Grim day in Europe

Nine dead and dozens injured as a very big truck plows into a crowd of shoppers in Berlin.


The Russian ambassador to Turkey is assassinated at a photography exhibit in Ankara. The suspect is an off-duty police officer who shouted "Allah Akbar!" and "We die in Aleppo, you die here!" as he stood over the body before being shot himself.

Monday roundup

Good morning, policy-and-culture observers.

Herewith a panoply of developments in the space-time realm as we commence Advent Week:

File this one under "I thought I was the only human being with this status": Tanza Loudenback at Business Insider proudly says she's never seen a Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movie.

Gordon Chang at the Daily Beast says China's seizure of the US Navy underwater drone was an act of war. Of course, it doesn't seem to even be on the Most Equal Comrade's radar screen:

Today, President Obama cannot even talk about Chinese aggression. He did not, for example, mention it in his opening statement at his press conference Friday and did not address it when answering Mark Landler of the New York Times, who raised the drone seizure in his question. 

And another of the MEC's foreign-policy successes fiascoes has yet to improve its human-rights record since its patty-cake with post-America culminated in full diplomatic relations:

Authorities across Cuba have cracked down on dissidents, arresting dozens, keeping others from marching in Havana, and detaining an American human rights lawyer, activists said Sunday.

In the first such anti-dissident operation since Fidel Castro's death last month, President Raul Castro seemed to indicate the Americas' only one-party communist state was in no mood for dissent.

A roundup in the country's east snared dozens and derailed street protests planned to demand that political prisoners be freed.

"There was a joint operation at 6:00 am in Santiago and Palma Soriano. They searched four homes, and so far we have 42 reported arrests -- 20 in Santiago, 12 in Palma and 10 in Havana," Jose Daniel Ferrer told AFP by phone.

The 46-year-old, who heads the Patriotic Union of Cuba (Unpacu), had called the demonstrations to demand that political prisoners be set free. Castro insists there are no political prisoners, just lawbreakers.

Ferrer said he was detained in Santiago, Cuba's second biggest city, at a police unit known as Micro 9.

"They threatened me, and said by calling the demonstration I was facilitating public disorder.... disobedience and espionage," Ferrer said.

Most arrests of dissidents in roundups are brief. Sometimes, the authorities prevent them from leaving their homes to attend a protest or march.

- Ladies in White, shut in -

In Havana, the award-winning Ladies in White group, which presses for the release of jailed dissidents who are their relatives, said that at least 20 of its activists were "under siege," kept from attending their weekly march.

"At least 20 homes were blocking the residents to keep us from marching today," said group leader Berta Soler.

It was a step backward for the Ladies in White. They long have been considered the only dissidents the Cuban government allowed to march regularly; they hold one weekly protest outside a church in Havana.

But not this Sunday, Soler said.

- US rights lawyer held, freed -

Kimberley Motley, an American human rights lawyer, was briefly detained on Friday along with Cuban activists Gorki Avila and Luis Alberto Marino when they planned to visit graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado, known as "El Sexto," in jail.

Maldonado was also arrested on November 26, a day after the death of Cuban revolutionary icon Fidel Castro, after painting on a wall in Havana the phrase "He's gone," her relatives say.

According to online newspaper 14 y medio, Motley left Cuba at the request of the government.

Now she tells us:

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Sunday she regrets secretly meeting with former President Bill Clinton last June because of the negative impression it gave some voters.

"I do regret sitting down and having a conversation with him because it did give people concern. And as I said, my greatest concern has always been making sure that people understand that the Department of Justice works in a way that is independent and looks at everybody equally," Lynch said on CNN's "State of the Union."

The Obama official said it has been "painful" for her to see how the infamous airport tarmac meeting played out during the height of an FBIinvestigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.

Moral preening and nanny-state finger-wagging in the Circle City:

The Indianapolis City-County Council passed a resolution in support of Meatless Mondays on December 5, 2016. The resolution encourages Indianapolis residents and institutions to try a meat-free day at the beginning of each week, aiming to reduce the city’s environmental footprint and raise awareness about healthy eating.

The resolution was championed by Council Vice-President Zach Adamson (D - District 17), and co-sponsored by Jared Evans (D - District 22), Blake Johnson (D - District 12) and Jeff Miller (R - District 16). “I’m excited the City Council has made clear both the importance of a diet high in vegetables and the negative impacts meat products have on our health and our environment,” Councilman Adamson said. “With Indianapolis ranking so high in diet-related illness, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, this is an important declaration that encourages our fellow residents to make healthy and environmentally sound food choices.”

Oh, please.

That said, Matthew Scully at NRO offers a viewpoint worth of consideration, namely, that humankind still lacks a truly humane approach to its interaction with the animal kingdom's lesser species.  You will notice though, that he does not call for any stinkin' government involvement.

Staying true to the principles as the age of Squirrel-Hair gets underway

It seems to me that one mark of a conservative is getting the response to the remark, "It's a new day; the old ways have been tried and found ineffective, so we're going with something new" correct.

Clearly, if such a remark comes from a leftist, the way for a conservative to formulate the response is pretty much ready-made. "No, transgender bathrooms, subsidies to solar-panel "companies," pseudo-agreements that allow mortal enemies to obtain nuclear arsenals, therapy dogs for law students, government-run health-insurance exchanges, and race-based Congressional caucuses are as wrong as ever" is the proper rejoinder. Pretty much a no-brainer, right?

But what to say to the person so uttering when he or she is speaking about Trumpism, the injection of a populist-nationalist sentiment into the ideology heretofore known as conservatism?

We've had to contend with these get-with-the-program exhortations from the likes of Hannity, Coulter, Ingraham, Gingrich, Root and Black since the summer of 2015.

