Here’s an open thread for talking about it.
Obama is delusional about tyranny, or lying
Maybe both, actually.
This article from last February has some rather chilling quotes from Obama about ISIS. If he’s telling the truth here about his beliefs (always a serious question with Obama), it shows him to be so out of touch with the general lessons of history that he should be labeled delusional:
How does President Obama propose the Islamic State will be defeated? By letting it rule and fail. “Ultimately,” the President assures Americans, ISIL can’t satisfy people in a “sustained” way.
“[U]ltimately these terrorist organizations will be defeated because they don’t have a vision that appeals to people”¦. ISIL can talk about setting up the new caliphate, but nobody is under any illusions that they can actually in a sustained way feed people or educate people or organize a society that would work.”
In short, President Obama envisions dissatisfied citizens eventually defeating ISIL.
I had somehow missed that interview when it took place almost a year ago. The statement indicates no knowledge whatsoever about how a tyrannical government can stay in power despite starving its people and allowing its society to become dysfunctional (if these areas could be said to be “functional” in the first place). Has Obama never heard of North Korea, for example, or the USSR in its Stalinist heyday? Not to mention the sorrows that have befallen his newly-favored country, Cuba?
Yes, I should stop worrying what Obama thinks. More important is the damage he’s done and how it might be repaired, and whether it can be repaired. But I pause to observe that a president said this sort of thing and it hardly received a ripple in the press, whereas in earlier decades it would have been considered unconscionable by both sides. That’s an even bigger problem than Obama, who is a mere symptom—although he’s a symptom who has done a great deal of harm.
Why are we not taking in many Christian refugees?
It is now fairly well-known that the percentage of Syrian refugees the United States has taken who are Christians is very small. And yet this is a group that ought logically to be first in line because members face the most obvious danger and persecution—not only in Syria, but in any Arab or Muslim country to which they might have fled, and also because Syrian Christians would have almost no chance of being terrorists, and would be less likely to espouse anti-liberty beliefs such as a desire for sharia law or a theocracy.
We already know how very little Obama has seemed to care about the plight of Christians in the Middle East today, both rhetorically and in terms of action. So it’s no stretch at all to imagine that this administration would deliberately exclude Christian refugees or discourage them in some way from coming here, rather than allowing them or encouraging them. However, at least some of the lack of Christians among the refugees to the US is a reflection of the way the system works vis-a-vis the UN, which does the initial vetting—a system that, by the way, desperately needs changing.
Here’s a comprehensive article about the way this works. We need to totally revamp our “farm it out to the UN” approach, but there’s virtually no chance that Obama would do that, because it suits him as is:
The gross underrepresentation of the non-Muslim communities in the numbers of Syrian refugees into the U.S. is reflected year after year in the State Department’s public records. They show, for example, that while Syria’s largest non-Muslim group ”” Christians of the various Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions ”” constituted 10 percent of Syria’s population before the war, they are only 2.6 percent of the 2,003 Syrian refugees that the United States has accepted since then. Syria’s Christian population, which before the war numbered 2 million, has since 2011 been decimated in what Pope Francis described as religious “genocide.”…
Instead, minorities have difficulty getting to step one in the U.N. process. The religious terror that drove them from Syria blocks their registering. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is largely limited to collecting refugee applications and making resettlement referrals from its own camps and centers ”” the burden of feeding creates strong incentives for this practice. In an e-mail to me, Knox Thames, the State Department’s new special adviser for religious minorities, wrote that “many minorities have not entered the UN system because they are urban refugees.” That is, because they live far from the remote U.N. camps and aid centers, they lack the information and access to register. And, as is widely known, many non-Muslim refugees try hard to avoid these camps…
According to British media, a terrorist defector asserted that militants enter U.N. camps to assassinate and kidnap Christians. An American Christian aid group reported that the U.N. camps are “dangerous” places where ISIS, militias, and gangs traffic in women and threaten men who refuse to swear allegiance to the caliphate. Such intimidation is also reportedly evident in migrant camps in Europe, leading the German police union to recommend separate shelters for Christian and Muslim migrant groups…
…[M]any Christian refugees will “not be included in the [U.N.] camp referrals” because they have had to leave the camps after “cruelties inflicted upon them” there.
It’s very simple: by relying on the UN and its refugee camps to select and feed the refugees they house to us, the US practically guarantees that very few Christians will be among them. Unless the government changes that policy, and reaches out to seek Christian refugees from other sources, that will continue to be the case, which seems to suit Obama just fine.
[NOTE: A while back I came across a very lengthy article on the refugees from Syria. The author reported that in Turkey, where a huge number of Syrian refugees have fled, most of the Christians among them have been taken in by the Christian community in Turkey and resettled there (and the same for Lebanon, I seem to recall, although unfortunately I can’t find this article again to check it out). So although there had been many Christians fleeing Syria, there were not so many actively looking to come here.
This seems somewhat relevant to that issue, although it’s almost a year old. This supports it, but is rather old as well.]
[NOTE II: I’ve been trying to answer the question of when the UN and the UN refugee camps became the main source of refugees to the US, but it hasn’t been easy to find the information. I’m in somewhat of a hurry today, so I will leave the question unanswered for the moment except to note that a bill passed during the Carter administration and sponsored by Ted Kennedy started the ball rolling, although it didn’t seem to establish the system in the fuller form it later reached. At the time, most of the refugees were from Vietnam or Jews leaving Russia, and camps were not the issue, but this was the philosophy:
With [Ted Kennedy’s] proposal, he hoped to address the need for a reformed, non need-based policy that was not specifically designed for people from communist regimes in Eastern Europe or repressive governments in the Middle East, as it was in the past. At the time, there was an average of 200,000 refugees coming to the United States, most of which were Indochinese and Soviet Jews. The cost of resettlement was close to $4,000, but most refugees eventually paid this amount in federal income taxes. Many Americans feared a floodgate scenario with a large and sudden increase of the refugee population, but the 50,000 cap would only account for 10% of immigration flow to the U.S. and would allow one refugee for every 4,000 Americans, small numbers compared to those of countries like Canada, France and Australia. The bill was adopted by the Senate by a unanimous vote…]
Is Donald Trump’s doctor—Donald Trump?
Are there two people on earth who speak like this? [emphasis mine]:
Trump’s physician of 25 years, Dr. Harold Bornstein, said Trump “has had no significant medical problems” and called the candidate’s blood pressure and lab results “astonishingly excellent” in a signed statement Trump released publicly on Monday.
“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Bornstein, an internal medicine and gastroenterology specialist who works at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, wrote in the letter dated December 4.
Bornstein is not believed to have evaluated any past presidents.
By the way—not that this really matters, but I hadn’t realized it till now:
Trump would become the oldest U.S. president in history if elected, claiming the mantle from President Ronald Reagan, who was inaugurated at age 69.
Trump is due to turn 70 in June.
Our insane immigration vetting
This is the bunch we are supposed to trust to vet immigrants and refugees and asylum-seekers and visa-seekers:
Fearing a civil liberties backlash and “bad public relations” for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end a secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, a former senior department official said.
“During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process,” John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis. Cohen is now a national security consultant for ABC News.
If you’re looking for a job, social media messages are often used as part of the screening process. But not as part of the screening process for letting people into this country? Absurd. There are no civil liberties involved with using this for immigration vetting, either. That’s garbage. By definition, we’re talking about foreign nationals here, not citizens. In addition, social media is public rather than private.
The result of this ban? San Bernardino. And there probably will be more San Bernardinos in the future. Maybe the wounded and the families of the dead should sue the Obama administration for negligence.
Trump ♥ Trump
If you liked Obama, you’ll love Trump. Why? Because what we need more than anything else is another self-aggrandizing narcissist who thinks he’s the best at everything:
I actually have a great relationship with people. In fact, I was criticized in the beginning because I get along with Democrats and liberals and Republicans and conservatives ”” I get along with everybody.
Actually, you were criticized because you supported, contributed money to, and praised liberals and leftists such as Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, among many many others. And no, you don’t “get along with everybody.” See this*, and note that you have the highest unfavorability rating of all the candidates, and that includes Hillary Clinton, who’s also rather high on that score.
More from Trump on Trump:
“My judgment is great,” Trump said. “I built a multi-multi-multi-billion-dollar company, some of the greatest assets in the world, tremendously big, No. 1 bestsellers, including ”˜The Art of the Deal’ ”” which may be the biggest and best in terms of the business books ”” tremendous television show called ‘The Apprentice’ that lasted for 14 seasons.”
Well, then, let’s elect George Soros! Or Mitt Romney (ooops). Or perhaps Jeff Probst.
[NOTE: * That linked article has a title that makes it seem as though it’s about Trump’s divorce from Ivana, but that’s not why I linked it and that’s not what interests me. In fact, it just so happens that several people with whom Trump does get along are his various ex-wives. But there are plenty of other people in that article who’ve had dealings with him who do not have good things to say about him or about his machinations in the business world.
