Knock it off with this "protesters" crud

I swear, pretty much every report I've seen on the Hamas-orchestrated riot and border crossing going on in Gaza characterizes the goons doing the rioting - and, yes, getting shot for it by the IDF - as "protestors."

This matters. These people are waging war. Three of the dead Gaza citizens are armed terrorists. Rioters are hurling pipe bombs.

Sure, there are two events of significance associated with this day to which they are attaching this act of war: the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem today, and the birth of the modern state of Israel 70 years ago. But basically they just think the momentum of events is on their side and that the time is ripe for another attempt to destroy Israel. The 1988 Hamas charter makes that aim explicit.

Palestinians are indeed an abused people, but the abuse is not coming from Israel. Yes, the citizens of Gaza are living in squalor, with insufficient - well, just about everything. But the "government" there always seems to have plenty of funds for rockets and tunnels.

Not that Fatah, which runs things in the West Bank, is any better at governance. Abbas, like Arafat before him, has a fat bank account. He has a track record of expelling Fatah members who insist on democratic reforms. 

But at least it has the savvy to present something less out-front than the Hamas constantly-bared-fangs stance to the world.

But my main point here is that the choice of term to depict the multitude of hate-filled monsters amassed on the Gaza border confers a legitimacy that is wholly undeserved.

The next word in relation to this to keep an eye out for: "martyr."

What a dark worldview

This is how people - parents- of a certain "religious" orientation think they're glorifying God:

A husband and wife used their four children in a string of deadly suicide attacks on three churches in the Indonesian city of Surabaya that left 12 people dead, according to the country's ranking police official. 

The family included two daughters, aged 9 and 12 years old, said Head Gen. Tito Karnavian. The young girls were present when their mother detonated one of the bombs, and the couple's two teenage sons carried out a separate attack on another church. 

Earlier reports indicated at least 10 people died in the Sunday morning attacks, but Karnavian said during a news conference that 12 victims were killed. 

Forty-one people, including two police officers, were hospitalized with injuries, police spokesman Frans Barung Mangera said previously.

We get all worked up over goat-head statues in this country, but this is what real Satan-worship looks like.

Monday roundup

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

Take the National Science Foundation, for instance:

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

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

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

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

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

Or the National Institutes of Health:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or  UCLA:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Church. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on the matter of squarely facing the reality of the Trump era

You'll recall my post from Friday entitled "The Difficulties for Each and Every Camp Posed By the Reality of Donald Trump." Among the camps I examined was that embodied by George Will, whose Washington Post column about Mike Pence  has ignited a firestorm. Lefties are having a social-media field day with it. Trumpists are aghast.

I have to say that Bill Bennett's take is worth considering. I'm not saying I'm in complete alignment with it, but his objection to Will's stance strikes me as measured. He takes in the full context of what is either an outburst or a urgent lament, depending on one's point of view.

He enters into his argument quite graciously:

George Will is a neighbor and, if not a friend, more than an acquaintance. He has done me more than one good turn. He and his family have been hospitable to my family, and I, like so many others, have learned from and cited a great deal of his work over the years. All the more troubling, then, to see him stoop to ad-hominem attacks. 

Then he notes that Will has had rather persnickety standards for some time:

Since when are humility and decorum fodder for scorn of the worst kind? Since at least 1990, when Will did this to another honorable and unpretentious man: President George Herbert Walker Bush.

Will derided President Bush’s modesty as “arrogance,” excoriating the then-president for the high crime of de-emphasizing the “rhetorical dimension of the presidency” that Bush’s predecessor, the Great Communicator Ronald Reagan, employed with aplomb. 

What is it about proper, genteel, civil, self-effacing men that George Will doesn’t like? It is clearly not that he prefers improper, brash men. 

He then gets to the basis for his position, which is the importance of end results:

To put it in Will-ian terms: The only purpose these sesquipedalian insults serve is to denigrate men who are actually working to make this country better. The intellectual elite inside the Beltway would be well-served to look at the big picture. We understand that you think you’re classier than the president and smarter than the vice president. We just don’t care. 

What matters are the actions being taken by President Trump and Vice President Pence, and they are saving the country.

As I say, I don't give as much of a pass to either Pence or Trump as Bennett does, but he's basically right.

