A WORTHWHILE THREAD FROM MATT STOLLER: “Ok, let’s talk about the Democratic Party’s deep state. Not the politicians, not the consultants, but BigLaw. That’s where power lives.” See, e.g., Perkins Coie.
Archive for 2017
October 26, 2017
IRAN DOESN’T CARE WHAT WE THINK: Accepting Nuclear North Korea Tells Iran it’s OK, Warns Expert.
Of course, regarding the headline, it’s been decades since we gave them reason to care.
FOOTBALL CRAZY: In an early experiment in crowdfunding/sourcing, a minor league football (soccer) club in England was turned over to fans worldwide to fund and run. It wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t exactly a rip-roaring success, either.
HE’S RIGHT: Roger Simon: We Need an Investigation of the Entire Justice Department Now. “It’s obvious these various scandals are beginning to intersect or, more precisely, intersected long ago and now the connections are being revealed. Undoubtedly, more are to come. And it’s a safe bet they’ll be yet more astonishing. . . . The time has come for a thorough airing to renew the trust of the citizenry. That means a special investigator, but one with a wide berth to look into the entire DOJ and FBI, its patterns and practices, and, let’s be honest, our intelligence agencies as well. We’re living in a bureaucratic nightmare.”
SUMANTRA MEITRA: Europe’s Imperial Dilemma.
The British exit and the Spanish crackdown are both a direct consequence of the EU shaping up as an empire, without having the requisite will or capability to manage order across the continent or control the backlash resulting from its idealist and incoherent policies. Undermining state sovereignty has only empowered differing forces within EU. The culturally Catholic conservative Central Europeans, for example, are opposed to Brussels and Berlin meddling in their domestic affairs with unchecked migration or energy deals with the United States. Britain, on the other hand, left the EU due simply to a rational fear of Germany’s Angela Merkel opening the whole of Europe to millions of migrants. Now, ethnic groups like the Catalans have decided if they are going to be ruled by Brussels anyway, why bother listening to the middle man in Madrid? Also, there’s no logical coherence in the policy of EU supporting humanitarian interventions in Libya, and self-determination of other ethnic groups like the Kurds and Irish, while simultaneously and hypocritically opposing Catalonian independence.
A great Machiavellian paradox now tests Europe. It is too diverse, differing in language and culture, and never united before other than through forced imperium, to be bound together in the way the EU has envisioned. An empire, or its modern jargon-oriented equivalent, ultimately cannot be sustained, or defended without using brute force. After all, Westphalian nation-states came into existence as the old empires faded. That led to imperial colonial powers, which then ruled the world for centuries, before being dismantled by other regional nationalists. The last empire to fall was the Soviet Union, which kept the Warsaw pact countries under their power not by the strength of Marxist ideology, but by sheer military force. As soon as Soviet economic power collapsed, so too did the strength of their military, resulting in an opening for a nationalist tide. If the EU tries to morph into a full empire, the result would be more nationalistic backlash and chaos—to say nothing of heightened wariness and tensions with the United States, the UK, and Russia. If the EU doesn’t act like an empire, the regional ethnic groups will rebel against their national states.
And that’s the dilemma for humanity’s greatest liberal utopian project.
“Utopia” of course means “no where,” and I’m afraid “liberal” in this case is the modern, illiberal meaning of the word. But this is a solid, big-picture peace — highly recommended.
Or, if you constantly call admirable people like Charles Murray and Christina Hoff Sommers “white supremacists,” you may lead people to believe that white supremacy isn’t such a bad thing after all.
LENORE SKENAZY GOES INTERNATIONAL: In her new Spectator article, she points out that in 1971, 80% of British 8-year-olds walked to school by themselves. In 2005 it’s just 12% of 7-to-10-year-olds. At ten, I was taking a train and a bus to school in a different city. Things have certainly changed over there, and it surely explains a lot.
Update: Closely related, here’s Lenore and Jonathan Haidt in the new Reason, explaining that lot.
WHAT’S HAPPENING? Twitter has been miscounting user growth since 2014.. But, “It still delivered for Wall Street,” and the company “thinks it might achieve profitability by the end of the year.”
How?
