Friday morning roundup

S.E. Cupp gives a very effective refutation of Michelle Obama's identity-politics bluster about how any woman who didn't vote for Madame BleachBit last November was "ignoring her own voice."

It may sound like the stuff of tinfoil hat potboilers to say that it looks like Russia has been stoking divisions between Americans on social media, but that's what CNN is reporting.

An absolute must-read by Randoph Parrish at The American Thinker entitled "How to Destroy a Nation." He understands that it is very, very late in the day.

If you want to destroy a nation, you find a way to denigrate its belief in itself. Smear its founders. Belittle its accomplishments. Pillory it for failing to live up to its ideals. Mock its most sacred traditions. Deride its heroes.

In the end, you will no longer have a nation, but only a collection of tribes, who occupy the same space but share no common concepts. There is nothing to unify them. In other words, you will be able to pinpoint that country with geographical data, but you will not find a national people.

David French at NRO on the legacy of Hugh Hefner.

How snot-nosed is the Left in post-America? Well,, consider the response of a Massachusetts librarian to Melania Trump's gift of some children's books to the school where she works:

My students were interested in reading your enclosed letter and impressed with the beautiful bookplates with your name and the indelible White House stamp, however, we will not be keeping the titles for our collection. I’d like to respectfully offer my explanation…

Yearly per-pupil spending in Cambridge is well over $20,000; our city’s values are such that given a HUGE range in the socioeconomic status of our residents, we believe that each and every child deserves the best free education possible and are working hard to make that a reality (most classrooms maintain a 60/40 split between free/reduced lunch and paid lunch). This offers our Title I school and the district a lot of privilege and room for programming and pedagogy to foster “high standards of excellence.” Even so, we still struggle to close the achievement gap, retain teachers of color, and dismantle the systemic white supremacy in our institution. But hell, we test well! And in the end, it appears that data — and not children — are what matters…

Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes. Open one of his books (If I Ran a Zoo or And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example), and you’ll see the racist mockery in his art. Grace Hwang Lynch’s School Library Journal article, “Is the Cat in the Hat Racist? Read Across America Shifts Away from Dr. Seuss and Toward Diverse Books,” reports on Katie Ishizuka’s work analyzing the minstrel characteristics and trope nature of Seuss’s characters. Scholar Philip Nel’s new book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, further explores and shines a spotlight on the systemic racism and oppression in education and literature.

I am honored that you recognized my students and our school. I can think of no better gift for children than books; it was a wonderful gesture, if one that could have been better thought out. Books can be a powerful way to learn about and experience the world around us; they help build empathy and understanding. In return, I’m attaching a list of ten books (it’s the librarian in me) that I hope will offer you a window into the lives of the many children affected by the policies of your husband’s administration.

It's, um . . . persons like that who make it really hard to refrain from vitriolic lashing out, ad hominem attacks and mockery. But here at LITD we keep things on the level of ideas and principles, so we'll just let the above dog vomit speak for itself.

An out lesbian Methodist bishop calls Jesus a bigot. 

Even though the bumbling Republicans can't seem to repeal the "A"CA, we're not necessarily inexorably sliding toward single-payer

Why not?

Because enough post-Americans understand that its costs are impossible to cover that they're not going to sign on.

Sally Pipes, CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, explains in an IBD column:

Fifty-three percent support single payer, according to a June 2017 poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But this supposed support is a mirage. According to the same Kaiser poll, 62% would oppose single-payer if it gave the government too much power over health care. Sixty percent would reject it if it increased taxes.

Single-payer would do both. Sanders estimated that the single-payer plan he proposed during his presidential campaign would cost $1.4 trillion a year. To cover that cost, the plan included a 2.2% income tax, a 6.2% tax on employers and additional taxes on the wealthy.

Even a genie couldn't deliver single-payer at a cost that low. The liberal Urban Institute's analysis of Sanders' campaign plan found that federal expenditures would surge $32 trillion over its first 10 years.

Even those who are inclined toward collectivist approaches to health-care policy can see that Sanders is being supremely irresponsible. He has no idea where the money would come from, and that unsettles a lot of folks:

 Sanders admits that his plans for paying for his bill are imaginary. "Rather than give a detailed proposal about how we're going to raise $3 trillion a year, we'd rather give the American people options," he told the Washington Post.

That's not good enough for many of Sanders' ideological fellow travelers. Indiana University professor and New York Times contributor Aaron Carroll, who is sympathetic to the idea of single-payer, said, "I have a problem with plans that offer the moon and don't explain what they're sacrificing." Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., said of single-payer, there's an "issue about how you make sure there will be adequate resources put into health care."

And we have some state-as-policy-laboratories evidence to use for drawing some conclusions:

Three states have already seen their single-payer dreams go "poof" after looking at the price tag.

Consider Sanders' home state of Vermont. Back in 2010, Gov. Peter Shumlin ran for the state's top job on a pro-single-payer platform.

An analysis later found that the plan would have cost $4.3 billion — equivalent to just about the entire state budget. Paying for the plan would have required new 11.5% payroll and 9.5% income taxes. So in 2014, Shumlin abandoned the idea, claiming that "the time isn't right" and single-payer "might hurt our economy."

Last November, 80% of voters in Colorado rejected a ballot measure that would have created a single-payer system. The proposal would have imposed several taxes, including a 10% payroll levy, and still would have left the state to deal with a $7.8 billion deficit within a decade.

California recently pressed pause on a single-payer proposal that would have cost the state $400 billion annually — double the state budget. Not surprisingly, the bill's proponents offered no details about how they'd pay for their plan. 

But as I said the other day, to get to the point where the free-market argument would be widely understood and generate mass enthusiasm, it's necessary to peel back decades of layers of wonkery, notions that the argument must be couched in kitchen-table populist appeals focusing on cost, and, of course, this idea, perpetuated so effectively by progressives over the last century, that government should be in the business of "providing services."

A rather tall order, but we are helped by the numbers that are plain when one looks into what Sanders-style health care would cost.

Trumpism is NOT conservatism by any stretch - today's edition

Are we beginning to discern the contours of this "populism" that has eluded precise definition?

Even though Leftist demagogues like Chuck Schumer still want to call the tax proposal Squirrel-Hair seems to have settled on a gift to wealthy people and a "punch to the gut" to "working Americans," it strains credulity to think he doesn't know he's engaging in pure grandstanding.

