thought they knew everything. But thank God, they don't know anything. And God willing, we will defeat the infidels."
Abu Talha said he was among the ISIS fighters who took over Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, in June.
He said even if coalition attacks impede ISIS, they're not enough to stop ISIS' mission of fortifying an Islamic state across Sunni parts of Syria and Iraq.

"They hit us in some areas, and we advance in others," Abu Talha said. "If we are pushed back in Iraq, we advance in northern Syria. These strikes cannot stop us, our support or our fighters." 

Which is why IS is now at the outskirts of Baghdad:

US air strikes are failing to drive back Isis in Iraq where its forces are still within an hour’s drive of Baghdad.

Three and a half months since the Iraqi army was spectacularly routed in northern Iraq by a far inferior force of Isis fighters, it is still seeing bases overrun because it fails to supply them with ammunition, food and water. The selection of a new Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, to replace Nouri al-Maliki last month was supposed to introduce a more conciliatory government that would appeal to Iraq’s Sunni minority from which Isis draws its support.

Mr Abadi promised to end the random bombardment of Sunni civilians, but Fallujah has been shelled for six out of seven days, with 28 killed and 117 injured. Despite the military crisis, the government has still not been able to gets its choice for the two top security jobs, theDefence Minister and Interior Minister, through parliament.

The Most Equal Comrade may be trying to pass the buck (and drawing a lot of ire for doing so) to the intelligence community for not accurately assessing IS's rapid rise - and Clapper et all do indeed bear a fair amount of culpability -  but it doesn't hold up as the main explanation for post-America being asleep at the switch on this, given the MEC's having had accurate intel about the matter as early as before the 2012 election.

Then again, maybe it went in one ear and out the other, which would fit with the lackadaisical attitude demonstrated by his missing over half of his daily intel briefings during his second term.

So, for the moment at least, he's irrelevant to what's going down.  Any bets on whether he has a revelation and comes to understand the gravity of the situation?  I didn't think so.  In the planned-decline, post-American economy, it behooves all of us to hang on to what money we have.

UPDATE: Factor in Marie Harf's "Im-sure-even-ISIL-was-surprised" remark, and an even fuller picture of our plight emerges.

The Oklahoma beheading post

Haven't chimed in on this one until now, because, as is often the case in this age of the 24-hour news cycle and the ever-billowing world of cyber-punditry, there was nothing I could see to add in the first rush of coverage and conclusion.

And I still don't know what I could say about it that isn't handled in Kevin McCullough's Townhall column today:

He converted to Islam in prison and sat under the influence of imam Suhaib Webb. Webb was connected to the greater Islamic Society of Oklahoma. Webb also had associations with the mosque where the Boston Marathon bombers frequented. Worst of all Suhaib Webb was a confidant of Amwar al-Awlaki, the mastermind of the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11/01. The killer utilized the techniques of ISIS. And the Obama administration immediately labels it "workplace violence."

I know the authorities are having a hard time accurately describing what happened in Moore, but let's break some things down.

1. This attack occurred after Nolen converted to Islam.

2. This attack occurred after sitting under an Islamic Imam's teaching.

3. This attack followed the rejection of Islamic conversion of co-workers.

4. This attack followed an argument about Islam that got him fired. 

5. This attack followed an argument governing Islamic practice.

6. This attack followed Nolen's intolerance towards anyone's disagreement concerning the stoning of women (an inherently Islamic practice--as neither Jews nor Christians practice such.)

7. This attack followed the rationale of the Islamic State. (Convert, Flee or Die.)

8. This attack utilized the same methodologies as the Islamic State--beheading.

9. This attack--like 9/11 and Boston--was immediately praised--even by Muslims in the U.S.

Yes, the guy was a nut.

That actually leads to an interesting line of questions.

Wasn't the Ft. Hood shooter also a nut?

Wasn't it a little nutty of the 13 guys who orchestrated the September 2001 attacks to  waste their own lives, along with those of the nearly 3,000 they took with them, so horrifically?

Isn't it a little nutty of the Islamic State to take over towns and cities in Iraq, behead the all the men and sell the women into slavery?

So we are once again faced with the question of the relationship between insanity and evil - which in turn gets us into the realm of questions about "real" religion.  Willful separation from the omnipotent, sovereign creator seems like kind of a nutty way to live, does it not?  But then where do we find reliable instruction about how to live in alignment with Him?

And what supposedly sacred scripture might steer us wrong?

Just sayin'.

Mary Burke steps in it again

The FHer candidate for Wisconsin governor - she of the lifted-policy-paper-passages - has engaged in another misstep.

Of course, a large part of the FHer opposition to Scott Walker is rooted in his confrontation early on in his first term with the teacher's union.  We all recall (excuse the pun) the images of activists sleeping on the statehouse rotunda floor.

So, recently, the Trek heiress was recently asked if she could name a single school hurt by Walker's reforms.

Take it, Mary.

“I am concerned about whether we are going to be able to attract and retain and keep good people in our schools,” she said. “And I do see this. A man I talked to not too long ago, Jim from Neenah, was telling me about his daughter who graduated from UW-Eau Claire in education. She had two job offers: one in a school district in Minnesota, one in her hometown of Neenah. Guess which one she’s taking?”

