TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 856. With a video appearance by Sergeant Schultz. “Schultz’s famous line was, ‘I know nothing, I see nothing,….’ That’s what it feels like when we deal with answers from the IRS and the Obama Administration.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Migration Crisis and Europe’s Crippling Doubts.

What we are witnessing today is a crisis of two civilizations: The Middle East and Europe are both facing deep cultural and political problems that they cannot solve. The intersection of their failures and shortcomings has made this crisis much more destructive and dangerous than it needed to be—and carries with it the risk of more instability and more war in a widening spiral.
The crisis in the Middle East has to do with much more than the breakdown of order in Syria and Libya. It runs deeper than the poisonous sectarian and ethnic hatreds behind the series of wars stretching from Pakistan to North Africa. At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples seek.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Great Wave of immigration from the Middle East and North Africa is crashing into a continent beset with its own problems:

In Europe and the West, the crisis is quieter but no less profound. Europe today often doesn’t seem to know where it is going, what Western civilization is for, or even whether or how it can or should be defended. Increasingly, the contemporary version of Enlightenment liberalism sees itself as fundamentally opposed to the religious, political and economic foundations of Western society. Liberal values such as free expression, individual self-determination and a broad array of human rights have become detached in the minds of many from the institutional and civilizational context that shaped them.

Capitalism, the social engine without which neither Europe nor the U.S. would have the wealth or strength to embrace liberal values with any hope of success, is often seen as a cruel, anti-human system that is leading the world to a Malthusian climate catastrophe. Military strength, without which the liberal states would be overwhelmed, is regarded with suspicion in the U.S. and with abhorrence in much of Europe. Too many people in the West interpret pluralism and tolerance in ways that forbid or unrealistically constrain the active defense of these values against illiberal states like Russia or illiberal movements like radical Islam.

Europe’s approach to the migration crisis brings these failures into sharp relief. The European Union bureaucracy in Brussels has erected a set of legal doctrines stated in terms of absolute right and has tried to build policy on this basis. Taking its cue from the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other ambitious declarations and treaties, the EU holds that qualified applicants have an absolute human right to asylum. European bureaucrats tend to see asylum as a legal question, not a political one, and they expect political authorities to implement the legal mandate, not quibble with it or constrain it.

Elites who fundamentally don’t believe in the nations they govern cannot govern well.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Woman gets prison time for sex assault of teenage girl.

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SCIENCE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN “SOCIAL JUSTICE” STATUS POSTURING: Passions Supplant Reason in Dialogue on Women in Science: Would the same criticisms of our study have been made if it had revealed anti-women hiring attitudes?

In a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we published an article on data from five national studies that took us to an unexpected destination. The data showed that, in tenure-track hiring, faculty prefer female job candidates over identically qualified male ones.

Because that finding runs counter to claims of sexist hiring, it was met in the news media and in academe with incredulity and often panic. We have responded to those criticisms in five pieces in the Huffington Post (parts one, two, three, four, and five), as well as another essay in American Scientist and one on the website of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Some critics saw in our findings a disavowal of their own experiences with academic sexism. Even though our study examined only entry-level hiring, they viewed it as invalidating biases they faced outside the hiring context and as an attack on their advocacy for women. But data from multiple studies using different methods kept revealing the same striking preference for hiring women. So we reported the empirical data, hoping to generate an honest, productive dialogue about modern discrimination in the academy. Since hiring is no longer a roadblock, where else might we need to direct efforts and advocacy to help more women succeed?

In the latest critique of our results, Joan Williams, a law professor, and Jessi Smith, a psychology professor, claimed that our hiring study was “plagued by five serious methodological flaws” that negated our conclusions. None of their claims are valid. Let’s examine them individually. . . .

In their zeal to impugn our methods and analyses, these commentators invoked the specter of methodological flaws to dismiss a message, ratified by real-world hiring, that they seem to find personally threatening. Until there is full gender-fairness, we cannot enjoy any “comfort food.” In the interim, we hope our critics realize there is plenty of crow to eat.

Read the whole thing. But it’s notable how many of the critics were more concerned with issues of their own personal self-image than with actual data. And, of course, there’s a lot of money at stake: If there’s not actually a women-in-science problem, Intel might quit redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars from research into the women-in-science field, and a lot of people might have to get real jobs.

TAMARA KEEL: Sales Pitch.

Thing is, I don’t think what I do is sell guns so much as talk about guns. All you have to do is pull my string on the topic and off I go, in positively Aspie-like levels of detail and enthusiasm, on a topic near and dear to my heart. And then people buy the thing about which I am talking.

