Mexico and the non-tariffs - and the inevitable rush of hot takes

Mexico's president Manuel Lopez Obrador and its foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard held a rally in Tijuana to celebrate the outcome of negotiations over the twin issues of trade and stopping Central American would-be illegal aliens at the Mexico-Guatemala border.

Now, the question arises as to why they can take a celebratory stance, when a number of folks - pretty much all of whom, ahem, are, shall we say, rather enthusiastic about the current US president - portray a scenario in which Mexico buckled under the hard-nosed tactics of their US counterparts.

Now, it comes to light, via a New York Times article, that Mexico had agreed to take border action months ago.  It's kind of interesting to see the way Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman, the article's authors, frame the matter. They basically say that it was the Very Stable Genius whose knees started quivering because a critical mass of post-Americans understood what a bad idea the tariffs would be:

It was unclear whether Mr. Trump believed that the agreement truly represented new and broader concessions, or whether the president understood the limits of the deal but accepted it as a face-saving way to escape from the political and economic consequences of imposing tariffs on Mexico, which he began threatening less than two weeks ago.

Having threatened Mexico with an escalating series of tariffs — starting at 5 percent and growing to 25 percent — the president faced enormous criticism from global leaders, business executives, Republican and Democratic lawmakers, and members of his own staff that he risked disrupting a critical marketplace.

After nine days of uncertainty, Mr. Trump backed down and accepted Mexico’s promises. 

Well, the VSG wasn't going to stand for that, of course. So he went on a Twitter rant. I found this particular exhibition of his thin skin noteworthy:

If President Obama made the deals that I have made, both at the Border and for the Economy, the Corrupt Media would be hailing them as Incredible, & a National Holiday would be immediately declared. With me, despite our record setting Economy and all that I have done, no credit!

And you know that one has the throne-sniffers fist-pumping across the land.

As with anything in post-America, there is no time for a world-stage or national-stage development to marinate for even a microsecond. An assessment of whether it was a win or loss for one's own tribe must be issued immediately.

Is it possible that this turn of events was a little of this, a little of that, and that Mexico had little or no interest in letting yet another caravan traipse across its territory?

Some further investigative journalism and the hindsight of history after some months or years have passed will give us a better view. But few post-Americans have that kind of patience. There's a cadre of bad guys to own!

Saturday roundup

A culture-war skirmish that turned out right:

Oberlin College in Ohio may be one of the most egregious politically correct campuses in the nation. Back in 2013, the campus closed down for a day of “racial sensitivity training” despite the fact that the administration knew that the supposed “racial incident” that prompted this “crisis” (someone spotted wearing Klan robes on campus) was a hoax.

Then in 2016, Black Lives Matter and a number of super-woke Oberlin students launched protests and a boycott against Gibson’s Bakery, a family-owned and run establishment that has been a fixture of downtown Oberlin since 1885. What prompted this? Gibson’s had the temerity to apprehend and charge three students with shoplifting (they later pled guilty), but because of the race of the offenders, the Oberlin College wokerati accused Gibson’s with racism, racial profiling, and probably genocide for all I know.

The Oberlin student Senate passed a resolution charging Gibson’s with “a long history of racial profiling,” and the Oberlin dean of students, Meredith Raimondo, endorsed and distributed the flyer. The college also discontinued purchasing baked goods from Gibsons, because you just can’t take the chance that you’ll cause literal pain or mental anguish to Oberlin students by procuring a bag of racist bear claws for the faculty lounge.

Gibson’s decided not to take this politically-motivated harassment lying down. They filed a  libel and slander suit against Oberlin College, and yesterday a jury found for Gibson’s, ordering Oberlin to pay $11 million in compensatory damages. A punitive damages hearing will follow, so the total award could grow to over $30 million.

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has a complete account of the background of the case and the legal drama that has played out. A news account quotes Jacobson: “The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners. The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.”

And here's another one. Take your $21.5 million and stuff it, Culverhouse:

The University of Alabama's board of trustees has voted to return a $21.5 million gift from Hugh Culverhouse Jr. — the school's biggest donor — and take his name off its law school. The move comes after Culverhouse urged businesses and prospective students to boycott the university and the state over Alabama's new abortion law.

The school says the transaction to return the funds was processed Friday morning and that it will also return any accrued interest. Last fall, Culverhouse pledged to donate a total of $26.5 million over four years.

"The action taken by the Board today was a direct result of Mr. Culverhouse's ongoing attempts to interfere in the operations of the Law School," the university's vice chancellor for communication, Kellee Reinhart, said Friday. "That was the only reason the Board voted to remove his name and return his money."

Culverhouse issued a statement Friday in which he renewed his call for students "to protest and reconsider their educational options in Alabama."

Pardes Seleh gets video of a standoff at the Dyke March between the main group, which is excluding any Stars of David, Israeli flags or other symbols of Judaism, and a group displaying those very things. The spokesdyke for the exclusionary group explains her bunch's position in a too-nice-nice way, dripping with sanctimony. She's determined to be all peace, love, tofu and sprouts, even though we all know she can't stand the sight of the other bunch. And there's just something about the way she  enunciates the word "dyke." And is "dyke" some special category of female homosexuality? I'm assuming it is, and that I'm hopelessly behind the curve.

