What principle looks like

The Senate version of repeal and replace some kind of tweak to the current health care "law" gets a thumbs-down from four of the Senate's best:

Four Republican senators — enough to thwart passage — said Thursday they will not support the current Senate Obamacare replacement plan and will seek changes. 

Conservatives Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnsonof Wisconsin and Mike Lee of Utah said in a statement that they "are not ready to vote" for the proposal Senate Republicans released Thursday. 

"There are provisions in this draft that represent an improvement to our current health care system, but it does not appear this draft as written will accomplish the most important promise that we made to Americans: to repeal Obamacare and lower their health care costs," the senators said. 

Paul told reporters that "my hope is not to defeat the bill, but to make the bill better." He said, "We want the bill to look more like a repeal." 

Cruz told reporters that "I think we can get there, but the current draft doesn't do nearly enough."

Oh, that we could have 100 such champions of freedom in that august body.

Russia

Yes, North Korea definitely remains a front-burner issue, but Russia, with which the United States has never had what one would call warm relations, is presenting us with an array of gestures that arguably rise to the level of crisis.

There's this:

Russia's deputy foreign minister has cancelled a scheduled meeting with Thomas A. Shannon Jr., the under secretary of State for political affairs, the State Department said Wednesday.

Shannon, who is currently meeting with U.K. officials in London, was set to meet with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov in St. Petersburg on Friday.

According to the AP, Ryabkov said in a statement that "the situation is not conducive to holding a round of this dialogue" with the U.S. 

“We regret that Russia has decided to turn away from an opportunity to discuss bilateral obstacles that hinder U.S.-Russia relations,” State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said in a statement. “We would refer you to the Russian government to explain their decision to cancel this meeting. From our perspective, and as Secretary [Rex] Tillerson has made clear, there are many issues to be discussed. We remain open to future discussions.”

The announcement that Ryabkov would not meet with Shannon came a day after the U.S. Treasury Department added 38 individuals and entities, including two Russian government officials, to its list of those facing sanctions for Russian intervention in Ukraine and Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The decision to widen the list came as President Trump met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at the White House.

Nauert defended the sanctions on Wednesday, saying that penalties were in line with longstanding U.S. policy and should not have come as a surprise to the Kremlin.

"Let’s remember that these sanctions didn’t just come out of nowhere," she said. "Our targeted sanctions were imposed in response to Russia’s ongoing violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbor, Ukraine."

And, as we mentioned in the roundup this morning, this:

Russia’s defense ministry said Monday that, as a result of the U.S. shooting down the Syrian warplane, it would no longer abide by the 2015 U.S.-Russia “deconfliction” agreement, which was “aimed at minimizing the risk of inflight incidents among coalition and Russian aircraft operating in Syrian airspace.”

“From now on, in areas where Russian aviation performs combat missions in the skies of Syria, any air-born objects found west of the Euphrates River, including aircraft and unmanned vehicles belonging to the international coalition, tracked by means of Russian land and air anti-aircraft defense, will be considered air targets,” a statement from the Russian defense ministry read, according to CNN.

Russian foreign defense minister Sergei Ryabkov also accused the U.S. of helping terrorists by shooting down the Syrian plane.

And this:

 . . . on Monday, an armed Russian Su-27 fighter approached within five feet of an American RC-135 reconnaissance plane in the Baltic Sea.  This was the most dangerous of 35 similar incidents in the area since the beginning of June.  It is also consistent with escalating Russian interceptions of U.S. aircraft in other regions, particularly the Black Sea and off the coast of Alaska.

Pretty much puts the lie to the notion that the Trump administration is cozy with the Putin regime.

There is some solace in the fact that Russia and the US have a history of skilled backing away from the precipice. Remember the stakes everybody, and do what you can to ratchet this down.

UPDATE: A Wired article entitled "How an Entire Nation Became Russia's Test Lab for Cyber War" reveals much about Putin-era Russia's character.

The Cyber-Cassandras said this would happen. For decades they warned that hackers would soon make the leap beyond purely digital mayhem and start to cause real, physical damage to the world. In 2009, when the NSA’s Stuxnet malware silently accelerated a few hundred Iranian nuclear centrifuges until they destroyed themselves, it seemed to offer a preview of this new era. “This has a whiff of August 1945,” Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, said in a speech. “Somebody just used a new weapon, and this weapon will not be put back in the box.”

Now, in Ukraine, the quintessential cyberwar scenario has come to life. Twice. On separate occasions, invisible saboteurs have turned off the electricity to hundreds of thousands of people. Each blackout lasted a matter of hours, only as long as it took for scrambling engineers to manually switch the power on again. But as proofs of concept, the attacks set a new precedent: In Russia’s shadow, the decades-old nightmare of hackers stopping the gears of modern society has become a reality.

And the blackouts weren’t just isolated attacks. They were part of a digital blitzkrieg that has pummeled Ukraine for the past three years—a sustained cyber­assault unlike any the world has ever seen. A hacker army has systematically undermined practically every sector of Ukraine: media, finance, transportation, military, politics, energy. Wave after wave of intrusions have deleted data, destroyed computers, and in some cases paralyzed organizations’ most basic functions. “You can’t really find a space in Ukraine where there hasn’t been an attack,” says Kenneth Geers, a NATO ambassador who focuses on cybersecurity.

In a public statement in December, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, reported that there had been 6,500 cyberattacks on 36 Ukrainian targets in just the previous two months. International cybersecurity analysts have stopped just short of conclusively attributing these attacks to the Kremlin, but Poroshenko didn’t hesitate: Ukraine’s investigations, he said, point to the “direct or indirect involvement of secret services of Russia, which have unleashed a cyberwar against our country.” (The Russian foreign ministry didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)

To grasp the significance of these assaults—and, for that matter, to digest much of what’s going on in today’s larger geopolitical disorder—it helps to understand Russia’s uniquely abusive relationship with its largest neighbor to the west. Moscow has long regarded Ukraine as both a rightful part of Russia’s empire and an important territorial asset—a strategic buffer between Russia and the powers of NATO, a lucrative pipeline route to Europe, and home to one of Russia’s few accessible warm-water ports. For all those reasons, Moscow has worked for generations to keep Ukraine in the position of a submissive smaller sibling.

