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Today is devoted to items about “the administrative state.” This is the form that tyranny takes in the United States.

Pickerhead owns a business that fabricates precision metal parts for electronic enclosures. Shears, punch presses, and press brakes all use thousands of pounds of force to work sheets of stainless, aluminum, and cold rolled steel. So there are many opportunities for people to be seriously hurt. I learned the business  working as CFO for a company in Chicago that owned five factories in the country. Headquarters was at our plant in Elk Grove Village near O’Hare airport. Every calendar quarter someone was hurt. The most common injuries were shortened or lost fingers. Happy to say, the most serious injury in 34 years of operations of my company was three fingers shortened by  fractions of an inch. Some of the reasons for this success are passive because we only buy the safest machinery. Other reasons are more active. For example, we often decline to bid on jobs we think pose safety hazards. 

The result is the company goes for years between claims for Worker’s Compensation insurance, And the experience modifier for those insurance premiums is an excellent 65%. That means instead of $100,000, the premium paid is only $65,000 because of that good safety record  You would think OSHA (Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration) would be pleased with the record and would want to see how that happens.

 You would think that, but you would be wrong. They do not care. They only want to see if we are using the processes they currently deem to be proper. Results mean nothing. They only care about the process. And that process comes from the administrative state. Yet, many of the things we do to make work safer have nothing to do with those processes.

We also have zinc and chrome plating lines. Since those are heavy metals the state is interested in how we deal with waste. Once, when the Virginia water people were in the plant they asked questions about our paint booths. A few months later Virginia air people were in and suggested we might need a permit for the paint booths. They left a questionnaire for us to fill out. We did and two months later they wrote telling us we did need a permit and enclosed it along with a $10,000 fine for operating without the permit we did not know we needed.

 We hired a lawyer to write a couple of pages that said, in effect; “F**k you.” After months of back and forth, we agreed to a meeting at their office in Norfolk. Our lawyer went along so there were two of us. Virginia was represented by six people including an attorney who was late to the meeting and apologized saying she lost track of time walking on the beach.

 They came from Richmond. We could have gone there because Williamsburg is halfway between Norfolk and Richmond. But these people were on a boondoggle while they were saving the world. So they drove for two and a half hours and rented hotel rooms in Virginia Beach. Testimony ensued. The best part was that of the person who calculated the fine. He came up with “hard” number for $8,000 and said the final $2,000 was “arbitrary and capricious on my part.” He really said that!

 The meeting was being recorded and I sat quietly hoping my attorney would let that comment pass into the record without amendment. And he did. Negotiations left the company paying a $1,000 fine. This is a good example of the administrative state. And, mind you, Virginia is supposed to be a state that is good for business.

Then there are the worst people in the world – the county staff. Our county board wrote a good ordinance governing uses of land along waterways that run to the Chesapeake Bay. The county staff, though, wrote the enforcing regulations that created an administrative nightmare for homeowners who live along the James River. That led to the most ignorant people you can imagine tramping in backyards trying to pronounce indigenous – an old Indian word that means ‘food for deer.’

Scott Johnson of Power Line starts us off with our lesson on how we came to the American form of tyranny 

You may not be interested in administrative law, but administrative law is interested in you. Administrative law is unrecognized by the Constitution, but, according to Colombia Law School Professor Philip Hamburger, it “has become the government’s primary mode of controlling Americans.” He observes that “administrative law has avoided much rancor because its burdens have been felt mostly by corporations.” This is where you come in: “Increasingly, however, administrative law has extended its reach to individuals. The entire society therefore now has opportunities to feel its hard edge.”

Professor Hamburger’s assessment of the proliferation of administrative law may be an understatement. Formal administrative law — the regulations promulgated by the alphabet soup of federal agencies — dwarfs the laws enacted by Congress. To take one vivid example from the front pages of the news in the Age of Obama, the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a Obamacare) runs for 2,800 pages. Democratic House majority leader Nancy Pelosi famously predicted that we would have to pass the bill to find out what was in it. Pelosi was right in more ways than one. By one count published last year, the regulations implementing the act have consumed 10,000 closely printed pages of the Federal Register, at 30 times the length (in words) of the law passed by Congress. …

WSJ reviews the book that started the discussion.

In stirring his countrymen to ratify the new Constitution, Alexander Hamilton urged in Federalist No. 70 that “energy in the executive” would be “a leading character in the definition of good government.” It was, he argued, critical to national security and equally “essential to the steady administration of the laws.” But others in Hamilton’s day were less sanguine. George Mason feared that by vesting a president with so much power, “it may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic.”

In our own time, Republicans and Democrats can seem united in their distrust of a powerful executive branch, if for different reasons. Republicans contend that the administrative state, with bureaucracies ranging from the Education Department to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is a bloated, unchecked and almost lawless autocracy. Democrats worry that, in recent years, the president has assumed extraordinary war-making powers and has interfered with the proper functioning of regulatory agencies.

Aggressive assertions of executive power are controversial. But are they unconstitutional? Without hesitation, Columbia Law Professor Philip Hamburger would answer “yes.” In “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?,” Mr. Hamburger looks beyond the usual milestones of American regulatory history—the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, Roosevelt’s New Deal—to trace the origins and logic of dividing the powers of government and, by so doing, limiting the executive’s reach. …

Here’s a review from The Weekly Standard.

The administrative state is a modern invention. It was, and remains, a necessity in our complex modern age. Or so goes the argument. 

“The trouble in early times was almost altogether about the constitution of government; and consequently that was what engrossed men’s thoughts,” wrote Woodrow Wilson in his Study of Administration (1887). “The functions of government were simple, because life itself was simple. .  .  . No one who possessed power was long at a loss how to use it.” That all changed—apparently in Wilson’s generation—when “present complexities of trade and perplexities of commercial speculation” posed new challenges for government. 

“In brief,” Wilson wrote, “if difficulties of governmental action are to be seen gathering in other centuries, they are to be seen culminating in our own.” So we need experts: “[W]e have reached a time when administrative study and creation are imperatively necessary to the well-being of our governments saddled with the habits of a long period of constitution-making.” 

Necessary; there is no alternative. As the Supreme Court has declared, “[I]n our increasingly complex society, replete with ever changing and more technical problems, Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives.” 

That is a convenient narrative for the defenders of the administrative state. But it is fanciful. It is not historically accurate. And the justifications—especially the claim of necessity—are not new. Neither are the powers of the administrative state. Indeed, Philip Hamburger, professor of law at Columbia, argues here that it was precisely these justifications and powers that English and American constitutional law developed to protect us against. Not only is the modern administrative state unconstitutional, it is the very thing our Constitution sought to prevent. …

… Administrative law depends on epistemological arrogance, assuming that there is one right answer to a given problem. But our entire society (like all free-market societies) presupposes that there exists a diversity of opinions, objectives, and needs. It is precisely in an “increasingly complex” society that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. 

If the tendency of modernized society is toward freedom or at least social fragmentation, then continual direction by the federal government may actually be inconsistent with modernity.

Maybe humility—and constitutional government—are better after all.

Scott Johnson again. This time reviewing the book for National Review.

