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Just how bad a deal a college education has become was evident in data released by the government. NY Times has the story.

Colleges give prospective students very little information about how much money they can expect to earn in the job market. In part that’s because colleges may not want people to know, and in part it’s because such information is difficult and expensive to gather. Colleges are good at tracking down rich alumni to hit up for donations, but people who make little or no money are harder and less lucrative to find.

On Saturday, the federal government solved that problem by releasing a huge new set of data in a website called College Scorecard, detailing the earnings of people who attended nearly every college and university in America. Although it abandoned efforts to rate the quality of colleges, the federal government matched data from the federal student financial aid system to federal tax returns. The Department of Education was thus able to calculate how much money people who enrolled in individual colleges in 2001 and 2002 were earning 10 years later.

On the surface, the trends aren’t surprising — students who enroll in wealthy, elite colleges earn more than those who do not. But the deeper that you delve into the data, the more clear it becomes how perilous the higher education market can be for students making expensive, important choices that don’t always pay off. …

… The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling. The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.

But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At BenningtonCollege in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At BardCollege in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same. …

We’ve been flogging the increase of student debt for years. Now, even some house organs of the left see the danger. Here’s The New Republic.

… An infamous study on student debt by Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley, and Cecilia Elena Rouse of Princeton looked at the results of a highly selective university replacing loans with grants. It concluded “that debt causes graduates to choose substantially higher-salary jobs and reduces the probability that students choose low-paid ‘public interest’ jobs.”

Let’s imagine two scenarios. In the first you have high student loans, so you work for a corporation in the private sector for high wages. And in the second you have virtually no student loans, and you work for less wages in a job focused on the public interest, say as an educator or at a nonprofit. In both cases your student loan payment would be the same as a percentage of your income. The Brookings result would hold. However your lifetime choices will have radically changed as a result.

We see this with other lifetime measures, such as how entrepreneurial people are. A recent study by Brent W. Ambrose of Pennsylvania State University, and Larry Cordell and Shuwei Ma of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, found “a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation between changes in student loan debt and net business formation for the smallest group of small businesses.” This makes sense. You can keep your high student loan burdens low if you stay with an established employer. But if you strike out on your own, you’ll have less and more volatile income when you start. This is harder to manage with student loans, which also impacts your credit rating. Again, we can see the short-term student loan burdens staying the same, even though lifetime choices are much more limited as a result. …

… This has major consequences for people’s ability to build wealth. Indeed, much of the current energy in analyzing student loan burdens are looking at this longer dynamic, and how it interplays with the ability for people to amass savings. As Richard Fry of Pew found, using the same data set as Brookings, “households headed by a young, college-educated adult without any student debt obligations have about seven times the typical net worth ($64,700) of households headed by a young, college-educated adult with student debt ($8,700).” Fry also finds that those who took out loans are less satisfied with their financial situation compared to people without loans. Similar results have been investigated and found by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. 

This, in turn, has major consequences for how young people will ultimately transition into adulthood. According to Dora Gicheva of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, student debt decreases the long-term probability of marriage by a significant amount. In a result that should make social conservatives gasp, Gicheva found that an additional $10,000 in loans decreases the probability of marriage by at least 7 percentage points. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that young student debtors are retreating from those traditional markers of adulthood, homeownership and owning a car. These effects reflect the long-term consequences of student debt on a young person’s economic security just as much, if not more, than their monthly bill. …

And Kevin Williamson gives his views on the student loan scandal.

… As usual, the policy-making class worries most about the people who most closely resemble it socially and economically. But the report finds that the people coming out of selective schools have an average loan debt at graduation of only $23,000, while their degrees provide an average annual wage premium of $20,000. “For most people who graduate from top-tier schools,” Dynarski writes, “debt is easily managed.”

We have been having a very strange debate about income inequality in the United States for the past several years, one focused almost exclusively on the status of the hated “1 percent” or super-rich segments within it. From an economic point of view, this is deeply stupid: If Lloyd Blankfein takes a $100,000-a-year pay cut next year, that isn’t going to translate into two $50,000-a-year jobs for dropouts from P.S. 154 in the Bronx. But from a political point of view, concentrating on the 1 percent makes a great deal of sense to progressives: It is not, after all, conservative-dominated institutions run by Republican-affiliated unions that have failed the poor, the black, and the brown in practically every city in the United States.

The Left’s answer to the challenge of targeting our expenditures toward those Americans who most need them is to subsidize another round of loans, which will pass through Little Moonbeam on their way to her $150,000-a-year women’s-studies professor and the university’s $800,000-a-year president. That’ll show those rich people!

The M.F.A.s (Master in Fine Arts) can take care of themselves. So can those six-figure administrators and millionaire teachers’-union bosses. Meanwhile, the people who actually need our help get nothing.

To top off our week Andrew Malcolm is here with late night humor.

Fallon: President Obama will appear on “Running Wild With Bear Grylls” later this year. The episode features Obama roughing it on a golf course that hasn’t been mowed for a couple of days.

Meyers: In an interview Trump says he’s not crossed the line of appropriateness. You can read Trump’s entire interview in this month’s issue of ‘Juggs’ magazine.

Conan: A new study claims first grade students get nearly three times more homework than they should. This is according to the study’s lead researcher, Timmy.

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According to The Guardian, UK, the administration had a chance to dump Assad in 2012 and turned it down because the president and his crackerjack national security team figured Assad would fall anyway. Walter Russell Mead comments;

… If true, this was a staggering missed opportunity. The President’s string of misjudgments on the Middle East—on the peace process, Erdogan, withdrawal from Iraq, Libya, ISIS as the “J.V. team”, and Syria—is one of the most striking examples of serial failure in the annals of American foreign policy.Generally speaking, what the President seems worst at is estimating the direction in which events are flowing. He thought Erdogan was taking Turkey in one direction; Erdogan was going somewhere else. He thought there was a transition to democracy in Egypt; there never was a prospect of that. He has repeatedly been caught flatfooted by events in Syria. And Putin keeps running rings around him.

Understanding the intentions and estimating the capabilities of people who don’t share his worldview are not our President’s strong suits.

The Pope is coming to town. The Weekly Standard’s Irwin Stelzer greets him.

In eleven days the much-travelled Pope Francis will set foot on American soil for the first time: Unlike his two immediate predecessors, he did not visit this country before rising to the papacy. His baggage will include the mind-set typical of Latin American anti-U.S. populists, in his case the Argentine variety, numerous vitriolic attacks on our economic system, and support for many of the positions being taken by the Democrats’ left wing. And he will be unpacking that baggage before a joint session of Congress, the UN, a school in East Harlem (NYC), a prison, and a variety of other groups, as well as before television cameras covering his visit on channels devoted to it on a 24/7 schedule. …

… Pope Francis, or the more egalitarian “Bishop of Rome,” as he prefers to be called, is unambiguously opposed to the American system of “savage capitalism”. He has famously quoted a fourth century Doctor of the Church, St. Basil of Caesarea, who called money “the devil’s dung”, has railed against the “anonymous influences of mammon” and a “new colonialism” that includes “free trade treaties … [and] imposition of austerity,” and stated a preference for “cooperatives.” Throw in Francis’ views that we are witnessing “a disturbing warming of the climatic system … due to the great concentration of greenhouse gasses”, and that “there is an urgent need of a true world political authority”, and you have positions that it will take more than a spoonful of the Pontiff’s charm to make go down the throats of many Americans. Including rich, philanthropic Catholics. Politico reports that donors such as billionaire Ken Langone, working to raise $180 million for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, are so upset by the Pope’s attacks on capitalism, and on the rich, that they might just stop giving to the Church. …

… Final on the list of ironies is that there is a sense in which Pope Francis is the world’s über capitalist. The church he heads and controls owns 20 percent of Italy’s real estate, 25 percent of all the real estate in Rome, and has worldwide real estate assets that, counting no other assets, are valued at $2 trillion. The English-speaking MBAs hired by Francis to sort out the Church’s finances (pre-Francis, Italian was the official language in the Vatican counting house, limiting the available labor pool) told New Yorker magazine’s Alexander Stille that they recently discovered $1.2 billion in financial assets not previously on the Vatican’s balance sheet. Financial manager Danny Casey and fellow Australian, Cardinal George Pell, Francis’ appointee to the job of Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, told Stille that assets not devoted to the Church’s central mission – helping the poor and elderly, for example — “should be considered commercial assets, from which the Vatican should try to gain the best possible monetary return.” Oh.

Ed Driscoll of Instapundit spotted this Thomas Sowell nod to Eric Hoffer’s explanation of the psychological underpinnings of the left’s urge to control others. 

