Author Archives: thezman

Bearing False Witness

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There are six things that the LORD strongly dislikes, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.

—Proverbs 6:16–19

The Romans executes people who swore false oaths or made false accusations. But, they killed people for counterfeiting and adultery, too. How often the state punished someone for making false claims against another is unknown. But, life did not always count for much in the classical period. Commodus used to kill midgets in the arena just for entertainment so Rome is not a great guide to these things.

Similarly, the Muslims give 40 lashes for false witness, but they also stone homosexuals and whip adulterers. The Mohammedan is not wrong about everything, but they lack a sense of proportion in their punishments.

Bearing false witness has a long spiritual history in the West, of course, but not a long legal history. The crime of perjury was created in the 16th or 17th century in England. I would image it is the same in the rest of Europe. The rise of independent courts and impartial juries brought with it witness testimony as a formal part of a trial.

We need to rethink how we handle cases where the alleged victim clearly lied or made false accusations. This is a good example. This is ESPN so they leave out the part about video exonerating the accused, but the comments take up the slack. This football player was falsely accused of rape and has lost his career as a consequence.

Former San Francisco 49ers defensive end Ray McDonald confirmed to ESPN’s Josina Anderson on Monday that he plans to sue the woman accusing him of rape.

“I feel like what I am doing is the right thing because I know that I am not this bad person that people are making me out to be,” McDonald told ESPN on Monday. “I’ve been fired from my job. I know some teams don’t even want to talk to me because of this past accusation. All I am trying to do is clear my name and move on with my life.”

McDonald has been investigated by local law authorities on suspicion of sexual assault. He has not been charged with any crime.

The San Jose Mercury News earlier reported that McDonald’s lawyer, Steve M. DeFilippis, would file a lawsuit on Monday morning. McDonald has been trying to catch on with an NFL team since he was released by the 49ers in December for “a pattern of poor decision-making.”

“In the eyes of the NFL teams, the unresolved threat of charges being filed against him, even though factually unfounded, continues to present a roadblock to this remarkable athlete being able to move forward in his career,” DeFilippis said in a release. “This lawsuit is intended to vindicate him … and return his good name.”

According to court documents that were written by San Jose police investigators to obtain a search warrant for McDonald’s home, the accuser told authorities she fell and hit her head on the ground near the pool and has no memory of the sexual encounter that occurred in McDonald’s San Jose house, which police say occurred Dec. 14, a few hours after the 49ers returned from a 17-7 loss to the Seahawks in Seattle.

The woman stayed with McDonald at his home the next day and drank vodka with McDonald, according to the papers. That’s when McDonald conceded that a sexual encounter occurred, according to the court documents.

Suing this woman will do nothing. Maybe the player gets a statement from her that says he is not a rapist. Otherwise, nothing will happen to her. What should happen is she should spend ten years in the penitentiary. Sometimes, the best you can be is a warning to others and that’s what we have here. She should spend time in the can as a warning to other women who think this is a good idea.

Damsel in Distress Syndrome

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Steve Sailer has a post up about Hillary Clinton. I Posted something there which will be approved whenever Sailer decides to roll out of bed. The Unz site has a lot going for it, but the commenting system is a dumpster fire. Anyway, after posting it I thought about it some more and here are some things I should have added.

I never thought Hillary Clinton was all that interesting. In my work life, I’ve encountered her type many times. That’s the bitchy, middle-aged professional woman that is always pissed off because she cannot reconcile feminist orthodoxy with her reality. These are the broads who were marinated in feminism in college, but married well nonetheless.

They still have the feminist nonsense in their heads about how they can compete with the boys and take down the patrimony, but the reality is they just married well. Their husband makes a good living so they can live the life, but also “have a career.” In the case of Hillary Clinton, her career was being a screw up, who had a highly successful husband.

All the way back to Arkansas, Clinton seems to have been in over her head. The scandals with the shady land dealers are a prime example. Bill’s finger prints were never on those things. The same is true of the law firm shenanigans. The only thing anyone could ever pin on him were the bimbos and that’s nothing new in Southern politics.

