The obligatory DJT Jr. email release post

Actual facts are still hard to come by in this situation, but these seem to be the relevant ones as of the present:

1.) Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya says she is not nor ever has been employed by the Russian government. She also says she had no dirt on Clinton and had no intention of delivering such at the Trump Tower meeting with DJT Jr., Manafort and Kushner. She was there to talk about lifting the Russian ban on US citizens adopting Russian children, imposed in response to US sanctions against Russian-government officials shown to be abusing human rights.

2.) Veselnitskaya is on record as disputing "the well-documented account of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky’s brutal death at the hands of Russian officials."

3.) DJT Sr. had collaborated on the Miss Universe pageant in 2013 with Aras Agalarov, the Russian figure that Goldstone identified in his email correspondence as the guy with the goods on Clinton.

Last evening, if one watched any cable talking-head programs, one had to sit through innumerable tedious discussions about how DJT Jr.'s expression of enthusiasm for what Goldstone was telling him ["If it's what you say, I love it!"] and subsequent taking of the meeting with Veselnitskaya was not illegal, and how there is indeed no strict legal definition of collusion.

But I doubt if there's any significant disagreement in any quarters that it was dumb as hell. For starters, because it gave the New York Times the smoking gun regarding Trump camp footsie with a hostile foreign power that the paper of record had been itching for.

This is my first post on this. Don't be surprised if it's my last.

Gee, isn't this a big deal, especially if it's the tip of some iceberg?

In a sense, yes, but my position is, here we are, in mid-2017, combing over the president's sons emails and piecing together arcane details of associations and meetings rather than repealing the "A"CA, reforming the tax code and using all possible governmental instruments to remove cultural rot from our official institutions (i.e., ceasing and desisting all efforts to make transgendered people feel more "comfortable" in the State and Defense Departments and the CIA.)

And then there's Russia itself, and some very recent developments, namely the back-to-bakc tweets the president sent out after his meeting with Putin at G20. The first waxed enthusiastic about their discussion of a joint cybersecurity task force, and the second pretty much said, "never mind."

And my estimation of Tillerson is sinking fast. No, Mr. Secretary, we don't have anything like common goals with Russia regarding Syria.

And then, of course, there are Squirrel-Hair's water carriers. Sean Hannity's show last night was an hour-long exercise in what-about-ism. Yes, Hillary Clinton is skating with regard to some very bad breaches of national security, but that's not the subject at hand.

I'll end this post with the basic point with which I generally end such posts: We could have nominated an actual conservative, who would have beaten Hillary Clinton, and we'd be getting important stuff done right now.

Tuesday roundup

 Ted Cruz calls for the Senate to forego an August recess and work on the repeal plan for the "A"CA.

Very thoughtful piece at NRO by Nicholas Gallagher on the tension between the two key notions of what America is: an idea (namely, that liberty is an essential condition for human well-being) and a blood-and-soil geographically identifiable location populated by particular demographics.

North Korea has been supplying everything from arms to construction labor to a number of African nations for decades, and they are quite pleased with the partnership.

Identity politics madness in San Francisco prevents BART from releasing videos of criminals beating people up and robbing them on public transit:

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) authority is refusing to release surveillance videos involving a recent spate of robberies committed at BART stations in the last three months. Their reasoning?

They don’t want to perpetuate negative stereotypes of minorities.

 The CBS affiliate in San Francisco says in the last three months “there have been at least three robberies on BART involving groups of teenagers.”

April 22: Forty to sixty kids boarded a train at the Coliseum stop and robbed seven passengers, beating up two;

June 28: A group of four kids assaulted a passenger and made off with a cell phone at Dublin; and

June 30: A woman on a train with about a dozen teenagers had her phone snatched by one them before the group got off at the Coliseum stop. Thankfully, a good Samaritan was on hand to retrieve the phone.

Despite the heightened threat to the public, BART authorities continue to withhold video of the attacks from the press, citing concerns that they would be aiding negativity towards minorities, although they failed to identify which minorities are in question.

You knew this was coming: transgendered dolls.

There's been a lot of hype in recent times about China being poised to become a genuine world-stage leader. Don't buy it, says Rich Lowry.

Government doesn't grant you your rights

Steve McCann has long been one of my favorite American Thinker columnists. He came to the United States in 1951 as a child, orphaned in the carnage of World War II. He was blessed to have found his way to this country's founding documents and then the great works by the indispensable thinkers on the subject of human freedom.

His position is pretty much that which informs the decisions of what to post at this blog (as well as its name; yes, it's still very late in the day). America and the West generally are in decline and the chances to reverse that are dwindling.

In his piece published today, he reasserts a basic premise of his, that there are two impulses that drive human behavior:

The most dominant trait of mankind, as of all living creatures, is an innate desire to survive and prosper.  While many may willingly choose to pursue subsistence on their own terms, to the majority of the human race, the path of least resistance is the most desired.   Thus, mankind is susceptible to financial scams, gambling, crime, and resentment towards those who may have more.  But above all, far too many people are open to the concept of a central authority providing them with the means of survival.