While one motive is Russia's refusal to accept that, since the breakup of the USSR, Ukraine is a sovereign nation charting its own way in the world, this kind of funny business has a larger purpose we ought to take heed of:

Yushchenko, who ended up serving as Ukraine’s president from 2005 to 2010, believes that Russia’s tactics, online and off, have one single aim: “to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, to make its government look incompetent and vulnerable.” He lumps the blackouts and other cyberattacks together with the Russian disinformation flooding Ukraine’s media, the terroristic campaigns in the east of the country, and his own poisoning years ago—all underhanded moves aimed at painting Ukraine as a broken nation. “Russia will never accept Ukraine being a sovereign and independent country,” says Yushchenko, whose face still bears traces of the scars caused by dioxin toxicity. “Twenty-­five years since the Soviet collapse, Russia is still sick with this imperialistic syndrome.”

But many global cybersecurity analysts have a much larger theory about the endgame of Ukraine’s hacking epidemic: They believe Russia is using the country as a cyberwar testing ground—a laboratory for perfecting new forms of global online combat. And the digital explosives that Russia has repeatedly set off in Ukraine are ones it has planted at least once before in the civil infrastructure of the United States. 

Russia really doesn't cloak its aims in any kind of ideology anymore. It's just emblematic of a mindset we see a lot throughout human history: nation-states, kingdoms and empires behaving aggressively because they feel their inherent greatness entitles them to.

 

Travis Kalanick resigns as Uber CEO

The move was prompted by a letter, entitled "Moving Uber Forward, drafted by five big investors and delivered to Kalanick in Chicago.



Uber is a lot of things. It has rightly earned the admiration of free-market champions for bringing an entirely new business model to the transportation world, one in which supply and demand were synced up in real time, as riders could see how many drivers were in their area on their app, and drivers could likewise see what the concentration level of riders was like - indeed, whether it had risen to the point where surge pricing was in effect. The unionized taxi industry hates it, which led to baseball bats being taken to Uber cars at the Paris airport a couple of years ago.

But the company had some odd ways to go about asserting its efficacy, such as hiring former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to be its negotiating face with regulators, or hiring Eric Holder to lobby for it against efforts to make it conduct fingerprint checks, and then putting him in charge of an internal investigation into funny-business aspects of its corporate culture.

And about that funny business in the culture: It seems the place was rife with sexual harassment and bullying and bad morale.

It's at least somewhat emblematic of the tech-world's ethos in general: a combination of nerd-style go-getter-ism with a strong scent of testosterone, a corporate line crafted to burnish its progressive bona fides, and a line of undeniably cool products and services.

There's a real outreach campaign going with regard to drivers, probably at lest in part due to feeling the heat from proliferating competition. Tipping is now going to be part of the model, as is getting paid for wait times, and driver injury protection insurance.

Good moves, but let's hope the company is not drifting in the direction of conferring employee status on drivers. Ride-sharing's entrepreneurial aspect is most of its appeal.

But its current fortunes are representative of something true in any realm of human activity: Without a culture that venerates character, the most exciting model for improving everybody's lot will not sustain the enterprise.

The roots of our present rot

In the comment thread of a recent post, a reader asked me which side declared our present civil / cultural war.

I traced it back to the New Left academicians of the 1950s, particularly William Appleman Williams, the University of Wisconsin history professor who introduced the concept of moral equivalence. He posited that the US and the USSR were each just hegemony-bent superpowers with no discernible distinction between the righteousness of their aims. I then went into the radicalization that the New Left wrought, the militancy that filled the race-relations vacuum after Martin Luther King's death, the rise of feminism and the politicization of homosexuality, and, of course, the coarsening of our culture.

But I really think I could cede the floor to David French at NRO for presenting the most visceral account of the declaration of the war:

I grew up in rural Kentucky and went to college at a conservative Evangelical college in Tennessee. So it’s a bit of an understatement to say that I had limited exposure to the Left before my days at Harvard Law School. I was immersed in a new culture, and what I encountered was both reassuring and ominous. And it’s the ominous side, unfortunately, that is coloring much of American debate. 

I met liberals who are even today among the people I respect the most. They have keen intellects, gracious spirits, and virtuous goals. We disagree about means and sometimes disagree about ends, but I don’t doubt their ethics, intentions, or good faith. Liberal professors mentored me, I forged friendships that will last a lifetime, and I still learn from and appreciate the best expressions of liberal points of view.

But I also encountered cruelty and sheer malice. As I’ve written before, this was the era of the shout-down. This was an era not just of protests but also of malicious retaliation. Classmates told me to “go die” because of my pro-life speech. Some of my friends had their faces pasted on images of gay porn and posted around campus. Other friends were subject to campaigns to call future employers demanding that offers be revoked. The atmosphere was so toxic that GQ magazine wrote a piece describing the law school as “Beirut on the Charles.”

Yet in many ways Harvard embraced these hateful radicals. It gave them a home. It gave them a hearing. It gave them tenure. The most prestigious educational institution in the world was wrapping both its arms around some of the most vicious people I’d ever met. It was at Harvard that I came to understand the dynamic so powerfully described by Tom Wolfe in his legendary essay “Radical Chic.” All too many liberals admire radicals. They envy their commitment to the cause. They’re fascinated by their arguments, by their style, and by their very presence:

. . . and now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers. That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called “criminal facilitation.” And now he is out on bail and walking into Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s 13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue. Harassment & Hassles, Guns & Pigs, Jail & Bail — they’re real, these Black Panthers. The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny’s duplex like a rogue hormone.

The radicals mix with the liberals, and the liberals empower the radicals. What’s happening on college campuses today? A small fringe defies the rule of law, it shuts down free speech, and it sometimes even physically attacks speakers or their allies. It acts out of cruelty and sometimes even race-hate, spitting out the word “white” as if it’s inherently evil. And yet the liberal establishment caves into their demands (all while lauding their commitment to social justice), even issuing “stand down” orders to campus police that put innocent people in physical peril. The goal? To protect the safety of the rioters. At best, mainstream liberals deliver mild slaps on the wrist, like the joke punishments given to protesters at Middlebury College.