And public sentiment seems to bear that out. I also found noteworthy this piece at The Hill by Jared Whitley entitled  "Sorry, There's Not Going to Be Any Blue Tidal Wave." The whole thing should be read without excerpting - plus, I need to get ready for church - so I'll merely encourage you to do so.

The overall point here is that it looks like the reality of the Trump administration and Republican control of Congress and a majority of state governments is not going anywhere, so the task before us is to deal with it.

For conservatives, while it may not be a walk in the park, it should be easier than for "progressives," given that a hallmark of the conservative worldview is squarely facing reality.

 

Tossing away history's greatest opportunity for tawdry little baubles

Decades ago, when I had my head way up my tailpipe, one day I was sitting around drinking beers with a buddy (a real character, a Presbyterian minister with a gargantuan alcohol problem) and we were listening to the Grateful Dead's album Anthem of the Sun. I waxed loftily about what a noble vision the band had, how it embodied a generation's forging of a new, tribal, communal way for society to organize, based on a cosmic consciousness that was breaking like a new kind of daylight onto humanity.

"Narcissism," he tersely offered.

"Narcissism? How can you say that?" I responded. "The counterculture is all about selflessness and real community."

"Narcissism," he repeated.

I now understand that he was spot-on.

The whole countercultural enterprise was one big indulgence in self-congratulation. And historical ignorance. If only all those little tie-dyed brats - and the subsequent waves of wanna-bes that still litter the sociocultural landscape - would take some time to look at the entire sweep of human existence, they'd see that it's replete with such folly, such failed attempts to find the True Dawning of An Unprecedented Era of Peace and Connectedness.

I had the misfortune of coming of age during the apex of the countercultural enterprise, when it was plaguing society in its most concentrated form. You have to give it credit, it was enticingly exotic. It offered a very appealing alternative to the square old bourgeois values recently enumerated by University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. 

That stuff looked so stultifying compared to what the flower children and the New Left radicals were peddling.

What, once again, it takes a little historical perspective to realize is that us kids of the 1960s and 70s were living through the peak of Western civilization. The technological advancement, economic stability, national security and cultural resiliency that made for the milieu in which we were "maturing" was unprecedented and hasn't been seen since.

In his book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, Jay Stevens talks about the happenings and love-ins in Golden Gate Park at the onset of the hippie era and points out that the participants weren't  scroungy plebeians from lower social rungs, but students and ex-students of some of the nation's most prestigious institutions of higher learning - Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State - and from homes in which high-achieving parents had bestowed a level of comfort and opportunity know to few. They were privileged, if you will. And here they were, gyrating, flailing their arms, gobbling psychedelics and engaging in sex with strangers, tossing away their birthrights in a most cavalier fashion.

And all the movements that came out of that initial burst - environmentalism, feminism, mainstreaming of homosexuality - were just refinements of that reckless hissy-fit.

At the most basic level, it's all built on the greatest conceit of all: the perfectibility of the human being. It's all predicated on the notion that the human being can invent himself and refine that invention and achieve mastery over creation.

In fact, the whole panoply of New-Age "spiritual" schemes have as their core the belief that one creates one's own reality.

It's now crashing down upon us, as we realize that the world is what it has always been, and human nature likewise hasn't change one stinking bit.

If our times look particularly cacophonous and devoid of aesthetic richness, if meanness and fear seem to be the most prominent traits of institutional behavior, we have only to look at what we permitted to "blossom" in our midst.

What's required to reverse course? I think you know. And it's not too late. But it's going to require a level of contrition that we'll find most uncomfortable.

We'll have to acknowledge that none of us is the center of the universe. Only one being gets to be that. And He'd like us to get off our high horse and return to His embrace, but he's not going to make us. That is our choice.

A grimly sinister use of a seemingly innocent word

The word in question is "allow."

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed a bill late Friday that gay rights advocates say would allow religious-based adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples, single people and non-Christians in placing children.

The bill written by Republican Sen. Greg Treat provides legal protections to faith-based agencies that won’t place children in LGBT homes because of religious or moral convictions or policies.

Let that sink in. Really take a few minutes.

"Allow."

This is the same principle that has been at stake in the Baronelle Stutzman and Jack Phillips cases and so many others.

