If you're looking to build a home, Squirrel-Hair just made your project considerably more expensive

Today's exhibit in the ongoing flood of evidence that the current president has no consistency to his worldview, no ideological core that guides him, comes in the form of action on one of his most harmful impulses: protectionism.

Perhaps you've heard about the tariffs to be imposed on Canadian lumber.

Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute explains why this harms far more people than it helps:

There are a lot of news reports today about Trump’s decision to impose stiff tariffs on American companies (homebuilders) who buy Canadian lumber, here is a sample: “Trump slaps first tariffs on Canadian lumber,” “Tariff on Canadian lumber sends a stern message,” “Trump Administration To Impose 20 Percent Tariff On Canadian Lumber,” and “Trump slaps duty on lumber from Canada.” In each case, those news reports miss a few very critical points: a) Canadian lumber doesn’t pay the tariff, b) Canadian lumber companies won’t pay the tariff, and c) American lumber-buying companies (mostly homebuilders) will pay the tariff, which will be passed along to home buyers in the form of higher new home prices. Therefore, it’s more accurate to report that Trump has just slapped stiff 20% tariffs (lumber taxes) on the American people, not Canada.

And the phrase "far more people" can be quantified:

Tariffs on imported lumber might help protect, save or create jobs in one US industry (lumber producers), but will destroy more jobs in other US industries (construction in this case). Update: There are about 32 construction workers employed in homebuilding (5 million) for every one worker employed in logging (50,800) and lumber and wood production (105,900) combined.

And resulting effects don't take long to manifest themselves:

Update 1: From a statement today from the NAHB:

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) today denounced the decision by the U.S. Department of Commerce to impose a 20% countervailing duty on Canadian lumber imports, saying it will harm American home buyers, consumers and businesses while failing to resolve the underlying trade dispute between the two nations.

The trade agreement that has governed Canadian imports of softwood lumber since 2006 effectively expired at the end of 2016. Uncertainty surrounding a new trade pact is the primary catalyst for the 22 percent spike in the Random Lengths Composite Price Index for lumber since the beginning of the year.

These price hikes have negative repercussions for millions of Americans. It takes about 15,000 board feet to build a typical single-family home and the lumber price increase in the first quarter of this year has added almost $3,600 to the price of a new home.

Additionally, the NAHB estimates that 8,241 full-time housing-related jobs(mostly construction) will be lost as a result of the new lumber tariffs.

Update 2: CNBC reports today that “Housing stocks take a hit from Trump’s lumber tariff“:

Homebuilder stocks fell on Tuesday on concern new tariffs by the Trump administration on Canadian softwood lumber imports will raise costs.

We're starting to see that DJT can gather all kinds of groupings of erudite and insightful people who can fill him in on the implications of various policies, but he is going to boneheadedly forge ahead with whatever he thinks is going to enhance his "winner" image in the eyes of his willfully ignorant base.

I really don't think he can see how a move like this is completely at odds with his very good plan to reduce corporate tax rates to 15 percent.

This is why those of us who strove to bring an alternative into actuality still will not engage in the tribalistic impulse to defend him as some kind of emblem of America's turning a conservative corner. If that is indeed the case, it is because of advisers, lawmakers and cabinet and agency heads, not the man at the top.

Monday roundup

How shameful and imperiling was the Iran nuke deal? We're just now grasping the full magnitude, per Politico:

Obama, the senior official and other administration representatives weren’t telling the whole story on Jan. 17, 2016, in their highly choreographed rollout of the prisoner swap and simultaneous implementation of the six-party nuclear deal, according to a POLITICO investigation.

In his Sunday morning address to the American people, Obama portrayed the seven men he freed as “civilians.” The senior official described them as businessmen convicted of or awaiting trial for mere “sanctions-related offenses, violations of the trade embargo.”

In reality, some of them were accused by Obama’s own Justice Department of posing threats to national security. Three allegedly were part of an illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made microelectronics with applications in surface-to-air and cruise missiles like the kind Tehran test-fired recently, prompting a still-escalating exchange of threats with the Trump administration. Another was serving an eight-year sentence for conspiring to supply Iran with satellite technology and hardware. As part of the deal, U.S. officials even dropped their demand for $10 million that a jury said the aerospace engineer illegally received from Tehran.

And in a series of unpublicized court filings, the Justice Department dropped charges and international arrest warrants against 14 other men, all of them fugitives. The administration didn’t disclose their names or what they were accused of doing, noting only in an unattributed, 152-word statement about the swap that the U.S. “also removed any Interpol red notices and dismissed any charges against 14 Iranians for whom it was assessed that extradition requests were unlikely to be successful.” 

Three of the fugitives allegedly sought to lease Boeing aircraft for an Iranian airline that authorities say had supported Hezbollah, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization. A fourth, Behrouz Dolatzadeh, was charged with conspiring to buy thousands of U.S.-made assault rifles and illegally import them into Iran.

A fifth, Amin Ravan, was charged with smuggling U.S. military antennas to Hong Kong and Singapore for use in Iran. U.S. authorities also believe he was part of a procurement network providing Iran with high-tech components for an especially deadly type of IED used by Shiite militias to kill hundreds of American troops in Iraq.

The biggest fish, though, was Seyed Abolfazl Shahab Jamili, who had been charged with being part of a conspiracy that from 2005 to 2012 procured thousands of parts with nuclear applications for Iran via China. That included hundreds of U.S.-made sensors for the uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran whose progress had prompted the nuclear deal talks in the first place. 

