[Hat tip: commenter G6loq]
The interesting thing about that video is that while it’s parody, it’s very close to the actual substance of Trump’s campaign. It makes me wonder whether his entire campaign might be a form of parody.
Perhaps he could choose Jimmy Fallon as VP? But only if he keeps the makeup and wig, of course.
I’ve got a very busy day today.
I was just working on a long post and ran out of time. Gotta go!
So, probably this evening I’ll grind out some more. Till then, enjoy the weekend, and talk amongst yourselves.
The following is a quote from Evan Sayet. It was written in 2007 and is not specifically about immigration, it is simply about the worldview and motivation of liberals today. But it strikes me that it certainly applies to the current “migrant” crisis in Europe:
In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.
I would add “even to the point of committing cultural suicide or actual suicide.” To a person steeped in cultural relativism and postmodern thinking, all cultures are alike and all equally good—except that ours is worse.
The Western nations of Europe (it’s mostly those and not the Eastern ones, although Great Britain appears to be an exception) seem far more interested in thinking of themselves as good and moral people than of evaluating the nature of what might be happening in the current influx of people from the Middle East. What part of Hijira—jihad by immigration—don’t they understand? All parts, because acknowledging its existence, defending one’s own nationhood and culture, and understanding that Hijira is a very good possibility with a very significant number of these new “migrants,” would mean opening themselves up to charges of “discrimination,” and that is completely unacceptable.
The leaders of Western Europe try to offer reassurances by saying they will screen and vet the newcomers and make sure no dangerous people come in. That, unfortunately, is laughable. How do they propose to do that? There are too many arrivals, the Europeans are too understaffed, and they lack the ability and the time to look into the people’s background in Syria or the myriad other countries from whence they’ve come. What’s more, the new arrivals will be fertile ground for recruitment by the already-existing terrorists and extremists the Western countries have already welcomed, clothed, and fed.
What will the Europeans do with those arrivals they may manage to reject as unsuitable? They haven’t said. Will they put them on their vaunted watchlists, with the others who—while being oh-so-carefully “watched”—have committed terrorist attacks all over Europe?
I keep thinking of this song:
I want to make it clear that I don’t think most of the “migrants” are terrorists or jihadis. Most are probably not refugees, either, but are people looking for a better economic life and see their golden opportunity now, claiming that they fear for their lives (Jonah Goldberg explains the distinction). This is a whole other issue, one I won’t be addressing in this post, except to say that economic migrants should get in line and follow the legal immigration rules of the various countries they are trying to enter.
What I am saying here is that logic and realism dictate that a very significant number of the newcomers are jihadis, and that the nations of Europe cannot properly sort out which is which and deal with the jihadi group appropriately. This is profoundly dangerous.
He’s out of the race.
I liked Rick Perry. But he never really caught on, for whatever reasons. I think there just wasn’t anything that special about him compared to the many others, plus there were some lingering memories of his rather embarrassing errors last time.
“We have a tremendous field of candidates ”” probably the greatest group of men and women,” Perry said. “I step aside knowing our party is in good hands, as long as we listen to the grassroots, listen to that cause of conservatism. If we do that, then our party will be in good hands.”…
“It’d be easy just to keep going, be easy to go do the debate next week, be easy to keep going to Iowa and South Carolina and other states and everything and taking your money and dragging it out,” said Dallas businessman and longtime Perry donor Roy Bailey.
But, Bailey said, Perry “could see it was pretty obvious to him he wasn’t going to be the next presidential nominee from the Republican Party.”
And he was smart enough to know it, and to get out.
Which he then tried to walk back.
Here’s how it went:
A former French minister stirred up controversy Friday after saying Germany “took our Jews and gave us Arabs” as France began taking some of the thousands of refugees arriving in Germany.
Patrick Devedjian, a right-winger who served in the governments of presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, made the remark at a press conference, but quickly tried to backtrack on social media.
“My humorous jest was misplaced,” Devedjian wrote on his Twitter account, saying he regretted it all the more because he himself helps refugees in need.
