Archive for 2019
May 2, 2019
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Clinton Projection Syndrome.
For much of her professional life, Hillary Clinton had acted above and beyond the law on the assumption that as the wife of a governor, as first lady of the United States, as a senator from New York, as secretary of state and as a two-time candidate for the presidency, she could ignore the law without worry over the consequences.
For Clinton now to project that the president should be indicted suggests she is worried about her own potential indictment. And she is rightly concerned that for the first time in 40 years, neither she nor her husband is serving in government or running for some office, and therefore could be held accountable.
Read the whole thing.
MARINE COMMANDANT: You Can Have Purple Hair in Our New Cyber Force.
BLAME THE MESSENGER: May Sacks UK Defense Secretary Over Huawei Leak.
No. 10 has finished its investigation into the source of an embarrassing leak about a National Security Council vote to allow Huawei to help build out the UK’s 5G infrastructure despite Washington’s warnings and even some misgivings within the UK government itself.
As a result, the PM has decided to sack Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson, presumably because he was the source of the leak.
Williamson took his chances and paid the price. But he seems to have had the national interest in mind, which is more than can be said for any Western government doing business with Huawei.
COLOR ME SKEPTICAL: A Facebook request: Write a code of tech ethics.
But Zuckerberg should be aiming higher. The question isn’t just what rules should a reformed Facebook follow. The bigger question is what all the big tech companies’ relationships with users should look like. The framework needed can’t be created out of whole cloth just by new government regulation; it has to be grounded in professional ethics.
Doctors and lawyers, as they became increasingly professionalized in the 19th century, developed formal ethical codes that became the seeds of modern-day professional practice. Tech-company professionals should follow their example. An industry-wide code of ethics could guide companies through the big questions of privacy and harmful content.
State governments made compliance with these codes mandatory to get a license to practice medicine or law. Lawyers’ ethics require that they meet obligations — sometimes called “fiduciary” duties —of confidentiality, loyalty and care. Modern-day medical ethics are framed to include autonomy (i.e. respect for individual self-determination), “non-maleficence” (Hippocrates’ “first, do no harm”), beneficence and justice — concepts that reflect the same kinds of values.
I admire the sentiment, but as Peter Morgan and I wrote over 20 years ago, such “ethical codes” tend to be more about preventing competition and protecting insider interests than about actual ethical behavior. Often they reflect what we call (after Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones) the Grand Blifil Paradox, in which talk of ethics is used to conceal a fundamentally unethical enterprise.
JOEL KOTKIN: OUR SUICIDAL ELITES.
The French nobility, observed Tocqueville in The Ancien Regime and The Revolution, supported many of the writers whose essays and observations ended up threatening “their own rights and even their existence.” Today we see much the same farce repeated, as the world’s richest people line up behind causes that, in the end, could relieve them of their fortunes, if not their heads. In this sense, they could end up serving, in Lenin’s words, as “useful idiots” in their own destruction.
Although they themselves have benefited enormously from the rise of free markets, liberal protection of property rights, and the meritocratic ideal, many among our most well-heeled men and women, even in the United States, have developed a tendency to embrace policies and cultural norms that undermine their own status. This is made worse by their own imperious behavior, graphically revealed in the mortifying college admissions scandal in the United States, where the Hollywood and business elites cheated, bribed, and falsified records to get their own kids into elite colleges.
At the same time, these same people continue to boost their own share of the world’s wealth, as a recent OECD report reveals, largely at the expense of the middle and working class. The embrace of inexorable “globalization”—essentially shifting productive work to developing countries—may appeal to the progressive rich even as it, in the words of geographer Christophe Guilluy, “revived the citadels of Medieval France.”
Sometimes the elite policy agenda is justified as part of a “green” agenda that impoverishes the lower and middle classes by expelling basic industries, thereby boosting housing and energy prices. This in turn has set the stage for the kind of peasant rebellions—from Brexit and Trump to the rise of illiberal regimes in eastern Europe as well as the re-emergence of socialism—that threaten their hegemony.
Read the whole thing.
NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR THE GOOD STUFF: Sorry, Bernie Sanders, but Disney Doesn’t Have To Apologize for Making $1.3 Billion with Avengers: Endgame.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Subsidies, not profits, have crumbled the ivory tower.
LET THE WHOLE ROTTEN STRUCTURE FALL ON ITS OWN: Tucker Carlson Goes Off on GOP for Wanting to Intervene in Venezuela.
WSJ EDITORIAL: A Real Attorney General: Bill Barr gets smeared for refusing to duck and cover like Loretta Lynch.
Washington pile-ons are never pretty, but this week’s political setup of Attorney General William Barr is disreputable even by Beltway standards. Democrats and the media are turning the AG into a villain for doing his duty and making the hard decisions that special counsel Robert Mueller abdicated.
Mr. Barr’s Wednesday testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee was preceded late Tuesday by the leak of a letter Mr. Mueller had sent the AG on March 27. Mr. Mueller griped in the letter that Mr. Barr’s four-page explanation to Congress of the principal conclusions of the Mueller report on March 24 “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the Mueller team’s “work and conclusions.” Only in Washington could this exercise in posterior covering be puffed into a mini-outrage.