As she enters the Bob Dole phase of her career, she is slightly more interesting. Instead of the bitchy middle-aged “professional” woman, she is a a boozy old gal that is a feature of the Washington cocktail circuit. These are the women who have been married to politicians their whole lives and have a cultured cynicism that comes from years of disappointment.

Like Bob Dole, she is probably a hoot after a few drinks, but you can always sense why no one in the political class thought enough of them to put them in charge of anything. They are the sort of people who never ask, “What if this doesn’t work?” As a consequence, they get jammed up on minor stuff.

This e-mail scandal is a classic Hillary bungle. The old rule in politics is “never write when you can speak, never speak when you can nod.” There’s nothing wrong with having a private e-mail account. It should have been two steps removed from the boss. Hillary should have dictated her correspondence and never e-mailed anyone in her official capacity, other than to send birthday wishes.

But, that’s been the story for three decades or more with this woman. As I mentioned on my Unz post, everyone forgets why Clinton lost in 2008 to Obama. Her and her people failed to account for the rule changes the DNC implemented for the 2008 primary. The Clinton team was operating under the old rules, prior to proportional allotment of delegates.

I’m going to play amateur psychiatrist here. I wonder if this serial bungling is a way to get attention from her husband. When I worked in DC, I saw this quite a bit. The wives of politicians are often just furniture. They stand next to hubby on stage and for photos, but otherwise hubby thinks about them as much as he thinks about the coffee maker.

There are more than a few drama queens in the political wife club. It’s how they get the attention of their husbands who spend all of their time with their staff. Hilliary’s scandals are the one thing she and Bill share together. Maybe there’s a damsel in distress syndrome going on here that drives these unforced errors.

I remain skeptical about her chances to be president. There’s a Bob Dole ’96 vibe here. The party does not have anyone ready that they trust and it is not looking like  good year to run anyway. May as well let the old broad have her day in the sun as the first female nominee. Otherwise, everyone will just go through the motions.

The Narcotic of Anti-Racism

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Political and social trends are looking more and more like weird cults that people join for a short while and then abandon for some new crackpot thing. Just a few years ago the comments sections of websites were filled with nutters ranting about the glories of sodomite marriage. Then, the sodomites were thrown out of the temple and trannies were the new thing.

Anti-racism is looking like one of those trends that may have a long shelf life. I saw this in the NYTimes. If you look at the comments, you can see why it is so intoxicating to the lunatics on the Left. This comment from a kook named Tim C is emblematic:

I literally do not find “anti-white” bias and “reverse racism” valid concepts. Race is a concept no one in America do not want to discuss. And by that, I mean, white Americans. Rather than have an intellectual proactive discussion that produces proactive solutions that push social progress, all we do is point blame at the victims and do not think to comprehend why white America aggresses without responsibility. We cannot be post-racial when we have not even been racial.

Those sentences are barely English – literally! But, you can bet he felt great after having typed them. He got to bang on publicly about the pale penis people, thus showing his piety. That’s the thing about anti-racism. it’s hard to mock someone for it. Start yammering about trannies or even sodomites and people will snicker.

In many respects, anti-racism is the perfect topic for the Cultural Marxist. The pale penis people will always be with us so there is no “winning” or end game like we had with homosexual marriage. Since blacks will also always be with us, the disparities are a social constant.

The key to these modern movements is that the promised land must be just over the next hill. That way, the believers can feel their are getting closer so they get worked up in a frenzy at anything that is seen as an obstacle. As the Greeks learned in the Peloponnesian War, fanaticism comes easy when the enemy is evil.

Sailer think the whole enterprise is coming apart, but I don’t know. Hatred of the pale penis people has psychic rewards that can’t be easily replaced. Even homosexuals get tired of being around homosexuals so having the gay friend gets old quickly. Being anti-white, even if you’re white, is all upside and no downside. It’s like heroin that helps you work harder and be more conscientious, as well as be in a perpetual dream state.

Just scan through those comments. They are clawing each others eyes out to get to the top of the piety pole. They are rats hooked on coke banging at the little button to get their next fix. That does not go away without something filling the void.