You see, a key feature of the proposal is a significant hike on the rate of the highest bracket.

While it's always impossible to parse just why Trump does anything, it looks like his desire to curry the favor of those who look down on him (he missed the boat, at least on this, which Schumer, didn't he?) was a driving factor:

What prompted Trump’s move on taxes for the highest earners? His desire to jump in bed with Democrats again, according to Politico:

President Donald Trump — eager to work with Democrats on tax reform — upended Republican leaders' plans to cut taxes for the rich just as the party is set to unveil its much-awaited tax proposal.

During a meeting at the White House on Tuesday, Trump made a point of telling GOP and Democratic lawmakers that his top tax advisers — Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, both very affluent individuals — won’t see their tax bills reduced. Both men nodded in agreement, sources in the room told POLITICO.

While S-H is no genius, he's surely aware of what the percentages are regarding which brackets pay what:

Highest Quintile (above $234,700): $57,500

Fourth Quintile (above $83,800): $14,800

Third Quintile (above $49,800): $7,400

Second Quintile (above $29,600): $3,200

Lowest Quintile (above $15,500): $500

When you factor out the government transfers received, only the top two quintiles actually pay net federal taxes: $46,500 for the top quintile, $700 for the fourth quintile. As Mark Perry of American Enterprise Institute writes:

the richest 20% of Americans by income aren’t just paying a share of federal taxes that would be considered “fair” — it goes way beyond “fair” — they’re shouldering almost 100% of the entire federal tax burden of transfer payments and all other non-financed government spending.

Granted, the proposal lowers the corporate rate substantially, from 35% to 20. But that merely underscores the inconsistency and absence of principle that characterizes most of what S-H does.


But may I make a modest suggestion? It involves the same principle that I discuss in the previous post, the one about health care: speaking plainly about basic human freedom.

It doesn't matter if a person is rich, poor, or middle class, government ought to have to puke all over itself to justify taking the first red penny from any citizen. Therefore, if we're going to tax income, the only fair way to do it is at a flat rate across the board.

The odds of such a discussion getting a prominent airing are pretty dim in the Trump era.

 

Republican failure to repeal the "A"CA - first thoughts

A lot of layers of lessons here.

I'll start with a lesson that applies to a number of other issues, particularly how to deal with rogue states' nuclear ambitions. I've said before that the reason we're in such a pickle regarding North Korea and Iran is that no one mustered the foresight decades ago to take requisite preventive measures.  This applies to the health care situation as well. Full-throated defenses of a free-market approach should have been coming from every Republican legislator in both houses of Congress in the early 1990s in response to Hillary Clinton's attempt to steer policy toward a collectivist bias. I put a fair amount of the blame in Bush 43, who readily signed on to the expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs. Collectivists, including then-presidential candidate Obama, held the megaphone, since arguments in favor of liberty, choice and competition were relegated to the op-ed pages and some wonky journals. As with the line rogue regimes eventually cross (they become nuclear powers, and there's no going back), once this degree of government involvement in health care became law and got a few years of application under its belt, turnaround faded to the status of an improbability.

Another level it behooves us to look at is the aforementioned wonkery. I'm all for everyone and anyone being as knowledgeable as possible, certainly about the details of health care. And I acknowledge that, regarding health care, that's a pretty daunting task. Everybody concedes that health care policy gets complicated real fast.

But why?

That is not really so complex. The progressive mindset that started infecting American thought just about a century ago - the idea that modern, urban, industrialized life had become too complicated to be addressed by the Constitution and required a battery of specialists and experts in various fields to staff executive-branch agencies to regulate various aspects of life - flourished to the degree that FDR's ridiculous 1944 "second bill of rights," asserting such impossibilities as freedom from want, a guarantee of a job, and, yes, guarantee of health care, found a disturbingly large applauding segment of the public. Then of course came 1965 and the two major programs which have sprawled and grown more insolvent every day since their enactment: Medicare and Medicaid.

So the idea that government was supposed to "do things for us" and "provide services" came to be seen as innocuous and as self-evident as the actual governmental function of keeping us safe.

I'll say it again: freedom is elegantly simple. Government involvement in any aspect of life is the factor that complicates it.

It comes to change the thinking of private-sector players as well. Health insurance companies started talking to their customers in a markedly different way than those in the auto-insurance or home-insurance business, in which the monthly premium is clearly intended to mitigate the risk of unplanned occurrences.

Then there is the inexorable collapse of the "A"CA. Failure to repeal guarantees that millions of Americans will experience a moment of unprecedented shock at some point in the not-all-that-distant future, and waiting to fill the vacuum will be full-fledged socialism:

The bill for Obamacare’s unworkable financial scheme is already overdue, with health care companies fleeing the marketplace and that will leave 40 percent of the nation’s counties with only a single Obamacare-compliant insurer in 2018. Waiting in the wings for the moment of national health-care crisis is Bernie Sanders with Medicare for All, his euphemism for socialized medicine. At an estimated cost of $32 trillion over a decade, Bernie’s remedy would attempt to cure cancer with a draught of hemlock.

Then there is the question of why the Republican Party, even as it enjoys control of all three branches of the federal government and a majority of state governments, has shown that it is not the repository of the kind of clarity needed to provide a path back to freedom.

For that, I don't have a handy, paragraph-sized answer. I suppose a lot of it is all the factors involved in achieving political victory and just getting one's tail end to Washington: the fundraising, the kind of networking and schmoozing that must be undertaken, the risk of being vilified for speaking too plainly in a hostile media climate as society becomes more brittle.

It's a grim juncture at which we find ourselves, but there is no alternative to continuing to defend freedom. If it's foremost among one's values, one can't live with oneself if the only other voices in the national conversation food fight are championing tyranny and dehumanization.