Well, that school's superintendent sent the candidate a letter, basically asking her to quit blowing smoke:

It is unfair and misleading to claim that Act 10 is the primary reason why one specific candidate chose to accept a position in Minnesota over an opening in the Neenah Joint School District. There are many reasons why candidates choose to work in other districts and certainly some effects of Act 10 may factor into those decisions. However, to make a blanket statement that Act 10 is the reason teachers are leaving school districts in Wisconsin (in this case the Neenah Joint School District) especially by citing only one candidate’s decision to go elsewhere, is an unfortunate exaggeration at best. We are extremely proud of our schools in Neenah and incredibly proud of the staff we have assembled both prior to and since the passage of Act 10. We have never settled for an inferior candidate to fill a position and will never do that to our students or families. Since you have not reached out to me to learn more about our District, I will provide to you some data points that you might find revealing about why we continue to be a high performing district in Wisconsin. Since Act 10:

• we have faced, and met, the difficult challenges necessary to support student learning while retaining our excellent staff.
• we have significantly reduced an unsustainable $184 million unfunded liability regarding our Other Post Employment Benefits (OPEB). Meanwhile, we still provide all of our most veteran employees a $100,000 retirement benefit. New employees are also provided OPEB benefits and that is something that most districts have eliminated. As you are aware, this is in addition to the state retirement benefit.
• we have reduced class sizes and increased the number of our certified staff.
• our school board has supported pools of dollars for 2% salary increases (above the CPI) and 2% one time stipend awards every year for all employee groups for a total of 4% .
• Over the past two years, 57 certified staff members have received a $5,000 or more increase in their salary.
• more than 33% of certified staff received a 3% or higher salary increase in 2013-14, with 6% of them receiving 6% increases or higher.
• our insurance costs are the lowest in our area.
• we have no long-term debt.
• our mill-rate remains the lowest in our area at $8.53 and a decrease for the third consecutive year. 

I respectfully ask that you stop using Neenah as an example of the negative ramifications of Act 10. This request has nothing to do with my personal feelings or political stance. It is about a dedicated staff that is proud to work in Neenah. I would be pleased to speak with you further on this issue. Thank you for your time.

 Sincerely,

 Dr. Mary Pfeiffer
Superintendent of Schools
Neenah Joint School District

What does damage control look like after something like that?

 

No reason for this move except to pander to illegal aliens and the activists who dig them

Streiff at Red State on the dual phenomena of highly trained and dedicated US military personnel getting pink slips, and illegal aliens being permitted to serve:

. . . on the one hand we are forcing out people who are already trained and, in a large number of cases have combat experience. In return we are bringing in people who are illegal aliens and who owe no formal allegiance to the United States and who require training. There is no possible reason for this that makes sense from either an operational or personnel management standpoint. [UPDATE] In fact, all four services had met their enlistment goals for Fiscal Year 2014 (which ends September 30) by May 31. This is simply a sop Obama is throwing to his base and the race-based constituencies the Democrat party is beholden to and it is done so at the expense of American men and women who have, in many cases, put their lives on the line for this nation.

Again, I ask, has this country ever produced a more vile, poisonous and destructive figure than the Most Equal Comrade?

 

P5+1 patty cake fizzles

 A lot of good it did to extend the silly-ass talks beyond the July deadline.  Nothing is happening except whirring centrifuges and further erosion of our relationship with Israel.

“We were due to have a meeting this morning of the P5+1 on one side and the Iranians on the other but because of a lack of progress, this meeting (had) to be called off,” Reuters quoted [French foreign minister Laurent Fabius] saying.

Israel, meanwhile, voiced vociferous objections to a reported American proposal to soften its present demands that Iran gut its uranium enrichment program in favor of a new proposal that would allow Tehran to keep nearly half of the project intact while placing other constraints on its possible use as a path to nuclear weapons.

Diplomats who spoke to the Associated Press said the deal envisages letting Iran keep up to 4,500 centrifuges but would reduce the stock of uranium gas fed into the machines to the point where it would take more than a year of enriching to create enough material for a nuclear warhead.

Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said that Israel “strongly opposes leaving thousands of [uranium] centrifuges active in Iran,” adding that “this deal is reminiscent of the failed deal reached in 2007 with North Korea, which now possesses 10 nuclear warheads.”

The initiative, revealed late Thursday, came after months of nuclear negotiations between Iran and six world powers that have failed to substantially narrow differences over the future size and capacity of Tehran’s uranium enrichment program. 

Remember  the silly-ass Six-Way Talks with North Korea?  Chris Hill would come report back to Condi and W saying, "They're just impossible to deal with," and they'd send him back to try again.

Same phenomenon, different enemy.

Exactly the kind of reason why creating the DHS in the first place was a bad idea

It not only created a whole new bloated bureaucracy, full of overlap and redundancy, given the fact that  the CIA and the DoD already existed, in which technocratic dweebs could find a place to land upon finally graduating, it was the kind of body that was ripe for being hijacked for agendas having nothing to do with keeping us safe from jihad:

Protecting the infrastructure of American cities from the effects of climate change is rising on the agenda of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to a top agency official. 

