China's not going to be of any help walking the North Korea crisis back from the precipice - today's edition

Kim and Xi may have extremely strained relations, but somebody is China with a vested interest in profiting from oil exports is getting a pass on flagrant violation of UN Security Council sections:

Satellite images have caught Chinese ships selling oil to North Korean vessels more than 30 times since the end of October, according to a report Wednesday from South Korean media.

Chinese and North Korean ships illegally swapped oil in a part of the West Sea that lies near China. The location of the trade was chosen presumably to avoid detection from South Korea.

“We need to focus on the fact that the illicit trade started after a UN Security Council resolution in September drastically capped North Korea’s imports of refined petroleum products,” a South Korean official told reporters.

U.N. Resolution 2375 forbids ship-to-ship trade with North Korea, yet violations do occur because it is nearly impossible to detect violators absent a Chinese crackdown on smugglers. Sanctions were slapped on the isolated communist country in September.

So much for some kind of unified international community ready to defuse the North Korean threat.

That's not the world we live in.

The devil has found a soul to devour

How is this for a bone-chilling worldview?

Can abortion be a “positive” or “joyful experience” for pregnant women? Can women find “happiness” and “relief” by aborting their unborn children? That is the premise of a new book published this December by a feminist professor in Australia.

In her debut book Happy Abortions, University of Adelaide professor Erica Millarargues that pro-life activists have created an “emotional script” that casts abortion as a “procedure that is inherently productive of grief and shame.”

These feelings of grief and shame are merely “produced” by culture, Millar argues.

“The description of abortion as inherently grievable and traumatic generates a circular logic,” writes Millar. She goes on to claim that this logic itself — and not the act of killing an unborn child — creates the grief.

But even if a woman feels grief after an abortion, Millar argues that it’s negligible in the grand scheme of things.

“Abortion carries no predictable acute or prolonged emotional or mental health consequences for women,” argues Millar, a claim which she repeats numerous times throughout her book, as if she’s diligently trying to convince her readers.

She claims this despite numerous research studies finding that most women suffer some degree of despair, hopelessness, or emotional distress after having an abortion. While Millar does spend a great deal of research on the history of the pro-life movement, her book ultimately reads as a how-to manual to gaslight women into thinking that abortion is no big deal.

After all, as Millar notes, abortion is “an everyday rather than extraordinary event, experienced by approximately one in three women.” While this statistic is a cause for concern for many — since it illustrates that millions of children are aborted every year — Millar disregards this possibility.

To her, the more abortion becomes common, the less emotional weight should be attached to it. To some feminists: it’s almost as if abortion is as inconsequential as, say, a juice cleanse or going to get your nails done.

All of this hand-wringing over how abortion is framed as a grievable act isn’t for naught. Regulating how we view abortion is crucial to Millar, since depictions of abortion as “grievable” and “traumatic” have an impact on public support for abortion.

Let's keep Professor Millar in our prayers. And hope that a miraculous change of heart is not out of the question.

The regulatory realm: where the most egregious assault on freedom & economic vitality happens

Mona Charen's current column at Townhall passes along a New York Times front-page story (you read that right) about how an apple orchard in upstate New York was visited by government inspectors in October.

[They] demand[ed] to see reams of paperwork to ensure that the farm was in compliance with immigration rules, OSHA guidelines, the Fair Labor Standards Act and other laws and regulations.

Over the course of the next several days, the family and staff had to devote about 40 hours to compiling 22 different kinds of records -- everything from vehicle registrations to insurance certificates to employee time sheets. The federal rules on ladder safety alone amount to thousands of words. "It's terribly disruptive," Ten Eyck complained.

She goes on to cite how the US fares in the World Bank's ease-of-doing-business stats (fell from third-best in 2009 to seventh-best in 2016). She also points out that the regulatory leviathan is not just a federal-level thing, that it permeates state and municipal realms as well, resulting in overlap and redundancy - not to mention that many more pointy-heads poking around in America's businesses.

I'm reminded of a delicious moment from my days at a manufacturing company years ago. The front-office people alerted the CEO that an OSHA inspector had come. The CEO went out to the lobby and told him he'd have to get a warrant. The OSHA inspector, actually a nice fellow, kind of nodded and grinned and said, "Of course, you realize that all this does is delay your inspection by a day."

The CEO said, "Yes, I understand that. We're just doing it because we can."

How to scan a highbrow left-of-center opinion piece for its real agenda

So, while looking at the lineup of columns, op-eds and articles offered this morning at Real Clear Politics, I saw this piece, entitled "America and the Great Abdication" by Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haas. There's an element of click-bait-iness to that title. Is he going to accuse the US of becoming isolationist over the last year?

Fear not. He's actually quite equitable on that score:

Abdication is not isolationism. Donald Trump’s United States is not isolationist. He has authorized the use of limited military force against the Syrian government in a manner his predecessor rejected. U.S. military operations have gone a long way toward defeating ISIS in both Syria and Iraq. The Trump administration might employ force against Iran or North Korea, or both, and has pressed for and secured new international sanctions against the latter. It could well act (most likely unilaterally) in the economic realm, applying tariffs or sanctions as it sees fit against one or another trading partner. It is trying its hand (thus far without success) at mediating several disputes in the Middle East. The U.S. military effort in Afghanistan is to be extended and possibly augmented.

But then he eases into an explanation of what he means by abdication:

But abdication describes U.S. foreign policy all the same, as the United States is no longer taking the lead in maintaining alliances, or in building regional and global institutions that set the rules for how international relations are conducted. It is abdication from what has been a position of leadership in developing the rules and arrangements at the heart of any world order.