Democrats leapt on the letter as proof that Mr. Barr was somehow covering for Donald Trump when he has covered up nothing. Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, the Democratic answer to Rep. Louie Gohmert, accused Mr. Barr of abusing his office and lying to Congress, and demanded that he resign. The only thing she lacked was evidence.
Well, that’s been their main weakness all along. Plus:
Contrast that to the abdication of Loretta Lynch, who failed as Barack Obama’s last Attorney General to make a prosecutorial judgment about Hillary Clinton’s misuse of classified information. Ms. Lynch cowered before the bullying of then FBI director James Comey, who absolved Mrs. Clinton of wrongdoing while publicly scolding her. That egregious break with Justice policy eventually led Mr. Comey to re-open the Clinton probe in late October 2016, which helped to elect Mr. Trump.
All of this shows again the risks of appointing special counsels. They lack the political accountability that the Founders built into the separation of powers. Mr. Mueller, in his March 27 letter, revealed again that like Mr. Comey at the FBI he viewed himself as accountable only to himself.
This trashing of Bill Barr shows how frustrated and angry Democrats continue to be that the special counsel came up empty in his Russia collusion probe. He was supposed to be their fast-track to impeachment. Now they’re left trying to gin up an obstruction tale, but the probe wasn’t obstructed and there was no underlying crime. So they’re shouting and pounding the table against Bill Barr for acting like a real Attorney General.
It’s as if all of this was just a hastily-concocted sham designed to distract attention from Obama Administration wrongdoing.
UGH: Measles is an early warning sign for outbreaks of more serious diseases. “Once you have less than 95 percent of the population immune, you have enough people to keep the disease in circulation, Kretsinger explains. Most countries simply never attained that herd immunity level. Even if you maintained at 92 percent every year, as the population overall increases you’re increasingly likely to see an outbreak. . . . Even if there weren’t an increasing pushback from vaccine-hesitant parents, the truth is that over the last nine years our global vaccination rates have flatlined for pretty much all vaccines. Vaccination rates haven’t been decreasing over that time, Kretsinger says, it’s just that we never really achieved the level we needed to.”
Plus: “Should those diseases come back, we may be worse prepared in some ways than before. For a long time, the older generations in our society grew up in the pre-vaccine era, which meant that the overwhelming majority of them were exposed to these viruses. Now we have much less circulation of viruses, but also not sufficiently high vaccine coverage to prevent transmission altogether, and the combination is worrisome.”
THIS MAKES ME JOYFUL: My spell check is adamant that “intersectionality” is not a word. Right you are, Mr. Spell Check.
May 1, 2019
WILLIAMS COLLEGE HAS A “STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE” BUT: CC [Student Council] rejects Williams Initiative for Israel. “WIFI was the first club in over a decade that complied with all CC bylaws for recognition but failed to gain RSO status, according to archived CC minutes.”
A special award for spouting nonsensical propaganda goes to Williams student Joseph Moore. Anti-Israel activists frequently claim that Israel has engaged and is engaged in “genocide” against Palestinians, despite the fact that Arabs in Israel and the contested territories have had among the fastest population growth rates in the world for many decades straight. Moore’s response to this irrefutable retort to the charge of genocide:
“Even when you consider the fact that the Palestinian population is rising, it’s because they have a high fertility rate,” Moore said after the meeting. “Generally, populations in war zones have higher fertility rates because they don’t know if all of their children will make adulthood.”
It should be noted that the total number of Palestinians who have been killed in clashes with Israeli forces since 1967 is somewhere in the high four figures, mostly terrorists, amounting to maybe a week’s worth of killing from the recent Syrian civil war. If Moore doesn’t understand that a massively rising population combined with a few thousand killed during armed hostilities doesn’t add up to anything remotely like genocide, then it’s remarkable if he got into Williams. If he does understand it, then he’s just malevolent for claiming otherwise.
Relatedly some other Middle Eastern populations have in fact declined rather dramatically since Israel was established:
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Covington Kid Nick Sandmann Sues NBC/MSNBC for $275 Million.
RICH LOWRY ON WILLIAM BARR’S TESTIMONY AND THE RUSSIAN COLLUSION NARRATIVE HOAX: “In sum, this is all a non-scandal that shows how small the Russia controversy has gotten—from alleged treason to a squabble over a summary of a report that was released in full.”
THIS AGED WELL:
AT MINDING THE CAMPUS: The Left’s War Against White People. They told me if Donald Trump were elected, we’d see people pushing for race war in America. And they were right!
GAME OF THRONES, DELAWARE EDITION: Flashback: Biden Family Drama Has Everything: Sex, Hookers, Debt, Cocaine And A Son Sleeping With His Dead Bro’s Wife.
OPEN THREAD: Insert lame “hump day” joke here.
JIM TREACHER IS A NATIONAL TREASURE:
