More folks in Congress - including lotsa Democrats - are waking up to the realization that patty cake with Iran was always a bad idea

 The American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka, writing at The Dispatch, says that the Biden-era push to revive a deal with Iran on its nuclear ambitions is running out of steam among members of Congress:

“It is time to tell the Europeans—who[m] we have shown good faith with, that we were willing to enter into what was hopefully a stronger and longer deal—that the Iranians are not there,” Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez told the AIPAC New Jersey spring leadership dinner last week. Sure, it was what his audience wanted to hear; AIPAC has been lobbying against Barack Obama’s Iran deal since it was first signed in 2015. But Menendez is not alone. A June 1 non-binding measure offered by Sen. Jim Lankford (R-Oklahoma) demanding that any nuclear agreement address Tehran-sponsored terrorism and opposing sanctions relief for the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps passed with every Republican but one, and 16 Democrats, including Menendez and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Lankford got a lot of support from across the aisle:

Democrats who voted with Lankford: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York ), Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), Chris Coons (D-Delaware), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada) Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire), Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), Angus King (I-Maine), Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), Gary Peters (D-Michigan), Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona), Jon Tester (D-Montana) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon). Of the 16, five are up for re-election in 2022, three in tough races (Cortez Masto, Hassan, and Kelly).

And for good reason. Iran has once again been showing itself to bed a bad-faith negotiating partner:

The Board of Governors for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed a resolution condemning (with only two nations opposing) Tehran’s failure to disclose requested information about nuclear activity at three previously undisclosed sites. While the work was alleged to have taken place prior to 2003, documents spirited from Iran by Israel reveal a complex effort (which included documents stolen from the IAEA itself) to hoodwink the international nuclear agency. Any steps to condemn Iran at the IAEA would follow a two-year hiatus during which European powers and (reportedly beginning in November 2020) the Biden administration tried their best to sweet talk, cajole, bribe, and threaten Tehran back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal.

This whole undertaking was always a bad idea. Barack Obama and John Kerry pursed it so vigorously in the first place because they're both flaming narcissists who had some kind of idea that history would regard them as visionaries ushering in an unprecedented era of unicorns and rainbows. Kerry wanted it so badly he was willing to be publicly humiliated and insulted by Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at the interminable meetings at which the JCPOA was hammered out. And the Obama administration and those shilling for it continued to offer up flimsy defense of it afterward, even as top Iranian officials continued to cal the US the Great Satan and Iran's number-one enemy, even as Iran continued to wage proxy war through terrorist groups, and even as it captured a US Navy crew - on the day of an Obama State of the Union address - and distributed photos world wide of the crewmen on their knees with their hands behind their heads.

Appeasing bad guys is always a bad idea.

 

 

 

The fruits of patty-cake - today's edition

 During the later years of the Obama era, I had many posts with this title. Evidence was ample that Iran had not done much beyond complying with the narrowest interpretation of the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. There'd certainly been no change of heart, no desire on Iran's part to begin to really act like a well-intentioned member of the international community. When two US Navy patrol boats were captured by Iran in the Persian Gulf, their crew members photographed on their knees with their hands behind their heads, on the day Obama was to give the State of the Union address, or when the Ayatollah Khameini or top-ranking Quds Force or Revolutionary Guards spokesmen continued the rhetoric about the US being Iran's number one enemy, or when Iran continued to build ever-more powerful missiles, or when it would get caught shipping materiel to terrorist groups, I'd write a post with this title.

The reason was to hammer home a basic point of sensible foreign policy: you don't appease rogue regimes that have repeatedly declared that you are their enemy.

Pulling out of the JCPOA was one of the handful of laudable policy moves to come out of the Trump administration in my estimation.

But I feel pretty sure Trump did it from a transactional motivation rather than from adherence to the above-mentioned principle. He thinks in terms of deals, and saw the JCPOA as a bad one.

And then he put his signature inconsistency on display by making an abrupt turn from longstanding US policy toward North Korea and setting up and participating in the summits with Kim Jong-Un. We had to listen to gushing rhetoric about beautiful letters and North Korea's enormous potential, knowing full well there'd be no resulting change in that country's stance. 

If the JCPOA was driven at least largely by Obama's and Kerry's narcissistic determination to be seen as visionary peacemakers, Trump's overtures to Kim were that determination on steroids. 

And, no surprise here, it was all for naught:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatened to expand his nuclear arsenal as he disclosed a list of high-tech weapons systems under development, saying the fate of relations with the United States depends on whether it abandons its hostile policy, state media reported Saturday.

 

Kim’s comments during a key meeting of the ruling party this week were seen as applying pressure on the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden, who has called Kim a “thug” and has criticized his summits with President Donald Trump.

 

The Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim as saying the “key to establishing new relations between (North Korea) and the United States is whether the United States withdraws its hostile policy.”

The Kim regime has the same basic stance it's had for decades:

He again called the U.S. his country’s “main enemy.”

“Whoever takes office in the U.S., its basic nature and hostile policy will never change,” he said.

So when some drool-besotted Trumpist starts in with the list of supposedly great accomplishments of the Very Stable Genius and gets to this subject, you can respond, "I think we can take that one off." 

  

Biden cabinet picks - initial thoughts

 I don't have anything like exhaustive familiarity with the backgrounds and positions of most of these people, but after doing some research, I tend to concur with the view I'm seeing from a spectrum of folks that they look like what one would expect for Biden Cabinet picks. It's clear he and his team of advisors are being driven to a considerable degree by diversity. That's what a Democrat administration in 2020 / 2021 is going to prioritize. Most of them seem to be serious people with impressive credentials. From what I can tell, they're not wild-eyed radicals.