What does a unreconstructed conservatism say to them?

Especially since they just won a huge political victory?

There's nothing gracious about the way they state it. Ask Jonah Goldberg:

From the Right, any time I say anything — and I mean anything — critical of Trump, I’m told it’s proof that I’m “bitter” or “biased” and that I can’t admit I was wrong about him, etc. I can go on TV and say that Trump has been brilliant at x and y but I’m still concerned about z, and all I’ll hear is the whistle of incoming ALL CAPS arrows: GET OVER IT! HE WON! GO AWAY NEVER TRUMPERS! HOW DO I TURN OFF CAPLOCK!!!111! Etc.

The quest for clarity gets much stickier in dealing with this bunch than it does with proudly overt leftists. For one thing, they have a point about how actual conservative principles do indeed get an airing in the age of Squirrel-Hair. Pompeo, Mattis,  DeVoss, Pruitt, Perry, Puzder, Sessions, and, obviously, Pence, are all great picks. What's there to gripe about?

Plenty. You see, there's the light-of-day Trump, who listens to those he respects and acts on their advice. That's clearly how we got such an overall great cabinet. Then there is the after-dark Trump, the one who barks and bellows at his thank-yu rallies, and, of course, tweets well into the night.

The one who leaves you shaking your head and muttering, "What the hell brought that on?"

The latest exhibit in substantiation of this assertion:

With the election behind him and nothing to lose, Trump is openly admitting what was pointed out on social media and more traditional news sources throughout the campaign: Trump supporters are dangerous.

From the Hill:

“You people were vicious, violent, screaming, ‘Where’s the wall? We want the wall!’ Screaming, ‘Prison! Prison! Lock her up!’ I mean you are going crazy. I mean, you were nasty and mean and vicious and you wanted to win, right?” Trump said in Orlando, Fla., during a stop on his “thank you” tour.

“But now, you’re mellow and you’re cool and you’re not nearly as vicious or violent, right? Because we won, right?”

Not nearly? Is that supposed to make the rest of society feel better?

I haven't read the transcript of the whole speech; I saw that he was at some podium as I channel-surfed and, as usual, found a college-basketball game that was much more to my liking. But what kind of context could an utterance like that be put in that would explain its fundamental weirdness?

I actually think the more important work to be done, in terms of arguing with the various types of people exhorting us to get with the program of a new day, is with leftists rather than the self-appointed populists who still consider themselves conservative. They are going to carry Squirrel-Hair's water long past the point where their self-respect is taking a beating. They truly don't care about the vulgarity, shallowness, narcissism and lack of core principles that have been the essence of real conservatives' opposition to Trump all along. He will get a pass for the most egregious outbursts.

But leftists, because they are ignorant - and by that I mean that they have zero interest in parsing the fissures on the Right and seeing that rightie sector that still has deep misgivings about this guy winning the presidency - will use all its formerly-mainstream organs (NYT, CNN, etc.) as well as social media and opinion-site comment threads to try to lump everyone right-of-center into a Trumpist camp.

The thorny task before sites like LITD is to navigate between the necessary task of keeping the three pillars of actual conservatism front and center and giving the nod to S-H when he gets stuff right.

It's important work. As always, the practice of conservative principles, both in official government proceedings as well as in the culture, is a mission of urgency. On the other hand, since, clearly, not a lot of people have not thought those principles out, the matter of distinguishing for them the stark difference between what they actually are and this imperfect vessel by which they will imperfectly be promulgated and implemented is going to occupy a lot of our time and mental energy.

And expect no help from you-know-who. He is who he is, for better and definitely for worse.

It's still late in the day and this is still post-America - today's edition

Pause for a moment to remember the National Geographic Society's distinguished beginnings. It was founded in January 1888 by 33 explorers and scientists at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. Philanthropist Gardiner Greene Hubbard was its first president. He was succeeded by his son-in-law Alexander Graham Bell. Bell's son-in-law Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor was the first full-time editor of its magazine.

Think of the vast variety of landscapes and cultures, cities and remote outposts, it has brought into our nation's homes over the decades with a seamless blend of erudition and accessibility.

And now turn your gaze upon the full extent of its rot:

As part of its January 2017 issue exploring our evolving understandings and definitions of gender, National Geographic is featuring nine-year-old transgender rights activist Avery Jackson on its cover—the first time a trans person has made the cover of the magazine.

Beginning next month, hordes of energized legislators, cabinet-and-agency-head appointees, staff and advisors to executive-branch personnel, and pundits and wonks are going to affect massive change to areas of our national life that are the proper purview of government: health-care policy, tax policy, environment policy, foreign policy and the like.

But we must not take our eye off the evil being spread throughout our culture. Institution by institution, the Left is ruining the foundations of our society, inuring us to the mainstreaming of the grotesquely abnormal.

This is not government's fight, save for the occasional court case. It's mainly a struggle that has to take place in spheres such as conversations in homes and workplaces and on social media. As we know, it requires courage, because it means withstanding accusations of bigotry.

But the policy arenas in which reversals of the damage done in the last eight years seem likely will be mere window dressing if the rot at the core of how we live is not also reversed.

It is task number one.

Friday roundup

Why do the Russian hacking activities during the just-concluded US election cycle seem so focused on one party? The other party had a better email filter.

Important Megan McArdle column at Bloomberg arguing that the Trump transition teams's request to see records of any climate conferences Department of Energy staffers have attended is a bad move that needs to be backed away from, but that the Left is on very shaky ground getting incensed about it, given its harassment of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This chick is going to be trouble:

Initially Ivanka was going to operate outside the administration, managing the family businesses with her brothers once Trump himself withdrew from them. Then it looked like she wouldn’t be on the business side after all but would join her father and husband in the new administration somewhere. That developed further with news that she’d be getting space in the East Wing that typically goes to the First Lady, supporting the theory that Ivanka will be taking on the public duties of FLOTUS more than Melania Trump will. And now here’s the IJ Review with news that Ivanka’s already out in front on legislation, dialing up congressional Republicans to lobby for legislation on one of her pet causes, creating tax incentives — and a new entitlement — related to child care.