For three-quarters of a century, from World War II through the Cold War and well into the post–Cold War era, the United States was the principal architect and builder of global rules. This is not to say that the United States always got it right; it most certainly did not, at times because of what it did, at other times because of what it chose not to do. But more often than not, the United States played a large, mostly constructive, and frequently generous role in the world. 

Ah, yes, those "global institutions" and "rules for how international relations are to be conducted." They have stood us in such good stead, haven't they? Why, no one's been beset by rogue nations with nuclear ambitions, nonstate jihadists, or even endemic corruption within those institutions, right?

But in the next paragraphs you get where he really wants to take this argument:

Under Donald Trump, however, U.S. foreign policy shows clear signs of significant departure. Support for alliances, embrace of free trade, concern over climate change, championing of democracy and human rights, American leadership per se—these and other fundamentals of American foreign policy have been questioned and, more than once, rejected. Trump is the first post–World War II American president to view the burdens of world leadership as outweighing the benefits. As a result, the United States has changed from the principal preserver of order to a principal disrupter.

This change has major implications. It will make it far more difficult to deal with the challenges posed by globalization, including climate change and nuclear proliferation, to regulate cyberspace on terms compatible with American interests, or to help relieve the plight of refugees on terms consistent with American values. It will make it more difficult to build frameworks that promote trade and investment and to ensure that the United States benefits from them.  

The Carterist term "human rights," the focus on which during that president's term saw the spread of the Marxist-Leninist cancer in Central America, the theocratic revolution in Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is first mentioned among the wonderful things Haas wants to see pressed by a virtuous and engaged US. Perhaps he's heard that women are going to get to drive in Saudi Arabia this year. Or about the dismantling of the ISIS caliphate, a great relief to the Yazidi, Kurdish and Christian women of the area. (Granted, Haas does speak of that monstrous organization "losing its hold.")

But note how the term "climate change" makes two appearances. That's the true "bingo" here. When a technocratic administrative type talks about "American leadership," it inevitably means spending a bunch of US money on addressing a supposed problem with no basis in reality. Nothing brings the world's collectivist pointy-heads together quite like an opportunity to peddle this utter fiction. Expose the fiction, and the conferences (and jet travel to and from), book deals and tenure dry up.

His last two paragraphs contain a glaring contradiction:

The net result is a world of growing disarray. This trend is partly the result of what might be called structural factors—the rise of China, globalization, the emergence of a large number of entities (state and nonstate alike) with meaningful capacity and often dangerous intentions, and the failure of regional and international institutions (many created in the aftermath of World War II) to adjust sufficiently to new distributions of power and new challenges. In many cases, the gap between the challenge and the ability of the world to come together to manage or regulate it is not just large but growing. Rising disarray is, as well, the result of several poor policy choices made by the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama—and, increasingly, Donald Trump.

The good news is that the costs of promoting global order tend to be less than the costs of not; the bad news is that this truth does not seem to be recognized by many Americans, including 45th president. Abdication is as unwarranted as it is unwise. It is a basic fact of living in a global world that no country can insulate itself from much of what happens elsewhere. A foreign policy based on sovereignty alone will not provide security in a global, interconnected world. Or, to paraphrase the jargon of the day, America cannot be great at home in a world of disarray.

Which is it, sir? Is globalization a contributor to growing disarray or something to be prioritized in the crafting of foreign policy?

Anyway, the main point here is to provide an example in the art of honing your sense of smell so as to dig through the requisite number of paragraphs in a piece on any given subject to find out what the left-leaner is really pushing. For all the blather about an interconnected world and leadership, it comes down to the same thing it always does: spreading the notion that America ought to chase a dream of a nice, clean world in which bureaucrats get lauded for imposing a vision that has never been the way reality works anywhere.

A chilling portrait of moral cowardice

The Western civilization-haters got to her and now she's woke:

Grammy-winning singer Lorde has succumbed to peer pressure and canceled a concert in Israel as a way to cater to the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, a campaign created as a way to punish Israel for its "oppression" of Palestinians, according to its founders. The movement is so extreme that even liberal governors have condemned it. In June 2016, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order deeming that state agencies can strip funding from any company that is privy to the BDS movement.

Still, Jewish activist Justine Sachs and Palestinian activist Nadia Abu-Shanab wanted to get Lorde's attention and penned a letter to the artist urging her to comply with the BDS campaign. In their letter, they condemned President Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, arguing it was a slap in the face to Palestinians. The two young women also accused Israel of operating on a system of apartheid.

Check out her hurl-inducing announcement of her reversal in tour plans:

Having seen the letter, Lorde complied with their request.
 

"Noted!" she wrote on Twitter. "Been speaking w many people about this and considering all options. Thank u for educating me I am learning all the time too."

This is the kind of sewer mentality we are up against.

 

The basic phoniness of the secular-utopian vision

What a half-century of metastasizing can do to a sociocultural movement.

It was fifty years ago that major news periodicals were reporting, as if back from a Joseph Conrad-esque expedition, on the hippie phenomenon. The tone of the coverage imparted a sense that this was unprecedentedly exotic. Greatest-Generation types - the hippies' parents - bought it, and responded by either walking on eggshells so as to not irreversibly sunder familial ties, or, if financial leverage could be employed, laying down ultimatums while the window of opportunity to exert influence was still open.

But the movement was comprised of strains that had been with American society for some time. The Beat movement in literature had been around ten years, if one dates it to the publication of the genre's major works, longer if one dates it to the antics of its leading lights that became the stuff of those works. Vegetarianism and communal living had been practiced in various times and places for well over a century. Spiritual inquiry based on immediate mystical experience, even of the chemically induced variety, had been around since at least the time of the works of William James and Richard Maurice Bucke.