Most post-Americans don't dig take-the-knee, and let us really look deeply at how that can effectively serve the cause of reviving our culture

Guy Benson at Townhall, in the course of citing the poll that proves this to be true, offers a couple of paragraphs of crucial insight. For a while, discussion and ranting about media bias and elite cultural institutions skewing the public's understanding of what is actually happening on the ground had become something of a trite and tiresome time-filler on talk radio and low-hanging content fruit for flush-faced pundits. But this cultural development really does point up the divide between what real people know and the convictions they harbor in the cores of their beings and the mad and poisonous fantasies that provide the foundations of the Left's worldview:

Today, we're watching something of a rerun, except the canyon between the press and the people is even wider here.  Setting aside the stipulations that of course peaceful protests are protected speech, that Trump erred in calling for firings, and that issues like police brutality are worthy of serious attention, most Americans do not support using the national anthem as an occasion for protest. We've been following the public opinion polls on these questions over the last few days, and the patterns are clear: Solid majorities oppose anthem kneeling (more than seven-in-ten call it "unpatriotic," according to a CBS survey), and sizable minorities are consuming lessof the NFL's product as a result of the brouhaha.   Some new numbers, via a polling firm called Remington Research Group, who conducted a scientific national poll of more than 1,600 Americans [tell the story; see link].

The over-politicization of normally-apolitical aspects of American life is a pet peeve of mine, and it seems I'm far from alone.  Some social justice types have criticized my take, asserting that only "privileged" people who are comfortably ensconced in the status quo feel this way.  That's demonstrably false (see above); I'd argue that the desire to prevent politics from poisoning unifying cultural institutions is a widely-shared, human impulse. I'd also wager that privileged liberalsare among the likeliest groups in the country to have the time and energy to foment constant outage over everything.  But back to the data: A lopsided majority also says that players should stand respectfully during the anthem (64/24), with half responding that the refusal of some (a small percentage, it should be noted, even this past week) to do so makes them less likely to watch games.

I guess a boneheaded, Trump-esque, Kurt Schlichter-esque, Laura Ingraham-esque way of interpreting this data would be to bellow, "You effete, pointy-headed elites and race-baiters and collectivists want to engage in an ever-escalating culture war with us based on your dismal numbers, bring it!"

And, quite honestly, I can only find one reason to take any issue with that stance.

It's this: Does it foreclose on a degree of clarity that we might want to have handy to serve us as this culture war gets even nastier (if that's possible)?

I realize the battle is pitched and there's no getting to kumbaya by direct route.

Therefore, my fellow actual conservatives, let us take stock of every possible arrow in our quiver. We want the most effective ones most handy.

You may have noticed a tapering off in the frequency of my posts in recent days. I could chalk it up to being busy, which is certainly the case, praise be to God for my blessings. But the real reason is that I hear a small voice admonishing me to proceed carefully.

What this blog is after is the pursuit of what is good, right and true. It will not get mired in wonkery, and by the same token it will not stoop to cheap tribalistic gratification.

So, yes, the numbers are with us. Heartening to see.

But we must also feel the charge to proceed responsibly.

Western civilization is at stake.

Another example of why principles, not cults of personality, must drive policy consideration

Michael Rubin at AEI reminds us why making stars out of dissidents and political prisoners doesn't necessarily lead to Jeffersonian democracy:

In 1990, Burma’s junta stripped opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi of her election victory and placed her under house arrest. The following year, the Nobel Foundation, citing “her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights,” awarded her its peace prize.

Soon, Suu Kyi’s empowerment became Washington’s metric for success in Burma. Pundits cited Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2011 visit to Suu Kyi as a “clear-cut triumph” for US efforts to bring Burma in from the cold.

Today, however, Suu Kyi provides cover for a campaign of ethnic cleansing that has killed thousands and made nearly a half million more refugees in Burma.

He cites some other examples that illustrate his case:

Alas, she’s not alone as the recipient of misplaced hope. For decades, Western diplomats seeking to reform rogue regimes have bet everything on dissidents and individual politicians. Yet for every Lech Walesa, there has been a Suu Kyi. Too often, subjects of liberal hope have ushered in not peace and liberalism but dictatorship and bloodletting.

Diplomats and pundits once celebrated Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki and Rwanda’s Paul Kagami as progressives, if not committed democrats; today, both men preside over repressive dictatorships. Fifteen years ago, officials likewise celebrated Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise to power as a man who could democratize Turkey. Instead, he has embezzled billions of dollars and transformed Turkey back into a police state.

Even when there was never any illusion about a partner’s commitment to democracy, misplaced hope in the ability of individuals to change themselves and transform society has backfired.

The basic lesson here is that every last human being falls short of God's glory. Setting that kind of store by one of them is asking too much of political reality.

This is not to say that some historical figures are worthy of admiration, but even in those cases, the principles must remain front and center.

This is something we should hope occurs to the drooling, bug-eyed devotees of the current US president sooner rather than later.

 

Puerto Rico

You may not have much in the way of material resources or time, but you can pray.

This is an island with a population of over 3 million and it has no electricity.

It's heartening to see the aid pouring in, but this is going to be a long, painful slog.

This is the kind of situation that provides us an opportunity to grow spiritually.

Just remember Puerto Rico whenever you pray.

It's a reminder that real suffering goes on in this broken world, and it's there that we see His face.

Ben Shapiro's six takeaways from take-the-knee weekend

I'm not giving away the entirety of what he has to say by enumerating the six takeaways, because he has important observations under each.

They are:

1. It's idiotic to protest the national anthem.
2. It's idiotic for President Trump to call for firing those who protest the national anthem.
3. Trump will make bank off this issue.
4. Democrats will make bank off this issue.
5. Our cultural fabric is eroding. Quickly.
6. The NFL will lose most from this nonsense and they deserve to.

I will reprint what he has to say under point number five:

In February 2017, I wrote a column titled, “Can The Super Bowl Save America?” The basis for the column was simple: America needs to take a breath from politics every so often. Football is one of those breaths. As I wrote:

Hollywood and pop culture would do well to remind themselves that if they don't want to alienate half their audience and exacerbate our differences, they can allow us room to breathe. The Super Bowl did that this year. For that, we should be just a little grateful, even if it didn't solve any true underlying problems. Those will require a bit more time and a bit more space.

So much for that rosy notion. The NFL has become ground zero for the culture wars. Which means that we can’t see movies anymore, watch TV shows anymore, or even watch sports anymore without feeling that we’re being judged. That means our common spaces are disappearing. And we have so little political common space already that cultural common space was our last relic of togetherness.

That is the gist of everything I write at this site in a nutshell. This nation is cracking up.

We've obviously learned nothing from scriptures warnings of what happens when a specially chosen city or nation thumbs its nose at that status and openly mocks almighty God.