 

College Blues

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I think the only reason to read the NYTimes (or any other agit-prop daily) is to get a heads up about what the Left plans to do to us next. It’s like the scene from Men in Black where Agent K reads the supermarket tabloids for the real news. In the case of the NYTimes, there’s no news, just warnings.

This is from a few weeks back and I saved it figuring there would be other warnings from other places. It could make for blog post material. The other day I saw this on ZeroHedge. My bet is the Liberal Democrats are going to be testing a bunch of these ideas for the 2016 election. The idea is to promise the young free money so they will be vote for the Left. Inevitably, the other side will offer up their own basket of goodies to the millennials.

The NYTimes idea has been kicking around for years. I recall “new” Democrats yammering about this back in the 80’s. Their big idea back then was a thing called Teacher Corp. The students who went into teaching would get their loans forgiven. I forget the name of the other plan for non-teachers, but it was basically a lifetime tax. The graduate would pay a special tax for the rest of their working life to pay back the tuition.

These ideas all sound great if you are an economic illiterate. When you subsidize demand, prices rise. When you throttle the growth of supply, then prices rise even faster than the subsidy. That has been the policy in the US for decades. Free money from the state is given to student to use for college. Colleges wisely raised their prices to account for the free money. The state keeps upping the free money and the colleges keep raising prices.

Maybe there’s a connection?

If the government created a BMW purchase plan where everyone is eligible for a $5000 subsidy if they buy a BMW, the price of BMW’s will go up by $5,000. The reason is BMW is not stupid. They know that demand will suddenly spike so they can sell all of their cars at the former price plus the new premium. They may even cut supply to reduce costs.

That’s what has happened in America. At the end of WW2, we had eight Ivy League schools and 139 million people. Today we have eight Ivy League colleges and 339 million people. The student bodies of these schools are the same size as they were 70 years ago.

At the bottom end, we have many more state schools and many more seats in state schools, but the price is vastly greater, even accounting for inflation. The California system used to be free for California residents. That’s not longer the case. Amazingly and I’m sure it is a coincidence, most state colleges charge what students are able to borrow under Federal programs.

The trouble is the central planners are in a trap. The delinquency rates on the trillion in student debt are going up. Tuition rates are unsustainable as new students cannot borrow enough to cover the costs. Even if they could, the delinquency rates would just climb faster. Universities, for the most part, are trapped in a cost model that requires raising tuition rates at multiples of the inflation rate.

The doomsday crowd is way over the top on most things, but they may be right about student loans and the whole college racket. The little guys will be the first to go as they often have no reason to exist in the first place. The Sweet Briar closure is a typical example.

The fact is, no amount of clever policy can change reality. People with debts they cannot pay, don’t pay them. When costs rise to the point where prices are unsustainable, people stop buying the product. As the old saying goes, things that cannot last eventually end.

Christianity and ID

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I generally think of Christians in America as being on “my side” of things. By my side I mean opposed to Cultural Marxism, socialism and so forth. That’s not always true, of course. Many Evangelicals are socialists. Many are simply religious and will vote for anyone who is “born again.” Jimmy Carter won a big slice of the Evangelical vote thus allowing him to carry the South and win the election. I’ve known many Evangelicals that think the only issue that matters in politics is the religion of the politician.

American Evangelicals are interesting to me in that I’m not entirely sure the current version is, strictly speaking, Christian. They certainly share much with traditional Christianity, but they have some big differences too. The focus on the text of the Bible is one obvious departure. Traditional Christians understand that the Bible, as we know it, evolved over centuries. Translations have errors and never fully capture the nuance of the original. Therefore, a literal interpretation is not possible.

This leads to some rather strange circular reasoning when talking with an Evangelical about scripture. Pointing out what I just wrote above about the trouble with translation is met with a quote from the Bible. If you make mention of the fact that the Catholic Church selected the books of the Bible and you get some other quote from scripture. The Bible is proof that the Bible is literally the word of God. It is a tautological defense that only makes sense to those who already believe. It’s many skeptics think Evangelicals are a cult.