Great Alexandra deSanctis piece at National Review entitled "Joe Biden Never Was Pro-Life." Along with tracing his public support for the Hyde Amendment until about 48 hours ago, going back to voting on its passage in 1976, she reminds us of such Biden moves as voting against Robert Bork's SCOTUS nomination (a move similar to his latest, in that he originally supported Bork). That seat, of course, went to Kennedy, who "went on to affirm Roe v. Wade in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, authoring the constitutionally illiterate decision that upheld the Court-imposed regime of abortion-on-demand."

And speaking of the procedure whereby the brains are vacuumed out of the skulls of people who aren't born yet, here's a HuffPost piece that may be the wackiest thing you'll read this decade. (I can say that, because this decade's nearly over. As to how soon after that you'll read something wackier, I wouldn't be willing to bet.) It's entitled "Women Aren't the Only People Who Get Abortions." A taste:

Even the most progressive health organizations, like Planned Parenthood, are still not up to speed on some of the most rudimental ways to give competent and compassionate care to trans and nonbinary folks. 

“Even the pro-choice people are constantly, constantly choosing to ignore my existence,” Gutiérrez said. 

Dr. Krystal Redman, executive director of southeastern nonprofit SPARK: Reproductive Justice Now, pointed to the fact that, historically, legislation in the U.S. has been created by cisgender white people. And that, she argued, creates a systemic “narrative of gender being binary.” 

“Just based on the history of how these laws were created, naturally the narrative and the conversations behind it become this cis-het [cisgender, heteronormative] centered narrative,” said Redman, a cisgender woman.

The language of choice was specifically created by cisgender people for cisgender people, Redman explained. Instead of the question being “Are you male or female?″ or “Do you have insurance or are you uninsured?”, the question for most nonbinary and gender-nonconforming folks is, “What provider can I go to that truly understands the dynamics of my body?”

“Cis folks need to understand that they operate within a privilege,” Redman said. “I don’t care what other racial or ethnic identity you identify with but just by the premise of being cis-identified, there is so much more privilege that you have over folks who do not identify as cis.”

Fewer post-Americans are moving - near or far - than at any time since 1948.  Discuss among yourselves.

 

If a twilight struggle for the definition of conservatism is underway, I know which side I'm on

I've been sitting here deliberating whether to provide a link to the essay I'm about to discuss. I generally don't do so in these cases. If the piece is so poisonous to the national discourse that the question of responsibility for aggravating a dark trend arises, I decline.

But I'm going to in this case. Human Events editor-in-chief Raheem Kassam's piece entitled "National Review is Obsessed With Itself" fairly drips with determination to assume the role of arbiter for what constitutes legitimate conservatism in the present moment - and to stamp out that which falls outside its parameters.

I've had to do some maturing myself over the years in regard to what permissibly qualifies as a conservative position. While I still hold to the notion of three pillars that became the accepted model some thirty-plus years ago, I see that there is a big-tent quality to our worldview, that there is something to the notion that it is a sensibility at least as much as a hard and fast platform, and that its essence has resulted from a distillation process that, one could argue, goes back to our common ancestor, Edmund Burke.

There have been purgings before. William F. Buckley had to serve notice to both the John Birch crowd and the Randians that they fell outside the bounds of what qualified. When neoconservatism first became a thing in the mid-to-late 1970s, some of the former liberals fared better at making a full transition than others. For instance, it took a while for the great Jean Kirkpatrick to start to see the efficacy of right-of-center domestic-policy orientation.

The Trump phenomenon has proven thornier than previous points in the synthesis. Trump's status as a party-affiliation flip-flopper was the first glaringly obvious problem. Once his candidacy became the sensation of the primary season, the photo from his (third) wedding reception of him and Melania yukking it up with Bill and Hillary Clinton made the rounds fairly instantly. Then came signals of his collectivist views on health care ("We have to take care of everybody") and his vow not to make any changes to the structure of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Time passed and he became president, and he engaged in rank appeasement of North Korea within weeks of its testing of its most fearsome missiles. That, as we know, led to two summits, the second of which ended in collapse, which in turn has led to Kim's return to full-bore belligerence. It's this kind of stuff; other examples abound.

An unprecedented aspect of the Trump phenomenon is the degree to which it's built around one figure . There was some of that in the case of the Objectivists, but they revered Ayn Rand because of her ideas. And it's also true that three of our four most recent presidents have been pathological narcissists with slavish cult followings, Bush 43 being the exception. However, other than Trump, these were Democrats.

Which gets us to Kassam's piece. The tone is a little different from, say, that of Kurt Schlichter, but not the spirit. His unmistakable point is to use Trumpian tactics to try to delegitimize what has been the flagship magazine of conservatism since the month after I was born. There is no other reason for his citing of NR's circulation statistics and his use of Schlichteresque terminology ("muh free market," "Conservative, Inc."). He doesn't hesitate to go for the point of NR's most recent maximum vulnerability, citing - and linking to - the Nicholas Frankovich piece NR published in the first few hours of the Covington-kids situation, barely noting the fact that the magazine took the piece down and apologized for such a hasty and mistaken first take.

