What's eating you, Betty? Your candidate not on the stage next week? Most of the country thinks your boy is a buffoon? Don't know if your own party will support the big deal you just made?I love Chicago. I lived there -- which is actually "here" as I write this, having been here for the last three days -- more than 20 years ago, and cherish any opportunity to come back. And Chicago is especially nice in the summer. A friend of mine said years ago that no city in America gets more out of summer than Chicago, and that is surely true.
Until today, however, I had never ridden in a boat on the river, gazing up at the great buildings of the Chicago Loop. I recommend it. Herewith, some pictures from the afternoon's doggle of boon.
Big Stan...
What's got you down, Chum? Are you worried your little 
There's a new Republican -- well, he's always been a Republican, but he's new to you -- running for Connecticut's seat in the United States Senate. Augie Wolf is a college friend of mine, and stands as good a chance of beating 70 year-old Richard Blumenthal -- when did the Democrats become the party of old people? -- like a newly imported Persian rug. Watch the opening salvo, and consider sending a contribution.
What's got you down, friend? Are you worried that your sure thing in 2016 looks more beatable every day?  |
| AP Photo |
There is fun for everybody in the TigerHawk tabs this morning, and in the few minutes remaining on this flight I'll pass along my favorites. There is something to irritate most everybody...
Blog hounds have all read or seen Hillary Clinton's risible attack on the "share economy". Apparently, though, her PAC hasn't gotten the message. Like any other non-French city dweller with two nickels to rub together, the "Ready for Hillary" team uses Uber all the time. (For my part, I've asked every Uber driver I've hired in the last few months whether they like it, and the universal response (n=6) is that they love it. The exploitation here is purely in the mind of the social engineers.)
Immigrants, lawful or otherwise, commit less crime than citizens, not more. This is even true among Latino immigrants alone. There are excellent reasons to assert control over the border and more closely regulate non-citizens within our borders. Their supposed criminality is not among those reasons, however many votes demagoguery attracts.
"Re-Re-Re-Reintroducing Hillary Clinton." The New York Times actually wrote that in a headline. Presumably the point is that one can fool some of the people -- apparently almost half -- all the time. #RubeWatch.
Just what we need, another federal crime to fire up the social justice warriors. Remember, do not criminalize any offense that you are unwilling to enforce with deadly force. The two go hand in hand. And, no, this does not mean I approve of revenge porn.
More later.
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| For Captain Todd--full travel rig |
Where was my trigger warning?
The front page of The New York Times book review section is given over to a book called The Unraveling by one Emma Sky. Ms. Sky is British, an "Arabist," and originally an opponent of the invasion of Iraq, who ultimately volunteered to advise British and then American military officers in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. Apologies for the block quotation, but it sets up what follows for those of you who cannot get past the pay wall:
Emma Sky has a lovely sense of irony about many things, from her evocative name to her frustrated dreams for Iraq, where, in the first decade of this century, she spent what she thinks of as the most important years of her life advising senior officers in the American military. “Amidst the horror of war, I had experienced more love and camaraderie than I had ever known,” she writes. “I had become part of their band of brothers.”There is a lot in there about her perspective on the American military, her longstanding (professional) relationship with General Ray Odierno, the first collapse between 2003 and 2007, and the ultimate success of the "surge" starting in late 2007 and running in to 2009. But then there is this (bold emphasis added):Many soldiers have felt that way, but Sky was no soldier, and not even American. She had been among those who opposed the war, an Arabist in her mid-30s working for the British Council, a cultural and educational organization. She thought she would go on temporary duty to Iraq after the shock and awe of 2003 to apologize, if she could, and try to help the Iraqi people. This was a common sentiment among Western Arabists at the time: We shouldn’t have done this, but having done it, we must make it work.
Almost against Sky’s better judgment, as she writes in her important and disturbing memoir, “The Unraveling,” she quickly found herself sucked deep into the business of occupation as she tried to sort out the chaos after the fall of the tyrant Saddam Hussein. She thought she would be working with the British in the coalition forces that had participated in the invasion, but they told her to talk to the Americans running the show. She also thought she would be in Baghdad, but wound up about 150 miles to the north in Kirkuk.
