SCHOOL SHOOTINGS: Facts, Fallacies, Freedom and the Future.
Solid set of speakers at this one. It’s short notice, but if you’re going to be in the Los Angeles area this weekend, it might be worth your while.
Archive for 2018
May 16, 2018
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: 10 Reasons My Cat Deserves To Win The Intersectional Victim Olympics.
WELL, THAT’S COMFORTING: The Next Deadly Pandemic Could Be Unlike Any Threats We Know, Say Experts.
YOU KNOW THAT THAT’S NOT ALLOWED: George Korda: Finding the way to open and honest conversations about race.
STEPHEN KRUISER: Twitter’s Silence When Enforcing Behavior Rules Make Them Hard to Follow. “Conservative purge time again?”
Again or still?
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Former teacher sentenced for indecent behavior. “A woman who pleaded guilty in February to three counts of indecent behavior with juveniles was sentenced Friday in state district court to five years on each charge with the Department of Corrections with all but 18 months suspended on each charge and to run concurrently. . . . The victims were two 13-year-old boys and a 14-yearold boy. Lake Charles police began their investigation after a student’s mother reported that Odom had inappropriate contact with her son on multiple occasions. Prosecutors said Odom sent one victim nude photos of herself via a text message, and they said she performed oral sex on him in a classroom.”
I feel like she’s getting off easier than a male teacher facing the same charges would have.
THE SHAMEFUL, UNETHICAL SMEARING OF JORDAN PETERSON: The psychologist and intellectual might be controversial, but he’s not ‘enabling Jew hatred.’
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Astonishingly, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is still #1 most read on Amazon.
GOOD QUESTION: Trump’s Instincts on Afghanistan Are Right, So What Happened?
Last month marked the 40th anniversary of the 1978 coup that violently brought communist rulers into power in Kabul. Two years later the Soviet Union invaded. Ten years later, they withdrew, laying the foundation for the Mujahideen Civil War that led to the rise of the Taliban in 1996 and their war against the Northern Alliance. This war was still raging on 9/11 when the U.S. military entered the scene. The fundamental causes of these various civil wars still remain today. After 40 years of fighting, the Taliban’s fight against Kabul is not going to simply end due to U.S. intervention.
The sooner Trump translates his instincts on ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan into policy, the better for America. A withdrawal will improve American national security and strengthen economic prosperity. Extricating U.S. troops from Afghanistan will not be easy, however, because there are many in Washington — senior military leaders among them — who want to defend the status quo at any cost. There is no benefit to the United States in trying to fight yesterday’s failed battles but trying to do it “better.” The strategy has failed, not the tactics.
There’s no light at the end of this tunnel.
TRUMP BAD. CONSTITUTION WORSE. Elizabeth Warren Is Gravely Concerned about . . . the Electoral College.
BUTTERFIELD ALERT: L.A. Times asks, How Could California Be Poor While Doing So Much to Fight Poverty?
(Classical reference in headline.)
THE HAPPINESS CURVE: Past your prime? Not at all. Research shows that happiness follows a U-shaped trajectory. Happiness starts high with youthful optimism and declines throughout middle age before rising once more — a revelation to those of us who have been raised fearing the “second half” of life. Check out Jonathan Rauch’s fantastic new book about why life gets better after 50. Reading it felt less like a book and more like a start of a movement to take better advantage of the gifts, resources and wisdom of people who we once would say were “past their prime.”
GET WOKE, GO BROKE? ABC set to dial back political humor from pro-Trump ‘Roseanne’ next season.
WILL NEW YORK’S NEW AG GIVE THE CLINTONS ANOTHER MULLIGAN? Nearly two dozen May 15ths have passed since the Clinton Foundation was created in 1997 and New York donors have been solicited ever since. Tuesday was the latest deadline for the Clinton Foundation to comply with the Empire State’s laws and regulations for charities.
Neither departed NY AG Eric Schneiderman nor any of his predecessors — including Eliot Spitzer and current Gov. Andrew Cuomo — did nothing to enforce those laws and regs regarding the Clinton Foundation. Among much else, the Clinton Foundation failed to disclose foreign donors despite New York’s requirement that their names and amounts be made public.
Now there are more than a dozen aspirants hoping to become the new AG. Will any of them uphold equality before the law? Charles Ortel, writing in LifeZette, and other inquiring minds want to know.
RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: New Terror Trend? Wave of Family Suicide Bombers Follows Intense ISIS Training for Kids. “The mother of one family cell detonated a bomb on one of her young girls before detonating her own suicide bomb at Indonesian church, authorities said.”
ELIOT COHEN: A Reckoning for Obama’s Foreign-Policy Legacy. “Veterans of the last administration are learning a hard lesson: Policies constructed by executive order and executive agreement are just as easily blown up by them.”
The Iran deal was, in truth, a very bad one. It did nothing to inhibit Iranian behavior in the broader Middle East, did nothing to stop its ballistic programs, and opened the path for a resumption of the nuclear-weapons program in a decade or so. Some of us said so at the time. Walking away from it, however, will make matters worse not only because success is unlikely, but because this shredding of an earlier presidential agreement further undermines the qualities that those who look to American leadership have come to value — predictability, steadiness, and continuity. Even when American allies have doubted the superpower’s wisdom, they usually felt they could count on its constancy.
Predictability in being taken for a sucker is no virtue, and tearing up treaties the Senate rejected is no vice.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Students blast ‘intimidating’ endorsement of Nobel for Trump.
When a committee chair issued an unauthorized statement on behalf of the Student Bar Association at Rutgers Law School and refused to rescind it, SBA President John DeLuca decided to give him a taste of his own medicine.
DeLuca issued a statement endorsing President Trump’s nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize, which was quickly denounced as “harmful,” “dangerous,” and “intimidating.”
As always, it’s different when we do it.
“A CONSPICUOUS LACK OF CURIOSITY”: Questions the Press Hasn’t Asked about Violence in Gaza.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Kellogg pulls out of Venezuela due to economic crisis.
Kellogg did not specify what difficulties it was facing in Venezuela, but companies typically struggle to find raw materials due to product shortages and currency controls that crimp imports. Socialist President Nicolas Maduro’s government also stops companies from raising prices to keep up with hyperinflation, denting profits and sometimes rendering operations unsustainable.
Venezuela’s Information Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
The closure is not expected to significantly worsen food shortages in Venezuela, but it was a further blow to morale for many Venezuelans as Kellogg’s is the most popular and available cereal in the country.
Stunned workers were barred from entering Kellogg’s plant in the central city of Maracay and massed outside, seeking information, local business sources said.
The move by the multinational was a typical one in Venezuela after years of economic crisis.
I’d ask the last company to leave to please turn off the lights, but that’s being taken care of already.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Commencement speaker slammed for criticizing #MeToo movement. “Nella Gray Barkley caused a stir with her commencement speech at Sweet Briar College, during which she said she has only ‘partial sympathy’ for the #MeToo movement. Barkley argued that women must stand up for themselves by setting ‘high expectations’ and ‘ground rules,’ which some students and alumni called a ‘shameful and disgusting’ display of ‘internalized misogyny.'”
Expecting women to display agency and take responsibility is now anti-feminist.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Nikki Haley Throws Down at UN and Much, Much More. “President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen is fighting Michael Avenatti, the “lawyer” representing porn star Stormy Daniels, who released what appear to be Cohen’s bank records. How did he get these bank records?? The media is uninterested.”
It’s almost as though their disinterest leans in only one direction.
TODAY IS THE 52nd ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION: The consensus minimum death toll figure for that period in Chinese history is 400,000. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday place the number at up to three million in Mao: The Unknown Story. But even without a single death, the Cultural Revolution would have been horrific. It was an attempt—in some ways entirely successful and in other ways not—to destroy the fabric of Chinese civilization.
The opening event was the Politburo’s issuance of the so-called “May 16th Notification.” That fevered document laid out Mao’s justification for the attack:
Chairman Mao often says that there is no construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation; it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which is construction. Put destruction first, and in the process you have construction.
The May 16th Notification is full of class warfare and conspiracy-minded paranoia:
Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khrushchev for example, who are still nestling beside us.
In the coming months, things spun out of control. Red Guard students (often financed by the Party) were instructed to attack the “Four Olds”—old customs, cultures, habits and ideas. And attack they did. Entire libraries, temples, monasteries and mosques were destroyed. Clergy were arrested and sent off to camps. The national police chief declared that it was “no big deal” if Red Guards were beating “bad people” to death. Countless enemies of the people were denounced, humiliated, and made to confess their sins. Many were tortured. Many were sent off to the countryside for re-education, where they often died, since the villages did not have enough to feed them. China was brought to its knees by gangs of thuggish teenagers, drunk with power.