At best, a few brave souls will issue statements and write stern op-eds condemning censorship and academic intolerance. These voices are vital and appreciated, but it often feels as if they represent mere fingers in the dike — doing their best to hold back a torrent of radical rage.

The liberal response to Black Lives Matter is one of the best examples of this sad phenomenon. Millions of well-meaning Americans — justifiably eager for racial reconciliation and often deceived by misleading statistics and sometimes outright lies — have elevated an organization that has dedicated itself to the disruption of the “western-prescribed” nuclear family, celebrates cop-killers, and keeps mounting protests that turn violent (and sometimes even deadly). 

And there you have it.

Wednesday roundup

The sixth Congressional district, the one represented by Tom Price and Newt Gingrich, stays in Republican hands. Karen Handel has defeated Freedom-Hater challenger Jon Ossoff. And a slew of celebrities have lighter wallets today for a whole lotta nothin'.

South Korea has found a crashed North Korean drone on a mountainside. Its camera had aerial photographs of the THAAD site. SK considers it a "grave provocation."

Why is the Betsy DeVos-run Department of Education still investigating gender-pronoun "offense" claims?

How do Squirrel-Hair's slavish devotees feel about him telling a gathering of tech-world movers and shakers he favors "comprehensive" immigration reform? Will this be the nail in the coffin for Ann Coulter's crush?

Russia says it will view as hostile any aircraft not its own flying west of the Euphrates River in Syria.

The administrative class gets ever-more clever about getting inside the heads of the techno-eunuchs it employs

Have you always detected a certain odor wafting from such activities as team-building and leadership training? A certain combination of organizational conformity, insufferable jargon and touchy-feely perkiness?

Did you, when smelling said odor, think, this is going to take on an ever-more lefty tone?

Was it when "diversity" became part of one's orientation when joining a large bureaucratic organization, or perhaps when "giving back to the community" became a job requirement?

Well, check out how refined the effort to probe the sanctity of the space inside your skull has become. How you're assessed by your organization is no longer a matter of what you say and do, it extends to thoughts and assumptions you might not even be aware of having:

Students at the University of Pennsylvania will learn to confront their “denial and unconscious bias” surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and other minority statuses during a new course offered this summer.

The class, “Diversity and Inclusion: Strategies to Confront Bias and Enhance Collaboration in 21st Century Organizations,” will be co-taught by Dr. Aviva Legatt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey Floyd, an organizational psychologist who works in leadership development.

“In the workplace, it is inevitable that difference between individuals will cause conflict—whether explicit or beneath the surface,” the course description says. “Denial and unconscious bias will prevent issues from being addressed.”

While decades of pop-psychology has argued that unconscious bias is a major influence on how white people treat black people, or how heterosexual people treat the gay community, new research has actually found scarce evidence to prove this link.

Gregory Mitchell, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, reviewed the most current research on the issue earlier this year and concluded:

Seventeen years after introduction of the [test that measures unconscious bias], only a handful of studies have examined the influence of implicit bias on real personnel decisions, and those studies have provided inconsistent and at best weak evidence that implicit bias has any impact on employment decisions.

So, why is this Ivy League class predicated on an outdated theory that has been criticized by numerous researchers in the last few years? Good question.

Nevertheless, eager students will learn to fight their “denial and unconscious bias” through a number of tactics in the class, including through writing personal reflections about their own biases and talking to their classmates about them.

While Professor Legatt declined to share a copy of the syllabus with PJ Media, she previously co-taught an online course dedicated to “Optimizing Diversity on Teams,” which taught business leaders “specific strategies to get buy-in for their diversity initiatives” and how to fight the “biases that can harm these efforts.”

During the course, Legatt identified a variety of ways that “hidden bias” can creep up in the workplace, such as “offering to help women when the help is not asked for” and giving women easier, “less-challenging,” work assignments.

Legatt also claimed that employees perpetuate “hidden bias” around issues like gender, race, and sexuality “all the time,” and thus, it’s important to address because it has consequences for employee retention and burnout.

Still no peer-reviewed, replicated research proving this link, though.

We've come a long way from trust falls and ropes courses.

 

The irony involved in the Left's anti-corporate-world rhetoric: their target is correct, but the reason for their sentiment is way off-base

Ben Domenich has a piece at The Federalist today  in which he starts out by pointing out a real semantical problem in our current civil war conversation: We lack a universally agreed-upon definition of "globalism." He then proceeds to zero in on a definition that is very much grounded in reality.

He looks at the world-spanning supply chains of big corporations and how they make for a monolith that outstrips the power of any nation to assert its sovereignty in the face of that monolith. The values of a Google, an Apple, a Cummins, will supersede those of the indigenous culture in which such a firm situates a facility.

One of the frequent blind spots for economic libertarians, speaking as one who has personally dealt with this log in the eye, is a tendency to allow principles of how economies work and the beauty of trade to make us ignore perceived threats animating people who value more than just the power to buy and sell. The gigantism encouraged by our modern globalist system has many perks across many industries. But it has also given rise to a global corporate elite. This elite tribe of globalists share certain values: they are more tolerant of regulation, insomuch as it drives out competition; they are more welcoming of government expenditure, insomuch as it buys their products, builds their needed infrastructure, and subsidizes their hospital systems; and they care little about the subjugation of rights to speech and religion, so much as it makes their ability to sell in certain markets inconvenient.

This technocratic global elite will brook no local cultural impediments to its vision:

Today, the centralized power among the leaders of the global tech industry – who have little use for free speech and religion, and are thoroughly onboard with the Messianic aims of the environmental movement and the redefinitional aims of the anti-family movement – are steadily prodding governments to seal up the valves and the hatches. In a world where all the companies agree, what use are they after all?