But as Thomas Sowell once told an interviewer:

“There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis — some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.”

Driscoll’s post also led us to Robert Zubrin’s National Review look at a Yale historian’s inadvertent attempt to explain a rational basis for Hitler’s lebensraum.

In my 2012 book, Merchants of Despair, I exposed the role that Malthusian thought — the belief that the world cannot support a growing human population — has had in motivating most of the worst atrocities of the past two centuries, notably including those of Nazism and more recent antihuman movements operating under the “population control” and “environmentalist” banners. Now prominent Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, which also lays out the Malthusian ideology behind the Holocaust.

But instead of forcefully rejecting the axioms of Malthusianism and the claims of its modern adherents, Snyder argues there’s something to them. The world faces catastrophe from the overconsumption of fossil fuels, anthropogenic global warming, and impending food and resource shortages, he says — echoing similar pernicious claims of the 1930s — and for this he blames the U.S. …

… But Snyder has it horribly wrong. Competition for scarce resources (land, food, energy) is effective as a demagogic myth, but it is not reality. There was no ecological crisis in the 1930s, any more than there is today. What there was then, as there is today, was ideological insanity. The Nazis’ war had no rational basis. Germany never needed more “living space.” Germany today has much less land per person, but a far higher living standard, than it had under the Third Reich. The problem was all in their heads.

Similarly, today there is no resource crisis. There are far more resources available per capita today than ever before in human history. That is because resources are defined by human creativity. Thus, contrary to Malthus and all of his followers, the global standard of living has continuously gone up as the world’s population has increased. The more people — especially free and educated people — the more inventors, and inventions are cumulative.

In this respect, America has been the most productive of nations. It is an anti-American — and anti-human — lie to say that we are destroying the world’s resources. The opposite is true. …

… The real lesson of the Holocaust for our time is this: We are not threatened by there being too many people. We are threatened by people who say there are too many people. …

… The fundamental question boils down to this: Are humans destroyers or creators? If the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed, with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide. …

More unintended consequences of the policies of our betters are reported as we learn rural residents in Botswana not only are missing income from trophy hunters, but also are in danger of losing crops and their lives as their villages are invaded by lions, elephants, and the like. NY Times has the story.

SANKUYO, Botswana — Lions have been coming out of the surrounding bush, prowling around homes and a small health clinic, to snatch goats and donkeys from the heart of this village on the edge of one of Africa’s great inland deltas. Elephants, too, are becoming frequent, unwelcome visitors, gobbling up the beans, maize and watermelons that took farmers months to grow.

Since Botswana banned trophy hunting two years ago, remote communities like Sankuyo have been at the mercy of growing numbers of wild animals that are hurting livelihoods and driving terrified villagers into their homes at dusk.

The hunting ban has also meant a precipitous drop in income. Over the years, villagers had used money from trophy hunters, mostly Americans, to install toilets and water pipes, build houses for the poorest, and give scholarships to the young and pensions to the old. …

… Zambia recently lifted a two-year-old ban on hunting leopards, and lion hunting is likely to resume next year. In 2013, Zambia curbed trophy hunting and imposed a blanket ban on hunting the big cats, also in an effort to replace trophy hunting with photographic tourism.

But that brought little income compared to hunting, Ms. Kapata said, while lions increasingly stalked villages for livestock. During the hunting ban, a local councilor was killed by a lion, she said.

“We had a lot of complaints from local communities,” Ms. Kapata said. “In Africa, a human being is more important than an animal. I don’t know about the Western world,” she added, echoing a complaint in affected parts of Africa that the West seemed more concerned with the welfare of a lion in Zimbabwe than of Africans themselves. …

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Borrowing a phrase from obama’s minions, Matt Continetti says it’s time for Hillary to “wet the bed.”

In early July, during another rough patch for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Dan Pfeiffer took to CNN to reassure his party. Pfeiffer used to be President Obama’s top communications aide. The title of his op-ed was “Stop the bed-wetting: Hillary Clinton’s doing fine.” Bed-wetting, Pfeiffer explained, “is a term of art in Obamaland.” Ah, the president and his acolytes. Such sophisticates.

Clinton shouldn’t panic, Pfeiffer argued, because she remains ahead in polling and in fundraising, because Bernie Sanders “is not Barack Obama,” and because “Hillary Clinton circa 2015 is not Hillary Clinton circa 2008.” Elections, after all, “are about fundamentals,” and “the fundamentals point to a decisive if hard fought victory for Clinton.” Of course, “A lot can change in the coming months.”

No kidding. As we enter the fall campaign season, Pfeiffer’s case seems laughably self-assured and unpersuasive. Now is precisely the time for Clinton and her team to wet the bed—indeed, they may already be doing so. …

Dems are now the “no diversity party” according to Victor Davis Hanson.

In the jubilation of the Obama election victories of 2008 and 2012, the Left warned Republicans that the party of McCain and Romney was now “too old, too white, too male — and too few.” Columnists between 2008 and 2012 ad nauseam berated Republicans on the grounds that their national candidates “no longer looked like America.” The New York Times stable crowed that the Republicans of 2008 were “all white and nearly all male” — not too long before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running-mate. In reaction to the defeats of McCain and Romney, Salon and Harper’s ran stories on the “Grand Old White Party” and “Angry White Men.” …

… Liberals had reversed the vision of Martin Luther King Jr.: The color of our skin, not the content of our character, is what matters. Superficial appearance, the ossified politics of the tribe — the curse of the world outside the United States, where corpses have piled up in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Iraq — alone mattered. Identity politics dictated that a shrinking white insular conservative party lacked the Democrats’ “inclusiveness” and “commitment to diversity.” Icons like Barack Obama were what mattered.

So we come to 2016, and the Democrats, of all people, are suddenly in danger of being the washer calling the dryer white. Who exactly are the serious and not so serious presidential candidates of each party?

On the Republican side, there is plenty of diversity as defined by liberals — Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio.

And on the Democratic side? The only representative of “diversity” is Hillary Clinton, who counts by virtue of being female, but who is white and soon to be 68, a fixture on the national political scene for more than a quarter of a century. …

John Fund thinks Trump’s mouth will catch up to him before the Iowa caucus in February.

… Trump is perfectly suited for the current media age. He provides enough outrageous quotes and distractions to remain such a source of endless fascination that the press has trouble catching up with his contradictions. D’Antonio says Trump “understood that in the media age, the frontier that might challenge a man or woman was found, not in the wilderness, but in the media. The boundary of this wilderness was marked by propriety, which was an elastic concept.”

Donald Trump has tested the media’s limits of propriety for three decades, and he’s usually succeeded in expanding them.

We will learn in the next four months just how far Trump can expand the equivalent political limits. As much as he may have mastered many of the lessons of the Robert Ringer classic Winning Through Intimidation, he might have forgotten a key one. “The secret to bluffing is knowing when not to bluff,” Ringer told me. “Some people don’t know when to stop, and they always regret it.”

Sean Davis says Jerry Seinfeld knows how to handle someone like Donald Trump.

… By many indications, Donald Trump appears to believe a man’s worth as a human being is based solely on his monetary wealth, while a woman’s worth is based on her looks. After all, this is a man who complimented his own daughter by saying he would probably date her if she weren’t his daughter, on account of her “very nice figure.”

This kind of behavior, and these kind of statements, are not the fruits of a healthy outlook on life. While many people regularly mock Trump for his outlandishness, I actually feel bad for him. I pity the desperate need for external affirmation through fame and wealth. As I wrote when Trump first announced his 2016 candidacy, I don’t think Donald Trump needs a campaign; what he needs is a hug. I legitimately feel bad for the guy.

Which brings us to Jerry Seinfeld’s advice for how to handle someone like Trump.

During a reddit AMA in 2014, comedian Jerry Seinfeld was asked how he handled hecklers who disrupted his sets. His answer provides a perfect blueprint on how Republican strategists, pundits, and presidential candidates should handle Donald Trump, who is basically a C-list comedy club heckler masquerading as a White House contender.

Here’s what Jerry Seinfeld said: …

Jim Geraghty spots the missing words in Trump speeches.  

Did you ever think you would see the day when the GOP front-runner rarely uttered the words “freedom” and “liberty”?

Perhaps some Republicans can be accused of loving liberty and freedom too much — or at least using those words as rhetorical crutches. Donald Trump is not one of them. The current GOP presidential front-runner rarely uses the words “freedom” or “liberty” in his remarks at all.