"Increasingly, we've moved not only from a security focus to a resiliency focus," said Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at Homeland Security, an agency better known for its fight to curb terrorist threats. 

Durkovich spoke Thursday on a panel at the Rising Seas Summit, a three-day conference organized by the U.S.-based Association of Climate Change Officers to discuss tools and ideas on building resiliency, particularly against rising sea levels.

In the aftermath of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, which devastated large swathes of the Northeastern U.S and caused over $60 billion in damages, Durkovich said her department reviewed the task of rebuilding with a new focus on "how to think about baking in resilience from the get-go."

You're actually busting your ass to pay the salary of little twerps who make official pronouncements laced with embarrassing jargon such as "baking in."

I mean, please, somebody tell me this is a parody, an Onion piece.

May their apartment windows be the first targets when the jihadists perfect their intercontinental smart rockets.

America's Iraq involvement according to Dexter

The former NYT and current New Yorker reporter Dexter Filkins was never too keen on the way we dealt with Iraq, going back the the days of the Baathist regime and the suspicion that it was amassing a WMD arsenal.  Still, he knew positive developments when he saw them:

in 2008, while at the NYT, he wrote extensively about the success of the surge just a few months before the presidential election. A month later, Filkins wrote again about the “literally unrecognizable” and peaceful Iraq produced by the surge. Six years later, Filkins was among the skeptics reminding people that the Iraqis’ insistence on negotiating the immunity clause for American troops was more of a welcome excuse for Obama to choose total withdrawal — and claim credit for it until this year — rather than the deal-breaker Obama now declares that it was.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air excerpts at length from a New Yorker piece Filkins wrote in  April that recounts some recent Iraqi history we've recounted here at LITD: Shiite Maliki ordering the arrest of Sunni vice president Hashemi in the immediate aftermath of US withdrawal, ensuing crackdowns and corruption.

Morrissey then also excerpts from the transcript of Hugh Hewitt's radio show in which Hewitt interviews Filkins, who talks about this sequence of events, and states quite plainly that it is evidence that, of all the errors the US has made with regard to Iraq in the last fifteen years, the 2011 total withdrawal was most definitely the worst.

Read the whole thing.

Responses coming in from various parts of the world to West taking on IS

The Filipino Abu Sayyef expresses solidarity with its jihadist brothers with knives in hands:

The Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), a jihadist organization based in the Philippines that previously was tied to al Qaeda and is now loyal to the Islamic State, has released a statement in which it threatened to kill a German hostage unless Germany backs out of the coalition with the United States. In a message released on Twitter in Arabic and Filipino, ASG said it has two demands for Germany, stipulating 15 days to meet these demands or the hostages will be executed. 

The two German hostages have been identified as Stefan Okonek and Henrike Dielen. Both were captured in waters off the coast of Malaysia in May. 

The demands set forth by ASG are as follows, according to a translation provided by SITE Intelligence Group:

"The first of our demands is to pay us 250 million pesos in return for releasing both of them (in addition to the second demand). The second: The participation with support from Germany to America must stop, in the killing of our Muslims brothers in Iraq and Sham [Syria] in general, and the mujahideen of the Islamic State in particular."

ASG has been notorious for kidnappings in the Philippines and surrounding areas. In the same article that identifies the two German nationals, it goes on to say that "two Germans were made to join European birdwatchers Elwold Horn and Lorenzo Vinciguerra. The two birdwatchers were abducted by the bandit group in Panglima Sugala, Tawi-Tawi on January 31, 2012."

I'd take them fairly seriously.  After all, a French hiker in an Algerian national park got it yesterday for much the same reason. 

Mind you, "taking it seriously" does not mean surrendering to demands.  It just means remembering that these guys are not some kind of interfaith-forum kumbaya singers.

Holder: exit stage left

J. Christian Adams reviews the tenure of one of the regime's most destructive overlords:

The damage he has already done to the country leaves a turbulent wake that is ill-matched to the financial reward awaiting him at a shameless and large Washington, D.C., law firm.

Our country is more polarized and more racially divided because of Eric Holder.  He turned the power of the Justice Department into a racially motivated turnout machine for the Democratic Party.  That was his job in this administration, and he did it well.

When I first reported on the racially motivated law enforcement of Holder’s Justice Department, it seemed fanciful to some. But after six years of Holder hugging Al Sharpton, stoking racial division in places like Florida and Ferguson, after suing police and fire departments to impose racial hiring requirements, after refusing to enforce election laws that protect white victims or require voter rolls to be cleaned, after launching harassing litigation against peaceful pro-life protesters, after incident after incident of dishonesty and contempt before Congress — after all this, it was clear to anyone with any intellectual honesty that this man had a vision of the law at odds with the nation’s traditions.

Why would it surprise anyone he behaved as he did?  As I made clear in my book Injustice, he carried around a quote in his wallet for 40 years about race that, he explained to the Washington Post, indicated that he had common cause with the black criminal.  That’s a fact.  That’s who he is. 

Of course, the speculation has started as to whether this means a SCOTUS nomination upon Ginsburg's retirement.

All the more reason why a large Pub majority on Capitol Hill is necessary.

WTF is with the Missouri legislature?

Whose idea was it to have this chunk of dog vomit lead the invocation?