Sky made herself useful in whatever way she could. She provided expertise in the region and the language that was appallingly rare in American ranks. Faute de mieux, she began to function very quickly like the Orientalists of the old British Empire — part diplomat, part diviner of local moods and frequent mediator in bitter disputes. She became the indispensable adviser to the United States colonel trying to hold together the explosive, contested Kirkuk region, which sits on 40 percent of Iraq’s enormous oil reserves. As Sky puts it, sardonically, “Within weeks of the fall of Saddam I had found myself governing a province.”
Sky and Odierno worked closely with the United States ambassador, Ryan Crocker, an accomplished Arabist in his own right, and Gen. David Petraeus, whose name had become synonymous with sophisticated counterinsurgency. Petraeus told Sky he saw her as a “kindred spirit.” But Crocker and Petraeus were gone by 2009, and when the Obama administration pushed forward with plans to withdraw American forces by 2011, everything started to go to hell again. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his coalition were defeated in parliamentary elections in 2010 by a more centrist, nonsectarian candidate (and an old favorite of the Central Intelligence Agency), Ayad Allawi. But Maliki, by playing his many sectarian cards, managed to hold on to power, and in the process reignited the hideous intercommunal violence most Iraqis hoped was behind them.This is rather an amazing couple of paragraphs to appear in the lead book review in the Sunday Times, but every now in then they still practice journalism over there. Hillary is indeed getting away with diplomatic murder right now, with all the mainstream attention to her record as Secretary of State going to her frenetic travel schedule and "public diplomacy" (as if effort were the most important metric), and the tragic sideshow of Benghazi on the right. This is a great waste, for there is much to be learned from Clinton's bottomless failure to accomplish anything important in that job, and her hand in key decisions that have been disastrous for American interests (including the war of choice against Libya, the very confusing signalling in the Syrian debacle, and, now, the collapse of Iraq). The smart GOP presidential candidate will dig more deeply in to Ms. Sky's book to learn more.Crocker’s successor at the United States Embassy-cum-fortress was Christopher R. Hill, a career diplomat with a long track record in Asia but no feel for the Middle East. He had the backing of Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, but he emerges from Sky’s book as the individual most responsible for forfeiting the gains of the previous years when he decided to throw Washington’s weight behind Maliki.
Sky clearly detested Hill: “It was frightening how a person could so poison a place,” she writes. And it appears the feeling was mutual. In a recent piece for Politico defending his record in Iraq, Hill suggests Sky (unnamed but unmistakable as Odierno’s political adviser) was a sucker for complaints by key Sunni members of the government who were being excluded, prosecuted and jailed. Actually, Hill didn’t have much time for people who had served in Iraq before him. The enormous importance of long-term relationships in Middle East politics seems to have escaped Hill, and those relationships were exactly what Sky was all about.
What's got you glum, Champ? Your SSN and financial history now sitting in the PLA's central data repository? Your "hot new Greek investment" going down the tubes? Share friends, share! This is the place.
That Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for President in 2016 is to some extent a foregone conclusion, her supporters long ago having closed their eyes to her gigantic flaws as they click their heels together hoping that it will someday again be 1993. As much as I am buoyed by the possibility of Joe Biden getting in the race and by Bernie Sanders' picking Hillary apart from the left, the answer seems baked in at this point from the Democratic side, leaving us with the now 17 strong Republican field to provide any real mystery for the politically news-starved.My father died of cancer 17 years ago today. A few days later we buried his ashes in a cemetary in Virginia that sits on land that has been in our family since before the American Revolution. The eulogy that I read at his service described a moment in the fight for free speech on American college campuses a long time ago. It is, sadly, more relevant today than when I wrote it back in 1998. I hope you enjoy it.
Remarks at the burial service for John B. Henneman, Jr.