Trump didn’t use the words “freedom” or “liberty” in his announcement speech. He didn’t use those words in his Nashville speech on August 29, or his Nashville rally on August 21, or his appearance at the Iowa State Fair on August 15, or his rally and news conference in New Hampshire on August 14, or his news conference in Birch Run, Mich., or his press conference in Laredo, Texas, on July 23.

He didn’t use those words while discussing his signing of the Republican National Committee’s pledge last Thursday, or in his contentious interview with Hugh Hewitt the same day.

Trump did use the term “free-market” once …

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Charles Krauthammer writes on the Iran charade on capitol hill.

… As a matter of constitutional decency, the president should have submitted the deal to Congress first. And submitted it as a treaty. Which it obviously is. No international agreement in a generation matches this one in strategic significance and geopolitical gravity.

Obama did not submit it as a treaty because he knew he could never get the constitutionally required votes for ratification. He’s not close to getting two-thirds of the Senate. He’s not close to getting a simple majority. No wonder: In the latest Pew Research Center poll, the American people oppose the deal by a staggering 28-point margin.

To get around the Constitution, Obama negotiated a swindle that requires him to garner a mere one-third of one house of Congress. Indeed, on Thursday, with just 42 Senate supporters — remember, a treaty requires 67 — the Democrats filibustered and prevented, at least for now, the Senate from voting on the deal at all.

But Obama two months ago enshrined the deal as international law at the U.N. Why should we care about the congressional vote? In order to highlight the illegitimacy of Obama’s constitutional runaround and thus make it easier for a future president to overturn the deal, especially if Iran is found to be cheating.

As of now, however, it is done. Iran will be both unleashed — sanctions lifted, economy booming, with no treaty provisions regarding its growing regional aggression and support for terrorists — and welcomed as a good international citizen possessing a peaceful nuclear program. An astonishing trick. …

Henry R. Nau, international relations prof at George Washington University, shows in a long form essay in Commentary how “restraint” often leads to war; a war more horrible than the one that was initially avoided.

President Obama argues that his nuclear agreement with Iran means “every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off.” He says, moreover, that it sets the stage to “incentivize them to behave differently in the region, to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative, to operate the way we expect nations in the international community to behave.” It will be “a lot easier,” he predicts, “to check Iran’s nefarious activities, to push back against the other areas where they operate contrary to our interests or our allies’ interests if they don’t have the bomb.”

The approach is a signature feature of Obama’s foreign policy. He has counted on diplomacy in a whole host of other areas to reduce tensions and preempt military conflict. And this approach has failed him repeatedly.
He reset relations with Russia—and Moscow annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. He launched a strategic partnership with China—and Beijing occupied and built military installations on disputed islands in the East and SouthChinaSeas. He extended an open hand to the Muslim world—and radical Islam erupted. Will the agreement with Iran be the next Obama initiative to invite more violence rather than less?

To judge by statements from the United States and Iran, and by the details of the deal itself, the answer is yes. …

… And so, as has often been the case in the past, an effort to avoid conflict may lead to far worse conflict down the road.

Why does violence escalate and war often follow? One line of argument says it’s the result of the United States’ acting too ambitiously and aggressively, as some believe it did in Iraq. Obama, among other critics, claimed that President George W. Bush pushed a worldwide freedom agenda and relied too heavily on military force to achieve it. Bush provoked terrorists and other rivals, and they pushed back, thus increasing conflict.

But another line of argument might be this: War happens when the United States is not ambitious or aggressive enough, and more aggressive nations respond by stepping up and attacking the interests of the United States and its allies because there is no one to prevent them from doing so. …

… Since its origins, America has thought about its approach to the world in three principled ways. Thomas Jefferson introduced the internationalist way, the ambition that America could not only change domestic politics from monarchy to republicanism but also world politics from war to peaceable trade and diplomacy. Alexander Hamilton championed the realist way, advocating national power, alliances, and territorial filibusters to defend the new nation’s western borders. And George Washington advocated the nationalist (in extreme form, isolationist) way, prioritizing independence and warning against both ambition and alliances in foreign affairs. 

These three approaches—internationalist, realist, and nationalist—became America’s standard foreign-policy traditions. The internationalist tradition, sometimes called liberal internationalism after the Democratic presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt who championed it, encourages the United States to believe it can tame international violence and spread democracy largely through multilateral diplomacy and economic interdependence, eventually replacing the balance of power with collective security that pools force and uses it as a last resort only with multilateral consent—the first Persian Gulf War being the prime example. … 

… It is time for a fourth approach. … … This approach would combine liberal internationalism’s commitment to spread democracy and make the world a better place with the instruments of realism to back up diplomacy with military force. But it would limit this combination of freedom and force by making the spread of freedom a priority only on the borders of existing free countries, primarily in Europe and Asia, not in “every nation and culture” worldwide. And it would tie military actions to diplomatic compromises that favor freedom—not to military victory followed by occupation and interminable nation-building. In the end, such restrained ambition—what we might call conservative internationalism—aims for a world in which nation-states remain separate, sovereign, and armed, and do not entrust vital national-security interests to international institutions—and yet, as democracy spreads, live side by side in peaceful competition under the democratic peace.

This approach was favored by Presidents Truman and Reagan, the presidents who initiated and won the Cold War. … 

… Here is how this conservative internationalist approach might work to confront contemporary challenges. 

First, the United States would remain the champion of freedom in the world. … 

… fading of freedom matters. Authoritarian regimes are the primary source of violence in the world. With dictators such as Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China, these regimes eliminate opponents at home and seize territory abroad. As they increase their influence, they make the world a more unstable place. Neighboring states take note and recalibrate. Hungary becomes friendlier with Moscow, Turkey drifts away from Israel and NATO, South Korea becomes more dependent on China, and Iraq turns to partnership with Iran. 

Freedom withers as it quietly accommodates oppression. To hunker down now, to go into a defensive crouch and give up the battle of advancing freedom abroad is simply the same as waiting for the world to deteriorate again and for the next war to come. So it has always been. … 

… Russia reneges on its nonproliferation commitment not to attack Ukraine, which gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994, because it values the annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine more than it values Ukrainian independence. China drags its feet on carbon emissions and ending North Korea’s nuclear program because it prioritizes domestic economic growth and the survival of an autocratic regime in North Korea.

Russia and China use the UN to restrain human rights, not to facilitate them. Multilateral diplomacy supports the rule of law, but the real question is whose law. Repeated compromises with authoritarian states in international institutions can advance laws that just as easily restrict freedom as promote it. 

To have serious negotiations with authoritarian countries, therefore, the United States needs to arm its diplomacy. It needs to bring military leverage to bear before and during negotiations, not just after negotiations fail. If America waits to use military power only after negotiations fail, nondemocratic states will simply negotiate until they have achieved their objectives by force outside of negotiations. … 

… President Obama practices “unarmed” diplomacy. Take his negotiations with Iran. He initiated talks with Tehran while cutting defense budgets and removing U.S. troops from Iraq. Then, with overall defense budgets declining, he “pivoted” U.S. naval assets from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. The economic sanctions levied on Iran were not backed up by a credible threat to use force if Iran did not stop its nuclear program. Instead, Iran saw a president who had lost control of his defense budget through a mindless sequestration process, was eager to exit Iraq, and was more concerned about the American defense posture in the Pacific than in the Mediterranean. 

Nor did Obama do much to counter Iranian aggression outside negotiations. He refused to support a Syrian opposition while Iran doubled down on its support of Syria’s dictator. He failed to counter Iran’s increased influence in Iraq when he bungled the negotiations over the Status of Forces Agreement between the United States and Iraq, largely because the Shiite government in Baghdad saw Tehran as a better partner for the future than Washington. Most recently, in Yemen, Iran-backed rebels seized the government, to which Obama responded by withdrawing American special-operations forces and ending the drone program against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that Obama once touted as a model national-security program. 

Most damaging of all, Obama stoked a bitter feud with America’s principal democratic ally in the region, Israel. … 

… Across the board, Obama’s diplomacy lacks muscle. Even Secretary of State John Kerry agrees. “Remember,” he testified, “sanctions did not stop Iran’s nuclear program from growing steadily. They already have what they want. They got it ten years ago or more.” This is a crippling indictment that the negotiations were not about stopping the Iranian nuclear program but about accepting it. 