In San Francisco, before the national media coverage, the movement had really been composed of art students at various Bay Area schools, folk singers recently taken with rock & roll, poets, and the marijuana dealers supplying them.

After the media coverage, busloads of runaway kids - mostly girls - from across the continent were arriving and being immediately greeted with, "Hey, darlin', got a place to crash? We have a real groovy scene happening at my place."

The types of drugs in circulation proliferated, too.

First came the psychedelics, held up by the mystical-experience prophets of the day as a bold leap forward for human understanding. Eventually, Timothy Leary and Alan Watts were found to be alcoholics, and Alan Ginsberg was revealed to be a deeply disturbed sybarite of the homosexual variety.

Then came speed, cocaine and heroin.

The scene boiled down to dope-peddling men preying on teenage girls by offering them lodging and getting them high. The distillation of this scenario into its darkest cult possibilities was, of course, the Manson "family."

Not exactly a novel development. Exploitative guys working angles to get vulnerable chicks to have sex is a story as old as our species.

A few months after the peak, in terms of media making it a trend, of the hippie phenomenon, the student-radical movement came to the fore. Again, it was the confluence of a number of strains that had been present on the political landscape for some time. Students for a Democratic Society had splintered off from the League for Industrial Democracy. William Appleman Williams had founded Studies on the Left in the 1950s. Some of the New Left's leaders were red-diaper babies and had attended Communist summer camps and schools. The campus sit-ins that appeared in the spring of 1965, nearly simultaneously with introduction of US ground troops to South Vietnam and aerial bombing in the North, were explicitly about rallying support for a Communist victory.

But by the end of the 1960s, it was apparent that the hippies and the radicals didn't have much use for each other. Abbie Hoffman was prevented from taking the stage at Woodstock. Saul Alinsky spoke of the uselessness of hippies in the cause of revolution.

Then came feminism. Again, the strains had been in place for a while. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, and the National Organization for Women was founded in the summer of 1966. The real breakout moment, though, was when women both in radical organizations and on hippie communes felt that they were being elbowed out of leadership positions.

Again, nothing new. Men and women are different, and since time immemorial, groupings of human beings have tended to be patriarchally structured.

Then came the Stonewall Inn riot of 1969, and the push for normalization of homosexuality was underway. This introduced an element that further complicated the dynamic within the structured settings of the counterculture.

In 1970, the first Earth Day was held. The table for that had been set by Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring.

One interesting thing about the birth of the modern environmental movement is that it represents the work-within-the-system / long-march-through-the-institutions approach to which many radicals turned in the wake of the fragmenting of the take-it-to-the-streets front that had held sway since the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964.

Organizer Denis Hayes had his credentials as a vagabond and rabble-rouser in order. He dropped out of college and hitchhiked around Europe and Asia for three years. Even upon returning to school (Stanford), he burnished his radical bona fides by leading a campus takeover of a weapons-research laboratory.

Alas, he graduated and then started studies at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, only to leave at the behest of Senator Gaylord Nelson, who wanted help organizing Earth Day.

This work-within-the-system approach was part of the more general mainstreaming of the notion of a counterculture. Columbia Records had as its slogan for a while "The Man Can't Bust Our Music."  Woodstock is remembered as the crescendo of the hippie ethos, but it was mostly middle-class college students who, after the weekend, got on the freeways of upstate New York and headed back home to pack for the fall semester. Norman Lear's CBS situation comedies, beginning with All in the Family, brought candid examinations of topics such as racial dynamics and abortion into middle class living rooms. (There was even a commendably amusing sendup of the left-leaning perpetual English-lit grad student in the character of Meathead.)

Meanwhile, the counterculture was fragmenting along lines any observer of human nature could have predicted. Feminism devolved into two main camps: abortion zealotry, and lesbian navel-gazing. The civil-rights movement, or rather what it had morphed into, saw environmentalists' emphasis on restoration of natural spaces as benign neglect of urban areas.  Male homosexuals claimed certain professions, particularly and interestingly those focused on enhancing women's looks, as their own, providing them cachet not available to other sectors of what the counterculture had become.

The fragmentation continues. In 2015, Democrat presidential candidate Martin O'Malley was booed offstage for saying that all lives mattered at a Black Lives Matter rally. "Transgender" activists claim that plain old homosexuals don't understand the particular kind of marginalization they experience.

There are still public figures trying to tie all this together, particularly in the realms of entertainment and broadcast journalism. Of course, 2017 has been the year of discovering that they are nothing but sexually predatory charlatans. Talk about ruined credibility.

Oh, and the list of deified rock stars who have died from being extremely unkind to themselves grows by the year.

Grassroots-level left-leaners - the kind who pollute your Facebook newsfeed - generally still hold on to the dream of a united front. They'll gloss over and make excuses for these fissures and turn up the volume on their platitudes.


It's wearing thin, though.

The reason for the Left's howls of anguish as a result of the 2016 election and this year's dismantling of much of the regulatory apparatus is that it's a stark signal that they have not won politically, and that culturally their dream has been exposed as hollow. A plurality of the American populace has said, "Well, if they've ruined all the major institutions of society - education, journalism, arts and entertainment, even much of the business world, and even many churches - we'll just work around the ruin."

Anyone sending a son or daughter to a university, anybody going to work for a Fortune 200 company, anybody subjecting himself, for God knows what reason, to the CBS Evening News, anybody who feels compelled to attend a Presbyterian, Episcopalian or Methodist church, who has had the good fortune to remain immune to the countercultural enterprise, fully understands the agenda that will permeate all dealings with the institution in question.

The crowd gathered at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park a half-century ago would barely recognize the assemblage of mutants and peddlers of delusion that are their descendants.

