It seems reality hews more closely to the way you always thought it was than to the way the nature-distortion jackboots demanded you see it

It looks like human nature is about what you'd always assumed:

A major new report, published today in the journal The New Atlantis, challenges the leading narratives that the media has pushed regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.

Co-authored by two of the nation’s leading scholars on mental health and sexuality, the 143-page report discusses over 200 peer-reviewed studies in the biological, psychological, and social sciences, painstakingly documenting what scientific research shows and does not show about sexuality and gender.

The major takeaway, as the editor of the journal explains, is that “some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence.”

Here are four of the report’s most important conclusions:

The belief that sexual orientation is an innate, biologically fixed human property—that people are ‘born that way’—is not supported by scientific evidence.

Likewise, the belief that gender identity is an innate, fixed human property independent of biological sex—so that a person might be a ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’—is not supported by scientific evidence.

Only a minority of children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood. There is no evidence that all such children should be encouraged to become transgender, much less subjected to hormone treatments or surgery.

Non-heterosexual and transgender people have higher rates of mental health problems (anxiety, depression, suicide), as well as behavioral and social problems (substance abuse, intimate partner violence), than the general population. Discrimination alone does not account for the entire disparity.

The report, “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences,” is co-authored by Dr. Lawrence Mayer and Dr. Paul McHugh. Mayer is a scholar-in-residence in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University.
McHugh, whom the editor of The New Atlantis describes as “arguably the most important American psychiatrist of the last half-century,” is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was for 25 years the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was during his tenure as psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins that he put an end to sex reassignment surgerythere, after a study launched at Hopkins revealed that it didn’t have the benefits for which doctors and patients had long hoped.
Implications for PolicyThe report focuses exclusively on what scientific research shows and does not show. But this science can have implications for public policy.
The report reviews rigorous research showing that ‘only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.’
Take, for example, our nation’s recent debates over transgender policies in schools. One of the consistent themes of the report is that science does not support the claim that “gender identity” is a fixed property independent of biological sex, but rather that a combination of biological, environmental, and experiential factors likely shape how individuals experience and express themselves when it comes to sex and gender.
The report also discusses the reality of neuroplasticity: that all of our brains can and do change throughout our lives (especially, but not only, in childhood) in response to our behavior and experiences. These changes in the brain can, in turn, influence future behavior.
This provides more reason for concern over the Obama administration’s recent transgender school policies. Beyond the privacy and safety concerns, there is thus also the potential that such policies will result in prolonged identification as transgender for students who otherwise would have naturally grown out of it.

The report reviews rigorous research showing that “only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.” Policymakers should be concerned with how misguided school policies might encourage students to identify as girls when they are boys, and vice versa, and might result in prolonged difficulties. As the report notes, “There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender.”

Beyond school policies, the report raises concerns about proposed medical intervention in children. Mayer and McHugh write: “We are disturbed and alarmed by the severity and irreversibility of some interventions being publicly discussed and employed for children.”
They continue: “We are concerned by the increasing tendency toward encouraging children with gender identity issues to transition to their preferred gender through medical and then surgical procedures.” But as they note, “There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents.”

So, for starters, can we immediately cease all coddling of these weird impulses in our military, our intelligence agencies, and our State Department?

 

 

Saturday roundup

This is the essence of the aloofness, skewed priorities and federal-level heavy-handedness with which the Most Equal Comrade and his Justice Department tyrannize post-America:

President Obama has refused so far to survey the Louisiana flood disaster, but he did let state and local officials know that he’s watching to make sure they don’t engage in racial discrimination.

In a 16-page guidance issued Tuesday, the Obama administration, led by the Justice Department, warned Louisiana recipients of federal disaster assistance against engaging in “unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin (including limited English proficiency).”

The guidance’s frameworks “highlight the importance of complying with nondiscrimination requirements of civil rights statutes, addressing the needs of the whole community, and ensuring equal opportunity to access recovery efforts.”

Needless to say, some Louisiana residents were offended, including the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher, who took umbrage at receiving an anti-discrimination lecture from Washington, D.C., as locals struggle to rescue, house and feed their neighbors.

“[E]verywhere you look you can find black folks and white folks loving on each other, helping each other through this crisis,” Mr. Dreher said in a Thursday post.

He referred to the guidance as a “long bureaucratic memo” issued by the “Department of Justice and many other agencies of the executive branch overseen by He Who Cannot Be Troubled to Leave Martha’s Vineyard.”

Charles Krauthammer at NRO on how theMEC's agenda of planned decline has create a vacuum that Russia is only too glad to fill:

his week Russian bombers flew out of Iranian air bases to attack rebel positions in Syria. The State Department pretended not to be surprised. It should be. It should be alarmed. Iran’s intensely nationalistic revolutionary regime had never permitted foreign forces to operate from its soil. Until now. The reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace.

Where for 40 years the U.S.–Egypt alliance anchored the region, a Russia–Iran condominium is now dictating events. That’s what you get after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That’s what results from the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq, and utter U.S. immobility on Syria. 

He goes on to enumerate other fronts on which Russia is showing the world who's picking up the chalk and chairing the meeting, such as the eight staging areas along the Ukraine border where Russia has amassed tanks, artillery and troops, as well as the joint naval exercises with China in the South China Sea.

Speaking of Russia, don't think that, just because Manafort has resigned as Squirrel-Hair's campaign manager, S-H's Russia issues are all resolved:

Navy Senior Chief Michael Nance was on MSNBC discussing the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, and he believes there is another bomb yet to drop.