Can it happen here? Probably not—at least not the way it happened in China. America’s equivalent of the Chinese “counter-revolutionaries” have more resources to fall back on and hence can afford to push back. (They are also increasingly armed. Even I, the original Miss Fumblefingers, have a mean-looking (though antique) firearm in my bedroom. Just thought you’d want to know.)
Still, when faint echoes of the Cultural Revolution occur here—as they frequently do these days—I get butterflies in my stomach. Our civilization, like every civilization, is in many ways more fragile than most people understand.
BYRON YORK: On The McCain Controversy.
McCain’s years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam will always define his biography. He showed courage and endurance under conditions most Americans cannot imagine. He is rightly celebrated for that.
But McCain’s valor came in a war America did not win and which remains divisive to this day. And some participants in the Vietnam War are still mad at each other; for example, the retired Air Force general who called McCain “songbird,” Thomas McInerney, himself has an impressive record of hundreds of missions over Vietnam. More than a decade ago, the Vietnam fight was over John Kerry and swift boats. Divisions remain.
In politics, McCain’s political career has been marked by a sometimes testy relationship with Republican Party doctrine and voters. In the 2000 GOP presidential primaries, his defeat of then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary led to a nasty showdown in South Carolina. Bush won, McCain lost, and some in the press came away with the impression that Bush had smeared McCain. On the other hand, some Republicans came away with the impression that McCain, who styled himself a “maverick,” would go out of his way to irritate his party.
Meanwhile, McCain cultivated a relationship with the media that was so close he sometimes referred to them as “my base.” McCain knew that many press types admired him because of his fondness for sticking it to the GOP. “Loving McCain was a way of expressing a negative opinion about the Republican Party,” longtime campaign adviser Mike Murphy said of the press in an interview with the Washington Post in 2006. . . .
McCain’s final act of angering Republicans came in July 2017, when he cast the decisive vote to kill the GOP effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. Many Republicans felt it was a bad bill, and any lawmaker would have good reason to oppose it, yet some still saw McCain’s vote as a way of getting back at Trump.
So McCain has a war record of pure heroism. He has a political record of real achievement, but also perhaps more than his share of the controversy that goes with politics.
So which to emphasize in what might be McCain’s final days? Here’s a thought: Why not dwell on the good, especially since it was so good? When someone dies, it really is fitting to look at the best that person did. And John McCain lived a great, patriotic life, doing more in service to the U.S. than his critics, or almost anyone else. When he dies, why not remember that?
Good advice, but he’s not dead yet, he’s still alive and taking his own shots. And he hasn’t retired, which means he’s still in politics, not above them, even when they get nasty.
AS CROSS-RACIAL ADOPTIONS BECOME COMMONPLACE, HANDWRINGING SEEMS TO HAVE INCREASED: We’ve come a fur piece since the 1980s, when the President of the National Association of Black Social Workers declared at a Senate hearing, “We view the placement of Black children in white homes as a hostile act against our community. It’s a blatant form of racial and cultural genocide.” Congress didn’t buy the argument. Noting that Black children had been languishing in foster care, because adoption agencies were hesitant to allow white families to adopt them, it first passed the Howard Metzenbaum Multi-Ethnic Placement Act of 1994 and then it strengthened that Act with Inter-Ethnic Placement Provisions of the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996. These statutes essentially prohibited federally funded adoption agencies from discriminating on the basis of race.
These days, cross-racial adoptions happen frequently. But I’ve started noticing more and more and still more worrying about possible downside consequences. What happens to a child when nobody in his family looks like him? Won’t it be traumatic? I guess that view is just one more sign of the times. As race becomes less important, people worry about it more.
A generation ago they used to laugh about adoption agencies of the generation preceding, which had gone out of their way to match the hair and eye color and adopting parents and children. This was thought to be excessive. Now the worriers seem to have come full circle. This is not to say that adopted children don’t have thoughts about their origins. But this would be so no matter who adopts them, and the way to handle it will differ enormously from child to child. I would put the current attention the issue is getting in the category of “first world problems.”
By the way, as recently as 2003, Randall Kennedy wrote that his experience with the National Association of Black Social Workers was that its members hadn’t changed their minds. They did change their rhetoric.