In short, in the span of about six weeks, she’s gone from someone who wouldn’t be involved in government to maybe the most influential “First Lady” on policy matters since, er, Hillary Clinton. Come to think of it, they’re both liberals and they’re both from New York. Maybe someday Ivanka too will blaze a trail to the Senate and eventually to her party’s presidential nomination, only to lose the election to Kanye West or some other rich guy who thought it’d be fun to run and beat the political nerds at their own game.

Sarah Chamberlain, the president and CEO of the center-right organization Republican Main Street Partnership, told Independent Journal Review that Ivanka Trump has been calling Republican members of Congress since her father’s victory last month.

“She’s calling some to talk about the child care provisions,” Chamberlain said. “It’s gonna be a big issue for her.”…

“I think she’s hoping to [play a large role in the administration]. It did come out she’s gonna have an office in the East Wing and actually I think she’s gonna be a great addition. I think she was a huge help in getting her father elected.”

In case you’ve forgotten, Trump’s Ivanka-crafted child-care plan caused a ripple among the three conservatives left in the party when he announced it in September, as it guarantees six weeks of paid maternity leave for new mothers. Under the plan, if your employer won’t cover the cost of that, Uncle Sam will. The expense to taxpayers will, supposedly, be offset by eliminating fraud from the federal unemployment insurance program, but ridding programs of “waste, fraud, and abuse” is a classic lip-service panacea for new federal spending. Americans like the idea of paid family leave, though, even if they’re uncertain about exactly who should pay for it. With Trump pushing Republicans to get onboard with taxpayer funding and Democrats already sure to back a new entitlement, it’s a cinch that a majority will support letting the feds handle it before too long. If Trump can get the right to rethink Vladimir Putin, he can get them to rethink paid maternity leave. And we’ve already learned a lesson from the Carrier deal: If a policy is popular, whether or not it sets a bad precedent is of secondary concern.

On the other hand, this is another great appointment:

President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will nominate attorney David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel, selecting an envoy who supports Israeli settlements and other changes to U.S. policies in the region. Friedman said he looked forward to carrying out his duties from "the U.S. embassy in Israel's eternal capital, Jerusalem," even though the embassy is in Tel Aviv.

Trump, like some of his predecessors, has vowed to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, a politically charged act that would anger Palestinians who want east Jerusalem as part of their sovereign territory. The move would also distance the U.S. from most of the international community, including its closest allies in Western Europe and the Arab world.

The president-elect said Friedman would "maintain the special relationship" between the U.S. and Israel.

But the announcement sparked anger from liberal Jewish groups. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, called nominating Friedman "reckless," citing his support for settlements and his questioning of a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

The statement doesn't detail how Friedman could work in Jerusalem. However, Trump advisers have insisted in recent days that the president-elect will follow through on his call for moving the embassy.

"He has made that promise," Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters Thursday. "I can guarantee you, just generally, he's a man who is going to accomplish many things very quickly." 

The gracious way to respond to Yasmin Seweid's hate-crime hoax would be to allow for the possibility that she is deeply troubled. Short of that, the only conclusion to draw is that it's pretty damn crummy to accuse a fictional group of guys of shouting Trump's name, telling her "You don't belong here" and pulling off her hijab.  Right up there with "hands up don't shoot" and the antics of mattress girl.

The fruits of an utter disregard for the exceptionality of Western civilization

You get this:

Fifty statues of Christ and other Christian figures have been defaced and smashed apart in a crime wave sweeping parts of Germany.

Statues in the Münster region in the west of Germany have been targeted over a series of months – including one of Jesus which had its head lopped off, and many more missing limbs or other fragments.

The intent is clearly to frighten and silence:

Mirko Stein of the Münster police told the channel: “large numbers of the people in the neighborhood where the sculptures are shocked and scared”.
“Based on the intensity of the acts of the perpetrator, one can already conclude that this act has a religious background.”
German criminologist Christian Pfeifer believes crimes were committed by someone who is “angry” and “hates the Church”.
Similar crimes against Christian artifacts in the area have been recorded as well.
According to the German tabloid Bild, 40 sculptures had been attacked in the two years preceding the current crime wave.

Police were investigating six men with alleged links to Islamic extremists, but gave up after three left for Syria, one died and the other two dropped off the radar. 

Someone who is angry and hates the Church . . . gee, ya think?

 

Thursday night just-because music

Fats, like Clifford Brown, Booker Little, Lee Morgan and Bix Beiderbecke, departed this realm far too soon. Some mentioned here just plain met fate  - such was the case with Clifford Brown on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1956 - and some were just so unkind to themselves that it killed them.

The latter was the case with Fats.

In an eternity-oriented view of things, that matters far less than what he has bequeathed us.

It's still late in the day and this is still post-America - today's edition

Two tales of West-hatred from the bowels of the post-American "educational" sewer:

Kat Kimpf at NRO on a development at a higher-"education" institution:

tudents at the University of Pennsylvania have removed a portrait of Shakespeare from its Fisher-Bennett Hall and have replaced it with a picture of a black lesbian poet Audre Lorde in the name of “diversity.”

According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, a group of students removed the portrait and placed it in the office of English Department chairman Jed Esty after a department “town hall meeting discussing the election” on December 1. The Penn reports that the department had actually voted to replace the Shakespeare painting for “diversity” reasons several years ago, but that nothing had been done about it until after that specific meeting.