The whole story boils down to this: yet another failed search for a "dream" that, once and for all, can be realized even though it flies in the face of what we all know about how reality, particularly human nature, works.

Tuesday roundup

The fear that artificial intelligence is going to render human activity obsolete is mostly based on hype:

CEOs dreaming of replacing their whiny, vacation-taking, sick-day-using human employees with a sleek fleet of never-complaining robots powered by artificial intelligence are going to be disappointed to learn AI is far behind the evolution of human development.

“The public thinks we know how to do far more than we do now,” Raymond Perrault, a scientist at SRI International, told the New York Times.

Artificial intelligence may be smart enough to learn the game of chess or fliphamburgers in a fast-food restaurant. But when it comes to common sense and decision-making skills, AI is way below the bar compared to adult human beings.

The “AI Index” released by Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SRI International, and other research organizations shows artificial intelligence produced in the United States is no smarter than a five-year-old. And Yann LeCun, the head of AI for Facebook, said even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems are no sharper on the uptake than vermin.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO does some exhaustive drilling down on the matter of the Steele "dossier," the conversation between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok in Andrew McCable's office, and the general inclination of the FBI and the Justice Department to pass on looking into the ample evidence of Clinton-campaign misbehavior - the kind detailed in Comey's July 2016 announcement, right before he said he'd decline to recommend indictment - even as it regarded the "dossier" as an "insurance policy" in the event - heaven forfend! - that Madame Bleachbit lose the election and DJT win it.

Iraqi Christians are understandably gleeful about returning to their towns and cities, recently liberated from ISIS, but have new safety concerns, particularly the Shiite militias that have the official backing of the government. There's already some harassment going on. The Christians did have fine Christmas celebrations throughout the country, though. Santa Claus was sighted in Mosul. At the link, check out the photo of the 30-foot Christmas tree in Baghdad.

Beautiful and glorious: Nikki Haley announces a $235 million cut to the US budget for the UN.

From the final-stages-of-higher-education's-rot file:

Terms like ‘boys and girls’ are frowned upon. Why must the left exert control over such simple aspects of life?

Campus Reform reports:

College pronoun FAQ: regularly ask for others’ pronouns

A resource guide at Bard College encourages students, faculty, staff, and visitors, to avoid using “gender binary” language.

The Pronoun FAQ, found on the school’s Office for Gender Equity resource webpage, encourages community members to “avoid using gender binary language such as ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ ‘boys and girls.’” Instead, they are urged to use “‘everybody,’ ‘folks,’ or, ‘all people.”

The guide also states that simply asking another person about gender identity once is insufficient.

“If I ask someone their pronouns once, is that enough?” the guide asks. “No, the best practice is to ask regularly because gender identity is not always fixed and static, and some people may change their pronouns.”

The top of the Pronoun FAQ states that the document is meant “to help community members educate themselves so that we can grow and evolve as a community,” and lists a few common pronouns, including gender-neutral alternatives such as “ze,” “zim,” “zir,” “zirs,” and “zirself.”

The pronoun guide also seeks to educate readers on questions such as, “What are gendered pronouns?” and “what are non-gendered or non-binary pronouns?”

In a section dedicated to “Suggestions for Faculty,” the guide concedes that “[i]n large classes, faculty may be unable to learn every student’s name and pronouns.”

We'll be mining evidence of what a national treasure Antonin Scalia was for some time to come:

Scalia had advice for young Christians—“to learn early and remember long” that [quality] of ‘differentness’; to recognize that what is perfectly lawful, and perfectly permissible, for everyone else—even our very close non-Christian friends—is not necessarily lawful and permissible for us.” Further, “that the ways of Christ and the ways of the world—even the world of Main Street America—are not the same, and we should not expect them to be.” Scalia emphasized that “it is only if one has that sense of differentness ... that one has a chance of being strong enough to obey the teachings of Christ.”

The great justice was well aware of which realm had permanence and which one was merely a passing parade:

Scalia was so bold as to touch on what are called the “two kingdoms” in theological circles. He quoted what Jesus said to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would have fought that I might not be delivered to the Jews. But, as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” This thought, said the justice, pervades the Gospels and is in the early church. He recalled the famous observation of a second century church father writing to one Diognetus:

“Though residents at home in their own countries, their behavior is more like that of transients. They take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to everything as if they were aliens. For them, any foreign country is a homeland, any homeland is a foreign country.” 

House Republicans re singing a different tune from Senator McConnell's I-foresee-us-moving-on-from-Obamacare-repeal position. 

Merry Christmas from Late in the Day

I'm struck by a phenomenon I've seen in the last few days: a number of my favorite pundits stating candidly that their personal lives are fraught with challenges. Examples I've seen have ranged from job loss to cancer to postpartum depression to regret for youthful foolishness. One tends to think that, at a certain level of success, there's not much to plying this trade but turning in great copy, engaging those who follow your work, keeping an eye out for more opportunities, and prospering thereby.

But it's not like that. Not for pundits or anyone else. Life's challenges come in two main categories: stuff that comes out of nowhere, such as illness or natural disasters, and circumstances resulting from successions of decisions of our own making. There are both in every life.

In every last human heart there's a yearning for completion. There is a plethora of models for dealing with it, from ancient to modern. Buddhists have the Noble Eightfold Path that ostensibly addresses the suffering caused by attachment to this realm. Muslims have a set of practices, including memorization of the Quran, fasting and pilgrimage. Recent decades have brought us Westerners various programs including Transactional Analysis, est, and Primal Scream Therapy, in addition to psychotropic drugs.

But once, for a thirty-three-year period beginning with the events we're celebrating this month, there walked on this earth a man who told us in no uncertain terms that it was his person that was the answer. Yes, he gave us parables and analogies. He healed the blind and lame, fed thousands with a few fishes and loaves of bread, and challenged the Pharisaic structure of the Judaism of his day.