The implicit motto of the global elites today is “no escape” – no escape valve from a permanently politicized life, where the only legitimate perspective is their monopolistic, secularized, authoritarian-friendly “no gods but science” view. When we do not view each other as legitimate – particularly when decisions are not coming from the people or properly elected officials, but from some other force – it leads to resentment, escalation, and eventually something much worse. We must view our fellow voters as legitimate citizens, and the leaders and policies we choose at the ballot box as legitimate expressions of the views of our fellow citizens. When we do not, we risk disaster. We risk conceding the field to the global elite that views us as a backwards people, who ultimately ought to be dissolved to elect another.

So the ground-level Leftist who sneers and rants at "the corporate world" has the right object of his or her ire, but the wrong reasons for harboring such ire.

But seeing that would require a very disturbing look in the mirror. The suits and muckety-mucks of the world they hold in such disdain are using their clout to impose on the entire world the very values that the Leftist holds dear.

Well-played, Leftists, even if you can't see the nature of your victory.

 

 

The only remedy for a brittle post-America on the verge of crackup

J. Robert Smith at The American Thinker quotes three tweets - one from actor James Woods, one from talk-radio host Michael Savage, and one from Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke - that characterize real civil war as inevitable.

As you know, there's been a debate lately about whether it is accurate / responsible to use the term "civil war" to describe our present moment. Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro have both taken Dennis Prager to task for using it (in the course of refutations of Prager's exhortations to regard Trump as "our general" in such a conflict; I take the Goldberg-Shapiro side in that larger context).

Rather than take an either / or approach to the debate, Smith says that what may be happening is an array of civil wars based on regional demographics:

For most Americans, their frame of reference is the U.S. Civil War. It was sectional rivalry -- a “War Between the States.” It was generally -- and neatly -- defined geographically. History rarely repeats itself, so blue states lining up against red states -- not for secession this go, but for national control – seems improbable.

There was more unanimity among citizens in South Carolina and Massachusetts at the time of the Civil War. While a left worldview dominates in California, and a right one does in Texas, both have populations that are hostile to the prevailing politics and ethos… substantial populations who resent the impositions of the reigning politics and cultures.  

Today, the states, though red or blue by degrees, are mixtures of communities -- populations who’s worldviews clash -- conflicts of politics, cultures, values, beliefs. Politics are merely an aspect, and, critically, more an endpoint for deeper divides.        

Keep in mind that many states have significant regional differences. Redder Central and Western Pennsylvania differ tellingly from Blue Philadelphia-dominated Eastern Pennsylvania. Upstate New York has little in common with New York City and its boroughs and nearby suburbs. Even in regions there are subsets at odds with surrounding communities and jurisdictions. Austin/Travis County, Atlanta/Fulton County, and Pittsburgh/Allegheny County differ from their states or regions. Birmingham, Alabama has more in common with Detroit, Michigan than the surrounding state. 

Absent colossal trigger issues or events -- union or disunion; free or slave; Fort Sumter -- degeneracy into multiple civil wars, played out in the states in varying degrees of intensity and duration, appears more realistic.  

Erick Erickson, writing at The Resurgent, says he is all out of optimism. He points out - correctly, I believe - that whether Democrats have been elbowed out of political power is not particularly relevant at this late date, because the Left has so effectively imposed a cultural totalitarianism on our society.

let’s not kid ourselves. If Texas decided to end abortion on demand and prohibit gay marriage, three-quarters of the Fortune 500, the NCAA, and every professional sports league would boycott the state. It is not enough that each state should be able to set its own values, even here the left demands adherence to its beliefs and punishment for the beliefs of others. So there is no escape from the culture war. There is no escape from the politicization of everything. There is no escape from an escalation of violence in politics. The minority nows gets to exert its will over the majority and every vice gets declared a civil right we must all worship and subsidize.

In our present atmosphere there is no escape from the American ISIS that is the political left. Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant and then it seeks to silence good. Evil is now dominant — but the partisan line is blurred.

The only escape is dissolution. We should part ways if we cannot have federalism. We should start talking about secession. If both sides have decided that every hill is a hill to die on and control of Washington means reward for their friends and punishment of their enemies, we need to end Washington. The way to do that is end the union.

I am no longer an optimist about the future of this country. This past week has shown there is no incentive for the better angels of ourselves to rise. Both sides are out for blood. 

I sort of think this was my real concern, lurking in the back of my mind, about the way populism had infected the conservative movement during the recently concluded election cycle. I'd only written here about cacophony, but maybe what I really dreaded was the final obliteration of civil discourse. The Left would do its thing, as it always has, but those who tried to present an alternative by example would get mocked by the new populists as having nothing more effective than core principles, erudition and eloquence, as if those were qualities worthy of disdain.

In the course of refuting Erickson's call for secession, Shane Van Der Hart at Caffeinated Thoughts asserts that there is only one way to heal what afflicts our nation:

. . . we have to recognize that politics will never cure what ails our country, the Gospel can. If anything is THE answer, it is the transforming Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Church needs to take the Great Commission of disciple making seriously. It starts with making sure we preach the Gospel to ourselves; we need to do a better job training those in the church. One does not have to look at many studies to discover heresy abounds in the Church, and that our children and grandchildren are leaving in droves.

Unfortunately, so many churches have focused so much on orthopraxy they have neglected orthodoxy. Yes, we need to engage our culture but engage them with the truth. To do that individuals and families in the Church need to know, embrace, and live the truth.

I can attest that this is what brought me to a sincere faith walk.

Nothing else can inject light into scenarios in which darkness looks to soon be total.

If your participation in this current post-American family fight is not driven by prayer, it's hollow and will lead to nothing anybody wants to see happen.

Some backstory to the Warmbier debacle

It seems the travel agency that organized the tour he was on was a mix of daredevil focus on unsavory destinations and partying:

 Warmbier was traveling to China when he signed up for a five-day North Korea trip with Young Pioneer Tours.

Gareth Johnson founded the company in 2008 seeking to create a space for people who usually shy away from group tours, according to the group's website. As a traveler, he fell in love with the people and culture of North Korea, he says. The 20 other higher ups in the company hail from The Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and other places, and one is from the United States, from Albuquerque.