… As Hamburger says repeatedly in this book, administrative law establishes a regime of the kind the United States Constitution was carefully designed to prevent. By his reckoning, we have returned to “the preconstitutional world” of the inglorious reign of James I: Royal edicts are in style, the Star Chamber is in session, and the king is working the outer limits of absolute royal power.

It is a form of government that is, in Hamburger’s view, fundamentally unconstitutional, unlawful, and illegitimate. He has some impressive authority on his side. James Madison famously proclaimed “a political truth of the highest intrinsic value” in Federalist 47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Hamburger concurs, arguing that it may also justly be pronounced the very definition of agency government.

Well, who is Philip Hamburger and why is he saying these things? Hamburger is not some rabble-rouser with thoughts of fame or fortune in mind looking to make a name or attract an audience. Rather, he holds an endowed chair at Columbia Law School. He is a distinguished scholar specializing in legal history. He is the epitome of respectability. His book bears the imprint of an elite academic publisher and it draws on a deep well of original scholarship to address what he characterizes as a leading danger to the future of limited constitutional government.

The book is in substantial part devoted to English legal history. Hamburger recounts how British monarchs claimed a right to issue edicts with the binding force of law and even to impose taxes under their prerogative power. They also established their own courts — the Star Chamber being the most notable example — to enforce their will.

This prerogative power was reformed over time, with legislative power restricted to Parliament and judicial power to the law courts. The courts rejected edicts promulgated by the king with the binding force of law; in 1641, Parliament abolished the Star Chamber and other prerogative tribunals.

Against this backdrop of legal history, the vesting by the U.S. Constitution of “all legislative Powers” in Congress (emphasis added), of “the executive Power” in a president, and of “the judicial Power” in the Supreme Court and the inferior courts established by Congress sparkles with a new eloquence, at least to me. This tripartite division of power among the branches of the government profoundly reflects the Founders’ understanding of the legal history recounted by Hamburger. They meant to lay out in our fundamental law the painful lessons learned in the long development of the English constitution. …

Another review comes from the Library of Law and Liberty. Sorry this has been so long. But like Kevin Williamson warned in 9/14/14 Pickings in “Consider the Moose”, beware not of ISIS, but of your neighbor telling you how to live.

Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? is a timely and major contribution to the most significant constitutional crisis of our time. As a work of scholarship it will inform and inspire future thinking on the administrative state for years.

This book, however, will greatly contribute to an emerging consensus about the perils of the administrative state, and help shape the constitutional response. Therefore Professor Hamburger’s book may well be the most important book that has been written in decades. Scholars have been denouncing the modern administrative state as incompatible with American constitutionalism for years, but nobody has made the argument as thoroughly and forcefully as Hamburger.

The fundamental thesis of his book is that administrative law is profoundly antithetical to any conception of law, not just the conception of law articulated in the U.S. Constitution. The crisis is not simply a constitutional crisis. It is a crisis of law itself. We risk moving from a nation governed by law to a nation of absolutism – the very absolutism that it took centuries for Britain and America to shed.

Specifically, Hamburger argues that the rise of binding administrative power represents the recurrence of extralegal, supralegal, and consolidated power. Administrative law is extralegal because it is a binding power exercised outside the law. That is, it binds citizens not through the laws and the orders of the courts, “but through other sorts of commands and orders” such as administrative legislation and adjudication. …

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P. J. O’Rourke wants Scotland to be free. For the entertainment value.

This coming Thursday the Scots will vote on whether to make Scotland an independent nation. And I hope they do because it will be a disaster.

I don’t say this as a prejudiced Irishman. Even though the thistle-arse sheep-shagger Scots swiped Ulster and sent a herd of Presbyterian proddy dogs and porridge wogs to squat on our land and won the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 by using unfair—indeed, unheard of —- organization, discipline, and tactics on an Irish battlefield. We Micks only hold a grudge about such things for 300 years or so.

Nor is Scottish independence a misery-loves-company moment for us Irish. True, Irish independence has been no bed of shamrocks, what with the Easter Rebellion, the black-and-tans, the civil war, the IRA, and the Celtic Tiger turning out to be a mangy barn cat drowned in the well.

We Irish don’t hate the Scots per se. They’re too much like us Irish, who all hate each other. So we’re just looking for a fine entertainment from across the Irish Sea as Highland Scots have a donnybrook with Lowland Scots, Glaswegians dust up with Edinburghians, and Clan Dewers unsheathes its claymores for battle with Clan Johnny Walker. …

We get a more serious look from Tom Wilson in Contentions.

At first the Scottish referendum was regarded as a bit of a joke. It was being called, if anything, to put the matter to bed. Yet in recent days the first polls have emerged suggesting that the number of Scots preparing to vote for secession may have just surpassed those wishing to remain in the union. This has caused a sudden sense of panic in Westminster. Some have already called on Prime Minister David Cameron to resign, or at least call an election, should Scotland vote to exit the United Kingdom. Even Henry Kissinger has weighed in and voiced his opposition to Britain “getting any smaller.” But the truth is that, very suddenly, the UK looks dangerously close to splitting in two.

David Cameron insists that he is a staunch defender of the union. Yet, as many have pointed out, losing Scotland wouldn’t be all bad for someone of Cameron’s outlook. For one thing, no Scotland could well mean no more Labor governments for the foreseeable future. All of the close elections won by Labor would have gone to the Conservatives had the Scottish vote been discounted. Then there’s the fact that, when it comes to public services, Scotland takes out far more from the national budget than it contributes. Lastly, while Scotland is more pro-European than England, should Scotland leave, it is hard to imagine the remnants of the United Kingdom having the appetite for going it alone and leaving the EU as well, something which Cameron also opposes. …

Nate Silver at the 538 Blog suggests Roger Goodell is paid well beyond his value to the NFL.

… The modest rate of franchise value growth under Goodell has come from a very high baseline — and perhaps some decline in the rate of growth was inevitable given how prodigiously they grew under Tagliabue. In absolute dollar terms — not percentages — NFL franchise values have risen by a collective $10.9 billion since 2006, compared with $11 billion for baseball, $7.5 billion for the NBA and $6.6 billion for the NHL. The NFL is still a hugely profitable business, and even poorly run franchises tend to make money because of the league’s aggressive revenue sharing and relatively favorable contractual agreements with players. According to Forbes, only the Detroit Lions lost money in 2013, and the league’s 32 franchises earned a collective $1.7 billion in operating income.

At the same time, the NFL did such a good job of expanding its reach and protecting its brand under Tagliabue and Pete Rozelle that even a mediocre commissioner could be in a position to look good. Compared to his predecessors and his counterparts in other leagues, Goodell’s value to the NFL’s bottom line hasn’t been quite so clear.

Apple season is upon us so we have a few posts on them. A writer for The Atlantic has nothing good to say for the Red Delicious. In order to save space we will use only the pull quote here. Follow the link if you want the rest.

At the supermarket near his home in central Virginia, Tom Burford likes to loiter by the display of Red Delicious. He waits until he spots a store manager. Then he picks up one of the glossy apples and, with a flourish, scrapes his fingernail into the wax: T-O-M.

“We can’t sell that now,” the manager protests.

To which Burford replies, in his soft Piedmont drawl: “That’s my point.”