None of this means that the only option left was, or is, to invade Iran. That’s a red herring. But it would have been possible to be tougher and more patient and to lead rather than to follow allies, as Reagan did in the case of the Soviet Union. Make it costlier and costlier for Iran to sustain its aggressive foreign policies and let the low price of oil undermine the hardliners in Tehran, the way it did the hardliners in the Soviet Union after 1985.
The road back to a better configuration of forces on the ground in the Middle East that might support peaceful agreements will take some time. The costs of an unarmed diplomacy are never visible immediately. They compound over time. And Obama’s policies of excessive restraint may have sown the seeds of violence for years to come. …

… The Iran deal is the final codification of Obama’s foreign-policy vision. He expects diplomacy to reduce military violence and change domestic regime behavior. But without the backing of military arms and the objective of expanding freedom, diplomacy with despots is a path to war, not peace. President Obama’s initiatives with Moscow and Beijing have resulted in more hostility, not less. And his Iran initiative is likely to produce the same. …

A thinking edition of Pickings requires some high brow cartoons.

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Even the media’s bien pensants can make the connection between the dead on Turkey’s shore and President Feckless. Here’s Edward Luce of the Financial Times.

When historians weigh President Barack Obama’s record, the word Syria looks set to be a negative. It is four years since Mr Obama called for Bashar al-Assad’s ejection from power. The US president did almost nothing to follow through on it — and the little he tried arguably tightened Mr Assad’s grip.

More than 200,000 deaths and 4m refugees later, it is hard to distinguish America’s response from that of other western democracies. With the notable exceptions of Germany and Sweden, the west has denied succour to Syria’s fleeing masses.

Mr Obama should be wary. Syria is not some footnote to a respectable diplomatic legacy. It is an indictment. …

… Second, America’s brand in the Middle East is as tarnished under Mr Obama as it was under George W Bush. It may be unfair to compare them. Mr Bush’s were errors of commission — chiefly in his Iraq invasion. Mr Obama’s are errors of omission in how he has handled Mr Bush’s legacy. But their costs are real.

From imprisoned democrats in Egypt, to Libyans fleeing their country’s disintegration, the US is no beacon under Mr Obama. The feeling — once articulated by the president himself — that the US could disentangle itself is mocked every day by the hordes escaping Syria and elsewhere. The spillover does not stop at Europe. In today’s world no region is an island, let alone the Middle East. …

And a Foreign Policy Magazine op-ed destroys the latest administration excuses.

“Stop them damn pictures. I don’t care what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures.”

Change “can’t” to “don’t” or “rarely,” and the plaintive words of the corrupt William Magear “Boss” Tweed in reaction to the scathing cartoons of Thomas Nast in 1870s New York City might just as easily be placed on the lips of President Barack Obama, as images of dead Syrian children washing up on Turkish beaches awaken a dormant American public to a humanitarian abomination and policy catastrophe. For an administration relying on public indifference to sustain a policy rich in rhetoric and devoid of action, the pictures are a damnable inconvenience. 

Faced by reporters suddenly jolted out of Syria fatigue, White House spokesman Josh Earnest recently followed his boss’s formula in defending the indefensible. Yes, Earnest admitted, there may have been alternatives to doing nothing as Iran and Russia helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assad do his worst to 23 million Syrians. But, according to Earnest, they “would have subjected the United States to a whole host of more significant risks, including more significant outlays of funds to fund essentially a war in Syria. It certainly would have put tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of American troops in harm’s way on the ground in [Syria].”

Is it possible that anyone in this administration really believes that invasion would have been the inevitable consequence of accepting the 2012 recommendation of Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus, and Martin Dempsey — then the defense secretary, secretary of state, CIA director, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, respectively — that the United States take the lead in training and equipping Syrian nationalists capable of fighting both Bashar al-Assad and a growing al Qaeda presence in Syria? 

Does any administration official — including the president — think that if the United States had destroyed the Assad regime’s instruments of mass murder two years ago, after the Syrian regime had crossed Obama’s chemical red line for the 14th time, that U.S. ground forces would have been obliged to occupy Syria? …

Garry Kasparov, Russian Grandmaster, is in the WSJ with an essay on the “Rewards of the Obama Doctrine.” Since he is a chess player, Kasparov can entertain many thoughts at once. Our president can only handle two; spend more and borrow more. 

A quick glance at the latest headlines suggests a jarring disconnect from the stream of foreign-policy successes touted by the Obama White House and its allies. President Obama has been hailed by many as a peacemaker for eschewing the use of military force and for signing accords with several of America’s worst enemies. The idea that things will work out better if the U.S. declines to act in the world also obeys Mr. Obama’s keen political instincts. A perpetual campaigner in office, he realizes that it is much harder to criticize an act not taken.

But what is good for Mr. Obama’s media coverage is not necessarily good for America or the world. From the unceasing violence in eastern Ukraine to the thousands of Syrian refugees streaming into Europe, it is clear that inaction can also have terrible consequences. The nuclear agreement with Iran is also likely to have disastrous and far-reaching effects. But in every case of Mr. Obama’s timidity and procrastination, the response to criticism amounts to this: It could have been worse.

Looking at the wreckage of the Middle East, including the flourishing of Islamic State, it takes great imagination to see how things would be worse today if the U.S. had acted on Mr. Obama’s “red line” threat in 2013 and moved against Syria’s Bashar Assad after he defied the U.S. president and used chemical weapons. …

… Power abhors a vacuum, and as the U.S. retreats the space is being filled. After years of the White House leading from behind, Secretary of State John Kerry’s timid warning to the Kremlin this week to stay out of Syria will be as effective as Mr. Obama’s “red line.” Soon Iran—flush with billions of dollars liberated by the nuclear deal—will add even more heft to its support for Mr. Assad.

Dead refugee children are on the shores of Europe, bringing home the Syrian crisis that has been in full bloom for years. There could be no more tragic symbol that it is time to stop being paralyzed by the Obama-era mantra that things could be worse—and to start acting instead to make things better.

A blog called The Wilderness has a long Jeremiad on the subject. We’ll have the normal pull quotes and then an abridgement. Follow the link if you want to read it all.

Flash back to 2011, and far as presidencies are concerned, it feels like a millennium ago. Barack Obama was basking in the fullness of the Arab Spring, posing as the personal midwife to a New Birth of Freedom as he polished his Peace Prize in front of the world. Truly this was a man who could not lose: it seemed like all he had to do was demand some former ally steeped in domestic conflict bow to his diplomatic omnipotence and boom: Instant Democracy. The media tactfully aided Obama by moving on from covering these international hotspots almost immediately after President Santa had finished gifting them with new regimes, so we wouldn’t have to trouble ourselves with any messy details about their aftermaths (until Ambassador Stevens found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time a year later, that is). The afterglow was unfaded. Barack Obama was still the fresh-faced President Hope and Change. Oprah was still crying.  But as it all fell to pieces, Obama received a brutal education in the truth that community organizing on the South Side of Chicago is light years away from an attempt to community organize the Middle East.

Which brings us to Bashar al-Assad, of course.

When Barack Obama demanded Assad step down in 2011, he took immediate ownership of any consequences to follow. Assad — not being much more than a photo-op for Nancy Pelosi or a dinner date for John Kerry, and owing us utterly nothing (unlike Mubarak or Khaddafi) — told Obama to get bent around a tree, …

… A foreign policy based on hoping that no one will call your bluff is dangerous and disastrous. As it turns out, not only was Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians not a true “red line,” ISIS’s use of them now multiple times doesn’t seem to be either . ISIS’s use of chemical weapons has been barely reported or acknowledged for the same reasons that much of ISIS’s activity overall never makes it to our own media shores — because it’s ugly, it’s inconvenient, and thanks to Obama’s “flexibility” it’s now an unsolvable Problem from Hell.

That’s always been this President’s problem: his complete inability to deal with the world at hand, as it exists right in front of his face. When the world forces Barack Obama off his script, he simply retreats to a golf course, ESPN, or most recently the remote wilds of Alaska.

Nowhere was this more evident than when his habit of diplomatic detachment inconveniently washed up on the shores of the Greek island of Kos last week when a boat carrying Syrian refugees capsized. While President Jor-El embarked on a magical mystery end-of-summer climate cruise to call attention to Alaskan glacier-melt in summer, the world was suddenly captivated by the lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi lying face down in front of rescue workers. …

… Once again world events inconsiderately  interrupted Obama’s semi-retirement and he was left holding a fish and taking selfies for an audience of himself and a business-as-usual press corps just happy to be along for the sights.

