America stills soars above global competition

Why does America continue to do well, in spite of the failures of Washington D.C.? Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Put simply, millions of quiet, determined Americans get up every morning and tune out the incompetence and corruption of their government. They simply ignore destructive fads of popular culture. They have no time for the demagoguery of their politicians and the divisive rhetoric of social activists. Instead, these quiet Americans simply go to work, pursue their own talents, excel at what they do, and seek to take care of their families.

The result of their singular expertise is that even in America’s current illness, the nation still soars above the global competition.

Only in America can you find the sort of innovation, talent, legal framework, and can-do attitude needed to invent and refine hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling. Just a few hundred thousand scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, oil riggers, and skilled craftsman have revived the once-ossified oil industry for 320 million Americans

The United States is not running out of fuels — as was predicted over the last 20 years. It instead has become the largest gas-and-oil producer in the world.

The epitaph for Silicon Valley is written each year. Its tech industry is copied the world over. Yet seemingly each year a new American technical innovation — the laptop, Google, Facebook, the iPad, the iPhone — sweeps the world. Apparently, American informality, meritocracy, and top-flight engineering still draw global talent into Northern California, which sends back out the latest gadgets to be gobbled up by billions.

Neither drought, nor needlessly cumbersome regulations, nor unfair trade practices have stalled American agriculture. The farms of the United States — where less than 2 percent of the population resides — have never turned out so much safe, nutritious, and cheap food that is feeding the world and earning America hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign exchange.

The U.S. military — in which fewer than 1 in 100 Americans serve — is facing record cuts. The Navy will have fewer ships than the American fleet of World War I. The Air Force and the Marine Corps are shrinking. Yet superb American forces continue to ensure that the United States and its allies remain safe. Neither Vladimir Putin’s Russia, nor the Communist Chinese hierarchy, nor the Iranian theocrats are quite ready to take the on the U.S. military. All are rightly worried that to do so would be suicidal.

America is not saved by our elected officials, bureaucrats, celebrities, and partisan activists. Instead, just a few million hardworking Americans in key areas — a natural meritocracy of all races, classes, and backgrounds — ignore the daily hype and chaos, remain innovative and productive, and dazzle the world.

The silent few of a forgotten America have given the entire country an astonishing standard of living that is quite inexplicable.

Read more here.

Making a splash

Edward Kosner examines journalism in America today:

Quite simply, print editors and their writers, and especially the publications’ proprietors, are being unhinged by the challenge of making a splash in a new world increasingly dominated by the values of digital journalism. Traditional long-form journalism—painstakingly reported, carefully written, rewritten and edited, scrupulously fact-checked—finds itself fighting a losing battle for readers and advertisers. Quick hits, snarky posts and click-bait in the new, ever-expanding cosmos of websites promoted by even quicker teasers on Twitter and Facebook have broadened the audience but shrunk its attention span, sometimes to 140 characters (shorter than this sentence).

Whether they realize it or not, and most do, print journalists feel the pressure to make their material ever more compelling, to make it stand out amid the digital chatter. The easiest way to do that is to come up with stories so sensational that even the Twitterverse has to take notice.

As it happened, the Rolling Stone piece was undone by old-school reporting by the Washington Post, which has the resources to do its job only because it is being subsidized by the Internet billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who bought the paper from the Graham family last year for $250 million.

The new, disruptive pressure of digital publishing on what has come to be thought of as traditional journalism isn’t going to ease anytime soon. Those who are owners or workers in legacy publishing have to understand that they can survive the onslaught—and perhaps eventually thrive—only by maintaining the rigorous standards that once made these publications not only respected but trusted by their readers and advertisers. Desperate times call for disciplined journalism.

Read more here.

Journalism in America today

Mollie Hemingway looks at the state of journalism today:

It’s absolutely true that we don’t have a wave of outright fabrication-out-of-whole-cloth. But what we have is much worse. We have a tsunami of inaccuracy that is generally tolerated, embraced and even celebrated so long as it serves the right political and cultural goals.

But the real problem doesn’t seem, at this point, to be about journalistic invention so much as adoption of narratives at the expense of facts.

I know you’re shocked — shocked! — that AP reporter Philip Elliott inaccurately described speeches about abortion. But note that it fit the media’s general narrative of downplaying news that might be damaging to the pro-choice movement — COUGH GOSNELL COUGH — while distorting and hyping news about pro-lifers to make them look bad.

Far too many reporters covering this administration are willing to swallow whole the outlandish claims made by officials regarding what happened in the IRS scandal and, basically, every other scandal that we’ve seen in the last six years. The way Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone treated Jackie is the way a lot of reporters treat the causes, candidates and White House that they love and are passionate about.

Read more here.

Will Ted Cruz need 24-7 Secret Service protection?

Violent tax collection

The sad death of Eric Garner in New York City is being talked about a lot. One aspect of the story that has only been mentioned in passing is why he was being arrested. He was selling "loosies." Loosies are the preferred way of buying cigarettes for many people in New York. Why? Lawrence J. McQuillan explains:

Was he robbing a store or attacking innocent citizens? No, police arrested Garner supposedly for selling untaxed cigarettes. The strong-arm arresting process claimed Garner’s life, all over the sale of 75-cent loose cigarettes or “loosies.”

High taxes produce underground markets for goods and services, and when these taxes are hiked, smuggling increases. Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than in New York City.

In the name of cutting smoking rates, New York has the highest state cigarette tax at $4.35 per pack. New York City piles on an additional local cigarette tax of $1.50 per pack. Since 2006, the cigarette tax in New York state has been raised 190 percent. In response, cigarette smuggling there increased 59 percent. More than half of all cigarettes consumed in New York state are smuggled, according to a 2014 report by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Garner chose to participate in the booming underground cigarette market as a smuggler. Since 2009, he had been arrested eight times for selling loosies, which are popular among people who can’t afford a full pack because of the excessive taxes.

In January 2014, tough new penalties for selling untaxed cigarettes took effect in New York City. In July, emboldened by the new law, the city’s highest-ranking uniformed cop, Philip Banks, issued an order to crack down on loosie sales days before Garner died.

New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton wants the public to think that officer retraining on arrest procedures will fix the problem. However, Commissioner Bratton and other city officials choose to ignore the true cause: Current laws create too many situations that put police in conflict with citizens over consensual, nonviolent activities.

Eliminating punitive cigarette taxes would shrink the underground market and help redirect police resources to combating real crimes of force and violence, rather than empowering police to employ violence in the name of tax collection.

Read more here.

Empathizing with Putin and Islamists, but not Israel

Needed: a massive resettlement program!

What the Democrats need in order to win back the House of Representatives: a massive resettlement program! You see, they are too heavily concentrated in urban areas. The suburbs and rural areas are heavily Republican, in case you haven't noticed. Read more here.

Time to cash in on the "worst" ideas of the 90s.

Robert MacMillan writes:

Now that the internet has become a much bigger part of our lives, now that we have mobile phones that make using the net so much easier, now that the Googles and the Amazons have built the digital infrastructure needed to support online services on a massive scale, now that a new breed of coding tools has made it easier for people to turn their business plans into reality, now that Amazon and others have streamlined the shipping infrastructure needed to inexpensively get stuff to your door, now that we’ve shed at least some of that irrational exuberance, the world is ready to cash in on the worst ideas of the ’90s.

The lesson here is that innovation is built on the shoulders of failure, and sometimes, the line between the world’s biggest success and the world’s biggest flop is a matter of timing or logistics or tools or infrastructure or luck, or—and here’s the lesson that today’s high flying startups should take to heart—scope of ambition.

Go here to read more about ideas such as groceries and pet food being delivered to your door.

Not human-caused

So, what has caused the three-year drought in California?

Natural conditions, not human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases, are the driving force behind California’s three-year dry spell, scientists on a federal task force concluded Monday.

The evidence suggests a naturally induced “warm patch” of water in the western Pacific helped to create a high-pressure ridge that blocked precipitation from entering California, the experts said at a news conference to release the report.

“We have been able to identify this as a mode of ocean forcing of atmospheric circulation that causes West Coast drought,” said Richard Seager, a climate model specialist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Read more here.

The producers

Joel Kotkin and write that

the rustbelt could well be on the verge of a major resurgence, one that should be welcomed not only locally but by the rest of the country. Two factors drive this change. One is the steady revival of America as a productive manufacturing country, driven in large part by new technology, rising wages abroad (notably in China), and the development of low-cost, abundant domestic energy, much of it now produced in states such as Ohio and in the western reaches of Pennsylvania.

