Krauthammer

“To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and the source of its energy and freedom.” 
― Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

“History has blessed us with all the freedom and advantages of multiculturalism. But it has also blessed us, because of the accident of our origins, with the linguistic unity that brings a critically needed cohesion to a nation as diverse, multiracial and multiethnic as America. Why gratuitously throw away that priceless asset? How mindless to call the desire to retain it 'racist.”
― Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

“Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's Dhina, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty than ever in human history.
Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regular your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but--even better--in the name of Earth itself. Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment--carbon chastity--they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by and what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.” 
― Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics


“Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own--those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.
Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy--precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.” 
― Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics


“During the last presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama, asked why he was not wearing a flag pin, answered that it represented “a substitute” for “true patriotism.” Bad move. Months later, Obama quietly beat a retreat and began wearing the flag on his lapel. He does so still.” 
― Charles Krauthamm


“When Social Security began making monthly distributions in 1940, there were 160 workers for every senior receiving benefits. In 1950, there were 16.5; today, 3; in 20 years, there will be but 2. Now, the average senior receives in Social Security about a third of what the average worker makes. Applying that ratio retroactively, this means that in 1940, the average worker had to pay only 0.2% of his salary to sustain the older folks of his time; in 1950, 2%; today, 11%; in 20 years, 17%.” 
― Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics


“the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but—even better—in the name of Earth itself. Environmentalists are Gaia’s priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment—carbon chastity—they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat. Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe. There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society. So what does the global warming agnostic propose as an alternative? First, more research—untainted and reliable—to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate. Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean. But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these is a strict nuclear taboo. Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix off the table and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does the rationing.” 
― Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics

1918 pandemic

100 years ago, influenza killed as many as 50 million people. Could it happen again today?

Doyle Rice,  

One hundred years ago, death came with astonishing speed and horrifying agony.

Some influenza patients admitted to a Boston hospital in the morning of October 1918 would be dead by the evening, their bodies turning blue from lack of oxygen. Hospitals reported an average 100 deaths a day, overwhelming morgues. 

Up to 500 million people – about one-third of the world’s population – became infected with the influenza virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. As many as 50 million died, or one out of every 30 human beings on the planet, killing more American troops than those that died on World War I battlefields.

The intensity and speed with which it struck were almost unimaginable, the worst global pandemic in modern history. 

Most chilling is that such a calamity could again occur today. 

"A global influenza pandemic is No. 1, 2, 3 and 4 on our list of the most-feared public health crises," according to Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy 

Another expert, Vanderbilt University infectious disease specialist William Schaffner, said "we fear flu. We know how serious it is." 

It could happen again

Top health and science groups, such as the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, predict influenza pandemics are nearly certain to recur.  

"Influenza viruses, with the vast silent reservoir in aquatic birds, are impossible to eradicate," the World Health Organization warned.  "With the growth of global travel, a pandemic can spread rapidly globally with little time to prepare a public health response."

A pandemic could also arise if a strain mutates with or develops directly from animal flu viruses, the CDC said. The main contributors to a potential pandemic are the lack of a universal vaccine and humans' lack of immunity to those potential unborn strains.

"The threat of a future flu pandemic remains," the CDC said. "A pandemic flu virus could emerge anywhere and spread globally." 

If an equal ratio of Americans died in a pandemic today, that would be an unimaginable 2 million Americans. That's the current population of the entire Las Vegas metropolitan area. 

In a near worst-case scenario, a new, lethal and highly infectious flu virus would break out in a crowded, unprepared megacity that lacks public health infrastructure, according to Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Heath. 

Such a fast-moving virus could burst from a city and catch a ride with international travelers before public health officials realize what is happening.

Specifically, avian influenza viruses such as H7N9 top pandemic threat lists, according to Johns Hopkins. While these strains are mostly harmless in chickens, they could potentially evolve into much deadlier strains for humans.

“In terms of pandemic potential, an avian influenza virus is thought to be a likely candidate, based on prior pandemics,” says Amesh Adalja of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

However, there are safeguards to detect and counteract influenza outbreaks that did not exist 100 years ago.

These include systems to detect signs of potential outbreaks around the world, Schaffner said. In addition, he said scientists have the capacity to make vaccines more rapidly and also have better antiviral drugs that could be used to treat those who contract the disease.

Still, influenza and the potential for a pandemic are concerns that are always at the top of the list for experts who work with infectious diseases and public health, he said.