The head of a pro-abortion organization was invited to the Missouri House Chamber to open them in prayer before the induction of women’s right to vote activist Virginia Minor, into the Hall of famous Missourians.

Rev. Rebecca Turner has been Executive Director of Faith Aloud since June of 2001.

Faith Aloud is a group of religious people who believe in abortion for every person. They describe themselves on their website this way, “We are people of diverse religious beliefs, denominations, and practices. Our mission is to eliminate the religious stigma of abortion.”

She launches the content of the "prayer"  with this humdinger:

Ironically, Rev. Rebecca Turner, began her prayer, “Loving mother God…from whose womb we came into being…”

If I find out how this came about, I'll update this post.

After all, they have made their intentions pretty plain

There's nothing surprising about the latest threat from ISIS.  They're just acting on their fatwa:

Shoebat.com has translated more of the horrifying and extremely disturbing content of the Fatwa used by ISIS written in full by Nasr Al-Fahd, a Saudi theologian calling for the complete annihilation of the United States. Shoebat.com reviewed the 26 page Fatwa [link here] which was never translated for public study by the government showing the true colors of Islam including that such killing has already began.

The inception of this Fatwa began when terrorists wrote the scholar requesting a Fatwa on the issue of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Nasr Al-Fahd responds:

“Peace, mercy and blessings of God. It is no secret what was published in the media about the intention to hit America with weapons of mass Destruction. So what is the Fatwa ruling for the Mujahideen to use these? Is it permissible at all? Is it the Mother of necessity? … This issue, needs a complete message; and gathering from evidence and scholarly sources to the question regarding The House of War and how to practice Jihad-u-Dafi’ (Repulse Jihad) and the meaning of destruction of crops including reproduction of life (children) religiously, and so on which I will collect what was given by Allah’s will”. (Page 2)

In what Islam calls Repulse Jihad, which is basically using weapons of mass destruction, which was known in Islamic warfare, to put a complete stop and end of the enemy once and for all. ISIS then gives the response:

“If the infidels cannot be repulsed from the Muslims except by resorting to using such weapons, then it may be used even if it killed and wiped them out completely including decimating their crops and their descendants. I will include the details in my letter I mentioned. Therefore the question is asked and the answer is given and the matter is closed and concluded. (see Page #2)”

The letter and the details is what every ISIS leader carries on his laptop and is what is disseminated to their operatives globally. But its also quite widespread on the social network media in Arabic and that laptop discovery should not be shocking at all. It is what ISIS uses as well as several Jihadi networks who post the teachings for general public use for all Muslims residing in western societies.

On page 5, what westerns do not understand when they ask “why” and “what type of human being can kill indiscriminately”, ISIS explains the first lesson in such killing is that its what they term Ihsan, in English, it is “The act of kindness and charity”.

So brace yourself for some kindness and charity.

Uncovered but not thwarted - in fact, imminent

The West gets a bracing heads-up from Iraq's prime minister:

 Iraq’s prime minister says his country’s intelligence operation has uncovered a plot for an imminent attack on subway systems in the United States and Paris.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said he was told of the plot by Baghdad on Thursday, and that it was the work of foreign fighters of the Islamic State group in Iraq. Asked if the attack was imminent, he said, “Yes.”

Asked if the attack had been thwarted, he said, “No.” Al-Abadi said the United States had been alerted.

He made the remarks at a meeting with journalists on the sidelines of a gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly.

So far, none of the recent ratchetings-up of the threat level have led to foul deeds.   (In the Australian case, it's because they were able to find and bust the guys who were going to randomly pull people off the streets of Sydney and Brisbane  and behead them on video.)  But that merely reinforces the point Tom Ridge made over a decade ago:  The bastards only have to get lucky once.

Could be an interesting day.

A roundup of takes on the MEC's UN speech

Krauthammer: A signal to Iran that it's okay to get a nuclear arsenal.

Richard Grenell: Ferguson mention gives adversaries the green light to dismiss our statement's about their misdeeds.

Joseph Curl: "Breathtaking naivete."

Aaron Goldstein:  Eight teeth-grindingly irritating points, including taking the opportunity to diss Israel, attempt to make it look like 40 nations are actively on board with the confrontation of IS, "no clash of civilizations," and that s--- about the 21st century being somehow different than previous centuries.

Has America ever produced a more foul, stinking, vile human being than the Most Equal Comrade?

Granted, the United Nations is an utterly worthless body and has long outlived any usefulness it ever had.  Still, its annual General Assembly gathering in New York is always a big deal, because leaders of nations with extremely disparate sets of values go to the podium and state the cases for their countries and their visions, and the world press reports with immediacy what was said.

Which is why we must conclude that the MEC has sealed his place in history as the first president of the United States of America to be an enemy of the nation-state he presides over.

Damn it to hell, there was no reason to mention Ferguson.  It was pure gratuitous West-hatred.

I back down from no one in my assertion that the MEC is a chunk of dog vomit who imperils every one of us.

Freedom-Hater-care does not work - today's edition

Folks are bailing big-time:

Obamacare administrator Marilyn Tavenner admitted that several months after the open enrollment period ended, the number of paying customers has dropped precipitously. 