That does not mean Evangelicals are a cult or way outside the definition of Christian, but it certainly sets them apart from the Christian tradition. I’m painting with a broad a brush here, so bear with me. I’m thinking mainly about the narrow strains within the Evangelical movement. The followers of Joel Osteen, for example, are a different breed of cat from the old ladies at First Evangelical. Watch one of Osteen’s preacher shows and the word “cult” comes to mind. In another age, Osteen would have been burned at the stake as a heretic.

What got me thinking about this topic is some posts I saw recently, railing against evolution. There is a sub-culture in the self-taught Christian sphere that seems to be an off-shoot of intelligent design. It’s not that they believe in ID or creationism, but they think you’re crazy for “believing” in the false god Darwin or his false religion, evolution. It’s mostly anti-Darwinsim, if there was such a thing as Darwinism. It’s as if they created a secular religion they can criticize. Anyway, it go me thinking about what ID’ers believe.

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system’s components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago.

The implication here is that the designer, willy-nilly, chooses to rearrange the natural world as he/she/it sees fit. They carefully avoid discussing the designer as that would raise some uncomfortable issues, I’m assuming. Instead, they focus on the claims that certain natural phenomenon could not happen naturally and therefore must have been created by a designer for unexplained reasons. That last bit is important. The designer’s reasons are not only unknown; they are unknowable. Therefore, there is no need for inquiry.

The term for this is occasionalism. It is also explicitly anti-Christian. The foundation stone of Christianity is the fixed nature of God. When God makes a deal, he sticks to it and when he created heaven and earth, it was by fixed and discoverable rules. This idea, first promulgated by the Hellenized Jews, is a big deal in the evolution of religion. Instead of the super natural acting cynically and capriciously, God set the rules of nature and they are permanent. A rational God and a rational universe is the basis for Western civilization.

Now, creationism and intelligent design are harmless beliefs. Outside a few areas, people’s understanding nature is meaningless. Creationism is certainly inside the realm of traditional Christian theology, but intelligent designs seems to fall outside of it.  With creationism, God can be viewed as the watchmaker, who set all of the natural processes in motion. Young earth creationism is nuts, but the more common form is what the Church taught for a thousand years. Intelligent Design, in contrast, does not fit inside Christianity.

The Sons of Haven Monahan

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Reading the news these days is difficult because it so often reads like an old Lampoon gag. How many stories about boys being expelled for finger guns can you read before you start to think the schools are run by madmen?

This is one of those times when I’m left wondering if it is not some sort of elaborate gag.

Los Angeles police descended on Venice High School on Friday, arresting nine students in connection with a series of sex crimes that began more than a year ago and involved at least two female classmates.

All but one of the arrests were on campus; authorities were attempting to locate five other students. The investigation began after a parent reported the allegations on Tuesday.

As detectives investigated, they discovered at least one photograph showing sex acts, according to law enforcement sources. A photo that appears to show two teenagers engaged in a sex act has been circulated on social media. Allegations involved both consensual sexual acts between minors and coerced acts, which complicates the case, police said.

My first read registered “sex with minors” rather than “sex between minors.” Since the story is about arresting students, I went back and read it again, thinking I missed the part where the students were middle-aged men. Nope. They just arrested boys for having sex with their female classmates.

The alleged crimes include sexual assault and lewd acts with a minor. Although the incidents date back to 2013, Smith said, most occurred in the last two months — and as recently as this month. Sources said that several boys were present during at least some of the incidents.

Authorities provided few details about the allegations and declined to identify the boys who were arrested because they are minors, all between the ages of 14 and 17. Sources in law enforcement and at Venice High said some of the boys are members of the high school’s football and basketball program.

Someone better alert Steve Sailer. Haven Monahan has replicated and turned up in his local high school.

The allegations, they said, involved a group of male students working together to pressure girls into having sex. The boys were accused of making verbal threats and threatening the girls’ reputations, according to one of the sources.

In other words they just arrested boys for doing what boys have been doing for 50,000 years or more.