Burford, who is 79 years old, is disinclined to apple destruction. His ancestors scattered apple seeds in the Blue Ridge foothills as far back as 1713, and he grew up with more than 100 types of trees in his backyard orchard. He is the author of Apples of North America, an encyclopedia of heirloom varieties, and travels the country lecturing on horticulture and nursery design. But his preservationist tendencies stop short of the Red Delicious and what he calls the “ramming down the throats of American consumers this disgusting, red, beautiful fruit.”

His words contain the paradox of the Red Delicious: alluring yet undesirable, the most produced and arguably the least popular apple in the United States. It lurks in desolation. Bumped around the bottom of lunch bags as schoolchildren rummage for chips or shrink-wrapped Rice Krispies treats. Waiting by the last bruised banana in a roadside gas station, the only produce for miles. Left untouched on hospital trays, forlorn in the fruit bowl at hotel breakfast buffets, bereft in nests of gift-basket raffia.

As genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh.

For at least 70 years, the Red Delicious has dominated apple production in the United States. But since the turn of the 21st century, as the market has filled with competitors—the Gala, the Fuji, the Honeycrisp—its lead has been narrowing. …

We cut the above short because we wanted to save space for the following from The New Yorker on apple breeding.

… since apples and humans go way back—Thoreau begins his essay “Wild Apples” by noting, “It is remarkable how closely the history of the Apple-tree is connected with that of man”—a little backstory is necessary.

 

Malus pumila, of the family Rosaceae and the tribe Pyreae, was domesticated some four thousand years ago, in the fruit forests of what is now southeastern Kazakhstan, near the city of Almaty. Frank Browning, the author of “Apples,” reports seeing apple trees growing up through cracks in the pavement there. The wild horses of the nearby steppe liked to eat apples, and could cover long distances, carrying the seeds in their guts. Apples travelled westward along trade routes, and show up in Persia around the time of Alexander the Great, and in Europe not long after; the Romans cultivated them widely. (The apple in the Garden of Eden was most likely a pomegranate, or possibly an orange.) The species came to the New World with the first European settlers, in the form of seeds, and the pioneers, as they pushed westward, took apples with them.

 

By the time of the Civil War, there were many kinds of apples growing across the United States, but most of them didn’t taste very good, and as a rule people didn’t eat them. Cider was cheaper to make than beer, and many settlers believed fermented drinks were safer than water. Everyone drank hard cider. President John Adams drank a tankard before breakfast. Babies drank it before going to bed. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Carry Nation took up her axe in the service of the temperance movement, she likely employed it on apple trees as well as saloons. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the apple had a serious public-relations problem. …

… David Bedford, its inventor, is a wiry, bushy-browed, sixty-year-old horticulturist, who speaks with a residual drawl from his early years in North Carolina, where his father was a preacher and his mother waan amateur biologist. As a child, he loved all kinds of fruit except apples. “I can still remember that Red Delicious apple—that sweet but overripe smell and that mealy soft texture,” he told me. “Kids trade their snacks, but no one would trade for a Red Delicious.”

Bedford attended WheatonCollege in Illinois, where, as a biology major, he became interested in plant breeding, and where he tasted a really good apple for the first time. Another student had brought a bushel back from Michigan. “I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is what I’ve been missing.’ It was the beginning of my awakening.” Upon graduation, he worked for three years in a nursery in Rapid City, South Dakota, and then went back to school for a master’s degree in horticulture at ColoradoStateUniversity. In 1979, he took a job at the University of Minnesota’s horticultural station, which maintains one of only three large-scale apple-breeding programs in the country. …

… With all these new trees coming on each year, you won’t have space unless you thin out the duds.” He sprayed another tree trunk with the mark of death. “But it is kind of nerve-racking, because you want to give the tree a chance to do its best. No one wants to be known as the guy who killed the next Honeycrisp.”

Bedford was very nearly that guy. In 1982, the year he took over the breeding program, he was looking through the trees that his predecessor in the job wanted removed. One was MN 1711, a variety that had achieved élite status and been cloned, but had not done well for several years. The mother tree had been damaged by a particularly cold winter the year before, and the four clones had been marked for termination. In studying the data, however, Bedford noticed that the mother tree had been planted in one of the lowest, wettest parts of the orchard. “So I thought, We’ll give that apple one more year,” he said. That apple turned out to be Honeycrisp. Released in 1991, thirty-one years after the original cross was made, it has become the apple of Bedford’s dreams—the humble Minnesota apple that made it onto the national, and then the international, stage. It brought a new kind of texture to apples: flesh that was crunchy but not hard or dense. “That changed the whole game,” Fred Wilklow, the owner of Wilklow Orchards, told me one Saturday this fall when I dropped in at the greenmarket in Borough Hall, Brooklyn, to buy some of his apples. As we were talking, another customer overheard the word “Honeycrisp.”

“Oh, my God, Honeycrisp—they are the best!” she said.

“See what I mean?” Farmer Fred said.

“What’s amazing about Honeycrisp,” Brian Nicholson, the president of Red Jacket Orchards, in New York’s Finger Lakes region, told me recently, “is that it brings in people who don’t even like apples that much—people who prefer peaches or berries or whatever. So it just expands the apple’s share of the fruit basket, and that helps all growers.” The patent, which expired in 2008, combined with sales rights abroad, earned the University of Minnesota more than ten million dollars in royalties, making it the third-most-valuable invention ever produced there, after Ziagen, a drug used to treat H.I.V., and a vaccine that prevents P.R.R.S., a reproductive and respiratory virus in pigs. In 2006, the Association of University Technology Managers named Honeycrisp one of twenty-five innovations that changed the world, along with Google and the V-chip….

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OK, time to turn our attention to the jerks in Washington. Daniel Henninger writes about humbling of one of them.

… There is a story about Mr. Obama relevant to the war, battle or whatever he declared Wednesday evening against the Islamic State, aka ISIS. It is found in his former campaign manager David Plouffe’s account of the 2008 election, “The Audacity to Win.”

Mr. Plouffe writes that during an earlier election race, Mr. Obama had a “hard time allowing his campaign staff to take more responsibility.” To which Barack Obama answered: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it.” Audacity indeed.

In a 2008 New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, Mr. Obama is quoted telling another aide: “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.” Also, “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.” …

… Worse than misstatements have been the misdecisions on policy: the erased red line in Syria, the unattainable reset with Vladimir Putin‘s brainwashed Russia, the nuclear deal with the ruling shadows in Iran. The first two bad calls have pitched significant regions of the world into crises of virtually unmanageable complexity.

What we now know is that Mr. Obama is not even close to being his own best Secretary of State, his own best Secretary of Defense, his own best national security adviser or his own best CIA director.

The question is: Does he know it?

Can a humbling experience of such startling proportions have sunk in? …

Henninger is with the Wall Street Journal. How about Peter Baker from the NY Times? 

When President Obama addresses the nation on Wednesday to explain his plan to defeat Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria, it is a fair bet he will not call them the “JV team.”

Nor does he seem likely to describe Iraq as “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” with a “representative government.” And presumably he will not assert after more than a decade of conflict that “the tide of war is receding.”

As he seeks to rally Americans behind a new military campaign in the Middle East, Mr. Obama finds his own past statements coming back to haunt him. Time and again, he has expressed assessments of the world that in the harsh glare of hindsight look out of kilter with the changed reality he now confronts.