Nance, as well as many in the intelligence community, believe it is quite possible that Russian intelligence agent(s) were embedded within the Trump campaign. This goes along with the theory that many believe to be true; Russia is seeking to influence the Presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, their preferred candidate. Trump has repeatedly called for better ties with Russia, even at the cost of abandoning our NATO allies.

Manafort was let go from the Trump campaign presumedly to save face after evidence began to surface of his ties with Russia, but it is concerning that the Trump campaign didn't actually care about Manafort's ties until there was actual evidence. Now this isn't some cold war fiction novel, and there is probably not a horde of Russian spies embedded within Trump's campaign, but these ties to Russia could be deeper than we thought before. Hopefully the American people see this as alarming, as Russia is one of the last countries on Earth that we want to be aligning with.

Not if you listen to Squirrel-Hair.

The Stupid Party is finally looking at a strategy for legislative races in the event of the nearly inevitable:

Republicans, worried about preserving their House and Senate majorities in the face of fierce headwinds, are accelerating their plans to distance themselves from Donald Trump – and may soon concede, if only implicitly, his defeat.

Party strategists are mapping out blueprints for down-ballot candidates, in TV ads and on the campaign trail, to present themselves as checks on a Hillary Clinton presidency. It’s an approach that would essentially admit a Trump loss. In interviews, nearly one dozen Republican operatives said they had begun poll-testing the idea – which one labeled a “break glass in case of emergency” strategy - to gauge how the public would react to it.

Do you think Assad gives a diddly about post-America's support for the Kurds?

Syrian regime jets pounded US-backed Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria for a second day, even after the US-led coalition scrambled jets to protect its military advisers working on the ground.

In another escalation of Syria's bloody conflict, warplanes from President Bashar al-Assad's regime were bombarding the city of Hasakeh -- targeting Kurdish forces that for months have worked closely with coalition military advisers helping local fighters combat the Islamic State group.

On Thursday, the United States sent fighter jets to head off air strikes conducted by regime planes and to protect coalition advisers, but the Syrian planes had left by the time they arrived.

I wonder if Hillionaire still thinks of Assad as a "stabilizing force."

I din't really watch any of the Olympics. Generally speaking, my interest in them is passing at best. But what a sad capper the Ryan Locate affair is on a summer Olympics characterized by an opening ceremony that emphasized "climate change" hooey, raw sewage in the swimming water, severed body parts washing up on the beach, and Arab athletes refusing to compete against Israelis. That 32-year-old man-boy needs a spanking.




 

The Squirrel-Hair campaign: a case study in chaos

First, the breaking news: Paul Manafort is resigning as campaign chair.

Now, let's check out what Ben Shapiro has to say about Steve Bannon:

Bannon is a volatile figure, as I can attest from having known him for years — I was editor-at-large at Breitbart from 2012 to March 2016, and worked as a member of the top editorial team until late 2013. There are few people who have dealt with him who haven't been on the receiving end of a fully blue tirade over some nearly meaningless issue. He fancies himself a media Svengali, but has utilized celebrity politicians and pundits to push forward his own career, rather than vice versa. 

He's ambitious, he's mean as hell and he's willing to run roughshod over anyone to achieve his agenda.

Some of that might be a positive in a campaign honcho. Politics is bloodsport, and Bannon knows that — he was always fond of calling his political allies "honey badgers," as in the YouTube video that proclaims "honey badgers don't give a s---."

But when it comes to advising politicians, Bannon isn't likely to steer Trump toward victory.

That's because Bannon has made his bones riding the latest political horse until the horse collapses beneath him, then leaping to the next one.

Bannon's career in right-wing politics began to gain steam after he hooked up with former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and made a documentary touting the Tea Party; he then parlayed that into a new documentary with former GOP Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, whom he pressed forward as a legitimate political contender up until the point she collapsed into self-parody; he used the Palin connection to make friends in the highest level of the conservative movement; he offered free office space to Andrew Breitbart, then made a documentary starring Breitbart about the Occupy Wall Street movement; when Breitbart died, Breitbart's business partner offered Bannon the chairmanship of the company; he then used Breitbart as a poker chip to ingratiate himself with the Trump campaign.

There is no evidence that at any point, Bannon was a voice of moderation, or that he ever provided well-aimed critiques aimed at bettering those with whom he worked.

Bannon's a career enabler who has spent enormous quantities of time and energy devoted to ingratiating himself with major figures, then playing off them for his own benefit.

So, what's in it for Bannon? Well, if Trump wins, he's a genius: the man who saved the Trump campaign from itself, the master political whisperer. He'd presumably be White House chief of staff, and those he considers enemies could begin preparing their annual IRS audits.

If Trump loses, Bannon can always play the same game he's played before: convincing politicians with whom he works that he was on their side, and that they can work together. It's no coincidence that The New York Times reported Wednesday that Trump has "quietly explored becoming involved with a media holding."

What does Trump get out of all of this? He gets the feeling of comfort, of approval. As Wisconsin radio host Charlie Sykes put it, "Trump's campaign has now entered the Hospice Phase. He knows he's dying and wants to surround himself with his loved ones. #BreitbartCEO."

Ouch.

But, you see, Squirrel-Hair, being the seriousness-challenged sort that he is, isn't going to get too worked up about his political death:

There's sad truth to that: Trump wants to go out on his own terms. And those terms will be fully Trumpian. Which means that Trump will get Trumpier. The "let Trump be Trump" angle always attracted Trump, since he's a narcissist. Now he'll get to play out his fantasies with Bannon screaming "that's genius!" in his ear every few hours.