L.A. Unified Supt. Ramon Cortines said the students’ parents had been notified and crisis counselors were on campus to assist any other students.

“This is a painful moment for Venice High School and this district,” he said in a statement. “I want you to know that no sexual misconduct of any kind by students or staff will ever be tolerated in L.A. Unified.”

“We’re pouring all our resources over there today and for the next couple of weeks to make sure every child over there feels safe,” said school board member Steve Zimmer, who represents the Westside school. “Our crisis team and our psychiatric social workers are on site ready to provide services to every student who is affected by this, indirectly and directly.”

The fact that a school system has a “crisis team” and psychiatric social workers should be the place to start when historians dig through the rubble of our culture.

This will not end well.

Post-National America

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Another example of how the American ruling elite, endeavoring to break free from the constraints of national loyalty, is rendering citizenship pointless is in the area of foreign policy. In the American system, the President is tasked with negotiating treaties1. For those treaties to become law, they must be ratified by the Senate. In contract law, this is the same as a deal requiring board approval. The executives can sign what they like, but the contract is not enforceable until it is approved by the board.

The Founders recognized the dangers of giving the President sole discretion in treaty making. He could use this power to circumvent the power of the legislature by striking deals with other countries that trumped US law. Imagine Obama striking a deal with Mexico, giving Texas back, so their votes would not count in the next election.

It has always been a quarrelsome process and intentionally so. Treaties are the most important and dangerous activities performed by government. They start wars, end wars, start economies and end economies. They are not to be taken lightly so the American system has high hurdles built into the process. Presidents hate this, but they hate a lot of things that are safeguards against mischief.

The emerging Iran deal is revealing how the Obama administration is plotting to circumvent Congress and avoid submitting the matter to the Senate.

Major world powers have begun talks about a United Nations Security Council resolution to lift U.N. sanctions on Iran if a nuclear agreement is struck with Tehran, a step that could make it harder for the U.S. Congress to undo a deal, Western officials said.

The talks between Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — the five permanent members of the Security Council — plus Germany and Iran, are taking place ahead of difficult negotiations that resume next week over constricting Iran’s nuclear ability.

Some eight U.N. resolutions – four of them imposing sanctions – ban Iran from uranium enrichment and other sensitive atomic work and bar it from buying and selling atomic technology and anything linked to ballistic missiles. There is also a U.N. arms embargo.

Iran sees their removal as crucial as U.N. measures are a legal basis for more stringent U.S. and European Union measures to be enforced. The U.S. and EU often cite violations of the U.N. ban on enrichment and other sensitive nuclear work as justification for imposing additional penalties on Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress on Wednesday that an Iran nuclear deal would not be legally binding, meaning future U.S. presidents could decide not to implement it. That point was emphasized in an open letter by 47 Republican senators sent on Monday to Iran’s leaders asserting any deal could be discarded once President Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017.

But a Security Council resolution on a nuclear deal with Iran could be legally binding, say Western diplomatic officials. That could complicate and possibly undercut future attempts by Republicans in Washington to unravel an agreement.

Now, the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that international law does not trump US law. That’s not an issue here. The issue here is that Obama is trying avoid the whole treaty process by getting the UN Security Council to order its member nations to abide by this deal. Failure to do so would, technically, be a violation of the UN Charter. The fact that Iran, for example, has been in violation of the UN Charter for decades, as are other nations, is not important.

What Obama is attempting to do is shift the focus from the law, which is against him, to a future political fight waged by the next president. If Jeb Bush rejects this deal, for example, he would have the added problem of dealing with the UN and, presumably, US allies. Even though he would be well within the law, the politics of taking on the UN would complicate things.

In the near term Obama would argue that the failure of the Senate to approve his deal with Iran is putting the US at odds with the “international community.” The word “community” is a magic word on the Left so that means all the left-wingers in the American media will be out in the streets ululating about how Republicans are committing treason.

It won’t result in approval, but it lets Obama and future presidents avoid compliance with the law in future treaty deals. Instead of going to Congress, they will go to the UN, giving France more say in these matters than the American people.