In making his speech, Mr. Obama faces the challenge of reconciling those views with the new mission he is presenting to the American public to recommit the armed forces of the United States to the region he tried to leave. Rather than a junior varsity nuisance, he will try to convince Americans that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria represents a clear threat to national security in a state that is hardly stable. And he will seek to win patience for more war from a public that wishes it really was receding.

To Mr. Obama’s critics, the disparity between the president’s previous statements and today’s reality reflects not simply poorly chosen words but a fundamentally misguided view of the world. Rather than clearly see the persistent dangers as the United States approaches the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, they said, Mr. Obama perpetually imagines a world as he wishes it were.

“I don’t think it is just loose talk, I think it’s actually revealing talk,” said Peter H. Wehner, a former adviser to President George W. Bush now at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Sometimes words are mistakes; they’re just poorly put. But sometimes they’re a manifestation of one’s deep belief in the world and that’s what you really get with President Obama.” …

Mark Steyn posts on the ISIS speech. 

I was overseas when Obama gave his momentous ISIS address, but figured I could pretty much guess how things would go. Despite being the greatest orator of the last thousand years, he’s a complete bust at selling anything but himself, as comprehensively demonstrated in his first couple of years: see his rhetorical efforts on behalf of ObamaCare, or Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley, or Chicago’s Olympics bid. When it comes to war, he suffers from an additional burden: before he can persuade anybody else, he first has to persuade himself. And he can’t do it. So he gave the usual listless performance of a surly actor who resents the part he’s been given. It’s not just the accumulation of equivocations and qualifications – the “Islamic State” is not Islamic, our war with them is not a war, there’ll be no boots on the ground except the exotic footwear of a vast unspecified coalition – but something more basic: What he mainly communicates is that he doesn’t mean it.

That’s what the jihadist militias now in control of Tripoli understood about his “leading from behind”. That’s what Putin grasped about Obama’s “red line” in Syria. And that’s what any Isis member who took time out of his beheading schedule to watch the President on CNN International will have taken away from this week’s speech. …

… One sympathizes with Obama at having to pretend to be interested in tedious briefings about which set of unlovely ingrate natives we should back against the other. He was elected to be the post-war president – Clement Attlee to Bush’s Winston Churchill, an analogy that’s almost perfect except for the minor detail that in this case the enemy did not acceot that the war was over. Still, it takes two to tango, and Obama’s principal dance move is to stand at the side of the floor looking cool. The Obama Doctrine – “Don’t do stupid sh*t” – has been rendered in non-PG version as “Don’t do stupid stuff”. But it should be more pithily streamlined yet: Don’t do. The Obama “Doctrine” attempts to dignify inertia as strategy. …

Roger Simon posts on the “nowhere man” as he goes to war. 

Pity Barack Obama.  Our hapless chief executive must be suffering from a cognitive disorder the size of Alpha Centauri.   The poor guy grew up on the anti-imperialist mouthings of lefty poet Frank Marshall Davis, schoolboy revolutionary Bill Ayers and later anti-Israel professor Rashid Khalidi, not to mention the well-known anti-American excrescences of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and now he has to go to war — as an imperialist — against the very Third World people he was told again and again we colonized and destroyed.  His head must be about to explode.

No wonder he insisted in his Wednesday night speech that the Islamic State is not Islamic — what is it? Hindu?  Zoroastrian? A lost tribe of Hasidic Jews? …

… Welcome to nowhere war waged by a nowhere man.

Staying in a Beatles mode, we might say Obama is getting what he deserves — Instant Karma. (“Instant Karma’s gonna get you/ Gonna knock you right on the head/You better get yourself together, etc.”)

But Obama’s not going to “get himself together” because there’s no way he can.   You reap what you sow. Win the Nobel Peace Prize for no discernible reason and suffer the consequences of the famous dictum attributed to Leon Trotsky:  ”You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”  And at this moment war is very interested in Barack Hussein Obama even though he couldn’t be less interested in it. …

Mark Steyn again.

… From Benghazi to the Baltic, the world has the measure of Obama. The only people who don’t are America’s besotted, parochial elite and the deluded electorate who made this man “leader of the free world”.

Streetwise Professor gets his turn too.

Obama’s cultists often compare him to a chess master, playing the long game. There is another chess metaphor that is far more apt, however. Specifically, there is a story that has gained wide currency in which Vladimir Putin compares Obama to a chess playing pigeon. Putin supposedly said: ”Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game.”

This story is almost certainly false. The chess playing pigeon meme dates to far before Obama’s time. But there is no person that the story fits better. The story has resonated precisely because it is so right. If Putin didn’t say it, he should have, and he would have been dead on. …

Karen Tumulty writes for WaPo on the electorate that has finally wised up. 

Kimberly Cole was part of the coalition that voted in 2008 to make Barack Obama the 44th president and gave him another four years in 2012 to deliver on his promises of hope and change.

Now, the 36-year-old mother of three young children in Valencia, Calif., is among the majority of Americans who have lost confidence in Obama’s leadership and the job he is doing as president.

“He’s been faced with a lot of challenges, and he’s lost his way,” Cole said in an interview. She worries that Obama lacks the resolve needed at a time when things at home and abroad are looking scarier.

On the other side of the country, Karlene Richardson, 44, once counted herself a “very strong supporter” of the president. But now she feels much the same as Cole does.

“Honestly, I just feel that what I bought into is not what I’m getting,” said Richardson, an author and motivational speaker who teaches health-care administration at a community college in Queens. “I’m starting to wonder whether the world takes us seriously.”

Both Cole and Richardson were surveyed in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll and represent one of its most striking findings: the degree to which the president’s approval has slipped among key parts of the Obama coalition — the women, youth and Latino voters most responsible for putting him into office. …

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Vasily Grossman is Pickerhead’s favorite Russian author. National Review notes the 50th anniversary of his death.

On September 14, 1964, Vasily Grossman — one of the pivotal journalists and novelists of the 20th century, although he was little known in the West — passed out of this world. An eyewitness to the brutality and suffering of the Battle of Stalingrad, Grossman would, as the Red Army pushed westward, eventually step through the gates of Treblinka and record what is perhaps the first, and is considered by many to be the most vivid, description of the atrocities that were the Nazi extermination camps. He set down his observations and thoughts in The Hell of Treblinka, an essay that would be disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials as prosecutorial evidence. The service that Grossman provided to humanity in documenting accurately the Soviet war effort on the eastern front (no small achievement for a journalist writing for the Red Army’s Krasnaya Zvezda), and later the horrors of Hitler’s Holocaust, would itself merit a tribute on the 50th anniversary of his death. Beyond these monumental historical contributions, however, lies an equally significant moral proclamation on the nature of politics and the state. …

Stuart Taylor made some news in his review of the “John Doe” investigation by a partisan Milwaukee District Attorney. Taylor quotes an assistant prosecutor who says the whole probe was a Democrat party operation. This article is long, but critical in understanding the scorched earth politics of today’s Dems. This article was published just before proceedings in a Federal Appeal Court in Chicago. It looks like the federal court will kick the case back to state courts.