Bookworm reports on how a member of Congress used his appearance at a California middle school to engage in rank indoctrination:

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, state and local politicians did come and give talks at whichever public school I happened to attend at the time. The politicians’ topics were invariably uplifting things about civic involvement, public service, the great people of San Francisco or California, or similar anodyne, non-partisan stuff. Those days are over.

House Rep. Jared Huffman (D – Marin County) gave some young teens at a Marin public school a full-throated defense of hard-Left Progressive politics, along with a reminder to oppose President-Elect Donald Trump:

Congressman Jared Huffman did not hold back Tuesday as he discussed next month’s inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump with Mill Valley Middle School students.

[snip]

Huffman, who was elected last month to his third term, went to the middle school to talk with eighth-graders after receiving a batch of letters from them. The letters expressed opposition to the $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline project proposed to carry crude oil from the Bakken fields in Western North Dakota to Illinois. [No doubt written as a school assignment, if I know my Marin public schools . . . and I do.]

[snip]

Huffman said people across the nation will have to engage if they want to fight Trump’s interests, such as softening environmental regulations and deporting undocumented immigrants.

He said more letter-writing and other actions might be necessary in the next four years.

Huffman discussed complexities he sees as problematic under a Trump administration, including the former real estate tycoon’s business dealings. He referred to reports earlier this week that suggest Turkey’s government is leveraging Trump’s business interests with the arrest of Barbaros Muratoglu, a businessman with close ties to Trump.

“I think the deeper we look into that, the more we’re going to consider that this web of business interests he has all over the world — Japan, Russia and all these different countries — will make it very hard for us to have confidence that he’s governing in the interest of our country and not in the interest of the Trump corporation,” he said. 

Yes, the great cabinet picks from the incoming administration are an encouraging sign, as is the newly energized incoming Congress, as is the majority of states with Republican governors and legislatures.

But with this kind of poison flowing through the halls of the nation's schools, the battle, as of the present moment, remains uphill.

Wednesday roundup

Michelle Malkin has a chilling tale out of Oberlin, Ohio - home-of course, to one of the most rabidly totalitarian college campuses in post-America. A family-owned bakery, in business since 1885 experienced a shoplifting. An Oberlin College student was caught trying to get out of the store with two bottles of wine underneath his shirt. A 911 call was made, cops arrived - but not before a scuffle ensued, in which the shoplifters' friends gave the store employee a pretty nasty beating. Because the shoplifter was black, a boycott was organized at the college, which extends to the school itself cancelling its standing order for daily delivery of donuts and bagels. The dean of students distributed a flyer accusing the bakery of a history of racial profiling. All this is pretty rich, coming from a school with a history of fake hate crimes. Oh, and the effort of outraged townspeople to take their cause to social media? Facebook has censored their page.

Miss Sloane, the "thriller" about a Washington lobbyist who puts everything on the line to get rid of the Second Amendment, is a box-office flop.

Pro-lifers don't intend to sit idly by and take anybody's word for it that a given SCOTUS nominee is going to be sufficiently aligned:

President-elect Trump's pro-life allies are embarking on a campaign to narrow his Supreme Court short list to ensure a pro-choice nominee does not replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Andy Schlafly, lawyer for the conservative Eagle Forum and son of the late conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, held a strategy call on Tuesday with other pro-life groups joining his cause and warned that Trump "cannot be expected to know who's pro-life and who isn't, so he's going to rely on us, on conservatives," to guide him.

"We're going to see the Republican establishment in D.C. led by [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell try to deflect Trump away from taking a pro-life candidate," Schlafly said on the call. "What the Trump team will do is they will trot out some people with pro-life credentials to vouch for the nominee and we've got to be ready for that and we've got to anticipate that and start to bring that down now before they even pull it."

Schlafly told the Washington Examiner that 70 like-minded organizations have signed onto his coalition letter opposing the potential nomination of Diane Sykes, Steven Colloton, Joan Larsen, Neil Gorsuch, Raymond Kethledge or Allison Eid to the high court. The coalition letter set to be sent to Trump later this week features signatories from think tanks, academia and the legal community.

Strong stuff from a source not usually known for standing up to this type of regime:

The UN High Commissioner on Human Rights confirmed Tuesday that at least dozens of civilians in Aleppo have been slaughtered by Syrian regime forces who claim they're liberating the city and evacuating the citizens.

That's in addition to many more casualties suffered due to heavy bombardment of Syria's largest city.

Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein confirmed online reports of men, women and children being slain by government forces or militias loyal to Bashar al-Assad, including at least 11 women, 13 children and 58 men shot to death Monday by Assad forces entering homes, rounding up and killing residents.

“The crushing of Aleppo, the immeasurably terrifying toll on its people, the bloodshed, the wanton slaughter of men, women and children, the destruction – and we are nowhere near the end of this cruel conflict," Zeid said. "What can happen next, if the international community continues to collectively wring its hands, can be much more dangerous. What is happening with Aleppo could repeat itself in Douma, in Raqqa, in Idleb. We cannot let this continue."

This has global ramifications. As we know, the regime that currently has its grip on the throat of post-America, through the diplomatic representation of Secretary Global-Test and Wendy Sherman, "reached" an "agreement" with Iran, one third of an axis that also includes Russia and the above-mentioned Assad regime in Syria, on Iran's nuclear ambitions, thereby conferring ill-deserved legitimacy on it. Also, as we know, the other third of the Axis, Russia, has invaded Ukraine and taken over Crimea, harassed US ships and planes in international waters, and engaged in cyber-mischief. The US is about to select a new Secretary of State, and the likely appointee has ties to Russia that need a whole lot of explanation.