And that as much as anything points up the bully aspect of Trumpism's essence. The image one gets is that of an alpha-male grade-schooler on the playground, finding some kid minding his own business and bending the kid's knuckles backward just to watch him drop to his knees. There is no room in the Trumpists' mind for waiting for anyone to take a second look at his position. In other words, no grace.

And I need to say a word about Kassam's formulation "Where the conservative movement is headed." Conservatism, properly understood, is about immutable principles. It doesn't "head" anywhere. Speaking of the month after I was born, National Review's mission statement includes the legendary phrase "stand athwart history yelling stop."

Kassam's essay is nothing but another splash of gasoline on the fire. It reinforces the notion of an irrevocable split in conservatism.

It's also clearly devoid of any humanity and for that reason is on the wrong side of such a split if there is really going to be one.

It also makes excuses for someone who is not and never has been a conservative and doesn't understand what the term even means.

He's casting his lot with something extremely perishable.

Tariffs vs. tax cuts: the Very Stable Genius is undermining what his right hand is doing with the actions of his left

Two pieces for your consideration today.

One is a lengthy - as in cover story of the print edition - piece by Kevin Williamson at National Review entitled "Trump's Trade War Casualties." It's the kind of study Williamson is particularly good at. He profiles two South Dakota farmers, to the extent of tracing the number of generations their families have had roots in the area, and their trade-association activities and extra-agricultural business interests, and paints a spot-on portrait of Sioux Falls ("one of those midwestern gems . . . that punches above [its] weight . . [with] wine bars and ambitious little restaurants").

It's so wonderfully crafted and in need of being read in its entirety that I dare not give you a bunch of money paragraphs, but two little excerpts get to the essence of his point.


This:

Farmers in large part are paying the price for somebody else’s crusade. This is really not their fight. They’re farmers. They don’t do drama and hysterics and Sturm und Drang: They do business. VanderWal said as much in congressional testimony not long ago: “Farmers are patriots. We were willing to step up and take one for the team. But, at some point . . .” 

What’s really annoying to farmers is that none of this is really about them. This is about BMWs and Toyotas and steel and Boeing and the fact that Americans don’t like seeing “Made in China” on socks and flipflops they buy at Walmart because we are losing our position of worldwide sock and flipflop dominance, of front-runner status in the flipflop race, whatever. “For years, this was a nonpartisan issue,” VanderWal says. “I didn’t like Bill Clinton very much, but he did a fine job on trade. Obama worked on trade. The president is right about the theft of intellectual property, and we do broadly support what the president is trying to do.” 

But is it getting done? VanderWal smiles. “The president doesn’t respond well to criticism.”

And this:

“I want to let people know they need to make their planting decisions and cropping decisions, all production decisions based on where they see the market and where they see their own weather pattern and when they can get into the fields in their own area,” says Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture. Translation: Don’t count on a bailout for tariff-crippled farmers to make you whole. There’s going to be something, yes, but that’s just a patch. It is a big wide complex world and, the grand tradition of U.S. farm policy notwithstanding, a check from the government is not a long-term solution.

The other piece I want to bring to your attention is a more straightforward presentation of facts and figures. It's an article at Yahoo Finance entitled "Trump's Tariffs Have Already Wiped Out Tax Bill Savings for Average Americans."

President Donald Trump’s trade wars have already wiped out all but $100 of the average American household’s windfall from Trump’s 2017 tax law. And that’s just the beginning.

That last $100 in tax-cut gains also could soon disappear -- and then some -- because of additional tariffs Trump has announced or is considering. If the president makes good on his threats to impose levies on virtually all imports from China and Mexico, those middle-earning households could pay nearly $4,000 more as they shell out more for a vast range of goods -- from avocados to iPhones.

Subtract the tax cut, and the average household will effectively be paying about $3,000 more a year in additional costs.

“It’s giving with one hand and taking with the other,” said Kim Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, who’s written a book promoting free trade.

Here’s how the math works: middle earners got an average tax cut of $930 for the tax overhaul passed in late 2017, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. The tariffs already in effect cost the average household about $831, according to research from the New York Federal Reserve.

China Goods

Add in the additional tariffs on another $300 billion in Chinese goods that Trump proposed in May, and is still considering, and that increases the cost for an average family of four to about $2,294 annually, according to research from “Tariffs Hurt the Heartland,” a coalition of business groups.

Trump has also threatened to levy tariffs on all imports from Mexico, starting with a 5% tax beginning as soon as Monday that would increase monthly to 25% in October unless Mexico curbs illegal migration to the president’s satisfaction.

If the tariffs reach their highest level, the annual cost to households would increase by $1,700, according to Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the centrist Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The VSG is not playing 5-D chess, people. He's winging it.

As I've said before, I really have to wonder what private conversations between Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore are like - when Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro are not around.

Biden and the Hyde Amendment

He deserves a good-on-ya (at least for the moment; we shall see if he eventually folds) but the more important consideration is the backlash he's coming in for from fellow Dems. You're hearing a lot of fetid dog vomit about "poor women, women of color" not having access to abortion.

Listen up, you God-, freedom-, and dignity-haters, I will never submit to being forced at gunpoint to pay for my fellow human being getting a hole popped in her or his skull and having her or his brains vacuumed out.

Never gonna happen.

Never.

UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long.

