Last-day-of-2015 roundup

In keeping with one of the year's major themes, the rot of the post-American university continues apace:

Oregon State University will hold four racially-exclusive “Social Justice Retreats” focusing on “white privilege,” “microaggressions,” and “institutional racism” in the first month of 2016 alone.

During the weekend of January 8-10, the university will have two retreats — one specifically for white students, “Examining White Identity in a Multicultural World,” and “Racial Aikido,” which is specifically for non-white students.

According to the university website, the white students’ retreat will focus on “white privilege,” while the retreat for non-white students will seek to “empower students of color.”

The US State Department has drawn up a list of its "achievements" for the year that indicates level of lunacy that blows up the whole notion of diplomacy and statecraft as those terms have been conventionally understood for millennia.

 . . . the list was inspired by a note-to-staff from Kerry, "summing up a busy year and charting the course ahead." That led Kirby to draw up his list, to which he added the gimmick of "a great hashtag -- which was recently trending on Twitter" -- #2015in5words (as it happens, this hashtag has chiefly become a magnet for five-word comic variations on 2015 being the year in which "everyone was offended by everything" -- but never mind).

Thus do we have State's self-laudatory list of "The Year-in-Review: Pivotal Foreign Policy Moments of 2015." Each moment is summed up in five words with an accompanying paragraph and video clip, meant to show "significant success across a range of issues."

Actually, what most of this list suggests, to interpret it kindly, is that the State Department has decamped from Planet Earth and is by now operating in an alternate universe. This is alarming because the rest of us are pretty much stuck with the real-world fallout.

Ready for the items themselves? Bringing peace and security to Syria, winning the fight against violent extremists, the ensuring of a peaceful Iranian nuclear program, re-establishing of diplomatic relations with Cuba, the strongest climate change agreement ever negotiated.

Those are the biggies. State also pats itself on the back for these giant strides forward into the Age of Unicorns and Rainbows:

The State Department is pleased to remind us that in 2015 Kerry formally assumed the chairmanship of the Arctic Council, promising to protect Arctic ecosystems. Kerry also attended a conference in Chile on the oceans, to which he is personally devoted. And at the UN General Assembly, the U.S. committed itself to ambitious new UN global development goals, with Obama assuring the UN eminences that they could count on the generosity of the American people. The past year also brought diplomatic agreement on a Trans-Pacific trade deal so lengthy and complex that analysts are still debating whether on balance it would encourage or throttle free markets.

Your tax dollars pay these maniacs' salaries.

And here's why we call 'em Freedom-Haters, folks: the Federal Register was swelled with a record number of new regulations in 2015.  81,611 pages worth.

Yes, countries routinely spy on even their allies, and the Most-Equal Comrade's nomenklatura obviously wanted to know what Israel was up to in the run-up to the surrender to Iran. But well after post-America was certain that Israel was not going to employ force to take out Iran's nuke program, you still had these shenanigans going on:

Netanyahu’s discussions with members of Congress on a policy dispute between Congress and the president do not qualify as foreign intelligence. Destroying this kind of information should not have been a close call for NSA. Congress should immediately ask NSA director Michael Rogers and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to verify the Journal story and explain why intercepts of private discussions of members of Congress were provided to the White House. If this did happen, both officials should resign.

Second, the White House bears significant responsibility for this scandal. By encouraging and accepting this intelligence, the White House used the NSA as an illegitimate means to undermine its legislative opponents. This represented a major abuse of presidential power, since it employed the enormous capabilities of an American intelligence service against the U.S. Congress. It also probably violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation-of-powers principles and the Fourth Amendment, since surveillance may have been conducted against U.S. citizens without a warrant.

 ISIS has an ambitious agenda for the coming year, per Gulf-based analyst Dr. Theodore Karasik:

 . . . hundreds of sleeper cells in “dozens of countries” will mobilise in an unprecedented bid to spark a huge military retaliation in the Middle East, according to one of the world’s leading authorities on the death cult.

The claim comes as fears grow of a New Year’s Eve terror plot in London and other major European cities including Paris and Brussels cancel or curtail their traditional celebrations to say farewell to the year.

And it's official. Cos faces a felony assault charge. Another one of those stories that brings full circle a point of focus from early in the year, when post-America could no longer deny that the spinner of tales about Weird Harold and Fat Albert, the man who ate Jell-O pudding on TV commercials with grinning rug rats, the wise and even-tempered Dr. Cliff Huxtable, was a doper and rapist of scores of young women. Should have perhaps seen this as a possibility with his frequent appearances at Hefner's parties, but that other side of him was so compelling.

And that is maybe the overarching theme of this year that has mere hours to exist as present time: the post-American cattle-masses will apparently swallow any blob of hooey, no matter how patently preposterous.

Will 2016 be the year of the Great Wising Up?  LITD is not betting the rent.