… Now a longtime Chisholm subordinate reveals for the first time in this article that the district attorney may have had personal motivations for his investigation. Chisholm told him and others that Chisholm’s wife, Colleen, a teacher’s union shop steward at St. Francis high school, a public school near Milwaukee, had been repeatedly moved to tears by Walker’s anti-union policies in 2011, according to the former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office. Chisholm said in the presence of the former prosecutor that his wife “frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people involved … She took it personally.”

Citing fear of retaliation, the former prosecutor declined to be identified and has not previously talked to reporters.

Chisholm added, according to that prosecutor, that “he felt that it was his personal duty to stop Walker from treating people like this.”

Chisholm was referring to Gov. Walker’s proposal – passed by the legislature in March 2011 – to require public employee unions to contribute to their retirement and health-care plans for the first time and to limit unions’ ability to bargain for non-wage benefits.

Chisholm said his wife had joined teachers union demonstrations against Walker, said the former prosecutor. The 2011 political storm over public unions was unlike any previously seen in Wisconsin. Protestors crowded the State Capitol grounds and roared in the Rotunda. Picketers appeared outside of Walker’s private home. There were threats of boycotts and even death to Walker’s supporters. Two members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court almost came to blows. Political ad spending set new records. Wisconsin was bitterly divided.

Still, Chisholm’s private displays of partisan animus stunned the former prosecutor. “I admired him [Chisholm] greatly up until this whole thing started,” the former prosecutor said. “But once this whole matter came up, it was surprising how almost hyper-partisan he became … It was amazing … to see this complete change.”

The culture in the Milwaukee district attorney’s office was stoutly Democratic, the former prosecutor said, and become more so during Gov. Walker’s battle with the unions. Chisholm “had almost like an anti-Walker cabal of people in his office who were just fanatical about union activities and unionizing. And a lot of them went up and protested. They hung those blue fists on their office walls [to show solidarity with union protestors] … At the same time, if you had some opposing viewpoints that you wished to express, it was absolutely not allowed.”  …

 

… Moving on a parallel track in federal courts, O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth launched their so-far successful federal civil rights suit against District Attorney Chisholm, his assistants Bruce Landgraf and David Robles, and Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz. Their court papers accuse Chisholm and the others of using a frivolous and unconstitutional theory of “illegal coordination” to target and “silence political speech [they do] not like.”

Chisholm and his colleagues lost that case in May, when Judge Randa issued his surprisingly strong opinion, rejecting the prosecutors’ legal theory that conservative activists had illegally coordinated with Walker’s 2012 campaign as “simply wrong.”

Even if the Club and other groups did collaborate closely with Gov. Walker in raising and spending money, Judge Randa found, they had a legal right to do so under both Wisconsin law and the U.S. Constitution.

The prosecutors had argued that coordinated issue ads are tantamount to a campaign contribution and thus subject to the laws limiting contributions and requiring disclosure of donors, even if they stop short of urging a vote for a candidate.

But, Judge Randa held, coordinated ads can constitutionally be regulated only if they contain “express advocacy” or its “functional equivalent.” That’s campaign-finance-law jargon for a clear appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.

Flashing outrage at the investigators’ pre-dawn raids by armed officers who carried off files and computers, cellphones, and more from the homes of conservative activists, Randa wrote that “attempts to purify the public square lead to … the Guillotine and the Gulag.”

In handing down his decision to temporarily halt the investigation, Judge Randa ruled that the prosecutors have no “reasonable expectation of obtaining a valid conviction.”

Chisholm and his allies appealed to the federal Seventh Circuit in Chicago. The plaintiffs’ high-powered, hard-charging Washington lawyer, David Rivkin and his team have squared off against the prosecutors’​ lawyers in their briefs and will do so in the oral argument today. …

Kevin Williamson warns against dangers that often look benign. He makes the case that moose and honey bees have proven more dangerous than sharks. From that he suggests that many government actions will prove to be dangerous.

… The wolf, a staple of our fairy tales and films such as The Grey, is another creature that haunts our imagination, though North American wolf attacks are so incredibly rare that wolf scholars work with individual episodes rather than aggregate statistics. Domestic dogs, on the other hand, kill dozens of people each year. “What if there’s bears?” may be the stuff of nightmares, but you are in fact more likely to be attacked by a moose. …

 

… We certainly invent things to worry about when it comes to politics. Some of my more enthusiastic correspondents on the right send me missives about President Obama’s secret plan to install himself as president-for-life and suspend the 2016 elections, …

… Heavy debt, dysfunctional families, unfunded and unfundable liabilities, economic stagnation, official corruption, lawless government, overrun borders, social cohesion strained to the breaking point . . .

We’re gonna need a bigger boat. 

As an example of the dangers of government, The NY Times tells us that leftist governments have proved to be harmful to our health. Turns out people of the former East Germany are living longer since they have thrown off the communist yoke.

The life expectancy of East Germans has risen sharply since their state was reunified with the more prosperous West in 1990, a new study shows. Reunification added 6.2 years to the life of men in the former East and 4.2 years to their female counterparts, according to calculations by Tobias Vogt, of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, that were published ahead of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this year. If East Germany still existed, boys born in 2011 could expect to live to the age of 70.9, while girls would have a life expectancy of 78.7 years, the study showed. But in a reunified Germany boys born in 2011 were forecast to live to 77.1, and girls to 82.9. Mr. Vogt cited improvements in medical treatment and an improved standard of living as the reason.

PriceOnomics treats us to the story of the fake crying Indian.

On Earth Day, 1971, nonprofit organization Keep America Beautiful launched what the Ad Council would later call one of the “50 greatest commercials of all time.” Dubbed “The Crying Indian,” the one-minute PSA features a Native American man paddling down a junk-infested river, surrounded by smog, pollution, and trash; as he hauls his canoe onto the plastic-infested shore, a bag of rubbish is tossed from a car window, exploding at his feet. The camera then pans to the Indian’s cheerless face just as a single tear rolls down his cheek. 

The ad, which sought to combat pollution, was widely successful: It secured two Clio awards, incited a frenzy of community involvement, and helped reduce litter by 88% across 38 states. Its star performer, a man who went by the name “Iron Eyes Cody,” subsequently became the “face of Native Indians,” and was honored with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Advertisers estimate that his face, plastered on billboards, posters, and magazine ads, has been viewed 14 billion times, easily making him the most recognizable Native American figure of the century.

But while Hollywood trumpeted Iron Eyes Cody as a “true Native American” and profited from his ubiquitous image, the man himself harbored an unspoken secret: he was 100% Italian. …

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Joel Kotkin with a provocative essay on the growing class divide in the US. Not race, class.

Recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and along the U.S.-Mexico border may seem to suggest that race has returned as the signature issue in American politics. We can see this already in the pages of mainstream media, with increased calls for reparations for African-Americans, and expanded amnesties for the undocumented. Increasingly, any opposition to Obama’s policies is blamed on deep-seated white racism.

Yet in reality, race will not define the 2014 election, or likely those that follow. Instead the real defining issue—class—does not fit so easily into the current political calculus. In terms of racial justice, we have made real progress since the ’60s, when even successful educated minorities were discriminated against and the brightest minority students were often discouraged from attending college. Today an African-American holds the highest office in the land, and African Americans also fill the offices of U.S. attorney general and national security advisor. This makes the notion that race thwarts success increasingly outdated.