Government trying to tell citizens and private organizations that they must conduct business in violation of their faith.

This Oklahoma law merely protects adoption agencies from being forced to consign innocent children to lives in sin-based family frameworks.

And yes, I've seen the social-media comments about how it's better to have children in loving homes than bouncing around the foster-home system.

That is not the point.

The point is made plain by the AP's use of the word "allow." It's predicated on the notion that our rights come from government, rather than God. It conjures an image of government doling out parameters of behavior in dribs and drabs as it sees fit, withholding those that don't fit within its grand collectivist design.

This is a moment for celebrating, not raging. Human freedom and the glorification of God have been advanced in the Sooner state.

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

This is obviously beyond the AP's comprehension, but it's the glorious truth.

"Time to rip off the Band-Aid"

I guess you folks probably know about Kimberly Strassel's bombshell WSJ column that appeared Thursday.

It's hard to characterize any particular development in the whole web of palace intrigue that has been a feature of the Trump era as a bombshell. but this is.

It appears that that FBI planted a mole in the Trump campaign back in 2016.

The Department of Justice lost its latest battle with Congress Thursday when it agreed to brief House Intelligence Committee members about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.

Among them is that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation outright hid critical information from a congressional investigation. In a Thursday press conference, Speaker Paul Ryan bluntly noted that Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s request for details on this secret source was “wholly appropriate,” “completely within the scope” of the committee’s long-running FBI investigation, and “something that probably should have been answered a while ago.” Translation: The department knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, but instead deliberately concealed it.

House investigators nonetheless sniffed out a name, and Mr. Nunes in recent weeks issued a letter and a subpoena demanding more details. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s response was to double down—accusing the House of “extortion” and delivering a speech in which he claimed that “declining to open the FBI’s files to review” is a constitutional “duty.” Justice asked the White House to back its stonewall. And it even began spinning that daddy of all superspook arguments—that revealing any detail about this particular asset could result in “loss of human lives.”

This is desperation, and it strongly suggests that whatever is in these files is going to prove very uncomfortable to the FBI. 

The bureau already has some explaining to do. Thanks to the Washington Post’s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a “top secret intelligence source” of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe. When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.

This would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting. It would also be a major escalation from the electronic surveillance we already knew about, which was bad enough. Obama political appointees rampantly “unmasked” Trump campaign officials to monitor their conversations, while the FBI played dirty with its surveillance warrant against Carter Page, failing to tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that its supporting information came from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now we find it may have also been rolling out human intelligence, John Le Carré style, to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

Which would lead to another big question for the FBI: When? The bureau has been doggedly sticking with its story that a tip in July 2016 about the drunken ramblings of George Papadopoulos launched its counterintelligence probe. Still, the players in this affair—the FBI, former Director Jim Comey, the Steele dossier authors—have been suspiciously vague on the key moments leading up to that launch date. When precisely was the Steele dossier delivered to the FBI? When precisely did the Papadopoulos information come in?

She concludes with the same point that Andrew McCarthy made in the summing-up paragraph of his NRO piece the other day on the redactions-to-the-Russia-report aspect on all this.

The president needs to declassify every last bit of it. As Strassel puts it, "It's time to rip off the Band-Aid."

The difficulties for each and every camp posed by the reality of Donald Trump

Rich Lowry, editor of the magazine, National Review, that famously, in the spring of 2016, published an issue entirely devoted to opposing Donald Trump, threads the needle in his latest piece there, begrudgingly acknowledging a plain fact:

The president who says more outlandish and untrue things than anyone who has ever occupied the office of the presidency is also extraordinarily determined to deliver on his big promises.

Trump often doesn’t mean what he says, but when he says what he means — watch out. The combined forces of international pressure, polite opinion, outraged New York Times editorials, resistant advisers and sheer inertia aren’t an obstacle.

Many, including LITD, have argued that the laudable accomplishments to date could have been achieved by an actual conservative president, one with some consistency and a guiding set of principles. Lowry's not so sure:

It wasn’t simply that these decisions had opponents. Their opponents were overrepresented in (allegedly) sophisticated circles with disproportionate cultural clout. Even conservatives who disdain the elite feel this cultural pull. Whereas Trump, who has never been housetrained as a politician, is more immune to it. He might crave the approval of respectable opinion, but he’s also perfectly content to outrage it.