When I was in sales, one thing I learned was that when a customer told me I was a great salesman, it meant I had lost the sale. If they were enthusiastic about the product, though, it was good. And they were more likely to be enthusiastic about the product if I was enthusiastic about the product.

What I find funny among my law students — and it was far more prevalent among law students at Yale — is the idea that sales is a job that any idiot can do if they can’t get something better. I remember somebody in the dining hall there talking about “selling insurance” as that sort of job, and I pointed out to them that it’s really hard to get people to buy insurance, because it costs money and requires them to think about the prospect of bad things happening. They were surprised.

In Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man, she gets a sales job and discovers that it’s really hard, and that she has to get in character like an actor getting up for a part, and suddenly all those sales-training and motivational seminars that always seemed so cheesy to her make sense.

Of course, there are plenty of lousy salespeople out there. I remember car-shopping and driving up to the dealership where several of the salesmen were sitting on folding chairs shooting the breeze. The guy I talked to couldn’t answer basic questions that were answered in the brochures in the rack sitting right behind where they were shooting the breeze. If I had had his job, learning what was in those brochures would have been the very first thing I did.

But any job is easy to do badly. People who think that succeeding — or even just getting by for very long — in sales is easy don’t know what they’re talking about.

THIS WEEK’S WAPO MYSTERY: WHAT, EXACTLY, ARE HILLARY’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS? “To be fair, the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty doesn’t frame her story on the struggle to find any Hillary Clinton accomplishments as a mystery,” Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air. “The headline reads, ‘Hillary Clinton tries to show that her record is more than just talk,’ and Tumulty approaches it as a race to see whether Hillary can define herself before her political foes do. Having framed it that way, Tumulty notes that voters can’t name any achievements for Hillary other than winning two Senate elections and becoming a State Department frequent flier. And then, Tumulty proceeds to list … no accomplishments at all.”

So Hillary’s got the election completely sewn up I guess, and it’s only a matter of time before tingles start running up and/or down the legs of MSNBC hosts:

PEGGY NOONAN: The Migrants and the Elites: A humanitarian crisis threatens the future of Western institutions.

But here is a problem with Europe’s decision-makers, and it connects to decision-makers in America.

Damning “the elites” is often a mindless, phony and manipulative game. Malice and delusion combine to produce the refrains: “Those fancy people in their Georgetown cocktail parties,” “Those left-wing poseurs in their apartments in Brussels.” This is social resentment parading as insight, envy posing as authenticity.

But in this crisis talk of “the elites” is pertinent. The gap between those who run governments and those who are governed has now grown huge and portends nothing good.

Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighborhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality—normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular.

The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder.

People in gated communities of the mind, who glide by in Ubers, have bought their way out and are safe. Not to mention those in government-maintained mansions who glide by in SUVs followed by security details. Rulers can afford to see national-security threats as an abstraction—yes, yes, we must better integrate our new populations. But the unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry.

Perhaps the elites should be made to feel less safe.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, WE’D HAVE AN ANTI-SCIENCE GOVERNMENT THAT WOULD BRUTALIZE INNOCENT FOREIGNERS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT!

When the Justice Department arrested the chairman of Temple University’s physics department this spring and accused him of sharing sensitive American-made technology with China, prosecutors had what seemed like a damning piece of evidence: schematics of sophisticated laboratory equipment sent by the professor, Xi Xiaoxing, to scientists in China.

The schematics, prosecutors said, revealed the design of a device known as a pocket heater. The equipment is used in semiconductor research, and Dr. Xi had signed an agreement promising to keep its design a secret.

But months later, long after federal agents had led Dr. Xi away in handcuffs, independent experts discovered something wrong with the evidence at the heart of the Justice Department’s case: The blueprints were not for a pocket heater.

Faced with sworn statements from leading scientists, including an inventor of the pocket heater, the Justice Department on Friday afternoon dropped all charges against Dr. Xi, an American citizen.

It was an embarrassing acknowledgment that prosecutors and F.B.I. agents did not understand — and did not do enough to learn — the science at the heart of the case before bringing charges that jeopardized Dr. Xi’s career and left the impression that he was spying for China.

“I don’t expect them to understand everything I do,” Dr. Xi, 57, said in a telephone interview. “But the fact that they don’t consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn’t do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game.”

It’s clown cars all the way down.

WE’RE NOT THE ONLY ONES WITH BAD “ELITES”: Some blunt talk on “migrants” to Europe from a French ex-minister.