But at the same time that formal racial barriers have been demolished, the class divide continues to grow steeper than in at any time in the nation’s recent history. Today America’s class structure is increasingly ossified, and this affects not only minorities, who are hit disproportionately, but also many whites, who constitute more than 40 percent of the nation’s poor. Upward mobility has stalled under both Bush and Obama, not only for minorities but for vast swaths of working class and middle class Americans. Increasingly, it’s not the color of one’s skin that determines one’s place in society, but access to education and capital, often the inherited variety.

Worries about upward mobility have been mounting for a generation, and according to Pew, only one-third of Americans currently believe the next generation will do better than them. Indeed, in some surveys pessimism about the next generation stands at an all-time high.

But race is not the main determinant in looking to the future. The greatest dismay, in fact, is felt among working class and middle class whites, who are generally much more pessimistic about the future for themselves than are either African-Americans or Hispanics.

This pessimism—for all the discussion on campuses about “white privilege”—is even more deeply seated among young whites. According to a poll conducted by the left-leaning advocacy group Demos, only 12 percent of whites 18 to 34 believe they will do better than their parents, compared to 31 percent for African-Americans and 36 percent among young Hispanics. …

Neatly dovetailing with Kotkin’s ideas, is a NY Times article by Ross Douthat on the Rotherham scandal as he compares it to other deprivations by powerful and/or untouchable men.

… what happened in Rotherham was rooted both in left-wing multiculturalism and in much more old-fashioned prejudices about race and sex and class. The local bureaucracy was, indeed, too fearful of being labeled “racist,” too unwilling, as a former member of Parliament put it, to “rock the multicultural community boat.” But the rapes also went unpunished because of racially inflected misogyny among police officers, who seemed to think that white girls exploited by immigrant men were “tarts” who deserved roughly what they got.

The crucial issue in both scandals isn’t some problem that’s exclusive to traditionalism or progressivism. Rather, it’s the protean nature of power and exploitation, and the way that very different forms of willful blindness can combine to frustrate justice. …

… And in Rotherham, it meant men whose ethnic and religious background made them seem politically untouchable, and whose victims belonged to a class that both liberal and conservative elements in British society regard with condescension or contempt.

The point is that as a society changes, as what’s held sacred and who’s empowered shifts, so do the paths through which evil enters in, the prejudices and blind spots it exploits.

So don’t expect tomorrow’s predators to look like yesterday’s. Don’t expect them to look like the figures your ideology or philosophy or faith would lead you to associate with exploitation.

Expect them, instead, to look like the people whom you yourself would be most likely to respect, most afraid to challenge publicly, or least eager to vilify and hate.

Because your assumptions and pieties are evil’s best opportunity, and your conventional wisdom is what’s most likely to condemn victims to their fate.

Wired writes on the SS United States. 

This rust bucket is the SS United States, a once glorious vessel now moored next to a South Philadelphia shopping mall, where it’s been sitting in decay for 18 years, racking up roughly $60,000 a month in rent. Paint is peeling off its hull. The interior, stripped of previously asbestos-laden innards, is mostly bare. It doesn’t look like it now, but it is possibly the most impressive watercraft ever produced by the United States.

Active from 1952 to 1969, the SS US carried civilians between America and Europe quickly, safely, and comfortably. In the late 1960s, the booming airline industry, equipped with the jumbo Boeing 747, rendered the ocean liner obsolete. After nearly two decades in Philly, the ship has run up a huge tab and the SS United States Conservancy, a group that bought the ship in 2011 and intends to preserve it, is running out of money. If they don’t raise more funds soon, they’ll likely have to cede ownership, at which point it’ll likely be sold to the highest-bidding scrap dealer. “She is a very much endangered piece of American history,” says Thomas Basile, an adviser to the Conservancy. “We could be within a month of having to decide her state.”

The history of the SS US dates back to 1916, when William Francis Gibbs, whose naval architecture firm later designed more than half the American armored ships used in World War II, started working on the ship’s design. He spent the next 40 years overseeing its completion, up to its 1952 maiden voyage. The U.S. military got involved and financed two thirds of the $78 million ($780 million in 2014) construction costs near the end of the process, when Gibbs pitched the ship as a way to bring hundreds of thousands of soldiers home from Europe. …

From the SS United States as an example of the strengths of our country in the middle of the last century, we take a trip to China. Right across the border from Hong Kong into China proper is the city of Shenzhen (population fifteen million). That’s not a misprint, the city has 15,000,000 inhabitants. Most striking though is that in 1980 the population was only 330,000. It is the gateway to China’s manufacturing in Guangdong Province.  We have a short tour of the area from Joi Ito who is Director of MIT’s Media Lab. He says the area is a high-tech manufacturing ecosystem.

… After AQS, we visited King Credie, which made the actual printed circuit boards (PCBs). The PCB manufacturing process is a sophisticated process involving adding layers while also etching and printing all kind of materials such as solder, gold, and various chemicals involving many steps and complex controls. They were working on some very sophisticated hybrid PCBs that included ceramic layers and flexible layers –  processes that are very difficult and considered exotic anywhere else in the world, but directly accessible to us thanks to a close working relationship with the factory.

We also visited an injection molding plant. … Most of the plastic parts for everything from cellphones to baby car seats are made using an injection molding process. The process involves creating “tools” which are the huge steel molds that the plastic is injected into. The process is difficult because if you want a mirror finish, the mold has to have a mirror finish. If you need 1/1000th of an inch tolerance in production, you have to cut the steel molds at that precision. Also, you have to understand how the plastic is going to flow into the mold through multiple holes in the mold and make sure that it enters evenly and cools properly without warping or breaking.

The factory we visited had a precision machine shop and the engineering expertise to design and machine our injection molding tools, but our initial production volume was too low for them to be interested in the business. They wanted orders of millions of units and we only needed thousands.

In an interesting twist, the factory boss suggested that we could build the precision molding tools in China and then send these tools to a US shop for running production. Due to our requirement for clean-room processing, he thought it would be cheaper to run production in the US — but the US shops didn’t have the expertise or capability that his shop in China had to produce the tools; and even if they did, they couldn’t touch his cost for such value-added services.

This role reversal is an indicator of how the technology, trade, and know-how for injection molding has shifted to Shenzhen. Even if US has the manufacturing capacity, key parts of the knowledge ecosystem currently exist only in Shenzhen. …

… While intellectual property seems to be mostly ignored, tradecraft and trade secrets seem to be shared selectively in a complex network of family, friends and trusted colleagues. This feels a lot like open source, but it’s not. The pivot from piracy to staking out intellectual property rights isn’t a new thing. The United States blatantly stole book copyright until it developed it’s own publishing very early in US history. The Japanese copied US auto companies until it found itself in a leadership position. It feels like Shenzhen is also at this critical point where a country/ecosystem goes from follower to leader.

When we visited DJI which makes the Phantom Aerial UAV Drone Quadcopter we saw a company that was ahead. They are a startup that is growing at 5X / year. They have one of the most popular drones ever designed for the consumer market. They are one of the top 10 patent holders in China. They were clearly benefiting from the tradecraft of the factories but also very aware of the importance of being clean (and aggressive) from an IP perspective. DJI had the feel of a Silicon Valley startup mashed together with the work ethic and tradecraft of the factories we had been visiting.