When federal prosecutors and agents learned the true extent of the releases, many were shocked and angry. Some had spent years, if not decades, working to penetrate the global proliferation networks that allowed Iranian arms traders both to obtain crucial materials for Tehran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs and, in some cases, to provide dangerous materials to other countries.

“They didn’t just dismiss a bunch of innocent business guys,” said one former federal law enforcement supervisor centrally involved in the hunt for Iranian arms traffickers and nuclear smugglers. “And then they didn’t give a full story of it.”

In its determination to win support for the nuclear deal and prisoner swap from Tehran — and from Congress and the American people — the Obama administration did a lot more than just downplay the threats posed by the men it let off the hook, according to POLITICO’s findings. 

Through action in some cases and inaction in others, the White House derailed its own much-touted National Counterproliferation Initiative at a time when it was making unprecedented headway in thwarting Iran’s proliferation networks. In addition, the POLITICO investigation found that Justice and State Department officials denied or delayed requests from prosecutors and agents to lure some key Iranian fugitives to friendly countries so they could be arrested. Similarly, Justice and State, at times in consultation with the White House, slowed down efforts to extradite some suspects already in custody overseas, according to current and former officials and others involved in the counterproliferation effort.

And as far back as the fall of 2014, Obama administration officials began slow-walking some significant investigations and prosecutions of Iranian procurement networks operating in the U.S. These previously undisclosed findings are based on interviews with key participants at all levels of government and an extensive review of court records and other documents.
“Clearly, there was an embargo on any Iranian cases,” according to the former federal supervisor.

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air has the must-read take on Fearless Girl:

 It’s a similarly generic work in bronze, adequately depicting a young girl in a skirt with her hands on her hips throwing her chest out. If it were placed opposite a similar statue of an older woman in an apron with her arms crossed, the title of the piece might well have been, “Girl Throwing Temper Tantrum.” But when you put her in front of the bull [which has been displayed in a little public park just off Wall Street for years], she’s suddenly a symbol of standing up to the man or whatever other magic you wish to imbue in the totem. Either of these figures standing alone could represent almost anything. But juxtapositioned as they are, a new meaning offers itself up if you care to find one.

Returning to [bull sculptor Arturo] Di Modica’s point, it once again all comes back to context and the infinitely variable responses we have to art. One recent segment on cable news featured a woman standing in front of Fearless Girl weeping as she described how seeing the piece moved her to tears. I’m not unsympathetic to that, even if I don’t have the same response myself. I worked for several years with a woman who regularly used the same phrase as she recounted how she too was moved to tears the first time she saw an exhibit of Jackson Pollock paintings in a museum. I have zero doubt as to her sincerity, even though I’ve personally always thought that all of Pollock’s paintings could have been named Explosion at Paint Factory and sold off at a farmer’s market.

But all that rigid gender distinction is rapidly becoming so yesterday:

Trans-activist Riley J. Dennis says having ‘genital preferences’ in dating is transphobic.

Yes, you read that correctly. If you’re a man who wants your woman to have a vagina you’re a bigot.

Dennis released a video at Everydayfeminist.com about his theory on “cissexism”, which he says is interchangeable with “transphobia” and means “prejudice or discrimination against trans people.”

My head is spinning. So, you’re born gay, you’re born trans, but no one is born straight. Straight people are just bigots.

Got it….I think.

To quote Dennis:

[People] might argue that being attracted to women without vaginas in no way negatively affects trans people, but on the other hand I would argue it’s more complicated than that. We all have our implicit biases built into our preferences and gender isn’t as simple as just the genitals you have.

Speaking of vaginas, they figure into the final confirmation that Bill Nye should never be trotted out as any kind of science authority or other type of serious human being:

A clip of Bill Nye’s latest television show promotes transgenderism and other gender identities as hard science, and it’s performing horribly on YouTube, as of Monday.

“My Sex Junk,” published on YouTube Sunday, features actress Rachel Bloom singing a song about transgenders, gay sex, and how sexuality is a fluid concept. The clip comes from an episode of Bill Nye’s show “Bill Nye Saves The World.”

“Sexuality’s a spectrum, everyone is on it. Even you might like it if you sit up on it,” Bloom sings on stage. “Drag king, drag queen just do what feels right.”

Bloom also delves into a bizarre chant where she laments a world in which you have only two choices between gender identity: male or female.

“This world of ours is so full of choice. But must I choose between only John or Joyce? Are my options only hard or moist? My vagina has its own voice,” Bloom sings.

Claudia Rossett at PJ Media reminds us that, along with the strategic threat North Korea poses, we must never lose sight of its status as the world's premier human-rights horror.

On Bill O'Reilly, tribalism and ideology

My interest in the extent to which, if any, he has been a sexual harasser is mild at best.

I've just always found the guy oversold as a sharp mind. From his insistence that, when gasoline prices rise, it's due to some kind of price gouging at some point in the petroleum-industry supply chain to his conclusion that Barack Obama is a patriot to his punching-above-his-weight conflagration with George Will, he has proven himself an inexhaustible wellspring of WTF moments.

That leftists are now in claim-a-scalp mode shows just how removed from reality their current fever has rendered them. Even measured-tone pundits with an obvious liberal bent want rather desperately to make him out to be some kind of icon of the Right:

MSNBC's Chuck Todd called him a "leader" in the conservative movement, which is more wishful thinking than reality.

In truth, the secret of O’Reilly’s success was that he was a centrist. He hit the elusive sweet spot that many media outlets covet, but few actually bother to pursue.