Never mind what happens to the Republican Senate and House. This campaign has been Trump's plaything, and he'll play with it until the batteries go dead.

I may try to tune in to Laura's daily informercial for a few minutes just to see how she's spinning the latest development.

I know this: she and Sean and Michael Walsh look more foolish by the minute with their Never-Trumpers-are-moral-cowards pose.

Nope. Squirrel-Hair is not my guy. Never was, never will be.

 

A square look at the most glaring manifestation of post-America's cultural rot

Per the post immediately underneath this one, the Most Equal Comrade and his junta are driven by some very mad notions (the post below has to do with their nonchalance about major post-American cities getting incinerated), but this one may top anything so far.

The federal government of post-America no longer recognizes a universe in which human beings come in two distinct genders.

President Barack Obama’s deputies will insert a rule in federal regulations on Friday to prevent federal facilities from operating single-sex bathrooms.

The rule in the “Federal Register” of regulations will open up thousands of bathrooms in federally operated buildings to employees and visitors who claim on any given day to be “transgender” members of the opposite sex.

Now, Target, being a private organization with a keen interest in making a profit, has listened to the public, which responded to this kind of wackiness with an uproar that sent its stock price into a tailspin, has decided to split the difference and "offer more options":

Target thinks it has a solution – they’re adding an extra bathroom to most of its stores.

Target(TGT)CFO Cathy Smith said Wednesday that the company has heard objections to the transgender bathroom policy from some customers, though she said other customers had voiced support. In response, Target has decided to expand its use of a third, single-toilet bathroom at all of its stores, which can be locked by users.

That bathroom can be used by any customer who needs some privacy, including parents with small children of a different gender or those who are uncomfortable with a public bathroom in which a transgender person is allowed. 

Most of Target’s stores already have this single occupancy restroom, but all will be equipped with one by 2017. The project is set to cost about $20 million.

Is an extra, supposedly private bathroom really going to appease concerned parents who are fed up with Target’s social agenda? 

All of this, of course, sweeps under the rug the basic fact that the idea of being able to determine one's own "gender identity" is a fantasy and a tragic one at that:

gatekeeping has been replaced by cheerleading. In the U.K., where records are easier to obtain, clinics are facing an explosion in demand for “gender-identity treatment.” As the Guardian reports: “Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal increases in the number of referrals to all of the UK’s 14 gender identity clinics (GICs) in recent years, with a number of clinics experiencing increases of several hundred percent.”

At one major clinic, referrals quadrupled. At another, they increased 20-fold in ten years. At still another, referrals increased a jaw-dropping 28-fold in eight years. Clinics for children were seeing staggering annual increases: “The Tavistock clinic, the only centre for children and adolescents in England, has seen referral increases of about 50% a year since 2010–11. In the past year it has had an unexpected and unprecedented increase of 100%, up from 697 to 1,398 referrals.” The Guardian — because it’s the Guardian — laments that demand for gender-identity treatment is outstripping the available supply of practitioners, noting that the resulting shortfall is “leaving vulnerable people waiting years for a specialist appointment.”

Here in the United States, the evidence is more anecdotal, but the anecdotes are disturbing. Rod Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative has become something of a clearinghouse for concerns from anguished parents, many of whom note that entire peer groups seem determined to transition together. This letter was particularly poignant: 

As a parent living the nightmare of having a teen who suddenly announces she’s transgender, I can tell you there are NO doctors who will do anything but agree. There is NO science behind this. There is NO way to medically “diagnose” her. Her therapist knows that she is not transgender but fears there’s no way we can stop her. Three of her closest friends have already had full transition, paid for by their parents, so it is difficult for her to understand why we won’t do the same. It is no different than having your child captured by a cult, only this time the cult is a societal bandwagon which wants to do permanent physical harm to her perfectly healthy female body, all in the name of “love”. 

Parents have no idea how to respond, especially when doctors permit no dissent. Here’s another letter to Dreher: 

My own daughter professes to be a boy. It is a nightmare. It came out of nowhere at age 15 — this is not a case of a girl who always wanted to be a boy, or always acted like a boy. This is a girl who was proud to be a girl until she developed physically and boys and men started treating her like a piece of meat and a second class citizen. The nightmare is that doctors and therapists are not allowed to question why she wants to be a boy. The “cult of trans” dictates that her word must be taken or they can lose their professional standing. SO they are ready to prescribe testosterone shots and a double mastectomy despite the fact that she is a minor. These physical “medical treatments” for her psychological problem are permanent and barbaric. It is against “ethics” for professionals to provide any other treatment. It is a mother’s nightmare. 

To read sites like Transgender Trend (a mainly U.K.-based site that is “concerned about the current trend to diagnose “gender non-conforming” children as transgender) or 4thWaveNow (a blog launched by a “mother of a teenage girl who suddenly announced she was a ‘trans man’ after a few weeks of total immersion in YouTube transition vlogs”) is to go through the looking-glass — where troubled teens in groups will announce their intention to transition, typically with the enthusiastic (and smug) support of school guidance counselors and other educational professionals.

4thWaveNow is launching its own survey of what it calls “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” seeking input from parents whose children “experienced sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoria beginning between the ages of 10 and 21.” 

Naturally, the Left is furious. Nothing and no one can be permitted to contradict the narrative. Indeed, some on the Left respond to the women in the videos above by claiming that they’re still actually “trans.” To accomplish this trick, they do what the Left so often does — redefine common terms. To prominent trans journalist Julia Serano, “transgender” means people who “defy societal expectations regarding gender.”