We also visited a very high-end, top-tier mobile phone factory that made millions of phones. All of the parts were delivered by robots from a warehouse that was completely automated. The processes and the equipment were the top of the line and probably as sophisticated any factory in the world.

We also visited a tiny shop that could assemble very sophisticated boards in single-unit volumes for a price comparable to a typical monthly cable TV bill, because they would make them by hand. They place barely visible chips onto boards by hand and had a soldering technique that Americans will tell you can only be done by a $50,000 machine. What amazed me was that they used no assisted vision. …

… What we experienced was an entire ecosystem. From the bespoke little shop making 50 blinking computer controlled burning man badges to the guy rebuilding a phone while eating a Big Mac to the cleanroom with robots scurrying around delivering parts to rows and rows of SMTs – the low cost of labor was the driving force to pull most of the world sophisticated manufacturing here, but it was the ecosystem that developed the network of factories and the tradecraft that allows this ecosystem to produce just about anything at any scale.

Just like it is impossible to make another Silicon Valley somewhere else, although everyone tries – after spending four days in Shenzhen, I’m convinced that it’s impossible to reproduce this ecosystem anywhere else.  …

… I do believe that other regions have regional advantages – Boston might be able to compete with Silicon Valley on hardware and bioengineering. Latin America and regions of Africa may be able compete with Shenzhen on access to certain resources and markets. However, I believe that Shenzhen, like Silicon Valley, has become such a “complete” ecosystem that we’re more likely to be successful building networks to connect with Shenzhen than to compete with it head on.

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: President Obama made a surprise visit to Stonehenge the other day. Even crazier, today he made a surprise visit to the White House!

Conan: Reno is celebrating itself now as the world’s divorce capital. Also the city is planning an exhibit at its Children’s Museum called: “It’s All Your Fault.”

Conan: More Ray Rice fallout. He’s been taken out of the ‘Madden NFL 15′ game. A company spokesman says, “Violence against women doesn’t belong in ‘Madden 15.’ It belongs in ‘Grand Theft Auto.’”

Meyers: Obama announces his plans for the ISIS threat this week. It’s become an incredibly difficult situation. At this point, I think you just tell Liam Neeson they have his daughter.

A whole week without the white house wimp. We’ll get back to that next week. In the meantime, the cartoons are stacking up so here’s a bunch for the end of the week.

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John Fund with background on the vote for Scottish Independence.

The new YouGov poll on Scotland’s September 18 vote on independence shows “yes” in the lead for the first time, by a narrow 51 percent to 49 percent. The reason British politicians are now scrambling to offer Scotland more powers is that until now YouGov had been the poll showing the least support for separation.

British treasury secretary George Osborne has quickly promised that within days Scottish voters will be offered “more tax powers, more spending powers, more power over the welfare state.” He pledged that “Scotland will have the best of both worlds” by avoiding “the risks of separation” while acquiring “more control over their own destiny.” For many Scots, the last-minute offer lacks credibility for its lateness. Moreover, the offer comes after several hundred thousand votes have already been cast by mail.

Supporters of independence say that if Scotland goes it alone, British prime minister David Cameron will bear most of the blame. Jim McColl, one of Scotland’s wealthiest businessmen and a backer of independence, criticized Cameron in this vein when he spoke recently to the Independent. If Cameron had accepted Scotland’s offer to have a third question on the ballot that offered Osborne’s latest proposals, McColl said, “then that is what we would have got — everyone would have voted for more powers, but remaining part of the U.K.”

But Cameron insisted on a single “yes” or “no” ballot question that would force Scottish voters to make a clear choice, reflecting his belief that most Scots would flinch from a complete break. Indeed, at the time when the referendum was negotiated in 2012, a full 63 percent of Scots opposed outright independence. …

… Prime Minister Cameron insists he would not resign from office should Scotland vote itself out of its 300-year-old union with Britain, but there would be enormous public pressure for the “man who lost Scotland” to leave.

That would be an added bonus to Scotland’s independence, since increasingly Cameron — with his milquetoast views on the EU and his enthusiasm for climate-change regulation — has less and less of a claim to being a true ally of liberty. His departure would give British conservatives a chance to elect a new leader who might have a chance of limiting the number of votes lost to the thriving United Kingdom Independence Party and keeping Labour out of office. That could be a so-far-unexplored silver lining of Scotland’s “yes” vote for independence.

A negative view of the proceedings from Nile Gardiner. 

Next week’s referendum on Scottish independence has largely flown under the radar screen here in the United States. The cable news networks have devoted little attention so far to the issue, as the Isil threat in the Middle East continues to dominate international coverage. There has been no polling conducted on the Scottish question in the US, and it is doubtful that many Americans outside of the Washington policy bubble or the financial milieu of New York are particularly exercised by the outcome of a vote taking place over 3,000 miles away.

They should be concerned, however. What happens in Scotland will reverberate on this side of the Atlantic, and not for the better. Here are five reasons why Americans should be nervous about the outcome of next week’s vote if Scotland votes for independence. …

Paul Ryan gets a look from Matthew Continetti.

“We can fix these problems,” Paul Ryan tells me. He’s referring to the sluggish economy, the rising cost of living, broken immigration and health care systems, burdensome regulations, and stifling tax code. What would it take? The Republican Party has to win the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016.

Easier said than done. Especially when conservatives face an enemy inside their own party: the GOP consultant class.

“Everyone calls it ‘the Establishment,’” Ryan says. “That’s a loose word.” What he has in mind are Republican ad makers, lobbyists, public relations guys, media consultants, speechwriters, pollsters, retired officials, and fundraisers—the hundreds of thousands of Washington operatives who make a living from center-right politics.

Affluent, secure, beholden to the bipartisan conventional wisdom that avoids social issues and ideological fights, they are alienated from and hostile to the conservative base that keeps the GOP in business. These are the real takers (a term Ryan now abjures).

“The consultant class always says play it safe, choose a risk-averse strategy,” Ryan says. “I don’t think we have the luxury of doing that. We need to treat people like adults by offering them alternatives.”

Only by forcing voters to choose, he says, can you “win the kind of mandate you need to fix the country’s problems.” The alternatives are drift, aimlessness, inertia, and hoping that liberals will somehow doom themselves.

Fat chance. Presidential politics do not favor a GOP that has lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections. Ryan points to other obstacles, such as the rising share of minority voters and the Electoral College “Blue Wall.” His conclusion: “We’re in a tough place.” …

David Harsanyi says the federal government is the greatest threat to our liberty.

Local governments are pocket-sized hotbeds of tyranny. The only way to stop them is by promoting a stronger federal government.  So says Franklin Foer in the New Republic.

Here’s the kicker of his piece:

“Centuries ago, in the age of monarchs, the preservation of liberty required constraining the power of the central state. In our era, protecting rights requires the opposite. Only a strong federal government can curb the autocratic tendencies burbling across the country. Libertarians worry about the threat of local tyrants, too, but only abstractly. In practice, they remain so fixated on the perils of Washington that they rigidly insist on devolving power down to states, cities, and towns—the very places where their nightmares are springing to life.”

Nearly everything is wrong with this paragraph.

More on the Rotherham, England story. This time from the NY Times.