Chellowe Cemetery, July 13, 1998
Our father, whose ashes we bury here today, was – in a most redundant sense – a “unique individual.” He was a political conservative in the most left-wing community the United States has ever indulged – the American university of the last thirty years. He believed that the best music, clothes and hairstyles ever devised were those that were popular on Ivy League campuses in the middle 1950s, but he understood the “current” thinking of college kids better than any of my friends’ fathers. He was not a devoted churchgoer, but he had such strong feelings about the changes in established religion that he banned the current version of the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer from this service. He was a Republican who voted for Richard Nixon twice and he served as an officer in the United States Navy, but he retained a fundamental distrust of big institutions, including both federal regulatory agencies and multinational corporations. He was a wonderful father, husband and son, and he most wished to be remembered as a professor, scholar, medieval historian and librarian.
On this occasion, I wanted to tell a brief and fairly cerebral story about my father that taught me an important lesson, and makes me as proud today as I was at ten years old, when the events in question occurred. Most of you have never heard of these events, or if you have you probably do not appreciate their significance to me.
In February 1972, the University of Iowa Psychology Department invited a Harvard psychologist, Richard Hernnstein, to speak on research he had conducted with pigeons. Professor Hernnstein was controversial, because the previous September he had published an article in the Atlantic Monthly suggesting that social and economic success in the United States might derive in part from measurable intelligence, and that since measurable intelligence was at least to a certain extent inherited, it followed that social and economic success might also be inherited. This position posed a sharp challenge to prevailing orthodox radical thought, so the organized left resolved to oppose Professor Hernnstein wherever he spoke, even when he was addressing totally unrelated matters, such as pigeons.
In the Iowa case, the front organization for the Students for a Democratic Society, the infamous SDS, repeatedly and publicly expressed their intention to prevent Professor Hernnstein from speaking, notwithstanding his formal invitation from the University. True to their threats, the SDS and its allies demonstrated so vocally that Professor Hernnstein was unable to speak and had to cancel his presentation.
The University administration remained basically silent during the days preceding and following the cancellation of Professor Hernnstein’s speech of February 25, refusing to discipline those responsible for the violation of academic freedom and free speech that had occurred. After a week of inaction by the administration, on March 3, 1972, Dad read a statement to his Medieval History class. Excerpts from the statement, and the aftermath of Dad’s decision to cancel a class in protest, I think reveal a lot about our father’s willingness to fight for what is right:Before you start writing, there is one matter which I feel I must talk to you about, even though you are probably sick of hearing about it. The deliberate and successful attack on academic freedom which occurred here a week ago was the most tragic and upsetting thing which has happened in the three years I have been here. I feel that I can’t continue to perform my duties here without saying or doing something to make public my sorrow and my sense of outrage.
Because there is such pressure for conformity in a large industrial society, a university has to promote diversity more than ever before. But it cannot offer you diversity of opinion or provide anything more than mere indoctrination unless every faculty member has the fully guaranteed right to say what he thinks is the truth, not simply what one political group wants him to say. This right is academic freedom. Without it, I could not remain in this profession and your prospects for a broad and diversified educational experience would be gone ….
I think that neither you nor I can afford to have this issue swept under the rug. As a means of symbolizing my protest at the administration’s failure in this case, I am canceling Monday’s lecture in this course. I hope that you will take a few moments during that hour to reflect on the fact that freedom is very hard to win and very easy to lose.
A firestorm of publicity erupted. Backed into a corner, the administration disciplined the students involved, decertified the SDS front organization, and, for good measure, censured my father for canceling his class.
