The new Miss Universe is a Nicaraguan; that country's people are exuberant; the government, not so much

 A case of national cognitive dissonance if there ever was one:

Nicaragua’s increasingly isolated and repressive government thought it had scored a rare public-relations victory last week,” reported the Associated Press. Why did Daniel Ortega and his gang think that? Because Miss Nicaragua, Sheynnis Palacios, won the Miss Universe pageant. That is something for a dictatorship to take advantage of.

But there was a problem: Apparently, Señorita Palacios had taken part in pro-democracy demonstrations when a student.

In celebration of her victory in the pageant, Nicaraguans took to the streets, but not in the way the government would have wanted. As the AP said, they waved “the blue-and-white national flag, as opposed to Ortega’s red-and-black Sandinista banner.”

I’m glad that the Sandinistas have their own flag, their own symbol, leaving the national flag to other Nicaraguans.

Further from that AP report:

Vice President and First Lady Rosario Murillo lashed out Wednesday at opposition social-media sites — many run from exile — that celebrated Palacios’ win as a victory for the opposition.

“In these days of a new victory, we are seeing the evil, terrorist commentators making a clumsy and insulting attempt to turn what should be a beautiful and well-deserved moment of pride into destructive coup-mongering,” Murillo said.

Dictatorships want a nation to have no life outside the dictatorship itself. Remember the slogan of Mussolini and his gang: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

Félix Maradiaga is a Nicaraguan democracy leader and a former political prisoner. With other prisoners, he was released earlier this year. They were exiled to the United States, by plane. Let me quote from a piece I wrote about Maradiaga and his ordeal:

The plane was a charter from Omni Air Transport. When it took off, the prisoners — now ex-prisoners — sang the national anthem. And prayed. The moment was “bittersweet,” says Maradiaga. Sweet, because they were out of prison. Bitter, because it would be some time before they were allowed to return to their homeland. (If ever?)

Note something about the national anthem: It is illegal to sing it in Nicaragua. It is also illegal to raise the national flag. Why? Because the dictatorship sees both the anthem and the flag as symbols of the opposition.

Can't sing their actual national anthem or fly their actual national flag, because the Sandinistas want to supplant them with their own brand logo.

I found this noteworthy because the 1979 (highjacked) revolution in Nicaragua, and its impact on US policy toward Central America, was the issue that catalyzed my conversion experience. In the early 1980s, I was a clueless and aimless sort-of left-leaner. But I was taking an increasing interest in world affairs, and I became curious as to just what the Sandinistas were all about. So I read Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by Shirley Christian. 

Shortly thereafter, I had occasion to hear a presentation by a guy from our local "peace fellowship" who had just returned from a "fact-finding' mission to Nicaragua and El Salvador. He unfailingly toed the Reagan-is-supporting-the-bad-guys-in-the-region line. I squirmed in my seat, awaiting the chance to bring some clarity to the Q&A session.

When the presenter called on me, I said, "Mister, you're leaving out the important part of the story. The Sandinista National Liberation Front is a hardcore Marxist-Leninist organization, and has been since its late-1950s founding by Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borge. The same is true for the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador, which, fortunately, has not so far taken over that country."

Gasps and looks of disbelief went up from those seated around me. They couldn't handle the injection of some reality into the proceedings. 

Of course, in the ensuing years, Daniel Ortega lost his gamble that the FSLN could win a fair and Internationally monitored election. Violeta Chamorro, the matriarch of the family that published La Prensa, the newpaper that had opposed the Samoza dictatorship and then the Sandinista regime, became Nicaragua's president. The country's fortunes rose and fell over the years, and in 2007, Ortega again assumed the presidency. But since then, the true nature of his ideology has been too on-display for the peaceniks to make gestures of support toward. He's universally seen as being on the level of Venezuela's Maduro and the regime in Cuba. 

Anyway, congratulations to Ms. Palacios. May she inspire her fellow Nicaraguan citizens to hold steadfast in their resistance to the grim nonsense their government has imposed. 