Now, over to the left side of the spectrum. Caitlin Huey-Burns at Real Clear Politics points up the challenges for Democrats in this midterm election year in a good-and-improving economic climate:

. . . efforts to explain the party’s plan to “revisit” the tax law if elected to the House majority underscore the difficult question Democrats are trying to answer: How do you talk about the economy when the economy is good?

“Every time [Democrats] deny the economy is starting to turn or get better for certain parts of the population, they also hurt themselves,” says party strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “They appear to be cheering on bad news.”

And Democrats could face a similar challenge on recent news about Trump’s plans to meet North Korean leader Kim Jung Un, seen as entirely separate issue but nevertheless one that relates to overall feelings of security. While success on that front is hypothetical at this point, opponents of the president are already trying to balance skepticism and applauding signs of progress. A CNN poll released this week, for example, found that 77 percent of Americans approve of the meeting.

That same survey found that 52 percent of voters approve of Trump's handling of the economy, up from 48 percent in March. And 57 percent of voters said things overall are going well, up from 49 percent registered in the last poll on that question in February.  

Now, let's talk about George Will's Washington Post column, which is mainly about Mike Pence, in the context of Pence having decided his own character was of tertiary importance or less compared to doing what's necessary to keep his current job:

Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.

Will offers a couple of examples of what he means: the cabinet meeting at which members went around the table giving personal testimonies to their utter fealty to the VSG and how it kicked off an ongoing "I'm deeply humbled" riff, the shout-out to Joe Arpaio, he of the VSG pardon.

Chris Cilliza's take at CNN on Will's column is also worth noting. For one thing, his characterization of Will ("the always-use-the-$1,000-word-when-the-$1-word-would-do wordsmith") is just plain great writing. But he provides some additional insight into Pence's transformation - his "faustian bargain," as Cilizza puts it:

Pence came to prominence during his days in the House. He rocketed up through the ranks in Congress thanks to his ability to bridge the gap between social and fiscal conservatives and his telegenic presence on cable TV. He left Congress in 2012 to run for governor -- a move widely seen as laying the groundwork for a national bid.

But Pence's political future grew cloudy as chief executive of his home state -- bogged down by a massive national controversy over his decision to sign a religious freedom bill and then his backtracking on some of the provisions in it viewed as anti-gay. By 2016, Pence was facing a serious battle for a second term. His hopes of being a major player on the national stage had faded considerably.

And then Trump named him as VP. 

From Pence's perspective, it all made sense. No one thought Trump would win. In the wake of that loss, Pence could effectively portray himself as a party guy, someone who signed on to a troubled ticket in hopes of rescuing it for the good of the party but ultimately couldn't do it. The Trump loss would fall entirely on Trump and his deep flaws as a candidate. Pence would emerge unscathed and, as importantly, with a massive amount of name ID and credibility with Republican activists and donors looking for a 2020 nominee to take down President Hillary Clinton.

Except Trump won. And that changed everything for Pence. The second it was clear Trump was actually going to be president, Pence grasped the fact that he was now wedded to Trump forever. And, rather than run from that characterization or try to create some healthy distance between himself and the wildly unpredictable President, Pence sprinted toward Trump and laid a massive bear hug on him. And he's never let go.

At every bill signing ceremony, Pence is there -- perched just off Trump's shoulder, smiling and nodding reassuringly. When Trump causes controversy with some impolitic comment, Pence is there to calm the jangled nerves of Republican congressional leaders and give media interviews about what Trump really meant. When Trump holds a Cabinet meeting, Pence is there to lavish praise on the boss man. ("I'm deeply humbled as your vice president to be able to be here," Pence told Trump at an end-of-the-year cabinet meeting in 2017. "Because of your leadership and because of the strong support of the leadership of the Congress, you're delivering on that middle class miracle.")

Who can envy Pence's fate? At least the rest of us - most certainly a fifteenth-tier blogger banging away in a decidedly non-coastal locale - have some elbow room in how to deal with the VSG phenomenon.

But none of us can ignore it. The guy's too momentous.

