Tuesday roundup

If Robert Mugabe is indeed forced to step down as Zimbabwe's dictator (which looks ever more likely, given that he has been removed as head of his party, the Zanu-PF, which was the title that gave him his power), his successor will likely be his former bodyguard and enforcer, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Mnangagwa is an even bigger monster. The Fifth Brigade, which he employed to carry out a massacre lasting several years, was trained in North Korea.

More seismic shifts in Saudi Arabia: the country's Grand Mufti has issued a fatwa forbidding war against Jews.  This from a guy whose past pronouncements have included these:

Sheikh Abdul Aziz is not exactly a theological liberal. In March 2012, he reportedly declaredthat it was necessary to destroy all churches in Kuwait, or possibly in the region.

Earlier this year, he warned of the “depravity” of cinemas and music concerts, saying they would corrupt morals if allowed in the kingdom.

In December 2015, while calling for greater Islamic co-operation against Isis, he labelled Isis “part of the Israeli army”, thus suggesting that when it comes to Israel he is delusional.

So undoubtedly he’s not going to announce that synagogues or churches may be built in Saudi Arabia any time soon.

Nevertheless, he is the most senior cleric in the state which has served as the epicentre of Sunni Islamic fanaticism and the most austere and conservative interpretation of a religion which has Jew-hatred at its theological core. If such a man is now saying that war against the Jewish state is not holy at all but must be forbidden on religious grounds, will this not have some impact within the Islamic religious world for which holy war against the Jews is an article of faith?

H/T: Bookworm 

Stephen Moore likes several features of how the Republican tax plan - the synthesis of what the House and Senate are doing - is shaping up: elimination of state and local tax deduction, eliminating the "A"CA individual mandate, and this one, which  is actually the imposition of a new tax. He likes it (and so does LITD), because it addresses the bloat and hence the rot in post-American higher education:

Finally, there is the proposed tax on college endowments. These are massive storehouses of wealth: Harvard and Yale combined sit on a nest egg of almost $60 billion, enough to give every student free tuition at these schools from now until forever. Instead, these university endowments act like giant financial trading dynasties, with very little of the largesse going to help students pay tuition. The GOP plan would put a small tax on the unspent money in the endowments if they don't start spending the money down. My only complaint is that the tax is way too low. But the first shot against the university-industrial complex has finally been fired.

The productivity of American universities, as Richard Vedder of Ohio University has documented, continues to decline. Vedder also found that university tuitions don't go down when these schools have bigger endowments. They go up. These endowments subsidize the six- and seven-figure salaries of pompous, tired, and tenured professors (who teach four or five hours a week) and administrators. Bravo to Republicans for starting to turn off the spigot.

Colin Flaherty, author of Don't Make the Black Kids Angry, writing at The American Thinker, examines the pomposity and enormous self-regard of Pippa Biddle, a writer for Wired and a product of a blue-blood upbringing.

Pippa and her pals used to take vacations to some deprived corner of the world, spread a little whiteness around, pronounce the natives better for it, and go back home to, in her case, to captain the ski team at Miss Porter’s.

During one of her trips of “Volun-tourism,” Pippa and her pals were building some kind of school or nuclear power plant or whatever white people build in third world hellholes, which is almost always pieced out and sold off before their departing flights leave the runway. She later found out that the locals had to come in at night and tore down everything they had built that day. Then rebuilt it. Turns out that building a wall is a lot more complicated than the ladies at Miss Porter’s school realized: you need a level to make sure the wall is… well, level.

Pippa made a bit of splash in the New York Times when she declared that all the white people traveling to help black people were racist and wrongheaded and harmful. 

It could have been called Don’t Make the Entitled White Rich Girls Angry.

And Pippa was not going to stand for that anymore. Not on her watch.

Instead, Pippa decided to make a living out of writing fairy tales of hate speech the same way she built a wall: without foundation, without expertise, without anything except an overweening whiteness that allowed her to appoint herself as guardian of all things black.

With nothing on the level.

Thanks, Pippa, we got it from here: We are going to continue to document how black crime and violence is wildly out of proportion, and how reporters and public officials and trust fund babies are in denial, deceit, and delusion about it. People like you, Pippa.

Ouch!

Erick Erickson makes a point we often make here at LITD - namely, that male and female human beings are not interchangeable. Therefore, he says, men must not treat women the way they treat other men. They must treat women much better. Brings to mind the assertion John Kelly made in his presser a while back, that we used to understand that women are sacred.