The second, and perhaps more surprising, is the wealth of human capital already existent in the region. After decades of decline, this is now expanding as younger educated workers move to the area in part to escape the soaring cost of living, high taxes, and regulations that now weigh so heavily on the super-star cities. In fact, more educated workers now leave Manhattan and Brooklyn for places like Cuyahoga County and Erie County, where Cleveland and Buffalo are located, than the other way around.

Yet a funny thing has happened on the way to oblivion: the rustbelt’s industrial base is reviving. Cheap and abundant natural gas is luring investment from manufacturers from Europe and Asia, who must otherwise depend on often unsecured and more expensive sources of energy. The current energy and industrial boom, according to Siemens President Joe Kaeser, “is a once-in-a-lifetime moment.”

Indeed, since 2010, jobs have expanded in energy, manufacturing, logistics and, with the return of the housing market in some areas, construction. Although much of the expansion has taken place in the sunbelt, notably Texas, the rustbelt economy has also been a prime beneficiary. Of the top ten states for new plants in 2010, five were in the rustbelt—led by second place (after Texas) Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana.

Most impressively, there has been a revival of job growth in these areas. Between 2009 and 2013, rustbelt cities and states dominated the country’s industrial revival. At the top of the list is Michigan, which gained 88,000 industrial jobs, a performance even greater than that of Texas, which came in second. The next three leading beneficiaries are all rustbelt states: Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

For much of the past half century, the rustbelt states suffered high levels of unemployment. But today Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin have considerably lower rates of unemployment than the national average, and considerably less than California, Georgia, Nevada, New Jersey, and New York.

The rustbelt’s technological strengths differ considerably those of the two leading engineer cities, San Jose/Silicon Valley and Houston. In the Silicon Valley engineers tend to be focused on the high profile digital economy, while those in Houston are generally engaged with oil and gas. In contrast, the rustbelt’s workforce is more involved in the world of production, of practical engineering. Their work conforms closest to French sociologist Marcel Mauss’s description of technology as “a traditional action made effective.”

Read more here.

Consequences of the irresponsible self-indulgence of our time

Thomas Sowell writes:

Rape is a crime. It belongs in a criminal-justice courtroom. And those found guilty belong behind bars for a long time.

What could possibly have led anyone to believe that college professors or campus administrators should be the ones making decisions about charges of criminal acts that can ruin the lives of the accuser or the accused?

Do we want people punished, based on other people’s preconceptions, rather than on the facts of the individual case? Apparently there are ranting mobs who do, and many in the media who give them a platform for spouting off, in exchange for the mobs’ providing them with footage that can attract an audience.

The law is not the place for amateurs. We do not need legal issues to be determined by academics, the media, or mobs in the streets.

Every society has orders and rules, but not every society has the rule of law — “a government of laws and not of men.” Nor was it easy to achieve even an approximation of the rule of law. It took centuries of struggle — and lives risked and sacrificed — to achieve it in those countries that have some approximation of it today.

To just throw all of that overboard because of mobs, the media, or racial demagoguery is staggering.

A generation that jumps to conclusions on the basis of its own emotions, or succumbs to the passions or rhetoric of others, deserves to lose the freedom that depends on the rule of law. Unfortunately, what they say and what they do can lose everyone’s freedom, including the freedom of generations yet unborn.

For people who have never tried to take into custody someone resisting arrest, to sit back in the safety and comfort of their homes or offices and second-guess people who face the dangers inherent in that process — dangers for both the police and the person under arrest — is yet another example of the irresponsible self-indulgences of our time.

Force cannot be measured out by the teaspoon, and there are going to be incalculable risks every time force is resorted to, because no one can predict what is going to happen in the next moment. Anyone involved can end up in the hospital or the morgue. Let the responsibility lie with whoever forces a resort to force.

Gruber refuses to tell Congress how much taxpayer money he received to deceive the taxpayers about Obamacare

Thanks to Ace of Spades

Happy Birthday Little Richard

Little Richard turned 82 this week. I wonder if he is still singing about Lucille.

Yes, the Nazis were socialists

Were the Nazis socialists? Daniel Hannan writes:

Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.

Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order.

But what about the “Nazis-were-far-Right” shtick?
Read more here.

Reality will always trump political spin

Is the Islamic State smuggling nuclear and radioactive material out of Iraq? One jihadist on Twitter is claiming that IS has smuggled a device into Europe. Adam Kredo writes:

Iraq reportedly informed the United Nations in July that terrorists had seized nuclear materials being housed at Mosul University. Some 90 pounds of uranium were said to have been stolen, according to reports.

Former Pentagon adviser Michael Rubin said that intelligence officials should be considering the information disseminated by purported IS confidants.

“Too often, counterterrorism officials plan to prevent replication of the last terror attack,” Rubin said. “Terror groups, however, plan to shock with something new.”

“Maybe Britani is lying, and maybe he’s not. But Western officials would be foolish to assume that just because something hasn’t happened yet, it won’t,” Rubin said. “The terrorist groups have the motivation and, thanks to post-withdrawal vacuum created in Iraq, the means to strike the West like never before.”

The threats also should factor into the ongoing debates about border control, according to Rubin.

“Perhaps it’s also time to recognize that open borders and successful counter-terrorism are mutually exclusive,” he said. “It’s a lesson that might fly in the face of Obama’s ideology, but reality will always trump political spin.”

Read more here.

Presuming the guilt of the accused

Emily Yoffe writes:

Unfortunately, under the worthy mandate of protecting victims of sexual assault, procedures are being put in place at colleges that presume the guilt of the accused. Colleges, encouraged by federal officials, are instituting solutions to sexual violence against women that abrogate the civil rights of men.

More than two dozen Harvard Law School professors recently wrote a statement protesting the university’s new rules for handling sexual assault claims. “Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process,” they wrote. The professors note that the new rules call for a Title IX compliance officer who will be in charge of “investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review.” Under the new system, there will be no hearing for the accused, and thus no opportunity to question witnesses and mount a defense. Harvard University, the professors wrote, is “jettisoning balance and fairness in the rush to appease certain federal administrative officials.” But to push back against Department of Education edicts means potentially putting a school’s federal funding in jeopardy, and no college, not even Harvard, the country’s richest, is willing to do that.

Any woman who is raped, on campus or off, deserves a fair and thorough investigation of her claim, and those found guilty should be punished. But the new rules—rules often put in place hastily and in response to the idea of a rape epidemic on campus—have left some young men saying they are the ones who have been victimized. They are starting to push back. In the past three years, men found responsible for sexual assault on campus have filed more than three dozen cases against schools. They argue that their due process rights have been violated and say they have been victims of gender discrimination under Title IX. Their complaints are starting to cost universities. The higher education insurance group United Educators did a study of the 262 insurance claims it paid to students between 2006 and 2010 because of campus sexual assault, at a cost to the group of $36 million. The vast majority of the payouts, 72 percent, went to the accused—young men who protested their treatment by universities.

I’ve read through the court filings and investigative reports of a number of these cases, and it’s clear to me that many of the accused are indeed being treated unfairly. Government officials and campus administrators are attempting to legislate the bedroom behavior of students with rules and requirements that would be comic if their effects weren’t frequently so tragic. The legal filings in the cases brought by young men accused of sexual violence often begin like a script for a college sex farce but end with the protagonist finding himself in a Soviet-style show trial.

One campus rape is one too many. But the severe new policies championed by the White House, the Department of Education, and members of Congress are responding to the idea that colleges are in the grips of an epidemic—and the studies suggesting this epidemic don’t hold up to scrutiny.

There are approximately 12 million female college students in the U.S. (There are about 9 million males.) I asked the lead author of the study, Christopher Krebs, whether the CSA represents the experience of those millions of female students. His answer was unequivocal: “We don’t think one in five is a nationally representative statistic.” It couldn’t be, he said, because his team sampled only two schools. “In no way does that make our results nationally representative,” Krebs said. And yet President Obama used this number to make the case for his sweeping changes in national policy.

The one-fifth to one-quarter assertion would mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.

The names Hannah Graham and Morgan Harrington, two Virginia college students who were kidnapped, raped, and murdered, are powerful testimony to the need to get campus sexual assault right. Jesse Matthew, 32, being held for Graham’s murder, has also been linked to Harrington’s and will be tried for the rape of a third woman who managed to get away. When he was a college student, Matthew was expelled from two consecutive schools, Liberty University and Christopher Newport University, after accusations of rape. Tragically, neither case ended up in the criminal justice system. It is precisely because serial predators of the kind Lisak describes do exist that we should recognize adjudicating rape is not the job of college administrators but of law enforcement. Expelling a predator only sends him out into society to attack again.