Pandemics ignore national borders, social class, economic status, and even age.

1918 pandemic

Spreading from birds to humans, the 1918 pandemic might have started in Kansas. Or France, or maybe Asia, according to Olsterholm.

What is known is that it was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of bird origin.The First World War, about to come to its horrific end in Europe in November 1918, may have played some role in moving the virus around the world. "But we can't say that the war was the cause," he said.

It was "a widespread, worldwide pandemic. It was a virus no one had ever seen before," said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

More: After deadly 2017-18 flu season, surgeon general urges Americans to get shots

The pandemic killed more people in 24 months than AIDS killed in 24 years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century, according to the book "The Great Influenza."

The dead included about 675,000 people in the United States. In just October alone, the worst single month in the U.S., an unthinkable 100,000 Americans died. Many were young adults in the prime of their life.

"The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the 20- to 40-year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic," the Centers for Disease Control said.

The World Health Organization said the 1918 influenza pandemic was known colloquially as “Spanish flu,” although there was nothing “Spanish” about the epidemic.

Flu today and how to protect against it

Although every flu season is different, and influenza infection can affect people differently, millions of people get the flu every year, according to the CDC. Hundreds of thousands of people are hospitalized and thousands or tens of thousands of people die from flu-related causes every year.

An annual seasonal flu vaccine is the best way to help protect against flu, the CDC said. Everyone 6 months of age and older should get a flu vaccine every season.

Even if it's only 40 percent effective, that's still better odds than doing nothing at all, Offit said. "Influenza knocks you out."

Vaccination has been shown to have many benefits, including reducing the risk of flu illnesses, hospitalizations and even the risk of flu-related death in children. Osterholm recommends getting the shot as close to the heart of flu season as possible, since the duration of protection is limited. 

As what a citizen can do to prevent a future pandemic, though a seasonal vaccine would be ineffective, he said the best action is to reach out to the government and tell them to start working on new vaccines for influenza. 

Prayer - Gracious Love

Prayer - Gracious Love

All-knowing Lord—who has numbered the stars in the sky—you know our hearts and thoughts even before we know them ourselves. Your gracious love fills all our needs. What comfort and peace it gives our souls. With praise and thanksgiving. Amen.

Government Will Soon Spend More on Interest Than on the Military.

SUSTAINABILITY:

 As Debt Rises, the Government Will Soon Spend More on Interest Than on the Military.

“Tax cuts, spending increases and higher interest rates could make it harder to respond to future recessions and deal with other needs.”

The run-up in borrowing costs is a one-two punch brought on by the need to finance a fast-growing budget deficit, worsened by tax cuts and steadily rising interest rates that will make the debt more expensive.

With less money coming in and more going toward interest, political leaders will find it harder to address pressing needs like fixing crumbling roads and bridges or to make emergency moves like pulling the economy out of future recessions.

Within a decade, more than $900 billion in interest payments will be due annually, easily outpacing spending on myriad other programs. Already the fastest-growing major government expense, the cost of interest is on track to hit $390 billion next year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Tax cuts are the least of our debt problem given that Washington still enjoys record revenues, year after year. What Washington has is a spending problem, and zero appetite for addressing it.

173Posted at 10:09 am by Stephen Green   

Drive to destroy Kavanaugh is the worst of feminism.

HEATHER MAC DONALD:

 Drive to destroy Kavanaugh is the worst of feminism.

The most salient fact about this alleged episode will never register on elite consciousness: the sexual free-for-all environment, which may or may not have given rise to an assault by Kavanaugh. The sexual revolution declared that the traditional restraints on the male libido — norms of male chivalry and gentlemanliness and of female modesty and prudence — were patriarchal and oppressive. Men should stop protecting women and putting them on a pedestal. Males and females were assumed to desire easy sex with equal fervor, and to be able to walk away from a one-night stand with equal complacency.

With regard to students, adults should remain nonjudgmental and as far out of the picture as possible. Chaperones were relegated to the relic pile, as fusty as a mothballed corset. Starting in the 1970s, affluent parents often absented themselves from their teenagers’ parties, leaving the house liquor cabinet unattended. Popular culture became hyper-sexualized.