A secondary characteristic of the human race, also shared by other species, is the need by some within the group to conquer or maintain control over their fellow man.   In the post-Industrial Revolution era, the easiest course to assume this power was to promise, in exchange for the votes of the people, that the state, through a new ruling class, would provide the citizenry cradle-to-grave security.  Thus, a Faustian bargain encompassing the desire by the majority for ease of survival and others for the need to rule through the vehicle of an authoritarian central government whose primary purpose would be control of virtually all economic, political and societal activity.

Regarding the second impulse, he takes the reader back through the centuries-old philosophical dichotomy regarding whether government ought to support individual autonomy, or impose an airtight collectivism and thereby put a lid on the individual's impulse to control others. He examines what Plato versus Aristotle had to say (Plato: collectivism, Aristotle: individual autonomy), and compares and contrasts the positions of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and a few other such pairings.

It's when he gets to the Progressives of the early 20th century that we see the collectivist view in its full obscenity:

The Progressives, beginning in the 1890’s, seized upon the concept of “fairness” and redefining “fundamental rights” as the basis of rejecting the Founders’ concept of a natural moral order.   Rather than accept the theory that the purpose of government is to protect man’s natural rights, the Progressives put forward the notion that government’s primary purpose is to ensure fairness and economic equality.   Therefore, fundamental rights, as prominent Progressive thinker Charles Merriam (1874-1953) wrote, “...are considered to have their source not in nature, but in law.”  John Dewey (1859-1952), often considered the father of American Progressivism, also wrote: “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.”

Got that? According to these freedom-haters, it is through the benevolence of the State that you are granted the privilege of keeping what is yours.

This came up in the comment thread of the post here at LITD right below this one. A commenter excerpted from a Brookings Institution piece by Isabel Sawhill in which she claimed that a policy of cutting taxes for rich people was a failed notion, because, according to her, it has not led to an uptick in job creation.

That misses the point entirely.

There is no more pure form of property than money. Except in situations of barter, it is what each of us gets in exchange for our labor. The party on the other end of a given economic transaction gets the fruit of that labor, we get money which is ours to do as we wish with.

Do you see how Sawhill's view is rooted in the Progressive premise? If the State deems that you getting to keep what is yours is having a macroeconomic result it deems undesirable, it reserves the right to take some portion of it that it deems appropriate.

We won't ever begin to reverse the decline until this argument is framed properly. We need elected representatives, executive-branch policy administrators, think-tank scholars, teachers and citizens in all walks of life to understand what is at stake here.

It's a monumental task, but for some of us, sleeping well at night hinges on being relentless about it.

What the hell are these people doing calling themselves Republicans?

Big thumbs-down on this baldly redistributionist idea from some "GOP lawmakers":

Conservative groups are warning GOP senators against keeping an ObamaCare tax on investment income in their healthcare bill, an idea that has gained some traction among lawmakers.

GOP lawmakers have floated keeping ObamaCare’s 3.8 percent net investment income tax to help pay for more generous healthcare subsidies for low-income people. Democrats criticized an earlier version of the Senate’s healthcare bill for eliminating the tax because it generally applies to high earners.

But prominent conservatives argue Democrats will criticize the bill regardless of what happens with the tax. They say the tax is harmful to economic growth and should be repealed. 

“This tax, just like any tax increase, is an anathema to conservatives as it suppresses economic growth and opportunity throughout our nation,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh said in a statement Wednesday. “Under no circumstances should the NIIT be included in any forthcoming Republican ‘repeal’ bill.” 

ObamaCare’s net investment income tax applies to individuals making more than $200,000 and married couples making more than $250,000. The tax falls on forms of income that include capital gains, dividends and interest. 

Yes, it suppresses economic growth - taking otherwise productive money out of the economy and handing it to Leviathan - but more fundamentally, it forcibly seizes Citizen A's money to pay for the particular needs of Citizen B.

UPDATE: James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute invites us to face a very discomfiting question: Is the GOP still the party of supply-side economics?

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?

 

Is Eastern Europe the most Western place in the West?

Giulio Meotti, writing at the Gatestone Institute's website, says it probably was no coincidence that Trump gave his speech in Poland:

There has been a growing tendency of Visegrad [Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary] leaders to depict Islam as a civilizational threatto Christian Europe. If, in Western Europe, Christianity has been dramatically cast aside by public opinion and severely restricted by EU official rules, in Eastern Europe new polls revealthat Christianity is as robust and patriotic as ever. That is why Trump called Poland "the faithful nation". That is why US Catholic magazines are openly asking if there is a "Christian reawakening" in Eastern Europe. Slovakia approved a law to prevent Islam from becoming an official state religion.

These Central- and Eastern European countries know that Western Europe's multiculturalism has been a recipe for terror attacks, for a start. As Ed West of The Spectator noted:

"Not all of Europe, of course. Central Europe, chiefly Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, remain largely safe from the terror threat, despite the former in particular being a Nato player in the Middle East. It is precisely because the reasons for this are so obvious that they cannot be mentioned. Poland is 0.1 percent Muslim, most of whom are from a long-settled Tartar community, Britain is 5 percent, France 9 percent and Brussels 25 percent, and those numbers are growing".

What is presumably "obvious" here is that Poland and Hungary are not hit by Islamic terror attacks because they have very few Muslims, while Belgium and UK it is the reverse. Europe would probably have been safer if it had followed Eastern Europe's example.