By August 15, over 700,000 of the administration’s initial “sign-ups” had dropped their Obamacare coverage, Tavenner said in testimony to the House Oversight Committee. The administration has been advertising 8 million sign-ups since the first enrollment period ended in April.

Upon questioning, Tavenner had no details about the reason for the sharp drop, but presumably a large number of the sign-ups failed to ever pay their premiums, as many experts had predicted.

By August, that number does not include the several hundred-thousand-strong that had eligibility problems and will only be dumped from their health coverage on September 30. The Obama administration only just finished verifying the citizenship and immigration statuses of first year Obamacare sign-ups. (RELATED: Obama Admin Is Kicking 115K Off Obamacare Plans)

The administration will kick another 115,000 customers off their coverage on September 30, after those ineligible customers have been receiving benefits, and possibly tax credits, for up to nine full months. That brings the total number of paying Obamacare customers down to less than 7.2 million at the end of the month.

Not getting the attention that jihad, the IRS scandal, the illegal-alien flood, and the school-lunch fiasco are getting at the moment, but when it comes up in conversation or on your social media feeds, you have ammo to lob at the Freedom-Haters.

Just no

Think deeply about what the term "Coca-Cola" means to you.  Think about how it was developed, launched, and marketed in the late 1880s in Atlanta by John Pemberton, Asa Candler and Frank Robinson.  Think about all the great ad campaigns throughout the 20th century.  Think about its rapid spread throughout the world.  Think about how it ranks alongside Mickey Mouse, baseball, blue jeans, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and the hamburger and hot dog sandwiches as one of America's great popular-culture contributions to the world's ground-level life.  What it symbolizes is difficult to encapsulate in one paragraph.

Pepsi's not far behind.  It glommed on to Pemberton's concept, but did so early on and thereby also assumed status as a symbol of American culture.

And now all that goes down the collectivist toilet:

The nation's largest soda marketers -- which have been feeling the heat from health advocates -- on Tuesday pledged to reduce beverage calories consumed per person nationally by 20% by 2025.

Executives from PepsiCo, Coca-Cola Co. and Dr Pepper Snapple group announced the goal in New York City at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. The effort includes involvement from the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which was founded by the American Heart Association and the Clinton Foundation.

"I am excited about the potential of this voluntary commitment by the beverage industry. It can be a critical step in our ongoing fight against obesity," former President Bill Clinton said, according to a statement.

We're going to be defeated by the array of our enemies, not because of any esoteric military or strategic missteps, but because we came to hate what made us great: our funky, sweaty, inventive, devout-yet-feisty essential character as a people.  We have surrendered to the nicey-nice / 21st-century-is-different mindset that crushes all that.

And we won't be able to pull into a drive-in and get a satisfying meal five years from now.  But I suspect that will be the least of our worries five years from now.

If you don't think the rot of our education sector and our culture generally have had an effect, check this out

Kids protesting against learning about the societal foundation that has made possible their "right" to engage in this kind of dog vomit:

Hundreds of students walked out of classrooms around suburban Denver on Tuesday in protest over a conservative-led school board proposal to focus history education on topics that promote citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, providing a show of civil disobedience that the new standards would aim to downplay.

The youth protest in the state's second-largest school district follows a sick-out from teachers that shut down two high schools in the politically and economically diverse area that has become a key political battleground.

Student participants said their demonstration was organized by word of mouth and social media. Many waived American flags and carried signs, including messages that read "There is nothing more patriotic than protest."

"I don't think my education should be censored. We should be able to know what happened in our past," said Tori Leu, a 17-year-old student who protested at Ralston Valley High School in Arvada.

The school board proposal that triggered the walkout calls of instructional materials that present positive aspects of the nation and its heritage. It would establish a committee to regularly review texts and course plans, starting with Advanced Placement history, to make sure materials "promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights" and don't "encourage or condone civil disorder, social strike or disregard of the law."

Put down the blunt and read some Locke, you ingrate smart-ass blobs of worthlessness.

Before you go concluding that the Most Equal Comrade has suddenly found patriotism . . .

He lets the UN crowd know he's still a hopeless Freedom-Hater and junk-science enthusiast:

Even as American warplanes struck targets in Syria, even as regimes tottered in Jordan and Iraq and Yemen, among others, even as the Japanese economy collapses and the economies of India, China and Brazil shake, even as Ebola virus runs rampant through Africa, Obama announced that terrorism, instability, inequality and disease represented secondary threats. “There’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other,” Obama said, “and that is the urgent and growing threat of climate change.” 

Obama then went on a non-scientific rant about the pseudoscience of manmade climate change. “In America,” he said, “the past decade has been our hottest on record” – neglecting, of course, to mention that according to Christopher Booker of the UK Telegraph, “The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record.” Obama continued with his litany of alarmism: floods, wildfire seasons getting longer, droughts, rainstorms.

“Worldwide,” Obama concluded, “this summer was the hottest ever recorded – with global carbon emissions still on the rise.” In the United States, however, better technologies are stanching the rise of carbon emissions – while 2013 saw a rise in American carbon emissions, America saw a steady decline in CO2 emissions from 2006 on, thanks in large part to recession. That process, by the way, works in reverse as well: purposefully cutting carbon emissions can destroy economies.