It’s a bizarre scenario in what was an otherwise modest earnings report. Twitter reported $590 million in revenue for the quarter, a decline of 4 percent year-over-year. That marks the third straight quarter of year-over-year revenue declines. Wall Street expected the company to generate $587 million last quarter.
One positive sign: It finally expects to turn a profit by the fourth quarter — that’s bottom line profit. It stands to reason since Twitter reported the lowest quarterly loss in Q3, about $21 million, than it has in three years.
One big reason for potential profitability: Twitter is spending much less on stock-based compensation for employees than it was a year ago. Twitter spent $101 million on stock-based compensation last quarter, down 36 percent from a year ago.
Twitter’s operating expenses are still too high for what probably ought to be a low-overhead microblogging service.
IT’S A FRAUD BECAUSE OF POLITICS, AND IT’S A FINALIST BECAUSE OF POLITICS: Just How Much Did Nancy MacLean Get Wrong? Despite being a finalist for the National Book Awards, Democracy in Chains is fatally flawed history.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Augustana U. instructor: Whites ‘slaughtered, maimed’ way to power, little has changed today. If that were true, you’d think people would be afraid to say it, and they’re manifestly not.
Cost of Attending Augustana University: $41,098 per year. Kinda pricey for a small school in South Dakota that hates white people.
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Justice Department settles IRS lawsuits from 400 conservative groups claiming discrimination. “It is improper for the IRS to single out groups for different treatment based on their names or ideological positions.”
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Dems Play Dumb on Dossier, DOJ Releases Whistleblower and Much, Much More.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Culturally Appropriate This, Social Justice Jerks.
You just need to understand that these people don’t care about other cultures – if they loved other cultures so much their sole experience with other cultures would not be accusing their immigrant housekeepers of stealing the silverware.
It’s a pose, a scam, an okie-doke. They want you to shrug and comply. Their strategy is to whine, complain, and annoy you until you become accustomed to obeying. They want to exhaust you with a never-ending litany of accusations of breaking the unending supply of new rules you didn’t know existed before you broke them.
This endless series of new rules is supposed to keep you off-balance and constantly vulnerable to their correction and guidance. You will never, ever be right – there’s always some new infraction for which you must submit to further restrictions of your right to self-governance.
True.
MICHAEL BARONE: Jeff Flake is the senator from the wrong state.
In commenting on Sen. Jeff Flake’s announcement that he was retiring rather than seeking a second term in the Senate, Ben Domenech of the Federalist wrote that Flake’s “brand changed dramatically.”
I take a different view: Flake, R-Ariz., in his 12 years in the House and five years in the Senate has taken consistent views. His strong free-market conservatism on economic issues led him to oppose former President George W. Bush’s Medicare prescription drug bill and TARP legislation, as well as the 2001-02 No Child Left Behind bill. He supported “comprehensive” immigration legislation in the House (for which John Boehner booted him from the Judiciary Committee) and in the Senate (as a member of the “Gang of Eight”).
Domenech’s point is that he bucked the Republican leadership in the House and not in the Senate, but in both cases he was acting in accordance with his own principles. Which are in line with the principles of those of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints and the great bulk of its believers.
Flake is from a pioneer Mormon family: his great-grandfather William Jordan Flake, together with William Snow, founded the Mormon town of Snowflake, Arizona in 1878 (it’s up in the mountains and it does snow there). He graduated from Brigham Young University, an LDS school, and served as an LDS missionary in South Africa. His district residence is in Mesa, the huge (population over 450,000) suburban city east of Phoenix in the Valley of the Sun, which was founded by LDS pioneers at almost exactly the same time as Snowflake.
As voters, members of the LDS Church tend to be Republicans, free market on economics, conservative on such cultural issues as abortion, but also sympathetic to immigrants. These are all Jeff Flake’s positions.
He was clearly not the man for this moment.
HERE WE GO AGAIN: MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ Addresses Harassment Allegations Against Mark Halperin.
“Now to a story that broke overnight involving someone you see around this table every day. CNN is reporting allegations regarding our friend Mark Halperin during his time at ABC News over a decade ago, unnamed sources detailing unwanted advances and inappropriate behavior. Halperin apologized for the pain his actions caused and said “I will take a step pack from my day-to-day work while I properly address the situation.,” said co-host Mika Brzezinski, facing the camera. “We are going to be following this story as it develops I’m sure we are going to be talking about it again when we know more about it.” She did not address whether NBC News had taken any action regarding Halperin’s status as a contributor to the program.