Elevating the psychological comfort of victims over society’s need to punish criminals will only let perpetrators go free.

What is to be done? How can the government and institutions of higher education address sexual assault, support victims, identify predators, and not unfairly punish innocent students?

A good place to start would be scaling back the powers of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which has overstepped its bounds in micromanaging university policies and enforcing draconian rules that infringe on the rights of the accused.

The prohibition about discussing the connection between alcohol and sexual assault should be lifted. We don’t live in a perfect world, and while school administrators should do their best to provide safe environments, it is up to each individual to make wise decisions. Getting incapacitated has no upside for young men or women. Administrators ignore the role of alcohol in sexual assault at their peril, and at the peril of their students, men and women.

We also need to change the culture of discourse around sexual assault on campuses. To stand up for the rights of the accused is not to attack victims or women. Our colleges, like the rest of our society, must be places where you are innocent until proven guilty. The day after graduation, young men and women will be thrown into a world where there is no Gender-Based Misconduct Office. They will have to live by the rules of society at large. Higher education should ready our students for this reality, not shield them from it.

Read more here.

Betting against the others

Thanks to Christopher Buckley

Cowards

Pat Buchanan writes:

Among the primary causes of the ruin of FDR’s great coalition, and the rise of Nixon’s New Majority, was the belief in Middle America that liberals were so morally paralyzed by racial guilt they could not cope with minority racism, riots and crime.

And so they lost the nation for a generation.

That same moral paralysis is on display in the aftermath of the grand jury conclusion that Officer Darren Wilson acted in self-defense when he shot Michael Brown on Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Missouri.

The grand jury concluded that not only did most witnesses support Wilson’s version, but the forensic evidence was consistent with what Wilson said had happened, and contradicted Brown’s lying companion.

Hence, no indictment, and wisely so.

Yet, Michael Brown’s death, whatever the grand jury decided, is an irreversible tragedy, horrible for his mother and father.

But what happened last week was not a tragedy but a national disgrace, a disgusting display of adult delinquency.

Monday night we witnessed in Ferguson a rampage of arson, shooting, looting and vandalism, with police and National Guard ordered not to interfere. Stores and shops, the investments of a lifetime for their owners and the livelihood of their employees, were firebombed and pillaged as police looked on.

For a week, mobs blocked highways, bridges and commuter trains from New York to Oakland. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade was disrupted. On Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, moms and their kids at malls had to climb over unruly protesters to do their Christmas shopping. The civil rights of law-abiding Americans were systematically violated.

Make no mistake. The Ferguson riots of recent months were like neighborhood cookouts compared to Watts in ‘65, Detroit and Newark in ‘67, and Washington, D.C., and a hundred other cities after the 1968 assassination of Dr. King. But the reaction of our political, media and moral elites seems even more irresolute than that of the liberals of the 1960s.

Only three weeks in office, Eric Holder called us “a nation of cowards.” Observing his and his boss’ performance in the wake of the Ferguson riots and other rampages, the same word come to mind.

Read more here.

A multigenerational project

Ann Sterzinger writes that:

amusement at others often betrays a vague feeling of our own shame.

Are we all creatures of media? Have we seen the death of books? Of face-to-face conversation?

We didn’t start forsaking the people around us for glowing pictures on a box when the smartphone was invented. Losing one’s humanity is a multigenerational project.

Having lunch with lions

Gavin McInnes writes:

Telling women they’re not sex objects and forcing them into the workforce has made them infertile. White Americans have stopped having babies and raising families, which is why we’re about to become a minority in our own country.

Girls don’t rule the world. Evil does.

Getting picked on prepares kids for the real world. When I go into a work meeting, it’s not that different from stepping into the ring. People want to test your mettle. I’ve noticed a direct correlation between how much time I spend boxing and how much money I make. We shouldn’t be protecting kids from conflict. We should be training them to enjoy it.

That’s what happens when you try to sanitize everything: more people end up getting hurt. If Mao had left the Chinese to their own devices instead of saving them from themselves, 77 million lives could have been spared. So stop trying to make a world where we can sit down and have lunch with lions. They’re brutal and dangerous animals. That’s what’s so beautiful about them. I don’t want to live in a world without this kind of beauty.

Please read more here.

Dismantling Judeo-Christian culture

Gavin McInnes writes about the cultural Marxists who run Canada and Britain, and who have far too much power in our American government.

making us less safe in the name of protecting people.

He salutes Ezra Levant, the Canadian journalist and TV host who

is primarily known for fighting the totalitarianism and corruption of various human rights commissions. He’s one of the few with the patience and resources to call them out on their hypocrisy and expose them for what they really are: cultural Marxists determined to dismantle Judeo-Christian culture.

In 2006, Levant was “investigated” by the Alberta Human Rights Commission for daring to reprint the Mohammed cartoons. He decided to tape the investigation; it became an international story that brought the commission out of the shadows and into the scrutiny of the Canadian taxpayers (who were paying about half a million dollars for the case).

Levant refused to apologize or back down in any way and after paying over $100,000 in lawyer fees, he was exonerated. Since then, he has made it his life’s work to fight for free speech, and it’s all meticulously documented in his thrilling book Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights.

Read more here.

The Night of Undocumented Shopping

Steve Sailer writes of Ferguson:

Just as in the farcical 2013 trial of “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman, when the rule of law was finally applied to this tragedy, we found that the public had been relentlessly misled.

Months of egging on the mob in Ferguson, Missouri by the Obama Administration, the Democratic Party, and the national media in order to goose turnout in this month’s midterm elections have culminated in the Night of Undocumented Shopping.

CNN reported:

An entire row of businesses on West Florissant Avenue, a major thoroughfare, was engulfed in flames. … Many business owners will return to their shops to see their livelihoods in ruins. Looters broke into a beauty supply store and stole hair weaves and wigs, leaving the heads of mannequins strewn in the middle of the street.

In Ferguson, it’s time for reparations … to the shopkeepers.

And it’s past time for a National Media Day of Shame and Reflection on why they keep falling for frauds and fiascos.

Read more here.

"We can't do anything!"

John Derbyshire laments that we now live in a country that "can't do anything." We are leaving Afghanistan after losing 3,481 coalition casualties and $1,000,000,000,000 dollars. The enemy, the Taliban, is stronger than ever. The Taliban is based in Pakistan, so we can't do anything?

“If youth only knew: if age only could,” say the French. Darn right. When you’re young you’ll tackle anything. Every experience is a first fine careless rapture. With age comes hesitation, then passivity, then incapacity.

Whatever we once were, we no longer are. Whatever vigor we once had now hangs limp and useless.

I am dreaming of a U.S.A. that can do things: deport illegals, shoot looters, win wars. It’s pure nostalgia, of course. We can’t do stuff like that today. We can’t do anything.

Read more here.

The Age of Aquarius

Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris and his wife Eileen McGann are not admirers of Hillary Clinton, to put it mildly. They have formed a website entitled The Hillary Daily.com to make regular comments about Hillary's candidacy. I wonder about the etiology of the ill will they have toward her.

Today Eileen tackles Hillary's suggestion that we should empathize with our enemies:

In a speech to a half-empty auditorium at Georgetown University that her spin doctors would undoubtedly describe as half-full, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have sealed her presidential ambitions.

At the very least, she raised serious questions about her fitness to be Commander-in-Chief.

She’s dangerous. We need to keep her far, far away from that Oval Office.

In a momentous statement, she called on Americans to “understand” and “empathize” with the “perspective and point of view” of our enemies, helping to “define the problems, determine the solutions.” She said “Smart Power” left “no one on the sidelines” and used “every possible tool and partner to advance peace and security.” Clinton even called for “respect” for our enemies.

She sounded like a new age philosopher about to belt out a line from The Age of Aquarius at a 60‘s peace rally. You could almost hear the words:

“Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars.”

Perhaps we should ask her which of our enemies she would have us "empathize" with? ISIS, who beheads reporters on the internet? Iran, who tortures and kills thousands of political dissidents every year and foments terrorism? Or North Korea that starves its own people to death? How about Assad who gases them? Putin who boldly
annexes his neighbors by force, ignoring international law?

What’s gotten into her? This woman who maintains the largest, most comprehensive, expansive, and growing list of personal and political enemies of any American political figure? Who dug up blackmail material on her husband’s mistresses to cow them into silence? Now she wants us to be forgiving, respectful, and compassionate to our enemies. Has she ever been?

You’re in over your head, Hillary. Go home. Channel Osama in the privacy of your own home. Don’t endanger our country.