Devedjian, who comes from an Armenian family and now leads the Hauts-de-Seine region of wealthy suburbs west of Paris, said the joke was meant to be about Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
Actually, when I first read his remark, I didn’t perceive it as a joke. I saw it as a statement of fact. Of course, the Germans didn’t do either thing without a significant amount of French cooperation.
And the fact that Devedjian is of Armenian ethnicity is probably not irrelevant.
The “joke” that was not a joke has various interesting elements:
—the linkage of Germany’s WWII activities with its present-day guilt trip over those activities and the resultant bending-over-backward to atone
—the commonality of German dominance both in WWII and in the present, telling France what to do
—subtle acknowledgement of the fact that Arabs and Jews are ethnically linked, if not equivalent
—awareness of the fact that, despite that ethnic linkage, there are vast and troubling cultural differences that don’t shape up in favor of the superiority of the Arab ethos
In other related news: now whoever would have guessed that this was about to happen? (That’s sarcasm, by the way):
Muslim radicals in Germany are trying to recruit some of the growing numbers of asylum seekers reaching the country, according to intelligence services quoted by the German news agency DPA.
The Islamic extremists “are trying to approach the young unaccompanied refugees, who arrive in our country without their families and are particularly looking for contacts and support,” a spokesman for the intelligence service in the southern state of Bavaria told DPA.
The number of terrorists and potential terrorists in Europe have already reached such high numbers that authorities cannot possibly monitor all that are on the security radar screen. In fact, nearly all of the recent attackers were “known to authorities” as suspicious characters, and yet they slipped through and were able to attack. So what’s the remedy? Why, import a lot more people to screen and try to follow!
Then we have Peggy Noonan, who writes about the problems in Europe with her customary mix of kindness, insight, and fuzzy thinking:
What a crisis Europe is in, with waves of migrants reaching its shores as the Arab world implodes. It is the biggest migration into Europe since the end of World War II and is shaping up to be its first great and sustained challenge of the 21st century. It may in fact shape that continent’s nature and history as surely as did World War I.
What’s muddled about that? “It is the biggest migration into Europe since the end of World War II…” But the migrations and DP camps of Europe during and after WWII were not migrations INTO Europe, they were almost entirely migrations of Europeans within Europe. Some Europeans were lucky enough to be able to leave Europe and come to the United States or Australia or Canada or other calmer countries outside Europe, of course. But off the top of my head I fail to recall large groups of Japanese citizens arriving on Europe’s shores during and after WWII—or citizens of other non-European country affected by WWII. There was an influx of people from countries that had been colonies of Britain (for example, India), but they were not refugees from WWII and in any event represented carefully controlled and regulated legal immigration from a Commonwealth country.
Later in her essay, Noonan does manage to inject an interesting statistic, and although she doesn’t source it, it conforms with what I’ve read elsewhere: “Seventy-two percent[of the current refugees] are men, only 13% women and 15% children.”
Noonan later writes:
The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder.
People in gated communities of the mind, who glide by in Ubers, have bought their way out and are safe. Not to mention those in government-maintained mansions who glide by in SUVs followed by security details. Rulers can afford to see national-security threats as an abstraction””yes, yes, we must better integrate our new populations. But the unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry.
I understand what Noonan is saying here, and I’ve said a version of it myself. But I think she’s fooling herself (and the “elites” are fooling themselves) if she thinks anyone is safe. We are all threatened by terrorism, home-grown or imported. We are all threatened by vast unassimilated groups of people from religions and cultures that are not merely different from ours but are militantly opposed to ours, cultures in which large segments of the population are devotees of a religion and politics that is dedicated to our destruction and/or subservience and/or conversion. One tool by which this might occur is through Hijira, the doctrine of jihad by immigration.
Twenty-five House Democrats joined all the House Republicans (save Massie of Kentucky, who voted “present”) in voting “no” to approval of Obama’s Iran deal.
So once again, a bill has bipartisan support—and that support goes against the president. And once again, it probably won’t matter. The only possible significance of this bill might be (a) for future reference, because it puts the deal’s supporters and opponents on the record, and (b) possible grounds for a lawsuit against Obama.