Anthony Blinken comes across as earnest. He says he's going to put humility among the foremost values driving his work if he's confirmed as secretary of state. I get the sense he wants to see the US be a consensus-builder and facilitator on the world stage, which is fine as far as it goes - in fact, a refreshing change from the bull-in-a-china-shop "American First" stance of the era now concluding.  Let's see how it's fleshed out in such matters as alliances and shoring up a sense of the West as a crucial player among the world's spheres of influence. There's also the unsettling matter of the Biden administration serving notice that the global climate is going to be a top priority. More about that later.

Janet Yellen is a Keynesian and I think she tends to look at economic matters through a largely macro lens, but from what I can tell she's regarded as pretty level-headed. She ought to make an interesting treasury secretary. Hey, Elizabeth Warren didn't get the gig, which brings a sigh of relief.

Alejandro Mayorkas has an impressive resume. He has some experience in dealing with cyber-crime. I can't find much that would indicate where he stands on terrorism or the military machinations of America's enemies, which are key areas of focus for a Homeland Security secretary. 

Linda Thomas-Greenfield likewise doesn't have the kind of trail of demonstrations of outspokenness on the kinds of matters that come before either the UN Security Council of General Assembly. Will she be a dig-in-your-heels-and-demand-Western-principles-get-defended firebrand like Jeane Kirkpatrick, John Bolton and Nikki Haley? I wouldn't bet on it. I think she's more of a bureaucrat who will fit well with Blinken's style. 

Avril Haines, the DNI Director-designate, is an interesting figure. In 1992, she dropped out of a doctoral program at Johns Hopkins to join her husband in purchasing a Baltimore bar that had been seized in a drug raid. They turned it into a cafe-bookstore, which held, among other things, erotica reading nights. She later went back to academia and got a Georgetown law degree. In 2018, she ardently supported Trump's pick of Gina Haspel to be CIA director, praising her credentials forthrightly.

And then there's John Kerry, who is going to be climate czar. I guess in a Dem cabinet, you have to have one hardcore leftist. Stop rolling your eyes. We all remember his leadership of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the way he lied about he US committing atrocities in a congressional hearing. He went to Nicaragua as a first-term Senator in the 1980s and met with Daniel Ortega to tell him that not all elements of the US government were on the same page with that awful Ronald Reagan. He's called Israel an apartheid state. As Secretary of State, he and Wendy Sherman allowed themselves to be humiliated and yelled at by Iranian foreign minister Zarif during the interminable negotiations that led to that shameful piece of appeasement with one of the West's most threatening enemies, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. And, of course, he thinks the global climate is in some kind of trouble that requires humankind to urgently put the brakes on its advancement, and that is the area that is going to be his portfolio on this cabinet. 

So there are no real surprises here. Much to follow and observe with an open mind, and some things to oppose right off the bat. 

One thing we can say for sure is that it will be a whole different ballgame from what we've seen under the Very Stable Genius.

Saturday roundup

While here at LITD we are wont to keep the Three Pillars at the ready when discussing the nature of conservatism, it's important to remember that as a worldview it is the distillation of various strands of thought. And we must admit that some of our forebears had some funny ways about them. Richard M. Weaver's notions that medieval Europe and the antebellum South were as close to model societies as humankind has seen, that jazz was barbaric and devoid of musical principles, and that war could be conducted according to a chivalric code are thorny. Midge Decter had to call out Russell Kirk for remarks that smacked of an anti-Israel stance. Bill Buckley had to pry the fingers of the Objectivists and Birchers from National Review.

All this came to mind earlier today as I digested two nature-of-conservatism pieces I ran across: Matthew Continetti's Washington Free Beacon essay entitled "There's No Escaping Trump" and Andrew Sullivan's New York Magazine piece "America Desperately Needs a Healthy Conservatism."   Continetti is of the face-it-Trump's-impact-on-the-Republican-variety-is-also-leaving-a-permanent-mark-on-conservatism-as-an-ideology variety. Sullivan was inspired to write his piece by having just read Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition by Roger Scruton. I'm not so sure I buy his assertion that conservatism is, by nature of being a product of a particular place and time (the West over the last two-plus centuries) exclusive to certain peoples. Seems to me the Three Pillars will rock any society in which it's tried. He also veers off into a "conservative" argument for an environmentalism predicated on the global climate being in some kind of trouble. Talk about kinky! But they are both worth a rub of the chin. I may explore the train of thought they've engendered when time permits.

Here's what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore to a photo shoot with a construction crew:

Ocasio-Cortez was pictured wearing a $3,500 outfit as she posed with construction workers.​ She was decked out in a Gabriela Hearst blazer ($1,990), Gabriela Hearst pants ($890), and some Monolo Blahnik shoes ($625).

Secretary of State Pompeo on Global-Test's end-run regarding Iran:

"What Secretary Kerry has done is unseemly and unprecedented. This is a former secretary of state engaged with the world's largest state sponsor of terror and, according to him... he was talking to them, he was telling them to wait out this administration."

[snip]

"You can't find precedent for this in U.S. history and Secretary Kerry ought not to engage in that kind of behavior," he said. "It's inconsistent with what the foreign policy of the United States is as directed by this president, and it is beyond inappropriate."
Pompeo  pointed out that he saw Kerry at the Munich Security Conference in February with former Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Obama Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, calling them "the troika."

"I'm confident that they met with their troika counterparts," Pompeo continued. "I wasn't in the meeting, but I am reasonably confident that he was not there in support of U.S. policy with respect to the Islamic Republic of Iran -- who this week, fired Katyusha rockets toward the United States embassy in Baghdad and took action against our consulate in Basra." 

He added: "Actively undermining U.S. policy as a former secretary of state is literally unheard of."

Great Heidi Munson piece at The Resurgent entitled, "Do You Ever Feel Abandoned By God? Emotions Aren't Always Our Best Guide."  Any given moment in our lives, however dire, is a mere snapshot, and we never have all the facts and context. Plus, God is in charge and loves us infinitely.