Read more here.

Hoist on its own petard

Victor Davis Hanson believes that Barack Obama's ideology has been thoroughly discredited.

The hope-and-change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from “leading from behind” to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of a war against ISIS.

There were only two saving graces to Obama’s misadventures abroad. One, as was also true of the alphabet stew of domestic scandals, each ensuing disaster seemed to divert attention from the prior calamity. Two, Obama was not able to halt new energy exploration on private lands as he had done with federal leasing. So followed a gas and oil renaissance that he opposed but can now claim as a great boon to American global leverage. Otherwise, what Barack Obama has accomplished, in the fashion of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in the Twenties and Thirties, will be to avoid minor confrontations on his watch — if he is lucky — while ensuring catastrophic ones for his successors.

Illegal immigration is praised only by those who benefit directly from it, whether in the familial sense of inexpensive nannies, cooks, or gardeners; or in the corporate interest of cheap labor in the hospitality industries, agriculture, and construction; or in the political sense of new liberal constituents; or in the tribal sense of expanding the so-called La Raza base. But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues.

The burdens of the attempt to grant federal exemption to millions of foreign nationals who have never followed U.S. immigration law inevitably fall on the middle-class taxpayer and the entry-level worker. We will also soon learn that over 11 million illegal aliens are not all Dream Actors. Rather, there is a huge minority of millions of illegal residents who have broken all sorts of U.S. laws, have not worked and are on public assistance, and have no record of sustained residence in the United States. When a guest chooses to break the laws of his host by entering his home illegally, that is usually the beginning, not the end, of illegality — a mindset and pattern of behavior that in many cases is not ended by simply erasing federal immigration law. The demand for immediate action for those who would qualify for Obama’s amnesties begs the question of whether there would be commensurately quick deportations of those who do not.

Take also global warming — for Secretary of State John Kerry, the world’s greatest challenge. Once the planet did not heat up in the last 18 years, and once the ice of the polar caps did not melt away, global warming begat climate change. The new nomenclature was a clever effort to link all occasional weather extremities to some underlying and fundamental climate disruption. Brilliant though the strategy was — the opposites of cold/hot, drought/deluges, and calm/storms could now all be used as proof of permanent climate change — global warming finally was hoist on its own petard: If it caused everything, then it caused nothing.

So, in the end, what was global warming? It seems to have grown up largely as a late-20th-century critique of global-market capitalism by elites who had done so well by it that they had won the luxury of caricaturing the very source of their privilege. Global warming proved a near secular religion that filled a deep psychological longing for some sort of transcendent meaning among mostly secular Western grandees. In reality, the global-warming creed had scant effect on the lifestyles of the high priests who promulgated it. Al Gore did not cut back on his jet-fueled and lucrative proselytizing. Obama did not become the first president who, on principle, traveled with a reduced and green entourage. Solyndra did not run a model transparent company as proof of the nobility of the cause. As in the case of illegal immigration, the losers from the global-warming fad are the working and middle classes, who do not have the capital to be unharmed by the restrictions on cheap, carbon-based fuels.

The natural outcome of the reactionary approach to race relations — identity politics, the salad bowl in lieu of the melting pot, the effusions of trillions of dollars over the last half-century into Great Society dependencies — is Ferguson. We are left with the movement’s slogan, “Hands up; don’t shoot!” which now joins a growing historical corpus of racial mythography — “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” and “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Ferguson illustrated many of the problems of postmodern liberalism: the anti-empirical insistence that the facts of the shooting of Michael Brown did not matter much; critical legal theory, which ignored the time-honored role of a disinterested grand jury; the tolerance of illegality as some sort of acceptable protest against the system; and the liberal media’s hyping a crisis on the understanding that the ramifications of the violence were safely distant from their own schools, neighborhoods, and restaurants.

The bitter truth is that Barack Obama himself is a figure who has always trafficked — albeit far more brilliantly and subtly than the buffoonish Sharpton and Jackson — in racial divisiveness, from his candid admissions in his memoir and his acknowledged dutiful discipleship at the feet of the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright to “typical white person,” the clingers speech, “punish our enemies,” and the racially charged spin on the ongoing Skip Gates, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown cases. A sign of his brilliant racial contortionism is the current canard that losing 6 percent of the black vote is proof of diversity while winning only 40 percent of the white vote is an ominous sign of a new racism.

The more the liberal media outlets of shrinking audiences warned of “increasing racial tensions” as they sought to spike animosities, the more they were oddly deaf to the real story of Ferguson: a growing majority of Americans that has grown tired of racial demagoguery and profiteering. Last month’s election illustrated that the drumbeat of a supposedly old, shrinking, white, and selfish electorate juxtaposed to a new dynamic, idealistic, electorate of color only served to lose Democrats the former voters while not winning enough of the latter voters to make up the difference. After the disastrous Obama tenure, the U.S. will either return to the melting pot and the idea that race and tribe are incidental, not essential, to our characters, or it will eventually go the way of all dysfunctional societies for which that was not true — Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq.

Finally, and most important, Obamism did not even deliver on its extravagant promises of a new ethos of ending crony capitalism, the revolving door, lobbyists in government, and government corruption. Indeed, Obama will go down in history as presiding over the most corrupt administration of the last half-century, when historians finally collate the IRS, VA, GSA, and Secret Service scandals; the erosion of constitutional jurisprudence; the serial untruths about Benghazi, amnesty, and Obamacare; the harassment of journalists; the record shakedown of Wall Street lucre in 2008 and 2012; and the flood of lobbyists into and out of the Obama administration. Eric Holder – with his jet-setting to sporting events on the public dime, spouting inflammatory racialist rhetoric, politicizing the Justice Department, selectively enforcing settled law, and being held in contempt of Congress for withholding subpoenaed documents — managed what one might have thought impossible: He has made Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell seem a minor rogue in comparison.

Six years after the summer of hope and change, no one in the Democratic party is showcasing American foreign policy, pushing for cap-and-trade legislation, singing the praises of Obamacare, bragging about the way amnesty was handled, or pointing to a new cleaner and more transparent federal bureaucracy. What started out with “hope and change” and “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” ended up with a president who habitually misleads his countrymen, a baffling array of scandals, the discrediting of the obsequious media, and policies that not only did not work but by any historical model could never really have worked.

As proof, watch as Democrats regroup for 2016. Their unspoken commandment will be that most of what Obama did, they must either ignore or deny.

Read more here.

A large war is looming

Victor Davis Hanson believes that "absent preventive American vigilance," a large war is looming. He worries that

Collapsing oil prices — a good thing for most of the world — will make troublemakers like oil-exporting Iran and Russia take even more risks.

Lecturing loudly and self-righteously while carrying a tiny stick did not work with Japanese warlords of the1930s. It won’t work with the Communist Chinese either.

Radical Islam is spreading in the same sort of way that postwar Communism once swamped post-colonial Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But this time there are only weak responses from the democratic, free-market West. Westerners despair over which is worse — theocratic Iran, the Islamic State, or Bashar Assad’s Syria — and seem paralyzed over where exactly the violence will spread next and when it will reach them.

There once was a time when the United States encouraged the Latin American transition to free-market constitutional government, away from right-wing dictatorships. Now, America seems uninterested in making a similar case that left-wing dictatorships are just as threatening to the idea of freedom and human rights.

In the late 1930s, it was pathetic that countries with strong militaries such as France and Britain appeased Fascist leader Benito Mussolini and allowed his far weaker Italian forces to do as they pleased by invading Ethiopia. Similarly, Iranian negotiators are attempting to dictate terms of a weak Iran to a strong United States in talks about Iran’s supposedly inherent right to produce weapons-grade uranium — a process that Iran had earlier bragged would lead to the production of a bomb.

The ancient ingredients of war are all on the horizon. An old postwar order crumbles amid American indifference. Hopes for true democracy in post-Soviet Russia, newly capitalist China, or ascendant Turkey long ago were dashed. Tribalism, fundamentalism, and terrorism are the norms in the Middle East as the nation-state disappears.

Under such conditions, history’s wars usually start when some opportunistic — but often relatively weaker — power does something unwise on the gamble that the perceived benefits outweigh the risks. That belligerence is only prevented when more powerful countries collectively make it clear to the aggressor that it would be suicidal to start a war that would end in the aggressor’s sure defeat.

What is scary in these unstable times is that a powerful United States either thinks that it is weak or believes that its past oversight of the postwar order was either wrong or too costly — or that after Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, America is no longer a force for positive change.

A large war is looming, one that will be far more costly than the preventive vigilance that might have stopped it.

Read more here.