CNN reports that “Halperin would leave his roles at that network and as an analyst at NBC News.” So there doesn’t seem to be much doubt that there’s at least some truth to the allegations about Mika’s “friend.”
Is the infotainment industry just as rife with sexual misbehavior as the entertainment industry? Stay tuned…
BACK TO THE FUTURE: China Edges Closer to One-Man Rule.
In unveiling a new top leadership lineup without a potential successor to Mr. Xi on Wednesday, the Communist Party edged closer to resurrecting one-man rule, four decades after the death of Chairman Mao.
The parade of the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee onto a red-carpeted podium in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People was the climax of a twice-a-decade process that placed Mr. Xi on a par with Mao in the party constitution and positioned him as pre-eminent leader even beyond his second five-year term.
Concentrating such power in Mr. Xi—who can now make policy and personnel choices virtually uncontested—draws to an emphatic end an era of collective leadership. It also represents a historic gamble.
Mr. Xi is calculating that strongman rule will make it easier to add China to the ranks of rich, global powers and to project Chinese power globally. An early test of the latter comes in just a few weeks, when U.S. President Donald Trump is due to visit Beijing.
The risk is a political culture that rewards loyalty over initiative, in which it is harder for the leadership to astutely address complex challenges.
There’s also the problem of legitimacy. Democracies and democratic republics hold ritualized revolts every few years, in which the people get to throw the bastards out and put in some new ones. Through that process, tensions are released and at least some legitimacy is restored.
China’s rule-by-communist-conensus allowed for an orderly transfer of power, but never faced any real stresses like mass unemployment or a long an unpopular war. But now Xi is betting that he doesn’t need the consensus fig leaf, or even the appearance of orderliness.
We’ll see how he fares.
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WELL, OKAY: Biden on 2020: “I’m not going to decide not to run.”
Maybe by then this whole sexual harassment thing will have died down. Flashback: Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents:
“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.
“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.
“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”
Plus: Washington Post: What Are We Going To Do About Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?
Also: Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit.
Related: Talking Points Memo: Why Does Creepy Uncle Joe Biden Get A Pass From Liberals?
Plus:
STEPHEN KRUISER: The GOP Didn’t Abandon Jeff Flake, He Abandoned His Constituents.
AN EMOLUMENTS WIN FOR JOSH BLACKMAN AND SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: DOJ Shifts Position: “The Government Has Not Conceded That POTUS Is Subject to the Foreign Emoluments Clause.”
COULD IT BE… SATAN 2? Russia to test new missile ‘that can beat any defences.’
The RS-28 is destined to replace R-36, nicknamed SS-18 Satan by Nato.
Weighing 100 tonnes and with a range of about 6,200 miles, the Sarmat will carry up to 16 warheads and, according to Moscow, will be capable of beating any missile defence system.
It could carry a payload capable of destroying an area “the size of Texas or France”, according to Zvezda, the defence ministry’s television channel.
First tests of the Sarmat were planned for last year but had to be put back. They were delayed again in March because the launch silo was not ready, and then in April because of a missile fault.
Whatever Russia’s financial and production problems are, the most recent US land-based ICBM, the Minuteman III, ended its production run in 1978.
WE NEED SUNLIGHT: Grassley calls for special counsel on Uranium One sale.
Dramatically upping the stakes as it showcases its bolstered military prowess, North Korea last month conducted its first test of a powerful hydrogen bomb. Shortly afterward, the country’s foreign minister responded to Donald Trump’s threat to “totally destroy” North Korea by saying the country could conduct the “strongest hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific Ocean”.
It was not an idle warning, according to senior diplomat Ri Yong Pil, who told CNN the possibility was meant to be taken “literally”.
“The foreign minister is very well aware of the intentions of our supreme leader, so I think you should take his words literally,” Mr Ri told CNN.
This is China’s baby, so the leadership in Beijing ought to give some thought to how they’d react to a nuclear test announcement from Seoul, Tokyo, or Taipei.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Feminist prof says ‘traditional science’ is rooted in racism.