The company is based in Xi'an, China, but also has offices in Almaty, Khazakstan, in central Asia, Dakar, Senegal, in west Africa, Havana and, for North Korea tours, a bar and tourism office called The DMZ Bar in Yangshuo, China, that specializes in trips to North Korea. All tours begin and end in Beijing and travelers enter North Korea by train, according to the company's website. The tours offer themes ranging from politics to biking along the DMZ demilitarized zone between North and South Korea to scuba diving.

The company appears to pull from young people seeking to experience off-the-tourist-track places on a budget. Drinking is a theme too and the company's Yangshuo, China, office that specializes in North Korea doubles as a bar.

In a 2016 piece on the Vibe.com website, Johnson is quoted as saying he launched the company after finding an inexpensive way to get into Hong Kong and getting drunk with a North Korean "in charge of stuff."

Johnson grew up in a working class family in West London and at 21, left England to become a bartender in the Cayman Islands. He also did a stint in Cuba, taught English in China and has made it into Eritrea, an African country undergoing border tensions with Ethiopia.

"I feel that interaction and cultural exchange is always positive," Johnson told Vibe.

At the time, he declined to discuss Warmbier, except to say, "If I bring guests that are respectful, willing to listen, willing to interact with people, North Koreans will see that we are normal people as well."

Traveler Adam Pitt told the Consumer Affairs website of his own trip into North Korea with Young Pioneer Tours that included lots of drinking, including an inebriated Johnson who could barely stand or talk, and bribes paid to tour guards. Johnson did not immediately respond to an e-mail sent to his company account on Monday. Tour guide Rowan Beard told Consumer Affairs that Pitt's account was not factual, and that while people do drink beer on the tours, it is not excessive.

And that name, "Young Pioneers." I really doubt that it's a coincidence. That was the name of the organization in the old Soviet Union that prepared teens and young adults for Communist party membership.

Does Johnson still feel that "cultural exchange is always positive?"

When everything is casual, regard for the self becomes outsized, and regard for others withers

For all that gets written about the outward trappings of culture - dress, speech, manners, food, art - the subject is far from exhausted.

G. Bruce Boyer, former fashion editor at Town & Country and the author of a history of menswear, makes a significant contribution to that conversation in the June issue of First Things. His general point is not entirely new. It is the one with which Joseph Epstein launched his still-relevant 2004 Weekly Standard essay, "The Perpetual Adolescent." 

WHENEVER ANYONE under the age of 50 sees old newsreel film of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak of 1941, he is almost certain to be brought up by the fact that nearly everyone in the male-dominated crowds--in New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland--seems to be wearing a suit and a fedora or other serious adult hat. The people in those earlier baseball crowds, though watching a boyish game, nonetheless had a radically different conception of themselves than most Americans do now. A major depression was ending, a world war was on. Even though they were watching an entertainment that took most of them back to their boyhoods, they thought of themselves as adults, no longer kids, but grown-ups, adults, men.

How different from today, when a good part of the crowd at any ballgame, no matter what the age, is wearing jeans and team caps and T-shirts; and let us not neglect those (one hopes) benign maniacs who paint their faces in home-team colors or spell out, on their bare chests, the letters of the names of star players: S-O-S-A.

Part of the explanation for the suits at the ballpark in DiMaggio's day is that in the 1940s and even '50s there weren't a lot of sport, or leisure, or casual clothes around. Unless one lived at what H.L. Mencken called "the country-club stage of culture"--unless, that is, one golfed, played tennis, or sailed--one was likely to own only the clothes one worked in or better. Far from casual Fridays, in those years there weren't even casual Sundays. Wearing one's "Sunday best," a cliché of the time, meant wearing the good clothes one reserved for church.

Boyer echoes this observation, using back issues of Life magazine rather than newsreels as our documentation of the assumptions of that era.

A little further up in his essay, he uses clothing to make clear the dichotomy between one's formal, public self and one's private self:

For quite a few years now, academic philosophers and socio­logists, as well as pop­ular social commentators who get paid to pronounce on such matters, have been telling us that people have been abandoning their formal personas in favor of the whims and behavior of their individual selves. The point of all the ink seems to be that public ritual behavior has given way to personal freedom, and that while we all used to have two personas, a public one and a private one, we now only have a private one which has gone public. Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man appeared in 1977, followed by Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism in 1979, and then the deluge. The publishing climax may well have come in 2000 with Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, in which Putnam argued that individuals were increasingly disconnected from one another and social structures.

While not putting an emphasis on dress itself, most commentators who have discussed the relationship between the public and private person have made reference to both dress and manners when discussing the abandonment of the formal public self. And perhaps nowhere can the loss of public self be so readily seen as in the clothes we wear. One commentator remarked, “A ‘gentleman’ no longer tipped his symbolic hat to a ‘lady’ to show the conventional respect due her sex; he no longer had a hat to tip.” And no one doubts that the hat is gone, as well as the suit, the tie, and the polished leather oxford. The word I’m searching for is casualization. There’s been, in the past couple of decades, a Great Casualization of the business wardrobe. The suits and white dress shirts and discreet ties that most businessmen wore for a hundred years and more started to disappear after the 1970s. When this casual business trend began in earnest in the following decade, fashion writers started referring to it as “the third wardrobe”—an alternative to both the tailored business clothes and athletic-inspired clothing that had traditionally comprised a man’s wardrobe for much of the twentieth century. Today, traditionally tailored clothing—suits, sports coats, and their accompanying accessories—might legitimately be considered the third wardrobe, a luxury wardrobe worn for dressy occasions by many, and daily by those in positions of real power in society.

His subsequent fleshing out of his point takes the reader into some areas of cultural unfolding that have been under-considered. He devotes a fair amount of space to the implications of the G.I Bill for the evolution of Americans' notions about formal dress. Democratization was working inland from the coasts, particularly the east coast.

The sons of steelworkers, mill hands, teachers, clerks, and farmers could go to college, start a business, buy a small house and car. A telling indication of this new prosperity could easily be seen by looking at what young people wore. Ivy League clothes—the soft-shouldered, buttoned-down, saddle-­shoed, gray flannel wardrobe—were by 1950 not limited to the Eastern establishment elite who had owned the style and worn the clothes for more than half a century, but were adopted by youth from Boston to Brownsville to every land grant college in the Midwest. The Ivy look—the Eastern establishment elite look writ large—became a symbol of the new prosperity. 