What is the legacy of Ferguson?

Victor Davis Hanson asks, in the wake of Ferguson,

Will some law enforcement officials now surmise that it is wiser to ignore some crimes in the inner city on the practicable logic that the denouement for the officer will likely be negative — either by stopping the assailant through force or not stopping the assault and thus being assaulted? If the suspect is unarmed but attacks, the post-Ferguson choice will either be to suffer physical harm or to respond in ways that may equate with the end of a career.

Just as the ethics reformer in the White House has left a legacy of unprecedented presidential scandal, so too the racial healer has presided over the greatest erosion in racial relations in the last half-century. That is the lesson of Ferguson — and the Fergusons to come — and the backlash outrages to the Fergusons to come — and on and on and on.

Read more here.

Generic Christmas: guaranteed not to offend

Are you squeamish about celebrating Christmas as the day we remember the birth of Jesus Christ? Here's a wonderful generic Christmas song for you.

Top writers and thinkers in America today

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that it is mostly about featuring the ideas and words of people who are much smarter than I. In that quest for truth, one of the things I have done is subscribe to something called "The Best of Journalism." Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer for The Atlantic, is the one who puts that together twice a week.

This week Mr. Friedersdorf did something unusual. He admitted that he didn't see the signs of "staggering journalistic malpractice" when he linked to a Rolling Stone Magazine story about an alleged rape. I wrote to Mr. Friedersdorf congratulating him for publicly acknowledging his mistake, and I asked him if he had considered the possibility that the reason he didn't see it may be because, like the majority of people in his profession, he has a liberal bias.

I told Mr. Friedersdorf about my blog, and he said he would read it. So, who are the people I read that I think shed light on the great issues of the day? Here is a list of people for whom I am very grateful for their area of expertise, whom I regard as the top writers on critical issues of our day:

Critiques of the domestic and foreign policy failure of the Obama administration: Victor Davis Hanson

What it means to be a Christian, and what Christmas is all about: Ann Voskamp

All about Islamic Jihad, the sworn enemy of America, Israel, and the west: Andrew McCarthy, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller

All about Iran, the world's biggest sponsor of terrorism: Michael Ledeen

Justice in America: Andrew McCarthy and J. Christian Adams

The hoax of global warming and climate change: William Teach, Anthony Watts, and Steven Goddard

Economic, demographic, and political commentary about places: Joel Kotkin

The evil of feminism: Chateau Heartiste

Political analysis: Ace of Spades

China: Epoch Times

Resistance to socialism: Bill Whittle, Scott Ott

There are many more outstanding writers and thinkers I rely on to enrich my knowledge of the world. They are listed on the blogroll at the right side of my blog.

Update: Mr. Friedersdorf replied: "For writers and thinkers on the right, I regularly follow Reihan Salam, Charles C.W. Cooke, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Radley Balko, Matt Labash, Rod Dreher, Daniel McCarthy, Andrew Ferguson, Heather Mac Donald, James Poulos, everyone at the Orange County Register op-ed page (where I am a columnist), Ross Douthat, Yuval Levin, Jim Manzi, and many more–too many to name them all, I suddenly realize!"

132 years!

Did you know that the seat Mary Landrieu just lost in Louisiana has been Democrat for 132 years? Here is an interesting article and chart breaking down each Senate seat according to how long it has been held by the party currently in office.

Thank you, voters!

Harry Reid is no longer in control of the U.S. Senate. Louisiana added number 54 today to the Republican roster. His name is Bill Cassidy. The Democrats now have 46. Read more here.

A holy night

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

A thank you project

Thanks to Ann Voskamp

What's wrong with liberalism

Jennifer Rubin sees three trends in modern liberalism:

First, liberalism’s moral superiority led to intellectual laziness, a refusal to look at the way the world is (e.g. the failure of Keynesian economics, the nature of Islamic fundamentalism, the shortcomings of the liberal welfare state, disregard for the benefits of free markets). With that laziness came a distasteful tone. Twitter seems the perfect medium for the snarly left — filled with one-liners, personal attacks, snap judgments and just plain meanness. Identity politics, the last refuge of a movement with few policy innovations to offer, becomes the default mode for the left.

Second, the faults in liberal ideology became more acute as society became more complex. Yuval Levin (conservative philosopher, policy wonk and editor who has no liberal counterpart) writes: “But the size and cost of the liberal welfare state are a function of its basic character, and it is that character that is really at issue in most policy debates between liberals and conservatives. The fundamentally prescriptive, technocratic approach to American society inherent in the logic of the Left’s policy thinking is a poor fit for American life at any scale. The liberal welfare state ultimately cannot be had at an affordable price. It is not the architecture of one or another particular program that makes it unsustainable. It is unsustainable because the system as a whole must feed off of the innovative, decentralized vitality of American life, yet it undermines both the moral and the economic foundations of that vitality.” To be blunt, a set of assumptions about society and the world that were wrong but passable in 1960 are an obvious debacle in 2014. Giving the left power in the form of their dream president proved a fatal move, allowing all to see its gross shortcomings.

Third, the left’s disdain for limitations on its quest for power (the rule of law, factual accuracy, due process, personal civility) has proven to be unwise and self-destructive. Smash-and-grab politics cannot sustain itself. The president can’t simply make up facts and seize power from the legislative branch to achieve what he wants. The narrative cannot be accurate if the facts are wrong. Fair-minded people revolt against kangaroo courts and institutional railroading. And loss of polite debate and respect for opponents erode the public square and obviates the need for much needed self-reflection and reasoned argument. As universities fall down on their job of instilling ethical and intellectual excellence the failures of other liberal institutions (the media, the think tanks) leave a movement adrift and shallow.

Obama has certainly been bad for Democrats, but until they fix what is wrong with liberalism the Democratic Party will not recover.

Read more here.

Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap

More from Chateau Heartiste:

Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Every psychological dynamic you see playing out in mass societies liberated from artificial constraints on the sexual market flows from this premise. This means, as a systemic matter, women are coddled, men are upbraided. Women are victims, men are victimizers. Women need a leg up, men need to man up. Women have advocacy groups, men have equal opportunity violations.

Rationalizing favoritism toward women as some sort of payback for male privilege, or refusing to acknowledge this favoritism altogether, is an example of the cognitive calisthenics and evasive sophistry most people will indulge to avoid grappling with the cold, black void of an uncaring evolutionary replication machine.

Read more here.

Who gets the blame?

Are you a woman? Do you have a talent for avoiding consequences? Chateau Heartiste writes:

Women are the biologically and reproductively more valuable sex, (men are the culturally and civilizationally more valuable sex), and this instinctive reality influences every social and political aspect of our lives. It’s the reason why women are eager to recuse themselves from any blame, no matter how deserving, and the reason why men are eager to enable women to do this.

Since this sex difference in blame apportioning and accountability is biological in nature, there will never be a program or seminar or rehabilitation camp capable of overturning it. The most you can do is point it out so the worst excesses of it aren’t codified into law by raving feminist lunatics and nancyboy beta suckups.

Women are indeed verbal magicians in the art of redirecting blame and avoiding consequences for their actions. They likely evolved this talent as an answer (antidote?) to male physical and martial superiority. Some other ways women avoid consequences:

- blaming “the system” or “the patriarchy” (this covers a wide swath of feminist philosophy, such as it is)
– pathologizing male behavior
– exploiting white knights (most of whom are beta males secretly yearning for romantic attention)
– making “for the children” pleas
– demanding female sexual empowerment, then demanding desexualized men (a fine demonstration of cruelty)
– gossip and alliance-building
– tears
– sex withdrawal (the male analogue of sex withdrawal is resource withdrawal. ask a wife how she’d feel about that!)
– its opposite: promises of sex
– poisoning children against their fathers
– making, or threatening, abuse and rape allegations (more common than most think, because a tyrannical state permits this vile behavior to metastasize)
– being unaware of or ill-disposed toward examining their own sexual machinations (it’s easier to defy blame for crappy behavior when you can’t perceive the importance of your agency, or the motivation for your desires)

Read more here.

On winning primaries

One of the most astute observers of the American political scene, in my opinion, is Ace at the Ace of Spades blog. Here are some excerpts of one of his posts today:

That is how you win. Not by actually changing people's minds, but simply by arguing the issues upon which they already agree with you are paramount and determinative, and the issues on which they disagree with you are minor and not worth discussing much.

Only egotistical fools bull forward with a plan to run on issues -- emphasize issues -- that he knows the voting public disagrees with him on.