Professor Tim Groseclose (formerly of UCLA, now of George Mason), who is the best authority on political leanings in the media, used data analysis in Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind in 2011 to show that not only were most media outlets left of center, but also that public opinion was further left than it would have been were it not for the media’s effect. On a scale of 0 to 100 — zero being most conservative, and 100 most liberal — the true center of the American public, absent media influence, was around 25, Groseclose argued. And O’Reilly, on the same objective scale, registered as exactly that: 25.

As excerpted at the time by the Powerline blog, Groseclose wrote:

… What if we could magically remove the metaphoric glass and see, face-to-face, the average American, once his political views are no longer distorted by media bias? What would we see?

The answer, basically, is Ben Stein.

…

Yes, the actor, author, commentator, and former host of Win Ben Stein’s Money. More specific, the person whom we’d see is anyone—like Ben Stein—who has a Political Quotient near 25. The Political Quotient is a device that I construct to measure political views in a precise, objective, and quantitative way. A person’s PQ indicates the degree to which he is liberal. For instance, as I have calculated, the PQs of Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) are approximately 100. Meanwhile the PQs of noted conservatives Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) are approximately 0.

Two other people whose PQs are approximately 25 are Bill O’Reilly and Dennis Miller. They are significantly more conservative than the average American voter, whose PQ is approximately 50. But they are significantly more liberal than politicians like Michele Bachmann or Jim DeMint.

As my results show, if we could magically eliminate media bias, then the average American would think and vote like Stein, Miller, O’Reilly, and others who have a PQ near 25.

What his audience correctly sensed, though, was that his everyman persona was not schtick. He came by it honestly:

An Irish Catholic from working-class Long Island, born in 1949, O’Reilly was reared by a generation with warm feelings toward FDR’s New Deal economics, came of age in the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, and launched his career amid the Reagan Revolution. These were formative experiences shared by millions of Americans. Repulsed by the radicalism of Berkeley and the Black Panthers, offended by the lecturing of Jimmy Carter (crystallized in his “malaise” speech), but not far removed from the horrors of the Great Depression and World War II, they found themselves looking back affectionately to the economic ascendancy and cultural consolidation of the 1950s. And so they landed firmly on the right side of the political spectrum — but nearer its center than we often recall today. It was this audience that Fox News targeted when it was created in 1996 and that found a representative voice on The O’Reilly Report, which launched that same year. 

Consider that sentence beginning with "O'Reilly was reared by a generation with warm feelings toward FDR's New Deal economics."

That's important for understanding the size of his audience. It's the ethos that Matthew Continetti captured so incisively in his supremely important 2015 essay "Revenge of the Radical Middle":

These voters don’t give a whit about corporate tax reform or TPP or the capital gains rate or the fate of Uber, they make a distinction between deserved benefits like Social Security and Medicare and undeserved ones like welfare and food stamps, their patriotism is real and nationalistic and skeptical of foreign entanglement, they wept on 9/11, they want America to be strong, dominant, confident, the America of their youth, their young adulthood, the America of 40 or 30 or even 20 years ago. They do not speak in the cadences or dialect of New York or Washington, their thoughts can be garbled, easily dismissed, or impugned, they are not members of a designated victim group and thus lack moral standing in the eyes of the media, but still they deserve as much attention and sympathy as any of our fellow citizens, still they vote.

What the radical middle has seen in recent years has not given them reason to be confident in our government, our political system, our legion of politicians clambering up the professional ladder office to office. Two inconclusive wars, a financial crisis, recession, and weak recovery, government failure from Katrina to the TSA to the launch of Obamacare to the federal background check system, an unelected and unaccountable managerial bureaucracy that targets grassroots organizations and makes law through diktat, race riots and Ebola and judicial overreach. And through it all, as constant as the northern star, a myopic drive on the part of leaders in both parties to enact a "comprehensive immigration reform" that would incentivize illegal immigration and increase legal immigration despite public opposition.

This element, along with

•  the Beltway Establishment with which both conservatives and leftists expressed their disgust in the last election cycle, as well as

• those leftists, with their identity politics, thug means of asserting their presence in what remains of the national discourse, and utter flight from reality 

is the source of the dissonance drowning out the timeless conservative message.

It's said that O'Reilly's departure signals greater changes at FNC, as Rupert Murdoch's sons implement their notions of where the network ought to go. While the way that shakes out remains to be seen, it almost certainly doesn't behoove us as conservatives to invest hope in some kind of new era more reflective of what we stand for.

Such an outlet is probably not going to be found on television, which is fine.  It's not a medium conducive to persuasion of the type that we need to be about.

Tuesday roundup

Not that it's going to lead to a reversal of the referendum's outcome, but the codification of the changes to the Turkish constitution that Turks voted on Sunday, while now pretty much a done deal and sealing Erdogan's status as a dictator, appears to be fraught with fraud:

Article 94 of Turkey’s Election Law states that election tabulators cannot count envelopes and votes inside not carrying the official stamp of the election. The rule was enacted to prevent ballot-stuffing. Yet, an hour after the ballot boxes were opened, the High Electoral Council reversed its decision.

Then, in Turkey’s southeast where the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) dominates, observers were removed from the balloting room for “security reasons” so only the government-appointed officials in the room counted and tallied results. Fraud in this process alone may have changed the results. This isn’t just theoretical: In Urfa, a Facebook video emerged showing ballot stuffing.

The Republican Peoples Party says it is filing objections involving 2.5 million votes. If only one-fifth of that total changes, the final result will change as well.