One last item about this that needs mentioning: the Assad regime has retaken Aleppo and ISIS has retaken Palmyra. The "moderate rebels" that were supposed to be the West's proxies in the Syrian mess are not a relevant force today.

Why it's still late in the day and why this is still post-America: Why does a president-elect feel like he has time to meet with a pop celebrity - someone whose reason for fame is a body of "work" in a "musical genre" characterized by relentless ugliness and an utter absence of humanity - who just last month had a complete meltdown at a concert and whose friends are deeply worried about him, to talk about "multicultural issues?" This whole business of a variety of public figures being photo-opped in the lobby of Trump Tower on the way up the elevator to kiss Squirrel-Hair's ring establishes a precedent that would seem to run counter to the bleating of Squirrel-Hair's devotees that they spearhead some kind of "anti-elitist" movement.

Tillerson: a glaringly problematic pick among an otherwise pretty uniformly excellent slate of cabinet choices

The incoming administration's cabinet choices so far have generally been excellent. (This afternoon, another such pick, Rick Perry for Energy Secretary, lengthened that list.)

Ben Shapiro at Daily Wire lists seven reasons why he feels the Tillerson choice is downright "rotten."

The two that compel me to see things his ways are these:

2. Tillerson Is Pro-Global Warming Legislation. As Jim Geraghty of National Review points out this morning, Tillerson has been an advocate of anthropomorphic global warming:

At ExxonMobil, we share the view that the risks of climate change are serious and warrant thoughtful action. Addressing these risks requires broad-based, practical solutions around the world. Importantly, as a result of the Paris agreement, both developed and developing countries are now working together to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, while recognizing differing national responsibilities, capacities and circumstances. In our industry, the best hope for the future is to enable and encourage long-term investments in both proven and new technologies, while supporting effective policies. Which is what we are doing. We have long supported a carbon tax as the best policy of those being considered.

4. As Head of Exxon, Tillerson Veered Left on Social Issues. Tony Perkins of Family Research Council says that Tillerson’s a rotten pick thanks to his embrace of leftist social policy at Exxon, including funding Planned Parenthood and pushing the Boy Scouts to include gay scoutmasters. Here’s Perkins: “if these are the kinds of deals Tillerson makes….then who knows what sort of "diplomacy" he would champion at DOS?”

The other five are fairly convincing as well.

Memo to Squirrel-Hair: What was wrong with John Bolton?

"A thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgement"

A difference in viewpoint between two intelligence agencies:

Hacking occurred? Check. Russians involved? Check. An operation by the Russian government to elect Donald Trump? Er … not so fast. After leaks that the CIA believes that the Russians deliberately set out to crown Trump set off days of angry demands and accusations, Reuters reports that the highest levels of the intelligence structure don’t share that view. Instead, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence appears to side with the FBI — that the CIA hasn’t produced evidence of motive for the hacks:

The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election, three American officials said on Monday.

While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not dispute the CIA’s analysis of Russian hacking operations, it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials, who declined to be named. …

The CIA conclusion was a “judgment based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked,” one of the three officials said on Monday.

“(It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment,” the official added.

Reince Priebus emphatically denies that Republicans got hacked at all. As RNC chair, one would assume he’d know if it happened, but as Donald Trump’s new chief of staff, he’d certainly have some interest in denying it now, too. Senator John McCain alluded to that when insisting on a Senate investigation, saying that just “because Mr. Priebus says that doesn’t mean it’s true.” True, but considering that this appears to be the entire fulcrum of the CIA’s analysis, perhaps that should be the first point either corroborated or debunked in the upcoming hearings.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense anyway. First off, as Gabriel Malor points out, the hacks in question started well before anyone thought Trump would win the nomination, let alone the general election . . . 

To believe that the entire exercise was designed to elect Trump, one would have to see evidence that Russians were hacking Trump’s Republican rivals in the primaries. No such attacks have ever been noted, although some of them would certainly prefer that explanation than the reality of how they lost to Trump. Several of them attacked Trump for his attitude toward Putin, so if these candidates saw hacking attempts from Russia coming at them, it seems almost unbelievable that they would have remained quiet about it. A DNC hack would be a really indirect way of electing any Republican, let alone Trump.

Perhaps one can express this in the negative — that the Russians wanted to keep Hillary Clinton from getting elected rather than wanting to boost Trump. But does that make any sense? Hillary was going to keep Barack Obama’s foreign policy largely in place, under which Putin and Russia had managed to do pretty much what they wanted in the Middle East and in eastern Europe. Perhaps Trump’s foreign-policy comments made him more attractive, but those didn’t start coming out until well after the Russians began penetrating the DNC in summer 2015.  

The point I have emphasized in the argument Ed Morrisey is making at Hot Air is absolutely key.

You can't get a Lefty whose knickers are in a twist over this to explain what Russia's motive would be.

But jumping to goofy conclusions on the basis of no evidence whatsoever is what desperate people do.

Memo to Squirrel-Hair: just make good cabinet and SCOTUS appointments, sign what Congress sends you, and otherwise shut your taco-bowl-hole and do nothing

I have, in some recent posts, used the word "enigma" to characterize DJT based on his transition-period behavior. He has made nearly uniformly great cabinet and agency appointments (although his latest consideration - see post below - is fraught with questions). But he continues to tweet and bleat, displaying not only his characteristic pettiness, but a reversion to protectionism that runs counter to appointments such as Puzder.

Maybe I've been giving him too much credit. "Enigma," after all, is a three-syllable word, and it implies a thought process sophisticated enough to come up with a keep-'em-guessing strategy for making an impression on the pundit class and the portion of the general public not up to its eyeballs in Kool-Aid.