Ben Sasse is such a cool guy

I know he comes in for abuse from ugly bullies like Kurt Schlichter, but anybody who is not ate up with attitude can see that he is one of the top-ranking good guys.

Take, for instance, what he did in this hearing:

For some reason, Democrats love to ask President Trump's judicial nominees about their religious backgrounds. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) was worried that U.S. district judge Peter Phipps, nominated to serve on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, would be no exception. So, he launched a preemptive strike at Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing and asked Phipps about his membership in the Knights of Columbus (KoC), a Catholic fraternal organization, and whether it has anything to do with his nomination. After all, Democrats have obsessed over the group in recent years.

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) admitted to being puzzled such line of questioning.

“Judge, did you get questions for the record about being a member of the Knights of Columbus?” Sasse asked. “This is a new tradition around here evidently, trying to figure out if people are members of religious organizations.”

"Yes, associated with my district court nomination," Phipps acknowledged. He said he does "not" know why.

Sasse described the Knights of Columbus as a harmless organization that organizes "community service...fish fries, and pool parties," leading him to pose a more humorous inquiry.

"Are you now or have you ever been involved in the organization of a fish fry?”

And one of the Senate's most prominent Western civilization-haters responded with Pavlovian predictability:

“To be clear, no senator on the Democratic side has ever suggested that a member of any organization is per se unfit for the bench, only those who cannot be fair and impartial,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI).

But, National Review called her bluff. Just a few months back, Hirono told judicial nominee Brian Buescher she was worried about his relationship with KoC.

"The Knights of Columbus has taken a number of extreme positions," Hirono said before asking the nominee to promise to "end" his membership with this organization "to avoid any appearance of bias."  

Ben Sasse - demonstrating the art of having fun while fighting.

 

What is the way back from our societal atomization?

In the course of a Dennis Prager column on causes of mass shootings (in which he admirably points up how Barack Obama's disdain for the country he used to preside over was on full display recently), he enumerates the basic societal changes that have not only been a precipitating factor in those, but a number of other ills as well:

. . . wouldn't the most productive question [to ask about why the number, by decade, of them has gone from few than 10 before the 1970s to the number we have now] be what, if anything, has changed since the 1960s and '70s? Of course it would. And a great deal has changed. America is much more ethnically diverse, much less religious. Boys have far fewer male role models in their lives. Fewer men marry, and normal boy behavior is largely held in contempt by their feminist teachers, principals and therapists.

And the numbers for each societal change bear him out:

Regarding ethnic diversity, the countries that not only have the fewest mass murders but the lowest homicide rates as well are the least ethnically diverse -- such as Japan and nearly all European countries. So, too, the American states that have homicide rates as low as Western European countries are the least ethnically and racially diverse (the four lowest are New Hampshire, North Dakota, Maine and Idaho). Now, America, being the most ethnically and racially diverse country in the world, could still have low homicide rates if a) Americans were Americanized, but the left has hyphenated -- Balkanized, if you will -- Americans, and b) most black males grew up with fathers.

And

Regarding religiosity, the left welcomes -- indeed, seeks -- the end of Christianity in America (though not of Islam, whose robustness it fosters). Why don't we ask a simple question: What percentage of American murderers attend church each week?

And

Regarding boys' need for fathers, in 2008, then-Sen. Obama told an audience: "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools; and 20 times more likely to end up in prison."

Yet, the Times has published columns and "studies" showing how relatively unimportant fathers are, and more and more educated women believe this dangerous nonsense.

Then there is marriage: Nearly all men who murder are single. And their number is increasing. 

In a City Journal essay, Kay Hymowitz discusses a study released by the insurance company Cigna and a UN World Happiness Report showing that the US and the West generally, as well as Japan, which is a fairly Westernized Asian nation, are beset by rampant loneliness. The bulk of the essay is an inquiry into why that is so:

Certainly, some voguish explanations for the crisis should raise skepticism: among the recent suspects are favorite villains like social media, technology, discrimination, genetic bad luck, and neoliberalism.

Still, the loneliness thesis taps into a widespread intuition of something true and real and grave. Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers of “deaths of despair” suggest a profound, collective discontent. It’s worth mapping out one major cause that is simultaneously so obvious and so uncomfortable that loneliness observers tend to mention it only in passing. I’m talking, of course, about family breakdown. At this point, the consequences of family volatility are an evergreen topic when it comes to children; this remains the subject of countless papers and conferences. Now, we should take account of how deeply the changes in family life of the past 50-odd years are intertwined with the flagging well-being of so many adults and communities.

Parallel with Prager's point much?

She discusses a concept I wasn't previously acquainted with, but which makes a great deal of sense: the Second Demographic Transition:

 (The first transition occurred around the time of the Industrial Revolution, as the high death and birth rates that had been humanity’s default condition since the Neanderthals declined dramatically, leading to rapid population growth.) Mostly associated with the Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, the SDT (the unfortunately evocative acronym) is a useful framework for understanding the dramatic rupture between the Ozzie and Harriet and Sex and the City eras.