The de-fanging of the EPA is already bearing marvelous fruit. The coal industry is coming back strong:

Buried in an otherwise-humdrum jobs report was the jaw-dropping pronouncement by the Department of Labor that mining jobs in America were up by 11,000 in March. Since the low point in October 2016, and following years of painful layoffs in the mining industry, the mining sector has added 35,000 jobs.

And coal companies with which to get those jobs are once again more numerous:

There's more good news for the coal industry. Earlier this month, Peabody Energy -- America's largest coal producer -- moved out of bankruptcy, and its stock is actively trading again. Its market cap had sunk by almost 90 percent during Barack Obama's years in office. Arch Coal is also out of bankruptcy.

Okay, so that's one for the good-move side of the ledger, and here at LITD we duly - indeed, heartily - note those. But consider some realities regarding Trump the man and Trump the president that Kevin Williamson at NRO enumerates:

No fighting China on currency, no wall, no NATO reform. Add a few more items to the list: Janet Yellen was definitely out before she wasn’t; our relationship with Russia was “great” during the campaign but today is a “horrible relationship” that is “at an all-time low” (he may not know about the Cuban missile crisis); the president could not make war on Syria without congressional approval (“big mistake if he does not!”) until he could. The Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land. Steve Bannon of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn of Goldman Sachs, Steven Mnuchin of Goldman Sachs, and Dina Powell of Goldman Sachs are firmly ensconced in their various roles throughout the Trump administration. The alt-right basement-dwellers and sundry knuckleheads beamed that Trump was going to be a “nationalist,” and that he would give the boot to coastal elitists, moderates, and Ivy League snoots. In reality, Trump is a New York Democrat who is being advised by other New York Democrats — Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner prominent among them — who are more or less the sort of people who brought you the Obama and Clinton administrations: business-friendly corporate Democrats, people who think of themselves as post-ideological pragmatists, consensus progressives who are much more interested in opening up backdoor channels to Planned Parenthood than they are in the priorities of people they consider nothing more than a bunch of snake-handling rustics and talk-radio listeners stockpiling gold coins and freeze-dried ice cream in their basements. Trump was a Clinton donor and a Chuck Schumer donor, and he is acting like one.

  Surprise.

Williamson mentions "business-friendly corporate Democrats, people who think of themselves as post-ideological pragmatists," but even if they think of themselves that way, they are in fact moral cowards hoping the climatista alligator eats them last, as Rick Moran discusses at PJ Media:

Despite the talk from climate hysterics about greedy corporations opposing efforts to combat global warming, the facts tend to speak for themselves.

International corporate giants have been on board the climate-change bandwagon for more than a decade. Their reasons have nothing to do with science and everything to do with reading the writing on the wall. If the world is going to go off half-cocked and suck the life out of the industrialized economies combating climate change, big business wants to be in a position to influence what happens to them.

It's no different than hiring another lobbyist in Washington or Brussels. Whatever expense there is in supporting the climate hysterics will be more than offset by savings in guiding the debate in ways that keep them operating.

So the question is, will corporations use their influence on President Trump to urge him to accept the Paris climate accord?

The smart money is saying yes.

Axios:

To varying degrees, most major companies producing coal, natural gas and oil either explicitly back sticking with the 2015 climate deal struck in Paris, or they're opting not to lobby against it, a dramatic shift from just a few years ago. They're not necessarily cheering global efforts to address the issue, but the decision not to oppose it has the same effect as tacit backing.

The reasons corporate America is uniting on global climate policy are many and often depend on the products made and how global a company's operations are:

• Consumer-facing companies like Starbucks and Pepsi, have long prioritized policies to cut carbon emissions because they don't sell products that directly contribute to the problem. They also have more direct interaction with consumers who like to buy from green-minded corporations.
• C ompanies that generate electricity have said, for much of the past decade, that they're moving away from coal toward cleaner burning sources of power, including natural gas and renewables. The Edison Electric Institute, the trade association representing investor-owned utilities, held a reception last year honoring the Paris climate deal after its conclusion, even though it officially doesn't have a position on the deal.
• Companies with huge global footprint s, like General Electric and ExxonMobil, know that pulling out of one diplomatic deal can only weaken the U.S. standing on other geopolitical issues, which could hurt their operations around the world.
• Publicly traded fossil-fuel companies are facing growing calls from their investors to address climate change, or at least to not fight such policies. This is a newer trend that's gained influence over the past couple of years.
• Major oil companies, like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, have increasingly invested in natural gas, which emits 50% less carbon than coal when burned. Companies with big natural gas portfolios will gain with climate policies that accelerate a shift already underway to replace coal with natural gas. ExxonMobil, which bought big natural-gas producer XTO Energy in 2010, sent a letterto the White House in March urging Trump to stay in the deal. That letter followed a tweet by the company's top lobbyist just hours after Trump won the election expressing support for the accord.

"When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use," Joseph Stalin reportedly said. The corporate mindset is entirely predictable, based as it is on the simple concept of maximizing profits given the realities in which they exist. Any claim to morality or "good citizenship" is true only as long as it serves that overriding goal.

So yes, it's a great PR move to play along with climate-change hysterics, all the while working as hard as they can to keep the devil from their door.  

Jared Dobbs at The Federalist provides one of the best explanations of why Christians objecting to participating in same-sex weddings is not bigotry LITD has come across.


 

It's come to this

A lot of LITD posts lately have been about levels of rot on post-American campuses that are always one step beyond what one could have imagined.

And now we have this:

The UC Davis student senate has made it optional to display the American flag at its meetings, stirring up controversy on campus and conservative blogs.