In other words, I am now considering that he is just plain winging it, that he is incapable of a mode of pronouncement other than wild s--- randomly flying out of his mouth.

Consider the three classic Squirrel-Hair traits on display here: thuggishness, economic illiteracy, and an inability to put a coherent sentence together:

Trump then [in a Fox News Sunday interview with Chris Wallace] gave the laughable claim he’s still all for free trade, even though he’s not(emphasis mine).

“I’m a big free trader.  But it has to be fair.  So, what’s happened is we have lost, over a period of years, short years, 70,000 factories in this country.  Chris, 70,000.  

I always say to people, I think it’s a typo. How could it be so many? Seventy thousand factories. We’re being stripped of our workers. We’re being — I mean, we’re being stripped of our jobs, our good jobs are really good down, and we’ve got to stop it. And the only way you’re going to stop it, the nice way is, we’re reducing taxes very substantially for companies so they’re not going to have to leave because of taxes. We’ll be reducing regulations. Now those are the nice ways of doing it and everyone loves it and everyone’s happy. Businesses, way down. Also middle class, but way down, OK, taxes and regulations.

But when a company wants to move to Mexico or another company — or another country and they want to build a nice, beautiful factory and they want to sell their product through our border, no tax, and the people that all got fired, so we end up with unemployment and debt, and they end up with jobs and factories and all of the other things, not going to happen that way. And the way you stop it is by imposing a tax.”

This is just dumb, and perverts the understanding of “free markets” Trump claims to actually believe in. If you reduce regulations and taxes, then companies will decide to stick around. Tax Foundation published a study in August pointing out America’s corporate income tax rate is one of the highest in the entire world (emphasis mine).

The top marginal corporate tax rate among the 188 countries surveyed was the United Arab Emirates, which has a top rate of 55 percent (Table 1). The United States, with a combined top marginal tax rate of 38.9 percent (consisting of the federal tax rate of 35 percent plus the average tax rate among the states), has the third highest corporate income tax rate in the world, slightly behind Puerto Rico. In contrast, the average across all 188 countries is 22.5 percent, or 29.5 percent weighted by gross domestic product (GDP).

And check out his summary dismissal of the WSJ editorial board's intellectual prowess:

His complete lack of understanding on trade and taxes gets even worse. From his conversation with Chris Wallace.

Now, I’ve come up with a number of 35 percent. There is no tax if you don’t leave. There is no tax at all. You know, people are saying, they don’t understand, really, what I’m doing. I read The Wall Street Journal the other day. Honestly, their editorial board doesn’t get it. I don’t think they understand business. I don’t think The Wall Street Journal editorial board — and I know some of them. They’re really nice. I don’t think they understand business. They don’t understand what I’m saying.

There’s a 35 percent tax, but there is no tax if you don’t move. But if you move your plant or factory and you want to sell back into our country, you fire all your people, there are going to be consequences for that. There are going to be consequences. You know what’s going to happen?

Nobody’s going to move. They’re not going to move. They’re not going to leave. They’re going to stay here. 

But what Trump doesn’t say (whether on purpose or not) is the companies who do decide to not be located in the U.S. will just raise prices to absorb the 35% tax hike. So Playstations will probably cost at least 35% more, shirts made outside of the U.S. will cost more, some alcohol prices will go up, food products, and even some weapons prices because not every gun is made in the U.S. (including the ever popular Glock). There’s also the chance domestic products will go up because parts may have to be imported from foreign countries because they don’t grow here in the U.S.

This is the consequences of Trump’s threat to enact a 35% tax on companies who decide to not be located in the U.S. The most frustrating part is the fact Trump appears to get half the equation (hey, let’s lower taxes and regulations). But then he goes into this protectionist nuttery which is only going to hurt the economy more than help it. It’s possible Trump is just bloviating here and doing the 35% number so he can get something closer to 20 or 15%. This is still bad policy and one he should re-think before trying to get it pushed through Congress. 

The title of this post is a bit lengthy, but I wanted the basic message to be given due prominence. We're going to need a robust and proactive Congress and set of executive-branch appointees - hell, we're going to need a robust and proactive Mike Pence (not the one who waxed S-H-esque post-Carrier about American workers "losing" from a free market; Mike, you have the gig now; you don't have to hang with the guy so much) - to counter the wilder moves of a guy with no discernible skill sets beyond owning tall buildings and working mobs of devotees into a frenzy.

We need to hear more about how Tillerson sees Russia's clearly expansionist aims

Tom Rogan has an article at NRO that is worth your while. The overall gist is ostensibly the five results he foresees from the fall of Aleppo, and I'll enumerate them for you in a moment. But it seems to me that what he is really trying to impress upon the reader is how Putin views this development.

In fact, let's start with Rogan's prediction number five:

Finally, Putin will use Aleppo’s capture to damage U.S. foreign policy. His intentions are already clear. After all, in English-news propaganda outlets such as RT, the Russians are proudly rejecting American demands that Sunni rebels be given safe passage out of Aleppo. It’s Obama vs. Putin 101. Unwilling to pressure Russia, Obama is simply ignored by Putin. Through this public display of American impotence, Putin asserts his grand strategy in the Middle East. In the Middle East, where influence is defined by fear and by perceptions of power, Putin is seizing influence and control over American allies.

In early October 2015, President Obama claimed that “an attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won’t work.”

Aleppo’s rubble has proved Obama wrong. His misjudgment has come at a heavy cost. In the lacerated lungs and starved stomachs of 200,000 Syrian civilians, American credibility has turned to ashes. In its place, Putin’s KGB phoenix is rising. 