But not according to Obama. According to Obama, he has heard the call of the people:

The alarm bells keep ringing. Our citizens keep marching. We cannot pretend we do not hear them. We have to answer the call. We know what we have to do to avoid irreparable harm. We have to cut carbon pollution in our own countries to prevent the worst effects of climate change.

Still the king of planned decline:

Obama then said there was good news: “we have the means -- the technological innovation and the scientific imagination -- to begin the work of repairing it right now.” What are those means?
Cutting American growth, first and foremost. Which, to Obama, is a net positive, since he believes that global economic inequality leads to all social ills. “[T]oday,” Obama explained, “I’m here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and its second largest emitter, to say that we have begun to do something about it.”
For example, Obama stated, we “now harness three times as much electricity from the wind and 10 times as much from the sun as we did when I came into office.” Obama neglected to mention that an utterly negligible amount of America’s electricity comes from wind and solar – 4.13 percent and 0.23 percent, respectively. By way of contrast, 39 percent of our electricity comes from coal, another 27 percent from natural gas, and 19 percent from nuclear.
Nonetheless, Obama continued, “these advances have helped create jobs, grow our economy, and drive our carbon pollution to its lowest levels in nearly two decades -- proving that there does not have to be a conflict between a sound environment and strong economic growth.” Actually, Obama’s stimulus packages have helped stagnate the economy, and carbon emissions were declining before Obama took office. But facts are merely propaganda waiting to be rewritten.
But Obama wasn’t done yet: he had more wonderful initiatives to announce. He said he would move forward with his Climate Action Plan, which will force power plants not to emit as much CO2, thereby radically driving up the price of energy for everyone in the United States. But this crippling sanction on American power generation was a big win, Obama chortled: “when completed, this will mark the single most important and significant step the United States has ever taken to reduce our carbon emissions.”

Obama announced that he had “new actions in renewable energy and energy efficiency” to push which would supposedly “save consumers more than $10 billion on their energy bills” – small comfort for those who will see their electricity bills skyrocket. According to the Obama-associated Associated Press, American electricity bills will rise 13 percent by 2020 thanks to Obama’s Climate Action Plan. 

He reaches his crescendo - or maybe "nadir" is the word I'm looking for - when he lays on thick that the-mere-fact-that-it's-the-21st-century-means-there's-something-evolved-about-human-nature / shrink-it-to-a-manageable-problem mindset for the assemblage:

To end, Obama dismissed the world’s worries over “the swarm of current events” and bothersome “economic challenges and political challenges.” After all, Obama said, we all need food and air and hopes and dreams!

[I]f we act now, if we can look beyond the swarm of current events and some of the economic challenges and political challenges involved, if we place the air that our children will breathe and the food that they will eat and the hopes and dreams of all posterity above our own short-term interests, we may not be too late for them. While you and I may not live to see all the fruits of our labor, we can act to see that the century ahead is marked not by conflict, but by cooperation; not by human suffering, but by human progress; and that the world we leave to our children, and our children’s children, will be cleaner and healthier, and more prosperous and secure.

This is our president: a man more focused on weaving together beautiful sentiments and pledging beautiful sacrifices in order to stop the weather than he is on leading America to victory against actual enemies and challenges. But that’s also the wonderful thing about fighting shadows: nobody expects you to win.

That's our MEC.  Still the same old poisonous and destructive menace he's always been.

Bobby Jr. came unglued a long time ago

His rant at Sunday's climate-alarmist goose-step in New York was like some kind of caricature:

Kennedy saved his most venomous comments for the Koch Brothers, accusing them of “treason” for “polluting our atmosphere.”

“I think it’s treason. Do I think the Koch Brothers are treasonous, yes I do,” Kennedy explained.

“They are enjoying making themselves billionaires by impoverishing the rest of us. Do I think they should be in jail, I think they should be enjoying three hots and a cot at the Hague with all the other war criminals,” Kennedy declared.

“Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offence and they ought to be serving time for it,” he added.

Perhaps this is how he channels the energies he's desperately trying not to devote to the jones that has plagued him for years:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. grappled with what he called his biggest defect — “my lust demons” — while keeping a scorecard of more than two dozen conquests, according to his secret diary.
The thick, red journal was found in their home by his wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who, distraught over their impending divorce and Kennedy’s serial philandering, committed suicide last year.

A copy of the 398 pages, reviewed by The Post, details RFK Jr.’s daily activities, speeches, political activism and the lives of his six children in the year 2001. But they also record the names of women — with numbers from 1 to 10 next to each entry. 

The codes corresponded to sexual acts, with 10 meaning intercourse, Mary told a confidant. There are 37 women named in the ledger, 16 of whom get 10s.

On Nov. 13, 2001, RFK Jr. records a triple play. The separate encounters — coded 10, 3 and 2 — occur the same day he attended a black-tie fund-raiser at the Waldorf-Astoria for Christopher Reeve’s charity, where he sat next to the paralyzed “Superman” star, magician David Blaine and comic Richard Belzer.

It was a hectic month for Kennedy, who traveled to ­Toronto, Louisiana and Washington, DC — and listed at least one woman’s name on 22 different dates, including 13 consecutive days.