Squirrel-Hair gonna Squirrel-Hair - today's edition

The chief executive caps off his week in customary style.

There had been at least a semblance of a consensus in, if not objective, at least non-Kool-Aid-guzzling circles that he'd had a fairly good week or two. A great UN speech. Productive sideline meetings at the General Assembly pow-wow. A demonstration of leadership in the hurricane responses.

He squelched it all big-time last night in Alabama. It was characteristic of his rallies since becoming president, which is to say, it was a lot like the rallies from the campaign days. Full of bluster, meandering and obsession with fading public figure Hillary Clinton.

His lack of consistency was on full display with his I-used-to-not-like-the-electoral-college-but-now-I-like-it pronouncement.

And why was it important to say anything about Hillary Clinton's views on the Second Amendment?

And, of course, the biggest takeaway was the digression into NFL knee-takers. Of course, they're spoiled brats who deserve our contempt, but once again, he obliterated the whole concept of presidential demeanor with his wouldn't-you-love-to-see-some-NFL-owner-say-get-that-son-of-a-bitch-off-the-field-he's-fired crowd-stoker. And, in case you weren't aware of what a big shot he is, he mentioned that he's friends with several of them.

And remember that the purpose of the rally was to whip up support for Luther Strange, who is almost certain to lose in the primary to Judge Roy Moore.

And consider that three diehard S-H sycophants - Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Sarah Palin - are scheduled to fly in to the state and stump for Moore tomorrow.

The pattern is not a trend of growth in his office. It's one of a hopeful sign followed by true-to-form behavior that provides easy fodder to the Left, makes conservatives cringe, confirms his slavish devotees' view of themselves as at the forefront of a historic American realignment, and diminishes us all.

I should have known better than to give John McCain the benefit of the doubt

I understand that Graham-Cassidy is still weak tea. I understand its hail-Mary nature. I understand that it still takes the heavy-handed approach to preexisting conditions.

But as I said a couple of days ago, it's an improvement over the last couple of shots at this, and opens the door to further moves that, if the stars aligned properly, could get us to repeal.

The "A"CA is not working. I don't give a damn what David Axelrod and Jimmy Kimmel say. It's utterly worthless for most American citizens.

I gave John McCain the benefit of the doubt on the last go-round, because I thought it was a case of tweedle-dum-tweedle-dee. Not enough better than the "A"CA to get shook about.

But this is an improvement over that. It moves the damn needle.

So now, I'm back to harboring the contempt for the Arizona senator that I had in 08, when he spent his presidential campaign showing the country, rather ostentatiously, how ate up he was with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome he was ("let us remember that those across the aisle are not our enemies" - perhaps the most unnecessary statement a politician ever uttered).

He has squelched the last remaining chance to stem the tide of socialized health care in post-America:

McCain said he could not support the bill "without knowing how much it will cost, how it will effect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it. Without a full CBO score, which won’t be available by the end of the month, we won’t have reliable answers to any of those questions.”

“I take no pleasure in announcing my opposition. Far from it,” he continued. “The bill’s authors are my dear friends, and I think the world of them. I know they are acting consistently with their beliefs and sense of what is best for the country. So am I.”

Doesn't his service in the Navy, particularly in Vietnam, outweigh the damage he's done since? I know it does for Mona Charen, who wrote an undeniably consideration-worthy tribute to him in that vein at NRO this week. 

But consider what someone wrote in the comment thread underneath it:

While he was imprisoned in Vietnam, McCain's wife was disfigured in a car accident. McCain didn't like his wife's lost looks. In 1979 — while still married to Carol — he met the much-younger (and very wealthy) Cindy Hensley at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her and abandoning his suffering wife. He managed to divorce her and marry Cindy five weeks later. Quite consistent with McCain's "character."

But I don't wish to digress too much. My real point here is his failure, due to his lack of anything approaching consistent conservatism, to see a big enough picture to realize that he blew the last shot we had to make a significant change in the foreseeable future.

And about that CBO scoring, Tyler Cowen has this to say:

The CBO has estimated that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path, and over time will need to choose some significant mix of tax increases and spending cuts. Graham-Cassidy looks bad because it accelerates some of those fiscal adjustments, but American health-care consumption will end up being curtailed anyway.

There is an unfortunate tendency of Obamacare defenders to pick and choose which CBO messages they publicize. If the CBO estimates that a Republican health-care bill will cut insurance coverage, that estimate is played up. But when the CBO surveys the nation’s longer-term fiscal conditions, that is downplayed for fear it will discourage moves toward bigger government. 

He's not doing this for principle-driven reasons. I can forgive Rand Paul, because he is a free-market purist and I'm pretty much one myself. McCain just being a stinking maverick, and there's nothing cute about it.

Wednesday morning roundup

I tend to agree with this NRO editorial that Rand Paul ought to come around on the Graham-Cassidy bill. I might not have taken this position at any number of points earlier this year, but Congress is clearly exhausted by the successive efforts to actually repeal the "A"CA, and this legislation does, to employ a hackneyed phrase, move the needle, albeit not by a whole lot.

A true replacement of Obamacare would be better than Graham-Cassidy, but Graham-Cassidy is still much better than Obamacare. It abolishes the individual and employer mandates, caps per capita spending on Medicaid, blocks federal funds from going to insurance plans that cover abortion, and lets interested states attain freedom from some of Obamacare’s regulations. Some of those states could use that freedom to create markets in which people outside of Medicare, Medicaid, and employer-based coverage would finally be enabled to buy cheap, renewable catastrophic-insurance policies.

The senator’s objections to the bill amount to a case for improving it, perhaps in a conference committee after it passes the Senate. They do not amount to a case for voting it down. The bill goes farther in the right direction than the “skinny repeal” bill for which Paul voted earlier this summer. That bill abolished only the individual and employer mandates.

Jason Riley at the WSJ does a great job of taking down race polemicist Ta-Nehisi Coates. Would excerpt some of it, but apparently my reading of it a while ago was my one free article before the paywall kicked in. If you aren't a subscriber, you'll do well to make this your free article as well.

Prayers for Puerto Rico. Maria is one mean bitch.

Modern post-American adolescents aren't getting it on or imbibing the juice or weed at the rate of even their recent forebears, but they aren't getting jobs or driver's licenses at the same rate, either.