If you're a conservative, consider this advice: Carry no one's water. Insist on fealty to principles. You'll inevitably be disappointed by the paltry degree to which any individual is eventually going to perform on that score, but that is, as they say, baked in to the equation.

In other words, applaud Trump's good moves, but don't lick his boots.

The real solution regarding both of the front-burner bad-guy regimes? Topple 'em

The big debates going on regarding the current junctures at which we find ourselves in relation to Iran and North Korea are, respectively, whether the JCPOA pullout is a good thing or not, and whether a truly new era of peace can be ushered in by the spate of high-level contacts.

Melanie Phillips cuts through the fog and spells out what really needs to happen in both cases:

the elephant in the room is regime change.

Let’s go back to something approaching first principles. The Iranian regime is a menace to the world going far beyond its nuclear ambitions.

It has waged a self-declared war against the West since it came to power in 1979. It has killed numerous American, British and other coalition troops in Iraq. It is the greatest single state sponsor of terrorism in the world, responsible for the murder of countless innocents.

It has a burning genocidal ambition to wipe Israel off the map. Some of its members, especially the Supreme Leader, are fanatics of the Shia “Twelver” sect who believe that destroying Israel and the US in a global apocalypse will bring the Shia messiah to earth.

It is developing long-range missiles outside the terms of the nuclear deal altogether and which in themselves threaten the region and the world. The nuclear archive extracted in the Mossad coup proves its leaders are congenital liars who can never be trusted under any circumstances.

Accordingly, no accommodation can ever be reached with this regime to negate the threat it poses. The only reasonable strategic aim is, therefore, its removal.

Now consider North Korea. It has already been allowed to develop nuclear weapons. It is developing missiles and other technology which can attack the United States. It is credibly thought to be in league with Iran over its nuclear weapons program.

It broke its previous treaty with the US committing it to nuclear disarmament. It has been shown to lie and so can never be trusted. It will thus never stop presenting a threat. Accordingly, no accommodation can ever be reached with it. The only reasonable strategic aim is therefore its removal.

In the appeasement-minded West, regime change is associated with war. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

For here’s the thing. Although both Iran and North Korea have been holding the world to ransom, both are weak. Both are economic basket cases; Iran’s currency is in free fall. Both could be flattened by US military power.

The only reason for their strength is the craven weakness hitherto displayed by the West.

The nuclear deal allowed money to flow to Tehran with which it has equipped and trained its proxy armies and spread its power into Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Gaza and elsewhere.

As for North Korea, America’s feeble-minded eagerness in the nineties to negotiate and then preserve an agreement enabled the regime to become the menace it is today.

Now the US will turn off the financial spigot through which Western money has been pouring into Iran’s war machine. Assuming these severe sanctions are not (shamefully) undercut by Britain and Europe, these may provide the final push that can fell the regime.

For the Iranian people are continuing to mount widespread riots and protests. All but unreported in the West, this resistance across all classes poses a serious threat to the regime and it knows it.

“The future of Iran belongs to its people,” Trump said. “There has been enough suffering, death and destruction – let it end now.”

The best way to bring that about is regime change. And the best way to bring that [ital ‘that] about is to give the people the incentive to redouble their resistance and, crucially, make them believe they can succeed – because this time the world will support not the regime but them.

All efforts should now go into promoting and supporting the Iranian people with whatever they need to bring down their leaders.

As for Kim Jong-un, his offer to meet Trump, like his unprecedented meeting with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, is undoubtedly due to the pressure being put on him by his patron, China. And that’s because China itself is under pressure from Trump’s threats of a trade war – not to mention the fear that Trump is such a loose cannon he might actually do what he has threatened to do and flatten Pyongyang.

Nevertheless, we must assume that Kim will cheat any agreement to de-nuclearize. So Trump should be making him (and China) an offer they can’t refuse. Either Kim accepts safe passage for himself and his family to live out their days in peaceful retirement; or he sees himself and his country destroyed (and China crippled) through punitive sanctions, backed by the credible threat of military action. Either way, he should be told, he is over.

It has become an article of faith in the West that the only way to resolve conflict is through negotiation and compromise. If faced with a fight between God and the devil, the West would doubtless split the difference and call it a triumph.