But this makes no sense. By that definition, every female but Barbie herself is transgender because no girl has a personality that conforms in all ways to classical, stereotypical femininity. By that definition, Barbie’s boyfriend Ken is thoroughly transgender. What’s “manly” about him?

As I have said before, if you indulged yourself in a time-machine fantasy and brought back some friend of yours - or maybe a parent, sibling or teacher - from, not even fifty years ago, which indeed makes for a bracing exercise, but a mere ten years ago, and show that person 2016 in all its grotesqueness, that person would think you were presenting some kind of fictional vision. You might well be regarded as utterly mad.

I can't think of a front on which the death rattle of Western civilization is more on display than that having to do with the obliteration of basic human nature.

Our universities, our corporations, our municipal governments, our nonprofit civic organizations, are all going to open their doors tomorrow morning. And the day after that.

But the day is coming when they will have been subsumed into the tangled mass of supposedly human life forms piled high, slithering and groping for basic gratifications, humping and gobbling, much like what Moses found when he came down from Mount Sinai and became so enraged that he dashed the tablets inscribed with the basic moral instructions for human living to the ground.

But there isn't likely to be any Moses, no one who will be summoned back to the mountaintop to get a second copy.

The Most Equal Comrade and his minions feel emboldened to be straight up about his planned-decline agenda in his final months

For example:

The State Department admitted Thursday that the US would not hand over $400 million in cash to Iran until it released four American hostages — two weeks after President Obama insisted the payment was not a “ransom.”

State Department spokesman John Kirby was asked at Thursday’s press briefing: “In basic English, you’re saying you wouldn’t give them $400 million in cash until the prisoners were released, correct?”

“That’s correct,” Kirby replied.

In an Aug. 4 press conference, President Obama said the opposite.
“We do not pay ransom. We didn’t here, and we won’t in the future,” the president told reporters, speaking of the Jan. 17 payment and hostage release.

Families “know we have a policy that we don’t pay ransom. And the notion that we would somehow start now, in this high-profile way, and announce it to the world, even as we’re looking in the faces of other hostage families whose loved ones are being held hostage, and saying to them ‘We don’t pay ransom,’ defies logic,” Obama added at the time.

He lectured the press for even raising the issue.

“It’s been interesting to watch this story surface. Some of you may recall, we announced these payments in January. Many months ago. There wasn’t a secret. We announced them to all of you. [Press secretary Josh Earnest] did a briefing on them. This wasn’t some nefarious deal,” the president said. “It wasn’t a secret. We were completely open with everybody about it and it is interesting to me how suddenly this became a story again.”

The US claims the money — delivered in cash stacked aboard an unmarked cargo plane — was part of a settlement of a longstanding dispute with the Iranian regime over a never-completed arms deal from the 1970s.
Kirby continued to maintain Thursday that “the two negotiations were separate,” referring to the hostage release and arms deal.

This world is awash in adversaries and enemies of post-America. Is there any doubt that each and every one of them is learning the lesson that is out there for them to learn from this episode? Kick and abuse post-America and regard it with contempt. The hilariously silly nomenklatura ruling it is so obsessed with its unicorns-and-rainbows vision of an "international order" and so satisfied with itself as guardian of that vision that history has never provided those of us interested in raw domination with an easier mark.

 

Wednesday round-up

Kevin Williamson, in a NRO piece about the Most Equal Comrade's latest imposition of fuel-efficiency standards on the trucking industry, points up the suffocating paternalism at the core of the Freedom-Hater mindset, as well as the economic ignorance upon which it is proudly predicated:

President Obama: I demand you save yourselves billions of dollars! 

Truckers: Oh, we’d never thought of that! Thanks, and blessings be upon you!

The answer, of course, is that improving fuel efficiency comes at a price. You don’t just throw away your old tractor-trailers and buy new ones: The current, slightly less-fuel-efficient models cost around $200,000 a copy and there are about 2 million of them in service, along with another 13.5 million commercial trucks in other configurations. Brady Dennis of the Washington Post reports that the new fuel-efficiency standards will add about $14,000 to the price of a big rig — or $28 billion, more than a third of the commercial-trucking industry’s annual revenue and many times more than its annual profit. 

Michelle Malkin at Townhall says that, in hiring thug / corruptocrat / champion of using climate hooey as a tool for tyranny Ken Salazar to manage her transition team, she is connecting with a kindred spirit.

And Squirrel-Hair has just made drooling sycophant and Breitbart poohbah Steven Bannon his campaign manager.

And what force stoked ongoing rioting in Milwaukee after the first night?

A tiny faction of old, radical communist revolutionaries is helping to lead and organize the violence which has engulfed Milwaukee in the wake of the police shooting death of a black man who, police say, raised a semiautomatic handgun at pursuing officers.

The fringe-left group is the Chicago chapter of the Revolutionary Communist Party — a Maoist outfit which advocates violent insurgency. Its membership is mostly white.

Revolutionary Communist Party members managed to turn a generally peaceful Sunday evening in Milwaukee into another night of violence by organizing a several-blocks-long march, Milwaukee police chief Ed Flynn told the Associated Press.

The radical communists “showed up, and actually they’re the ones who started to cause problems,” Flynn said at a Monday press conference.

And Russia - yeah, the Russia that is also using an Iranian airbase for staging sorties into Syria - smells Western weakness and is readying its next bite into Ukraine:

The Pentagon has identified eight staging areas in Russia where large numbers of military forces appear to be preparing for incursions into Ukraine, according to U.S. defense officials.