A new study shows that computer models are a worthless way to draw conclusions about the global climate.

Orlando Gooden is a poisonous force in our culture and should not be allowed anywhere near eight-year-olds

This is horrific:

The entire Cahokia Quarterback Club football team, which is made up of kids who are eight or even younger, took a knee during the playing of the National Anthem before their game last Sunday at Little Devil’s Field in Belleville, Ill. And they were encouraged to do so by their coach.

“One of the kids asked me if I saw (people) protesting and rioting in St. Louis. I said yes; I said, ‘Do you know why they are doing it?’” said Coach Orlando Gooden.

Coach Gooden said his player responded, “Because black people are getting killed and nobody’s going to jail.”

Gooden, who played football at Mizzou, said the kids knew about the Jason Stockley decision.

“I felt like it was a good teaching moment for me to circle the team and have a meeting,” he said.

The coach said he spoke to them about that and other situations that have happened in our country. He then explained why former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick started kneeling during the anthem.

“One of the kids asked, ‘Can we do that?’ I said, ‘As long as we know why we’re doing it, I don’t have a problem with any of it.’”

Here’s the problem, though. Did they know why they were taking a knee? Was it a chance to take part in a fad, or did the coach and other adults present engage in an age-appropriate discussion of why it might or might not be a good idea to kneel during the anthem? And what about using this “teaching moment” to challenge the falsehood put forth by the child that “black people are getting killed and nobody’s going to jail”?

Coach Gooden went on to say, “What I teach my kids is love, integrity, honesty, fairness, respect … boundaries.” While it’s good the coach is teaching these important things, let’s be clear, these are notthings Colin Kaepernick
stands kneels for. Kaepernick kneels for one thing: Colin Kaepernick. It is a self-indulgent temper tantrum from a man who has thrived because America gave him many opportunities to do so. His ingratitude to the nation that helped him succeed is not the lesson to be teaching the pee wee team.

We’re talking about third graders here. They don’t have the maturity to take on this issue; they almost definitely had little understanding of what they were doing. The adults knew better, but let it happen anyway. 

I suppose one solution is to carve up the kids' crotches and render them eunuchs so that playing football is not even an issue. That's a big thing in America's schools now.

Seriously,  this evil man is imprinting a lasting notion in his players' minds, the basic leftist  notion that the United States of America is inherently flawed, that its law-enforcement apparatus is not to be trusted, and that institutional bigotry is rampant.

Save that dog vomit for private discussions with fellow freedom-haters, Gooden. Leave innocent kids out of it.

This is yet another glaring bit of evidence that, since culture is upstream from politics and economics, boosting the GDP or wage levels or skilled-trades education is not going to cure the basic spiritual sickness that is at the root of society's present brittleness.

Memo to the current administration: Please bring the kind of resoluteness and clarity to the worthless Paris climate accord that you seem to be bringing to national-security threats

The post immediately below lauds the president's speech to the UN General Assembly. That speech minced no words. It spoke of both values and security interests. It spelled out why the world's rogue nations are classified the way they are.

Can we please have a little of that with regard to environment policy instead of this kind of tepid mishmash?

[A White House] email informing all  . . .  said administration’s “position was made very clear during the breakfast” hosted by Mr. Cohn with the various energy ministers. (Bold in the original.) Nor did this White House missive skimp on specifics, adding to the atmosphere of clarity. In summary:

• The breakfast was a “useful conversation” on “the President’s energy agenda,” US energy resources and technologies, and energy security, economic growth, and the reduction of emissions.
• “The conversation also focused on ways that our countries can work together to provide affordable, reliable energy to help reduce global poverty.”
• Technology and innovation will continue to play an important role as our countries strive to achieve these important goals.
• The US is a global leader in advanced energy technologies, including highly efficient fossil fuels, and looks forward to continuing this conversation to promote a balanced approach.
• The US looks forward to continuing this conversation.

Wow. Sadly, the energy ministers’ time is extremely valuable, and it appears to be the case that the breakfast ended before the very clear administration position on precisely what “the right conditions” are and the meaning of “better for the country” could be delineated. This is unfortunate, particularly given that the Paris agreement is an absurdity utterly indefensible regardless of one’s views on the science and policy analytics of anthropogenic climate change. Let us review a few realities that really are clear, to wit:

• If we apply the EPA climate model under a set of assumptions that strongly exaggerate the effectiveness of international emissions reductions, the Paris emissions cuts, if achieved by 2030 and maintained fully on an international basis through 2100, would reduce temperatures by that year by seventeen one-hundredths of a degree.
• The US contribution to that dubious achievement — the Obama climate action plan — would be fifteen one-thousandths of a degree. Add another one one-hundredth of a degree if you believe the Obama pseudo-agreement with China is meaningful. (It is not.)
•  This effort to reduce GHG emissions would impose costs of at least 1 percent of global GDP, or roughly $600 billion to $750 billion or more per year, inflicted disproportionately upon the world’s poor. Would those arguing the US should not withdraw from the Paris agreement please explain how it can be justified simply as a straightforward exercise in benefit/cost analysis?
• And about those emissions promises: They are incorporated in “Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions,” which few supporters of the agreement seem actually to have examined. If the goal is some unspecified reduction in global GHG emissions intended to moderate future temperature increases, then the Paris “strategy” is preposterous because the agreement does not and even in principle could not contain an enforcement mechanism.

Most of the INDCs promise GHG emissions cuts relative to a “business as usual” baseline, that is, relative to a future emissions path unconstrained by any policies at all. Since emissions are closely correlated with economic growth, a nation can “achieve” its promise by overestimating future economic growth slightly; when future growth proves lower than projected, the same will be true for GHG emissions. Thus will the “commitments” be met without any actual change in underlying emissions behavior at all. INDC fulfilled!

Apart from the absence of an enforcement mechanism, notice as well that the agreement contains no actual target for global reductions in GHG emissions. Instead, the agreement simply lumps together the dubious INDCs submitted by the individual governments, which again may or may not represent actual future emissions reductions.

Not to worry, say the proponents: The agreement puts in place a review process and recalibration of targets every five years. That means, obviously, that the initial promises might not be met; precisely how is it that the revisions five years from now, and five years after that, ad infinitum, will prove any more meaningful than the “landmark” promises just made? What is blatantly obvious is that this “review” process has nothing to do with emissions reductions; it is instead a mechanism guaranteeing endless meetings and Conferences of the Parties and permanent employment for the climate industry into the indefinite future. That is the deeper implication of the administration intent to “continue this conversation.”