The results were not pretty: the male libido, free to act as boorishly as it wanted; females getting drunk to reduce their innate sexual inhibitions, unprotected by any default assumptions against casual premarital sex. Whether a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh took advantage of this putative sexual liberation, many other teenagers have, and in so doing, merely followed the new script for sexual relations.

Those derided Victorian values of chivalric paternalism are now being reimported covertly on college campuses, however, where male students are deemed responsible for female well-being during drunken hook-ups, even if the male and female student are both equally inebriated.

The old system restrained both men and women, but the developing system places all the responsibilities on men — because apparently third-wave feminists must be protected like children.

128Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green   

U.S. Urged to Rapidly Prepare for Electromagnetic Pulse Attack

 Bill Gertz

24 hours ago

The United States is vulnerable to a devastating electromagnetic pulse event caused by a high-altitude nuclear blast or solar superstorm, according to a recently published book.

Peter Pry, a former CIA analyst and author of the book EMP Manhattan Project, is urging the government to rapidly harden the U.S. electric power system against EMP similar to the three-year crash program to build the first atomic bomb in 1942.

"Today the United States and the world faces another existential threat—from an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) catastrophe that can be caused by nature or man, and topple the technological pillars of modern electronic civilization," said Pry, who served on a congressional EMP commission in the early 2000s. 

The book contains fresh assessments of the EMP threat produced by a more recent congressional commission last year that concluded the United States would suffer millions of deaths from a major EMP incident.

EMP was discovered in the 1960s during above-ground nuclear tests. The tests showed a nuclear blast created a pulse capable of disrupting or destroying electronic devices over large areas, in some cases over 1,000 miles away.

The latest EMP commission found the United States is confronted with "a present and continuing existential threat from naturally occurring and manmade electromagnetic pulse assault and related attacks on military and critical national infrastructures."

An EMP event would produce an electric power outage over large areas of the country that could last for a year or longer.

Emergency systems, such as generators, also are vulnerable to damage from EMP.

EMP events would disable critical supply chains and plunge the entire country into living conditions similar to those of centuries ago prior the use of electric power.

"An extended blackout today could result in the death of a large fraction of the American people through the effects of societal collapse, disease, and starvation," the commission stated in its July 2017 report. "While national planning and preparation for such events could help mitigate the damage, few such actions are currently underway or even being contemplated."

William R. Graham, former head of the EMP commission, stated in a preface to the book that a nationwide electrical blackout of one year "could kill millions, perhaps prove fatal to most Americans, by starvation, disease, and societal collapse."

"EMP is a civilization killer," Graham said.

The book warns that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are preparing to use EMP attacks combined with traditional military strikes and new cyber attacks in future conflicts.

The threat was highlighted by North Korea's announcement in state-run media in September 2017 that the country's thermonuclear device could be detonated at high altitude and produce "great destructive power … for superpowerful EMP attack."

North Korea is suspected of cooperating with Iran on EMP and warhead miniaturization technology.

China is known to be developing nonnuclear EMP bombs that would simulate the effects of EMP from a nuclear explosion.

Russia's EMP weapons program is said to include both strategic and tactical EMP arms, some of which reportedly are designed as antiaircraft weapons.

EMP and cyber attacks would impair the United States quickly and decisively by causing blackouts resulting from disabling large portions of the U.S. electric grid. The current grid includes three regional systems for generating and distributing electric power.

"Foreign adversaries may aptly consider nuclear EMP attack a weapon that can gravely damage the U.S. by striking at its technological Achilles Heel, without having to confront the U.S. military," the book states.

Pry blamed bureaucratic politics and government bungling for the fact that the most recent EMP commission report revealed that recommendations made by the earlier EMP panel in 2008 were never implemented.

"A new finding of the congressional EMP commission—that notes not a single recommendation of the original EMP commission has been implemented since 2008, a decade ago—is that the chief impediment to protecting the American people from EMP is not technology or cost, but the incompetence of the U.S. government," Pry said in a email to the Free Beacon.

"Bureaucratic politics has been the chief impediment," he added noting the Defense, Homeland Security, and Energy Departments as well as the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission "have all failed in their duty to make EMP protection of life-sustaining critical infrastructures a high priority, and have failed to work together to achieve the necessary protection."

President Trump, however, has made dealing with EMP a priority.

"President Trump deserves high praise for being the first president to include EMP protection of the electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures in his new National Security Strategy," Pry said.

Congress passed the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act in 2016 directing Homeland Security to make plans to survive and recover from EMP a high priority.