The next set of developments he traces is fascinating. For instance, he sees the outfit Miles Davis wore onstage at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival as a major cultural bellwether:

 . . . Davis stepped onstage at the ­Newport Jazz Festival wearing a seersucker jacket and club-collar shirt purchased at Charlie Davidson’s Andover Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and set a trend for the look of jazz musicians for the next decade and beyond. 

Interest in trends coming from Britain and Italy also helped take men's formalwear in the direction of lighter fabrics and cuts more accommodating to the movements of ambitious and energetic young achievers.

I do kind of wish he hadn't jumped so abruptly to the startling revolution in sensibilities wrought by the 1967 Summer of Love and the 1969 Woodstock festival. There is, it seems to me, some groundwork to be laid so as to make that countercultural burst more understandable.

In fact, one really needs to back up and examine unfavorable takes on this whole notion of a public self from hundreds of years ago. The argument that these customs and conventions are merely a pretense, a mask for the animal passions and thirst for raw power that drive human beings everywhere, has a long pedigree. Voltaire’s Candide in the eighteenth century, the Dada and Surrealist art movements of the early twentieth century, mid-century phenomena such as beat literature, Lenny Bruce’s revolutionizing of standup comedy, and the camp sensibility, and the various forms of identity politics that continue to morph to this day constitute a cursory timeline of mockery of the notion that there is anything more to refinement than artifice.

Consider the momentum though, with which the deterioration of a basic body of commonly regarded etiquette, customs, standards for language and dress, and expectations that art will in some way, even when dealing with terrible subject matter, be beautiful has proceeded.

Vulgar language began to appear in mainstream movies circa 1969 or 1970. It followed the appearance thereof in recorded music by perhaps a couple of years. The basis for its introduction into these realms was the argument that since everybody mutters such words and phrases in private, there’s something dishonest about banning it from the public sphere, that so banning somehow actually makes our discourse less rich and productive.

Boyer does make mention of the introduction of the work shirt into the American make wardrobe, as well as the increase in the prevalence of denim that continues to this day. He could, however, have bolstered his case by more overtly ascribing the rise to the romanticizing of the proletariat sensibility. The division between suits on the one hand and jeans and work shirts on the other even played itself out on rally stages where it was one way for young New Left adherents to get in the faces of their Congress for Industrial Democracy elders. Then, of course, there was the inestimable impact of the figure Bob Dylan cut in his folk-purist phase.

Boyer then takes us through the intervening decades between the great 1960s upheaval and today, during which upper management at America's large corporations, sensing the irreversibility of this new relaxing, introduced Casual Fridays, which didn't take long to become loosened codes for every day of the week.

His concluding insight is worth pondering. We no longer have attire available as a means for getting a bead on where someone has been:

Clothes have always provided the most obvious indication of both dignity and definition. There was no question in anyone’s mind when Louis XIV walked into the room who was king. His yards of ermine and gold cloth made it easy. But today we see a man walking in midtown Manhattan wearing a pair of jeans, denim shirt and jacket, cowboy hat, and cowboy boots and have no idea what he may be. He may of course be a cowboy, but on 34th Street? All we are given to know is that he wants to be thought a cowboy. At least for today.

The emphasis is mine. this is a hugely important point. Having jettisoned the notion of a public self, we grant everyone infinite leeway for self-invention.

I touched upon this phenomenon in a post here last month about tattoos, entitled "Self-Adornment, Taste and the Tension Between Individual Sovereignty and Cultural Health."

I'd like to offer the possibility that its look-at-me factor feeds a sense of self-importance, of a neurotic yearning for autonomy that is one of the chief signs of post-American society's rapidly declining health. It feeds this notion that everything about our daily lives ought to bear our signature, that everything must reflect personal style. Compose your own playlist to pump through your earbuds. Festoon your car with bumper stickers - maybe even a license plate - that trumpet to the world what you care about, or what reviles you. Get your coffee, your pizza, your salad dressing, exactly like you want it. (Let's see if I can remember all the varieties of ranch dressing I saw when I was shopping for the original kind the other day: bacon, avocado, cucumber, buttermilk, lite, fat-free . . . I'm forgetting some, but you get my point.)

If the whole point of abandoning stiff fabric and a narrowly proscribed range of permissible personal flourishes in favor of that which is loose and flexible was to elevate authenticity to a place of primacy among our cultural values, it's richly ironic, is it not, that many use this leeway to cloak their supposedly authentic selves in what amount to costumes, and the rest choose to appear among their fellow citizens in such a minimalist fashion that there seems to be no self about which to be authentic.

Sunday evening roundup

Joseph Bottoms, a professor of cyber-ethics and director of the Classics Institute at Dakota State University has a must-read review at the Washington Free Beacon on Philip Hamburger's new book, The Administrative Threat.

A taste:

This element of the Constitution is what the modern administrative state ignores. We have now a "revival of absolute power," in exactly a way that the Founders would have understood: a use of power that stands outside the constraints of the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches laid out in the Constitution. As Hamburger writes, "Eighteenth-century Americans assumed that a rule could have the obligation of law only if it came from the constitutionally established legislature elected by the people." Twenty-first-century Americans are governed instead by unelected officials who do their own rule-making, their own enforcing, and their own judging.

Kimberly Ross has a great Father's Day piece at Red State  called "Long Live the Patriarchy."

As LITD readers know, this former Never Trumper is now in the camp of let's-assess-each-development-on-its-merits. The abrupt change in Cuba policy is one for the good-move side of the ledger.

If you'd like to consume a feast of clear, deep thinking guided by unwavering principle, sprightly touches of humor, and ah-yes-I-feel-at-home-here humanity, languish a while at the YouTube channel of Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto.

How deep is Western civilization rot? This deep:

Currently, the Defense Department is working to meet a July 1 deadline for transgender integration training.

That’s right. It’s not about military readiness. They’re teaching them to bow to the LGBTQ mafia, at the expense of the integrity of our military.