As we see with open borders, the end game is about rupturing the ties between the rulers and the ruled. In a nation, the rulers have a natural loyalty to their host nation and its people. Their success is the nation’s success. Citizenship, therefore, has value. Being an American, even if you were a field hand or factory laborer, had benefits just for being an American citizen.

In the post-national system our rulers are ushering in, citizenship has no value. Your elected representatives have no power as Congress (or parliament) becomes ornamental. The laws offer preferences to those that are not legal citizens in areas of employment and welfare benefits. Being a legal citizen becomes a sucker’s play. Once the people figure it out, the ruling classes are free to drop all pretense of loyalty to nation and citizenship.

The next phase is a world of cloud people, untethered from the ground below them. Like medieval lords, they extract rents to finance their lavish lifestyles, but unlike those lords they will have no sense of obligation to their subjects. In Brazil, the elite live in the hills, guarded by private armies. The rest are left to their own devices. What services provided by the elites are to mitigate against unrest.

The administrative class of the managerial elite will function as game keepers, making sure the people are fed and given minimal care. They will try to suppress violence and crime, but their main duty will be keeping the people in their pens.

Whether this will work is debatable. So far, human organization has been about scaling up the kin-tribe. The post-national cloud people look more like colonizers, which eventually ends with one side swinging from a noose. But, there was a time when no one thought a country could work.

1I Know that technically the Senate simply permits the President to ratify the treaty as part of its advice and consent authority.

Gambling on Iran

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The other day, John Derbyshire posted a column of questions he would like asked of prospective presidential candidates. One of them was about Iran.

Nuclear proliferation.  Pakistan, a dysfunctional kleptocracy maggoty with Muslim fanatics, has for nigh on 20 years had nuclear weapons, and now has missiles with which to deliver them.

North Korea, under the control of a Mafia-style gangster family utterly ruthless in maintenance of its power, is similarly equipped.

Fifty years ago, communist China, under the autocratic control of a megalomaniac who had just got through watching impassively while his policies caused 30 million of his countrymen to die of starvation, got the bomb, and is now a major nuclear power.

Deterrence has an excellent track record, even with regimes at the furthest extremes of craziness and cruelty. Should Americans be concerned about Iran going nuclear? Why?

I’ve been mulling that one over for a while and I don’t think I agree with what Derb is suggesting. Pakistan is a mess now, for sure, but it was not always this sort of a mess. The secular rulers have, even now, been able to keep the religious crazies from gaining control of the nukes. In other words, so far we have been lucky.

To say deterrence has any impact on Pakistan is simply wrong. The world has been lucky so far. Maybe the almost certain annihilation of the country that would come from India, if the Muslim crazies got hold of the nukes has made the secular elements more determined. That feels like a stretch to me. Dumb luck looks like the right answer here and who knows how long that holds.

North Korea is not run by religious fanatics and the sanity of the ruling class is not in question. We may think it is nuts to operate as a hermit kingdom, but that’s a matter of taste, not fact. Otherwise, we are dealing with rational people who are pretty smart.Given their position in the world, they have managed to survive despite a lot of big enemies.

Has deterrence altered their behavior? We have no way of knowing.  We do know they have sold nuclear technology to Syria and missile technology to Iraq and Iran. If they have not been deterred from that, there no reason to think they will be deterred from selling a nuke. We can’t know these things, which means we can’t say deterrence has worked here.

China and the Soviet Union are the two good examples. Russia and China are old countries run by smart people. These are people with no history of messianic religious impulses. There’s nothing in the history of these people to think they are anxious to usher in the end times. Deterrence works with these countries for the same reason it works for the US. It’s not fear of destruction. It’s fear of blowing up the planet.

Iran is nothing like China or Russia. Persia is an old society, but there’s not a whole lot of Persia left. Genetically, Iranians are just Arabs. I’m sure the average guy walking the streets of Tehran is in no hurry to blow up the world, but we know a lot of them are tossing and turning every night dreaming of it.