 

Ginning up climate alarmism is all about tyranny; now they're coming after what's on your dinner plate

 The United Nations is utterly worthless when it comes to calming actual global hot spots, such as Ukraine or Israel. However, it does seem to have the resources for this:

The world’s most-developed nations will be told to curb their excessive appetite for meat as part of the first comprehensive plan to bring the global agrifood industry into line with the Paris climate agreement.

The global food systems’ road map to 1.5C is expected to be published by the United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organization during the COP28 summit next month. Nations that over-consume meat will be advised to limit their intake, while developing countries — where under-consumption of meat adds to a prevalent nutrition challenge — will need to improve their livestock farming, according to the FAO.

From farm to fork, food systems account for about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and much of that footprint is linked to livestock farming — a major source of methane, deforestation and biodiversity loss. Although non-binding, the FAO’s plan is expected to inform policy and investment decisions and give a push to the food industry’s climate transition which has lagged other sectors in commitments.

The guidance on meat is intended to send a clear message to governments. But politicians in richer nations typically shy away from policies aimed at influencing consumer behavior, especially where it involves cutting consumption of everyday items.

“Livestock is politically sensitive, but we need to deal with sensitive issues to solve the problem,” said Dhanush Dinesh, the founder of Clim-Eat, which works to accelerate climate action in food systems. “If we don’t tackle the livestock problem, we are not going to solve climate change. The key problem is overconsumption.”

Who's this "we" that has to "tackle the livestock problem"? Is I just the pointy-heads at your agency? Are you sure the world's cattle ranchers and pork producers are going to get on board? What's your plan for making this more effective than the feeble attempt to get China to stop building coal-fired power plants?

Here's a term to make one's hair stand on end: "road map [for a] shared direction of travel":

The plan will be rolled out in three parts over the next few years to eventually include country-specific recommendations.

The road map has the potential to offer a “shared direction of travel” for livestock companies and their investors, mirroring the role of the International Energy Agency’s net zero document for the energy sector, according to FAIRR Initiative, an investor network focused on intensive animal production.

“This road map is needed to bring clarity to both companies and investors so that they can plan for the transition,” said Sofía Condés, head of investor outreach at FAIRR. “The longer companies wait to act, the more drastic and potentially disruptive the transition.”

The FAO’s work is one of several food-focused announcements and pledges that are expected to come out of the COP28 summit in Dubai. While climate summits have tended to steer away from agrifood issues largely due to sensitivities over food security, this year’s organizers are trying to push through a number of initiatives outside the formal talks, said Clim-Eat’s Dinesh.

Anybody who has read LITD for any length of time knows I am most definitely not a MAGA type. That movement has employed the term "globalism" in a manipulative way to justify protectionist economic policy. But there is, on the other hand, a cadre of administrative dweebs who clearly hold the free market in disdain and are constantly devising ways to intrude into the personal lives and decision-making of people who live far from their ivory-tower offices and conference rooms. James Burnham first brought this to our attention in 1941 in The Managerial Revolution. 

My message to them is that when they start eyeing my grill, oven and dinner plate, it's getting real personal. 

This citizen of a sovereign nation - not of some kind of "global community" - says, resoundingly, "Like hell you will."

 

Mike Johnson is the most dangerous kind of Kool-Aid guzzler

 He seems to have had a working moral compass in 2015:

Years before he played a lead role in trying to help President Donald J. Trump stay in office after the 2020 election or defended him in two separate Senate impeachment trials, Speaker Mike Johnson bluntly asserted that Mr. Trump was unfit to serve and could be a danger as president.

“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook on Aug. 7, 2015, before he was elected to Congress and a day after the first Republican primary debate of the campaign cycle.

Challenged in the comments by someone defending Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson responded: “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief.”

Mr. Johnson, then a state lawmaker in Louisiana, also questioned what would happen if “he decided to bomb another head of state merely disrespecting him? I am only halfway kidding about this. I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be President.”

The comments came at a time when many Republicans who would later become loyalists of Mr. Trump were disparaging him and declaring him unfit to hold the nation’s highest office. Only later did they fall in line and serve as the first-line defenders of his most extreme words and actions.