“All of this is an effort to ensure the seamless transition and the full implementation of DoD policy,” said Zenia Boswell, a representative from the Army National Guard’s Personnel Policy Division, in a Thursday press release.

As of July 1, the release went on to say, “a person’s gender status — including being transgender — will no longer be a disqualifying factor from enlisting in the military.”

But it’s more complicated than that, as DoD has not yet finalized a transgender accessions policy. In the meantime, officials said, units are continuing to get training on the existing directive for currently serving soldiers.

To be clear, an indefinite hold was put on transgender admissions, but they’re moving forward, in preparation for what seems to be an anticipated lift.

Folks, that 's why it's accurate to call our nation post-America, even though we're rid of the Most Equal Comrade.

Father's Day: an excellent opportunity to reflect on manliness in the richest sense of the term

Occasionally, my pastor knocks it out of the park with his sermon.

Such was the case with his Father's Day message today.

It was richly multileveled. He spoke of his relationship with his own father, how the latter had led and taught through quiet example far more than overt lecturing or hammering home of formal standards. (He even got a little choked up when he noted it was the second Father's Day without his dad.) He cited the statistics tying social ills - drug abuse, violent crime, educational failure - to the absence of a father in a male's life. He made note of the fact that Jesus consistently referred to God as his Father, rather than calling him Lord or any other characterization found elsewhere in scripture.

But it was his distillation of the panoply of qualities that go into making a good father down to three that really gave shape to his remarks. These are providing, protecting and teaching. He then spoke of the sense of balance that a father needs to bring to each role. Overemphasis on providing can lead to the classic absence of the workaholic who misses the games, recitals, graduations and birthdays that are the milestones of his children's lives. Giving protection an outsized role leads to hovering and smothering and denying a child the space to fail and learn from it. Being too focused on teaching can lead to a child tuning out and thereby missing valuable lessons.

He then touched on the ways in which post-American culture elevates the undeniable virtues of the feminine mode of being human in a zero-sum context, as if that can't be good without maleness being bad. In other words, what happens is that masculinity gets disparaged. Hence we get university workshops on "toxic masculinity."

This, he ventured, is why we now hesitate to depict Jesus, who was a carpenter circa 20 AD, when such a tradesman was routinely slinging around large timbers and stones and using tools that required considerable strength to bring to bear on such materials, as manly. We want him unwaveringly gentle, with pretty hair and soft facial features. We want him exquisitely tolerant.

But that's not who he was. Yes, he made it clear that he was here to maximize the number of found sheep. The lost and the dead were his first priority. But he made it clear that their hearts were indispensable parts of the equation. If someone refuses to be found by Jesus, he has no choice when the hour of no sunset and no dawning arrives but to say, "I never knew you." When he encountered broods of vipers, he called them as much.

It doesn't take a rocket science to see why millennials are turned off by a plain-speaking messiah. They are most uneasy with the notion of right and wrong being objective. They see the church as engaging in the codification of human opinions:

Just over 60 percent of millennials say that Christianity is “judgmental,” and 64 percent say that “anti-gay” best describes most churches today. 

Just how important is the kind of example-setting that a committed father can do to the health of our culture? Well, if enough men with offspring slack at it, role models become ever-fewer:

Many youth have had no -- or very limited -- exposure to adult role models who know what they believe, why they believe it, and are committed to consistently living it out.

Authenticity is a term that can be used for good or ill. Employed in the service of some kind of "people-ought-to-just-be-themselves" ethos, it encourage narcissism and even infantile self-absorption. But a dignified authenticity - of a type nearly synonymous with backbone - is a precious commodity.

Father's Day presents those of us who are males, even if we don't have children, with a call to nobility. Male and female He created us, and He saw that it was good.

Manliness is not celebrated by the antics of singers in bro-country videos, or even action movies featuring some squinty-eyed, machine-gun-wielding protagonist with his back to the wall.

At least not nearly as well as by the example of a dedicated father, who, even in his inevitable sinfulness, perseveres in his effort to demonstrate qualities he understands to be good, right and true.

Of course, it's best celebrated by the Nazarene carpenter who said that his words came from his Father and nowhere else.

Tyranny and nature-denial to our north

At least post-America hasn't gone this far yet:

Canada passed a law Thursday making it illegal to use the wrong gender pronouns. Critics say that Canadians who do not subscribe to progressive gender theory could be accused of hate crimes, jailed, fined, and made to take anti-bias training.

Canada’s Senate passed Bill C-16, which puts “gender identity” and “gender expression” into both the country’s Human Rights Code, as well as the hate crime category of its Criminal Code by a vote of 67-11, according to LifeSiteNews. The bill now only needs royal assent from the House of Commons to pass into law.

“Great news,” announced Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister. “Bill C-16 has passed the Senate – making it illegal to discriminate based on gender identity or expression. #LoveisLove.”

Not everyone is so enthused:

Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, and one of the bill’s fiercest critics, spoke to the Senate before the vote, insisting that it infringed upon citizens’ freedom of speech and institutes what he views as dubious gender ideology into law.

“Compelled speech has come to Canada,” stated Peterson. “We will seriously regret this.”

“[Ideologues are] using unsuspecting and sometimes complicit members of the so-called transgender community to push their ideological vanguard forward,” said the professor to the Senate in May. “The very idea that calling someone a term that they didn’t choose causes them such irreparable harm that legal remedies should be sought [is] an indication of just how deeply the culture of victimization has sunk into our society.”

Peterson has previously pledged not to use irregular gender pronouns and students have protested him for his opposition to political correctness.

“This tyrannical bill is nothing but social engineering to the nth degree, all in the name of political correctness,” Jeff Gunnarson, vice president of Campaign Life Toronto, a pro-life political group in Canada, told LifeSiteNews.

When we codify little-kid-let's-play-pretend-wheee-we-can-invent-ourselves delusions as policy and law, we are looking at a moribund civilization.

 

 

 

Standing around the gasoline can, holding lit matches

June 2017 post-America is not a very fun place.