Senate Bill 76 passed Thursday, said Michael Gofman, a student senator who opposed the change.

The bill amends bylaws that required the United States flag to be on display at every senate meeting of the Associated Students, University of California, Davis. The revised bylaws give senate members the option to petition for the display of the flag 24 hours before each meeting. The ASUCD senate pro tem ultimately has authority to decide whether the U.S. flag will be displayed, according to the revision.

The resolution says that since “the concept of United States of America and patriotism is different for every individual, it should not be compulsory that the flag is in view at all times during Senate meetings.”

Jose Antonio Meneses, who introduced the resolution, said the changes were meant to ensure the student government is following federal law, which he says doesn’t allow an organization to mandate displaying the flag.

“It wasn’t political in any way,” Meneses said. “But because it is the United States flag ... it’s a touchy subject to talk about. We want to make sure we are not sued.”

Gofman disagreed, saying all governing bodies within the U.S. – including a student senate – should display the flag. 

“It was a purely political issue from the start,” Gofman said.

The student government decision drew attention from internet blogs, many conservative – including Fox News Insider, the Daily Caller and The Blaze. Some stories say the flag has been “banned,” “banished” or “dropped.”

Meneses said that while he supports freedom of speech, many of the stories are inaccurate. 

“It’s not a ban on the flag,” he said.

He cited a 1943 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found West Virginia could not compel students to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

“The opinion in that case is that you can’t force people to pledge your allegiance, by (the flag) being there; by extension, you are pledging your allegiance to a symbol that you don’t relate to or that you don’t equate yourself with,” he said Monday.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article145130714.html#storylink=cpy

Actually, beyond the fracturing of the national fabric embodied in this move, the sloppy legal reasoning disturbs me most. This punk's use of the phrase "by extension" to equate displaying the flag with calling an assemblage to hedge allegiance to it is the kind of mentality that leads to a legitimization of the concept of a "living Constitution."

To what presently unforeseen level of decay will the post-American university sink next?

Your must-read for today

Not even going to excerpt from it. For one thing, it's a fairly short read. For another, each of its ideas is best presented in the overall context. And, I must confess, I'm a bit rushed. Heading off to church now, and then a very full plate today.

But the central idea of Andrew Michta's essay at The American Interest is that, more than the jihadist threat, more than the challenges posed by North Korea, Iran, Russia or China, more than the economic underperformance of America and Europe, the reason the West itself has dicey prospects is the erosion of its foundational concept, the sovereign nation-state. Our decadent culture is to blame for that.

Okay, one teaser sentence:

Today, in the wake of decades of group identity politics and the attendant deconstruction of our heritage through academia, the media, and popular culture, this conviction in the uniqueness of the West is only a pale shadow of what it was a mere half century ago. 

Now, read it all.

And Happy Easter.

The sewer of nonsense that is the post-American university - today's edition

Three examples today:

At Brown, the imperative of distorting the natural order trumps usage of proper grammar:

A Wall Street Journal reader forwarded James Freeman a copy of the letter received by the reader’s daughter from Brown University Director of Admissions Logan Powell. The reader, Freeman reports, is still trying to make sense of the letter. The reader’s bright daughter had already received news of her acceptance when a letter arrived that was addressed to her “Parent/Guardian.” 

Freeman reports:

Oddly, the note referred to the accepted student not as “she” but as “they.” Dean Powell’s letter also stated that our reader’s daughter had no doubt worked hard and made positive contributions to “their” school and community. Our reader reports that his perplexed family initially thought that Brown had made a word-processing error. That was before they listened to a voice mail message from the school congratulating his daughter and referring to her as “them.”

Surely you can guess the rest of the story. As a journalist, however, Freeman sought an explanation:

It turns out that the errors were intentional. Brown spokesman Brian Clark writes in an email that “our admission office typically refers to applicants either by first name or by using ‘they/their’ pronouns. While the grammatical construction may read as unfamiliar to some, it has been adopted by many newsrooms and other organizations as a gender-inclusive option.”

In one sense, this particular story has a happy ending. Freeman relates that the reader believes the school “wants to make it clear that only left wing extremists are welcome at Brown. Fine with us — good riddance.”

Like so many others inside the asylum of our elite educational institutions, the powers that be at Brown are out of “their” “minds.” The problem, however, is pervasive among these institutions. These institutions should not become “their” exclusive preserves. There has to be an answer.

The obvious question regarding Clemson is how it is going to hold classes if each student and even instructors has his own sense of how time unfolds:

Clemson University’s ‘diversity education and training” teaches employees that every “cultural perspective regarding time” is equally valid, so it’s wrong to expect people to be prompt.

Clemson is spending $26,945 on “diversity education and training” for its faculty members, Campus Reform reports:

“Clemson President James Clements pledged that ‘all employees will participate in diversity education and training,’ last April, in order to create a more inclusive environment on campus.”

In one slide, employees are taught that tardiness is acceptable because the concept of time is culturally relative. Thus, every culture’s perception of the actual time must be respected - since one “cultural perspective regarding time is neither more nor less valid than any other.”

The slide gives the example of “Alejandro,” who called a 9:00 AM meeting, and teaches that he should not rebuke a group of foreign professors and students who show up late:

“Time may be considered precise or fluid depending on the culture.”

Thus, the slide teaches, Alejandro shouldn’t impose his definition of time on others, because “his cultural perspective regarding time is neither more nor less valid than any other.”

A Wellesley  student's editorial makes plain why we call 'em jackboots:

True story: Wellesley used to be a thought of as a good school with bright students.