As many as 40,000 Russian troops, including tanks, armored vehicles, and air force units, are now arrayed along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.

Additionally, large numbers of Russian military forces will conduct exercises in the coming days that Pentagon officials say could be used as cover for an attack on Ukraine.

“Russian units will likely practice reinforcing the [Crimean] peninsula through such activities as amphibious landings and air defense exercises, and this may involve the change out of equipment and long convoys of military vehicles,” one defense official said.

The military exercises are an ominous sign. Similar large-scale Russian exercises were conducted near Ukraine a month before Moscow carried out the covert military operation to take over the strategic Black Sea peninsula in March 2014.

Navy Capt. Danny Hernandez, a spokesman for the U.S. European Command, told the Washington Free Beacon that the upcoming Russian exercises are being closely monitored.

“We are extremely concerned about the increased tensions near the administrative boundary between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine,” Hernandez said. “We urge both sides to avoid provocative steps or rhetoric that could escalate the situation.”

Russian forces do not appear to be building up inside the occupied Crimean Peninsula along the border with Ukraine, he said.

However, over the past several months large numbers of Russian troops and tanks have been moving into eight bases stretching from Yelnya, near Smolensk and northeast of Ukraine, southward through Rostov—a city located very close to eastern Ukraine.

And Squirrel-Hair wants closer relations with this bunch.

Why the Pub squandering of its chance to nominate an actual conservative is so tragic

Any of the others in the original contenders in the deep bench of a year ago could have beaten this despised hag:

In the new NBC/Survey Monkey poll, 59 percent of people regard her unfavorably. When presented with various positive descriptions of her, 52 percent of people opt instead for “none of the above.” Only 12 percent of Democrats call her honest and trustworthy. And yet she leads by 9.

And the last contender standing was the best of all.

Stupid is going to lose to evil.

John Yoo and Jeremy Rabkin: don't fall for the SCOTUS-justices argument

Two top-notch legal scholars with their heads on straight put that ploy to rest:

As conservative law professors, we share the concern that a Hillary Clinton victory would halt decades of efforts to restore an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.  Since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February, the court has been divided between four very liberal justices and four conservatives (some more than others).  Central constitutional concerns, including religious freedom, voting rights, property rights, the death penalty and gun control are  up for grabs, possibly turning on the views of the next new justice.

Trump himself has been gloating over the leverage the situation sets up.  “They have no choice,” he said on the stump in Virginia not long ago.  “Even if you can’t stand Donald Trump, you think Donald Trump is the worst, you’re going to vote for me.  You know why?  Justices of the Supreme Court.”

But the Supreme Court is not enough. Our nation confronts a revanchist Russia; a bellicose, expansionist China; terrorism in Europe; and civil war in the Middle East — in short, a world reeling at  the edge of chaos. The president's first responsibilities are to maintain national security, advance our national interests in foreign affairs and provide direction for the military. As Alexander Hamilton observed, the framers of the Constitution vested the executive power in one person, the president, to ensure that the United States could conduct its foreign relations with “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.”
Faced with mounting international instability, Trump’s answer is to promise an unpredictable and unreliable America.  He has proposed breaking U.S. commitments to NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, closing our military bases in Japan and South Korea, repudiating security guarantees to NATO allies, pulling out of the Middle East, and ceding Eastern Europe to Russia and East Asia to China.  A Trump presidency invites a cascade of global crises.  Constitutional order will not thrive at home in a world beset by threats and disorder.

While he is shaking up the world, Trump will also nominate conservatives to the federal courts — or so he says.  But no one should rely on his vague promises.  He has already flip-flopped on numerous core issues, such as the minimum wage, tax rates and entitlement reform.  Even when he announced his list of judges in May, Trump would not be pinned down. 

They conclude their argument by pointing out that supposedly reliable justices sometimes surprise us unpleasantly.

Sorry, Laura and Sean, we're still not buyin' what you're sellin'.

That's major insurer number three

Aetna joins Humana and United Health in pulling out of most "A"CA exchanges.

There is no clearer example of the contempt with which the overlords regard the cattle-masses in post-America. While the Most Equal Comrade was peddling his blatant falsehoods about keeping your plan and keeping your doctor and premiums not going up, the architect of the damn thing was talking about "the stupidity of the American voter" and letting loose with this bit of candor:

"If you had a law that made it explicit that healthy people are going to pay in and sick people are going to get subsidies, it would not have passed."

This is what they think of you.

This isn't failure. Not by the overlords' standards. The collapse of economic freedom is happening right on schedule.

Monday roundup

"Science" advisors to the EPA don't like that agency's fracking report, and want it to keep trying to prove that the practice is some kind of sin:

The draft report on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) from the EPA is nearing the end of its more than five year journey and the findings were a major blow to the green energy crowd. Try as they might, there simply was no evidence of systemic contamination to ground water or other resources and the report essentially gives the practice a qualified thumbs up. That didn’t sit well with the major environmentalist donors to the Democrats, so plans have been in the works to sabotage the report. That showed up this week when the ad hoc panel of science advisors to the EPA released their own rebuttal, claiming that the wording of the report isn’t up to par. (Washington Post)

Science advisers to the Environmental Protection Agency Thursday challenged an already controversial government report on whether thousands of oil and gas wells that rely on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” systemically pollute drinking water across the nation.

That EPA draft report, many years in the making and still not finalized, had concluded, “We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States,” adding that while there had been isolated problems, those were “small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells.”…

But in a statement sure to prolong the already multiyear scientific debate on fracking and its influence on water, the 30-member advisory panel on Thursday concluded the agency’s report was “comprehensive but lacking in several critical areas.”