But it's time for us to give up the purely reason-based arguments along the lines of, "I don't get what he meant by saying he himself was the wellspring of the living water, the bread, the vine in which we all are to abide."

You incline your heart toward him, and then you get it. He is beckoning you to recognize his uniqueness, his holiness. That was God shivering in that manger, and it was God thirty-three years later heaving and groaning on that cross.

He is the answer to everything, because he created it all. He is present in the eternity that is the backdrop to the successive moments of our temporal lives.

This vast universe, running as it does on utterly reliable laws of physics, chemistry and biology, answers to him. And, if you want to talk in evolutionary terms, it culminates in his knocking at the door of your very own soul.

It's a perfect universe in every way, save one: your decision to use your free will to say yes to him.

Let's say yes today. Let's acknowledge that he is king and all will be well if we proceed according to his plan.

That plan  not a bullet-point list of things to do, not a formula or a program. It's merely looking him straight in the eye and saying, "Here I am, Lord. Make me whole."

We'd be so lost without that.

But we're not lost.

It may be late in the day, but, in the words of someone who knew him personally, spoke with him, travelled with him, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

Russia: still just an adversary, but not too far from actual enemy status

This ought to make us all sit up and pay attention:

The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Robert Neller, told troops Thursday that "there's a war coming" and urged them to be prepared.

"I hope I'm wrong, but there's a war coming," Neller told Marines stationed in Norway, during a visit there, according to Military.com. "You're in a fight here, an informational fight, a political fight, by your presence," he added. 

The commandant pointed to Russia and the Pacific theater as the next major areas of conflict, predicting a "big-ass fight" in the future. 

"Just remember why you're here," he said. "They're watching. Just like you watch them, they watch you. We've got 300 Marines up here; we could go from 300 to 3,000 overnight. We could raise the bar."

Neller's visit comes amid tensions between Russia and NATO allies. Russia warned neighboring Norway that the presence of American troops could hurt relations, after Norway decision to host a new unit of U.S. soldiers through the end of 2018. 

Particularly when considered in conjunction with this:

In what must come as a terrible shock to liberals who believe that President Trump is Russian President Putin's puppet, the American president has approved a plan to send antitank missiles to Ukraine, thereby ensuring a "new phase" in the conflict between that country and Ukraine.

The decision to send Javelin antitank missiles, the Wall Street Journal reports, "places Washington closer to the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Although Ukrainian government officials have long sought these missiles, the U.S. refused to do give in to the pressure fearing doing so would escalate the conflict."

A few thoughts:

• This all once again confirms that Trump is winging it. While Trump foreign policy is generally playing out in terms that provide a welcome relief to the appeasement and "leading from behind" policy of the previous administration, we have to wait until a move is made to discern some general direction. In other words, so much for the tweets a while back about how much the US and Russia have to work on together. (Has anybody heard about Russia being a major player in the final dismantling of the ISIS caliphate?) We can't tell anything from Trump's bloviating. 
• That said, he has an instinct for surrounding himself with people of consistent vision.
• Unresolved world-stage problems do not just go away by themselves. Just because Russian threats to Ukrainian security have not been on the front burner for a while does not mean they ceased to exist.
• The other big nation that has adversary status from a US standpoint is, of course, China. What constitutes adversary status in 2017 is superficially civil behavior on leaders' parts at international gatherings, but clear signals in all other ways that the nation in question cares not a whit about cooperation on anything vital to US interests.
• The collusion meme looks sillier all the time - unless one is talking about collusion involving the Clinton machine, certain problematic elements in the FBI, the DoJ, the CIA and the NSA, and certain problematic elements within the Russian power structure.

Western civilization is a unique blessing to humankind

A subject that finds its way into a variety of comment threads here at LITD is the indispensability of Western civilization. The view that it offers our species nothing of particular value relative to other civilizations is sometimes put forth. While all viewpoints, respectfully expressed and cogently argued, are welcome here, this one concerns me, as it points to the fading of the very idea of a Western civilization.

Most colleges and universities don't give a diddly that such is the case. The most prominent exception to this is Hillsdale College in Michigan, which not only requires such subjects as the study of the Constitution for any and all majors of those on its campus, but makes lecture series on that and other subjects that will enhance one's grounding in Western thought - ranging from C.S. Lewis to Shakespeare to an overview of Judeo-Christian theology to a compare-and-contrast look at ancient Athens and Sparta to the Federalist Papers - available for the general public to take for free.

The school's president, Larry Arnn, is deeply concerned with the increasing ignorance among Westerners of their own heritage:

America’s lack of civic and cultural knowledge is an existential threat, says Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn in his introductory lectureto the college’s free online lecture series, “History 101: Western Heritage.”

“We’re living in a time as if some blight has come across the earth,” Arnn says. “Something fantastic, something deep, something old, something elevated, something high is basically being obliterated.”

He points to the constant litany of public surveys stretching back decades that keep showing large percentages of Americans cannot say when Abraham Lincoln lived, who Joseph Stalin was, or what century the Civil War took place. Pointing this out has become a sort of cottage industry of reoccurring bestsellers such as E.D. Hirsch’s 1984 “Cultural Literacy,” Neil Postman’s 1985 “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” and Allan Bloom’s 1987 “Closing of the American Mind.” Despite constant re-acknowledgement of this phenomenon, however, it not only persists but has worsened.

While the oldest data is not as plentiful as today’s, sociological surveys such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1837 “Democracy in America” and Hirsch’s careful documentation of available evidence for the twentieth century, as well as other surveys of original material, all indicate a marked decline in public knowledge since the founding era. Arnn argues that this decline directly reduces Americans’ ability to fulfill our duties as citizens to govern ourselves.