The SDT began emerging in the West after World War II. As societies became richer and goods cheaper and more plentiful, people no longer had to rely on traditional families to afford basic needs like food and shelter. They could look up the Maslovian ladder toward “post-material” goods: self-fulfillment, exotic and erotic experiences, expressive work, education. Values changed to facilitate these goals. People in wealthy countries became more antiauthoritarian, more critical of traditional rules and roles, and more dedicated to individual expression and choice. With the help of the birth-control pill, “non-conventional household formation” (divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, and single parenthood) went from uncommon—for some, even shameful—to mundane. Lesthaeghe predicted that low fertility would also be part of the SDT package, as families grew less central. And low fertility, he suggested, would have thorny repercussions for nation-states: he was one of the first to guess that developed countries would turn to immigrants to restock their aging populations, as native-born young adults found more fulfilling things to do than clean up after babies or cook dinner for sullen adolescents.

The disruption of family life caused by the SDT in the U.S. has been rehearsed thousands of times, including by this writer, but the numbers still startle. In 1950, 20 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, it’s approximately 40 percent. Four in ten American children are now born to unmarried mothers, up from about 5 percent in 1960. In 1970, 84 percent of U.S. children spent their entire childhoods living with both bio-parents. Today, only half can expect to do the same.

There have been reverberations:

 (The first transition occurred around the time of the Industrial Revolution, as the high death and birth rates that had been humanity’s default condition since the Neanderthals declined dramatically, leading to rapid population growth.) Mostly associated with the Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, the SDT (the unfortunately evocative acronym) is a useful framework for understanding the dramatic rupture between the Ozzie and Harriet and Sex and the City eras.

The SDT began emerging in the West after World War II. As societies became richer and goods cheaper and more plentiful, people no longer had to rely on traditional families to afford basic needs like food and shelter. They could look up the Maslovian ladder toward “post-material” goods: self-fulfillment, exotic and erotic experiences, expressive work, education. Values changed to facilitate these goals. People in wealthy countries became more antiauthoritarian, more critical of traditional rules and roles, and more dedicated to individual expression and choice. With the help of the birth-control pill, “non-conventional household formation” (divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, and single parenthood) went from uncommon—for some, even shameful—to mundane. Lesthaeghe predicted that low fertility would also be part of the SDT package, as families grew less central. And low fertility, he suggested, would have thorny repercussions for nation-states: he was one of the first to guess that developed countries would turn to immigrants to restock their aging populations, as native-born young adults found more fulfilling things to do than clean up after babies or cook dinner for sullen adolescents.

The disruption of family life caused by the SDT in the U.S. has been rehearsed thousands of times, including by this writer, but the numbers still startle. In 1950, 20 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, it’s approximately 40 percent. Four in ten American children are now born to unmarried mothers, up from about 5 percent in 1960. In 1970, 84 percent of U.S. children spent their entire childhoods living with both bio-parents. Today, only half can expect to do the same.

The upshot? Millennials and those after them place a higher priority on career than on marriage and family:

The challenge is to find ways to communicate that need to coming generations before they make decisions that will further fragment their lives and communities. So far, that’s not happening. Millennials and their younger brothers and sisters say that they would like to marry and have children, but only 30 percent see a successful marriage as one of the more important things in life. About half shrug off single parenthood as a nonissue; in their view, cohabitation is fundamentally the same as marriage. Though the overall share of American babies born to unmarried mothers has declined a bit in the past few years, the majority of births to millennials are to unmarried women. So far, younger kids—Gen Z, as they are sometimes called—don’t look as though they’re ready to rebel from the nonchalance of their older siblings. In a 2018 survey of attitudes of 10- to 19-year-olds by PerryUndem Research and Communication, three-quarters rated having a successful career as “very important.” Fewer than a third said that marrying or having children mattered that much. Notably, boys and girls had almost identical answers.

Hymowitz's essay, as you can see from these exceprts, is an important deep dive, but she doesn't include any appreciable examination of something that was front and center among Prager's points: religion - specifically of the Judeo-Christian variety.

Given that God designed marriage and family, it only makes sense that home environments that neglect or exclude Him are more likely to see their cohesion fray.

Without the connection of kinship, we assume we can invent ourselves. We chart paths of ambition, achievement and amusement to no discernible end. And "meaning" begins to seem like a meaningless  thing to contemplate. And it's not far down that slope to the question of why it matters that a few dozen people get shot up in a public place. After all, we no longer attach any stigma to forms of self-mutilation such as tattoos and piercings and "gender reassignment" surgery.

All kinds of consequences flow from having no one expecting you to be home for dinner or to be in your own bed when dawn breaks. And, ultimately, there's no reason for that kind of accountability once no one sees that God insists on it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Devil has devoured this woman's soul

Pardon me for passing along something that may stick with you all day in a really unpleasant way.

[In a clip from a PBS documentary] a red-haired woman is seen talking a nurse. She’s currently pregnant with twins in the clip. As she and the nurse talk she is handed a pill which will kill the babies and initiate a miscarriage. The woman takes the pill on screen, which is you, the viewer, effectively watching as a woman kills her babies.

As this happens, the nurse describes the process, saying that after 24 hours she will take an additional pill that will then begin the cramps and bleeding that will push what she calls the “pregnancy tissue” out of her body.

The woman who swallowed the pill is then interviewed, and she gives what I can only describe as an incredibly disturbing justification for aborting her twin babies.