But then both Johnson and the Very Stable Genius arrived in Washington and Johnson got to know the VSG personally and "grew to appreciate the person that he is and the qualities about him that made him he extraordinary president that he was."

And that conversion experience has led him to already make up his mind regarding who to endorse for 2024:

Speaker Mike Johnson said he's "all in" for former President Donald Trump's 2024 bid to return to the White House during a Tuesday morning appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

"I have endorsed him wholeheartedly," Johnson said, adding he was "one of the closest allies that President Trump had" in Congress during his first term as president.

This guy is the gatekeeper regarding what bills get consideration from the entire House, and he's third in line for the presidency.

This makes some judgement by two Christian intellectuals that I merely said was questionable in a post at Precipice the other day  look downright disturbing:

Currently up at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s website are two pieces that bother me a fair amount. EPPC has long been a think tank that has particularly won my admiration, but these essays are causing me misgivings.

Of the two essays in question, Patrick T. Brown’s does the far better job of taking into consideration what Never Trumpers find objectionable about the selection of Mike Johnson as House speaker:

The MAGA wing of American conservatism often seems more unified by its enemies than what policies they share. They dislike globalists, a left wing they see as obsessed with race and gender, and Republicans who seem to care more about mainstream approval than “fighting” for conservative victories.

But which battles are worth fighting for can sometimes be nebulous. The right flank of the GOP applies its populist impulses in, at times, opposite directions — some want to protect entitlements, others to reform them. Some seek to dismantle the administrative state, others to use it to advance conservative principles. Some Republicans still talk about balancing the budget or ending the Fed, while others want to see investments in industrial policy or pro-family tax incentives.

This fluid swirl of priorities made the intense drama over replacing former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy largely about internal party dynamics rather than any meaningful policy disagreements.

But that doesn’t mean Rep. Mike Johnson’s elevation as speaker won’t have a significant impact on the priorities of the Republican caucus going forward. No one can question his bona fides as a conservative’s conservative — which may help different factions of the party feel like their concerns are being heard and keep the thin Republican majority in the House together.

Johnson, who represents the Shreveport, Louisiana, area was a relative unknown before this week, even to political insiders. But he has long been an ally of social conservative groups who see their mission as protecting the unborn from abortion and strengthening traditional family values.

His official website proclaims an appreciation for “free markets and free trade agreements,” and hits familiar notes around cutting spending and regulations, reducing the scope of government and ensuring America “remain[s] the strongest military power on earth.”

If McCarthy was willing to wear any number of new skins to position himself as leader of the Republican conference, Johnson can’t hide his spots even if he wanted to — a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who stands up for traditional Republican principles even if others in the party wish the GOP would evolve past them.

Just last month, former President Donald Trump was calling Florida’s six-week abortion ban, signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a “terrible thing” and suggesting he’d be willing to compromise on an issue many conservatives see as one of life and death.

National Review’s Noah Rothman reacted to news of Johnson’s selection by lamenting Republicans had nominated a speaker who “opposes same-sex marriage” (as do about two-thirds of self-described conservatives). Buckets of ink have been spilled about the party’s increasingly complicated relationship with free trade and limited-government economic policy.

Johnson’s selection — at a time when the relationship between social and religious conservatives, establishment-wing Republicans and the MAGA movement had shown signs of fraying — may prove to have long-lasting ramifications. He has introduced bills seeking to prevent public schools from teaching children under 10 about sexuality and “gender ideology,” to prevent minors from being taken across state lines to procure an abortion without a parent’s consent and to require men to pay child support during pregnancy.

But when Brown gets around to describing the crux of what disturbs non-MAGA conservatives, he does so with kid gloves:

As many politicians have, Johnson has made some statements that strike many today as tone-deaf. Like many Republicans, he played footsie with conspiracy theorists after the 2020 election and his policy stances on cutting government spending may not be popular with the median voter.

“Played footsie”? Really? 

He was up to his ears in culpability for what happened on January 6, 2021:

Johnson, who was the GOP caucus vice chair and is an ally of Trump, led theamicus brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 2020 election results in four swing states Biden won: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called on the Supreme Court to delay the electoral vote in the four states so investigations on voting issues could continue amid Trump’s refusal to concede his loss. It alleged that the four states changed their voting rules without their legislatures’ express approval before the 2020 election.