Here are the others. I offer them because they all relate to this last one:

 First off, Syria’s Sunni-dominated rebellion will no longer be national campaign — it will become a collection of geographically limited ones. Apart from two sparsely populated central areas, the moderate rebels will hold only pockets of southeastern and northeastern Syria. At that point, unable to move between different battlefields, they’ll be highly vulnerable to axis operations . . . 

Second, al-Qaeda-linked organizations, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), and other Salafi-Jihadist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham will grow stronger. The axis claim that capturing Aleppo will weaken extremist groups, but the opposite is true . . .

Third, and as an extension, when Aleppo falls, we’ll see expanded external support for the extremists, notably from the Sunni monarchies. Led by the House of Saud, the Sunni kingdoms view Assad thru the lens of sectarian hatred. That view is formed partly by Assad’s slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrian Sunnis, but also by his alliance with Shia-revolutionary Iran. After Aleppo, expect the monarchies to increase funding, perhaps through proxies, for groups such as JFS and al-Qaeda . . . 

Fourth, the Assad axis will escalate operations in Syria’s western, rebel-held Idlib governate. Idlib is critical to the rebellion’s existence because the rebels control areas along a roughly 50-mile border with Turkey. That border is the rebels supply aorta. But after Aleppo falls, the axis will push hard against Idlib border settlements, such as Ad Dana in the east, and Jisr ash-Shugur in the west. They know that as the border goes, so goes the rebellion . . . 

So the Russian bear sees a great strategic advantage shaping up on the Syrian chessboard.

Which brings us to the subject of DJT's likely choice of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State. The reasoning seems, to seasoned observers, to be that, as the head of not only the world's biggest energy company, one with world-wide reach, but a business organization with annual revenues exceeding those of many nation-states,  he has developed a great deal of savvy in terms of dealing with the heads of state in all regions of the world.

Russia gets mentioned a lot in this regard. Tillers and Putin have been negotiating partners since 1999. 

In the late 1990s, when serving as a vice president for Exxon’s Russian unit, Tillerson helped revive a $17 billion oil development in a remote region east of Moscow that’d been stalled by bureaucratic inaction for most of a decade.

The project, which tapped a cluster of oil discoveries beneath the ice-choked seas off Russia’s Far East, became a crown jewel in Exxon’s global portfolio, pumping hundreds of millions of barrels of crude since the first wells came online in 2005. The achievement burnished a resume already chock-full of successes helping direct Exxon’s forays in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

“Russia made his career,” said Joseph Pratt, a University of Houston oil-industry historian, in a 2015 interview. Tillerson’s success in turbulent late ’90s Russia “really impressed” Exxon’s leadership team at corporate headquarters in Irving, Texas.

But is there a trail of position papers, any newspaper columns or pieces for major opinion journals from which we can glean just how he views Russia in recent years - say, since the seizure of Crimea, or the incursion into Ukraine, or rumblings of Russian government involvement in hacking misadventures?

Unlike the Trump cabinet picks so far, this one is being met with some reservation, particularly in the body that will have to sign on to the appointment:

Some senators, who must confirm Tillerson if he’s nominated, are balking. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona said in an interview on Fox News that Tillerson’s past relationship with Putin “is a matter of concern to me.” Fellow Republican Marco Rubio of Florida, who sits on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, wrote on Twitter that “being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for” from a secretary of state.

Marco Rubio in particular is someone whose guiding principles, and his adherence to them, garner my respect. (McCain, not so much. Talk about hit-and-miss. In this case, though, he is on the side of prudence.)

I hope there's a lot of conversation about this today, given the speed at which President-elect Get-'Er-Done likes to move on these matters. The next Secretary of State's job is going to entail facing grave dangers, not just doing deals.

Sunday roundup

You'll recall that the other day, I posted - in a roundup - a link to a Dennis Prager piece about men being hardwired to objectify women, but not to worry, because a good man can simultaneously take into regard her full humanity. Raja Halwani, philosophy professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, offers a somewhat different take on the matter:

The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that human beings tend to be evil. He wasn’t talking about some guy rubbing his hands and crowing with glee at the prospect of torturing an enemy. He was thinking about the basic human tendency to succumb to what we want to do instead of what we ought to do, to heed the siren-song of our desires instead of the call of duty. For Kant, morality is the force that closes this gap, and holds us back from our darker, desiring selves. 

Once desire becomes suspect, sex is never far behind. Kant implicitly acknowledged the unusual power of sexual urges and their capacity to divert us from doing what is right. He claimed that sex was particularly morally condemnable, because lust focuses on the body, not the agency, of those we sexually desire, and so reduces them to mere things. It makes us see the objects of our longing as just that ­– objects. In so doing, we see them as mere tools for our own satisfaction.

Treating people as objects can mean many things. It could include beating them, tearing into them, and violating them. But there are other, less violent ways of objectifying people. We might treat someone as only a means to our sexual pleasure, to satisfy our lust on that person, to use a somewhat archaic expression. The fact that the other person consents does not get rid of the objectification; two people can agree to use one another for purely sexual purposes.

But don’t we use each other all the time? Many of us have jobs – as cleaners, gardeners, teachers, singers. Does the beneficiary of the service objectify the service provider, and does the service provider objectify the recipient by taking their money? These relationships don’t seem to provoke the same moral qualms. Either they do not involve objectification, or the objectification is somehow neutered.

Kant said that these scenarios weren’t really a problem. He draws a distinction between mere use – the basis of objectification – and more-than-mere use. While we might employ people to do jobs, and accept payment for our work, we don’t treat the person on the other side of the transaction as a mere tool; we still recognise that person’s fundamental humanity.  