It’s fitting in a way: it is the photograph of a young boy washed up on a Turkish beach that encapsulates the consequences of what happens when a coddled President, content to do as little as possible before turning over a world spinning off its axis to his successor, is allowed to distract himself with selfies in Alaska.  Barack Obama’s successor will almost certainly bear most of the brunt and the blame of his inaction. In Hillary Clinton’s case it would be most deservedly so. …

… It wasn’t “the United States” that let Obama get away with declaring “I didn’t set that red line, the world did” only to have him to walk out the door like a dejected child needing an afternoon snack and media-induced nap. No, that was our media: rather than hold him accountable for his own declarations of removing Assad and setting a “red line,” they simply shrugged, muttered a word or two about how war Totally Sucks Anyway, and went back to writing think pieces on the cultural impact of the President’s NCAA tournament bracket.

Because of DC media’s nerd-prom infatuation at the thought of being a part, any part, of this socially cool West Wing Presidency, we have to turn to other sources in calling out this ridiculous clipboard hashtag foreign policy. …

Max Boot posts on the charge the white house has been cooking the books on ISIS intelligence.

Is the U.S. winning the war against ISIS? To listen to administration spokesmen, you would think so. Never mind that the terror group controls an area the size of the United Kingdom or that its hold on Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi remains unshaken. Never mind that ISIS continues to draw large  numbers of foreign recruits, that it continues to destroy antiquities, enslave women, and commit numerous other atrocities. “ISIS is losing,” John Allen, the retired marine general who coordinates the anti-ISIS campaign, proclaimed in July.

So strong is the spin coming from the White House that now some 50 intelligence analysts who work for U.S. Central Command are alleging that their superiors have twisted their findings to put lipstick on the pig that is Operation Inherent Resolve. As Shane Harris and Nancy Youssef report at The Daily Beast, the Pentagon’s inspector general has opened an investigation into complaints of “alleged manipulation of intelligence.” The complaint describes a “Stalinist” climate within CENTCOM in which bad news is no news.

Of course, a full investigation will be required to assess the validity of these charges, but I find the complaint eminently reasonable for two reasons. …

Investor’s Business Daily editors get a laugh from the Dem presidential campaigners’ digs on obama’s economy.

… Every single one of those scathing attacks came from Labor Day remarks by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden.

Their prognosis is dead-on. As we’ve pointed out repeatedly, the recovery that started a few months after Obama took office has been the worst since the Great Depression, with GDP and employment growth far below the average post-World War II recoveries.

Median family incomes have declined, millions are working part-time jobs because there isn’t full-time work, 13 million have dropped out of the labor force entirely. Millions more are poor and on food stamps. And the latest IBD/TIPP poll shows 46% think we’re still in a recession and 52% say it’s not improving.

Naturally, neither Biden, Clinton nor Sanders mentioned Obama, much less blamed him for the current state of affairs. But lest they forget, it was Obama who presided over the largest Keynesian stimulus in history and signed the job-killing ObamaCare law.

And it was Obama who succeeded in getting multiple tax hikes on the “rich.” And it was his administration that has imposed massive regulations on banking, health care, energy suppliers, employers and just about every other corner of the private economy. …

Turning our attention to other elected left wing fools, Noah Rothman says liberals do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

… Amid a refugee crisis, the American left will give no credit to European conservatives like Angela Merkel and David Cameron, who have committed to taking in the displaced from North Africa and the Middle East. Those same liberals will point to a handful of Republican presidential candidates who have opted to burnish their anti-illegal immigrant credibility by opposing calls to absorb some of these refugees into the United States. Their self-indulgent back patting is undeserved. Truly mitigating this crisis means making hard choices about war and peace. Truly saving the future means stemming the flow of migrants into a continent that can scarcely employ or provide services for its own citizens. The left congratulates itself for evincing an abundance of empathy. It’s a poor substitute for embracing policies that end crises. In power, the left presides over triage, mitigates the harshest effects of their shortsighted policies, and is congratulated by fellow travelers in the press for their courage.

The left scarcely deserves the benefit of the doubt they receive from the public. Their hearts may be in the right place, but their hearts are distinctly poor governors. It is time for liberals to take stock of their disastrous records, and that can only happen when the public and the press stops excusing the left’s abject failures because they believe their intentions are noble.

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Streetwise Professor posts on the Bergdahl indictment. Says the Pentagon has flipped a well deserved bird to the president.

The Bowe Bergdahl case largely disappeared from view, likely because it was overtaken by so many other foreign policy foulups. The Isis explosion. The Syria implosion. The Iran capitulation.

But the story re-emerged yesterday. Well, sort of re-emerged: the coverage has been muted, at best, despite the fact that the charges are sensational.

Not only did the Pentagon charge Bergdahl with desertion: they charged him with “misbehavior before the enemy,” which could result in his incarceration for life. This is about the most serious charge that can be brought. …

… The White House fought tooth and nail to stop the Pentagon from charging Bergdahl: bad optics, dontcha know, to have embraced a deserter’s family in the Rose Garden, and to have traded 5 hard core terrorists for him.

The Pentagon not only defied Obama on this: they doubled down and charged Bergdahl with cowardice before the enemy. A charge almost never used. So the Pentagon is saying: Mr. President, you embraced the family of an utterly dishonorable coward in the Rose Garden, and traded five terrorists for him.

FU, in other words. …

Nice essay on unintended consequences by Kevin Williamson.

News item: There is a new cholesterol-control drug on the market, Repatha, which is enormously beneficial to people who suffer serious side effects from the statins commonly used to control cholesterol or who derive no benefit from statins. Some 17 million Britons are potential beneficiaries of the drug, but they will not be able to use it, because the United Kingdom’s version of Sarah Palin’s death panel — which bears the pleasingly Orwellian name NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence — says it is too expensive. The United Kingdom’s single-payer health-care system is effectively a monopoly, and not an especially effective one: Cardiovascular-disease mortality rates in the United Kingdom are nearly 40 percent higher than in the United States. That’s not nice. And it isn’t what was supposed to happen. … 

… In the social sciences, the term of art for these developments is “unintended consequences.” Some unintended consequences are unforeseeable, but many are not. They are at least partly foreseeable, even if unintended, and our good intentions do not entitle us to blind ourselves to reality. Demand curves slope downward: When you raise the price of something — a ton of coal, an hour of labor — then the quantity demanded will be lower than it would have been at a lower price. …

… Some outcomes are positively perverse. In the 1960s, the federal and state governments began imposing more demanding liability standards on businesses in the belief that if a firm faces greater liability, then it will be more responsible when it comes to risky activities. The result wasn’t more corporate responsibility, but more widely dispersed corporate responsibility, as the economists Al H. Ringleb and Steven N. Wiggins showed. Instead of higher corporate safety standards, there was a proliferation of small corporations, the number of which, they calculated, was about 20 percent higher than it would have been with different liability rules. Why? Because businesses outsourced high-risk tasks to small, specialized firms with relatively little in the way of assets, meaning that they could simply declare bankruptcy and liquidate when faced with a large judgment. …

… When Paul Krugman welcomed the inflation of a housing bubble to offset a collapsing stock-market bubble in 2002, he didn’t understand that he was urging a policy that eventually would kneecap the world’s economy. But he’s only a Nobel laureate in economics and so cannot be expected to think very much about the big picture. …

David Harsanyi says environmentalists will lose and that is good for the human race.

… If there were any chance environmentalists could “win,” as Chait claims, rolling back hundreds of years of progress rather than waiting for the technological breakthroughs that will organically allow us to “transition” away from fossil fuels, the world would be in trouble. Thankfully, they can’t win. Not because Republicans hate science or because anyone Democrats disagree with is bought off by shady oil men, but because, in the end, neither they nor I nor you are giving up our lifestyles in any meaningful way.

For us, the Chinese, Indians, Nigerians, and everyone else, that’s great news.  The environmentalist is free to embrace  fantasy and then fatalism, or they can start figuring out ways to acclimate to this new reality.

Hillary says she’s sorry. Ron Fournier asks, “Sorry for what?” And then he says there are nineteen questions she should answer. 

“I’m sorry about that,” Hil­lary Rod­ham Clin­ton said six years after seiz­ing con­trol of gov­ern­ment email and after six months of deny­ing wrong­do­ing. Just this week, it took three dif­fer­ent in­ter­views in four days for her to beg the puni­est of par­dons: “I do think I could have and should have done a bet­ter job an­swer­ing ques­tions earli­er.”

You think? By any ob­ject­ive meas­ure, the Demo­crat­ic pres­id­en­tial front-run­ner has re­spon­ded to her email scan­dal with de­flec­tion and de­cep­tion, shred­ding her cred­ib­il­ity while giv­ing a skep­tic­al pub­lic an­oth­er reas­on not to trust the in­sti­tu­tions of polit­ics and gov­ern­ment.