Eastern Europe not only shows a greater understanding of Western culture than Western Europe does; these Eastern countries have also been far more generous to NATO, the bulwark of their independence and security. Culture and security go hand-in-hand: if you take your own culture and civilization seriously, you will be ready to defend them.

A brief look at the NATO's members' military spending as a percentage of GDP shows that Poland meets the 2% target, unlike all the Western European countries. Only five of NATO's 28 members -- the U.S., Greece, Poland, Estonia and the U.K. -- meet the 2% target. Where is France? And Belgium? And Germany? And The Netherlands?

"Unlike most of its NATO and European peers," Agnia Grigas, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, explained, "Poland has for the past two decades consistently viewed defense as a priority issue, and as a result, has been slowly but steadily emerging as the bedrock of European security". Poland -- unlike Belgium, Italy and other European countries -- is not a "free rider" but a trustworthy partner to its US ally. Poland showed loyal support to the United States both in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its troops fought the Taliban and helped to topple Saddam Hussein.

It's one thing to evolve and advance, which Western nations have shown the world how to do, but it's of supreme importance for those of us in the West to remember our identity, what it consists of, why it's supremely valuable, and what is entailed in preserving it.

Is it too much to ask that post-America's largest city not have a relentlessly shameful mayor?

Is there a level on which this is not disgusting?

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday skipped an NYPD swearing-in ceremony, made especially poignant by this week’s assassination-style murder of a female police officer in the Bronx, so he could attend an anti-Trump protest in Germany.

According to the New York Post, de Blasio was too busy preparing for his surprise trip to Germany where he plans to join leftist protesters at the G-20 summit on Saturday.

Hizzoner’s overseas jaunt was kept under wraps until just 90 minutes before he took off from Newark Airport. A last-minute announcement said he “will attend several events surrounding the G-20 Summit, including Saturday’s Hamburg Zeigt Haltung rally.”

The Marxist mayor is scheduled to take part in a rally and will return to New York City Sunday.

And, for those who think this kind of thing is important, consider the carbon footprint he left flying over there to act like a spoiled brat.

Now the Left is going to try to make the term "the West" into some kind of code for bigotry

I'd seen Peter Beinart's Atlantic piece about Trump's speech in Poland in my first round of news-and-opinion perusal this morning, and had resolved to blog about it when I got the opportunity. Now, at 12:30, I'm ready, and I see that it has come to the attention of some others as well.

Noah Rothman at Commentary makes a number of points I was going to put forth:

“The West is not an ideological or economic term,” wrote the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “The West is a racial and religious term.” “The ‘south’ and ‘east’ only threaten the West’s ‘survival’ if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders,” Beinart insisted. “They only threaten the West’s ‘survival’ if by ‘West’ you mean white, Christian hegemony.” This is true only if we accept Beinart’s premise; that the West is only a racial and religious affiliation and not a set of political traditions. If we see the West as a champion of individual liberty, freedom of worship, reason and rationality, and republican governance—not to mention a bulwark against the forces of reaction, totalitarianism, and theocracy—Beinart’s definition is both narrow and incoherent.

Notice how disingenuous Beinart is in formulation his position. For one thing, he makes a point of using a couple of George W. Bush speeches as points of comparison, and then tries to say that just because Trump couched his remarks in geographical terms, he was somehow minimizing Christianity's universal message, or speaking of some different definition altogether:

To grasp how different that rhetoric was from Trump’s, look at how the last Republican President, George W. Bush, spoke when he visited Poland. In his first presidential visit, in 2001, Bush never referred to “the West.” He did tell Poles that “We share a civilization.” But in the next sentence he insisted that “Its values are universal.” Because they are, he declared, “our trans-Atlantic community must have priorities beyond the consolidation of European peace. We must bring peace and health to Africa. … We must work toward a world that trades in freedom … a world of cooperation to enhance prosperity, protect the environment, and lift the quality of life for all.”

In 2003, Bush returned, and in his main speech didn’t use the terms “West” or “civilization” at all. After celebrating Poland’s achievements, he said America and Europe “must help men and women around the world to build lives of purpose and dignity” so they don’t turn to terrorism. He boasted that America was increasing its funding to fight global poverty and AIDS because “we add to our security by helping to spread freedom and alleviate suffering.” And he said “America and Europe must work closely to develop and apply new technologies that will improve our air and water quality, and protect the health of the world’s people.”

Bush’s vision echoed Francis Fukuyama’s. America and Europe may have been further along the road to prosperity, liberty, capitalism, and peace than other parts of the world, but all countries could follow their path. And the more each did, the more America and Europe would benefit. In deeply Catholic Poland, Bush sprinkled his speeches with religious references, but they were about Christianity as a universal creed, a moral imperative that knew no civilizational bounds. By contrast, when Trump warned Poles about forces “from the south or the east, that threaten … to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition,” he was talking not about Christianity but about Christendom: a particular religious civilization that must protect itself from outsiders.

Beinart employs the baggage of Trump's protectionist bluster in previous speeches to say that in this speech, his use of the word "defend" is fraught with paranoia:

When Bush spoke in Poland, America’s leaders still mostly discussed globalization as a process by which America improved the rest of the world. Trump generally discusses globalization—the movement of both goods and people—as a process by which the rest of the world cheats, weakens, and threatens America. In his two speeches in Poland combined, Bush used variations of the word “defend” five times. Trump used them 21 times in a single speech.