The result of the West’s appeasement of Iran, however, has been regional chaos, world terror and 120,000 missiles embedded among the civilian population in Lebanon from where they are pointing at Israel.

Trump declared, “We will not allow a regime that chants ‘Death to America’ to gain access to the most dangerous weapons on the Earth.”

How long have we waited for America to say that! But the threat is wider and more immediate than nuclear weapons. Whether or not all-out war now develops between Israel and Iran, the time for fine words is over. Now is the time finally to end these evil regimes.

There are ways to squeeze each of them sufficiently to bring this about. Let's hope someone in a position of influence in this administration is working on that full-time.

But there's that lack of a filter between his brain and mouth

Guy Benson tweets about the latest example of how the Very Stable Genius can adulterate his most laudable achievements:

Trump working to bring our hostages home & pressuring NoKo toward the bargaining table: Trump praising Kim Jong Un for “excellent” treatment of the American hostages Kim’s regime kidnapped and held as bargaining chips:

Yes, honey catches more flies than vinegar, but a little calibration would have been advisable. This has a Kerry-esque vibe about it.

Wednesday roundup

Mark Theissen on Gina Haspel's spy chops:

It was one of the Clinton administration’s biggest counterterrorism successes. Just weeks after al-Qaeda terrorists trained by Iran blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Gina Haspel’s phone rang in the middle of the night. She was in her final weeks as station chief in what the CIA describes as an “exotic and tumultuous capital” in central Eurasia, and intelligence had just emerged that two senior al-Qaeda associates linked to the embassy bombings were on their way to the country where she was stationed.

Haspel swung into action, devising an operation to capture the terrorists. She worked around the clock, sleeping on the floor of her office, as agents tracked the terrorists to a local hotel, where the men were apprehended after a firefight. According to the CIA, “The successful operation not only led to the terrorists’ arrest and subsequent imprisonment, but to the seizure of computers that contained details of a terrorist plot.” For her efforts during the operation, which ultimately disrupted a terrorist cell, Haspel in 1999 received the George H.W. Bush Award for Excellence in Counterterrorism.

This is as much as the CIA has revealed, but according to press accounts, several senior al-Qaeda associates were captured in Baku, Azerbaijan, just weeks after the embassy bombings. They included Ihab Saqr , a top lieutenant of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Essam Marzouk, who also worked for Zawahiri and had trained two of the embassy bombers. Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, had reportedly intercepted signals indicating that Saqr was headed to Baku to meet an Iranian intelligence operative. 

And she gets big-time bipartisan kudos, Kamala Harris's moral preening notwithstanding:

“She has served in some really tough places, high-risk hardship posts, and has performed some extraordinary operations,” said former CIA official Henry “Hank” Crumpton, who was Haspel’s boss in the agency’s National Resources Division. According to a source familiar with her career, Haspel was once deployed in a conflict zone, when military officials from a hostile nation arrived without warning at an event she was attending. As she left, they fired at her vehicle, blowing out a tire. She still keeps the bullet as a reminder of the risks CIA officers take each day to protect the country. She knows their sacrifices firsthand. For her, some of the stars on the CIA’s Memorial Wall represent the names and faces of friends she has lost in the line of duty.

“She’s truly a spymaster,” said one retired senior intelligence official who knows Haspel well. “She’s managed intelligence operations against the hardest targets, Russia in particular. She has earned great respect from intelligence leaders around the world; even people like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would have to respect her operational savvy.” Yet despite her many accomplishments, colleagues say, she is a paragon of humility with zero political ambition. “She’s never lobbied for a job,” one of her former CIA bosses told me . “The jobs searched for her.”

Little wonder that so many senior Obama-era intelligence officials — including Leon Panetta, John Brennan, Michael Morell, James R. Clapper Jr. and Jeremy Bash — have urged the Senate to confirm her. To vote down someone so obviously qualified as political retribution for the CIA’s now-defunct interrogation program would be a travesty. President Barack Obama’s Justice Department concluded that no crimes had been committed. Moreover, as CIA veterans point out, Brennan was himself deeply involved in the interrogation program, and was confirmed 63-34 as Obama’s CIA director, with only two Democrats and one independent voting against him. Why the double standard for the first woman nominated to lead the agency?