An apo­logy doesn’t fix that. An apo­logy also doesn’t an­swer the scan­dal’s most im­port­ant ques­tions. 

1. While apo­lo­giz­ing in an ABC in­ter­view on Tues­day, you said, “What I had done was al­lowed, it was above board.” You must know by now that while the State De­part­ment al­lowed the use of home com­puters in 2009, agency rules re­quired that email be se­cured. Yours was not. Just nine months in­to your term, new reg­u­la­tions re­quired that your emails be cap­tured on de­part­ment serv­ers. You stashed yours on a home-brewed sys­tem un­til Con­gress found out. Why not ad­mit you vi­ol­ated policy? Why do you keep mis­lead­ing people? 

2. If what you did was “above board,” then you wouldn’t ob­ject to all ex­ec­ut­ive branch of­fi­cials at every level of gov­ern­ment and from both parties stor­ing their email on private serv­ers – out of the pub­lic’s reach. Tell me how that wouldn’t sub­vert the fed­er­al Free­dom of In­form­a­tion Act and “sun­shine laws” in every state? …

Shannen Coffin in National Review says there have been a lot of thing for Hillary not to think about.

Hillary Clinton told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell in an interview last week that she just didn’t think about things when she set up her private server to use exclusively as her official e-mail while secretary of state. She “was not thinking a lot when [she] got in. There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world.” Understandably, she “didn’t really stop and think what kind of e-mail system will there be.”

So she didn’t think when she paid a former campaign staffer to build the server and set up “Clinton.com” e-mail addresses for herself and close State Department aides, including her deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin.

She didn’t think when she hired that campaign staffer at the State Department, but continued to pay him off the federal books for his services in maintaining her secret server.

She didn’t think when she neglected to report her server to the Department of Homeland Security, as required by law, so DHS could audit the security of her system as part of its mission to protect the government’s Internet security.

She didn’t think, when she …

Hillary’s gonna get a new image. Jonah Goldberg reacts.

What if this is as good as it gets?

You have to wonder if that’s what Hillary Clinton’s handlers are saying to each other right about now.

Of course, that’s not what they’re saying in public — or on background to the press.

The New York Times reported this week that Clinton plans to be spontaneous from now on:

“There will be no rope lines to wall off crowds, which added to an impression of aloofness. And there will be new efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seems wooden and overly cautious.”

I don’t blame Times reporter Amy Chozick for being so passive in her writing. But just for the record, there was no “impression” of aloofness. There was — and always has been — aloofness. Nor did the candidacy “seem” wooden and overly cautious. It is wooden and overly cautious, because Clinton is wooden and overly cautious.

And that won’t change.

Consider what you just read. The Clinton team is responding to the fact that Clinton is inauthentic and scripted by floating a trial balloon to the New York Times about her plan to be spontaneous.

The Clinton campaign is officially only five months old. But the real campaign is closer to 20 years old. …

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Following on the theme of the last Pickings, Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of WaPo, writes on the president’s Syrian legacy.

This may be the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.

Starvation in Biafra a generation ago sparked a movement. Synagogues and churches a decade ago mobilized to relieve misery in Darfur. When the Taliban in 2001 destroyed ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, the world was appalled at the lost heritage.

Today the Islamic State is blowing up precious cultural monuments in Palmyra, and half of all Syrians have been displaced — as if, on a proportional basis, 160 million Americans had been made homeless. More than a quarter-million have been killed. Yet the “Save Darfur” signs have not given way to “Save Syria.”

One reason is that Obama — who ran for president on the promise of restoring the United States’ moral stature — has constantly reassured Americans that doing nothing is the smart and moral policy. He has argued, at times, that there was nothing the United States could do, belittling the Syrian opposition as “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth.” …

Jennifer Rubin carries the thought along. 

There is nothing like the spectacle of thousands of refugees pouring into Europe to awaken American politicians and media to the Syrian civil war that has killed more than 200,000 and created millions of refugees, who flooded into Syria’s neighbors before they came to Europe.

As many have pointed out, President Obama bears primary responsibility for refusing to match deeds with his declaration that Bashar al-Assad “must go.” Had Obama acted more than four years ago as critics and his own national security team urged, in all likelihood thousands would still be alive, millions of refugees would not have fled Syria, jihadists would not have found a base of operations (from whence they swarmed into Iraq, resulting in more deaths and refugees) and Russian troops would not know be established in Syria, a sign of how much influence disagreeable powers have and how little we do.

Now, it’s not often that a president gets a second bite at the apple — the perfect opportunity to self-correct a horrible decision. Obama, however, got his when Assad used chemical weapons on multiple occasions. The president could have built a multi-national force, bombed Assad’s military assets and tipped the balance of power away from the Syrian leader. But Obama in 2013 managed to flub that as well, and in the meantime convinced the Iranians and the Russians he was feckless. (One wonders if Vladimir Putin would have invaded Ukraine had Obama exercised muscle in Syria rather than looking for Russian help to bail him out of a conflict he never had any intention of taking on.) …

Matthew Continetti writes more on foreign policy.

… the result of Obama’s foreign policy is to empower America’s adversaries. This has been, in its conduct and consequences, an anti-American White House.

I am not saying that the president or the Democratic Party is anti-American in ideology or rhetoric or intent. What I am saying is that the net effect of President Obama’s actions has been to legitimize, strengthen, and embolden nations whose anti-Americanism is public and vicious and all too serious.

Iran is an obvious example. The anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism of the regime is inescapable. Not even Obama, who has gone out of his way to defend the Iranians as rational actors, can ignore it. How has Iran’s “power position” been affected by this White House? In 2009, when the regime faced its most serious challenge in years, the president was silent. In 2011 and 2013, when urged to act against the regime’s closest ally in Syria, the president did nothing.

Why? To speak out in favor of protesting students, to support the Syrian rebels, to punish Bashar al-Assad for violating red lines the president himself had drawn—these acts would have jeopardized the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

The outcome of those negotiations was a deal in which the Iranians agree to suspend some elements of their nuclear research for about a decade in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief. So a fundamentalist theocracy whose leaders chant “Death to America” and whose self-identity is based on a revolutionary challenge to the United States and Israel has been endorsed as a quasi-member of the “international community,” and will receive an infusion of much needed cash. …

… Experience has taught Obama nothing. The next administration won’t be “building” on his foundation. It will be attempting to reclaim the ground that this anti-American White House has lost.

Rick Richman says Kerry tops Neville Chamberlin.

In his speech yesterday on the Iran deal, Secretary of State Kerry mentioned “Israel” or “Israeli” 26 times – protesting a bit too much about his concern for the ally put at existential risk by the Obama administration’s cascade of concessions. Even eerier was the similarity of Kerry’s words to those of Neville Chamberlain in the British parliamentary debate on the Munich agreement in 1938. … 

… Chamberlain proceeded with a 369-150 vote in Parliament, while the Iran deal will proceed against bipartisan opposition in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, both the Senate and the House as a whole, and the majority of the American people, as expressed in multiple polls. President Obama will use a partisan minority to make an end run around the Constitutional requirement for treaties – a provision the Founders intended to insure that any significant multi-year foreign commitment would not proceed without a national consensus reflected in a two-thirds Senate vote – as his secretary of state employs rhetoric, in prepared remarks, that would have embarrassed Neville Chamberlain. …

Noah Rothman posts on Hurricane Katrina’s most enduring legacy.

For a city as infatuated with its old-world charm as New Orleans, institutional change arrives slowly – if ever. Often, it takes a catalyst, sometimes a horrible one, to create the impetus for shifts and adaptations that appear in retrospect utterly transformative. The disastrous physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans had this catalyzing effect. For all the shocks and displacements that arose from that tragedy, its destabilizing effects also resulted in sweeping progress. The reforms to the city’s education system, which has risen like the phoenix out of the disaster, is the miracle that the left dares not acknowledge. For the nation’s entrenched public education unions, its implications are too terrible to contemplate.

The city of New Orleans did not embark on the most radical education reform experiment in generations out of a sense of altruism or adventure. In the wake of the devastation that followed the flooding of nearly 80 percent of the city, education reform was a project of necessity. After the floods, much of New Orleans’ educational infrastructure had been damaged beyond repair. The city’s tax base had fled. The Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) was reluctantly compelled to ask some 7,000 teachers and staff – many of them displaced themselves — to find new work. In November of 2005, with flood waters still lingering in disadvantaged parts of the city, the OPSB acquiesced to the surrender of four-fifths of the entire New Orleans public school system to the all-charter Recovery School District (RSD). …

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The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Interview is with Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell turned 85 years old this summer, which means he has been teaching economics to Americans through his books and articles for some four decades. So it seems like a natural question: Have we learned anything? Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all?