Most women are identified only by first name in the ledger. They include a lawyer, an environmental activist, a doctor and at least one woman married to a famous actor.

Yet he was front and center as a moral arbiter on Sunday.  I guess that crowd has to fill the God-sized hole with something.

Neil deGrasse Tyson and the I've-got-science-on-my-side posture

Just why does the Hayden Planetarium director and Cosmos host have such rabidly devout followers?  Charles C. W. Cooke at NRO gave us an insight into that in a July article:

 . . . people who are, or wish to be, hip, cool, and intellectual “glom onto these labels and call themselves ‘geeks’ or ‘nerds’ every chance they get.”

Which is to say that the nerds of MSNBC and beyond are not actually nerds — with scientific training and all that it entails — but the popular kids indulging in a fad. To a person, they are attractive, accomplished, well paid, and loved, listened to, and cited by a good portion of the general public. Most of them spend their time on television speaking fluently, debating with passion, and hanging out with celebrities. They attend dinner parties and glitzy social events, and are photographed and put into the glossy magazines. They are flown first class to university commencement speeches and late-night shows and book launches. There they pay lip service to the notion that they are not wildly privileged, and then go back to their hotels to drink $16 cocktails with Bill Maher.

In this manner has a word with a formerly useful meaning been turned into a transparent humblebrag: Look at me, I’m smart. Or, more important, perhaps, Look at me and let me tell you who I am not, which is southern, politically conservative, culturally traditional, religious in some sense, patriotic, driven by principle rather than the pivot tables of Microsoft Excel, and in any way attached to the past. “Nerd” has become a calling a card — a means of conveying membership of one group and denying affiliation with another. The movement’s king, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has formal scientific training, certainly, as do the handful of others who have become celebrated by the crowd. He is a smart man who has done some important work in popularizing science. But this is not why he is useful. Instead, he is useful because he can be deployed as a cudgel and an emblem in political argument — pointed to as the sort of person who wouldn’t vote for Ted Cruz.

Once again, we see what a powerful intoxicant self-congratulation is.

That Tyson delivers it isn't a matter of conjecture.  There's substantiation:

Answering a question about Obama’s cameo onCosmos, Tyson was laconic. “That was their choice,” he told Grantland. “We didn’t ask them. We didn’t have anything to say about it. They asked us, ‘Do you mind if we intro your show?’ Can’t say no to the president. So he did.”

One wonders how easy it would have proved to say “No” to the president if he had been, say, Scott Walker. Either way, though, that Obama wished to associate himself with the project is instructive. He was launched into the limelight by precisely the sort of people who have DVR’d every episode of Cosmos and who, like the editors of Salon, see it primarily as a means by which they might tweak their ideological enemies; who, as apparently does Sean McElwee, see the world in terms of “Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. the Right (Cosmos, Christians, and the Battle for American Science)”; and who, like the folks at Vice, advise us all: “Don’t Get Neil deGrasse Tyson Started About the Un-Science-y Politicians Who Are Killing America’s Dreams.”

And it's not just professional pundits:

All over the Internet, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s face is presented next to words that he may or may not have spoken. “Other than being a scientist,” he says in one image, “I’m not any other kind of -ist. These -ists and -isms are philosophies; they’re philosophical portfolios that people attach themselves to and then the philosophy does the thinking for you instead of you doing the thinking yourself.” Translation: All of my political and moral judgments are original, unlike those of the rubes who subscribe to ideologies, philosophies, and religious frameworks. Myworldview is driven only by the data.

This is nonsense. Progressives not only believe all sorts of unscientific things — that Medicaid, the VA, and Head Start work; that school choice does not; that abortion carries with it few important medical questions; that GM crops make the world worse; that one can attribute every hurricane, wildfire, and heat wave to “climate change”; that it’s feasible that renewable energy will take over from fossil fuels anytime soon — but also do their level best to block investigation into any area that they consider too delicate. You’ll note that the typical objections to the likes of Charles Murray and Paul McHugh aren’t scientific at all, but amount to asking lamely why anybody would say something so mean. 

Anyway, Robert Tracinski at The Federalist came across an interesting YouTube clip of Tyson that shows just how exquisitely hollow this attitude can be.  Tyson, talking at a convention of "skeptics" - that is to say, atheists - offers the hypothetical scenario of a cancer patient consulting three different doctors who give him predictions of months to live that vary within a month of each other.  The patient survives, goes into remission, and is cancer-free within a few years, and then thanks God for being spared.  He could have stopped there, but had to go on to talk about having been a physics lecturer to pre-med students and say, "Not all of them were smart, I assure you."

Tracinski summarizes the position Tyson puts himself in thusly:

Tyson paints himself into a corner where the only alternatives are: either God performs miracles, and doctors are stupid.

Medicine, you see, just doesn't pass the elitist nerd's rigor test the way physics does.  And philosophy certainly doesn't pass it:

 You really have to check this out to believe it: Tyson agrees with an interviewer that philosophers engage in “a little too much question asking” and ridicules them as people who “can’t even cross the street because you are distracted by what you are sure are deep questions you’ve asked yourself.”

It’s almost as if Tyson thinks physicists are the cool kids of academia, who like to make fun of those four-eyed nerds in the philosophy department.