As for Massie, he has explained his vote here. Simply put, he thinks the Iran deal was a treaty, and his vote is a refusal to cooperate with not voting on it as a treaty. So his position is more hardline that those of the other Republicans, not less.
As for the Senate, McConnell went ahead yesterday with a very different move and tried to vote on a disapproval of the deal in the Senate, one that was blocked by 42 Democrats voting not to invoke cloture. One can speculate on what went on in McConnell’s mind, and one would almost have to speculate because it’s hard to find any explanation of what he did other than the “failure theater” scenario of not really wanting to win in the first place, but just trying to give the appearance of wanting to win.
I cannot stand McConnell, but I’ve not bought 100% into the “failure theater” explanation (maybe just 85%). Politico says he’s got plans:
Republicans are plotting to make Democrats pay dearly for backing an agreement the GOP argues hinges on an historic enemy of the United States playing nice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to return to the floor next week to force Democrats to take more votes Republicans say they’ll regret as soon as Iran violates the terms of the deal or sponsors terrorist attacks, which critics believe is just a matter of time.
Is he planning to take up a vote of approval, like the House did? Is he planning to vote on the deal as though it were a treaty, as so many people have suggested it is? And what will he do about those 42 Democrats this time? What is to stop them from doing exactly the same thing the did yesterday and vote against cloture, thereby scuttling every single one of those proposals? What will he do about that?
On 9/11’s 10th anniversary I wrote a post that contained this observation:
For those of us who were grownups when 9/11 happened, it’s also been transmuted””not to something that was always there, but to something that’s been incorporated into our view of the world. We’ve all done that differently. But for us, the shock and surprise and horror reoccurs (to a somewhat diminished extent, of course; there’s no shock like the first shock) whenever we see the footage, or when we think””really really think, without the protective shield of familiarity””of what actually happened on that day.
I believe that, in the four years that have passed since I wrote those words, 9/11 has been transmuted into something that was always there, something that no longer surprises. And although I haven’t watched any footage today of the attack, I think there is less shock and no surprise.
The reason for that is that a great deal has happened since I wrote those words four years ago. Since then, although we had responded in Afghanistan to 9/11 and then to Saddam Hussein’s defiance of nuclear weapons inspections in Iraq, the Obama administration has purposely wiped out those gains, particularly in Iraq. When I wrote that 10-year anniversary piece in September of 2011, the US was poised on the brink of Obama’s complete withdrawal from Iraq, which he was determined to accomplish against the opinion and advice of every military adviser. In the four years since that withdrawal, ISIS has risen up in the vacuum that was left, and it has wreaked horrors on civilian populations, barbarities that are of enormous scale and magnitude even compared to 9/11 and which have reverberated around the world with images of sadistic violence. Does anyone doubt for a single moment that the killers would wreak a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand 9/11s on us if they could?
And then there’s the Iran deal that looms on the horizon, debated in a Congress that seems powerless against a tyrannical president bound and determined to sell our country out to a regime that is worse than Saddam Hussein’s and more implacably our enemy and the enemy of the world.
I could not have made up such a scenario back when 9/11 happened. And yet here we are.
The anniversary of 9/11 is a very solemn day. Today, when I say that “there is less shock and no surprise,” I mean neither disrespect nor belittling of the terrible event that was 9/11. The horror is just as horrible, and perhaps even all the more horrible knowing the point we’ve reached now. The 9/11 dead are still dead, their families still bereft, the 9/11 perpetrators still vile, the 9/11 heroes still heroic. We need to remember them and to bow our heads in grief, and in prayer if we are religious people.
But what I will be hoping for is a sea-change. I don’t know when it will happen. I don’t know how it will happen. I don’t know if it will happen. But I know we need a new dedication to the spirit on which this country was founded: that of courage, liberty, dedication, and clear-sightedness.
9/11 was not like Gettysburg. It was not a battle where soldiers died; it was a sneak attack on civilians going about their daily lives, although many who died were in the line of duty as police or firefighters. On the 9/11 anniversary we honor and mourn them all, every single one. But I want to paraphrase the closing of the Gettysburg Address and add:
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us””that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain””that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom””and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
[ADDENDUM: Here is the story of my own experience on 9/11 and its immediate aftermath.]