“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” Mr. Sowell says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.” …

… Why do we never seem to learn these economic lessons? “I think there’s a market for foolish things,” Mr. Sowell says—and vested interests, too. Once an organization such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is created to find discrimination, no one should be startled when it finds discrimination. “There’s never going to be a time when the EEOC will file a report saying, ‘All right folks, there’s really not enough discrimination around to be spending all this money,’ ” he says. “You’re going to have ever-more-elaborate definitions of discrimination. So now, if you don’t want to hire an ax murderer who has somehow gotten paroled, then that’s discrimination.” …

While our economy has a vacation from common sense, President Dilettante leads us in a vacation from history; all to the cheers of the Washington media claque.

We have some photographs, the juxtaposition of which illustrates the disconnect. Last week the president was on Alaska’s Arctic shore enjoying a photo-op while a world away the body of a small boy washes up on Turkey’s shore.

The event in Turkey comes about because our president has no courage, and stands for nothing save spending and borrowing our way to oblivion.

Noah Rothman posts on the boy.

His was one of twelve bodies collected on a Turkish beach on Wednesday. It has become a tragically common site to see the corpses of refugees fleeing the proliferating conflicts in the Middle East wash up on Mediterranean shores. This latest was perhaps the most heartbreaking. A Syrian boy, maybe two or three-years-old lay motionless in the surf. He had only ever known war; a horrible war characterized by intense violence, the use of chemical weapons, the Islamic State and al-Nusra, Bashar al-Assad’s thugs, and the various international actors who give these barbarians succor. He was, perhaps for the first time in his short and cruel life, at peace. Of all the appalling images to emerge from the Syrian conflict, this might have been the most soul crushing. … 

… It was President Barack Obama who declared the use of chemical weapons on civilians in Syria a “red line” for action, and it was President Barack Obama who flinched when it became clear that the regime in Damascus had ignored him. Soon, images began to filter into the Western press revealing the horrors wrought by these WMDs. Rooms full of bodies; people seizing, foaming at the mouth; children contorted and writhing as they met their horrible, terrifying end. The West had to act, but it did not. … 

… In the years that followed Obama’s shortsighted decision to abandon Syria (and the entire region, it would turn out) to violence, Europe would find itself in the midst of a refugee crisis. A great human tide has descended upon the continent as teeming masses of Middle Easterners and North Africans displaced by warfare take flight into Europe. … 

… Our Syrian boy was among those refugees who desperately sought to flee the horrors that prevailed at home. He was among the thousands who never made it to European shores. But the pressures that compelled his family to take to a violent sea will not abate. As a result of more Western cowardice, those pressures will likely intensify. …

Michael Gerson in the Washington Post has more.

One little boy in a red T-shirt, lying face down, drowned, on a Turkish beach, is a tragedy. More than 200,000 dead in Syria, 4 million fleeing refugees and 7.6 million displaced from their homes are statistics. But they represent a collective failure of massive proportions.

For four years, the Obama administration has engaged in what Frederic Hof, former special adviser for transition in Syria, calls a “pantomime of outrage.” Four years of strongly worded protests, and urgent meetings and calls for negotiation — the whole drama a sickening substitute for useful action. People talking and talking to drown out the voice of their own conscience. And blaming. In 2013, President Obama lectured the U.N. Security Council for having “demonstrated no inclination to act at all.” Psychological projection on a global stage.

Always there is Obama’s weary realism. “It’s not the job of the president of the United States to solve every problem in the Middle East.” We must be “modest in our belief that we can remedy every evil.”

But we are not dealing here with every problem or every evil; rather a discrete and unique set of circumstances: The largest humanitarian failure of the Obama era is also its largest strategic failure. …

As does Terry Glavin in Canada’s National Post. 

“The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,” Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in the Syrian community are feeling.”

There are feelings of deep gratitude for having been welcomed into Canada, Alazem said. But with their homeland being reduced to an apocalyptic nightmare — the barrel-bombing of Aleppo and Homs, the beheadings of university professors, the demolition of Palmyra’s ancient temples — among Syrian-Canadians, there is also an unquenchable sorrow.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s genocidal regime clings to power in Damascus and the jihadist psychopaths of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are ascendant almost everywhere else. The one thing the democratic opposition wanted from the world was a no-fly zone and air-patrolled humanitarian corridors. Even that was too much to ask. There is no going home now.

But among Syrian-Canadians, the worst thing of all, Alazem said, is a suffocating feeling of solitude and betrayal. “In the Western countries, the civil society groups — it’s not just their inaction, they fight you as well,” he said. “They are crying crocodile tears about refugees now, but they have played the biggest role in throwing lifelines to the regime. And so I have to say to them, this is the reality, this is the result of all your anti-war activism, and now the people are drowning in the sea.” …

… But what we are all doing — Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, Americans, Canadians, and all the dominant elites of the United Nations and the NATO countries that cleave to that sophisticated indifference known in polite company as anti-interventionism — is a very straightforward thing. We are watching Syria die. We are allowing it to happen. …

Andrew Malcolm notes the discouraging misplaced priorities.

Striving to maintain some political relevance as the nation’s focus shifts to choosing his successor, Barack Obama is using a brief visit to Alaska to portray America — indeed, the entire planet — in imminent, disastrous danger from global warming.

The Democrat has long touted global warming as a serious threat. In May, he told military academy graduates that climate change is the greatest threat to U.S. national security. The president’s analysis differs drastically from military leaders, who list Russia, North Korea, China and ISIS as the worst security threats facing the U.S. as Obama draws down its military forces.

Even as Russia annexes Crimea, foments rebellion in Ukraine, sells arms to Iran and aggressively develops Arctic commerce and energy, Obama sees no developing confrontation. Obama did note in Alaska that Russia in recent years has built a fleet of 40 heavy icebreakers. The United States has one in service. Obama suggests building another.

The president said addressing climate change is urgent and dismissed fears that more environmental controls and regulations would hurt the stumbling economy and jobs.

The pattern of talking up a crisis as a means to control the nation’s political agenda and provide a distraction from other news has been very familiar during these interminable 2,416 days of Obama’s White House occupancy. Even if, in the end, little useful action ever ensues on such issues. …

Pickerhead will have a vacation too. Next post will be in a few days.

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To close the week we have an unintended consequences edition. Starting us off, the Wall Street Journal Editors write on the economic problems caused by this president’s explosion of student loan debt. 

For years we’ve warned readers about the burgeoning calamity known as student loans, and the latest news is that the debt bomb is hurting the economy as well as the federal fisc. New evidence from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia illustrates how subsidized student loans sap small business creation.

Student loans have ballooned tenfold since 1999 to more than $1 trillion, the authors note in a July report. Other consumer debt—mortgages, car loans, credit cards—dipped during the 2008 financial crisis, but student debt doubled from $547 billion in 2007, nearly all of it on Education Department books. The Philly Fed is the first to examine how mortgaging an education influences entrepreneurship.

Here’s the connection: Entrepreneurs borrow money to get rolling. But the average student-loan customer owes $28,000 and so some enterprising adults are loaded up with debt, even decades after graduation. Nascent business (with no employees) report capital of about $44,000, according to a recent survey; half comes from loans and lines of credit. Debt-financing, the Fed points out, is critical for expanding a business in the years following its founding.

Yet graduates have sunk too far into the red to amass more liabilities, and not even bankruptcy can liberate them. The Fed found that new firms with roughly five employees dropped 17% on average between 2000 and 2010 in counties where relative student debt grew by 2.7%. …

Ed Driscoll posts in Instapundit about a restaurant in San Francisco that is using iPads for patrons to place orders. So, idiot liberals pass a $15 minimum wage and jobs are lost. Just another example of unintended consequences or is it a new chapter in the left’s war on the poor.

Eatsa in the city’s financial district offers iPad-based ordering, with meals prepared by people whom customers never have to see: …

… Riley Thomas, a San Francisco resident who works near Eatsa, was one of the few patrons who questioned the concept at a time when more and more families are struggling to survive in the city. “I like the food and love the price,” he said. “Still, it worries me that people will begin to think that this is how all restaurants should be run and it could really hurt jobs that are needed right now.”

Co-founder Scott Drummond said: “There is a fast food business model that we need to hit and we’re looking at ways that technology can increase efficiency … That way we can get the price down.” …

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit with another example of left/liberal foolishness. This time from France where the government mandated 35 hour work week is creating problems. Go figure!