Now, I’ve studied philosophy extensively (it was my major in college), and there is an awful lot of useless lip-flapping in the field, so I understand why scientists—who are used to crisper, more reality-oriented intellectual standards—are often turned off. But there is a big difference between saying that some philosophers and philosophies are useless, versus saying that the discipline as such is useless.

And the irony, of course, is that Tyson could have really found some use for it, because a little training in philosophy might have prevented him from making such a hash of that argument about miracles.

This appeal of this posture among collectivists is why climate-change alarmism hasn't died yet.  Far from it; the Most Equal Comrade is in New York as I write this, prattling on about having science on his side.

Busting a move

The US and five Arab nations have begun air strikes over Syria.

And this is interesting: apparently we're not just hitting ISIS targets, but Khorasan as well.

Getting going on what was going to happen sometime fairly soon anyway has a clarifying effect.  All the debate on how much good air strikes alone can do, and what coalitions and alliances are going to look like as the fight proceeds, can now be bolstered or have doubts cast on them by dint of real-time results.

So here we go.

Lois's Politico interview

A few noteworthy takes on it today.

 Ian Tuttle at NRO  notes the use of the she's-a-deep-and-complex-figure tactic:

“Lerner . . . has been painted in one dimension: as a powerful bureaucrat scheming with the Obama administration to cripple right-leaning nonprofits,” writes interviewer Rachel Bade. In reality, the scandal-hounded Lerner is — didn’t you suspect? — “a much more complicated figure than the caricature she’s become in the public eye.”

Of course, Richard Nixon was “complicated,” too, but he did not get 3,700 rehabilitative words in Politico.

And what's with the interviewer allowing her to avoid the elephant in the room?

In her interview, Lerner says she “declined to talk” about her part in the targeting scandal, as if Jack Bauer were plugging her nails with bamboo shoots. At The Federalist, David Harsanyi corrects that misrepresentation: “You didn’t decline to talk, you are benefitting from a clause in the Constitution that allows a person to shield themselves from self-incrimination. This fact certainly doesn’t make you guilty, but it almost surely means you’re hiding something pretty important.”

That latter point is worth reiterating: Lerner, like any defendant, is innocent until proven guilty, and she deserves the fair administration of the legal process. Individuals who have personally attacked her or threatened her or her family do a disservice to the cause of good government that they claim to represent. That said, if it acts like a corrupt tax official, and if like a corrupt tax official it refuses to quack . . .  

Tuttle notes that the attempt at defense that posits Lerner as an interchangeable cog in a braoder scenario makes the essential case that those without filters on their glasses are making: Lerner's a microcosm, an embodiment, of a view of governance, that is at odds with what America is, or at least has been:

Says Karen Grier, a tax attorney who worked with Lerner, “You could take her out of there and just stand in a different person, and no matter who it is, we would have the same result.”

Bade no doubt intended Grier’s quote as a defense of Lerner, but it suggests the point made by Lerner’s accusers on the right: that this is not about Lois Lerner — or Daniel Werfel, or Steve Miller, or any of the head honchos who made easy, early targets. The violation of the First Amendment rights of hundreds of organizations was not the work of one or two “rogue” operatives in Cincinnati, or in Washington, but the result of systematic malpractice at several levels. And that Lois Lerner has become a symbol of institutional corruption festering in America’s tax bureau is not the collective projection of Rush Limbaugh callers but the predictable result of her decision not to fess up to obvious wrongdoing and not to help those with the power to reform the IRS rein in its propensity for mischief. She will not earn any sympathy — nor does she deserve any — for flaunting her lack of cooperation in the pages of Politico. 

Repair Man Jack at Red State points out that you really can't accuse Lois of lying:

Politico may be what Politico truly is; however Lois Lerner was in no way lying when she said she was proud of how she did her job. She believes that if you are a Conservative you are unerringly a gibbering, fleck-spittled Cro-Magnon of Backwardation. You therefore need to be eliminated from any capacity in which you can impact the direction of Post-modern America. It is her job to take an aluminum softball bat to your knee-caps before you are able to catch up to any of the good guys representing the higher, more evolved species. That is what the honest, self-assured Progressive believes about anyone who disagrees with his or her political viewpoint.

As for public integrity? Screw it. It was a less important moral value. Her official powers were just another bastard sword. Who cares where you ram it through the carapace as long as the dragon flops over dead. She was totally impartial. Anybody she thought sucked got sliced and diced. What could be more fundamentally just? As far as Lois Lerner was concerned she was a gallant and proud paladin of the public trust. She can’t understand why you aren’t more thankful she was on the public payroll. And if you think I write any of this tongue-and-cheek; you do not get what Conservatives and Traditionalists are up against as we try our hardest to save America from those who would plow it under in the sacred name of !PROGRESS!

There never should have been an IRS.  (1913 was a particularly bad year for America; in addition to imposing the income tax on itself, it made Senators electable by the people, just like the House, rather than by state legislatures.)  ANd now we can see why more clearly than ever: It can be used as a tool not only for taking money and invading individuals' privacy willy-nilly, but advancing one vision  - the one with no use for freedom - and putting the other out of business.