“What I hope I feel is a sense of peace — not only with myself and the decision I’ve made — but also a sense of peace with these two beings that I’ve chosen not to bring into the world,” says the woman.

She then speaks to the camera but addresses the babies she’s just aborted.

“Thank you for choosing me, and I’m honored to be given this gift of life, and also I can’t do it right now,” she said. “I can’t accept that mantle in terms of the other lives I’m taking care of and I’m responsible for.” 

This is no different morally from someone who would look into the eyes of someone desperately clinging by fingertips to the edge of a cliff, and say, "I know you're in a tough spot, but I have a busy schedule today."

Sports-world wokeness - two recent examples

Dodgeball, for cryin' out loud:

When the Canadian Society for the Study of Education meets in Vancouver at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a trio of education theorists will argue that dodgeball is not only problematic, in the modern sense of displaying hierarchies of privilege based on athletic skill, but that it is outright “miseducative.”

Dodgeball is not just unhelpful to the development of kind and gentle children who will become decent citizens of a liberal democracy. It is actively harmful to this process, they say.

Dodgeball is a tool of “oppression.”
It is not saved because some kids like it, according to an abstract for the presentation, led by Joy Butler, professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of British Columbia.

“As we consider the potential of physical education to empower students by engaging them in critical and democratic practices, we conclude that the hidden curriculum offered by dodgeball is antithetical to this project, even when it reflects the choices of the strongest and most agile students,” it reads.

This “hidden curriculum” in dodgeball is far more nefarious than your average gym class runaround. Dodgeball is “miseducative” because it “reinforces the five faces of oppression,” as defined by the late Iris Marion Young, a social and political theorist at the University of Chicago.

As Butler’s abstract describes it, those “faces” are “marginalization, powerlessness, and helplessness of those perceived as weaker individuals through the exercise of violence and dominance by those who are considered more powerful.” Young’s list of these fundamental types of oppression also includes exploitation and cultural domination.

The audience for this argument is primarily teachers, including gym teachers, who are identified as part of the problem, for not acting on values they otherwise understand and claim to hold.

“Despite the fact that many physical educators understand their vital role in helping students develop robust, equal, productive relationships and critical awareness, their practices on the ground do not always reflect this agenda,” the presenters write. “We suggest that this tension becomes sharply visible in the common practice of allowing students to play dodgeball.” 

And this from the world of basketball has been germinating for a while, but now appears to be gaining traction:

A number of NBA teams have been considering ditching the term “owner” and high-level conversations have taken place over the past year, according to a report from TMZ.

These conversations have focused on the idea that the term “owner” feels racially insensitive in a league that is predominantly made up of black players.

Several high-ranking sources from multiple teams tell us people have been talking about the issue for a while but it gained steam in late 2018 when Draymond Green appeared on LeBron James' show, "The Shop," and argued against teams using the term.

"You shouldn't say owner," Green said ... noting the title should be changed to either CEO, Chairman or something like Majority Shareholder.

During the show, Jon Stewart agreed and explained, "When your product is purely the labor of people then owner sounds like something that is of a feudal nature."

Two teams have already made the change. The Philadelphia 76ers changed their titles from “owners” to “managing partners” and “co-owners” to limited partners.” The Los Angeles Clippers refer to their owner as “chairman” now.

"Chairman" isn't gender neutral, so I'm sure that will change soon enough.

Most teams are still using the term “owner” and are currently not being pressured to make the change. However, the league itself has changed its term for team owners to something they consider more racially sensitive. "We refer to the owners of our teams as Governors; each team is represented on our Board of Governors," an NBA spokesman told TMZ.

This is why I can't sign on to the everything-is-basically-fine-except-for-some-peripheral-nuttiness-people-are-lucky-to-be-alive-in-a-time-of-such-great-comfort-convenience-and-opportunity view of the present moment.  There is nothing that this rot does not permeate. From the arts to the corporate world to institutional religion to science and now, to the one area of life in which humans had historically retreated to blow off steam and test their skill, the dismantlers of our civilization are on the march.

Monday roundup

Jared Kushner's image as the boy wonder of Middle East peace negotiations is taking a hit. Palestinians in general don't like what he's coming up with; the stuff they've been insisting on all along -   statehood, Jerusalem as capital, and a right of return for refugees (71 years later, how many of those are there?) - isn't part of the plan. Each of the main Palestinian organizations has its specific reasons for giving it a big thumbs down:

The deal as outlined so far has been dismissed by President Mahmoud Abbas' western-backed Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Abbas has boycotted political dealings with the Trump administration for 18 months. This followed Trump's decisions in 2017 to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital and move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv.

Since then, the Trump administration has curtailed aid to the Palestinian Authority, shuttered the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) delegation in Washington and cut off finance to UNRWA, the U.N. agency supporting Palestinian refugees. Washington meanwhile endorsed Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

"In practice they have already started implementing 'the deal of the century'," the senior Palestinian leader said, "on the ground, step by step". "Today, the two-state solution has been scuttled".

Abbas is not alone in his view of the U.S. deal.

It was rejected by the Islamist Hamas movement, which does not recognise Israel's right to exist and has only given conditional consent to a state in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The PLO has dismissed the Kushner effort as an attempt to bribe Palestinians into accepting Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a prelude to Israel annexing about half their territory and leaving them with scattered cantons.