But the point here is not tariffs or intellectual property theft, it's a maniacal ideology enshrouded in a particular religion. A little further on, Beinart realizes he has to cover that base, and says this:

Jihadist terrorists can kill people in the West, but unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they cannot topple even the weakest European government. Jihadists control no great armies. Their ideologies have limited appeal even among the Muslims they target with their propaganda. ISIS has all but lost Mosul and could lose Raqqa later this year.

Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The “south” and “east” only threaten the West’s “survival” if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s “survival” if by “West” you mean white, Christian hegemony. 

Well, no, Peter, the jihadists don't have the resources to storm the meeting places of Western legislatures and declare coups d'etat, but we are already seeing a mindset spread that posits that frequent terrorist attacks are just something we're going to have to live with. There's a one-word encapsulation for that: demoralization. And it goes hand-in-hand with the acquiescence that accommodates sharia law and the performing of genital mutilation in doctors' clinics in Western nations.

The reason Trump mentioned the geographic angle is that it is from the south and east that immigrants, including no small number of individuals sympathetic to jihad, are poring into European nations.

Islam is not a Western religion, and making a high priority of "inclusivity" does not serve the cause of preserving Western values.

And let's add this fact to the mix: there are Western nations far removed from the geographic concentration of such countries. Israel is a Western nation. Japan, while by no means completely Western, has a great number of Western features: a basically free-market economy, a representative democracy form of government, and a balance between fealty to tradition and openness to advancement that ensures societal stability.

The extent to which Trump has thought any of this out is something we can't ascertain to any appreciable degree. Steven Miller wrote the speech. But neither is Trump some kind of white supremacist who secretly signals supremacist designs through his public remarks.

Rest assured, the way the term "the West" was used in the Poland speech is the way it's used by all serious people who understand that, yes, it must be defended: A body of thought distilled from a centuries-old conversation whose participants indeed did come from geographically Western nations, such as Greece, Italy, France, England, Germany, The United States, and Poland.

The gathering momentum of faith-hatred in post-America

Up 76 percent in 3 years:

The Family Research Council released a 66-page report entitled “Hostility to Religion: The Growing Threat to Religious Liberty in the United States” that shows some discouraging, but not unexpected, trends.

Their first report published in 2014 highlighted attacks going back a decade. In the new report, they have found a 76 percent increase in attacks on religious liberty in just the past three years.

When the first edition of this report was released in July 2014, religious freedom violations across the United States were already significantly high. Since that date, the number of incidents has only increased. The first edition—spanning over a decade—contained 90 incidents. Yet 69 new incidents have been added in the short time since the last report. That is a 76 percent increase in just under three years.

It is even worse when you just consider hostility toward religious beliefs about marriage and human sexuality.

Moreover, Sections III and IV, documenting hostility to religious beliefs on natural marriage and human sexuality, contained 42 incidents in the report’s first edition. In the time since then, 48 new incidents have been added to these sections. Thus, the number of these religious freedom violations more than doubled in a 114 percent surge.

The report includes four sections that highlight different categories:

• Attacks on religious expression in the public square,
• Attacks on religious expression in schools and universities,
• Censure of viewpoints regarding sexuality, and
• Suppression of religious viewpoints on sexuality using non-discrimination laws.

In their introduction, they cite some examples of the attacks they have documented over the last three years.

Since the first edition of this report came out about three years ago, the problems have only grown. Militant atheists and progressives continue to target long- existing crosses and historical markers of America’s religious heritage in public places. Teachers tell young school-children they can’t read their Bible in school. Private citizens and the government alike are attacking religious expression by other citizens. Whether it’s a media backlash to merely expressing a faith position on sexuality, or the use of nondiscrimination laws to punish religious business owners for their decisions, threats to free speech and free exercise are heating up both in the courts and the public square.

A society thus beset is not healthy.

An busy day for the "international community"

Of course, there's DJT's current Europe visit. It's started off well. His Poland speech resolutely affirmed the value of the entire West, touching on threats to it, reassuring all that the US will abide by Article 5 of the NATO agreement, but most importantly putting the West's spiritual foundation front and center among the reasons for its essentiality to humankind. It was a refreshing and surprising departure from the "America first" rhetoric into which he so facilely lapses. It would be interesting to know who the chief speechwriter was.

Now it's on to Hamburg, and, to no one's surprise, the anticapitalist riots are already underway. The big question is whether Trump's economic message will be protectionist or more inclined toward a free-market view. If it's the former, it takes a bit of wind out of the rioters' sails, given that their bogeyman is "globalism", just as it is for the populists who comprise DJT's slavishly devoted base.

There's also sure to be a demonstration of consternation on the part of several G20 leaders about the US pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords. Too bad. They'd be wise to pull out as well, and throw off the economic burden it imposes.

Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Modi has been in Israel. During his visit, the two countries signed agreements to deepen ties in such areas as defense, science, technology and agriculture. The Palestinian Authority feels snubbed, but given that Modi is clearly seeking economic partners dedicated to actual advancement, what do the Palis have to offer?