Johnson at the time sought support from his GOP colleagues for the lawsuit, sending them an email with the subject line “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.”

“President Trump called me this morning to express his great appreciation for our effort to file an amicus brief in the Texas case on behalf of concerned Members of Congress,” Johnson wrote in the December 2020 email, which was obtained by NBC News.

“He specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join on to our brief,” he continued. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”

. . . As rioters were overtaking the Capitol on Jan. 6, Johnson told Fox News in an interview that there was "nothing unusual" about Republican lawmakers' objections to the Electoral College certification and that "there’ve been many objections over the years.”

“I’m here as one of the advocates on the Republican side, stating our concerns about this election and the allegations of fraud and the irregularity and all that," he said.

The other piece, by Andrew T. Walker, disturbed me even more. Its tone is along the lines of well-well-guess-all-the-secularists-will-have-to-hold-their-noses:

The American project ended on Wednesday with the ascendency of Congressman Mike Johnson to speaker of the House.

That’s what the political left is telling the American people.

The carnival barkers who warn of so-called “Christian Nationalism” have fired up their presses to do what they always do—find yet additional justifications to ridicule and exclude conservative Christians (mind you, from the same crowd championing “inclusivity”). All this is done under the banner of “analysis,” and the “analysts” function as America’s self-appointed defenders of democracy.

The label “Christian Nationalist” has been invoked over and over again in the last few days to describe Speaker Johnson. Bill Maher compared Speaker Johnson’s prayer life to the same “voices” allegedly running through the Maine mass shooter’s head. So, it’s clear that our elites are very obviously reasonable and cool-headed in their analysis. It’s as though the Bat Signal alert has flickered, churning out the same talking points whenever conservative Christianity is brought into political discourse.

My disappointment is profound. Walker is an EPPC scholar I’ve particularly admired. He’s always demonstrated a healthy set of priorities, as well as depth of faith formation. But I cannot understand why Johnson’s election denialism isn’t the glowing red factor of most importance for him. It seems to run counter to what I’ve come to know of Walker through his whole body of writings. 

Wanted: some Christians able to resist any kind of glossing-over of cult thrall, much less the cult thrall itself. 

It is so effing late in the day.  

 

Neither Biden nor Trump is acceptable to me

 Carlos Lozada, writing at the New York Times, makes about as compelling a case as could be made for why, even though it's incredibly unpopular, a 2024 rematch between the current president and the Very Stable Genius is just what we need:

Only a third of Americans view President Biden favorably, and two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters want to nominate someone else for the presidency (no one in particular, just someone else, please). Trump is the overwhelming favorite to become the Republican nominee for the third consecutive time, but his overall approval rating is lower than Biden’s. And while 60 percent of voters don’t want to put Trump back in the White House, 65 percent don’t want to hand Biden a second term, either. The one thing on which Americans seem to agree is that we find a Biden-Trump 2024 rematch entirely disagreeable.

This disdain may reflect the standard gripes about the candidates. (One is too old, the other too Trump.) But it also may signal an underlying reluctance to acknowledge the meaning of their standoff and the inescapability of our decision. A contest between Biden and Trump would compel Americans to either reaffirm or discard basic democratic and governing principles. More so than any other pairing, Biden versus Trump forces us to decide, or at least to clarify, who we think we are and what we strive to be.

The VSG's Claremont, New Hampshire speech yesterday reinforced this assertion by Lozada:

Trump is running as an overtly authoritarian candidate — the illusion of pivots, of adults in the room, of a man molded by the office, is long gone. He is dismissive of the law, except when he can harness it for his benefit; of open expression, except when it fawns all over him; and of free elections, except when they produce victories he likes. He has called for the “termination” of the Constitution based on his persistent claims of 2020 electoral fraud, and according to The Washington Post, in a new term he would use the Justice Department as an instrument of vengeance against political opponents. We know who Trump is and what he offers.