Excellent David Harsanyi piece at The Federalist entitled "The Barack Obama Legacy Deserves to Be Destroyed." 

More funny business from Salem Media:

It might not be unusual that a conservative-minded media organization would aim to support the Republican nominee. But the former host, Elisha Krauss, said she feels it's disingenuous to ostensibly hire hosts to be open about their views, only to pressure them behind the scenes to change. 

For months, Krauss said, Salem executives explicitly pressured her to change how she treated Trump. Though Krauss said she praised Trump when she felt he deserved it, it ultimately wasn't enough. In January 2017, Krauss said, she was shell-shocked when a casual meeting with a company executive turned into her dismissal. 

Krauss declined to discuss the details of her severance, but said the rest of her contract had been settled. 

The emails obtained by CNNMoney were sent in the summer of 2016 to Krauss and Ben Shapiro, both former co-hosts of KRLA's "The Morning Answer," and both conservative Trump critics. Krauss and Shapiro co-hosted the show along with Brian Whitman, an anti-Trump liberal, and later Jennifer Horn, a pro-Trump conservative. 

"What I have been hearing on TMA... has not been in the spirit of 'supporting the GOP nominee,'" one Salem executive, Terry Fahy, general manager at Salem, wrote in an email to Shapiro and Krauss on July 19, 2016. "In fact, it seems that the show gets into negative minutiae of the Trump campaign and the GOP convention (e.g. criticizing Trump for having his kids speak at the convention.) Do we really need a side by side audio comparison of Trump's wife's speech with Michelle Obama's? How is that ultimately relevant to the big picture and advance the cause?"

Eventually the axe fell:

 On a Sunday in January 2017, at a meeting she was told to bring her husband and child to, Krauss said a Salem executive told her she had just hosted her final show. She was not to communicate with anyone at the station or her listeners. She was done. Her listeners, she said, were told she was the one who decided to leave.

By the way, Conrad Black has a new book out that gushes all over his idol the Very Stable Genius, if you're into that sort of thing. Maybe Salem ought to talk to him about a show.


The NYT tries just a little too hard to spin Pompeo's absence for the big announcement:

On Tuesday, the Times breathlessly reported that Secretary of State Pompeo was absent from Washington when Trump announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the nuclear deal with Iran. “At a Key Moment, Trump’s Top Diplomat Is Again Thousands of Miles Away,” the headline harumphed. 

The Times reported that “senior State Department officials were momentarily speechless on Tuesday when asked why Mr. Pompeo did not delay his trip by a day to be in Washington during Mr. Trump’s Iran deal announcement.” According to the Times, European diplomats complained privately that they were “having trouble getting answers from Washington.” 

But the Times knew that Pompeo was heading to North Korea make sure that three Americans who had been jailed by the dictatorship would be coming home. It reported as much in this same story. And ultimately, Pompeo not only returned with the three prisoners, but also worked on arranging a date and location for Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un.

The guy had work to do.

In an ABC interview, Vice President Pence said that one of the detainees freed from North Korea asked to get out of the plane while it refueled in Anchorage to see the sunlight, which he hadn't seen in "a long time." 

Noam Chomsky is one warped dude:

During the question and answer session after his talk, Chomsky aimed his misguided philosophizing at Christianity, saying that the faith that isn't Islam has set out to threaten the globe. Campus Reform noted:

“People in high places now claim to be devout Christians, and on the basis of Christian ideals they’re saying let’s proceed to destroy the world,” Chomsky asserted, adding, “I don’t know anybody in the Islamic world that’s doing that.”

Where has he been? From everything I've seen, the regimes oppressing women, children, and gays aren't Christian. The nations that threaten modern democracy do not worship Jesus as Lord. The vast majority of acts of terrorism aren't committed by Baptists or Episcopalians either. There's a common thread through most of the violence in the world: radical Islam. 

Great Ben Shapiro piece at The Weekly Standard entitled "How Conservatives Can Win Back Young Americans."

 

 

Eric Schneiderman: it's a level below hypocrisy

I've said many times that of the various human foibles that taint us all, hypocrisy bothers me the least. That's because hypocrisy can only ever be a personal charge against an individual or group of individuals. It tells us nothing about the veracity of the principles being espoused by the hypocrite.