Precisely what does a “better deal” mean in this context? Any forced reduction in emissions by definition means more expensive energy, an outcome utterly at odds with Mr. Trump’s consistent stance on energy policy. It means no change, literally, in future temperatures and climate phenomena. Does the administration believe the Chinese and the others will agree to more stringent controls on their emissions — that is, higher energy costs — as a tool with which to enhance US international competitiveness? If so, the administration is deceiving itself, and how would any such agreement be enforced anyway? 

Sort of sounds like Cohn is not the guy to be handling this.

Trump's UN address

I've been busy today, so I didn't get to see it, but what strikes me is the favorable reviews from venues not known to be favorable to DJT.

Sohrab Amari at Commentary called it his "Turtle Bay Triumph." Amari highlights what Trump had to say about each of the world's bad guys.

Trump named each of the world's bad-guy players - North Korea, Iran, the Sunni jihadist threat, Venezuela, China and Russia - and remarked on the particulars of each case. I especially liked what he had to say about Venezuela:

“The problem in Venezuela isn’t that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented."

Came right out and called the Iran deal worthless, too.


Rich Lowry at NRO characterized the reaction of those in attendance as basically "holy s---."

Erick Erickson at The Resurgent said it was Trump's best speech so far.

The takeaway seems to be that the president served notice that the US will not tolerate obvious threats to its security and will speak forcefully about why failed states are failed. And that the US is once again going to lead, not take its place among equals in some sort of imaginary "international community."

And, yes, I heard about the "rocket man" moniker. Squirrel-Hair gonna Squirrel-Hair.

Civilizational collapse in real time

This one has most of the items on the cultural-rot checklist: a guy who claims he has no gender, coddled college students, a tense standoff with a clearly disturbed individual in which police are placed in a stressful situation most of us would pee our pants if we found ourselves in, and, of course, reacting with a riot to the denouement thereof.

Rioters torched a police car at the Georgia Tech Police Department headquarters and fought with police Monday night in protest of a campus police shooting of a mentally ill student over the weekend.

About 50 agitators marched to the police station and rioted after a vigil earlier in the night to remember Scout Schultz, who was killed by officers after calling the Georgia Tech campus police on himself Saturday night.

Schultz, who had a history of mental illness, reported that a suspicious person was loose on campus, describing the suspect as “a white male with long blond hair, white T-shirt & blue jeans who is possibly intoxicated, holding a knife and possibly armed with a gun on his hip,” according to a statement from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. 

When police arrived on the scene, Schultz was walking around in a disoriented and unpredictable manner. Police shouted at him repeatedly to drop his knife.

"No one wants to hurt you, man," said one of the officers.

But Shultz kept walking toward them and the police opened fire. A multi-tool with a knife was recovered from the scene. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Schultz left three suicide notes behind in a dormitory room. The 21-year-old Schultz identified as neither male or female and led the university’s Pride Alliance. 

And so its his  supporters wreaked mayhem upon the streets of Atlanta.

And a similar situation is going on in St. Louis, where there have been three nights of idiotic burning, looting and police-taunting over the acquittal of a police officer who shot a heroin-dealing suspect who had led him on a high-speed chase.

The gossamer thread by which everything that makes our lives safe, pleasant and orderly is about to snap.

 

Japan's prime minister understands the stakes

I'd post the the op-ed itself, but it's behind the NYT paywall. Here is strieff's excerpt of the key part, as well as his commentary on it, at Red State:

Yesterday, the most extraordinary op-ed ran in the New York Times. It was by Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The subject was North Korea.

He gives a concise overview of what negotiating with North Korea gets you:

In the early 1990s, North Korea’s announcement to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency was a wake-up call. In response, Japan, the United States and South Korea engaged in dialogue with North Korea and agreed to construct two light-water reactors and to provide heavy fuel oil in exchange for freezing and ultimately dismantling its nuclear program. Japan, the United States and South Korea shouldered most of the financial burden, with the cooperation of Europe and other Asian countries.

We know what happened next: Several years after the heavy fuel oil was delivered and construction started on the light-water reactors, North Korea admitted to having a uranium enrichment program in violation of the agreement.

By the end of 2002, North Korea expelled I.A.E.A. inspectors, followed by an official withdrawal from the NPT in 2003. China and Russia then joined Japan, the United States and South Korea to create the six-party talks with the North. Pyongyang again agreed to the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. But instead, it declared itself a nuclear power in 2005 and carried out a nuclear test in 2006. The five countries’ attempt to solve the problem through dialogue failed.

In short, while the international community provided North Korea with sanctions relief and support as “compensation” for its pledges, the regime ignored most of its commitments.

And he rightly comes to this conclusion:

Considering this history and its continuing missile launches and nuclear tests, more dialogue with North Korea would be a dead end. Pyongyang would see more talks as proof that other countries succumbed to the success of its missile launches and nuclear tests. Now is the time to exert the utmost pressure on the North. There should be no more delays.

He is exactly right.

Winston Churchill is famous for his saying that “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” Churchill, unlike an enormous number of academics and think-tank denizens, never mistook “jaw-jaw” for appeasement. The international community has offered the North Koreans a way forward. Denuclearize and demobilize your ballistic missiles, in other words, comply with a couple of decades of UN Security Council resolutions and then we can discuss economic aid.

Abe’s statement is a very neat fit with the White House press conference by Nikki Haley and H. R. McMaster on Friday where they both said that time was running out. And over the weekend, McMaster reiterated on FoxNews Sunday:

This regime is so close now to threatening the United States and others with a nuclear weapon that we really have to move with a great deal of urgency on sanctions, on diplomacy and on preparing, if necessary, a military option. 

My post from this morning on Stephen C. Meyer pointing out that a higher-altitude and space-based missile defense system could be a way out of our existential pickle mentions that such a system could, if made high-priority, be ready to go in a year.

The question is whether we have that long.

Monday morning roundup

A Senate vote gives the National Institutes of Health a fresh $2 infusion, which it intends to spend on a bunch of studies about transgenderism. Would like to see Tom Price weigh in on this.