It recommended that the report be revised to include “quantitative analysis that supports its conclusion” — if, indeed, this central conclusion can be defended.

This board isn’t even arguing that they have evidence to the contrary. (Which would have been a neat trick since such “evidence” doesn’t appear to exist.) They simply don’t like the positive nature of the wording and would like to see even more test results than have already been submitted. They’re not saying that they have proof that fracking is dangerous… they’re just saying that the industry hasn’t proven that it isn’t.

The WSJ editorial saying Pubs should drop Squirrel-Hair if he can't make good on his promised ability to instantly become someone besides who he's always been ('"presidential," as he put it ti Sean Hannity) is behind a paywall, but there's a lot of discussion about it all over the punditsphere.  NRO mentions it in a piece about the pressure on Reince Preibus to quit pouring good money after bad. More quotes from it at this Daily Caller piece.

Second night of "unrest" in Milwaukee.

Bracing John Schindler piece on Russia's impact on the post-American election:

The news keeps getting worse. Alarming evidence of how deep the Kremlin’s got its tentacles in Washington mounts by the day. Large-scale hacking by Russian cyber-warriors didn’t just hit the Democratic National Committee, it stole emails from a wide array of top power-players, including the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO’s military boss.

Systematic Russian cyber-attacks on the DNC and related political targets in Washington were detected over a year ago by the National Security Agency, which monitors foreign cyber shenanigans, but the highly classified nature of this intelligence made it difficult to alert Congress about Kremlin espionage.

That the Russians stood behind this operation, using well-known hacking cut-outs, was established early by NSA. “It was the Kremlin, we had them cold,” explained an NSA official with direct knowledge of the case: “Moscow didn’t care we knew, they were unusually brazen.”

Although Democrats were the main focus of this espionage effort, prominent Republicans got hit too. Sen. John McCain was a target of the Russians, which is no surprise given his reputation as a hardliner on Kremlin matters. When President George W. Bush stated that he looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy…I was able to get a sense of his soul,” McCain famously retorted, “I looked in Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters—a K, a G, and a B.”

Under President Putin, Moscow again refers to United States as their Main Adversary, just as the KGB did during the last Cold War, and there can’t be many American politicians that Putin and his Kremlin loathe more than straight-talking John McCain.

To be clear, there’s nothing strange about a country spying on its adversaries. Everybody spies, and here the Russians are merely doing what any state would do—and what NSA does to the Russians and others right now. Espionage, human or electronic, is a normal aspect of the SpyWar that’s technically illegal but everybody participates in.

What the Russians are now engaged in, though, is something different and more serious. The Kremlin is weaponizing stolen information for political effect. This is something like what American spies term covert action, which includes the use of propaganda for political advantage over foreign adversaries.

Important Jed Babbin piece at The American Spectator entitled "Politicized Intelligence: Telling the Boss What He Wants to Hear". It's going on now, but don't look to either of the main-party presidential candidates to fix it next year:

It’s unlikely that Donald Trump would fix this if he were elected because he has evidenced no interest in these matters. And, if the past is prologue, we can predict that Hillary Clinton will follow her husband’s example.

Her husband's example? I thought the subject at hand was recent book-cooking.

Well, it was happening under the last Freedom-Hater administration as well:

On April 28, 1998 President Bill Clinton dropped in on a meeting National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was having with supporters of legislation that would have applied sanctions to nations that limited religious freedom. Clinton told the group:

“What always happens if you have automatic sanctions legislation is it puts enormous pressure on whoever is in the executive branch to fudge an evaluation of the facts of what is going on. And that’s not what you want. What you want is to leave the president some flexibility, including the ability to impose sanctions, some flexibility with a range of appropriate reactions.” [Emphasis added.]

Clinton didn’t want the facts. He admitted that he’d change them to suit his agenda. He clearly preferred not to get intelligence information that wouldn’t suit his political agenda.

A report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, issued almost a year later, contained what was called an “Intelligence Side Letter.” Its principal author, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, brought it to my attention years ago to illustrate his belief that intelligence — especially unfavorable facts — had to be honestly reported. The Side Letter said, in part:

The President’s recent discussion of “fudging” occurred in the context of a discussion of the effects of sanctions laws on his flexibility to conduct diplomacy.… However its effects are manifested, “fudging” has a corrupting influence on both the policy making and intelligence communities. A symbiotic relationship between the consumer and the provider of intelligence can easily be established in which they shape their questions and answers to satisfy the needs of the moment or to avoid unwanted, unpleasant and uncomfortable longer-term consequences.

In plainer terms, unless the relationship between intelligence providers and consumers is one of trust and cooperation, the falsification of intelligence or the conclusions drawn from it pose a serious threat to the nation.

Christian Toto at PJ Media on the somber concluding panel discussion among Katie Pavlich, Guy Benson and Leon Wolf at RedState Gathering.  It will make you hate 2016 all over again.

 

 

Bots, you own this - today's edition

He's losing millennials:

 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is consolidating the support of the Millennials who fueled Bernie Sanders' challenge during the primaries, a new USA TODAY/Rock the Vote Poll finds, as Republican Donald Trump heads toward the worst showing among younger voters in modern American history.

The survey shows Clinton trouncing Trump 56%-20% among those under 35, though she has failed so far to generate the levels of enthusiasm Sanders did — and the high turn-out that can signal — among Millennials.
"I get worried about the bigoted element of our country, and that they will stick with Trump regardless of his stupidity," says Elizabeth Krueger, 31, an actress in New York City who was among those surveyed. She supports Clinton. "She is not going to be a perfect president, but who would be?"
The findings have implications for politics long past the November election. 

If the trend continues, the Democratic Party will have scored double-digit victories among younger voters in three consecutive elections, the first time that has happened since such data became readily available in 1952. That could shape the political affiliations of the largest generation in American history for years to follow.

In the new survey, half of those under 35 say they identify with or lean toward the Democrats; just 20% identify with or lean toward the Republicans. Seventeen percent are independents, and another 12% either identify with another party or don't know.

Trump's weakness among younger voters is unprecedented, lower even than the 32% of the vote that the Gallup Organization calculates Richard Nixon received among 18-to-29-year-old voters in 1972, an era of youthful protests against the Vietnam War.

It's not looking good for Squirrel-Hair in a couple of key states:

Hillary Clinton has extended her lead in Florida and is now up five points over Donald Trump, 45 percent to 40 percent; she led by three points in June.

And Clinton now has a dominant nine-point lead in New Hampshire, 45 percent to 36 percent, a lead that has her threatening to take that battleground state off the board entirely, just as last week, a double-digit lead in Virginia made that state look like anything but a toss-up.

Much as in other states we've surveyed lately, Clinton has moved out to lead despite relatively low numbers on many attributes and voters' doubts about her truthfulness. But voters feel Trump is even lower on a few other key measures: only 29 percent in Florida, for instance, feel he has good judgment and temperament, and 71 percent say that does not. That includes four in ten Republicans (though most of them are voting for him nonetheless).

Some party functionaries are listening to the canary:

Publicly, Republican Party officials continue to stand by Donald Trump. Privately, at the highest levels, party leaders have started talking about cutting off support to Trump in October and redirecting cash to save endangered congressional majorities.

Since the Cleveland convention, top party officials have been quietly making the case to political journalists, donors and GOP operatives that the Republican National Committee has done more to help Trump than it did to support its 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, and that therefore Trump has only himself and his campaign to blame for his precipitous slide in the polls, according to people who have spoken with Republican leadership.

Sean Spicer, the RNC’s top strategist, on Wednesday made that case to 14 political reporters he convened at the organization’s Capitol Hill headquarters for an off-the-record conversation about the election.

This is what you get when you cast your lot about a guy about whom this is the case:

It’s as if he lost his car keys in his rectum and he’s looking for them face first.

So, to repeat the gist of my Friday post about Bots who try to shame those of us in I-could-have-told-you-it-would-come-to-this mode, you have nothing to say to me, and I have nothing to say to you.

The Rio Olympics: hotbed of Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred

Some specifics:

After losing a judo match on Friday, Islam el-Shehaby, a fighter from Egypt, refused to shake his Israeli opponent’s hand — a major breach of judo etiquette. After beating him handily, Israeli fighter Or Sasson extended his hand to el-Shehaby. In response, the Egyptian fighter backed away, refusing to reciprocate the gesture. 

El-Shehaby was reportedly under pressure from Islamic groups and Egyptian nationalists to drop out of the match with Sasson. The day before the match, a TV host for an Islamist-leaning network pressured el-Shehaby to refuse to fight Sasson, the Daily Mail reports.

“My son watch out, don’t be fooled, or fool yourself thinking you will play with the Israeli athlete to defeat him and make Egypt happy,” the host said. “Egypt will cry. Egypt will be sad and you will be seen as a traitor and a normalizer in the eyes of your people.”

The incident between the two fighters is only the latest anti-Semitic action Israeli athletes have faced in Rio. 

In an Olympic qualifying match, Ala Ghasoun, a boxer from Syria, refused to fight an Israeli athlete. Ghasoun said competing with an athlete from Israel “would mean that I, as an athlete, and Syria, as a state, recognize the state of Israel.”

Earlier this week, another judo fighter reportedly forfeited a match so as not to face an Israeli athlete in a later round. Saudi Arabian officials tweeted out that judo fighter Joud Fahmy dropped out of a preliminary round due to an injury sustained during training, but multiple media outlets reported later that she was not injured. 

Women in Saudi Arabia are heavily restricted from athletic activities. In 2009 and 2010, Saudi officials shuttered women-only gyms. Women are also barred from virtually all sporting arenas. 

Last week, the head of the Lebanese Olympic delegation refused to let Israeli athletes board a bus the two countries were supposed to share en route to the opening ceremonies, The Washington Times reports. Olympic organizers had to send a separate bus to transport the stranded Israeli athletes so they could get to the games. 

Just before the start of the games, media outlets pushed a sob story about Palestinian swimmer Mary al-Atrash, claiming she was unable to use an Olympic-sized pool for training. 

“There is no Olympic-sized swimming pool in the Palestinian territories that Palestinians are allowed to use, so Atrash practices at the YMCA in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem,” Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported. “The pool is 25 meters long, half the length of the facility she’ll compete in at Rio.”

In a Facebook post, Israeli officials called out Atrash, saying she refused to apply for a permit to travel to Jerusalem to use their facilities. Liel Liebovitz of Tablet Magazine pointed out that there are several full-sized pools within the Palestinian territories she could have used as well.

Where is the outcry from the international setters of standards for these sports?

On a side note, where are Syrian Olympic teams training? Isn't the entire country basically a pile of rubble? And what "Syria" is it representing, given the multiparty civil war that's been underway there for years? The Assad regime? The ISIS caliphate? Some stronghold of some "moderate" force?