French Minister: Hey, that 35-hour work week isn’t working out so well.

His comments, which echoed similar sentiments from an interview almost exactly a year ago – made a splash across front pages of French newspapers on Friday.

‘ “The left was wrong to think that France would improve if people worked less. It was a false idea,” he said during his closing statement at the conference.

He added that “one shouldn’t ask what your country can do for you, rather what you can do for your country’s economy”.

Supporters say the flagship policy of the French left creates jobs by limiting the amount of time employees are allowed to work, thereby encouraging companies to take on more staff.

But critics at home and abroad say it is an inflexible law that hampers business and creates a bloated workforce. ‘

Yeah, I’m going with #2 here.

And our betters in the bien pensant class have begun to notice that college is not always a good deal. As an example we have a recent article by John Cassidy who writes on business for The New Yorker; one of the left/liberal house organs. In a hyperbolic mood Pickerhead once called the education establishment “a vast criminal conspiracy.” More to the point, there is no other part of our economy that does a poorer job serving its customers while charging higher and higher fees. And what do you know? Even the slow people who set government policy are beginning to figure it out. Of course, this is from the New Yorker so, Cassidy can’t seem to figure out these problems are typical unintended consequences of left/liberal messing with our economy.

… The “message from the media, from the business community, and even from many parts of the government has been that a college degree is more important than ever in order to have a good career,” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at Wharton, notes in his informative and refreshingly skeptical new book, “Will College Pay Off?” (PublicAffairs). “As a result, families feel even more pressure to send their kids to college. This is at a time when more families find those costs to be a serious burden.” During recent decades, tuition and other charges have risen sharply—many colleges charge more than fifty thousand dollars a year in tuition and fees. Even if you factor in the expansion of financial aid, Cappelli reports, “students in the United States pay about four times more than their peers in countries elsewhere.”

Despite the increasing costs—and the claims about a shortage of college graduates—the number of people attending and graduating from four-year educational institutions keeps going up. In the 2000-01 academic year, American colleges awarded almost 1.3 million bachelor’s degrees. A decade later, the figure had jumped nearly forty per cent, to more than 1.7 million. About seventy per cent of all high-school graduates now go on to college, and half of all Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have a college degree. That’s a big change. In 1980, only one in six Americans twenty-five and older were college graduates. Fifty years ago, it was fewer than one in ten. To cater to all the new students, colleges keep expanding and adding courses, many of them vocationally inclined. At KansasState, undergraduates can major in Bakery Science and Management or Wildlife and Outdoor Enterprise Management. They can minor in Unmanned Aircraft Systems or Pet Food Science. OklahomaState offers a degree in Fire Protection and Safety Engineering and Technology. At UticaCollege, you can major in Economic Crime Detection. …

… “It is certainly true that college has been life changing for most people and a tremendous financial investment for many of them,” Cappelli writes. “It is also true that for some people, it has been financially crippling. . . .The world of college education is different now than it was a generation ago, when many of the people driving policy decisions on education went to college, and the theoretical ideas about why college should pay off do not comport well with the reality.” …

… If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn’t differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (and expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers—in this case, colleges and universities. …

… It is well established that students who go to élite colleges tend to earn more than graduates of less selective institutions. But is this because Harvard and Princeton do a better job of teaching valuable skills than other places, or because employers believe that they get more talented students to begin with? An exercise carried out by Lauren Rivera, of the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern, strongly suggests that it’s the latter. Rivera interviewed more than a hundred recruiters from investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms, and she found that they recruited almost exclusively from the very top-ranked schools, and simply ignored most other applicants. The recruiters didn’t pay much attention to things like grades and majors. “It was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige,” Rivera concluded. …

… Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor market where college graduates didn’t previously tend to compete. As Beaudry, Green, and Sand put it, “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.” Even many graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects, which receive so much official encouragement—are having a tough time getting the jobs they’d like. Cappelli reports that only about a fifth of recent graduates with STEM degrees got jobs that made use of that training. “The evidence for recent grads suggests clearly that there is no overall shortage of STEM grads,” he writes. …

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To continue to try to take our minds off the fools in DC we have a few interesting items. The first is from a blog named PulpTastic. It is 20 quotes from children’s books that every adult should know.

Some of life’s greatest lessons can be found in children’s literature, and ironically, most of us only realize this once we are no longer kids. The following quotes are some of our favorites from books we used to read, and they may very well send you down a trip to memory lane. …

“A person’s a person no matter how small.” – Dr. Seuss.

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard” – A A Milne; Winnie the Pooh.

Then Five Thirty Eight has a Nerds Guide to the 2229 Paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. This is a large enough file so that many of the images had to be deleted. Follow the link if you want to see all of those in the article.

Through the lobby thronged with tourists, the line for tickets, the line for the cloakroom, and the line for the ticket taker, up the narrow escalators, past the cafe and bookshop on the second floor, the photographs and drawings on the third, and the installations in progress on the fourth, we finally arrive at the fifth floor of The Museum of Modern Art.

This is where they keep the really good stuff — the paintings reproduced in framed prints and on postcards in the gift shop — giants of impressionism, post-impressionism, abstract expressionism, Fauvism, cubism and color field.

Step off the escalator, and we’re greeted by our first painting: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Glenn.” Press on. To the right is Balthus’s “The Street.” Hang one more left, and we’ve really arrived: Gallery 1. Staring at you or, more accurately, staring at the floor right in front of you, is Paul Cézanne’s “The Bather.” And just feet away, somewhere through that knot of cell-phone-camera-wielding museumgoers and just to the side of that hyper-vigilant security guard, is an image you’ll surely recognize: Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.”

The picture, of the view from van Gogh’s room in a French asylum to which he’d committed himself after mutilating his own ear, may well be van Gogh’s highest achievement. But “The Starry Night” — that instantly recognizable image, pulsating with the energy of nature — also goes by another, icier name: ObjectID 79802.

On GitHub, an online data and code hosting service, sits the entire MoMA collection: 123,919 pieces, including 1,656 sculptures, 28,411 photographs, 11,420 drawings, 1,936 films and — most important for our tour today — 2,229 paintings. One of the rows in this giant spreadsheet: ObjectID 79802. …

… At the museum today, we’re armed not only with our love of art, but also with this big pile of data. We’ll appreciate the beauty, to be sure. But if you have questions, I’ll also turn to the hard numbers for answers.

The technical hallmark of “The Starry Night,” as you’ve surely noticed, is its exaggerated brushwork — “a thick, emphatic plasma of paint,” wrote the late, great art critic Robert Hughes. The painting is, emphatically, oil on canvas.

And our data can shed some light on this painting’s most striking feature. “Is this combination of materials typical in modern art?” you ask. Great question — we’re going to have fun! Indeed, oil on canvas is the dominant medium for MoMA’s paintings; nearly half of them use those materials. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas is a distant second. Oil painting, around for some 900 years, still dominates in the modern era. …

Written records of commerce and trade from 4,000 years ago are reported by the NY Times Magazine. This is a fascinating example of the instincts for trade and commerce that are in our genes.

One morning, just before dawn, an old man named Assur-idi loaded up two black donkeys. Their burden was 147 pounds of tin, along with 30 textiles, known as kutanum, that were of such rare value that a single garment cost as much as a slave. Assur-idi had spent his life’s savings on the items, because he knew that if he could convey them over the Taurus Mountains to Kanesh, 600 miles away, he could sell them for twice what he paid.

At the city gate, Assur-idi ran into a younger acquaintance, Sharrum-Adad, who said he was heading on the same journey. He offered to take the older man’s donkeys with him and ship the profits back. The two struck a hurried agreement and wrote it up, though they forgot to record some details. Later, Sharrum-­Adad claimed he never knew how many textiles he had been given. Assur-idi spent the subsequent weeks sending increasingly panicked letters to his sons in Kanesh, demanding they track down Sharrum-Adad and claim his profits.

These letters survive as part of a stunning, nearly miraculous window into ancient economics. In general, we know few details about economic life before roughly 1000 A.D. But during one 30-year period — between 1890 and 1860 B.C. — for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal. Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few hundred traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat roughly at the center of present-day Turkey and functioned as the hub of a massive global trading system that stretched from Central Asia to Europe. Kanesh’s traders sent letters back and forth with their business partners, carefully written on clay tablets and stored at home in special vaults. Tens of thousands of these records remain. One economist recently told me that he would love to have as much candid information about businesses today as we have about the dealings — and in particular, about the trading practices — of this 4,000-year-old community. …