He says a “virus has come among us,” a virus in the form of the idea that “the things in the past have been superseded, they’re not valuable, they’re obsolete.” While this may be true of some things, particularly technological advancements, he says this is not true of many things, particularly truths about human nature that over time Western culture has uncovered and handed down.

What, in a nutshell, are the unique Western contributions  to general human understanding? There are two.

One is the distillation of the conversation begun with Greco-Roman models of government that has led to the conclusion that representative democracy is the form best suited to maximizing ordered liberty.

The other is the process, begun in ancient Israel, by which humanity arrived at the most accurate understanding of God's nature and our relationship to Him to be found among the world's religious traditions.

Arnn uses two cities as shorthand for this:

Western civilization’s centuries of dialogue between Athens and Jerusalem — two historic cities that represent reason and faith, respectively — establish universals about human nature that Americans once again need to draw upon to make key decisions about our future.

As the Christmas season proceeds to its climax, and as we all brace for the cacophonous rancor that is going to characterize  the sociopolitical landscape in 2018, we do well to rededicate ourselves to prioritizing this heritage we're blessed to be recipients of.

And, of course, over the next couple of days, to particularly focus on the central event that ties together both of the above-mentioned contributions, and the various strains within them. It's also the central event in the history of our planet. I speak, of course, of the 33-year period in which the Son facet of the triune God dwelt among us, was unspeakably brutalized and killed by those who feared the light he radiated, and rose to defeat the darkness pervading the hearts of those who wounded and killed him. (That would be all of us, every day.)

From Western civilization, we get the understanding of grace and freedom, God's two greatest gifts to us.

Thank you, almighty Lord!

The paragraph in Susan Rice's NYT op-ed that shows how good it is that she's far away from official levers of power

The piece's theme was how DJT's national-security speech was a departure from core American values.

In her fevered mind, these are core American values:

His plan "also glaringly omits many traditional American priorities," including issues of human rights, poverty, higher education, combating viruses, climate change, LGBT rights, as well as "the value of promoting democracy and universal rights," Rice wrote. 

"Traditional." How rich. How far back does something have to go to be considered "traditional?" Was getting preoccupied with the tiny percentage of the population with unconventional sex lives, and the even tinier percentage that resents the genitals and DNA it was born anywhere on the nation's radar screen before ten years ago? Did Madison, Hamilton or any other framer or founder have anything to say about viruses? Or "climate change"? And is the poverty present in some other country really the proper concern of our government? Ditto "higher education."

I'm not even going to get back into the lie she was peddling on Sunday morning shows right after Benghazi except to say that she has a lot of gall making any kind of pronouncement about moral authority.

How should a conservative regard the team-player question going into 2018?

Roger L. Simon's latest piece at PJ Media is entitled "Why the Remaining NeverTrumpers Should Apologize Now." The actual argument he puts forth is a little less confrontational than the click-bait title would indicate. He correctly points out that actual conservatives (as opposed to Trump-base types) are, as they should be, delighted with the solid list of policy-level victories achieved this year. He may or may not be right about the further point he makes: that there never was a great deal of daylight between Trumpist aims and those of conservatives. A lot of Trumpism comes down to vague bromides about trade and immigration that do poorly when fleshed out as actual policy position.

And his right-between-the-eyes characterization of how the protracted struggle between the two sides in the American divide is going to get ratcheted up to a level of ugliness in the coming election cycle that we surely have not yet seen strikes me as spot on:

 . . . a war is coming -- you can almost feel it in the air.  We should all pray that it will be non-violent and work hard to keep it that way.  But we should also have our ideological troops ready and prepared for that imminent battle for the hearts and minds.  It's going to be pivotal.

He then implores us - those conservatives who still find Trump too objectionable to actually cheer for - to join ranks without reservation:

NeverTrumpers, please join.  Past disagreements will be instantly forgotten and your skills immediately welcomed. I think you can depend on that.

Earlier in his piece, he takes note of some new openness on the part of some in our camp - but then he has to throw in that "could do more" business:

Rich Lowry of  National Review deserves special praise for his graciousness in this regard. Guy Benson -- on the Ingraham Angle Thursday night -- seemed ready to lend a hand, if a little tentatively. Ross Douthat has walked back a bit, as has Jonah Goldberg.  They could do more.  They are men of great credit and it wouldn't hurt their reputations. (Well, Douthat might endanger his job.)

With regard to Jonah Goldberg, Simon might want to read his latest at NRO. The gist is that the pretty-much-assured economic boost we'll see from the tax-reform bill may not be enough to surmount the Republicans' dismal prospects for next November. Two reasons for that: the ever-less-mainstream media that still controls the narrative for much of the public, and, of course, the public's pretty-well-set-in-concrete dislike of Donald Trump:

Trump is at 41 percent approval in the WSJ/NBC poll, which is a few ticks above the RealClearPolitics average, which has him hovering around 38 percent. But the theme is clear across polls and recent elections. The suburban, college-educated cadres that make up much of the reliable GOP base as well as the Republican-leaners who often provide the margin of victory, particularly in midterms, are simply fed up with Trump’s drama. Those voters either didn’t turn out or voted Democrat in elections in Virginia, Alabama, and elsewhere, giving Democrats significant and symbolic victories.

[snip]

The president’s party almost always suffers in midterm elections. Maybe we’ll get a roaring economy and a newfound confidence in the GOP, but, barring a war, I’ll be shocked if the GOP is not shellacked in 2018 if the most salient social issue out there remains Donald Trump.