In fairness, despite all of the attention being paid online today to this fascist anti-fascist excrescence (the paper’s server is overwhelmed with traffic as I write this), there’s nothing in it that you wouldn’t hear on any other campus or in any other campus’s faculty lounge. It’s distinguished by two things, one being the surprisingly poor quality of the writing. Normally when you’re claiming the intellectual authority to reeducate the unwashed and, if need be, to ostracize the unrepentant among them, you proofread your copy to make sure clanging phrases like “We have all said problematic claims” have been safely excised beforehand.

The other distinction is that tirades about “hate speech” usually don’t come with overt threats of “hostility” towards the infidels. They should, since that’s how this nonsense plays out in practice, as Charles Murray could tell you. But there’s still enough of a veneer of intellectualism in apologias for this sort of thought-policing that consequences for the nonconformists are usually merely implied, not recommended.

Wellesley is certainly not a place for racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech. Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech. The founding fathers put free speech in the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of the government. The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging…

We have all said problematic claims, the origins of which were ingrained in us by our discriminatory and biased society. Luckily, most of us have been taught by our peers and mentors at Wellesley in a productive way. It is vital that we encourage people to correct and learn from their mistakes rather than berate them for a lack of education they could not control. While it is expected that these lessons will be difficult and often personal, holding difficult conversations for the sake of educating is very different from shaming on the basis of ignorance.

This being said, if people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted. If people continue to support racist politicians or pay for speakers that prop up speech that will lead to the harm of others, then it is critical to take the appropriate measures to hold them accountable for their actions. It is important to note that our preference for education over beration regards students who may have not been given the chance to learn. Rather, we are not referring to those who have already had the incentive to learn and should have taken the opportunities to do so. Paid professional lecturers and politicians are among those who should know better.

These places were once the conduits by which an understanding of Western civilization's foundations were transmitted.

There's not doubt that they no longer serve that function, but what other kind of institution is equipped to take up the mantle?

One for the good-move side of the ledger

Good for fetal Americans, good for states' rights. Keep this kind of legislation coming!

Thursday, President Donald Trump signed into law a measure granting states the right to guide health care federal funding away from Planned Parenthood and towards women's clinics that do not perform abortions. 

"This is a huge deal for the Pro-Life Movement, because this is the first pro-life bill that has been signed into law in 14 years," a statement from the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List said. "This law will protect unborn children by allowing states to fund health centers that provide high quality health care for women, not abortion."

The bill was sponsored by Representative Diane Black (TN-6) and Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA).

The law affects Title X funding, which accounts for more than $60 Million of Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding. 

Susan B. Anthony List says that they intend to press harder against taxpayer funded abortion.

"Our next blow to the abortion giant will be to defund [Planned Parenthood] of nearly $400 Million of their Medicaid funding through reconciliation," the group said.

Diggin' that next move, too!

Thursday roundup

Ben Shapiro has a horrifying piece on just how far post-American society has deteriorated:

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a piece by Jack Turban, a research fellow at the Yale School of Medicine. Turban says that doctors should begin applying puberty blockers to children who identify as transgender as early as possible. That's because, according to him, "it has become clear that if we support these children in their transgender identities instead of trying to change them, they thrive instead of struggling with anxiety and depression."

Turban uses as his example one 14-year-old girl named Hannah who was born a boy named Jonah. Turban glows: "Hannah is using a puberty-blocking implant and getting ready to embark on the path of developing a female body by starting estrogen. Ten years ago most doctors would have called this malpractice. New data has now made it the protocol for thousands of American children."

Ten years ago, doctors weren't embracing politically correct insanity as medicine.

By now you probably know about the 21,600-pound GBU-43 bomb - the most powerful in the US arsenal after our nuclear arsenal - that was dropped on an ISIS tunnel system in Afghanistan.

Good piece in Commentary by Noah Rothman entitled "Don't Call Trump's Pivot 'Centrist.'" He's made several moves that have confounded his water-carriers lately, but the more noteworthy development is how the Bannon camp-vs-Kushner camp dynamic is playing out:

Increasingly, Trump’s agenda is being defined as beholden to “centrists” Jared and Ivanka. Kushner leads an influential group of “centrist financiers,” according to the Washington Post. He heads a “centrist faction” that has emerged ascendant, Axios reported. Kushner exerted his influence at the paper he owned, the New York Observer, to ensure “centrist” editorial coverage, the New Yorker averred.

This is a misleading descriptor. Only in political media could you describe two gentry urban liberals as “centrist” and get away with it.

If Trump desires positive reinforcement from the press, elites, and Beltway fixers with whom he is surrounded, ordering uncostly military strikes on a genocidal dictator isn’t the only way to go about it. There is no surer pathway to a “legacy achievement” than the pursuit of big-ticket legislation. And Trump’s new closest advisors are just the couple to guide the president’s evolution in this more liberal direction.

Kushner has been described as a typical Manhattan Democrat by friends and has even hosted fundraisers for prominent Democratic politicians. Leaks in the press regarding their influence over this president have routinely highlighted their ability to convince Trump to pursue liberal agenda items, like reserving his judgment on the Paris climate agreement. Ivanka Trump has proposed a new entitlement in the form of a $500 billion maternity leave program that amounts to an expansion of unemployment benefits to new mothers—a program that would induce businesses to abandon their own maternity programs and offload that burden onto the federal government. If this is what we call “centrist” now, we are in the midst of a crisis of linguistic imprecision.