One for the post-American-culture-is-a-fetid-sewer file: The Emmy Awards "ceremony" was a nonstop indulgence in Trump obsession.

What are the jihadists looking at next to inflict on Europe? Train derailments and food poisoning.

Rolling Stone is up for sale.

One for the now-race-is-as-fluid-as-gender-and-depends-on-your-ideology file: Chelsea Handler calls Ben Carson a "black white supremacist."

LITD is greatly disturbed by the confusion over whether or not the Trump administration intends to pull out of the Paris climate accord. Tillerson says there's a possibility it could stay in if US interests were adequately addressed. Hell, if actual US interest were actually addressed, it would blow up the whole damn agreement. The Paris agreement is stupid and harmful to not only the US but any country fool enough to take it seriously. This is the kind of crud we get when we don't have a solidly conservative president.

A way out of the no-good-options-regarding-North-Korea bind?

Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery  Institute's Center for Science and Culture, writing at NRO, says we need not live with our current array off options concerning the North Korean threat:

Many analysts have assumed that the U.S. has only three basic options for addressing the North Korean threat: an offensive first strike, diplomatic initiatives involving China and sanctions, or acquiescence. But the United States has other options that do not require either starting a war, waiting for help from the unwilling, or accepting the vulnerability of U.S. and allied cities to a North Korean missile attack. Rather than initiating a military strike or continuing to pursue ineffective diplomatic initiatives, the United States can take advantage of recent technological advances to deploy a more effective multi-layered missile defense, including one system perfectly suited to defuse the North Korean crisis.

Enter HALE BPI:

  . . . the United States urgently needs to develop and deploy higher altitude and space-based systems for missile defense. Arthur Herman of the Hudson Institute has taken the lead on advocating one such high-altitude system with particular promise for neutralizing the North Korean threat. Known as High Altitude Long Endurance Boost Phase Intercept (or HALE BPI), this system would offer another option besides acquiescence or a high-risk first strike against North Korean missile launchers.

As conceived by Len Caveny, the former director of science and technology at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the HALE BPI system would host anti-missile missiles on existing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have the capacity for continuous flying for 18 to 40 hours or more (thus, the term “long endurance” in the HALE acronym). Using sophisticated radar, infrared detection, and “data fusion” technology, these missile-equipped UAVs would circle the Sea of Japan outside North Korean airspace at an altitude of 45,000 feet or more. Upon detection and verification of a missile launch from North Korea, the HALE BPI UAV’s operator on the ground would have time (perhaps a minute or more) to fire a purely kinetic missile, i.e. a missile without an explosive warhead, at the missile in its “boost phase.” Using already existing guidance systems and the pure kinetic energy that can be generated by even a small object moving at an extremely rapid velocity, the missile would destroy a North Korea missile almost as soon as it leaves the launch pad.

Caveny says that such a system could be operational within 12 months if put on "an expedited war footing."

Advantages: It would minimize debris that would fall to earth from the destroyed missiles,  it wouldn't pose a threat to the deterrent capabilities of large-land-mass adversaries like Russia and China, which are currently concerned about that, and the way it's designed would

give ground operators a minute or more to decide whether a rising object over North Korea has a trajectory that indicates a ballistic missile on a dangerous course. In this context, a full minute represents an eternity and could prevent an unnecessarily provocative response from the United States and its allies to a “false positive,” and time to decide that the missile’s trajectory indeed represents a threat and must be destroyed.

Only concern, and I saw this expressed in the comments below the article, is that it has to be airtight. No such-and-such-intercept-success-rate calculations.

LITD will keep an eye out for further commentary on this.

You'll smile at these updates on three recent stories

A Michigan judge does the right thing re: The Tennes family-farmers market situation:

A federal judge ruled Friday that the Michigan farmers who were banned from selling their produce at a farmers market on public property because of their religious beliefs about marriage may resume selling their goods there as early as Sunday while their case proceeds.

The decision provides much-needed relief to Steve and Bridget Tennes, owners of Country Mill Farms in Charlotte, Michigan. East Lansing city officials had banned the Tennes family from selling at the East Lansing Farmer’s Market over a Facebook post addressing the farm’s policy on hosting same-sex weddings.

“As the court found, East Lansing officials changed their market policy to shut out Steve because they don’t like his Catholic beliefs regarding marriage,” Kate Anderson, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom who is representing the Tenneses, told The Daily Signal in an email.

“The court was right to issue this order, which will allow Steve to return to the 2017 farmers market while his case moves forward,” Anderson wrote.

Ben Shapiro's appearance at Berkeley went off with a minimum of silliness and tension and he gave a rocking speech. 

And Harvard rescinds the invitation to Bradley Manning to make him a visiting fellow.

The boobs kerfuffle

First of all, it was funny.

And it was hardly over the top. It didn't involve any bathroom humor or lascivious elaborations on his point. And he used the second most innocuous term he could have, after "breasts."

It was just the kind of jolting non sequitur required to inject a bit of levity into yet another ponderous talking-heads train wreck about identity politics:

Well, that was something.

During a panel discussion on the Jemele Hill controversy and the White House calling her to be fired, things took an entirely different turn when sports radio host and provocateur Clay Travis pointed out that he only believes in two things fully.

“I believe in the First Amendment and boobs,” Travis stated. 

It took a beat, but host Brooke Baldwin wanted Travis to clarify what he had just said, asking him specifically if he actually sad “boobs.”

“Boobs, two things that never let me down, the first amendment and boobs,” Travis said. “Those are the two things I believe in absolutely in the country.”

Further down the line, Baldwin still wanted to make sure that Travis was actually talking about women’s breasts and not booze. When she confirmed that was indeed the case, she ended the interview early.

“I’m done, I’m sorry. I’m done,” she exclaimed. “This conversation is over, yanking mikes, bye. Forgive me, live television happens and you think you heard something, you are not sure and then you realize it happened, so I apologize for him on that.”