The House is able to do what the Senate cannot, because the House has no filibuster or cloture to allow the minority to block a vote even if the majority wants one. And so we have this:
The House on Thursday approved a resolution aimed at laying the legal groundwork to prevent President Obama from lifting U.S. sanctions on Iran until lawmakers get to see the full text of the “roadmap” that governs how Tehran accounts for its past nuclear work.
In a party-line 245-186 vote, members passed the resolution by Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, and Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y. The non-binding measure declares that Obama has not met the requirements of a law enacted in May giving Congress the opportunity to review any nuclear deal with Iran.
The significance of this is unclear, but at least it’s something. The Senate cannot vote on a similar measure without changing the filibuster/cloture rule to make it possible for a simple majority to move to a vote. Even without that, though, this apparently could “be the basis of a lawsuit against the Obama administration, something House Speaker John Boehner said is a possible option.”
Tomorrow the House is planning to go ahead with a vote on a resolution to approve the deal, which will fail to win a majority. My prediction is that this will be mostly along party lines, although some Democrats will join the Republicans in failing to approve. The idea is to get the House Democrats to actually go on record as affirmatively approving the deal, rather than hide from making an official public commitment on the issue.
As completely expected, the Iran deal disapproval measure failed to win the requisite 60+ votes to invoke cloture in the Senate and allow a vote on the merits.
We’ve known for quite some time that this would happen. But this article (and no doubt many others in the MSM) frames it as both “improbable” and a big victory for Obama and the Democrats.
That’s not surprising either; that’s the way the MSM rolls.
For example, there’s this from the article, describing the Congressional Democrats as: “overcoming ferocious Republican opposition and delivering President Barack Obama a legacy-making victory on his top foreign policy priority.” The reality is that Obama’s deal not only did not get a single Republican vote, it failed to get all the Democratic votes, either. So this was another bipartisan vote—but as usual with Obama, the bipartisanship was all on the side of the opposition to the president.
This “victory” of Obama’s, so “legacy-making,” therefore consisted of Obama getting just enough Democrats on his side to block a vote on the merits (that vote to invoke cloture failed by a margin of two). Even had cloture gotten the necessary 60+, and the disapproval bill come to a vote and been passed, Obama would have vetoed it and there would not have been enough votes to override that veto.
This “victory” consists of Obama’s managing to use a minority vote to allow him to get away with making a deplorable bargain conceding an enormous amoumt to one of our worst enemies, and against the will of a large majority of the American people. It’s the mullahs who are the real victors here. Some legacy.
[NOTE: Personally, I think the Republicans should have changed the rules on cloture for this (not that they were ever going to do that). However, I realize that’s just my emotion talking, because even had they done so and thus been able to vote for disapproval, Obama would have vetoed it. Because Obama has veto power, and because the Democrats are dedicated to Party First, the entire enterprise was doomed no matter what the approach.
Even had the Senate decided to vote on this as a treaty, which needs 2/3 for approval, they would have run into the same exact roadblock involving the 60-vote cloture threshold. They could not have voted on the deal as though it were a treaty without getting 60 votes to allow it to come to a vote, and the Democrats would never have given them that opportunity. Even if the Senate somehow had managed to vote on it (which was always unlikely), then Obama would simply have ignored the failure to ratify the treaty, saying that the deal was not a treaty but instead an executive agreement, and the courts would have almost certainly backed him up (if it went to the courts at all).
In fact, that scenario might still play out, because as I understand it, nothing stops the GOP from trying to vote on it as a treaty at this point. I predict they won’t even try, because of the aforementioned likelihood that it could never come to a vote for similar reasons to what happened with today’s Senate events.
It might have mattered to have been able to at least debate the disapproval bill, pass it, and force Obama to use his veto. But how many people even pay attention to that sort of thing, when the measure itself would not have stood, and the Iran deal would not have been blocked in the end?
What a sad, sad day.]
