“BAD LUCK.” New York Times: Bad Luck and Worse Manners Tarnish Obama’s Asia Trip.

This bad luck is explained by Richard Fernandez:

If you listen to Rodrigo Duterte’s now infamous rant against president Obama (start a minute 6) you might be forgiven for thinking it was Howard Zinn or Bill Ayers speaking, allowing for the accent. He spoke of the “lapdogs of America” who forget that “America has one too many [offenses] to answer for”. He argued that the Philippines “inherited the [Muslim] problem from the United States” and since “everyone has a terrible record of extrajudicial killing … why make an issue of it.” He describes the massacre of the Indians, the oppression of migrants etc. as reasons for ordering the deaths of thousands proving, if there was any remaining doubt, that he learned the lesson of moral equivalence well.

From this Duterte concluded that he wouldn’t listen to lectures from the SOB leader of such a country. It’s almost as if he’s been listening to Obama and Obama was hoist on his own petard. The Western left has the habit of preaching from a moral height while simultaneously describing its history as one unending crime. You’ve heard the teaching moments. “I live in a house built by slaves.” “You didn’t build that!” This whole country is stolen!

Say it often enough and someone will believe you. Somebody did. The trouble is you can’t rise from the toilet to suddenly preach from a great moral height. It’s possible to do one but not both simultaneously. Of course the liberal left can context shift and switch between sackcloth and ashes and the throne of moral superiority with the alacrity of Dr. Who. But Durterte isn’t that nimble.

The clash between the two is tragi-comedy. Obama’s planned teaching moment has complicated the problem of holding the Philippines against an expansionary China. The stark reality is that Duterte’s Philippines is almost totally helpless against the Chinese military power and extremely vulnerable to Islamic terrorism. Who does Duterte think is keeping the Chinese away? The Philippine Navy? Nor will his hometown of Davao last very long against Islamic rebels without intelligence support and Sigint from the United States.

Angry adolescents need their parents to pay the bills and keep them safe, too, but they don’t acknowledge that. And leftism is the politics of spoiled children, regardless of their age. Or, to put it more bluntly:

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

And no matter how cool you try to be, when you’re President of the United States, sometimes you wind up being The Man against whom the spoiled brats rage.

TED GALEN CARPENTER: New Support for a European Union Army

While the American news media were preoccupied with Donald Trump’s latest tweet or Hillary’s Clinton’s latest explanation for a scandal that barely passed the straight face test, a more important development took place in Europe that received scant attention. The prime ministers of both Hungary and the Czech Republic urged the European Union to build its own army. That is a very significant shift in attitude. Until now, the European countries had been content to channel security matters through NATO and to focus the EU’s attention on economic issues.

The insistence on NATO’s primacy also reflected Washington’s wishes, since it guaranteed U.S. control of transatlantic security decisions. That control came at a high cost, however, since it enabled the European allies to free ride on Washington’s security exertions.

Given Europe’s 20th Century history, American “control of transatlantic security decisions” ought to be seen as a feature, not a bug.

And say what you will about the expense, but keeping the peace is cheaper than fighting a war.

LIZ PEEK: Here’s the Real Reason Trump’s Outreach to Blacks Scares the Left.

Related: AP: “Trump was warmly received by the group. . . . ‘For the first time in my life,’ she told him, ‘I feel like my vote is going to count.'”

WHEN ONE QUESTION ANSWERS ANOTHER: Why Is Hillary Already Using the Russians as an Excuse for Losing in November?

Plus: Whatever Happened To All Those ‘Trump Is Doomed’ Predictions?

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS ON HOW ACADEMIC FEMINISM HURTS WOMEN.

ROGER SIMON ON THE REAL REASON HILLARY’S HEALTH IS AN ISSUE: “For the most obvious reason: like virtually everything else, she lies about it!”

Update the firmware on your military-grade amphibious exoskeleton, reboot your cranial OS, and read the whole thing.

IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T MADE LUNCH PLANS YET:

Happy #NationalBeerLoversDay! pic.twitter.com/0gQIDyNBiH

— Good Morning America (@GMA) September 7, 2016

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1217.

WHY SO OBSTRUCTIONIST?

Plus: Senate Democrats block defense funding bill for third time.

Why do Democrats hate our troops and want American babies’ lives to be at risk to Zika?

THIS DEAL KEEPS GETTING WORSE ALL THE TIME: There’s Still a Lot We Don’t Know About the Iran Deal.

CHAOS UMPIRE RULES: Colleges Respond to Racial Tensions By Making Them Worse.

The Times also notes that colleges have been on a hiring spree for “chief diversity officers”—bureaucrats whose whose jobs include designing micro-aggression training courses, creating materials like Harvard’s “social justice placemat,” and determining that kind of political speech is acceptable and what kind is punished by Title IX investigations. (Who says there aren’t jobs for humanities majors?)

Joking aside, it’s important to note that the types of programs the Times describes are very, very unlikely to have their intended effect—if the intent is really to reduce campus racial and ethnic tensions. As the social psychologist Christ Martin has noted, the proliferation of these courses courses is a testament “to the success of the diversity industry in marketing itself, not their ability to produce results.” And the sale is easy to make to campus administrations where left-of-center ideology is almost completely dominant.

What little research we do have on diversity programs suggest that if they have any effect, it is to inflame racial tensions. As the Harvard Business Review reported earlier this year, “laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out. As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.”

Similarly, major studies show that self-segregation into “ethnic enclaves” on college campuses—a practice diversity courses often encourage—increases inter-group hostility and mistrust. That’s one reason white nationalists and others on the alt-right tend to join with the campus left in supporting racial consciousness-raising.