Trump himself certainly doesn’t get along with everyone. He likes to jab at people, especially anyone who is a rival. And he likes to sue people; whatever the merits of his various and sundry lawsuits might be (and I leave that up to you to decide), they are certainly not evidence of “getting along with everyone” (see also this for an idea of just how litigious he is). But he also likes to tell us what a great guy he is and how he gets along with everyone. Ah, it’s all good, right? It’s Trump!]
[NOTE II: I think I wrote this post mainly because I ♥ to make the hearts sign.]
Sympathy for terrorists
A reader sent me a link to this Cynthia Ozick piece in the Weekly Standard about having sympathy for terrorists:
At bottom, an open-hearted willingness to understand “everyone” is an appalling distraction from the intrinsic depravity of the act of premeditated murder. The evil deed speaks for itself; to search out the evildoer’s “backstory,” to look for some exculpating raison d’éªtre, is no more useful or edifying or moral than an attraction to pornography. Pascal’s aperé§u ”” to understand is to forgive ”” comes perilously close to our current penchant to treat terrorists as interesting characters in a novel. True, Conrad did it in The Secret Agent; James did it in The Princess Casamassima. But let the Roman poet Terence have the last (Latin) word: Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi. What is permitted to the gods is not permitted to pornographers. James and Conrad, after all, understood that a terrorist in a novel is not the same as a jihadist spree in California or a terror massacre in Paris; and that murder, contra Pamuk, deserves no artistic credo.
This reminded me of this post I wrote back in 2006, which it may be time to republish. So here it is.
Thomas Sowell writes with clarity and succinctness on one unusual and especially troubling characteristic of the enemy we now face: its undeterrability. Undeterrability makes this fight different from previous ones. It makes efforts at peaceful negotiation directly with that enemy worse than futile; it makes them dangerous.
There was one sentence in Sowell’s column that especially caught my attention. In describing the nature of the enemy, he harked back to the 1985 Achille Lauro incident, in which 69-year-old wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer was murdered by Palestinian hijackers and his body dumped overboard.
Sowell asks:
What kind of people would throw an old man in a wheelchair off a cruise liner into the sea, simply because he was Jewish?
What kind, indeed? Human beings, for starters, not devils. But that doesn’t mean we need to sympathize with them. And certainly we would be well within our rights to call Klinghoffer’s murderers Nazi-esque, in targeting this particular man and treating him with such brutality merely because of his Jewishness.
I recall hearing the news of the hijacking and the shocking manner of Klinghoffer’s death. At the time I had no context in which to place it; it seemed an inexplicable atrocity that chilled my blood. It was incomprehensible to me, and so its significance as a signpost to the nature of the enemy was muted and blurred. It’s only in retrospect that I’m able to say, “But, of course.”
There’s another thing I neither noticed nor comprehended at the time, but that I’m certainly aware of now. And that was the almost immediate post-modern interest of some in understanding–empathizing with, and even sympathizing with–Klinghoffer’s murderers.
The opera “The Death of Leon Klinghoffer,” produced in 1991 and written by composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman, includes beautiful arias for the terrorists. It was received with accusations by some that it glorified terrorism, and kudos by others for its evenhanded treatment of the perpetrators’ grievances.
In previous years, an opera on such a theme might have featured the terrorists as traditional villains steeped in evil, with thunderous and dissonant music to signify the horror of what they did. But in this version, they were given sonorous and lovely melodies to sing and sympathetic words to portray, whereas the Klinghoffers and their associates were apparently portrayed as petty and materialistic bourgeoisie (note: I have not seen the opera).
To have chosen this particular incident–in which a helpless and innocent man in a wheelchair was murdered in cold blood, his body dumped overboard–and somehow turned it into a vehicle to air Palestinian grievances seems to me to be multiculturalism gone mad.
Who wrote the opera? The librettist, Alice Goodman, is an interesting tale herself. Born and raised as a Jew in Minnesota, educated in literature at Harvard, married to a British poet, she became an Anglican priest and opera librettist.
You can listen to Ms. Goodman discussing the opera here, in a BBC interview that features part of an aria from it by one of the terrorists (or maybe it’s a recitative; I’m no opera expert). Despite having read about the opera fairly extensively prior to hearing the clip, I was still surprised at the emotional tenor of the singing. Yes indeed, without even being able to decipher the words of the libretto, just hearing the music and the voice of the kidnapper made it clear that he was being given a respect and a certain esthetic elegance and dignity that could only serve to elevate him in the eyes of the listener.
Then I listened to Ms. Goodman speak (an aside: why does she have a British accent? Is this some sort of affectation, is it a requirement for the Anglican clergy, or has she resided in Britain so long she’s taken on the speech patterns?).