But back to Europe, all eyes are on the face-to-face meeting between Trump and Putin. For once, this might make for a useful application of DJT's squirm-inducing bluntness, given what Russia just did at the UN:

Russia on Thursday blocked a U.N. Security Council Resolution drafted by the U.S. that called for “significant measures” in response to North Korea’s launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The U.S. circulated the statement among the 15-member council after announcing plans for a new sanctions resolution against the nuclear-armed regime in North Korea. But an objection by Russia killed the statement, said a U.N. diplomat.

Russian officials argued that the missile launch Tuesday had not been verified as an intercontinental missile.

North Korea claimed it was an ICBM. The U.S. and U.N. also determined that Hwasong-14 missile launched by North Korea was of intercontinental range.

Mr. Trump and his administration have stepped up with tough rhetoric against the regime of dictator Kim Jong-un since the missile launch, which was North Korea’s first successful test of an ICBM.

Everybody understands the urgency of this situation - even Russia, despite its lone "assessment" that the missile was only intermediate-range, which goes to show just how cold the motives driving Russia's foreign policy are.

It's not like the Security Council was going to make a "heavy move," to empty a bit of Squirrel-Hair parlance, anyway. There would have been a new round of sanctions, but it would have had zero effect in terms of deterrence.

It seems that the grinning, chubby despot of a small parcel of northeast Asia, who never gets invited anywhere, has frozen the world's heavy hitters in their tracks.

Prediction: Events unfolding from those discussed above are going to be even more interesting.

It's adjusted readings, not actual warming

Well, how about this?

A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

“Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.

The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.

Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for “biases” in the data. The new study doesn’t question the adjustments themselves but notes nearly all of them increase the warming trend.

Basically, “cyclical pattern in the earlier reported data has very nearly been ‘adjusted’ out” of temperature readings taken from weather stations, buoys, ships and other sources.

In fact, almost all the surface temperature warming adjustments cool past temperatures and warm more current records, increasing the warming trend, according to the study’s authors.

“Nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments,” Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”

“You would think that when you make adjustments you’d sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling. That’s almost never happened,” said D’Aleo, who co-authored the study with statistician James Wallace and Cato Institute climate scientist Craig Idso.

Their study found measurements “nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history,” which was “nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern.”

“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three [global average surface temperature] data sets are not a valid representation of reality,” the study found. “In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

Based on these results, the study’s authors claim the science underpinning the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gases “is invalidated.”

Now, can we dispense that there's any reason for humankind to collectively mobilize to stop advancing?

 

Ontario opts to become a sewer of totalitarianism and lunacy

This is how advanced the rot is in our neighbor to the north:

Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, just passed a law that could allow the government to remove kids from their home if their parents oppose the new transgender ideology.

Could there be anything more terrifying for parents than that?

It’s not hard to see why the passage of Bill 89 captured the attention of so many across the globe.

But how did this bill—which is about foster care and adoption—get caught up in politically correct ideologies about “gender identity” and “gender expression” in the first place?

It didn’t come out of nowhere.

Ontario has passed five gender laws in the past five years, few of which received much media attention or even opposition in the legislature. Bill 89 is the latest in this litany of bad legislation.

It was back in 2012 “gender identity and gender expression” were added to Ontario’s Human Rights Code, making Ontario the first jurisdiction in North America to pass such a law.

With that initial snowball, the avalanche got rolling.

Facilitated by a majority government and a lame-duck opposition, the following bills sailed through to provincial law in Ontario:

• Bill 13, also in 2012, compelled public schools to have gay-straight alliances and demanded schools combat “homophobia” and “transphobia.”
• Bill 77 in 2015 prohibited particular forms of therapy for minors who struggle with gender dysphoria or other aspects of their sexuality, against the advice of numerous psychiatrists and counsellors.
• Bill 28, which passed into law in December 2016, removed the terms “mother” and “father” from Ontario law, and permits “pre-conception agreements” allowing four unrelated and unmarried people to become parents.

All of this led to the Supporting Children, Youth and Families Act, which passed into law just over a week ago. It is still commonly called Bill 89.

Bill 89 is a child protection bill that aims to make changes to our foster care and adoption system across Ontario. It regulates the Children’s Aid Societies, which includes over 40 organizations across the province responsible for responding to child protection concerns.

The impetus for Bill 89 was, in part, the murder of a 7-year-old girlwhile in the care of her Children’s Aid Society-appointed guardians.

The new law makes a number of innocuous changes and even some positive ones to how children who are abused and/or abandoned will be treated.

Yet the controversy stems from the inclusion of language from the Ontario Human Rights Code into the new child welfare act. This takes us right back to 2012 when “gender identity and gender expression,” two nebulous terms, were added into the Human Rights Code.

Prior to Bill 89, social workers considered principles in a child protection case—principles like continuity of care, stable family relationships, and respecting cultural, religious, and regional differences.

After Bill 89, social workers attempting to assess a child’s situation must now consider the specifics of the Ontario Human Rights Code, including “[a] child’s or young person’s race, ancestry, place of origin, color, ethnic origin, citizenship, family diversity, disability, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.”

This is really happening on our continent.

Bringing clarity to the core issue in the Baby Charlie case

For a razor-sharp incisive take on the questions that arise in the situation of Charlie Gard, his parents, the British Health Service and the EU, check out this piece by Daren Jonescu.

One of the most subtle and telling questions, raised by many, is what would happen should Charlie’s parents be granted permission to keep him alive with experimental treatments, only to find their son trapped permanently in a vegetative state. Should Britain’s national health care system be on the hook to pay to keep a baby alive indefinitely in such a condition?

In short, no — because the British government should not be providing health care. The question occurs to us, and seems complicated, only if we accept the key premises of the argument for socialized medicine, namely, (a) universal health care is a human right, and (b) government is the only proper guarantor, through confiscatory taxation and/or other coercive means, of this universal right to health care (i.e., medical services).

As for premise (a), health care that is not self-administered is a service that must be provided by other people, and as such cannot be a right, as this would mean other humans are morally and legally obliged to provide that service for us, in effect to become our indentured servants. (Consider: If no one chose to go to medical school, would this not constitute a violation of our “right” to health care? How can you have a right to the results of other people’s career choices?)

Further, it would mean that other citizens in our community may have the fruits of their labor expropriated to pay for these services on our behalf, which makes them our slaves. A right that, in order to be asserted, requires the coercive use and disposal of the lives, time, and labor of other people is no right at all. It is oppression with a sweeter name.

As for premise (b), since government assuming the role of chief provider or overseeing guarantor of health care makes sense in practice, and is legitimized in theory, only by the presumption of premise (a); and since premise (a), implying indentured servitude and economic slavery, has no moral legitimacy at all within the limits of a society that purports to be free or republican — that is, a society in which individual human beings are regarded as the basic political units — premise (b) may be dismissed as inherently illegitimate.

It's a little bracing to digest, but the fact that we live in a world of trade-offs is central to what is at issue here:

 . . . if the boy survived in a “catatonic” state requiring ongoing and prohibitively expensive care, then, in a just and free world, the parents would be responsible for finding ways to raise the money they needed through work or charity, and, if they should truly be unable to do so, then they might be faced with the most inescapable reality of life in the non-utopian world, which is that we can’t always have what we would like, and the world doesn’t owe us everything we would like.

Through no one’s fault, I am not a billionaire, and therefore can’t have billionaire things. I have no right to billionaire things, however much I may want them. As an adult wishing to live responsibly in a society founded in freedom and equality, I have to accept that I have no right to other people’s money or property, even when the consequences of not having them might be sad or tragic for me.

In any case, no reasonable person is asking for Charlie Gard to be kept alive in perpetuity in a vegetative state. The real issue is who should be making the final decisions about his fate, where there are decisions to be made. Apart from the self-refuting brutality of the government’s bureaucratic calculations about the economic value of a life, the only half-sensible argument for the State to have the final authority is that “the government-employed doctors know best.”

And so they might — but that is of no consequence to the matter of moral and legal authority. I may think you read stupid books, but I have no authority to burn your books and force you at gun point to read mine. And were the State to appoint me to the position World Expert of Literature, I would not thereby acquire any greater authority to burn your books and force-feed you mine. Your mind is yours, whether I like how you use it or not, and whether or not I might have better ideas about how you ought to use it. You may be encouraged to listen to my recommendations, and strongly advised to take them more to heart than the recommendations of others. I can go no further without violating your essential liberty.

Likewise with medical professionals, whether they have the stamp of State-approved expertise or not. All things being equal, an expert does not trump a parent, anymore than my superior taste in literature trumps another man’s freedom of thought.

The central issue here is not whether the hopes of Charlie’s parents are realistic, but whether a child ultimately belongs — in the sense of primary moral and legal guardianship — to his parents or to his government. 

And Jonescu draws the proper larger inference from the principles at play in this specific situation:

[The state] has no moral authority to decide the terms or limits of the right of self-preservation for the innocent private citizen in the first place.

And without that moral authority, the argument for socialized or single-payer health care is dead in the water — and deserves to be.

 Which is why we should all hope that the Ted Cruz-Mike Lee idea for once and for all resolving the repeal and replacing of the "A"CA comes to fruition. Let each state decide if it wants to implement policy based on a fiction, or operate in conformance with the realities of this world.

Of North Korean ICBM tests and sex-robot "ethics"

"The good gets better and the bad gets worse."



- Mose Allison



On several recent Sundays, my pastor has prefaced his sermon by saying he was going to delve into a topic so controversial that most modern pastors of most stripes avoid it: end times.



For one thing, it's a fool's errand. Just ask William Miller, the Baptist preacher who, two years in a row, convinced his congregation to gather on a Vermont hillside to witness the Second Coming. (A core of diehards, even after the second year's gathering, stayed together under the leadership of Ellen White and came out to Battle Creek, Michigan and founded the Seventh-Day Adventists.)



And the buzz-saw cacophony of life in this fallen realm rarely calms down to a level so unusual it's worth remarking upon, if you'll notice.



Still, history shows us that there are times when there's a clear spike in the intensity of human folly.



Yesterday, I mentioned, in the course of my Independence Day post, that there's a thread of sanguine outlook that one has found over the past several years - and often from smart and principled people on the right; pieces on the subject from Kevin Williamson and Victor Davis Hanson come to mind - that makes a compelling case that we've never had it so good.