Hanan Ashrawi, a moderate Palestinian leader, tweeted that the Kushner plan and the Bahrain conference were just "a handout to make our captivity palatable".

And while it's been interesting to observe the closer ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia due to their common alarm about Iran, King Salman won't endorse a deal that doesn't meet the Palis' conditions.

Sandy From Westchester has, in the space of five months, established herself as a kingmaker in the Freedom-Hater party.  Former Maryland congressman John Delaney wasn't exactly tearing up the polls anyway, but he came in for boos and derisive laughter at the California Democratic Convention for telling those assembled that Medicare for all is a bad and unworkable idea and that 150 million post-Americans who are at least somewhat presently satisfied with their health insurance don't want it yanked away. In a tweet, Sandy said his assertion was "untrue" and that he needed to "just sashay away."

Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute has a great piece today entitled "China and Mexico: One Two Many Trips to the Tariff Well." Why is it so that there is one too many?

Placing high tariffs on one of them would mean we’d buy a lot more from the other; now we might not be able to. Canada, our third-largest source of imports, doesn’t send us the same products China and Mexico do. Neither does our fourth (Japan), fifth (Germany), and sixth (Britain), all much richer than China and Mexico and competitive in different sectors.

We have smaller trade partners, such as India, who do compete with China and Mexico but they can’t substitute for Chinese and Mexican goods on anything like the scale necessary. Imports from India last year were less than $90 billion.

Nor can we shift much production at all to the US in just the few months of time left according to the administration’s threats. If we apply 25% tariffs on China and Mexico simultaneously on October 1, the only thing we’re going to get is far more expensive products from China and Mexico.

One response from the administration might be to look to the longer term. In the long term, production would rise somewhat in the US and other countries would be able to replace Chinese and Mexican supply. That process, however, will take far longer if the main substitute for China (Mexico) and the main substitute for Mexico (China) are taken out of the picture.

As a China hawk, I have further concerns. The president’s confrontation of the PRC has caused companies to consider moving production. That process will slow if firms fear heavy new tariffs, for widely varying reasons, may be introduced on other countries. Further, in a battle for share of the US market after 25% tariffs, China would easily out-subsidize Mexico, and huge amounts of dollars would continue to flow to the Communist Party.

None of this means it is acceptable for Mexico to allow tens of thousands of migrants from other countries to pass through to the American border. Nor is it acceptable for China to continue to steal American technology important for national security and the health of our economy. But it is certainly possible to argue that tariffs are not a good response in either case. For example, the US has plenty of other tools to deal with China, such as targeting Chinese state-owned enterprises with sanctions.

If President Trump still insists on broad tariffs, there is no escaping that these two sets of tariffs undermine each other. The administration should bite the bullet and set a priority. And only one of these countries is a globally dangerous dictatorship.

Michael Brown is one of those Christian conservatives whose fealty to sound doctrine is refreshing, but whose enthusiasm for the Very Stable Genius leads him to make some very lame excuses for the guy. Such is the case with his latest Townhall column in which he claims to see 5-D chess in the VSG's balancing of his recognize-the-great-contributions-of-our-LGBT-citizens pandering with his reinstatement of the ban on transgenders in the military. Weak tea, Michael. The VSG is nowhere near that deft. He does what he thinks is going to make him look like a winner at any given moment even if it contradicts - because he has the memory capacity of my cats - what he did to look like a winner yesterday.

I mean, check this out:

As an evangelical supporter of Trump, I would much rather that he did not muddy the waters with what appears to be a mixed message. But it’s who he has been since he announced his run for president. And overall, when the dust settles, he has done far more to oppose LGBT activism than to support it, as Signorile and his colleagues know all too well.

Play-like energy forms are hitting users of normal-people energy forms in the pocketbook:

Solar panels and wind turbines are making electricity significantly more expensive, a major new study by a team of economists from the University of Chicago finds.

Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) "significantly increase average retail electricity prices, with prices increasing by 11% (1.3 cents per kWh) seven years after the policy’s passage into law and 17% (2 cents per kWh) twelve years afterward," the economists write.

The study, which has yet to go through peer-review, was done by Michael Greenstone, Richard McDowell, and Ishan Nath. It compared states with and without an RPS. It did so using what the economists say is "the most comprehensive state-level dataset ever compiled" which covered 1990 to 2015.

The cost to consumers has been staggeringly high: "All in all, seven years after passage, consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of the policy," they write.

Freddy Gray at Spectator USA is exactly right that the VSG needs to cut it out re: the schoolboy name-calling exchange he has going with London mayor Sadiq Khan:

Trump being Trump, he can’t resist counter-punching Khan. Twitter spats are his modus operandi. But it is a shame that he has insisted on reigniting his feud with Khan, since there are far more interesting things to talk about at this important moment in the relations between America and Brexit Britain. Trump vs Khan is a silly distraction, a bit like that ridiculous (and oddly small) Trump baby protest blimp that commands so much media attention.