"But Obama holdovers and the permanent Washington bureaucracy think they know better than the president, the Congress, and the EMP commission," Pry said. "Only in Washington do endless studies, meetings, and conferences on EMP count as action."

The Pentagon, Pry added, is holding up publication of several EMP commission reports that were ready for publication at the end of last year.

"What is needed is for President Trump to appoint an executive agent, as President Franklin Roosevelt did in General Lesley Groves to head the WWII Manhattan Project that invented the atomic bomb," Pry said.

The executive agent would be able to cut through federal bureaucratic roadblocks.

"Protecting against the worst threat—nuclear EMP attack—will also mitigate all lesser threats, including from solar storms, nonnuclear EMP weapons, worst-case cyber warfare, sabotage, and severe weather," he said.

Pry suggested that Trump could follow the example of President Dwight Eisenhower who personally oversaw development of the national highway system in the 1950s.

The cost of a high-priority counter-EMP program is relatively modest compared with the original Manhattan Project.

Pry estimates that the nuclear bomb project that required new technology and machines cost about $20 billion in current dollars.

The congressional EMP Commission calculated that the cost of hardening the national electric grid would be about $2 billion dollars.

Natural EMP can be caused by magnetic solar superstorms, like the Carrington Event in 1859, that if repeated today would cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts, and damage to electric grids.

A nuclear EMP attack could be carried out with a single nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude or a few weapons set off 200 miles above earth.

The nuclear EMP blasts could be fired on long- or short-range missiles, a high-altitude jet strike, or even a high-altitude balloon.

"Russia, China, and North Korea now have the capability to conduct a nuclear EMP attack against the U.S.," the book states. "All have practiced or described contingency plans to do so."

Terrorist or other less-sophisticated adversaries also might use EMP if they were to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Other non-EMP threats to the U.S. electric grid include cyber attacks designed to cause blackouts and sabotage against extra-high-voltage transformers using rifles, explosives, or nonnuclear EMP or directed energy weapons.

Pry, who specialized in Moscow's nuclear war planning during 10 years at CIA, currently is executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a congressional advisory board.

The Assault On Kavanaugh Is Proving Trump Voters Right.

RICH LOWRY:

The Assault On Kavanaugh Is Proving Trump Voters Right.

First, that good character is no defense. If you are John McCain, who genuinely tried to do the right thing and carefully cultivated a relationship with the media over decades, they will still call you a racist when you run against Barack Obama.
If you are Mitt Romney, an exceptionally earnest and decent man, they will make you into a heartless and despicable vulture capitalist, also for the offense of campaigning against Obama.

If you are Brett Kavanaugh, a respected member of the legal establishment who doesn’t have a flyspeck on his record across decades of public service in Washington, they will come up with dubious accusations of wrongdoing from decades ago when you were a teenager.

Second, that the media is an unremitting political and cultural adversary. In the Kavanaugh controversy, the press has been wholly on the other side, presuming his guilt and valorizing his accusers and their supporters, including Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, whose most famous contribution to the debate was telling men to “shut up.” The advocacy isn’t limited to cable networks or the Twitter feeds of journalists. It reaches all the way up the food chain. . . .

Third, that politics isn’t just rough-and-tumble; it’s red in tooth and claw. Process and norms are nice, but they go out the window as soon as something important is at stake, like a potential fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Senate Democrats may delicately talk about the importance of norms and civility on Sunday shows, but watch how they act.

Yep. Then they complain that Trump is coarsening our politics.

127Posted at 10:24 am by Glenn Reynolds   

from Kavanaugh’s letter to Senators Grassley

DID TRUMP CHOOSE WISELY?

 IT LOOKS LIKE HE DID:

This is from Kavanaugh’s letter to Senators Grassley and Feinstein:

These are smears, pure and simple.  And they debase our public discourse.  But there are also a threat to any man or woman who wishes to serve our country.  Such grotesque and obvious character assassination–if allowed to succeed–will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from service.

As I told the Committee during my hearing, a federal judge must be independent, no swayed by public or political pressure.  That is the kind of judge I will always be.  I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process.  The coordinated effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out.  The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out.  That last minute character assassination will not succeed.

He’s right, of course.

This is the kind of thing that causes good people to decline to be nominated.

 Indeed, it will dissuade people even if it doesn’t succeed in his case.