It's hard to argue with the abundance of evidence they cite: cell phones that allow us to instantly retrieve pretty much any information, however esoteric, we wish to get, medical advances that have put most diseases known to our species behind us, opportunities to prosper in an array of exciting fields of endeavor, and, yes, the enduring stability of representative democracy as the form of government in a number of nations.



I won't run through, yet again, my plethora of evidence to the contrary. I did so yesterday, and have enumerated them many times on this blog.



Rather, let me put on the table two items of fresh evidence to be found on this morning's Drudge Report: North Korea's ICBM test and its diplomatic aftermath, and a "code of ethics" shaping up among the world's makers of sex robots that would put the making of sex robots explicitly designed to look and sound like children off-limits.



I kind of surprise myself that I don't blog more often about the ratcheting up of tensions between North Korea and  - well, the world, actually. But the fact is that even the wonkiest think pieces about the subject, penned by the most erudite strategists applying their minds to the matter, tend to end their essays with a paragraph the gist of which is, "There are no good options. This is about as tough a conundrum as the world has faced."



Then there's the sex-robot-ethics story.



There's a general sound of alarm that we ought to heed that questions what will be left for human beings to do for their livelihoods as automation pervades more and more of the world of work.



And now comes the possibility that we won't even need our fellow human beings for . . .





. . .  what?



What is sex for?



Once in a while we catch a glimpse of a pair of dogs or cats in the throes of instinctual impulse, an act which, in nature's clever design, will perpetuate their species.



But the literature, including scripture, produced by our species on the subject attests to at least the possibility of more noble reasons for human beings to interact thusly.



Because we have souls, and therefore the capacity for love, we form families, in which the children produced thereby can find encouragement, trust, comfort and loyalty, and can learn supremely important lessons about cultivating a dignified bearing, a sense of humor, a work ethic and a yearning for God.



The cynic will point out that adultery has always been with us, as has sex untethered from marriage, and that the whole matter boils down to self-gratification not much elevated from the above-mentioned dogs and cats.



C.S. Lewis discusses a passage from Orwell's 1984 in which the protagonist demands of the heroine that she tell him with the utmost conviction that she adores the bodily sensation of orgasm. He wants to hear that she craves not him, but the experience contained solely within herself.



And that's the ultimately terrifying thing about a libertine view of sexuality. It reduces our fellow human beings to objects of our gratification. Secondary considerations are eroded until we no longer even consider them. And then, yes, we are reduced to the level of dogs and cats.



We've now made that possible. Consider that pathetic spectacle of someone engaged in union with a robot, the "human" partner bringing to bear all the passion we're familiar with: the heavy breath, the pronounced veins in the forehead, the sweat. A brute animal getting off with a machine.



Do not both of these disparate stories from today's news lineup have in common the theme of the human being deciding to jettison his humanity?



So much for being made in His image and likeness.



It was for just such decisions on our part that a flood and fire and brimstone were imposed upon a hopeless world.



This may not be a peak moment compared to various other times in human history. In any event, an astute person will take such indicative developments as a reminder to be vigilant.



You want your lamp well-oiled for the moment of reckoning, and that will surely come.

Another Independence Day when prayer and grieving are more appropriate than celebration

Independence Day for the past few years has demonstrated what good advice it is to engage this fallen realm with the most modest of expectations. No worldly good thing, not even one of the two most special nations in human history, is going to provide any of us with unending blessings.

We still have the backdrop of material abundance that makes for counterarguments to the fact that America and the West generally are past the peak of their ability to enhance human life. It was the main counterargument put forth, usually by leftists but sometimes smart and principled people on the right who somehow amassed enough evidence to embrace a we've-never-had-it-so-good perspective, from the time that Western decline became obvious to all who chose to see. It was an argument that persisted during the Obama years, even as economic productivity ground to a halt, radical Islam rallied for a new era of menace, America's nation-state enemies, adversaries and rivals came to see it as an easy mark, and the culture's rot accelerated.

I didn't even bother to write a post explicitly reflecting on Independence Day last year. My posts from July 3 were entitled "They Smell Weakness - Today's Edition" (about a Russian frigate coming within 150 yards of the USS San Jacinto in the eastern Mediterranean) and "It's Because of Infantile Dweebs Like This That Jihadists Feel Emboldened" (about a collection of essays by Ohio State professors on that school's blog blaming the mass shooting at Orlando's Pulse nightclub on "toxic masculinity," ultranationalism" and "fetishization of weapons.") My July 4 entry was about Huma Abedin, who could well have been our current White House Chief of Staff, disposing of personal documents in a burn bag.

The fault lines are a little different now from a year ago, but not a great deal. The players are still the same. A hard left still pursuing the Great Leveling Project, a cadre of Donald Trump fans whose slavish devotion keeps them blind to his obvious unfitness for his position, a news, opinion and entertainment media world with its own culture of self-congratulation, a church seemingly unable to address any of this, and a handful of citizens preoccupied with the relationship between freedom and the need for God.