Ms. Goodman’s answer to the question of whether the opera is anti-Semitic or an apology for terrorism is an interesting one. She says no (no surprise there); she believes that the charges of anti-Semitism and the rest are a result of her showing the terrorists as “human beings.”
I disagree. I happen to think that terrorists are most decidedly human beings, as were Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and–well, every other human being who’s ever lived. We all know how Hitler loved dogs, and was a vegetarian. To be evil does not require that one be a devil; being a human being who does evil will suffice. I believe in treating people as human beings, but that does not require giving evildoers a forum and writing lovely arias for them to sing.
Ms. Goodman says she speaks not just as the librettist, but as a priest, when she recognizes the perpetrators as human beings with ideals–wrongheaded, yes, but idealistic nevertheless–as though idealism somehow has a value in and of itself. Perhaps she’s never heard about the road to hell and what it’s paved with.
Ms. Goodman acknowledges that the music and the words Adams and she wrote for the terrorists who committed this atrocity were lyrical and heartfelt, and she understands that this fact created “a dissonance difficult for some people to take.”
Count me in as one of those people. I guess I’m just not highly evolved enough to understand the convoluted mental gymnastics required in comprehending how that doesn’t constitute some sort of sympathy and apology–if not for the devil, then for the human beings who perpetrated this heinous act.
Cruz’s comprehensive immigration plan
If you want to take a look, it’s here.
Here we go again
It’s getting really really close to Christmas now. And although Chanukah is almost over, there’s still time to give a gift or two.
So once again I’m asking you to solve all your gift-giving dilemmas by turning to that online colossus, Amazon.
And if you use those widgets on my right sidebar to click through for all your Amazon purchases (now and at any other time of year) you will also be giving a small but still not insignificant gift to neo-neocon (it adds up, folks), and all without spending any extra money yourself. What could be more wonderful?
I thank you all in advance. And I’ll be bumping this up and/or re-posting it every now and then until Christmas.
[NOTE: In case you have ad blocker or something of that sort, and the Amazon widgets don’t show up on your computer, go here. You can also click on any Amazon book link within a post and anything you order during that click-through gets credited to me. I believe it’s true even for things you put in your cart but don’t order till a bit later, although there’s a time limit on how long they can be there and still get credited when ordered (I’m not sure what that limit is, though, so best to order sooner rather than later).]
Islam: religion or not?
Quite a few critics of Islam say that it’s not a religion.
My answer is that Islam is not a religion like other religions. But in certain respects it is similar to a religion and/or is functioning as a religion and not just a political system like Communism, which was a belief system that replaced religion but did not have these aspects. For example, Islam includes belief in a Supreme Being, clerics, houses of worship, guides to living, and belief in an afterlife. And even for those people who say it’s not a religion, a problem is that Islam calls itself a religion, has done so for over a millennium, and is widely regarded the world over as being a religion.
As a religion (or as something with many aspects of a religion that calls itself a religion), Islam promises many things, including an afterlife in paradise for its terrorist murderers. Even Communism couldn’t offer its followers that; the rewards it offered were in this lifetime, especially if the person was a higher-up in the Party. So, as a religion (or as a religion of sorts), Islam can do two things (although not just these two things): it can use our own principles of religious tolerance against us to destroy us and those principles, and it can whip its followers up to even greater fervor by its promises about rewards in an afterlife that will last forever. It also offers membership in a whole that transcends the individual, but Communism made that offer to its devotees as well.
So I repeat: although in many respects Islam goes beyond what we think of as a religion, into the governmental and political (you can see some of the results in Iran), religion definitely has something to do with it. And if Islam did not call itself a religion, it would not be so difficult to rally support for fighting against jihadis, who present the added problem of masquerading as being followers of a regular religion rather than a murderous apocalyptic death cult.
Are all Muslims followers of a “murderous apocalyptic death cult”? No, but (a) they are followers of a religion that in its most fundamental form can easily become one, and often has; and (b) they are followers of a religion which, if adhered to at all strictly, is antithetical to our Western doctrines of liberty and human rights.
The Trump addiction: madder music and stronger wine
.Victor Davis Hanson on Donald Trump’s appeal:
Trump sees his daily bombast as an injection of outrage for a constituency now hooked on someone who finally voices their pent-up anger. The more reckless Trump’s doses of scattergun outrageousness, the better the fix for his supporters.
For quite a while I’ve thought that was one of the reasons nothing Trump has said has given the slightest indication of turning off his supporters, and nothing is likely to do so. The more “outrageous” he becomes, according to the MSM and the 3 people who are planning to vote for Jeb Bush, the more his supporters enjoy it.