Glenn Reynolds' dim view of what social media is doing to us ought to give us pause:

In the days of the old blogosphere, when people expressed views on their own personal blogs, scattered across many different servers and platforms, other blogs might pick them up.
But each time that happened, it took a conscious decision, and at least some degree of thought, to compose and publish a blog post, and bloggers who published links to stories or posts found elsewhere often encouraged readers to “read the whole thing.”
On social media, a “share” or “retweet” takes but a second, and research indicates that most people never read anything but the headline before sharing. This facilitates the rapid spread of outrage mobs, conspiracy theories and hysteria.

Things are made worse by the fact that social media sites operate under algorithms that promote “engagement,” which generally means emotion. And because, as tech visionary Jaron Lanier has written, the easiest emotions to engage are the negative emotions, the effect of social media platforms’ algorithms is to amplify negative feelings.

The more you use them, the angrier and sadder you’re likely to become. (And they’re quite consciously designed to be addictive.) 

Jim Geraghty at National Review is pretty worked up - and rightly so - about PACs from the yee-haw stratum of the Right scamming people who think their donations are going to rescue Western civilization: He gives the figures for amounts donated in a particular time frame vs. how much actually went to particular political candidates or causes of a slew of organizations: Put Vets First, Conservative Strike Force, Tea Party Majority Fund, a bogus Sheriff David Clarke-for-Senate campaign fund, and the Committee To Restore America's Greatness, just to name a few.

Don't hold back, Jim. Tell us how you really see it:

And some folks want us to believe that the problem with the conservative movement is David French?

Why is the conservative movement not as effective as its supporters want it to be? Because day after day, year after year, little old ladies get called on the phone or emailed or receive letters in the mail telling them that the future of the country is at stake and that if they don’t make a donation to groups that might as well be named Make Telemarketers Wealthy Again right now, the country will go to hell in a handbasket. Those little old ladies get out their checkbooks and give what they can spare, convinced that they’re making a difference and helping make the world a better place. What they’re doing is ensuring that the guys running these PACs can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle. Meanwhile, conservative candidates lose, kicking the dirt after primary day or the general election, convinced that if they had just had another $100,000 for get-out-the-vote operations, they might have come out on top.

Mayor Lightfoot, call your office: 50 shot, 10 dead in Chicago over the weekend.

 

 

Barney & Clyde - episode 7

Here's the link.

Pour yourself something bracing and join us at the Libation Station for episode 7 of Barney & Clyde, a fortnightly and forthrightly delivered exchange of views, from the libertarian (Clyde) and conservative (Barney) perspectives on the issues of the day and their broader implications.
This episode's five segments: 
Big Questions (in which we look at what a right is and what cannot be a right, by definition)
You'll Never Be Woke Enough (Ani di Franco takes fire from fellow feminists)
Old News (whither Howard Schultz?)
Intramural Dustups Ahmari vs. French
Strange Bedfellows Ted Cruz teams with Sandy From Westchester to craft a bill prohibiting former legislators from lobbying Congress

Two Democrat governors who actually deserve hearty good-on-yas

Good on ya Steve:

Nevada governor Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, vetoed legislation on Thursday that would have preemptively committed the state’s presidential electors to whichever candidate won the national popular vote.

“After thoughtful deliberation, I have decided to veto Assembly Bill 186,” Sisolak said in a statement. “Once effective, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact could diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests and force Nevada’s electors to side with whoever wins the nationwide popular vote, rather than the candidate Nevadans choose.”

“I recognize that many of my fellow Nevadans may disagree on this point and I appreciate the legislature’s thoughtful consideration of this important issue,” he added.

The legislation, which was approved by the state Senate last week, would have made Nevada a signatory to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which technically preserves the Electoral College but subverts its authority by requiring that signatories award all of their electors to the candidate that wins the national popular vote.

And good on ya John:

Nearly three decades ago, when Democratic Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards' wife was 20 weeks pregnant with their first child, a doctor discovered their daughter had spina bifida and encouraged an abortion. They refused.

Now, daughter Samantha is married and working as a school counselor, and Edwards finds himself an outlier in polarized abortion politics.

"My position hasn't changed. In eight years in the Legislature, I was a pro-life legislator," he said. When he ran for governor, his view was the same. "I'm as consistent as I can be on that point." 

Edwards, who has repeatedly bucked national party leaders on abortion rights, is about to do it again. He's ready to sign legislation that would ban the procedure as early as six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant, when the bill reaches his desk.

Louisiana's proposal, awaiting one final vote in the state House, would prohibit abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, similar to laws passed in Kentucky, Mississippi, Georgia and Ohio that aim to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. 

We shall see how much room there is in today's Dem party for this much - to employ a currently fashionable term among Dems - diversity. But for the moment, let's acknowledge that two chiefs of state in our union did the right thing.

"It could get worse"

Ben Domenech weighs in, bracingly, at The Federalist on the Ahmari - French dustup:

. . . it could get worse: it’s possible both the perspectives of these Christian conservative thinkers are too optimistic. Social conservatives should be most concerned that both French and Ahmari are wrong about what the enemies of freedom believe possible, that the harshest voices in the American left won’t be satisfied just driving traditional American values from the oped pages or the universities or the local boards. Instead, the left may be turning into the culture war white walkers, bent on utter and total destruction of everything American Christians hold dear – including the liberty to hold beliefs at odds with the consensus of the elite – and that they will root for that belief, even when it is hidden in their hearts.

The present moment kind of has that feel, doesn't it?