43Posted at 7:59 pm by Gail Heriot   

“BELIEVE THE WOMAN:”

“BELIEVE THE WOMAN:”

America always knew woman’s Emmett Till story was a lie.

After more than a half-century of living a lie, Carolyn Bryant Donham decided to tell the truth. Emmett Till never grabbed her by the waist and said, “You needn’t be afraid of me, baby I’ve (done something) with white women before.”
She can’t remember now if the 14-year-old Chicago youngster even whistled at her on his way

out the door.

Her confession to historian and author Timothy Tyson in 2007 may have helped clear Donham’s conscience and bring her to this place of “tender sorrow” she says she now feels for Till’s deceased mother.

But for African-Americans and many others who are just learning of this revelation in Tyson’s new book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” it does nothing.
We already knew her story was a lie.

But social pressures made it impossible to say so.


Totally unrelated:

Protesters Rally Against Kavanaugh, and Back His Accusers: ‘The Wave of Women Is Here.’

 Posted at 8:23 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

Obama Won -VDH

Obama Won

By Victor Davis Hanson| September 23rd, 2018

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

—Barack Obama, October 30, 2008

 

By traditional metrics, Barack Obama’s presidency was mostly a failure. The economy, in a new first, never hit annualized growth of 3 percent. His signature domestic policy—Obamacare—caused chaos. Millions lost their coverage and doctors, and paid far more in deductibles and premiums. The stagnant recovery after the 2008 recession was the worst in 50 years.

Myriads of new regulations, higher taxes, and socialist jawboning vegetated the economy. Scandals at the IRS, Department of Veterans Affairs, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department, General Services Administration, and National Security Council abounded. Obama weaponized the federal government by punishing opponents through the IRS, monitoring suspect reporters, scapegoating and jailing a video maker, and using the deep state to exonerate Hillary Clinton from serial wrongdoing and to sabotage the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.

Abroad, a diplomatic “reset” empowered Vladimir Putin’s Russia from the Crimea to the Middle East. The Iran deal legitimized Iran’s ascendant Middle East hegemony. Chinese trade cheating was of no concern. ISIS was but a “JV” terrorist clique. North Korea freely pointed nuclear missiles at the West Coast. Israel and the Gulf monarchies and Egypt were no longer close allies. Outreach and deference instead were shown to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. “Lead from behind” bombing of Libya led to a disaster. Nonexistent “red lines” in Syria, flexible nonproliferation “deadlines” issued to Iran, and rhetorical “step-over” lines given Vladimir Putin all eroded U.S. credibility. And on and on.

Yet in terms of culture, Obama clearly won.

“White Privilege” Goes MainstreamHe institutionalized radical cultural shifts by creating entirely new rubrics of privileging race and gender. The old idea of due process and the rule of law were subordinated to identity politics, whether in matters of sanctuary cities and non-enforcement of immigration law or campus charges of sexual assault. The larger culture made the necessary adjustments and followed suit .

Before the Obama administration, the sloganeering about “white privilege” was confined mostly to shrill and irrelevant university academic departments. Indeed, race prior to 2009 was becoming less important a half-century after the Civil Rights movement. Americans were increasingly multiracial, and welcomed assimilation, given increasing intermarriage and the frequent inability to calibrate race by superficial appearance.

Inasmuch as there were tens of millions of impoverished whites in rural and rust-belt America, the notion that skin color ipso facto any longer denoted privilege was a hard sell. Many ethnic groups enjoyed higher per capita incomes than did those whites. Certainly, no one thought an out-of-work coal miner in Appalachia had an edge on black NFL players, or that the children of the Rust Belt were given preferences in college admissions.

By the same token, even radical feminism still operated within the realm of Western jurisprudence. Charges of sexual assault, like all other allegations of criminal behavior, were to be adjudicated by evidence, testimony, and cross examination. What outraged the nation about the purported victims of Bill Clinton’s sexual assaults was not that Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey were freed from citing evidence in pressing their claims, but rather that the Clintons’ (both Bill and Hillary) power and influence had pruned the likelihood of Bill’s victims ever obtaining a fair hearing.

Yet most everything changed with the Obama election, and we have felt Obama’s legacy on matters of race and gender ever since. From the very beginning of his tenure, Obama sought to fulfill his promise of fundamentally transforming the country. On matters of race, he had easily defended—to media indifference—his racist and Antisemitic personal pastor Jeremiah Wright (“I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother. . . ”).