Great Daren Jonescu essay entitled "Turning Sadness Into Sentimentality":

I almost called this little essay “Turning Tragedy Into Tripe.” For I am thinking of the inevitable September 11th anniversary “memorials.” There are ways to remember life- or world-changing moments without turning them into emotional pablum. The modern world, however, has lost those ways, just as it has lost its way in general with regard to the meaning of history, the lessons of experience, and the adult imperative of rising above that manipulative sentimentality and cloying “social feeling” which, in the name of “never forgetting,” serve only to infantilize and diminish the souls of men.

If you were personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, or lost close friends or beloved family members that day, you will naturally experience some echo of the old pain as the calendar reminds you of your suffering. But for everyone else, the pretense of deep feeling — whether of the patriotic “USA, USA” sort or the self-centered “Oh, dear me” sort — is something that must be dredged up, much like the popular outpouring of feeling that one witnesses after the death of a celebrity, from Princess Diana to Robin Williams to John McCain. Everyone wishes to be a part of the “event,” and to act out a level of intimate engagement that is not grounded in any personal reality, but rather in a desire to belong, i.e., to share in a great communal feeling through the sort of self-annihilation that late progressive man mistakes for self-expression.

We all know what has to be faced in order for this looming grimness to be reversed:

The federal government collected a record $1,521,589,000,000 in individual income taxes through the first eleven months of fiscal 2018 (October 2017 through August 2018), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.

However, the federal government also ran a deficit of $898,112,000,000 for those eleven months, according to the statement.

Check out the video of the Weather Channel guy waxing dramatic in the Florence wind, leaning into it, while in the background a couple of people stroll by in normal fashion. But, hey, if you're going to perpetuate the meme that weather is getting worse due to human advancement, a little theatricality is useful tool.

Monday roundup

Identity politics jackbootery is infecting the STEM world, big-time, as Heather MacDonald, writing in the City Journal, exhaustively demonstrates.

Take the National Science Foundation, for instance:

The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed by diversity ideology. Progress in science, it argues, requires a “diverse STEM workforce.” Programs to boost diversity in STEM pour forth from its coffers in wild abundance. The NSF jump-started the implicit-bias industry in the 1990s by underwriting the development of the implicit association test (IAT). (The IAT purports to reveal a subject’s unconscious biases by measuring the speed with which he associates minority faces with positive or negative words; see “Are We All Unconscious Racists?,” Autumn 2017.) Since then, the NSF has continued to dump millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism. In July 2017, it awarded $1 million to the University of New Hampshire and two other institutions to develop a “bias-awareness intervention tool.” Another $2 million that same month went to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University to “remediate microaggressions and implicit biases” in engineering classrooms.

The tortuously named “Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science” (INCLUDES) bankrolls “fundamental research in the science of broadening participation.” There is no such “science,” just an enormous expenditure of resources that ducks the fundamental problems of basic skills and attitudes toward academic achievement. A typical INCLUDES grant from October 2017 directs $300,000 toward increasing Native American math involvement by incorporating “indigenous knowledge systems” into Navajo Nation Math Circles.

The INCLUDES initiative has already generated its own parasitic endeavor, Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER). The purpose of EAGER funding is to evaluate INCLUDES grants and to pressure actual science grantees to incorporate diversity considerations into their research. The ultimate goal of such programs is to change the culture of STEM so that “inclusion and equity” are at its very core.

Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on “diversity.” Those “un-diverse” scientists discovered the fundamental particles of matter and unlocked the genetics of viruses. Now that academic victimology has established a beachhead at the agency, however, it remains to be seen whether the pace of such breakthroughs will continue. The NSF is conducting a half-million-dollar study of “intersectionality” in the STEM fields. “Intersectionality” refers to the increased oppression allegedly experienced by individuals who can check off several categories of victimhood—being female, black, and trans, say. The NSF study’s theory is that such intersectionality lies behind the lack of diversity in STEM. Two sociologists are polling more than 10,000 scientists and engineers in nine professional organizations about the “social and cultural variables” that produce “disadvantage and marginalization” in STEM workplaces.

One of the study’s directors is a University of Michigan sociologist specializing in gender and sexuality. Erin Cech has received multiple NSF grants; her latest publication is “Rugged Meritocrats: The Role of Overt Bias and the Meritocratic Ideology in Trump Supporters’ Opposition to Social Justice Efforts.” The other lead researcher, Tom Waidzunas, is a sociologist at Temple University; he studies the “dynamics of gender and sexuality” within STEM, as well as how “scientists come to know, and hence constitute, sexuality and sexual desire.” Such politically constituted social-justice research was not likely envisioned by Congress in 1950 when it created the NSF to “promote the progress of science.”

Or the National Institutes of Health:

The National Institutes of Health are another diversity-obsessed federal science funder. Medical schools receive NIH training grants to support postdoctoral education for physicians pursuing a research career in such fields as oncology and cardiology. The NIH threatens to yank any training grant when it comes up for renewal if it has not supported a sufficient number of “underrepresented minorities” (URMs). One problem: there are often no black or Hispanic M.D.s to evaluate for inclusion in the training grant. If there is a potential URM candidate, the principal investigators will pore over his file in the hope of convincing themselves that he is adequately qualified. Meantime, the patently qualified Indian doctor goes to the bottom of the résumé pile. For now, medical schools can claim Argentinians and the sons of Ghanaian plantation owners as URMs, but if NIH bean-counters become more scrupulous in their “diversity metrics,” this aspect of biomedical research will reach an impasse.