The threat to conservatism posed by the nationalist populism of Steve Bannon was that, by assuming control of the GOP, he could transform the philosophy of small government into an ideological muddle that endorses big spending and government interventionism with a hefty dose of ethnic anxiety. The same threat exists if Trump becomes a conduit through which his daughter and son-in-law can exert their influence over presidential policy. Trump’s support for a $1 trillion infrastructure program purchased entirely on credit is no more conservative than the creation of a new entitlement program. The principled right is bound by ideology to confront and oppose both initiatives, even if that’s an exhausting proposition. Conservatives thus need to gird themselves for the struggle to preserve the definition of conservatism once again, albeit from a new threat.

We could have had Ted.

Interesting piece at PJ Media on a survey taken in the UK that shows that a significant percentage of "Christians" don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus or in life after death. Author Daniel J. Phillips sets things straight:

 . . . one has the perilous liberty of insisting that Christ did not bodily rise from the grave, or one can admit that Christ did. Anyone may do either.

However, if one chooses the first option, he must let go of any claim to be a Christian. And if he claims to be a Christian, he must let go of the first option. How can I say that? Because I’ve read 1 Corinthians 15 and taken it seriously. Affirming the bodily resurrection of Jesus is definitional for Christian faith.

Why do people pretend otherwise? I’ve never seen the appeal in claiming to be something you aren’t. I wasn’t a Christian for the first part of my life. I knew it, and I didn’t want anyone to be mistaken. Now that I am a Christian, I don’t want anyone to believe that I’m an atheist, or a Mormon, or a Roman Catholic, or a Hindu. I’m not going to try to say, “Well, I’m really an atheist, but I believe in God and everything the Bible says.” Or “I’m really a Roman Catholic, but I look to Jesus alone for salvation, by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, as I learn from Scripture alone.” And so on. Why pretend to be what you aren’t?

There are literally no real benefits to a false claim to Christian faith. A false claim not only does not erase sins, it adds to them. It provides no reason to hope for Heaven, or God’s acceptance or love. In fact, it inoculates one to the real saving message of the Gospel, since one imagines he’s already checked that box – which he hasn’t. All such a person has to look forward to is hearing the words Jesus warns us He’ll say to “many” in the last day: “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7:23). They are all certain they’re “in” – saved, OK with God – and they’re all wrong.

So why do people who in major ways do not sync with the Biblical description of a Christian become so emotional when anyone suggests that they drop the label, as they have already dropped the beliefs and/or practices inherent in the label?

The facts are simple enough: atheists do not believe in God, Muslims do not eat pork, and Christians admit that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead.

Otherwise, we might as well eliminate the words hypocrite, delusion and deception also. 

The jackboot-snowflakes at Notre Dame say they'll feel "unsafe," doncha know, if Vice President Mike Pence comes to give the commencement address next month.

 

 

Bracing straight talk from the Secretary of State

In his presser with Sergei Lavrov, Tillerson gets real:

Tillerson said he had a "productive," two-hour meeting earlier in the day with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.

"I expressed the view that the current state of U.S.-Russia relations is at a low point and there is a low level of trust between our countries. The world's two foremost nuclear powers cannot have this kind of relationship," Tillerson said.

So much for the idea that Russia thought that DJT would be some kind of puppet. Now, the lady in the pantsuit with the "reset" button?

When the cattle-masses get bored, they cook up identity-politics and junk-science nonsense

Hackneyed adages endure for a reason. Their lack of dependency on circumstantial factors imparts to them a reliability that allows us to quickly size up situations in which we sense their application.

Take idle hands being the devil's workshop. Evidence for this one's veracity abounds.

George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen senses that, in recent decades, America has become a society of idle hands. His new book, The Complacent Class, fleshes out his observation, as does an interview with the American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis:

PETHOKOUKIS: Instead of calling it “The Complacent Class” you could have titled it “The Stagnant Society.” I think your thesis is, since the 1980s, American society has become less dynamic, more risk averse. We’re not starting businesses, we’re not moving, and this is a bad thing. Is that about right?

COWEN: Yes, it’s a bad thing but it’s quite tricky. Mostly, we’re doing this because it makes us happier. Life is safer, more convenient and more comfortable – no one wants to say those are bad things. But, at the margin, if you don’t take enough risk, there does come a time where you start moving backwards, can’t pay the bills, or have decent governance. So over the longer run it’s a bad thing.

What are the key data points you think which would support the idea? First, that we’re a complacent society.

Most of the book looks at different ways in which change in the United States has slowed down. So, for instance, we move across state lines at much lower rates, about 50% lower, that we used to, we Medicaid ourselves much more frequently, we’re not so willing to let our children even play outside, there are schools that have banned the game of tag because it’s too violent, startups are a percentage of overall businesses activity, our DOW, rates of productivity growth, innovation, as we best can measure them – they too are down, our physical infrastructure has barely progressed in many parts of the country, it’s gotten worse, travelling is harder than it used to be.

So we’re in this world where there’s one wonderful, souped up sector – information technology — but we’re using those games to just slow down change in so many other parts of our world.

Cowen sees plenty of political-level culpability across the spectrum for abetting of this phenomenon:

Looking at what’s happening in Washington I don’t sense that policy-makers are looking at the world the way that you’re looking at it right now.

Washington is a mix of the most foolish place in our country, but actually the part with the deepest understanding. It’s the one part of America that gets why it’s so hard to change things. I agree the campaigns were very backward looking. When Trump talked about infrastructure it was repairing roads, tunnels, and bridges – an idea I’m not against by the way – but when that’s the entirety of your positive vision I think that’s quite sad.
And now we see the Republicans controlling the major branches of government and not actually being able to do much with that. And I think that too is reflecting just how deep and far reaching the stasis is. The government is often where some problems show up first.