Obama supporters never objected, even when Obama employed terms like “typical white person” of his own grandmother who had sacrificed to ensure that he could afford attending a tony prep school. In office, Obama quickly injected himself into the Professor Henry Louis Gates psychodrama to brand the police as inherently biased. His commentary on the Trayvon Martin case was reduced to reminding Americans that the president and the late Martin shared an African-American identity. His 2008 “clingers” speech was the model for Hillary Clinton’s later “deplorables” rant; “get in their faces” and “bring a gun to a knife fight” boilerplate were welcomed as progressive challenges to the old order.

Obama invited to the White House rappers whose lyrics were often patently racist and misogynist. His favorite, Kendrick Lamar, had just released an album cover that displayed a dead white judge with his eyes crossed out, as rappers toasted his corpse on the White House lawn. Kendrick’s lyrics often expressed hatred for the police (“And we hate the popo”).

Attorney General Eric Holder referred to African-Americans as “my people” (the sort of a racially chauvinist reference that would have gotten any other Attorney General fired) and intoned: “in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” (I supposed Holder was including in his “always been” and “nation of cowards” the 1.5 million who died, were wounded, or were missing in the Civil War, especially the 600,000 Northerners who were casualties of a war to end Confederate slavery.) The racist and Antisemite Al Sharpton was a regular visitor to the White House. And a 2005 photo of Obama posing with the abject racist and Antisemite Louis Farrakhan was suppressed until after the Obama presidency.

“Diversity” and DivisionYet the main racial legacy of the Obama Administration was the institutionalization of a new binary that had transcended past notions of affirmative action aimed at rectifying the historical discrimination of African Americans.

What replaced the construct of affirmative action became known as “diversity.” In reductionist terms, that mean “white” and “non-white,” rather than “white” and “black,” and, more importantly, it made irrelevant all prior notions of class or real historical grievance.

Suddenly, one could cross the border illegally from Oaxaca and instantly become a “minority,” simply by reason of an antithesis to the “white” majority, with all the resulting grievances and reparations that accrued. Immigrants from India, the Arab world, or Latin America, regardless of their wealth, appearance, and status, likewise were lumped together under the doctrine of “diversity.” Immigration itself was weaponized. Notions of legality, meritocracy and diversity in adjudicating immigration gave way to welcoming in as many as possible who might empower the Obama political agenda of ethnic tribalization.

Salad-bowl immigration policies also fueled polarization, as a new bond of being “nonwhite” brought together Asians, Latino, Arabs, blacks, and almost anyone who could claim to be “nonwhite,” again regardless of the circumstances of their birth, their own experiences in America, their actual racial ancestry, or their wealth and class.

Instead, the necessary slogan “white privilege” justified the new divide: a wealthy immigrant from Paraguay “counted” as a minority deserving of special consideration in a way the son of a white Youngstown, Ohio clerk did not. The facts surrounding the individual cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Trayvon Martin in Miami Gardens, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore were irrelevant—given all three deaths were leveraged for wider grievances against the so-called white majority community. (Had the half-Peruvian defendant George Zimmerman just ethnicized his name and adopted his maternal surname, and thus reinvented himself as Jorge Mesa, the case would have incurred little media attention).

Race and, to a lesser extent, gender now replaced class, as the grievance to govern almost everything in America from NFL pregame National Anthems to the speeches at the Emmys and Oscars.

The New IdealBy 2016 actors, celebrities, and politicians felt no hesitation in using the word “white” in an almost exclusively derogatory fashion, especially given the new recalibration of “demography is destiny” and the increasing alienation, self-destruction, and pathologies of impoverished and lower-middle class whites in the deindustrialized heartland.

Dividing the country by white and nonwhite made sense to the Obama Administration, because the divide promulgated the idea that Obama had been elected by a record non-white bloc voting (in fact, Obama in 2008 would get a higher percentage of the white vote than had John Kerry in 2004). Obama’s model for other Democrats was that, in the future, immigration, tribal voting and demography changes would only accentuate that trend. The Obama paradigm would become the new electoral legacy of the Democratic Party, to be intensified as it was successfully passed down to each new generation of progressives.