A winning politician is often likened to a weather vane. He can also be likened to a mirror. Barack Obama, a narcissistic fool if there ever was one, was nevertheless astute enough to recognize the heart of his appeal, noting that he was but a "blank screen" upon which voters could project their deepest beliefs.

So Jeb Bush's candidacy is essentially a Protest Candidacy. Protest Candidacies are all about "convincing people" of this or that thing they don't already believe. Occasionally they may have some impact, in that they raise the profile of an issue.

But what Protest Candidates do not do is win primaries, and Jeb Bush's Protest Candidacy (apparently protesting conservatism itself, it seems like) will likewise fail to result in an actual nomination.

It will be the most high-profile, most extravagantly funded Protest Candidacy in history, but it will result in a failure, as all Protest Candidacies result in failure.

I don't know how many of these egotistical imbeciles (Huntsman, Bush) are going to go into a primary swearing I can fight all 40 million of ya and beat ya!

You can't. This is a negotiation of a corporate merger, not a philosophy class with one man leading the class towards wisdom. A political campaign is a negotiation of a multiparty merger into one short-lived political corporation.

You don't win by "winning," you win by making most of the factions feel they're all winning.

The "Jeb is the moderate warrior who will fight the conservative base" story is largely promulgated *BY THE PROGRESSIVE MEDIA* in covering Jeb, not by Jeb in his own words, himself.

That said, I only tend to hear Jeb taking on the conservative base. I do not hear him attacking the progressive Social Justice Welfare State.

I think the media is juicing this some, possibly just seeing what they want to see, but Jeb is in fact helping them do this.

Read more here.

Are you getting enough sleep?

Do Boehner and McConnell fight Obama just like Obama fights wars?

Could we go back to the Stone Age?

You can't be dependent on someone without allowing them to control you

He's got a message that upsets the apple cart!

"The Democrats can't have black folks living like the Huxtables. That would have black folks living independent from them!" AlfonZo Rachel, as usual, has a unique take on the allegations about Bill Cosby, none of which have yet been decided in a court of law. He believes that a "long awaited plan for Bill" has been waiting in the wings of the progressive elitists who run the Democratic party. If Bill had not espoused conservative views, when advising fellow black Americans about how to improve their share of the American pie by hitting the books, believing in themselves, and working hard, traditional America values, perhaps he would have been given a pass by the liberal media. Case in point: "Bill Clinton, proven in court to be an adulterous lying pervert! And the feminists love him!"

On the other hand, Cosby doesn't make excuses and turn fellow blacks into victims. He preaches tough love. AlfonZo points out that there are at least two lessons Cosby will be learning from this experience: liberals are not your friends, and don't ever have a different narrative than the politically correct one espoused by the Left.

It was the environmental whackos

Over 100 brains have been stolen from the University of Texas psychology department. Social media had lots of theories. One theory was that Abby Normal may have taken it.

However, this sign was spotted on N. Lamar near MLK, just southwest of the campus.

I don't think there is any truth to the rumor that Taylor Swift may have stolen them as ingredients for her cat's hair conditioner.

Ralph K.M. Haurwitz of the American-Statesman Staff writes:

Human brains missing from a University of Texas collection were disposed of in “approximately 2002” because their poor condition rendered them unsuitable for research or teaching, the university said Wednesday.

UT said in a statement that its preliminary investigation also found “no evidence” that any of the brain specimens came from Tower shooter Charles Whitman, “though we will continue to investigate those reports.” Whitman’s 1966 rampage eventually took 16 lives, including those of his mother and wife, whom he stabbed to death before climbing the Tower.

The preliminary investigation found that UT environmental health and safety workers, in conjunction with a biological waste contractor, disposed of 40 to 60 jars, some containing multiple brains. A pathologist at the state hospital collected the brains from autopsies of deceased mental patients.

Read more here.
Thanks to Christopher Buckley

Expression is not acting

Erik Erickson writes:

Republicans will not stop Barack Obama’s executive overreach. In fact, while you were enjoying your Thanksgiving there were a number of stories out that the Republican leadership wants to give its members an opportunity to express their outrage and opposition.

Expression is not action.

So instead, when Congress returns to Washington after this Thanksgiving break, they will behave like the turkeys we all just carved up for dinner. They’ll do a song and dance, they will express their outrage, then they will fund Barack Obama’s amnesty plan.

Read more here.

A protest

Thanks to Gerard Vandereun, who thinks the sign in the middle surely has to have been photoshopped.

Sheriff Clarke calls out Eric Holder

Sheriff Clarke is a Democrat!

Thanks to Gerard Vanderleun

The sexual revolution

Mangin writes:

The sexual revolution, enabled by penicillin and the pill, is like nothing ever seen in history. So maybe its consequences could not have been foreseen. The current younger generations appear to think that life has always been this way.

Men don't have it quite as bad, as their value in the market doesn't decline nearly as rapidly as women.

He refers to this poem written by Phillip Larkin:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Read more here.

Western cultural decline

Much is being written and discussed about Western cultural collapse. Roosh Valizadeh writes:

Cultural collapse is the decline, decay, or disappearance of a native population’s rituals, habits, interpersonal communication, relationships, art, and language. It coincides with a relative decline of population compared to outside groups. National identity and group identification will be lost while revisionist history will be applied to demonize or find fault with the native population. Cultural collapse is not to be confused with economic or state collapse. A nation that suffers from a cultural collapse can still be economically productive and have a working government.

He goes on to list seven aspects of cultural collapse:

1. Removal of religious narrative from people’s lives, replaced by a treadmill of scientific and technological “progress.”

2. Elimination of traditional sex roles through feminism, gender equality, political correctness, cultural Marxism, and socialism.

3. Delay or abstainment of family formation by women to pursue careerist lifestyles while men wait in confused limbo.

4. Decreasing birth rate among native population.

5. Government enactment of open immigration policies to prevent economic collapse.

6. Immigrant refusal to fully acclimate, forcing host culture to adopt external rituals and beliefs while being out-reproduced.

7. Natives becoming marginalized in their own country.

Roosh elaborates on each of these points in a very thought-provoking article here.

Why did Europeans dominate explorations of the globe?

Why have Europeans dominated global exploration? That is the topic of an article written by Mangan. He writes:

A couple of things occurred to me as possibilities. One is the concept of what used to be known as oriental despotism, conspicuously absent from most of the West. The term used to baffle me; after all, the West for most of its history has not been democratic. No, it has not, but it has not been autocratic either. The ruler has usually never had absolute power in the sense of having a claim on everything. Therefore, Western explorers could expect to be rewarded with both money and status for their exertions. In non-Western parts of the world, becoming too accomplished risked one's neck at the hands of a jealous ruler.

How about monogamy? The Incas that Pizarro faced were members of an extremely inegalitarian society in which the emperor, his lieutenants, and on down to the bureaucrats, claimed all the women. The ordinary man, and thus the ordinary soldier, had virtually no chance of getting a wife. So why would he fight on behalf of an entity like that? The West has stood out for much of its history by its monogamy, where every man has a decent chance at a wife and family. Therefore they had more of a stake in society.

And then there's the Faustian restlessness, like in Edmund Hillary, who climbed Everest because it was there. That may be a good explanation for the accomplishments of European explorers.

Read more here.

Where will jihadists strike next?

Christmas is the busiest time of the year for airlines. Officials in Europe are worried about jihadists returning home from fighting with IS. They are reportedly considering banning all hand luggage or banning all electronics from hand luggage. Donal Macintyre writes:

The latest threat is understood to have been uncovered by American intelligence officers who fear that despite success in taking out key Al Qaeda bomb-makers, the genie is out of the bottle and sleeper cells are currently preparing for a doomsday scenario.

David Drugeon, a 24-year-old Frenchman and one of Al Qaeda's most trusted bomb-makers was killed by a cruise missile strike earlier this month to the west of the Alepo, Syria.

Drugeon, who was part of an Al Qaeda off-shoot called the the Khorasan group, and was said to be targeting US and UK airlines with non-metallic explosive devices, which could be concealed in mobile phones, computers and printer cartridges.

Although now dead his work remains a huge threat as his skill set is likely to have been spread among a number of terror apprentices, including an unidentified Saudi-born bombmaker.

Last night leading terrorism expert Dr Sally Leivesley said the banning of hand luggage and hand held electronic devices is unlikely to be accepted by the airlines despite the risks.

Dr. Leivesley, a former Home Office risk adviser, said that terrorists are now more likely to be "white, blond and blue eyed" who are radicalized in as little as five weeks.

She also claimed that female terrorists were becoming a significant risk, adding: "Crime profiling shows that white, middle class women, who are better than averagely educated, are susceptible to the terrorist narrative.

read more here.