Here I’ll share a story from an Iranian I knew in the 80’s. He was a conscript fighting against the Iraqis. His unit was in the Basra area as the Iranians threw everything they had at the city hoping to end the war. They were faced with a minefield and volunteers were called for to clear a path. A bunch of Revolutionary Guards volunteered. They cleared a path through the minefield by running through it, exploding the mines.

The point is Iran is not China or even Pakistan. The people in charge are messianic fanatics. A good portion of the population supports the leaders on religious grounds. Maybe they are not that serious about destroying Israel and ushering in the end times. Maybe it is just what they say to keep up appearances. We can’t know that.

I think if I was asked to pick the worst country on which to test the deterrence theory, I’d pick Iran. Even the Saudis seem to be more constrained in their actions and they may be the most thoroughly Muslim society on earth. Iran defines itself in opposition to the West and therefore seeks out ways to cause mayhem in the West. Deterrence does not seem to have had any effect so far.

There’s a tendency on the Dissident Right to blame American foreign policy for everything wrong in the world. The Paultards do this a lot. I think it is fair to say America has bungled a lot of things in this realm. When it comes to the Arabs, American has been stunningly incompetent. None of which changes the fact Iran is run by messianic fanatics who talk constantly about blowing up the world.

Of course, there’s good old fashioned indifference, which I find appealing, generally speaking. Iran is not going to nuke America. If they did, we could easily wipe them off the map. We would lose a city, but they would not exist. Iran is a problem of Europe, Israel and the Arabs. There’s an argument there, but it is not deterrence. It is indifference.

Regardless, It seems pretty clear that the Obama administration is prepared to let the Iranians go nuclear. Who knows, maybe they will be right this time.

Obama’s War on White People

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Obama’s war on the pale faces continues to escalate. Now we have two more cops ambushed and shot.

Two police officers were shot during a protest outside Ferguson, Missouri, police headquarters early on Thursday, police said, just hours after the city’s police chief quit following a damning U.S. Justice Department report into his force.

The shooting of the officers, who were in serious condition at a hospital, was the latest incident in months of turmoil in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, which has been at the center of an intense national debate over police use of force, particularly against black men, since a white officer killed an unarmed black teenager there in August.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told reporters early on Thursday that a 41-year-old officer from his department was struck in the shoulder and a 32-year-old officer from the nearby Webster Groves Police Department was hit in the face about midnight as the crowd was starting to break up.

“These police officers were standing there and they were shot, just because they were police officers,” Belmar said. “I have said all along that we cannot sustain this forever without problems.”

He said the officers, whom he did not identify, were both conscious and hospitalized. The department planned to release more information at 9 a.m. CDT (0800 DST).

An Obama administration spokesman said, “The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism. Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.”¹

As soon as you hear the word justice, just assume what is meant is revenge and you are  closer to the truth. That’s something people have always known, until the lunatics took over the west.

The violence grew out of a Wednesday night demonstration in which several dozen protesters gathered in front of the Ferguson police department, just hours after Police Chief Thomas Jackson resigned.

The night started peacefully but about two dozen officers clad in riot gear later faced off with the protesters. At least two people were taken into custody.

Gunshots rang out about midnight turning a scene of relative quiet into pandemonium. Many of the remaining few dozen demonstrators fled, some screaming.

The line of police scrambled, with many taking defensive positions drawing their weapons and some huddling behind riot shields, according to a video published online.

Belmar said the shooter was among the demonstrators standing across from the officers.

“I don’t know who did the shooting, to be honest with you right now, but somehow they were embedded in that group of folks,” he said.

Protesters at the scene, however, said on social media that the shots did not come from where they were standing.

“The shooter was not with the protesters. The shooter was atop the hill,” activist DeRay McKesson said on Twitter.

“I was here. I saw the officer fall. The shot came from at least 500 feet away from the officers,” he said.

I’m thinking DeRay was there, knows who did the shooting and is a member of the vibrant community. Just a guess.

 

Clintonian Decline

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Watching the Clinton e-mail scandal unfold, I can’t help but think about the old Southern Methodist football scandal. For my non-American readers, this was a scandal surrounding the football (American football) program at Southern Methodist University in 70’s and 80’s. The people running the program broke every rule on the books at least once and most several times. They seemed to relish their outlaw status so no amount of warnings deterred them.