The diversity mania also determines the way medical research is carried out. The NIH has onerous requirements that government-sponsored clinical trials include the same proportion of female and minority patients as is found in the medical school’s “catchment area” (its geographic zone of study). If some of these populations drop out of medical trials at disproportionate rates or are difficult to recruit, too bad. If these URM and female-enrollment quotas are not met, the medical school must “invest the appropriate effort to correct under-accrual,” in the words of the NIH guidelines.

That “appropriate effort” can cost a fortune. Schools such as the Mayo Clinic, located in overwhelmingly white areas, must still meet a diversity quota. Lung cancer and coronary-artery disease afflict adults. If a particular immigrant group in a research trial’s catchment area contains a disproportionate share of young people compared with the aging white population, that immigrant group will be less susceptible to those adult diseases. Nevertheless, cancer and heart-disease drug researchers must recruit from that community in numbers proportionate to its share of the overall population.

Accrediting bodies reinforce the diversity compulsion. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires that medical schools maintain detailed diversity metrics on their efforts to interview and hire URM faculty. Medical school search committees go through lengthy implicit-bias training sessions and expend enormous amounts of effort looking for something that they often know a priori doesn’t exist: qualified URM faculty candidates. The very definition of diversity used by academic review panels is becoming ever more exacting. A 2015 panel assessing the academic strength of San Diego State University’s biology department complained that the faculty, though relatively representative of traditional “underserved groups,” nevertheless failed to mirror the “diversity of peoples in Southern California.” The use of a school’s immediate surroundings as a demographic benchmark for its faculty is a significant escalation of the war between the diversocrats and academic standards. Naturally, the accrediting panel made no effort to ascertain whether those Southern California peoples—including Hmong, Salvadorans, and Somalis—are netting Ph.D.s in biology in numbers proportional to their Southern California population.

Many private foundations fund only gender- and race-exclusive science training; others that do fund basic research, such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, nevertheless divert huge sums to diversity.

The major scientific societies push the idea that implicit bias is impeding the careers of otherwise competitive scientists. In February 2018, Erin Cech presented preliminary findings from the NSF intersectionality study at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting; naturally, those results showed “systemic anti-LGBTQ bias within STEM industry and academia.” Another AAAS session addressed how the “hierarchical nature” of science exacerbates gender bias and stereotypes, and called for the “equal representation of women” across STEM.

Or  UCLA:

The engineering school at UCLA minted its first associate dean of diversity and inclusion in 2017, despite already being subject to enormous pressures from UCLA’s fantastically remunerated Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and other bureaucrats. “One of my jobs,” the new engineering diversocrat, Scott Brandenberg, told UCLA’s student newspaper, is “to avoid implicit bias in the hiring process.”

Or what's going on in the realm of medical-school admissions:

Medical school administrators urge admissions committees to overlook the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores of black and Hispanic student applicants and employ “holistic review” in order to engineer a diverse class. The result is a vast gap in entering qualifications. From 2013 to 2016, medical schools nationally admitted 57 percent of black applicants with a low MCAT of 24 to 26, but only 8 percent of whites and 6 percent of Asians with those same low scores, according to Claremont McKenna professor Frederick Lynch. Individual schools have larger score disparities. This achievement gap does not close over the course of medical school, but the URM students who do complete their medical training will be fanatically sought after anyway. Adding to medical schools’ diversity woes is the fact that the number of male URM student applicants has been declining in recent years, making it even harder to find qualified candidates.

Racial preferences in med school programs are sometimes justified on the basis that minorities want doctors who “look like them.” Arguably, however, minority patients with serious illnesses want the same thing as anyone else: subject mastery.

Big tech companies have decided that "implicit bias" is more important than objectivity:

The giant Silicon Valley companies offer gender- and race-exclusive mentoring programs and give special consideration to females and URMs in hiring and promotions. Managers go through the same costly implicit-bias training as faculty committees. In August 2017, Google fired computer engineer James Damore for questioning the premises of Google’s diversity training and policies. The discrimination lawsuit he subsequently filed against the Silicon Valley giant reveals a workplace culture infused with academic victimology. Employees denounce the advocacy of gender- and race-blind policies as a “microaggression” and the product of “racism” and “misogyny.” Managers apologize for promoting males, even when females are being promoted at a higher rate. All-male research teams are mocked; employees self-righteously offer to protect Google’s oppressed females and URMs from “blinkered, pig-ignorant” conservative opinion. A manager reprimands someone for pointing out that white males are actually underrepresented at Google compared with the general population. The manager informs the errant employee that caring about facts may seem to be a trait of engineers, but “being absolutely correct is inappropriate” when it comes to “discussions of race and justice.” Facts are especially inappropriate “in the context of the threat” faced by minorities and females at Google. Needless to say, no female or underrepresented minority faces a threat at Google.

Jack Shafer at Politico looks at the slow death of the Denver Post. While he doesn't mention it specifically, he's citing a textbook example of Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction. And he does mention a term / concept I'd not heard before: "harvesting market position."

It's good to see a Kevin Williamson piece again at NRO (he hasn't resumed staff status; his byline depicts him as a "Texas-based writer").  His advice for "involuntary celibate" dudes ("incels," as the buzz-inclined call them) is to join a church.

It probably is not the case that those guys are maladjusted fruitcakes because they can’t get a girl; more likely, they can’t get a girl because they’re maladjusted fruitcakes. But you more or less normal, nonpsychotic, workaday types having trouble meeting a girl: Join a church. Today. Or Sunday. If you don’t know which one to go to, pick whichever one your parents or grandparents went to, unless they were hippies or atheists, in which case go Catholic.

There are girls who want to go home with a guy they met at a bar, but, as many of you no doubt have discovered, you are not that guy. And if you were going to be that guy, you’d be him by now. The sexual revolution, like any revolution, has its cruelties. As Ross Douthat put it in the New York Times, “Like other forms of neoliberal deregulation the sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.” So maybe just cross the club off your list. On the other hand, there are girls who want to date — and marry — a guy they met in church. You know where you find those girls? 