But he offers weak tea when he frames his reasoning for why Biden is a foil to that:

Biden’s case to the electorate — for 2020, 2022 and 2024 — has been premised on the preservation of American democratic traditions. In the video announcing his 2020 campaign, he asserted that “our very democracy” was at stake in the race against Trump. In a speech two months before the midterm vote last year, he asserted that Trump and his allies “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundation of our Republic.” And the video kicking off his 2024 re-election bid featured multiple scenes of the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “The question we are facing,” Biden said, “is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom.” That is our choice in 2024.

Why do I say that? After all, what happened on 1/6/21 was indeed a major assault in American democracy.

But consider the issue, along with preserving democracy, on which Biden polls better than Trump:

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll that shows Trump leading Biden in five battleground states also asked registered voters which candidate they trust on key questions. Trump won on the economy, immigration and national security; Biden received higher marks on just two issues. The first was abortion, a core priority among Democratic voters and one that proved powerful in last year’s midterms and the off-year elections and ballot initiatives last Tuesday in states like Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia.

My view on abortion boils down to this: If it's a diabolical act, a criminal act warranting the most severe punishment, and a sin against God for me to pop a hole in your skull and vacuum your brains out, why is it any less so if you're not born yet?

As I put it in my latest piece at Precipice, 

The division between those who are pro-life and those who assert the necessity of legalized abortion hinges on the notion of a human soul, and whether one is present from the moment of conception. That’s why the rejoinder to the right-to-make-my-own-decisions-about-my-body argument is to assert that more than one body - and hence more than one soul - is involved when a woman is pregnant.

I’ve never been demonstrative about my own pro-life position, never attended any rallies or dinners or engaged any elected officials about the matter. It may not be the most laudable way to be pro-life, but I’ve reacted to the state of affairs over the last fifty-plus years by being sad. Sad that pro-choicers want to put worst-case scenarios - rape, incest and fathers unwilling to be fathers - first. What a hard and cold way to view human development. What would it take to uphold the ideal of family, that most basic of social units, where, when it’s in a healthy condition, is the environment in which we learn about how to lovingly interact with other people? What about venerating nurturing, guidance, encouragement, team spirit, humor, and generosity?

There seems something bitter at the core of a pro-choice position. Its inclination is to respond to what I’m saying in the above paragraph with, “Yeah, show me an actual family that unfailingly venerates those things, that sustains the happiness of everyone in it, that isn’t fraught with underlying issues.”

If you want to see the playing-out of that particular argument, click the link.

But here I bring up abortion because it's only one element of why I can't vote for Biden, or, more broadly, for Democrats.

Abortion is really a sub-category of identity politics militancy. It sets women up, not as roughly half of the human species, but as an oppressed demographic - alongside people who happen to be black, people with unorthodox sexual attractions, and people who have some notion that they'd find fulfillment in mutilating their crotches and messing with their God-given hormonal balance. 

And then there's climate alarmism. Biden is a full-throated champion of having the federal government interfere in the millions of freely-entered-into agreements on the value of millions of goods and services that take place every day, in the name of weaning society off fossil fuels, which are cheap, dense and readily available, compared to any the play-like energy forms our overlords would impose on us. 

And he endorses wealth redistribution as the cudgel by which he'd bring this agenda to fruition. 

James Madison, the architect of our Constitution, was quite clear on this point. It is not within the proper purview of government to influence people's choices on energy forms, or to mandate preferences in hiring or college admission based on demographics, or to change the thousands-of-years-old definition of marriage, or indulge anyone's insistence on being regarded as the gender opposite what he or she obviously is.

It is wrong to take Citizen A's money to address the particular needs or wants of Citizen B.

Indeed, we ought to insist that government puke all over itself to justify taking the first red cent from any of us, ever. 

So I cannot accept a choice between a cult leader who makes it clear he'll try to jail anyone who is not 100 recent loyal to him, and a candidate who has been steeped all his life in the ever-more-collectivist tilt of the Democrat party.

I have no problem with staying home next May and nest November. 

I will not have the eternal record book showing that I contributed to the final shattering of this country, even if that's inevitable.