Simon doesn't come right out and say so, but he's asking "NeverTrumpers" (his term, not mine. We have long since retired it, given that the guy's been president since January 20) to make the final leap: to champion him as the standard-bearer of our values and principles.

I know I can't do it, and I'm quite sure I'm not alone. For one thing, per Goldberg, it looks like political suicide. More importantly for me, however, is the point I hammer home relentlessly: the cultural component of all this remains far more daunting than the public-policy front, and Donald Trump is a poster boy for our cultural sickness (the disgusting utterances to the contrary by Robert Jeffers, Jerry Falwell, Jr. and, just today at The American Thinker, Robert Oscar Lopez notwithstanding).

A small example that speaks volumes: our enemies continue to have a field day on Facebook posting the nude photos of Melania Trump that appeared in Maxim years ago. What is an effective refutation? That it was years ago? That she now reads to children in hospitals, or graciously serves tea to visiting First Ladies from other countries? Sorry, the plain fact is that no previous First Lady had anything remotely approaching this in her past.

For those who think it's somehow unfair to drag her into this, there are the quotes - yes, the ones I gathered and listed recently - from DJT himself showing his true attitude toward women and sexuality.

A couple more examples from the thousands available for citing: He called the towering intellectual Charles Krauthammer a "dummy." He strongly insinuated that Ted Cruz's father was implicated in the JFK assassination. He's on record as seeing merit in the universal-health-care idea. He spoke admiringly of the pedophile Jeff Epstein.

And I will not be cowed by Kurt Schlichter types who say this stance is much too prissy to be of any use in the war that we all - Schlichter, Simon, as well as all of us who still point out that Trump is no conservative - agree has been thrust upon us. If we do not define victory in that war as restoring a general societal atmosphere that pleases God, then count me out. 

Simon is asking too much of us.

Defending the ideas and principles we know to be right and true - with fierceness and a clarity that will make the enemy wither? Reporting for duty.

Doing what I can to help truly conservative candidates win next November? Where do I sign?

Saying Donald Trump is great? Not taking that assignment. 

There is no "Arab world" consensus that the Israel-Palestinian question is the central Middle East issue

Great Zev Chafets piece at Bloomberg today about how, in an age in which Iran poses a dire threat to the entire world, Israel is not the crux on which Middle East stability and security hinges.

He contrasts the recent announcement that the US will make good on the 1995 act passed by the US Congress declaring Jerusalem as the Israeli capital with the policies of the two most notorious anti-Israel US presidents, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama:

Neither of those former presidents actually came out and said that Israel was the cause of all the Middle East’s problems. But they both based their regional diplomacy on the assumption.

In 2006, while promoting a book that likened Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with South African apartheid, Carter opened a window on his real thoughts. "The heart and mind of every Muslim is affected by whether or not the Israel-Palestine issue is dealt with fairly,” he told an interviewer. He added that the U.S. is hated by "former close friends" such as Egypt and Jordan, "because we won’t do anything about the Palestinian plight."

This is what the American-Israeli scholar Martin Kramer calls “linkage” -- the myopic tendency to see Israel as a wrench in the wheel of America’s Arab policy. In that interview, Carter even called it the "linkage fact." But, to be fair, the concept didn’t originate with him.

In the mid-1940s, an on-balance pretty good Democrat president, Harry Truman, demonstrated far more vision and understanding of an overarching West than his State Department:

 This is what the American-Israeli scholar Martin Kramer calls “linkage” -- the myopic tendency to see Israel as a wrench in the wheel of America’s Arab policy. In that interview, Carter even called it the "linkage fact." But, to be fair, the concept didn’t originate with him.

It goes back at least to the end of World War II. In 1945, the State Department sent newly inaugurated President Harry Truman a memo warning of “continual tenseness in the situation in the Near East largely as a result of the Palestine question.” State’s recommendation was to avoid Zionist activists and think about America’s long-term interests.

Truman (like Trump) had a low opinion of expert advice. In 1947, he ordered a reluctant U.S. ambassador vote “yes” in the United Nations General Assembly on the creation of the Jewish state. The contrary assessment among the diplomats Truman derided as the “striped pants boys” was, I think it is fair to say, misguided.  

More recently, we see that much of the "Arab world" actually has had a "meh" response to the Jerusalem announcement:

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey called an emergency summit of the Organization of Islamic States to protest Trump’s Jerusalem decision, more than half of the invited heads of state and prime ministers didn’t bother to show up.

And then there is the approach of the Most Equal Comrade. As we've learned in the last few days, the MEC's administration apparently was letting Iranian proxy Hezbollah run cocaine into the United States, because it was more important to the MEC - and his State Department - to get a worthless "deal" in Iran's nuclear program. That kind of emphasis on appeasement of a mortal enemy was on full display in his answer to a question about the Israel-Palestinian issue:

In an appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he was asked if reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions was a necessary precursor to reviving the peace process. “If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way,” he replied. “To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians -- between the Palestinians and the Israelis -- then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.”

With the recent Jerusalem announcement, and the presence of Nikki Haley, who has, over the course of this year proven to be a national treasure, America seems to finally be getting its head on straight regarding what actual problems are in the Mideast, and what phenomena aren't really such a being deal.

 

 

Memo to Senate Pubs: back away from this poisonous EEOC renomination while there's still time

J. Christian Adams at PJ Media tells the eye-opening tale of how a nature-denying, civilization-wrecking agent of toxicity insinuated herself into an influential government agency, and how Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee are asleep at the wheel as the opportunity to remove her arises:

In 2010, conservative powerhouses like the Family Research Council, American Family Association, Liberty Counsel, and Traditional Values Coalition vigorously opposed the nomination of Chai Feldblum to a seat on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Their opposition to Feldblum in 2010 was based on the belief -- later proven correct -- that Feldblum would use her perch to radicalize conceptions of family, gender, and who should be in which bathroom.