Blue-state, and overwhelmingly leftwing, California became the new ideal of what was now possible. California’s non-white population was heralded as the new majority, given both massive illegal and legal immigration, along with the infusion of trillions of dollars of global profits and investment into progressive Silicon Valley, together with punitive taxes on the shrinking and soon departing middle class.

A subtext of the Obama era new dichotomy of white/nonwhite was not necessarily privilege versus lack of privilege, or racists versus victims of racists. Instead the message was of an unspoken and disappearing tribe being replaced by ascending tribes—and therefore everyone for their own careerist advantages should make the necessary adjustments to a society obsessed with identity. And for those without the necessarily correct DNA, racial rebranding could become a construct of self-identification, as in case of Ward Churchill, Elizabeth Warren, or Rachel Dolezal.

Obama’s Only Real LegacyIn matters of sex and gender, the Obama administration also looked to the campus for guidance. The Department of Justice’s new rules on sexual assault, particularly at colleges and universities, seemed to be imported in toto from the Gender Studies department and ignored the Bill of Rights.

New Department of Justice guidelines essentially did away with due process and created a Star Chamber academic court. Here, the accused (if male) was denied the right to face his accuser (if she was female), to producer counter evidence, to exercise the right of cross examination, and to assume the tradition of being presumed innocent until proven guilty. If there had been no Duke lacrosse cases, no Rolling Stone frat boy investigations, and no iconization of “Mattress Girl,” they all would have had to be invented—given the new atmosphere where an accuser, if of the right gender or race, must be believed, and where the accused, if of the wrong gender or race, must be condemned as guilty. The current Kavanaugh confirmation circus is the logical expression of the Obama Administration’s eight-year subversion of due process in matters of accusations of sexual assault.

Finally, another cultural achievement of Obama was to destroy the last vestiges of a Democratic workers’ party of Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, or even Bill Clinton and to replace it with a pyramidal party of the poor dependent on government entitlements and reparations, and a small, rich, and hip elite at the top.

Obama institutionalized the idea that a Silicon Valley hipster billionaire could and should play act being left-wing, if only he would pledge to use his wealth and power to promote progressive causes, whose consequences he cynically would be able to avoid by virtue of his influence and riches.

Hollywood celebrities, Wall Street schemers, and techie billionaires all entered the public square demonizing “white privilege” that the rich enjoyed by fobbing it off on those poorer who had none of it. The substitution of race and gender for class, then, was Obama’s truly signature achievement.

It was no accident that in the days after he left office, the Obamas cut nearly $60 million in book and film deals, while Obama himself took off to millionaires’ yachts and islands to deplore the Trump Administration, whose policies were beginning to help the unemployed that had been most left behind by his own boutique environmental and regulatory policies so cherished by the affluent.

By 2017, these fundamental transformations were clear. Americans now scrambled to find their proper tribe (and on occasion gender), either for careerist advantage or for perceived protection, from the government. And the very rich had found a way to be the very cool, by virtue signaling their superficial embrace of tribalism, just as in private they continued to live their mostly apartheid existences. Shouting from the rooftops that one “celebrates diversity” meant that behind the enclave wall he didn’t need to.

The agenda of balkanizing America into tribes, and white/nonwhite binaries, and galvanizing the rich and poor against the middle class was Obama’s only real legacy. But it is a legacy that nonetheless fundamentally transformed America.

Jesus Yesterday, Today, and Forever

              Jesus Christ is the same yesterday

                      and today and forever.

Hebrews 13:8 NIV

https://bible.com/bible/111/heb.13.8.NIV

Eternity is Planted in the Human Heart

He has made everything beautiful in its time.

 He has also set eternity in the human heart; 
'yet no one can fathom what God has done from 
 beginning to end.


Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV

The Real FISA Scandal - Andrew Klavan

The Real FISA Scandal

A bill for eight years of willful media blindness is starting to come due.

Andrew Klavan

February 4, 2018 

Politics and law

Scandal is not an exact science. But on a scale of “nothingburger” (Bret Stephens of the New York Times) to “worse than Watergate” (GOP congressman Steve King), the information in the House Intelligence Committee FISA Memo comes in at about a solid seven. It now seems very likely the FBI and Department of Justice deceived a FISA court with an uncorroborated piece of Democrat-funded oppo research in order to obtain a warrant to spy on American citizen Carter Page. If, as seems reasonable to conjecture, the broader target turns out to have been the Donald Trump presidential campaign for which Page had recently worked, the needle on the scandal meter will begin to edge up into the red zone.