THE ONLY SLURS I HEARD WERE AT THE STYLE: But okay, whatevs. Star Wars novelist strikes back at gay character slurs.  “Quick, the book is tanking.  Claim homophobia.”

NOW THEY INVENT IT: Three brothers create a lawn mower you can control via Google. The boys would have fought over who got to do the lawn, if we’d had this.

YEAH, WHAT DOES A GAL HAVE TO DO FOR LOBSTER: No, 48 Million Americans Are Not Going Hungry.

WE’RE RICH: That is, the government is… burning through money faster than ever.

WELL, GOOD. I’VE BEEN SLEEPING ENTIRELY TOO WELL: Russia developing underwater drone submarine to deliver megaton nuclear weapon.

HOLY CTHULHU: Alex stops you from publishing inconsiderate content: Weirdly, and apparently is this bullsh*t piece of Marxist leftist trash really meant to be taken seriously? IS a perfectly politically correct sentence.  As you can imagine, it sets my mind at rest.

ER, WHAT? Experts Concerned We’ve Sent Sexist Messages to Space.

ROGER SIMON: Adieu To Rick Perry. “All we have is our guesses. But it is clear that in this year of the non-pro, voters were not excited by the record of a man who was governor of one of our largest states for fourteen years, a period during which that one state, Texas, generated more than a third of the nation’s private sector jobs. Maybe that says more about us than it does about Rick Perry.”

KURT SCHLICHTER ON HEROES, COWARDS, AND 9/11. “9/11 was not a tragedy. It was cold-blooded murder, and it presented us with a stark choice.”

WOMEN AND CHILDREN LAST. IowaHawk:

THE DAY WE FORGOT: “Fourteen years later, Americans have learned no great lessons from 9/11,” Ben Domenech posits today, and reluctantly, in many respects, I think he’s absolutely right:

Nor did 9/11 prompt a great debate and rethinking of what risks freedom entails, what its nature is, and what the need for heightened security demands from our government and from us. What does it mean that government exists to secure our liberty, and what should we do with that liberty, once secured? Today people take it for granted that we will be frisked, poked, and prodded in all sorts of ways, but that it mostly amounts to pointless security theater. They take it for granted that our established security state is so unsecure that it can be easily penetrated by foreign governments with no consequence for them. They assume our government spies on us, but also assume that it is not very good at it.

Think back to other epochal moments in American history: the moment Americans learned of Lexington and Concord, or Fort Sumter, or Pearl Harbor. What did Americans do on hearing that news?

At bare minimum, they were forced to take a stand within their communities in reaction to the great event. They had to make a choice. They had to change their lives.

Nothing like that happened on 9/11. It came and it went. We wept and we forgot. The indictment of our society today is that 9/11 wasn’t a date that changed everything for us, not for the elites, and not for the people.

But the previous battles that Domenech mentioned were all fought against clearly-labeled enemies. While it’s now reached near-British levels here in America, political correctness had already started reshaping our language by September of 2001. Rather than punching back at the very moment he could reshape the culture, President Bush allowed himself to be hamstrung by the language police in the immediate wake of 9/11.

Thus, instead of being labeled as a war against radical Islam or a war against Al Qaeda and its allies, it was simply called the “Great War On Terror.” But terror is a tactic, not an enemy; as Daniel Pipes noted as early as 2002, calling such an existential struggle a “War on Terror” is like calling World War I the War on Trenches or World War II the War on Submarines. And today, PC, the attitude of “better dead than rude,” as John Derbyshire memorably wrote, also in 2002, has gotten so bad that former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson is insulting the GOP base from the pages of the Washington Post, on this of all days, noting that “Republicans’ fringe tone on Islam shows a sharp turn since 9/11.”

But that will happen when no progress appears to made against an enemy that elites won’t even name, let alone willing to conceive of any other exit strategy than “declare victory and go home” as Mr. Obama did in order to secure the 2012 election. While our mid-20th century elites were very much big government socialists in the Obama mode, in some key areas, they were made of far sterner stuff.

Or as Iowahawk noted last year at this time, and retweeted today:

RON FOURNIER: Where were you when the world stopped turning?

Actually, it was more a case of things returning to normal, something that most of our leadership still hasn’t figured out. Because figuring it out would require them to say, and do, and think, uncomfortable things.

LIFE AMONG THE ELITES: “Don’t Drop the Soap is a controversial prison-themed board game designed by art student John Sebelius as a 2006 class project at the Rhode Island School of Design.” The son of Kathleen Sebelius.

LESS GOVERNMENT, MORE FUN: Record-Setting Hiker Fined $500 For Drinking Champagne Atop Mt. Katahdin.