So what about in 2017?

Feldblum has been renominated for an EEOC slot as part of a package deal, and those who know Feldblum best are saying that Republicans have been hoodwinked into renominating her.

Some Republicans, apparently including some inside the White House, think it’s fine to put an activist radical on the EEOC in order to get two more Republicans confirmed to the EEOC.

But Feldblum is no ordinary radical. As one lawyer familiar with EEOC practice tells me, “she’s worth three Republicans” because of her radicalism and willingness to fight to transform notions of gender, family, and life.

Paul Mirengoff aptly points out at Powerline:

It seems obvious that getting a GOP majority on the EEOC a couple of months early is not worth five more years of Chai Feldblum, plus the likelihood that she will become Chair of the Commission if Democrats win the presidency in 2020. It’s not even close.

So who is Chai Feldblum, and how did we arrive at a point where an activist left-wing radical was appointed by the president for a commission that has the power to interfere with small businesses' freedom?

Feldblum is the ideological architect of all of the most radical LGBTWHATEVER agenda items of the Obama presidency: transvestites in girls locker rooms, lawless expansion of federal employment oversight, you name it.

So why would Feldblum be renominated?

There is backstory on Feldblum that hasn’t been fully reported. All of the normal clearance and vetting procedures usually used for Senate-confirmed nominees were short-circuited. Her nomination was rushed through the Senate HELP Committee. Feldblum even bragged to some that her goal was to trick Republicans before they knew what was happening.

The goal was to get Feldblum’s nomination in front of the Senate as fast as possible. Why would Republicans play along?

Three main reasons. One is cluelessness:

The answer: To get the EEOC nominations of Republicans Janet Dhillion and Daniel Gade confirmed, which highlights a curious connection in this saga we will revisit in a moment.
Getting Dhillon and Gade confirmed were seen as the most important goals. Keeping a radical activist off the commission -- one who has bent concepts of gender and was the author of the most extreme transgender policies of the Obama era -- was not considered to be as important as getting Dhillon and Gade on the Commission.
So many of President Trump’s supporters ask me how something like this can happen. Let’s try to decode it.

First, ideological illiteracy is to blame. Too many Beltway insiders are illiterate when it comes to the radicalism of the Left, and in this case the radicalism of Feldblum. They don’t understand the zealous creative destruction that animates activists like Feldblum. They think two Republicans beat one Democrat. Paper covers rock. They don’t understand that radicals like Feldblum are soldiers in the "fundamental transformation" that was part of the Obama age. 

Some with knowledge tell me a young, inexperienced staffer was almost entirely responsible for cooking up the Feldblum bargain. The staffer was more interested in getting Dhillon and Gade confirmed and couldn’t be worried about keeping the transgender/gay radical agenda of the Obama administration alive at the EEOC. More perhaps on that another day. For now, it’s not too late for the Senate to demand a better dish, one that doesn’t feature Feldblum. There are plenty of other Democrats out there who aren’t radical change agents. Go find one.

 

The  second is the desire to try to get a seat at what they perceive as the cool kids' table:

Second, too many Republicans are still afraid of what Chuck Schumer and National Public Radio think. 

Also, they have residual symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. They have not fully considered how ugly someone like Feldblum can get in the pursuit of the obliteration of recognition of how nature is designed.

Third, they don’t understand how a vocal Leftist in the minority on the EEOC can drive the entire agenda of the EEOC, especially one with so many connections at the New York Times and NPR. Passive majorities afraid of ideological brawls can’t beat a streetfighter.

She's been in a position to do damage more than long enough. Time for an entirely different way of viewing this situation.

 

 

 

Don't go to - or send your offspring to - these gulags

Institutions of higher learning used to be the world's premier environment for the free exchange of ideas. Now they are sewers of rank tyranny:

Over 90 percent of the America's top colleges maintain policies regulating campus free speech, with one third employing severely restrictive policies, according to a study released Tuesday.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reported in its annual end-of-year analysis on campus speech and harassment policies—what FIRE terms "speech codes"—found that over half of the 461 schools included in FIRE's study continue to use methods that have some "chilling effect" on expression.

One in nine campuses continue to preserve "free speech zones," or limited strips of campus to which administrators at public institutions restrict demonstrations, pamphleting, and other public expressions of views, according to the report. These zones can make up less than 1 percent of a campus, according to FIRE.

Samantha Harris, vice president of policy research at FIRE, said such policy is "blatantly unconstitutional."

They also have served, since the Middle Ages, as the repositories of the best Western civilization has produced in the way of literature, art, philosophy and science, thereby ensuring that there would noble cultural advancement. We are going to have to look elsewhere for such preservation of the best that has been thought and written.

Congress ends the year with a solid achievement - and it's on its signature issue

There's one more hoop to jump through after the Senate's passing of what has turned out to be a pretty darn nice tax bill.  Due to an arcane procedural glitch, the House has to vote on it again, which may be taking place as I write this. Then it's off to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue for a presidential signature.

Over 80 percent of US taxpayers will see that they are keeping more of their own money. Corporations get to keep a lot more of their own money. Positive economic effects will manifest themselves in short order.

Of course, the Freedom-Haters are howling in existential anguish. That may make for a post unto itself, but I don't want to make it the main point here, other than to reiterate the basic truth that needs to be the first rejoinder whenever they start in with their statist rhetoric: The money belongs to individual citizens and various private organizations, not the government.

And there is still the issue of the $20 trillion-plus debt, which cannot be solved without making major changes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

But freedom and prosperity are getting a major boost, and that's a fine thing.