My clearest direct memory of these events is of a conversation I had with our father as the controversy was playing out in the press. I asked him why he had canceled his class and gotten into trouble with the University (a fairly straightforward question from a ten year old boy). I will always remember his reply: “The right of freedom of speech does not matter for people we all agree with. Freedom of speech only matters for people whose ideas we deplore.” It is a seemingly obvious point that even Americans often forget. For me, those words flash through my mind every time I learn of an attempt to suppress free speech. I cannot help it – it is a piece of Dad that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
As the son of a historian and a librarian, I took it upon myself to review Dad’s voluminous and well-organized files in the preparation of these remarks. Almost a year before, in April 1971, our father had anticipated the entire episode in a letter objecting to a draft Statement on Professional Ethics being circulated by the University of Iowa Faculty Council. The draft Statement asserted that a “professor’s first priority should be to do all in his power to prevent death and injuries due to violence” during periods of high tension on campus. Dad denounced that requirement, writing that:[w]hen conditions on campus are abnormal, the threat usually involves a demand for scapegoats, as some tried to make ROTC a scapegoat for last year’s Cambodian intervention. It is at these crucial moments that the first obligation of faculty members must be to act rationally and to stand firmly behind any member of the community whose rights are threatened. Standing firm is a difficult matter, since capitulation often appears to be the only way of averting violence. Nevertheless, every time we sacrifice somebody else’s rights in the hope of avoiding bloodshed we are guilty of unethical and unprofessional conduct and make our own rights less secure and less respected.
Dad, we love you and will never forget you. May you rest in peace in the Virginia soil that you loved so very much.
While I am the designated small-l libertarian in these precincts, I usually vote Republican because in the end I hold out hope, however poorly supported by postwar history, that the GOP is our best shot at halting the growth of government in the United States, and perhaps rolling it back a bit. If only the GOP were reliably in favor of less, rather than more, government intrusion, but that is a subject for another day.
I further believe that capturing the presidency is far more important than even overwhelming control of Congress or state governments. Congress has proved itself incapable of standing up to the executive again and again, and even when it passes laws it "delegates" almost all of the substance to the regulatory agencies that form the permanent government in Washington, further ceding power to the Oval Office. The torrent of regulation is so great that even the most sympathetic federal judges cannot roll them back fast enough, never mind that we will not have sympathetic federal judges for long if the Democrats win another couple of terms in the White House.
It is therefore essential that Republicans win the next presidential election.
Unfortunately, the mathematics of the Electoral College make that an extremely daunting task. I have not seen a more eloquent diagnosis of the problem than this analysis, written by a Republican, published just after the huge GOP landslide last November. Here is the upshot, but the detail behind the upshot is so interesting, and depressing, you really need to read the whole thing:
Behold the Blue Wall:Or, to put it in terms the young 'uns might understand, "because math." And if you think the data are cooked, read the whole thing for the very deep bad news. The GOP has lost its appeal to Americans who live in cities, and many on the right seem to think they can make it up by winning ever greater majorities among suburban and ex-urban whites. That is rank denial.
The Blue Wall is block of states that no Republican Presidential candidate can realistically hope to win. Tuesday that block finally extended to New Hampshire, meaning that at the outset of any Presidential campaign, a minimally effective Democratic candidate can expect to win 257 electoral votes without even trying. That’s 257 out of the 270 needed to win.
Arguably Virginia now sits behind that wall as well. Democrats won the Senate seat there without campaigning in a year when hardly anyone but Republicans showed up to vote and the GOP enjoyed its largest wave in modern history. Virginia would take that tally to 270. Again, that’s 270 out of 270.
This means that the next Presidential election, and all subsequent ones until a future party realignment, will be decided in the Democratic primary. Only by sweeping all nine of the states that remain in contention AND also flipping one impossibly Democratic state can a Republican candidate win the White House. What are the odds that a Republican candidate capable of passing muster with 2016 GOP primary voters can accomplish that feat? You do the math.
The question is whether any serious Republican can give voice to this math without suffering the ridicule of the activists and social media players on the right. Mitt Romney seems to get it, but is able to say the things he says only because he has taken leave of the primaries. Rick Perry, who has been surprising more than once in his career, also hints at the outlines of a clue. Maybe so does Marco Rubio. But none of these three seem likely to change the orientation -- pun intended -- of the GOP sufficiently to win more votes in the cities. Until that happens, Democrats will control the White House and use the power of the regulatory state to make the United States ever more like Europe.
Or, is the math in some way wrong? Make the case in the comments!
What we do know is this: China is a lot bigger than Greece, and its stock market has been tanking for three weeks. Since the U.S. stock market has not had an even 10% correct in roughly four years, some might say that last week was the selling opportunity of the year. We shall learn a lot more in the next few days.