So we need some sort of external shock. It’s not that we necessarily want it, but it’s just this coming that will shake us up out of places. Is Trump that shock?

Trump is the beginning of that shock, but Trump is not the end of the process. My view is not that Trump will bring fascism, but he will be too weak of a president and he will be at another step along an ongoing deterioration of governance in this country. He’s not well informed, he does not know how to work the levers of power, and this country’s not solving its problems under him.

So yes, it seems that Trump has won that race and arrived in first place as the disruptive shock. But it’s also, oddly, a presidency of stasis. The disruption is that you cannot refuse to solve your problems for ever; sooner or later those problems will get their revenge on you. 

I sometimes take flack in the comment threads here at LITD for my use of the term "cattle-masses" to describe the swath of American society that has embraced the complacency on which Cowen focuses. The accusation is that it takes an unduly dim view of this magnificent species of which we're members. But is there not a sort of abnegation of the full depth and breadth of our humanity at work in the acceptance of the state's having become a provider of services, the entity that addresses the big questions of the human condition, such as sickness, old age and economic security?

(And allow me here the liberty of a brief digression. Speaking of AEI economists, I am deeply dismayed at the turn Pethokoukis's college James C. Capretta has taken lately. He is the Institute's specialist in health-care economics, and his last few columns, as the abortive Paul Ryan "repeal-and-replace" plan was crafted and then yanked for lack of votes, has been touting statist proposals of the rankest sort: incentivizing people to keep insurance coverage consistent (Mr, Capretta, it is not the government's role  to be "incentivizing" anything), automatic enrollment into insurance, more subisidization, and "compromise" on Medicaid. Someone needs to stand at the front door of the AEI building and waylay Mr. Capretta's Kool-Aid supplier.)

And consider what else has been morphing and metastasizing during the same time frame in which Professor Cowen's complacency has gained its foothold: identity politics and junk science.

They've been morphing and metastasizing to the point at which we get this kind of infantile confluence:

 Witness the upcoming March for Science, scheduled for Saturday, April 22. This also happens to be Earth Day, which is nice enough — and hey, who could object to a good old-fashioned rah-rah session for science? I, for one, always welcome a refresher on string theory, or the confounding conflict between the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, or that long, troubling episode in our planet’s history when a few impertinent continents apparently traipsed all the way over to the other side of the globe and no one was there to panic about it.

Alas, this March for Science does not appear to be largely about science, or about people who know a great deal about science, or even about people who want to know a great deal about science. (It would be kind of fun, in fact, to quiz earnest potential attendees about the details of the scientific method, or whether Johannes Kepler should finally win that well-deserved Oscar.) Keeping up with today’s hottest trends, the March for Science has wrapped itself in identity politics, cranked up the oven to “scorch,” and potentially set things on track to unceremoniously collapse into one giant intersectional soufflé.

The troubles brewing within the March for Science surfaced in January, marked by a now-deleted official tweet: “Colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues.” Since then, the addled march has torn through four different diversity statements, shellacked by critics on both sides. (Harvard’s Steven Pinker bashed the march’s “anti-science PC/identity politics/hard-left rhetoric,” while others complained the statement didn’t go far enough.) The march’s latest set of “Diversity and Inclusion Principles,” when paired with its more shame-faced and apologetic sibling, the “Statement on Diversity and Inclusion,” tops out at over 1,000 words.

You might think that this amounts to a protest march protesting too much. But the hits keep coming. When Bill Nye, the children’s TV personality-turned-science-advocate, was announced as an honorary chair of the march last week, critics bemoaned his status as a white male. Oddly, no one seemed particularly riled up about the fact that Nye is not an actual “scientist” at all. “I was born a dorky white guy who became an engineer,” Nye told BuzzFeed, reportedly “baffled” at the brouhaha. “I’m playing the hand I was dealt. We can’t — this march can’t solve every problem at once.” 

But “science,” at least according to the new dogma, can. Since the election of Donald Trump, a trendy new sign has popped up in yards across America: “In this house, we believe black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal, science is real, love is love, kindness is everything.” People of various political leanings could talk for hours about some of the tenets of the sign — which specific “women’s rights” are we referring to, for instance? — but the “science is real” line confuses me every time.

What, after all, can it mean? Most likely, the line refers to anthropogenic climate change, and a beef with the Trump administration’s approach to that contentious issue. But if that’s the case, why not just have your sign say “Manmade climate change is real”? There’s clearly something else afoot, and it strikes deep into the heart of progressive politics today. 

Could this kind of nonsense have occurred in, say, the 1940s - let alone the 1870s, not to even mention the 1660s?

No, we had a grasp on the parameters of reality that has come to elude us.

And a vicious-cycle trend seems to be at play here. The less robust and vital our God-given ingenuity, the more we cook up ridiculous fantasies that further dull it.

I think Pethokoukis and Cowen are onto something with the notion of a shock. I don't know what form it will take, and neither does anybody else. Let us just hope that it's not something so rude that it takes from us the benefits of the material advancements of the last few decades.

The information revolution may not have had the impact of the discovery of electricity or the invention of the internal combustion engine, but the fruits of those advancements come to a screaming halt without the IT overlay which now drives it.

It would be good for the whole thing to not go kablooey in the course of our learning our lessons about human nature and how reality works.