Victor Davis Hanson sums it up with requite grimness:

America barely survived the Civil War of 1861-65, the Great Depression of 1929-39, and the rioting and protests of the 1960s. But today's growing divides are additionally supercharged by instant internet and social media communications, 24/7 cable news, partisan media and the denigration of America's past traditions.

All Americans need to take a deep breath, step back and rein in their anger -- and find more ways to connect rather than divide themselves.

As does Peggy Noonan at the WSJ:

What we are living through in America is not only a division but a great estrangement. It is between those who support Donald Trump and those who despise him, between left and right, between the two parties, and even to some degree between the bases of those parties and their leaders in Washington. It is between the religious and those who laugh at Your Make Believe Friend, between cultural progressives and those who wish not to have progressive ways imposed upon them. It is between the coasts and the center, between those in flyover country and those who decide what flyover will watch on television next season. 

As does Jay Caruso at Red State:

The question is whether or not people will choose reason and rationality over finger-pointing and casting blame the next time something like this happens. Over at Legal Insurrection, Kemberlee Kaye wrote the following:

If we want things to be different, we must act and do differently. It is far easier to blame than it is to do, but ultimately, it is up to each of us to do our part to ensure this country, our home, and our future is the absolute best it can possibly be.

Make sure to read the whole piece. It’s a compelling argument, but if you scroll down and get to the comments, you’ll see:

The fact of the matter is that “we” don’t need to do a damn thing different. “They”–the left, the media, that whole set of crazies–need to change “their” behavior.

What do you think is going to cause that change to happen? That’s the discussion that needs to occur here.

Another:

Welp, we’ll agree to disagree. This is not a ‘cycle’, this is entirely one side attacking the other side, my side. Every day is a relentless assault on our way-of-life, our God-given liberties, and indeed our lives. It’s like fighting jihadis, unless you’re willing to name your enemy, you don’t have a chance of successfully defending yourself.

One more:

Kemberlee’s article is pretty much what every battered wife says when she goes and puts up bail for the guy who just gave her a pair of black eyes.

It is not saying if a similarly published piece appeared on a left-of-center site, people in the comments section there wouldn’t have similar takes about the right. It’s a near-certainty they’d exist. And therein lies the problem.

It's not just the baseball-practice shooting.

It's incidents like this:

As we’ve often seen, if you belong to a group the Democrat party considers one of its constituencies (women, minorities, LGBTQ) and you have the audacity to believe in conservatism, a special ration of hate is reserved for you.

Over Pride weekend, Orange County Democratic Party Vice-Chair Jeff LeTourneau lost his ever-loving mind when he heard that a person gathering signatures for a recall petition against Democrat state Sen. Josh Newman was gay. After a pro-Newman worker gave him that information, he made a special trip to the Wal-Mart parking lot to harass the group.

LeTourneau – wearing his Orange County Democratic Party name badge – strolls right up to the signature gatherers, feeling fully entitled to verbally attack and attempt to intimidate them.

Which one of you a**holes is gay?

Get your s*** and get out of here.  You’re a f***ing disgrace to every gay person I know.

How dare you come into our community and do this? For what? $20 an hour or are you getting $3.25 a signature? You’re whoring yourself out for what, $20 an hour or $3.25 a signature?

LeTourneau’s rage was mainly directed at Carl DeMaio, a former San Diego City Council member and openly gay conservative radio talk show host. 

DeMaio is also the founder of Reform California, which is spearheading the Newman recall effort. Newman was targeted for recall after California legislators passed SB-1, a transportation bill which includes hefty increases in vehicle registration fees and fuel taxes. The measure passed mostly along party lines. Newman, who voted for the measure, barely won his Senate race last fall in an area that’s traditionally been conservative, he was the easiest recall target. If the GOP is able to take that seat back, Democrats will no longer hold a supermajority in the state Senate.

So, LeTourneau clearly knows who DeMaio is, but asks him where he’s from anyway. He even feels he has the authority to tell them to leave, and looks like he’s about to destroy their belongings. 

And this:

On a day when lawmakers from both sides of the aisle in Washington are asking Americans to unite, a loyal Starbucks customer says she was targeted for supporting Donald Trump. Starbucks said they are making sure this incident won't happen again.

"I don't know what politics has to do with getting a cup of coffee," Kayla Hart said. 

Hart walked in to Starbucks on East Boulevard in Dilworth on Wednesday morning, wearing a Donald Trump t-shirt. Instead of being greeted with a smile, Kayla said the cashier laughed and her order was labeled with a political message, mocking her support for the president.

"They shouted out build a wall and shoved a drink at me and then all the barisatas in the back started cracking up laughing," said Hart.

The commotion caught the attention of nearby customers.

"I just walked out because everyone was staring," Hart said.  

We are at the point where certain citizens of this nation will not tolerate sharing geographic space with other citizens.

Again, I must trot out a couple of terms I'm employing fairly frequently these days: brittleness and cacophony.

Post-America is brittle because defiant swagger drowns out any other kind of discourse now. If you're not fierce, if your fangs aren't bared, no one finds you relevant.

Post-America is cacophonous because there is nothing transpiring that is of a defensible nature that one might latch onto and call one's cause to die for.  Just because the Left engages in the brinkmanship-level provocation cited above, do you feel compelled to rally around Donald Trump, discern in him some kind of cause to champion? Of course not. He exacerbates the situation with his utter lack of maturity or ideological consistency.

On the other hand, generalized calls for "everyone" to "tone down the rhetoric" can quickly deteriorate into milquetoast pleas for a collective kumbaya hug - after which there will still exist issues on our societal plate such as wealth redistribution, gender fluidity, cooked-book "science" regarding the global climate, the disappearance of the canon of Western literature from Western universities, denial of the fundamentally problematic nature of Islam, and the notion that health care is some kind of "right."

But, you see, these are matters of principle and idea.

The question for the moment, I guess, is whether enough people still insist on principle and idea driving our discourse or whether vulgar ad hominem taunts and threats and identity-politics militancy are going to cloud every syllable of every exchange between and among us.

Again I say, I'd give anything to one day take the pulse of this society and conclude that the name of this blog had become obsolete.

Today is not that day.