Regardless, we note that hard work probably counts for something. In 2013, only 39% of Greece's population had a job (the comparable figures in Germany, the United States, and China, respectively, were 57%, 58%, and 68%). When the working population falls that low, the economy becomes a sucker's game. The "39-percenters" are probably wondering how they ended up holding the bag. And the credit committees around the world that signed off on those Greek loans ought to find another line of work.
Anyway, here is an interesting analysis from Deutsche Bank that explores the alternatives from here. The choices seem bad for Greece, at least in the short term, and will probably drive that 39% number lower.
The question for those of you with some scratch to invest is this: Will Greece plus China add up to the long-awaited correction in the U.S. stock market? The answer probably depends on whether you believe the central banks will flood the zone with liquidity and the Fed will postpone its telegraphed rate increase. My prediction -- and if I was good at this I would not be part of the 58% -- is that we are in for a few rough weeks in the financial markets, a lot of turmoil in the value of the Euro in particular, and a new surge in liquidity that will ultimately lead to an even larger asset bubble, all primed to blow up in the face of the next president.
Your results may vary.
The New York Times, which I heard defended yesterday in an Austin coffee shop as "one of our greatest cultural institutions," serves up front-page comedy gold: "Cuba's Environmental Concerns Grow With Prospects of U.S. Presence" by one Erica Goode. The point of the article is that Cuba has vast undeveloped shoreline, unlike anywhere else in the Caribbean, and that a flood of money from the United States might, er, develop it. Fair enough, but there are too many good moments in this otherwise pedestrian story to let it slip by without savoring the parlor-pinkness of the thing. To wit (emphasis added):
The country is in desperate need of the economic benefits that a lifting of the embargo would almost certainly bring. But the ban, combined with Cuba’s brand of controlled socialism, has also limited development and tourism that in other countries, including many of Cuba’s Caribbean neighbors, have eroded beaches, destroyed forests, polluted rivers, damaged coral reefs and wreaked other forms of environmental havoc.What? Is "controlled socialism" the new cute and fuzzy term in liberal circles for freaking totalitarian Communism? I totally missed that, but they don't send me every memo anymore. I think that's on purpose.
At any rate, somebody needs to tell Ms. Goode, who apparently rocks an "ABD" in Social Psychology from UC Santa Cruz -- my every relevant prejudice confirmed with one little search on LinkedIn! -- that poverty is a feature of "controlled socialism," not some unintended byproduct. The only commies who aren't poor are the CINOs, and they don't give a fig about the environment.
Then there is this:
Cuba’s green sensitivities evolved as much out of necessity as ideology.Basically "folks said"? Yeah, I bet that's exactly how it went down.The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991 and the continued isolation by the United States forced the country to fend for itself. With the tools of big agriculture — fuel for heavy machinery, chemical fertilizers, pesticides — out of reach, farming moved away from the increased sugar production that characterized the Soviet era, turning more to organic techniques and cooperatives of small farmers. Oxen replaced tractors, and even today, a farmer walking behind his plow is a common sight in the countryside.
“Basically, folks said we need the farmers to go out and figure out how we’re going to feed ourselves,” said Greg Watson, a former agriculture commissioner for Massachusetts, who visited Cuba last fall with a delegation studying sustainable agriculture.
Cut to the World Bank's data on Cuba's agricultural production, setting 2004-2006 at 100. Compared to that benchmark, in 1980 Cuba's ag production was at 134.4, in 1990 it was at 158.1, and by 1995 it had fallen to 88.2 (a decline of 44% in five years). No doubt, "folks" were saying all sorts of things.
By 2014 Cuban agriculture production was up to 103.2 (same index), so still more than 1/3 below the levels of 1990. Meanwhile, Cuba's population has increased around 10%, so the situation is even worse on a per capita basis.
The result of all of this "sustainability" has been, to say the least, not obviously sustainable.
Anyway, this state of affairs will be taken under advisement by the controlling socialists a bit later in the year:
How fully the country will pursue development is likely to be a leading topic at the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist Party next year, said Dan Whittle, a lawyer and senior director of the Cuba program for the Environmental Defense Fund.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
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