But back to the main point, what if the athletes of the countries neighboring, say, Norway, or Nigeria or Ecuador were behaving thusly toward the athletes of those nations? I'll bet there would be a bit more discussion of it in the broader coverage of the games.

Have Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham boxed themselves into an inescapable corner?

Now, of course, the easy retort to this would be that it's still mid-August and, as they say, a day in politics is an eternity.

But it's looking real bad for Squirrel-Hair. Reince Preibus is nervous. Down-ballot candidates are nervous.

And the two most ridiculous Trump-bots of all, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, are in a frenzy. They're reduced to - well, check it out for yourself:

Assuming Trump loses, there is no evidence to suggest that it will be because he didn’t get enough Republican votes. It will be because the entire concept that Trump and Hannity sold to GOP primary voters that he could appeal to Democrats and Independents, while Hillary would be easy to beat, was an obvious myth. In my view, there is no election to “sabotage,” because it was forfeited the moment Trump was nominated.

But none of this was nearly as bizarre as when Hannity brought on Trump super fan Laura Ingraham. After his rant, Hannity went to Ingraham for the classic TV talk host device of “here’s a guest who agrees with me on to tell me how right I am.” Ingraham proceeded to utter what is now the leader in the clubhouse for the most asinine thing a (once) respected conservative has said about Trump:

“If you call yourself a conservative and a Republican, it’s actually immoral not to vote for Donald Trump.”

Let that one sink in for a moment.

We conservatives are now being lectured that if we don’t vote for a guy who has at one time held nearly every liberal position there is, is professionally and temperamentally unqualified for the job, gave Hillary lots of money and praised her even after Benghazi, and consulted with Bill Clinton just before he entered the race, we are IMMORAL?!

We have officially left the gravitational pull of the rational earth. This reminds me of a black leader claiming that blacks had a moral obligation support O.J. Simpson in his murder trial (when O.J. wasn’t really even “black” and he certainly didn’t deserve to win).

Of course what is really happening is that Hannity and Ingraham know that they picked the wrong guy in the primaries (those ratings Trump provided rendered them intoxicated) and that it is they who are going to be responsible for whatever Hillary does in office. They are just getting a huge jump on trying to dupe the very same naïve customers they fooled into supporting Trump in the primaries, into believing it wasn’t really the fault of Trump, or his surrogates, that he lost.

And poor Sean has to keep assuring us himself that the pivot is still forthcoming, as does the so-he-humiliated-me-during-the-primaries-I-now-am-placing-my-hopes-in-him Hugh Hewitt:

For more than a year Trump and his choir assured everyone that he would indeed “pivot” and become more presidential.

As he told Hannity: “At the right time, I will be so presidential that you’ll call me and you’ll say, ‘Donald, you have to stop that, it’s too much.’” “

As I get closer and closer to the goal, it’s going to get different,” he told Greta Van Susteren in February. “I will be changing very rapidly. I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.”

As I wrote last week, this was always a lie (and a ridiculous thing to say even if it weren’t). Trump can no more promise to be presidential than a leopard can promise to be a top-loading washing machine that runs on good intentions when in energy-saver mode (did I get that phrase wrong?).

But as 8 trillion eggs on Twitter keep telling me, what I think doesn’t matter. But Sean believed it. Hannity even suggested in that interview that the real Trump – the one Hannity has known for years — is the presidential one. Hannity in effect seconded Trump’s own assurance that Trump could change instantly into a mainstream, mature candidate whenever he wanted. Many honest and decent people pocketed this IOU of presidentialness. In fact, this promise of a new, disciplined Trump seemed to be the only thing that kept Hugh Hewitt off suicide watch.

And now poor Sean is becoming a case study in how denial wraps itself in fantasy:

He has chosen to eschew the numbers of more reliable polls, in favor of the Gateway Pundit nonsense, as mentioned here this past weekend.

From Hannity’s own site:

As we’ve seen recently with Reuters, presidential polls cannot always be trusted.

So for anyone who’s been disheartened by the post-convention bump for Hillary Clinton, the Gateway Pundit has some uplifting numbers for you:

The website reports that analysis from the two candidates’ social media accounts could mean Donald Trump will win in a landslide.

Consider the two candidates’ Facebook accounts: Trump has over 10 million “likes” while Hillary has just over 5 million.

Stop laughing. That’s an actual excerpt from his actual website.

How about when the two candidates live stream their events? Trump averages 30,000 live viewers per stream while Clinton receives on average, a measly 500 viewers.

And on Reddit, “Hillary for Prison” has more than double the subscribers (55,000) than the actual Hillary Clinton page does (24,000).

This is an entirely new level of seat sniffing for Sean Hannity. If anyone ever had any lingering shreds of respect for the man, I’m not sure how those remain, at this point.

So, no, I am not at all getting hot under the collar in response to the finger-wagging from Sean and Laura. This righteousness pose they've assumed is wearing pretty damn thin.


The Hugh Hewitt types, the Mark Davis types, good people like Dennis Prager and the great bloggers Bookworm and Ace, I will not comply with their exhortations to get behind Squirrel-Hair, but at least I can respect them. They were vehemently opposed to him right up until that night in May, when, in Indianapolis, the finest candidate in the original field of seventeen, Ted Cruz, pulled the plug on his campaign. They still acknowledge S-H's awfulness and in fact usually preface their exhortations with such acknowledgement.

But Sean and Laura? No, you people were palpably giddy about this walking train wreck last damn summer, when the world was full of sweet possibilities.

You have a lot of nerve trying to shame those of us who remained actual conservatives.