Church. 

Most congregations — and practically every church committee that doesn’t have the word “men” in its title — are lopsidedly female. Maybe what gets those ladies out of bed on a Sunday morning is fire in the soul. But it’s a safe bet that some of them are there, at least in part, for the same reason you are: They are alone, and they do not want to be. And they don’t want to say “We hooked up after knocking down six Mango Madness Margaritas apiece at happy hour at Bennigan’s” when their parents and friends ask where they met. “We met at church” is a better opening chapter. 

All you have to do to clear that first hurdle is show up. You’re a man, you go to church, ergo you are a churchgoing man. Maybe you go for self-interested reasons. Most churches are good with that: Lots of people come to church not because they fell off their ass on the road to Damascus but because they are lonely or because they are unhappy with some aspect of their lives. That’s okay. In Jesus’s time, a lot of people came mostly for the show and the bread and the fishes. Just park your ass on a pew and we’ll see about your immortal soul. 

Former Secretary of State, Senator and leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War Global-Test is keeping some real unsavory company these days.

The more Dems talk about reversing the recent tax cuts, the more we should encourage them.

Jeffrey McCall, who spent years as a transgender, calling himself Scarlett, came around and aligned himself with reality. And it wasn't as a result of conversion therapy. It was a result of saying yes to Lord Jesus.

At that time Jerusalem shall be called the throne of the Lord, and all nations shall gather to it, to the presence of the Lord in Jerusalem, and they shall no more stubbornly follow their own evil heart.

Even though wind-turbine-generated power remains, from an economic standpoint, a play-like energy form, GE is planning to build a bunch of big - as in only a little shorter than the Eiffel Tower - windmills brand-named Halidade-X 12 MW.  And stick them in the ocean.

Saturday roundup

You may have heard that former Secretary of State Global-Test is going behind the US government's back, talking to Iran in an attempt to undermine current US policy about the JCPOA. Scott Johnson at Power Line poses an important question:

Isn’t this the kind of thing for which then Acting Attorney Sally Yates sicced the FBI on Michael Flynn? Because it allegedly violated the Logan Act? Why, yes, it is. 

Johnson reminds us that G-T got his start as a foreign-policy gadfly in 1971, as a representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, peddling lies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and even heading off to Paris to meet with America's Marxist-Leninist enemy. He could have also included a trip G-T took right after becoming a Senator himself. He hightailed it down to Nicaragua to meet with that country's Marxist-Leninist FSLN leadership - and undermine US policy.

FNC personality Neil Cavuto let the Very Stable Genius have it yesterday:

Even a Fox News host who’s unleashed has to be a *little* careful about how he addresses Trump, though. At one point here Cavuto says, “Now, I’m not saying you’re a liar — you’re president, you’re busy — I’m just having a devil of a time figuring out which news is ‘fake.'” Spoiler: He is, in fact, saying that Trump is a liar. A big one.

As did the WSJ editorial board:

What makes this extra interesting is the fact that another influential news outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Wall Street Journal, also let Trump have it in an editorial last night. Headline: “The Stormy Daniels Damage: Does Trump want Americans to believe him in a genuine crisis?”

Mr. Trump’s public deceptions are surely relevant to his job as President, and the attempted cover-up has done greater harm than any affair would have. Mr. Trump asked Americans, not least his supporters, to believe his claims about the payments. They were false and conveniently so in putting the onus on Mr. Cohen. Now, as more of the story has emerged, he wants everyone to believe a new story that he could have told the first time.

Mr. Trump is compiling a record that increases the likelihood that few will believe him during a genuine crisis—say, a dispute over speaking with special counsel Robert Mueller or a nuclear showdown with Kim Jong Un. Mr. Trump should worry that Americans will stop believing anything he says.

It's come to this: consent apps.

Type in the sex act you want to perform with your potential hookup. Remember to be as graphically specific as possible to avoid all your weird fantasies being revealed later in court documents. (Much better to reveal them only to a total stranger in the bathroom of a nightclub which you stumbled into by mistake thinking it was the men’s room.) Then read what you wrote aloud (for optimal humiliation). Your partner types her answer to your request into her phone and a barcode is created. Tap your phones together (in an imitation of the act you are about to perform) and the information is stored to a secure cloud-based database (to be accessed at a later date by a potential employer).

We may need to stay in touch with China about various matters, but it is not our friend:

The Pentagon has confirmed that American military aircraft have been targeted by a "high power laser" when operating near China's military base in Djibouti. 

I don't know about you, but I could use an uplifting story. The government of Iowa provides us with just that:

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Friday signed a law banning most abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, or at around six weeks of pregnancy, marking the strictest abortion regulation in the nation — but setting the state up for a lengthy court fight.

The Republican governor signed the legislation in her formal office at the state Capitol as protesters gathered outside chanting, “My body, my choice!” Reynolds acknowledged that the new law would likely face litigation that could put it on hold, but said: “This is bigger than just a law, this is about life, and I’m not going to back down.”

Reynolds signed the law surrounded by children from a local Christian school and children related to supporters.

Glory to God!

If there's a must-read in today's roundup, it's this week's G-File by Jonah Goldberg at NRO. It asks the question, what would the MAGA crowd have us actual conservatives do?

 Life isn’t binary — and neither is politics. If you are adrift in the ocean, your enemy isn’t just sharks; it’s thirst, hunger, drowning, and despair itself. If you face your predicament assuming the only thing you have to worry about is being eaten by a shark, you might fend off the sharks, but you will also probably die. Indeed, by ignoring other threats, you’d probably make yourself more vulnerable to a shark attack.