Sex, though, is different. When I hire someone to sing, according to Kant, my desire is for his or her talent – for the voice-in-action. But when I sexually desire someone, I desire his or her body, not the person’s services or talents or intellectual capabilities, although any of these could enhance the desire. So, when we desire the person’s body, we often focus during sex on its individual parts: the buttocks, the penis, the clitoris, the thighs, the lips. What we desire to do with those parts differs, of course. Some like to touch them with the hand, others with the lips, others with the tongue; for others still, the desire is just to look. This does not mean that I would settle for a human corpse: our desire for human bodies is directed at them as living, much like my desire for a cellphone is directed at a functioning one.

But, one might object, don’t we do sexual things because we love our partners, and want them to feel pleasure? Of course we do. But if we did so when we didn’t want to in the first place, then we do not do it out of sexual desire. And if we don’t do it out of sexual desire, then the problem of objectification does not present itself. We can enjoy sexually pleasing someone else. But you can think of the other person as a sophisticated instrument: to give the maximum pleasure, we have to please it.  

If those last few sentences strike you as indicating that Professor Halwani may be tying  himself in knots, that was kind of my impression, too. But consider what he says a bit later:

The capacity to reason is what makes people ends in themselves, worthy of moral respect, according to Kant. And what’s objectifying about sexual desire is its ability to numb a person to reason, both in themselves and in others. Its power is such that it makes our reason its servant: our rationality becomes the means to satisfy its goals. It has been the downfall of kings and leaders; the ruination of relationships; the seedbed of lies in the pursuit of getting laid (‘Me too! I love atonal music!’). In my pursuit to fulfil it, I cheat, I deceive, I pretend to be not who I am – and not just to the other person, but to myself, too. I set aside the other’s rationality, and in doing so, set aside their humanity. That is not my concern; his or her body is.

There's something unsatisfying about his conclusion, though, to evoke a sexual metaphor. He says he agrees with Kant that the inevitable pairing of sex and objectification present humanity with a moral dilemma and leaves it at that. Well, good professor, is there a way out? And if not, why bring the matter up? Can we not just say, "That is the way the world is constructed" and leave it at that? After all, everybody you see around you in the course of the day is the result of some kind of sex, excited or bored.

Great Kimberly Strassel piece at WSJ on why the important - and exciting - thing about Scott Pruitt's appointment to head the EPA is that it signals a rediscovered focus on federalism. Pruitt is not a climate scientist, he's a constitutional scholar. In participating in the move by a multitude of state AGs to sue to stop the Clean Power Plan, he was asserting states as coequal powers to the federal government. He's now in a position to make good on that assertion big-time.

One of the most heartbreaking episodes of the ISIS menace has been that group's destruction of priceless historical artifacts in the Syrian city of Palmyra. Elation was certainly warranted when it was driven out of the city last spring. Well, it's back:

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, "entered Palmyra on Saturday and now occupies its northwest. There is also fighting with the army in the city center," Al Jazeera reports. The observatory says the militants reached the city’s Tadmor Hospital and its strategically located wheat silos.
The activist-run Palmyra Coordination Collective also reports militants seized the city’s military warehouse and its northern and western neighborhoods after taking several government positions, oil fields, and strategic hilltops in the surrounding countryside in a rapid three-day campaign, the Associated Press reports.

There's been some concern in recent days that the urgency exuded by the incoming Congress to repeal the "A"CA will dissipate. If this NRO piece by Senator Mike Lee and Representative Mark Walker is any indication, such worries are not to be given too much weight.

Venezuelan authorities have arrested two executives of a toy company and seized its inventory of nearly four million toys. Photographed the execs being marched out of their facility. Seems the company was in violation of a government edict to reduce prices by 30 percent.

If there's a climate consensus, it just might be the opposite of the one claimed by the jackboots

Check this out:

The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

The survey finds that 24 percent of the scientist respondents fit the “Nature Is Overwhelming” model. "In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth.” Moreover, “they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives.”

Another group of scientists fit the “Fatalists” model. These scientists, comprising 17 percent of the respondents, “diagnose climate change as both human- and naturally caused. ‘Fatalists’ consider climate change to be a smaller public risk with little impact on their personal life. They are skeptical that the scientific debate is settled regarding the IPCC modeling.” These scientists are likely to ask, “How can anyone take action if research is biased?”

 H/T: Allen West

"The scientific cat fight of our time"

The Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels, writing at The Hill, predicts the thwacking of the hornet's nest that is going to take place when the EPA under Pruitt reverses the present regime's "finding of endangerment" for CO2:

It may very well be held that the EPA remains responsible for regulation under the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision unless there is a specific act of Congress reversing its progeny policies, such as the Clean Power Plan. So the Endangerment Finding must be reversed.

But how to do it? For years, federal agencies have thrown massive support at scientists who, as human beings, serve their best interests (and their employer-universities) by generating horror-show results that also generate more support and professional advancement.

The Trump administration is going to have to stock up on scientists and administrators who are savvy to this game, and they are going to be very hard to find, as there’s very little incentive to not play along.

There’s going to have to be a massive effort to pick apart failing climate models and questionably-adjusted data. They’re going to have to find people willing to expose the current regime’s blatant abuse of logic in generating inflated “costs” of global warming, while largely ignoring the co-benefits of fossil fuel power, like doubled life expectancy and undreamt-of wealth.

The academy is going to howl, and Washington’s science lobbies, like the American Association for the Advancement of Science (headed by Democratic ex-congressman Rush Holt) are going to go berserk.
Fasten your seat belts, for we may be about to witness the scientific-cat fight of our time.

On one side will be a massive and entrenched establishment, defending models that we now know were (and this is truly shocking) often adjusted to give a predetermined result. On the other will be a dogged and far smaller clan, tearing apart the code of these models, much like the ENIGMA busters of Bletchley Park. This will get ugly.

But truth will prevail now.