[NOTE II: Here’s an article by Steven Hayward on the limitations of the Congressional GOP majority.]
A new human fossil has been found, and it has some intriguing and unusual characteristics:
The researchers suggest that the fossils represent a previously unknown species in our genus, Homo, one that had a peculiar mix of physical traits and engaged in surprisingly sophisticated behavior for its brain size. But the age of the fossils has yet to be determined, leaving other scientists unsure of what to make of them.
The fossils exhibit a combination of primitive features that bring to mind our ancient australopithecine predecessors (including Lucy and her ilk) and features that are associated with Homo. For instance, the pelvis has a flared shape like that seen in Australopithecus, whereas the leg and foot resemble those of Homo sapiens. Likewise, the skull combines a small braincase with a cranium that is otherwise built like that of early Homo. The teeth, meanwhile, are small like those of modern humans, yet the third molar is larger than the other molars””a pattern associated with australopithecines. And the upper limb pairs an Australopithecus-like shoulder and fingers with a Homo-like wrist and palm. “All that combined leaves us with a really, really strange creature,” Berger remarks.
What’s more, there are lots and lots of them:
Cavers collected the bones from a difficult-to-reach chamber 30 meters below ground within the Rising Star cave system in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind region, which is famous for its human fossils. In their paper describing the new remains, published today in the journal eLife, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his colleagues report that the remains include multiples of nearly every element of the skeleton and represent at least 15 individuals. For a field in which even an isolated bone can constitute a major discovery, this find is an absolute windfall.
That’s absolutely incredible, from what I know of early human fossils from my long-ago physical anthropology courses (I was an anthro minor).
The combination of traits that have been found in these fossils reminds me of the famous hoax Piltdown man, which was a sensation when it was first “discovered” because it combined an apelike jaw with a brain case that resemble a modern human’s, a sort of chimera. Well, that’s because it was composed of an ape’s jaw and a modern human cranium, a fact that was exposed about 40 years after its 1912 “discovery.”
Let me be clear that I’m not accusing the scientists who discovered Homo naledi of perpetrating a hoax. For one thing, it would have to be an awfully elaborate conspiracy, and for another, modern science makes it much tougher to fool anyone about this sort of thing. I’m trying to emphasize the somewhat unusual mixture of traits in these fossils.
Scientists have so far been unable to date the bones because the conditions in the cave did not favor the preservation of DNA. Age can tell you a lot; for example:
If the remains are young, then scientists will have to come to terms with the fact that a small-brained human species with tool-wielding hands managed to persist alongside larger-brained human species””possibly including H. sapiens””for an amazingly long time. In that case, says team member John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, perhaps H. naledi was among the archaic human species that interbred with H. sapiens and thereby contributed DNA to the modern human gene pool, like Neandertals did.
There is also this:
At other fossil sites in the Cradle of Humankind, fossils are encased in sediment and animal bones are found mixed in with the human remains. The bones of humans and animals alike accumulate in the caves there through catastrophic events such as falling down a hole in the ground into an underground cave and getting trapped, or becoming dinner for the large carnivores that denned in the caves. But the Rising Star bones are not encased in sediment, nor do any remains of any vertebrate animals, apart from a few rodents and birds, accompany them. Given the absence of any evidence to indicate that Homo naledi fell or washed into the underground chamber or was transported there by a predator, the discovery team suggests that this small-brained human deliberately disposed of its dead. Furthermore, the location of the H. naledi bones in a chamber that appears to have always been lightless and difficult to access suggests that the humans went to great lengths to deliver the bodies there, and possibly needed an artificial light source (perhaps a simple torch) to do so. The behavior is important because it implies that H. naledi had, as Hawks puts is, “a shared cultural knowledge of mortality.”
Wow.
More here.
Trump’s Carly Fiorina “face” remark has highlighted and accentuated something about him that was already clear: he is a loose cannon, and he gets off on that and thinks many of his followers will get off on it, as well.
I think he is correct in that estimation. But I don’t think it’s true of quite as many of his followers as he thinks, and I think it repels at least as many if not more. I guess we’ll see.