I have no problem conceding that progressivism poses a greater threat to America than Trumpism. What I oppose are the conclusions people such as “John Ericsson” [a Federalist essayist writing under a pseudonym] draw from that. Those conclusions rest on a raft of unproven assumptions, starting with the idea that if only the Kristols, Ericksons, Goldbergs, Frenches, et al. stopped pointing out the manifest flaws, lies, trade-offs, and moral compromises inherent to 100 percent Trumpism, it would make a difference in Trump’s battle with progressivism. Would that it were true. In my more cynical moments, I sometimes suspect their real goal is not to guarantee a Trump victory but rather to guarantee that any defeat will be usefully shared and that no one will be able to say, “I told you so.”

But it goes deeper than that. Ericsson says that “ideas and persuasion” are almost comically insufficient in this war. What is required is a Colonel Kurtz–like will to do what is necessary. Maybe that’s true. But what, specifically, does he think I should be doing? Does he want me to lie? Sign up as an assistant to Sarah Huckabee Sanders so she can more artfully spin and prevaricate? Should David French radically reinterpret his Christian faith and defend shtupping porn stars while you have a wife and newborn at home? Must I rush to defend this deranged carbuncle [shown in a video clip inserted in Goldberg's piece] in his bid to send “Cocaine Mitch” packing? 

Does Ericsson think that, if literally every conservative went Full Gorka, Republicans would attract more voters? I’m going to need him to show his work.

More to the point, if the argument is that there’s no room on the right for people who want to stay in their lanes, make arguments, and try to persuade people, then the Right is doomed, and deservedly so. I have very little disdain for the paid GOP operatives trying to sell the main ingredients of sh** sandwiches as pâté. That’s their job, not mine. Nor do I condemn people who work in this administration trying to advance conservative policy. I applaud them, for the most part. But some people — like this guy — apparently think that everyone must mimic the worst tactics of the Left, grab the nearest club to hand, and fight for the leader of our tribe.

And let me be clear: This isn’t simply some Ivory Tower argument. I’ve been engaging in the arena for most of my adult life. I have no problem with the suggestion I should have the future of the conservative movement or even, to some limited extent, the future of the Republican party in mind. I work for a magazine that endorses politicians regularly. But another faulty assumption inherent to this binary-war jaw-jaw is that it will be better for the Republican party if everybody on the right gets on board and rows as one to the beat of Trump’s drum. This thinking assumes that Trump is the solution to the problems Ericsson lays out and that if you’re not part of Trump’s solution, you’re part of the problem. I think that’s silly and unserious. 

The US is set to overtake Saudi Arabia nest year as the world's top oil exporter. 

John Kerry is and always has been worthless at best; on the other hand, Benjamin Netanyahu rocks

Compare and contrast.

Here's what Global-Test had to say on Twitter about the recent unrest occurring in Iran:

With humility about how little we know about what's happening inside Iran, this much is clear: it's an Iranian moment and not anyone else's. But the rights of people to protest peacefully and voice their aspirations are universal and governments everywhere should respect that.

He's got some nerve. This, coming from a guy who worked for a regime that turned a blind eye the last time there was this kind of groundswell (2009, when post-America could have made the difference in Iran's election that year), unfroze Iranian assets to the tune of billions of dollars, and orchestrated a document of pure appeasement allowing the regime to continue amassing an arsenal of missiles and foster terrorism and, at the most, delay for a few years its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Then there's the message of full-throated support for the Iranian people from the most visionary and principled leader of any Western nation, Benjamin Netanyahu:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday expressed support for Iranian protesters, and condemned Tehran's claims that Israel is responsible for the demonstrations. 

“Brave Iranians are pouring into the streets. They seek freedom. They seek justice. They seek the basic liberties that have been denied to them for decades,” Netanyahu said in a recorded message.

Netanyahu also called Iranian claims that Israel is behind the protests “false” and “laughable.”

Says that all the money the Iranian regime is spending on its evil designs could have been spent on schools and hospitals. Says that one day, when the regime falls, Iran and Israel will be friends once again.

You really need to watch the video at the link. (Apparently it didn't embed when I pasted the above excerpt.) His delivery is, as always, half the impact.

The chasm between these views could not be wider.

This needs to be looked into

Talk about blatant appeasement:

The Obama administration likely hid information about Iran illicitly ferrying militants into Syria on commercial aircraft in order to promote the landmark nuclear deal and foster multi-billion dollar business deals with Tehran's state-controlled airline sector, according to lawmakers and other sources familiar with the matter.

The Washington Free Beacon first disclosed last week that congressional leaders are calling for an investigation into Iran for using its state-controlled air carrier, Iran Air, to ferry militant fighters into Syria, where they are taking up arms in defense of embattled President Bashar al-Assad.

Photographs provided to Congress show Iran using Iran Air to ferry these soldiers between 2016 and 2017, in part when the Obama administration removed sanctions on Iran Air and promoted multi-billion dollars sales between the carrier and aircraft manufacturer Boeing, which is seeking to provide Iran Air with a fleet of new planes that many suspect will be used to carry terrorist fighters and weapons into regional hotspots.

This behavior violates international laws governing the nuclear deal and has now led lawmakers and others to accuse the Obama administration of downplaying Iran's illicit activity in order to promote the nuclear deal and ensure Tehran receives a new commercial fleet.

Multiple senior Obama administration officials, including former secretary of state John Kerry, traveled the globe to promote trade with Iranian companies, including Iran Air, at the same time Iran was found to be ferrying militants into Syria. Lawmakers and others suspect the Obama administration either hid or downplayed this information in order to preserve the nuclear deal.

"The Obama administration lifted sanctions against Iran Air as a political concession during nuclear negotiations with Iran, not because of any change in its activity," Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.), one of the lawmakers calling for an investigation into Iran's use of commercial aircraft for military purposes, told the Free Beacon.