Finally, the governing body of college sports, along with their envious competitors brought the hammer down on them. For the first and only time, the “death penalty” was handed down and the program was shuttered for two years. The program never recovered and has been an afterthought ever since. A UK analog would be Chelsea being shutdown for two years and then relegated to second division permanently.

The intent of the punishment was to stand as a warning to others. If you did not respect the rules, the punishments would be severe. If you kept breaking the rules, the punishments would be draconian. The funny thing is, the results were something entirely different than expected. The fallout so frightened all of the other football playing universities, they decided that punishment should never again be used.

The result over the last thirty years is a decreasing ability of the sports playing universities to police themselves. The punishments have become ornamental and the investigations take so long no one remembers why they are on-going most of the time. The University of North Carolina, for example, was found to be faking classes and grades to keep players eligible. That was five years ago and nothing has come of it. the investigation is “on-going.”

Now, what does this have to do with the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics?

In the American system, impeachment and removal from office is the political death penalty. A judge, Secretary or executive that is deemed unacceptable by the legislature can be removed from office. In the 1970’s, the Liberal Democrats were prepared to use impeachment to remove Nixon. He resigned before it got to that point, but only because he knew he could not win at trial. The die was cast so he resigned.

The fallout was not what was expected. The Liberal Democrats were sure the Republican party would collapse. Instead, the party surged to majority status over the next two decades and the Liberal Democrats have never fully recovered. The Republicans, for their part, discovered a similar lesson twenty years later when they tried to impeach Bill Clinton. They stopped short, claiming to have made their point.

The point, however, was that the death penalty, so to speak, was forever off the table. By refusing to resign, Clinton exposed what everyone suspected, but preferred not to admit. That is, the American Congress no longer had the will or ability to enforce the rules on the executive. In one of life’s great ironies, the Nixon impeachment was about reigning in the imperial president. That led to the Clinton impeachment, which solidified the imperial presidency.

Like the SMU scandal I started with, attempts to enforce the rules ended up exposing the deep rot within the system those rules were supposed to protect. The greatest irony of all is that Hillary Clinton worked on the House Watergate committee as a young attorney and was fired for unethical behavior. What she learned, it seems, is that Nixon should have fought a little harder as there was simply no stomach in the ruling class for enforcing their rules.

The 1990’s will be looked upon as a seminal period in American history. The Clinton’s willingness and ability to corrupt the political system and their brazen disregard of the rules set a dangerous precedent. Obama is now issuing edicts as if he is emperor. Meanwhile, the Congress cowers in fear. This e-mail scandal shows quite clearly that the political class is broken.

If you doubt it, look at the facts. Clinton had this private e-mail system setup. It is against the law to mishandle government documents and the mere existence of this private e-mail system is more than enough to suggest that happened and happened deliberately and with malice of forethought.

The Congress can issue a subpoena for the physical server, all written documents related to it or having originated from it, all of the people who had access to it, etc. E-mail is a two-way street so all they need is one e-mail from the government to this domain to justify their actions. That would take a competent tech about an hour to find. The claim of destroyed hard drives could easily be proof of improper use of confidential information.

In other words, the Congress has a lot of power and they could come down on Clinton if they are inclined to do so. If Clinton refuses to comply, the Constitution gives Congress the power to arrest her and bring her in to testify. If she refuses, she can be imprisoned in the Capitol jail. In other words, this whole charade could be settled by the middle of summer and it would be the last time someone tried a similar stunt.

Of course, that’s not possible. The political class is paralyzed, incapable of enforcing its own rules. That leaves the field open for rogues and criminals. In another time, Congress would have been shuttered and its members executed as the most powerful political clans closed ranks. Today, we just have the current chaos.

There is a Faulkner quality to this. The grubby, grasping Clintons are the Snopes clan, slowly subverting the Compsons, in this case the American Republic. I would like to say that Obama is Benji, but the analogy really does not work, even though it makes me laugh.