It would be easy to lob the charge of hypocrisy at Eric Schneiderman and make that the focus of any discussion about him.

But something deeper and more rotten is what's really going on:

In one of the most disturbing passages in a story full of disturbing passages, [New Yorker writer Ronan] Farrow writes of how one of the women sought advice from her friends about how to handle Schneiderman’s abuse after their break-up. “After the former girlfriend ended the relationship, she told several friends about the abuse. A number of them advised her to keep the story to herself, arguing that Schneiderman was too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose.”

That's the key to what this is really all about right there. It's the same motivation that Madam Bleachbit had when she sought out Juanita Broderick at a Democrat fundraiser in Arkansas shortly after her husband had raped Broderick, put her hand  on Broderick's forearm, looked her right in the eye and said, "Bill and I want you to know how much we appreciate everything you've done for us. Do you understand? Everything."

These people talk a good game about equality and fairness, an end to bigotry, unfettered sexual-identity expression and a clean planet, but what they really want is power. They hate basic human freedom and have found this insidious way to work their designs.

It's a level below hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not why we should point up the carbon footprints they leave by jetting off to climate conferences. The whole point of their project is totalitarian control over you and me. Control over what we eat, what pronouns we use, and what temperature we set our thermostats at. Since they also hate God, Christian wedding-service providers will be made to violate their faith.

And when one of them wants a go at our crotches, we're expected to acquiesce.

Ain't gonna happen.

Kamala Harris's vomit-inducing virtue signaling and where we are as a culture

Harris presses her line of inquiry, with the appropriate self-congratulatory, smug facial expression, during Gina Haspel's confirmation hearing:

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) questioned CIA director nominee Gina Haspel's "suitability" to hold such a position on Wednesday.

Harris told Haspel during her Senate confirmation hearing that the selection of the CIA's new leader will be a "signal" to everyone around the world about American values.

She stated that Haspel had not answered if she believed previous interrogation techniques were immoral.

When Haspel did not answer the question multiple times, Harris grilled her further.

"Please answer yes or no. Do you believe in hindsight that those techniques were immoral," she said in the tense exchange. 

Haspel had tried to explain to Harris that the tools available at the time were fully employed at the Thailand site in question in order to keep thousands if not millions more Americans from dying in catastrophic attacks and Harris just kept harping on this personally-believe-it-was-moral angle.

The obvious answer is, of course it's moral. Unless you hate Western civilization, it's a no-brainer.

This analogy is by no means original, but anybody who had a modicum of love in his or her heart for his or her family would subject any fellow human being to excruciating torment if he or she thought it might prevent his or her child or spouse from getting killed by bad guys.

But such is the climate in post-America that Haspel couldn't just full-throatedly respond thusly.

Harris has pulled this kind of crud at a number of confirmation hearings. One notable recent example is asking Mike Pompeo about his views on homosexuality and "climate change" at his hearing to become Secretary of State.

 It's sick and ugly and harmful to the prospects for post-America's revival.

How rotten is post-America's culture?

This rotten.

The spring exhibit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute was an obscene and blasphemous display of pop-stars indulging their narcissism and nihilism in the most flamboyant ways they could craft.

There are photos at the linked Daily Mail coverage, if you have the stomach for it. Rhianna in a pope-type hat. Katie Perry as a winged angel. Madonna in a Franciscan habit surrounded by robed-monk type figures, who remove her robe to reveal a "racy white dress."

Other familiar faces similarly put the darkness in their souls on full display:

On the red carpet, Lily Collins said her look was “chic nun.” Sarah Jessica Parker somehow balanced a Nativity scene on her head. Jared Leto and Lana del Rey appeared as Gucci Jesus and Mary. 

Quite obviously, this was a huge middle finger to the Lord of all that exists. There's also the cultural level. What the flip are any of these people doing at what ought to be an elegant event characterized by an atmosphere of erudition? The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses some of the world's most treasured masterpieces from throughout the various periods of human achievement. It's a stately building on the eastern edge of Central Park. What are these entertainment mediocrities doing there at  all?

We have pop-ified and sexualized every last aspect of life in post-American society. It takes an act of will to escape it.

As we know, the devil is always prowling this realm, looking for souls to devour.

He had quite a banquet the other night in Manhattan.