It seems Mr. Travis's ideological leanings are fairly middle-of-the-spectrum. Besides, he'd trotted out the line before:

Baldwin claims that Travis's remark was unexpected, but according to Callum Borchers at WaPo, "Clay Travis used his ‘First Amendment and boobs’ line long before he shocked CNN." Travis was invited on Baldwin's show after he'd written:

I don’t believe Jemele Hill should be fired for tweeting Donald Trump was a white supremacist and for recently saying police officers are modern-day slave catchers. I also don’t believe Curt Schilling should have been fired for what he said about the North Carolina transgender bathroom law or any of the other conservative political positions he’s adopted over the years. That’s because I’m a First Amendment absolutist — the only two things I 100 percent believe in are the First Amendment and boobs — who is also capable of doing something that most in modern media seem incapable of — distinguishing between a person’s public job and their private political beliefs. (Which are also public thanks to modern-day social media.)

Borchers writes:

And that wasn't the first time. Travis wrote in June 2015 that “absolutism on either the right or the left is scary to me — which is why I’m a radical moderate — who believes in only two things absolutely: the First Amendment and boobs."

When Baldwin appeared stunned and disgusted by Travis's quip on Friday, he replied, “I say it live on the radio all the time.”

This is who Travis is. CNN ought to have known what it was getting.

All right then. I assume CNN did know. In which case, the whole hoo-ha is fake news. 

But Baldwin had to pen an opinion column for the CNN website expressing her outrage.

Why, per se was it demeaning?

Well, there is the aren't-we-more-enlightened-now-than-to-objectify-women take that, ironically, is shared by strident feminists and certain kinds of overly sensitive social conservatives.

Sorry, but as Dennis Prager has pointed out, men are more aroused by visual stimuli than women - that is, they objectify them:

1. It is completely normal for heterosexual men to see women to whom they are sexually attracted as sex objects.

2. That such sexual objectification is normal and has nothing to do with misogyny is proved by, among other things, the fact that homosexual men see men to whom they are sexually attracted as sex objects. If heterosexual men are misogynists, homosexual men are man-haters.

2. That such sexual objectification is normal and has nothing to do with misogyny is proved by, among other things, the fact that homosexual men see men to whom they are sexually attracted as sex objects. If heterosexual men are misogynists, homosexual men are man-haters.

3. One reason for this is the almost unique power of the visual to sexually arouse men. Men are aroused just by glancing at a female arm, ankle, calf, thigh, stomach — even without ever seeing the woman’s face. Those legs, calves, arms, etc. are sexual objects. That’s why there are innumerable websites featuring them. There is nothing analogous for women. Of course, a woman can be aroused seeing a particularly handsome and masculine man. But there are no websites for women to stare at men’s legs or other male body parts.

4. Every normal heterosexual man who sees a woman as a sexual object can also completely respect her mind, her character, and everything else non-sexual about her. Men do this all the time.

Let's turn the tables for a moment: Say the guest had been a female and the discussion was free speech, and, just to get a rise out of everyone, she said something equivalent, something like, "I like swim meets because you see all these guys' marvelous funpacks in detail," what would the reaction have been?

I daresay a lot of male viewers, anyway, would say, "My kind of gal!"

Now, to those who are at this point inclined to respond with, "The is just the kind of hedonism we need to turn away from if we're ever going to have a more. dignified, let alone God-inclined culture," I would refer you to what C.S. Lewis says on the matter:

It is not for nothing that every language and literature in the world is full of jokes about sex. Many of them may be dull or disgusting and almost all of them are old. But we must insist that they embody an attitude toward Venus which in the long run endangers the Christian life far far less than a reverential gravity . . . 

So what we have here is another case where basic fun, to be had by acknowledging the foibles common to most of us, cannot be permitted in the atmosphere of societal brittleness we now inhabit. We have lost all sight of the nuanced dimensions of being human.

Baldwin could have rolled her eyes and continued the discussion, especially since, as noted above, she probably knew Travis digs boobs.

A call to reverse a real bad move from the previous era (diplomatic relations with Cuba)

LITD is with these guys:

Five GOP Senators—Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Richard Burr, John Cornyn and James Lankford—have written a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calling on him to kick all Cuban diplomats out of the country and, if necessary, close the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. From the Hill:

“Cuba’s neglect of its duty to protect our diplomats and their families cannot go unchallenged,” the letter reads…

“The safety of U.S. diplomatic personnel and their families posted overseas remains one of our high priorities and a shared responsibility of those nations that host U.S. diplomatic facilities,” the senators wrote. “We urge you to remind the Cuban government of its obligation and to demand that it take verifiable action to remove these threats to our personnel and their families.”

The letter comes in response to the 21 American diplomats (and five Canadians) who suffered hearing damage while staying in hotels in Havana. Last month, reports revealed the injuries to some of the diplomats was much more serious than originally believed with some Americans suffering traumatic brain injuries.

Of course, the Communist regime in Cuba denies being behind this, but what is a more plausible explanation?

This, folks, is why you don't ever reach out to rogue regimes. You squeeze them with sanctions and let them know you're prepared to address any funny business they pull with whatever is needed.

It's why you don't engage in Agreed Frameworks or Six-Way Talks with North Korea.

It's why you don't enter into JCPOAs with Iran.

It's why you don't ever even hint that the Taliban might have a place at the table in any lasting settlement for Afghanistan.

Cuba has done nothing to improve its human-rights record since the Most Equal Comrade's disastrous move last year.

It is allied with the other rogue regimes of the world.

And it's pretty clear that it's damaged the hearing and brains of American diplomats.

Time to cut the cord.

Another one over Japan

North Korea is clearly not impressed with the UN Security Council's latest package of sanctions:

The Japanese government has issued a warning to its citizens after North Korea fired a missile over the country. 

It was launched from the Sunan district of Pyongyang, South Korea's military said.

The missile has flown over Japan, Japan's NHK television said, but the government is warning citizens to avoid touching anything that looks like debris.

It landed 1,240 miles off the cape of Erimo in Hokkaido island at about 7.06am local time.  

South Korea's defence ministry said it probably travelled around 2,300 miles and reached a maximum altitude of 478 miles after being launched near Pyongyang's airport.

The North previously launched a ballistic missile from Sunan on August 29, which flew over Japan's Hokkaido island and landed in the Pacific. 

The South Korean and US militaries are analysing details of the launch, the South's Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.   

South Korea's presidential Blue House has called an urgent National Security Council meeting. 

The  North Korean slow-burn-since-1953 is the clearest example of the spiritual implications of foreign-policy theory and the real-world application thereof. If you don't recognize and appropriately address evil - directed at you - the situation will escalate to the point where all your options are grim.