"Using social media and public flight tracking websites, any person with a computer can document Iranian military transports to Syria on commercial jets," Roskam said. "The Obama administration undoubtedly knew Iranian airliners were being used to fuel Assad's atrocities in Syria, but the administration officials who were globetrotting as Tehran's chamber of commerce trying to shore up the nuclear deal didn't care."

"Iran Air continues to support the Iran-Assad war machine to this day, and the Trump administration must hold the airline accountable and work to stop them," the lawmaker said.

Roskam and a delegation of other Republican congressmen petitioned the Trump Treasury Department last week to investigate photographic evidence showing Iran using Iran Air to ferry militants into Syria.

Such a sick desire for legacies as "visionaries" did Secretary Global-Test and the Most Equal Comrade have that they would willingly look the other way as Iran's presence in Syria was greatly enhanced.

 

The fruits of patty-cake - today's edition

Think about all your tax dollars that went for Secretary Global-Test and Wendy Sherman to go to those interminable meetings in Vienna and Geneva and get humiliated by Iranian foreign minister Zarif, think about the pomposity surrounding the P5+1 agreement finally getting signed, as you take in this:

Startling new evidence from German intelligence reports shows the Tehran regime is working to illegally obtain technology and know-how to advance its nuclear weapons and missile programs, despite the 2015 agreement to curb its nuclear program.

A report from the state of Hamburg holds that “there is no evidence of an complete about-face in Iran’s atomic polices in 2016” [after the Islamic Republic signed the JCPOA deal with Western powers in 2015, aimed at restricting Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief]. Iran sought missile carrier technology necessary for its rocket program.”

The report noted that the federal prosecutor filed criminal charges against three German citizens for violations of the export economic law due to the deliveries of 51 special valves to Iranian company that can be used for the Islamic Republic’s sanctioned Arak heavy water reactor. The installation, the intelligence officials wrote, “can be used to develop plutonium for nuclear weapons.” Iran pledged, under the JCPOA deal, to “dismantle the [Arak] facility,” the intelligence report states.

On the proliferation of atomic, biological and chemical weapons, a second report from Baden-Württemberg’s state intelligence agency report states: “Regardless of the number of national and international sanctions and embargoes, countries like Iran, Pakistan and North Korea are making efforts to optimize corresponding technology.”

The 181-page document outlines the technology Iran is seeking: “Products and scientific know-how for the field of developing weapons of mass destruction as well [as] missile technology.”

Iran’s illegal procurement and terrorist activities are cited 49 times in the report and range from cyberwarfare to espionage to support of the EU- and U.S.-classified terrorist organization Hezbollah.

The Baden-Württemberg report provides detail on Iran’s development of ballistic missiles with the aid of a Chinese front company. A Chinese import-export business approached a company in the southern German state that manufactures “complex metal producing machines” to buy equipment.

Berlin’s Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Control requested an end-use receipt for the Iranian purchase. The intelligence agency informed the engineering company that the merchandise was set to be unlawfully diverted to Iran. “This case shows that so-called indirect-deliveries across third countries is still Iran’s procurement strategy,” wrote the intelligence officials.

And they're working hard on delivery systems, too:

the 339-page federal document reports that Iran has not curtailed its missile program: “The amount of evidence found for attempts to acquire proliferation-sensitive material for missile technology/the missile program, which is not covered by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, remained about the same.”

Can we now deal with enemies as enemies?

 

Secretary Global-Test's final sprint toward a legacy of evil

The arrogance, the West-hatred and the ignorance of history's lessons in his speech about Israel yesterday were absolutely breathtaking.

Lots of talk about "settlement activity" (residential construction) and how Israeli politics have been given over to "right-wing extremism," but not a word about the 1967 or 1973 wars or their causes, not a word about the intifadas or the barrages of rockets into southern Israel since Israel gave Gaza to Hamas, not a a word about the maps in Palestinian classrooms on which the nation-state of Israel is absent, not a word about the town squares in Judea and Samaria named after "martyred" terrorists.

And the lecturing tone was rich indeed, particularly as manifested in the statement that if there is no two-state solution, Israel will have to decide between democracy and a Jewish identity.

Andrew McCarthy schools Global-Test on two fairly recent acts of participation by his own State Department in the crafting of documents that are predicated on nation-states being able to assume both democratic status and a religious identity:

I thought it might be interesting, then, to review the Constitution of Afghanistan, which the State Department had a major role in drafting. Here are Articles One through Three:

Article One: Afghanistan shall be an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary and indivisible state.

Article Two: The sacred religion of Islam is the religion of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Followers of other faiths shall be free within the bounds of law in the exercise and performance of their religious rituals.

Article Three: No law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of the holy religion of Islam in Afghanistan.

Then there’s Article Six:

The state shall be obligated to create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice, preservation of human dignity, protection of human rights, realization of democracy, attainment of national unity as well as equality between all peoples and tribes and balance development of all areas of the country. [Emphasis added.]

A “progressive society based on social justice” that is both Islamic and democratic? According to the State Department, no problem.

Then there is the Constitution of Iraq, the drafting of which the State Department similarly oversaw. Its preamble and first article assert that the nation is “looking with confidence to the future through a republican, federal, democratic, pluralistic system,” and that the Republic of Iraq’s “system of government is republican, representative, Parliamentary, and democratic.” There follows Article 2:

First: Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation:

A. No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.

B. No law that contradicts the principles of democracy may be established.

C. No law that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this constitution may be established.

Second: This Constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious rights of all individuals to freedom of religious belief and practice such as Christians, Yazedis, and Mandi Sabeans.

Note that second clause carefully. It assures that Iraq will maintain its Islamic identity no matter what. It further reaffirms that, when it comes to an Islamic country, the State Department believes a country can be fiercely Muslim in character, yet be a democratic republic that respects the rights of religious minorities.

Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute lays all the areas in which the premise of Global-Test's speech is wrong, wrong, wrong:

 Intransigence: Who is holding up peace? After long and careful negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority brokered by the United States and the broader international community, Israeli leaders offered their Palestinian counterparts peace deals in 2000 and 2008. Both the late Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat and his successor Mahmoud Abbas rejected the offers and walked away, without offering a counter proposal. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu froze settlement construction upon Obama’s request, Abbas again refused for nine months to even talk to the Israelis.

Diplomacy: The Palestinian Authority was created as a result of the Oslo Accords. By walking away from that agreement, both in terms rejecting terrorism and acting unilaterally, the Palestinian Authority have done away with the foundational document which legalizes their existence. By acquiescing to unilateral Palestinian actions and revising the basis of Palestinian-Israeli peace, Kerry has shown that U.S. diplomacy and commitments can never be trusted.

Law: The West Bank and Jerusalem are technically disputed territories, rather than occupied Palestinian land. That is why the Oslo Accords called for bilateral negotiations. While Kerry talks about the “1967 lines,” he means the 1949 Armistice lines. (When complaining about Israeli resorts on the Dead Sea, Kerry appears not to realize the 1949 Armistice lines make Israel littoral to the Dead Sea). This reflects ignorance among diplomats rising to the very top. Kerry is also confused about settlements. If it is illegal to build on disputed land, then all building, be it by Israelis or Palestinians, should be treated similarly. To suggest Jews cannot live in disputed land, as Kerry does, is akin to supporting religious apartheid. Kerry’s notion of mutuality when it comes to “natural growth” is bizarre. Israel is a sovereign state. The Palestinians are not.

Demography: Underlying Kerry’s argument is that peace is necessary to keep Israel Jewish and democratic. To support this argument, Kerry appears to be relying on a false understanding of Palestinian demography. The numbers he appear to rely on are false: The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics double-counts Arabs in Jerusalem, continues to count emigrants, and regularly adjusts its counts across censuses to confirm to the Palestinian Authority’s arguments. Kerry also appears not to recognize that Israel does not occupy the Gaza Strip. And while Kerry is talking Gaza and its plight, remember how much better off it is than so many other places: Turkey, Bosnia, and Brazil, for example.

Context: Neither Obama nor Kerry are students of history. With last week’s U.N. Security Council Resolution 2234, Obama and Kerry for the first time have denied Israel’s rights to the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site. Kerry appears unaware that Jordan — which occupied the Old City of Jerusalem but whose possession was not internationally recognized — had blown up synagogues and religiously cleansed the city. What Obama and Kerry do is legitimize this.

Motivation for terrorism: Is terrorism caused by the Israel-Palestinian conflict? If so, why did the U.S. intelligence community identify Islamist ideology as motivating terrorism a year before the partition of Palestine and two years before Israel’s independence?

U.S. credibility: Everyone can see what a final agreement looks like — both Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush helped negotiate it. Why can’t we impose that and just offer guarantees? Here’s the problem: It’s hard to talk about the ability of any state in the region to trust American security guarantees or red lines given Obama and Kerry’s reversal on the Syria chemical weapons red line.

We have seen, with the Most Equal Comrade's Christmas-week imposition of yet more coal-industry regs, his use of an obscure sentence in a 1953 law about offshore and outer continental shelf drilling to put large quantities of Arctic oil off-limits, and then Samantha Power's abstaining from a vote on the UN's vile condemnation of Israel, and now this speech by G-T, that this regime is on a hyper-drive damage spree in its remaining days.

These people hate America, Western civilization, human advancement and God.

Your tax dollars at work - today's edition

For swallowers of the "climate change" Kool-Aid, nobody tops Secretary Global-Test. He's called it as big a threat as jihad (actually, his word for that was the more amorphous "Terrorism"). He supports this idiotic Paris "agreement." (He has a track record of supporting idiotic "agreements.")

But his latest stunt is quite an expensive bit of grandstanding on our dime:

there were some obvious questions about this trip which the State Department should have been prepared for before they announced it. First of all and probably most on point is the question of… why? Why is the Secretary of State being sent not just to McMurdo Station on the tip of Ross Island (a much easier and cheaper place to reach) but to the actual South Pole research facility? That’s a fairly hazardous trip at the best of times and I seriously doubt Kerry is going there to conduct any ice core experiments on his own. Is there actually anything going on in that barren location which he couldn’t find out about via a satellite video conference or an in person meeting in Washington with scientists recently returned from their shifts there?

Those questions tie in with the cost to the taxpayers. For your average American citizen to just make it to the coast, either by cruise ship or a flight out of New Zealand, you’re looking at a bill in the twelve to fifteen thousand dollar range per person. And that doesn’t even take into account the additional expense and logistical difficulty of making it all the way to the pole, assuming you can even get permission to go. What sort of costs go into sending the Secretary of state, his staff and security detail to that frozen wilderness? Swinging back to the previous point, those costs should be balanced against whatever excuse they’ve come up with to make the journey a requirement for the nation.

The real explanation, absent something better coming out of the State Department, is that this is nothing more than a very expensive photo op for Kerry. He has no need to be there for any scientific or policy reason, but this is clearly designed to promote climate change “awareness” and dredge up support for the non-ratified Paris climate treaty. If you need a quick layman’s translation of that it simply means a massive carbon tax and hugely expensive executive mandates for more renewable energy which doesn’t currently exist in economically feasible forms. But it sounds great in an election year, so away we go.

Meanwhile, North Korea and Iran continue their missile tests, longtime Pacific Rim allies of the country formerly known as the United States are moving into China's orbit, Russian aircraft buzz US Navy ships at will, and ISIS is calling for terror attacks in the run-up to the post-American election.

Ah, the priorities of the planned-decline party.