White man beaten to death by three black youths in St. Louis

Jim Hoft has some details of a murder in St. Louis (which is near the town of Ferguson, Missouri) in which a white man was beaten to death by hammer-wielding thugs. This 17-year-old has been charged:
17-year-old Robert Mitchell is being charged as an adult with murder and armed criminal action. He and two other teens allegedly beat Zemir Begic, 32 to death with hammers. (KMOV)

The victim was with his fiance and family members when he left a restaurant near historic Bevo Mill.
That’s when the three black teens beat him to death with hammers.

Do you believe the accustions being made about Bill Cosby?

Maetenloch writes:

So at this point I do believe the rape accusations against Cosby - or to be more precise I believe the probability of all the rape accusations against him being made up to be vanishingly small. This is based on the sheer number of women coming forward, the fact that their accounts go back to the late 60s and have common details (particularly involving blackouts after Cosby give them drugs or a drink), the lack of financial benefit to them i.e. no lawsuits, and the fact some of the women have been publicly telling their stories of being raped by Cosby since the 80s. This was actually the first I ever heard of the accusations but apparently they have come out over the years but never found any media traction or just got hushed up.

To me the most damning detail to come out so far is the fact that Hollywood agents and insiders have been warning female clients for decades to never allow themselves to be alone with Cosby which tells you that a) these stories have been around for a long time and b) the insiders believed them enough to warn off their clients despite Cosby being a show biz powerhouse and potential star-maker. Also damning to me is the fact that Cosby won't actually deny the rape claims along with his recent behavior in a press conference where a cowed reporter could barely bring himself to even broach the topic of the rape claims. After listening to the tape of Cosby intimidating the reporter and then browbeating the producer to make the tape with his awkward non-denial disappear, my gut feeling was that this was a guilty man who had been used to getting his way for a long, long time. Except now the rules have changed and it's not so easy to make things go away like it used to be.

And I'm not happy about this in any way. I've long liked Cosby even before his Cosby Show days and always had great respect for him. He truly seemed like a great man.

But alas the real Bill Cosby appears to have been a far cry from the public Bill Cosby that everyone loved.

How will plunging oil prices affect your pocketbook?

The price of oil has fallen about 40 percent since mid-June. Steven Mufson writes:

At current prices, the annual revenue of OPEC members would shrink by $590 billion, money that will instead stay within the borders of the world’s biggest oil importers, led by the United States, China and Japan.

Read more here.

Demagogues thrive, while black-run cities become wastelands

Thomas Sowell asks wjat might be the lessons of Ferguson:

Soon after the shooting death of Michael Brown, this 285-pound young man was depicted as a “gentle giant.” But, after a video was leaked, showing him bullying the owner of a store from which he had stolen some merchandise, Attorney General Eric Holder expressed displeasure that the video was leaked. In other words, to Holder the truth was offensive, but the lie it exposed was not.

Three different medical forensic experts — one representing Michael Brown’s parents — examined the physical facts. These facts included the autopsy results, Michael Brown’s DNA on the door of the police car and on the policeman’s gun, photographs of the bruised and swollen face of policeman Darren Wilson and the pattern of blood stains on the street where Brown was shot.

This physical evidence was hard to square with the loudly proclaimed assertions that Brown was shot in the back, or was shot with his hands up, while trying to surrender. But it was consistent with the policeman’s testimony.

Moreover, the physical facts were consistent with what a number of black witnesses said under oath, despite expressing fears for their own safety for contradicting what those in the rampaging mobs were saying.

The first victims of the mob rampages in Ferguson have been people who had nothing to do with Michael Brown or the police. These include people — many of them black or members of other minorities — who have seen the businesses they worked to build destroyed, perhaps never to be revived.

But these are only the first victims. If the history of other communities ravaged by riots in years past is any indication, there are blacks yet unborn who will be paying the price of these riots for years to come.

Sometimes it is a particular neighborhood that never recovers, and sometimes it is a whole city. Detroit is a classic example. It had the worst riot of the 1960s, with 43 deaths — 33 of them black people. Businesses left Detroit, taking with them jobs and taxes that were very much needed to keep the city viable. Middle class people — both black and white — also fled.

Harlem was one of many ghettos across the country that have still not recovered from the riots of the 1960s. In later years, a niece of mine, who had grown up in the same Harlem tenement where I grew up years earlier, bitterly complained about how few stores and other businesses there were in the neighborhood.

There were plenty of stores in that same neighborhood when I was growing up, as well as a dentist, a pharmacist, and an optician, all less than a block away. But that was before the neighborhood was swept by riots.

Who benefits from the Ferguson riots? The biggest beneficiaries are politicians and racial demagogues. In Detroit, Mayor Coleman Young was one of many political demagogues who were able to ensure their own reelection, using rhetoric and policies that drove away people who provided jobs and taxes, but who were likely to vote against him if they stayed. Such demagogues thrived as Detroit became a wasteland.

What do you do if ou think black lives matter?

Can anyone speak or write candidly about welfare reform, affirmative action, capitalism, anti-crime measures, or measures taken against voter fraud, without being called a racist?

Kevin Williamson writes:

It is a seldom-appreciated irony that irresponsible allegations of racism are politically effective in the American context precisely because American society takes racism so seriously; in a society with more cavalier attitudes toward racism, such dishonest opportunism would bear less fruit. Politicians in Spain and the Republic of Korea, for example, worry a good deal less about insinuations that they might harbor insensitive racial attitudes. But in the context of the United States, one can effectively win a political argument not by demonstrating to any reasonable standard of evidence that one’s opponent is a racist but simply by maneuvering him into explaining that he isn’t a racist. It’s the “Have you stopped beating your wife yet” gambit on a grand and nasty scale.

So when former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani takes seriously the operative slogan of the Ferguson protests — “Black Lives Matter!” — and asks the obvious question — “Don’t they matter in the 93 percent of cases when the lives of black murder victims are taken violently by black criminals?” — the Left’s reflexive response is to denounce him as a racist. The Washington Post’s hilariously Orwellian fact-check column labeled Giuliani a liar even as it confirmed that his observation is, as a matter of fact, entirely true.

But real life doesn’t go according to script. That’s why we have the New York Times et al. — to write the script according to the Left’s dramatic imperatives, regardless of what actually happens. The media may not control the stage entirely, but they do control the lighting and the sound.

And thus we have the very peculiar situation in which “Black Lives Matter!” but black perpetrators don’t. Only white perpetrators matter. And if, as in the case of George Zimmerman, they are not exactly white, then they can be declared white by the New York Times. Only white perpetrators matter to the people behind the Ferguson protests because only white perpetrators are politically useful.

If you believe that black lives matter, then you should be working for school reform, economic growth, and — yes — more effective law-enforcement and crime-prevention measures to protect black communities, which suffer an enormously disproportionate share of crime and violence. Never mind the stagecraft: That’s what you actually do if you think black lives matter.

And the drama that’s going on in Ferguson right now? That’s what you do if you think black lives are merely useful to you — and, in the end, expendable.

Read more here.

Maybe it affects your perspective

Remember when President Obama cleared General Petraeus of endangering national security by having an affair with Paula Broadwell? Then how do you explain the fact that Obama's F.B.I. has not closed the case? Could it be that Obama doesn't want Petraeus speaking out against him and/or Hillary Clinton?

Eli Lake and Josh Rogin write:

As reported by Fox News last summer, Representative Jason Chaffetz (now the incoming chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform) had previously asked the Justice Department for answers on why the Petraeus file might still be open. “If he has done something wrong, charge him, if he has not, let him go,” Chaffetz told us last month. “At this point I don’t know what their motivation is. But I worry they will let this linger until the president leaves office.”

Bob Gates and Leon Panetta, two former defense secretaries, have not been shy about criticizing Obama's national security team.

But, not a peep from Petraeus.

But what does seem surprising, to many who know and have worked with him, is that the views he has been expressing are so at odds with what he has said and implied in the past.

For example, when Petraeus was inside Obama’s administration in his first term, he advocated for more troops inside Afghanistan and made the case for arming Syrian moderate forces. But when asked this summer about that effort, Petraeus demurred and focused on Obama’s new $500 million initiative in 2014 to train Syrian rebels. “I strongly support what’s being done now,” he said. “Half a billion dollars is a substantial amount of resourcing to train and equip.”

Chaffetz says that the fact that Petraeus hasn’t publicly criticized the White House on Iraq may not be an accident. “When the president has the ability to charge him with crimes, maybe it affects your perspective,” Chaffetz said. “I don’t know.”