Let’s put it this way: if this sort of thing had gone on under President Trump or even George W. Bush, the Times would have announced the news in front-page headlines so large it would have taken two strong men just to carry the letters to the press room. An enormous collection of Times reportage on the subject—with a black cover and some title like “The Path to Tyranny”—would have been on the bookstore shelves within the month.

And yet mainstream journalism’s reaction to the memo has so diverged from its past practices—and indeed from the media’s usual narrative about its own heroic role in our republic—that it constitutes a sort of meta-scandal within the scandal that in some ways is more dispiriting than the FISA scandal itself.

America’s news centers—from 42nd Street in Manhattan all the way to 57th Street in Manhattan—did everything within their power to suppress, taint, and minimize the impact of the memo, even before they knew what was in it. “President Trump’s assault on the nation’s law enforcement apparatus is unlike anything America has seen in modern times,” wailed a Times “analysis” (the paper’s term of art for front-page editorializing). “The memo is the most explicit Republican effort yet to discredit the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia,” reports CNN, increasingly the most trusted name in hysteria.

One CNN commentator—former CIA guy Phil Mudd—actually threatened that the memo would set off a vendetta by the Deep State against our elected president: “So the FBI people, I’m going to tell you, are ticked. And they’re going to be saying . . . If you think you can push us off this because you think you can intimidate the director, you’d better think again, Mr. President. You’ve been around for 13 months. We’ve been around since 1908. I know how this game is going to be played. We’re going to win.” It was almost as if Mudd were channeling The Onion’s satirical headline: “FBI Warns Republican Memo Could Undermine Faith in Massive, Unaccountable Government Secret Agencies.”

All this comes after a solid year of media whining about Trump’s criticism of their biased and dishonest coverage of his presidency. The general idea, in the words of one Times op-ed writer, is that “the unrelenting attacks on the news media damage American democracy.”

But is it Trump who is doing the damage? After all, those of us who still go to the movies have just sat through Steven Spielberg’s The Post, a two-hour left-wing talking point about how brave The Washington Post was when it defied President Nixon’s concerns over national security in order to expose government malfeasance by publishing the Pentagon Papers. Yet now—even before the FISA memo was published—news outlets, including both CBS and NBC, were highlighting and giving credence to dire warnings that the FISA memo would damage national security and, channeling The Onion again, undermine trust in unchecked law enforcement. After decades of listening to leftists screech about J. Edgar Hoover’s unjustified wiretapping, we are suddenly told to believe that a little unjustified FBI wiretapping now and again is a “nothingburger.”

In short, a press that should on principle raven for every piece of information that might be damning to the powerful of every stripe—a press that has shown itself willing to publish anonymous anti-Trump leaks that sometimes turned out to be false—has made it clear that they do not want you to know what they do not want to know themselves.

The truth is both the memo itself and the press’s unforgivable lack of curiosity and outrage about the memo are part of a much bigger scandal that has gone further to damage our republic than anything Trump has done or said. The memo represents just one more jigsaw piece in a picture of the Obama administration as a Chicago-style Democratic machine rife with cronyism and abuse of power, a machine to which the media closed its eyes.

We know this. It’s not conjecture. We know that Obama’s IRS made successful efforts to silence conservative voices during the president’s reelection campaign. After a settlement agreement in Z Street’s lawsuit against them, we know that the IRS also targeted Jewish groups that supported Israel. We know that Obama appointed one attorney general who styled himself the president’s “wing-man . . . there with my boy” (imagine Jeff Sessions saying that), and another who held a secret meeting with Bill Clinton while Hillary Clinton was under investigation. And now we begin to learn that the Obama Justice Department may have colluded with a Democrat’s campaign to spy on a Republican’s. Obama misled us about much of this and more: about the IRS; about when he himself gained knowledge of Hillary’s secret email server, a server he used under a pseudonym; about his secret dealings with Iran; and about the effects of his signature health-care bill.

All this—really a steady stream of deceptions and abuses of power—while journalists kowtowed to, flattered, and ultimately raved about the administration being “scandal-free.” The press sacrificed its credibility with eight years of willful blindness. Those who asked with the ancient Roman poet Juvenal, “Who will guard the guardians?” were answered by the self-styled heroes of journalistic truth-telling: “Not us.”

That’s the real scandal here, and it’s beginning to come out.