Yes, Donald Trump was elected president, giving the Republican Party control of the federal executive and legislative branches, as well as over half the nation's statehouses. Yes, Neil Gorsuch was appointed to the Supreme Court, and just this week it made a difference in two key decisions. Yes, the Keystone XL and Dakota access pipelines are going forward after years of obstruction for no reason rooted in reality, Nikki Haley is injecting urgently needed candor into proceedings at the UN, yes, Betsy DeVos is doing likewise at the Department of Education, and, yes, the employment picture is improving.

But none of this is sufficient to alter the conclusion that America has turned its back on God.

The notion that there can be anything other than two genders, a hard fact confirmed by everything from scripture to DNA tests, continues to gain ground. For all the positive official moves on the environmental front, such as pulling out of the Paris accord, municipal officials and scientific associations are determined to do all in their power to continue to abide by its utterly useless requirements. Universities continue their "privilege" indoctrination, even as they jettison the teaching of Milton and Shakespeare.

A few things are a little different this year. A media world and a president who deserve each other are locked in a cage match characterized by a mock beheading on one side, and a mock body slam on the other. The "Affordable" Care Act, which so entrenched the fiction that health care can somehow be a right that its repeal must be handled in such a way as to avoid forthrightly saying that it can't, may yet be dismantled.  The ISIS caliphate is in its death throes, even as its outposts in lands far from the Euphrates Valley grow in number and strength.

But in most important ways, it's the same trajectory as it has been. There is nothing less coarse about the culture. There is nothing less violent about inner cities. The family is even more an object of hate for the arbiters of what is left of our social architecture.

Society is so fractured, Black Lives Matter and the LBGT activist community can't abide by each other staging events. And then there's the right side of the spectrum. We have the likes of Kurt Schlichter calling Ben Sasse a wimp for taking a principled stand against the cringe-inducing Twitter habit of the president. (Chalk up another name on the list of pundits I used to admire but for whom my respect is rapidly dwindling.)

I'll read the Declaration aloud to my wife tomorrow morning, as I have for twenty-seven years, but more with the sense that I'm reading a blueprint for what could be tried among some people somewhere if they ever felt compelled.

This big wide continent sure would make a nice place for somebody to start a country predicated on the primacy of human freedom and dignity.

The point of the First Amendment is to be free to pray and worship wherever and whenever

Your recommended reading for this Sunday before Independence Day is a Quinn Hilyer essay at PJ Media on the Founders' understanding that God was the true architect of their project:

There is a straight line of reverence for one true God that runs from the settlers writing the Mayflower Compact to the patriots of liberty declaring independencefrom the mighty British Empire, and from thence to the statesmen who hashed out the Constitution of the new United States. How do we know that the Constitution's framers, too, thought faith essential to a successful polity, even though that document originally made no mention of God? Because not only was the Declaration's second-leading author, Ben Franklin, also influential at the Constitutional Convention (wherein he noted at a key point that God governs men's affairs), but the Constitution's most influential catalyst and advocate, James Madison, drafted the first and most famous amendment to that Constitution.

That amendment not only guaranteed the "free exercise of religion" — the absolutely essential provision that anti-religionists conveniently ignore — but also, in its first clause, guaranteed that government would not "establish" any particular sect. There are those who are uninformed who mistakenly think the anti-establishment clause is hostile to faith. That's wrong. Madison based that clause (indeed both clauses on religion) on his own work on the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, whose final, key guarantee of religious liberty was worded specifically via his own amendment at that legislature in Williamsburg. And why had Madison become such a passionate advocate of free religious exercise? It wasn't on behalf of atheism or agnosticism; it was in reaction to mistreatment of Virginia Baptists who wanted to celebrate their faith. He too wanted them to be able to openly practice their religion, not just in private but in public.

Madison was later to attest that "Belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources." 

Again, these were not men hostile to faith in the public square. They were hostile to any restrictions on faith in the public square; what they wanted was a public square that encouraged active expression of the faiths of all denominations. Their God was the Judeo-Christian God, and their belief in individual rights grew directly from the Judeo-Christian tradition that each individual human is given intrinsic worth, by God, that no government can take away.

Freedom was not in conflict with their faith; their conception of freedom grew from their faith. 

I am in agreement with the fundamental libertarian principle that the individual human being owns himself or herself. What good religious teaching during one's upbringing ought to impart is the understanding that the proper use of that freedom is to give oneself back the the God who created him. But God will never coerce that decision out of us. It's pretty much the message that the insipid 1970s meme was conveying: If you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it's yours.

The second greatest gift He gives us, after our lives, is our freedom. And, yes, this is the point at which I used to get confounded: The whole arrangement struck me as a rigged game. The only way to avoid eternal darkness was to use your free will to turn back to God.

And you know what? It is a rigged game. That's because, ultimately, God owns the universe. There's only one place to go if one, of one's own volition, refuses to turn back to His love, and that's the unbearable solitude of Hell.

There are a number of ways to articulate the reason why no one - not a burglar, not a rapist, and not even government - has the right to infringe on your freedom, but the one that covers all the bases is to point out that no one has the right to deprive anyone else of the opportunity to turn back to God.

This is in some ways a very sacred week we're embarking on. It invites reflection on a divine, precious gift that needs to be regarded with proper awe.

In 2017 post-America, with its distractions, obscenely distorted notions of "rights," and temptations to part with our birthright for a pittance, the darkness has not yet overcome the light.

Will it ever? That's up to you.