Read more here.

The Democrats' unspoken commandment for 2016

How did Obama's Hope and Change slogan work out in foreign policy? Victor Davis Hanson writes:

The hope-and-change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from “leading from behind” to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of a war against ISIS.

There were only two saving graces to Obama’s misadventures abroad. One, as was also true of the alphabet stew of domestic scandals, each ensuing disaster seemed to divert attention from the prior calamity. Two, Obama was not able to halt new energy exploration on private lands as he had done with federal leasing. So followed a gas and oil renaissance that he opposed but can now claim as a great boon to American global leverage. Otherwise, what Barack Obama has accomplished, in the fashion of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in the Twenties and Thirties, will be to avoid minor confrontations on his watch — if he is lucky — while ensuring catastrophic ones for his successors.

And Obama's domestic policy? Hanson doesn't think

a president has ever quite so habitually warned the country of the dangers that would soon emanate from himself.

Obama’s immigration legacy will be the juxtaposition of his serial insistence that he was not a king or an emperor, and could not contravene the Constitution by granting a blanket amnesty, with his efforts to do just that when it was no longer politically inexpedient.

Illegal immigration is praised only by those who benefit directly from it, whether in the familial sense of inexpensive nannies, cooks, or gardeners; or in the corporate interest of cheap labor in the hospitality industries, agriculture, and construction; or in the political sense of new liberal constituents; or in the tribal sense of expanding the so-called La Raza base. But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues.

We will also soon learn that over 11 million illegal aliens are not all Dream Actors. Rather, there is a huge minority of millions of illegal residents who have broken all sorts of U.S. laws, have not worked and are on public assistance, and have no record of sustained residence in the United States. When a guest chooses to break the laws of his host by entering his home illegally, that is usually the beginning, not the end, of illegality — a mindset and pattern of behavior that in many cases is not ended by simply erasing federal immigration law.

Take also global warming — for Secretary of State John Kerry, the world’s greatest challenge. Once the planet did not heat up in the last 18 years, and once the ice of the polar caps did not melt away, global warming begat climate change. The new nomenclature was a clever effort to link all occasional weather extremities to some underlying and fundamental climate disruption. Brilliant though the strategy was — the opposites of cold/hot, drought/deluges, and calm/storms could now all be used as proof of permanent climate change — global warming finally was hoist on its own petard: If it caused everything, then it caused nothing.

So, in the end, what was global warming? It seems to have grown up largely as a late-20th-century critique of global-market capitalism by elites who had done so well by it that they had won the luxury of caricaturing the very source of their privilege. Global warming proved a near secular religion that filled a deep psychological longing for some sort of transcendent meaning among mostly secular Western grandees. In reality, the global-warming creed had scant effect on the lifestyles of the high priests who promulgated it. Al Gore did not cut back on his jet-fueled and lucrative proselytizing. Obama did not become the first president who, on principle, traveled with a reduced and green entourage. Solyndra did not run a model transparent company as proof of the nobility of the cause. As in the case of illegal immigration, the losers from the global-warming fad are the working and middle classes, who do not have the capital to be unharmed by the restrictions on cheap, carbon-based fuels.

The natural outcome of the reactionary approach to race relations — identity politics, the salad bowl in lieu of the melting pot, the effusions of trillions of dollars over the last half-century into Great Society dependencies — is Ferguson. We are left with the movement’s slogan, “Hands up; don’t shoot!” which now joins a growing historical corpus of racial mythography — “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” and “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Ferguson illustrated many of the problems of postmodern liberalism: the anti-empirical insistence that the facts of the shooting of Michael Brown did not matter much; critical legal theory, which ignored the time-honored role of a disinterested grand jury; the tolerance of illegality as some sort of acceptable protest against the system; and the liberal media’s hyping a crisis on the understanding that the ramifications of the violence were safely distant from their own schools, neighborhoods, and restaurants.

After the disastrous Obama tenure, the U.S. will either return to the melting pot and the idea that race and tribe are incidental, not essential, to our characters, or it will eventually go the way of all dysfunctional societies for which that was not true — Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq.

Obamacare was, in the end, little more than a clumsy effort to take over the health-care system by redistributing resources from the supposedly too-well-off to the more noble less-well-off, with billions of dollars siphoned off to expand government bureaucracies and enrich crony capitalists. The architects of the Affordable Care Act were not affected by the ramifications of their own advocacy, which largely fell on the middle class in terms of higher deductibles, premiums, and taxes.

Finally, and most important, Obamism did not even deliver on its extravagant promises of a new ethos of ending crony capitalism, the revolving door, lobbyists in government, and government corruption. Indeed, Obama will go down in history as presiding over the most corrupt administration of the last half-century, when historians finally collate the IRS, VA, GSA, and Secret Service scandals; the erosion of constitutional jurisprudence; the serial untruths about Benghazi, amnesty, and Obamacare; the harassment of journalists; the record shakedown of Wall Street lucre in 2008 and 2012; and the flood of lobbyists into and out of the Obama administration. Eric Holder – with his jet-setting to sporting events on the public dime, spouting inflammatory racialist rhetoric, politicizing the Justice Department, selectively enforcing settled law, and being held in contempt of Congress for withholding subpoenaed documents — managed what one might have thought impossible: He has made Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell seem a minor rogue in comparison.

What started out with “hope and change” and “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” ended up with a president who habitually misleads his countrymen, a baffling array of scandals, the discrediting of the obsequious media, and policies that not only did not work but by any historical model could never really have worked.

As proof, watch as Democrats regroup for 2016. Their unspoken commandment will be that most of what Obama did, they must either ignore or deny.

Read more here.

Lose the primary, and win the general election?

Can you explain to me how a presidential candidate can lose the primary, but win the general election? That's what Jeb Bush said he is prepared to do! News flash for you, Jeb: if you lose the primary, you don't get to be the nominee of the Republican party in the general election! Jonathan Martin writes:

Mr. Bush said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council in Washington that Republican candidates must be willing to “lose the primary to win the general, without violating your principles.”

Huh?


Common Core lover Jeb Bush attends the National Summit on Education Reform in Washington last month. Credit Susan Walsh/Associated Press

Are tears a sign of weakness?

Ann Voskamp doesn't think so:

Tears are never a sign of weakness. Tears are always the sign of an open heart.

No matter how we’re hurting — it’s only when we lose hope that the real horror happens.

The very least you can do with your life is welcome in Hope. And He has a name.

And the very best you can do with your life is build a life with Hope. Live right under a roof of Hope.

“Hope is the thing with wings

That lands at the end of you

And shows you how to open to possibilities

So you never close again.”

It’s the first Sunday of Advent. Hope candles are lit everywhere. God is giving you Hope.

Hope — for you.

Read more here.

Has the media killed Black Friday?

Has the media killed Black Friday? By sensationalized reporting of the few incidents of bad behavior, the media has scared many would-be shoppers away from retail stores, even though most retailers have learned from past mistakes, and are much better able to handle the crowds. On-line shopping, however, is steadily increasing. Stores who stay open on Thanksgiving are shamed by the stories as ruining families, while stores that closed are praised as family-friendly and patriotic. Which stores paid their employees more, the open ones or the closed ones?

Read more here.

Then the defense cuts started happening

The USAF Band Holiday Flash Mob at the National Air and Space Museum 2013



Thanks to Curt Dale.

It's the content of your character!

Lisa Wirthman writes in the November 30 Denver Post that if we want to get more things done in politics, we should elect more women. She quotes Denver Congresswoman Diana DeGette as saying that women are "used to looking at the issue and the goal rather than the personality and the ego."

The Democrat party has been hijacked by progressive elitists who think that what matters is your group identity, not who you are as an individual. The nation thought by electing a person with a darker skin color, we could move past racial identity. Instead, we got just the opposite. After six years of the divisive policies of Barack Obama and Eric Holder, are blacks better off today than when Obama took office? Are Latinos? Are women?

These elitists make sure their children don't have to go to schools where there are lots of blacks, browns and Asians. They make sure that their neighborhoods are not invaded by people of color. They can come and help with the housecleaning or yard work, as long as they go back to their own neighborhoods when they have finished their day's work.

The rest of America, on the other hand, believe in the powerful truth expressed by Martin Luther King, Jr., when he said it is the content of one's character, not the color of one's skin that matters. Your gender does not matter, when it comes to the issue of your leadership abilities, nor does your skin color. What matters is the content of your character. We need to elect leaders who have good character. Some of those might be women, some men. Some might be white, some might be black, brown, or Asian-Americans. What matters is who you are as an individual, not what group you belong to.