There are a lot of people on the right (I use the word “right” because it’s the best one I have, but that doesn’t exactly describe it) who are so fed up with the GOP and Obama and PC-thinking and the downward slide of America that they want a loose cannon, they revel in a loose cannon. What does a cannon do, after all? Well, I’m no military expert, but I know that one of the main things cannons do is to knock down fortified defenses. The GOP is a fortified defense (in the metaphoric sense, of course), and the die-hard Trump supporters want a cannon to knock it down. And they don’t really care what else it might destroy, because the “boom!” feels so good when it’s on your side, aiming at what you see are the right targets for a change.
I see Trump as mostly “boom;” smoke and hot air and puffery. I agree that he’s said a lot of things that need saying, but that’s his entire value for me. Perhaps he’s more of a battering ram than a cannon, but a battering ram just gets you inside, it doesn’t fix anything.
That’s why I’m drawn to someone like Carson, for example. I’ve been listening to him more lately. He also has never held public office, but his quietness is the perfect foil for Trump’s bombast. Between the lines, though, you can also see an immensely strong resolve and an ability to say the hard, non-PC things. Carson just says them quietly, and somewhat slowly. The slowness and calm of Carson’s voice have an interesting effect, at least on me: he makes me hang on his words, waiting and eagerly anticipating what he might say next. It’s usually something insightful and worthwhile, as well as sensible.
As time goes on, candidates reveal themselves. That’s one of the benefits of a long campaign season (I can’t really think of another). Part of it is about that old-fashioned word: character. Trump has revealed his character to be that of a self-absorbed, vindictive, immature braggart. We’ve never had a president like that before—except—except for Obama.
I’m sick of it. I was sick of it before Obama’s presidency even started.
You might ask: why write so much about Trump? It’s a good question; after all, this is the second post today! But I don’t really see this as being about Trump. He’s just the jumping-off point. It’s about the American people and the presidency, what they want and what they need. We are at a crossroads that just might be the most important one in our history. We need to choose wisely, and well.
Is it really such a good idea to make fun of a rival candidate’s looks?
It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman being mocked, or a man or a woman doing the mocking. It’s always an extremely juvenile way to go.
And yet Donald Trump went there, about Carly Fiorina:
The [Rolling Stone] profile contains Trump saying of Fiorina, while watching her on TV, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?! I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”
Silly, mean-spirited, petulant, sophomoric (and that’s high school sophomore, not college). I’m not even sure what he’s referring to, since I happen to think Fiorina’s an attractive, well-groomed, well-dressed 61-year-old woman. I’d guess she’s had some “work” done on her face, but certainly not enough to be grotesque in any way. Here’s her response to Trump’s comments:
Trump himself is a 69-year old man whose face has seen better days (as have the faces of all of us of “a certain age”). All the more reason he shouldn’t go there. He’s had his share of ribbing about his supposed toupee, too, although not from me. I couldn’t care less if he wears a toupee or not, but I’ve never perceived him as wearing one. I’ve always thought he just has an unusual head of hair or sports an odd combover.
One thing I do think is that Trump, who appears to be another narcissist (I’m a bit tired of that these days, after all the years of Obama), is getting more and more full of himself now that his campaign has been so successful. Always confident and brash, he’s even more confident and brash than before. Flush with his own cleverness and PC-flaunting brilliance, he could be tempted to be just a little more outrageous as time goes on. Trump will either get hold of himself and rein it back a bit (just a bit, because if he reined it back too much, Trump wouldn’t be Trump), or this sort of juvenile trash-talking will escalate until he alienates more and more people.
All this talk about faces, though, makes me think of these songs, all of which are about reacting to a person’s face. They all have the word “face” in the title, too.
Enjoy:
I think maybe I wrote the part of the post about Trump and Fiorina just to have an excuse for the songs.
[ADDENDUM: Trump tries to walk back his comment by saying that when he said “Look at that face!” he didn’t actually mean Fiorina’s face, he meant her persona.
I don’t know about you, but to me there’s no way that “face” means “persona.” And “Look at that face!” means “look at that face.” There’s nothing metaphorical there.]