One of the many interesting aspects of the Trump phenomenon is that “regular” politicians seem pallid in comparison to him. Their sober, articulate, seemingly well-thought-out answers (I think some are, anyway) don’t send that thrill up (or is it down?) the leg, that frisson that means something exciting is happening, and something else exciting might be happening in just a moment if you stick with it.
The rest of the field? Well, every now and then there’s a joke, but other than that they sound like Teacher giving a lecture on Stuff. Policy, details—who needs it? Let’s have another shot of that Trump adrenaline. I’m not saying that’s the only reason Trump’s supporters are drawn to him—it’s not—but it’s part of it, and it’s part of what keeps people riveted on him and keeps the publicity coming his way. Trump is well aware of this, and keeps it coming, both from his own predilection for that sort of thing and as a tactic.
Obama had a similar galvanizing effect on his constituency, although his outward style appeared very different: professorial, smooth, cerebral, intellectual (or, as it seemed to me, pseudo-intellectual). I seemed to have been immune to his appeal, and I’m equally immune to Trump’s appeal. But I observe them both.
If you’re as old as I am, you remember when the children’s television show “Sesame Street” first came on the air. Younger people may not realize how very different it was from the kids’ shows that had gone before, which had been somewhat low-key and slow-paced. “Sesame Street” was a children’s program on steroids, fast and irreverent, cutting back and forth quickly, and witty enough to keep parents laughing and entertained. Speculation was that the show would help shorten the attention span of the generation that grew up watching it, and I believe it did.
At any rate, something seems to have made us more impatient, or some combination of things: the internet, video games, the prevalence of action movies, texting? A few years ago, for example, I watched a favorite old film, “The Day of the Jackal,” and was surprised at how slow it seemed now. I still love the movie; I think it’s a masterpiece, actually, and that the remake is an abomination. But many people nowadays find the original hard to watch because of how its more leisurely (although IMHO, still suspenseful) pace compares to what we’ve become used to.
And so I observe that, among all his other qualities, one of Trump’s big appeals is that people find him exciting to listen to and to watch. Whatever will he say next?
[NOTE: The title of this post comes from this poem.
And yes, I’m aware that Trump doesn’t drink. The title is a metaphor.]
[NOTE II: By the way, this post is meant to be a reflection on Trump’s style vs. the style of the other candidates, not on the relative merits of their positions. I’ve certainly discussed the latter, too—ad nauseam, perhaps—but that’s not what I’m trying to talk about here. Like it or not, a lot of what draws people to one candidate vs. another is personal style.]
Phytoplankton: we have not a clue
Phytoplankton have been proliferating in the North Atlantic when they were predicted to be doing the opposite, and we haven’t a clue why. Nor do we know whether the increase is beneficial or harmful.
Here’s an observation on this from Anand Gnanadesikan, who is an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins.
“What is worrisome,” he said, “is that our result points out how little we know about how complex ecosystems function.”
Here’s blogger Richard Fernandez:
This is important because phytoplankton are the foundation of the food chain.
Conventional wisdom held they should be dying. For years the numbers of phytoplankton were thought to be in decline due to Global Warming…Just as nuclear power and radiation explained everything in the 1950s, in 2015 the usual suspect in all modern mysteries is Global Warming…The way the narrative works is the Usual Suspect is guilty in every case. Things are simpler that way.
I am not a scientist, although I am more science and math literate than most people. But I’ve long been worried about the belief that the current state of computer modeling can deal with some of the most complex systems in nature adequately enough to predict the future or understand how an intervention would actually affect the system in the real world.
Fernandez quotes a work in which the late Michael Crichton has a character explain:
Computers were built in the late 1940s because mathematicians like John von Neumann thought that if you had a computer-a machine to handle a lot of variables simultaneously-you would be able to predict the weather…They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything.
Our very short-time weather prediction is excellent. But chaos theory throws off weather prediction if it’s just a bit beyond a week or so ahead. Weather prediction of that type (which is still relatively short-term) and climate prediction (which is far more long-term) are different creatures from each other, of course. However, the basic idea that we have enough variables and enough knowledge to reliably predict these things—and particularly to be able to intervene productively in them—appears to be a form of scientific and political hubris.
And that is true even without postulating that some scientists or especially government officials have an interest in fudging data or misrepresenting data, a question we don’t even have to consider for the purposes of this post. Even if it’s all on the up and up, how trustworthy would the conclusions be?
[NOTE: I highly recommend the work of Judith Curry, a respected climatologist who also respects some of the doubts of the so-called “AGW skeptics.” Here’s a sample of the sort of thing she writes at her website, which is worth a visit.]