If colleges were interested in making their student populations more racially harmonious, according to Martin, they would cut back on heavy-handed diversity courses and pivot instead toward programming that fosters a sense of common identity and social interaction among students of different backgrounds. Sadly, the reality is that some of the diversity programs the Times describes are likely aimed more at transferring resources to powerful political constituencies than at actually promoting cross-cultural respect.

That’s what it’s all about.

GOOD FENCES: UK to build ‘big new wall’ in Calais to stop migrants.

The four-meter (13 foot) high wall is part of a £17 million ($23 million) deal struck between Britain and France earlier this year to try to block migrants from crossing the English Channel.

“We’ve done the fence. Now we’re doing a wall,” British Immigration Minister Robert Goodwill announced at a government hearing on Tuesday.

It is the latest attempt to enhance border security in Calais, home to a controversial makeshift camp known as “The Jungle,” where thousands of displaced people live in squalid conditions.

The camp is notorious for being a major transit point for migrants, who often hop onto the back of UK-bound cargo trucks in the hopes of entering the country illegally. Many in “The Jungle” are reluctant to register as refugees in France because their preferred destination is Britain.

When the Chunnel was under construction, I was only half-kidding when I asked Brits how many explosives they had rigged on their side of it.

SYRIAN RED LINE UPDATE: Yesterday Assad government helicopters dropped barrels of chlorine on a rebel neighborhood in Aleppo. I’m linking to this VOA report because it includes a photo of hospitalized victims receiving treatment after a similar chlorine gas attack in August. Remember Obama’s warning? Our Feckless Leader said use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime was a red line…As Emily Litella would say: “Never mind.”

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: Donald Trump’s Adviser Explains His Real Economic Plan.

For starters, [Trump senior economic advisor Stephen] Moore said, major cabinet-level agencies should be eliminated. Walton asked him specifically about eliminating the departments of Commerce, Education and Energy. Together, these agencies employ an estimated 150,000 people, and they oversee things ranging from nuclear security to federal student loans to the U.S. patent system.

“I’m going to press as hard as possible to [eliminate the agencies],” Moore said. “We’re putting a budget together right now that is going to not only pay for the tax cut, but balance the budget in six or seven years. And to do that, you’ve got to make very significant cuts in those kinds of programs.

“I mean, my God, why do we need an Energy Department?” Moore asked, semi-exasperated. “All the Energy Department has done in the last 25 years is make energy prices more expensive!”

“Get the hell out of my way!” as another reformer once said.

BRITISH CRITIC JULIE BURCHILL: WHY I WAS WRONG TO ADMIRE STALIN. In the 1970s, Burchill now writes, “I was pretending to be a punk, a lesbian and a Jew, but at least I could be true to myself in this way. ‘I don’t kiss, I’m a Stalinist,” I’d often say…I shudder with nausea when I remember the way I used to admire myself in them, pouting into the mirrors that I snorted speed off of. ‘I’m a sexy teenage communist!’ I would gloat. But I spat blood whenever I saw a fellow punk sporting a swastika. Why? What was the difference? My side had killed 20 million.”

At a minimum. “In his acclaimed book ‘The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties,’ Anglo-American historian Robert Conquest said: ‘We get a figure of 20 million dead [under Stalin], which is almost certainly too low and might require an increase of 50 percent or so.’”

And fascism mercifully died in 1945. Stalin’s ideology would kill 94 million in the 20th century, and keeps going today.

(Found via Kathy Shaidle.)

JUST ADVANCE SCOUTS FOR #SMOD2016: A large asteroid will come TEN times nearer to Earth than the moon today. “An asteroid will pass extremely near our planet today. The 32ft (10 metre) long asteroid will pass by at a distance of one tenth of the distance between Earth and the moon. This close encounter will be followed by a much larger asteroid, 200ft (61 metres) long, that is set to pass us by in just a few days. . . . The Virtual Telescope project discovered the asteroid yesterday, and says when it passes Earth the asteroid will be visible from the southern hemisphere only.”

SIGN “O” THE TIMES: World stocks hit one-year highs as Fed hike prospects fade.

I’m so old I remember when stocks rose on strong economic news.

DIGITAL DEVASTATION: Depression, disease and no sex are some dangers of binge watching.

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ME, IN 2002: “The fact is, if you could come up with a new technology as simple and resistant to fraud as the paper ballot, people would be pretty impressed. So why do we use machines?”

Politico, today: Paperless voting could fuel ‘rigged’ election claims: Amid Democratic fears of hackers and Trump’s warnings about “cheating,” some key states still rely on electronic voting machines that lack a paper trail.

Plus: “10 yrs ago critics of paperless voting were called paranoid. Now both parties talk @ Russian hackers & rigged votes.”

Dems are suddenly worried that fraud might hurt them instead of benefiting them, meaning that the press now feels it’s okay to talk about the subject. . .

THAT’S GONNA LEAVE A MARK: Texas jury slams SEIU with $5M in damages.

How often do you see a labor union get taken to court over their shady, strong-arm tactics and actually be held to task? If your answer was never then you’re in for a pleasant surprise. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was dragged before a jury in Houston this summer and accused of waging a smear campaign designed to “kill” a cleaning company because they wouldn’t let them organize their workers based on a secret ballot. The decision is now in and the SEIU has been ordered to pay damages in excess of five million dollars.

Don’t mess with Texas, but do read the whole thing.

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED TO HEAR THAT THIS HAS ALL BEEN CHOREOGRAPHED: Emails show coordination between Clinton, Congressional Democrats at Benghazi hearing. “We wired it.”

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: EmailGate and the Mystery of the Missing GAMMA: Hillary Clinton’s ‘unclassified’ email included highly classified NSA information—why didn’t the FBI mention this fact?

WAIT, I THOUGHT WALLS DON’T WORK: Work to begin on ‘big wall’ at Calais to block migrants.