It started on the bumper cars in the children’s arcade of the local shopping mall. Lucy was 12, and a group of teenage boys, handsome and flirtatious, treated her and her friends to free rides and ice cream after school.

Over time, older men were introduced to the girls, while the boys faded away. Soon they were getting rides in real cars, and were offered vodka and marijuana. One man in particular, a Pakistani twice her age and the leader of the group, flattered her and bought her drinks and even a mobile phone. Lucy liked him.

The rapes started gradually, once a week, then every day: by the war memorial in Clifton Park, in an alley near the bus station, in countless taxis and, once, in an apartment where she was locked naked in a room and had to service half a dozen men lined up outside.

She obliged. How could she not? They knew where she lived. “If you don’t come back, we will rape your mother and make you watch,” they would say.

At night, she would come home and hide her soiled clothes at the back of her closet. When she finally found the courage to tell her mother, just shy of her 14th birthday, two police officers came to collect the clothes as evidence, half a dozen bags of them.

But a few days later, they called to say the bags had been lost.

“All of them?” she remembers asking. A check was mailed, 140 pounds, or $232, for loss of property, and the family was discouraged from pressing charges. It was the girl’s word against that of the men. The case was closed. …

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Joan Rivers gets a good send off from Peggy Noonan. 

There was nobody like her. Some people are knockoffs or imitations of other, stronger, more vivid figures, but there was never another Joan Rivers before her or while she lived. She was a seriously wonderful, self-invented woman.

She was completely open and immediately accessible. She had the warmth of a person who found others keenly and genuinely interesting. It was also the warmth of a person with no boundaries: She wanted to know everything about you and would tell you a great deal about herself, right away. She had no edit function, which in part allowed her gift. She would tell you what she thought. She loved to shock, not only an audience but a friend. I think from the beginning life startled her, and she enjoyed startling you. You only asked her advice or opinion if you wanted an honest reply.

Her intelligence was penetrating and original, her tastes refined. Her duplex apartment on the east side of Manhattan was full of books in beautiful bindings, of elegant gold things on the table, lacquered boxes, antique furniture. She liked everything just so. She read a lot. She was a doctor’s daughter.

We met and became friends in 1992, but the story I always remember when I think of her took place in June 2004. Ronald Reagan had just died, and his remains were being flown from California to Washington, where he would lay in state at the U.S. Capitol. A group of his friends were invited to the Capitol to take part in the formal receiving of his remains, and to say goodbye. Joan was there, as a great friend and supporter of the Reagans. …

… She was a Republican, always a surprising thing in show business, and in a New Yorker, but she was one because, as she would tell you, she worked hard, made her money with great effort, and didn’t feel her profits should be unduly taxed. She once said in an interview that if you have 19 children she will pay for the first four but no more. Mostly she just couldn’t tolerate cant and didn’t respond well to political manipulation. She believed in a strong defense because she was a grown-up and understood the world to be a tough house. She loved Margaret Thatcher, who said what Joan believed: The facts of life are conservative. She didn’t do a lot of politics in her shows—politics divides an audience—but she thought a lot about it and talked about it. She was socially liberal in the sense she wanted everyone to find as many available paths to happiness as possible. …

… It was Joan who explained to me 15 or 20 years ago a new dimension in modern fame—that it isn’t like the old days when you’d down a city street and people would recognize you. Fame had suddenly and in some new way gone universal. Joan and a friend had just come back from a safari in Africa. One day they were walking along a path when they saw some local tribesmen. As the two groups passed, a tribesman exclaimed, “Joan Rivers, what are you doing here?!”  …

We have been remiss in ignoring the story of abuse of young girls in Rotherham, England. A good piece in The Weekly Standard lets us correct that.

Two weeks ago, the British press broke the news contained in Professor Alexis Jay’s “Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham.” Between 1997 and 2013, Jay estimated, 1,400 young girls in that Yorkshire town were exploited: gang-raped, trafficked to other cities, threatened, beaten, and forced to bring other girls into the network. The police did not respond to emergency calls from the girls and their families; fathers reported being threatened and even arrested for complaining. The victims and the authorities knew that “by far the majority of perpetrators” were “Asian,” meaning Pakistani/Kashmiri Muslims, who constitute about 3.7 percent of Rotherham’s population of 260,000. Members of this group dominate the town’s taxi industry, and therefore had easy access to victims. The perpetrators were not merely pimps: They also dealt drugs and sold guns. Yet during the 17-year period she studied, Jay found, “councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue.”

Jay’s report proved that virtually everyone in any position of authority from the late ’90s until today must have known the scale of the sexual exploitation. Internal documents show that they heard reports on the situation several times, most notably in 2005. Town councillors have been accused of having business interests in the taxi companies​—​one of the companies that was accused of rounding up and grooming girls also had a contract with the city to ferry children between social services locations.

The story of such grooming rings in the north of England had been broached by many newspaper reports over the past decade, particularly by Andrew Norfolk of the Times. But the impact of the Jay report overwhelmed the usual attempts to say it was being exaggerated out of racism and Islamophobia. “This scale of criminality and victimhood is vast for a country that has traditionally regarded itself as law-abiding,” the British journalist John O’Sullivan wrote last week. And the size and scope of the tragedy has made it safe not only for columnists but for cabinet members to say that “institutionalized political correctness” is responsible for the tragic fate of the girls of Rotherham. From 1997 to 2013 it was imprudent to say anything like this, or even to mention the ethnicity and religion of the perpetrators: A Home Office researcher who tried to tell police and superiors what was going on was sent on a diversity training course instead. (The influential 1999 Macpherson Report said any policeman who has not been given formal diversity training must be assumed to be racist.) …

NY Review of Books writes on dying Russians.

… In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality. By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner.

In 2006 and 2007, Michelle Parsons, an anthropologist who teaches at Emory University and had lived in Russia during the height of the population decline in the early 1990s, set out to explore what she calls “the cultural context of the Russian mortality crisis.” Her method was a series of long unstructured interviews with average Muscovites—what amounted to immersing herself in a months-long conversation about what made life, for so many, no longer worth living. The explanation that Parsons believes she has found is in the title of her new book, Dying Unneeded.

Parsons chose as her subjects people who were middle-aged in the early 1990s. Since she conducted her interviews in Moscow over a decade later, the study has an obvious structural handicap: her subjects are the survivors, not the victims, of the mortality crisis—they didn’t die—and their memories have been transformed by the intervening years of social and economic upheaval. Still, what emerges is a story that is surely representative of the experience of a fair number of Russians. …

 

… In fact, if we zoom out from the early 1990s, where Parsons has located the Russian “mortality crisis,” we will see something astounding: it is not a crisis—unless, of course, a crisis can last decades. “While the end of the USSR marked one [of] the most momentous political changes of the twentieth century, that transition has been attended by a gruesome continuity in adverse health trends for the Russian population,” writes Nicholas Eberstadt in Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis: Dimensions, Causes, Implications, an exhaustive study published by the National Bureau of Asian Research in 2010. Eberstadt is an economist who has been writing about Soviet and Russian demographics for many years. In this book-length study, he has painted a picture as grim as it is mystifying—in part because he is reluctant to offer an explanation for which he lacks hard data.

Eberstadt is interested in the larger phenomenon of depopulation, including falling birth rates as well as rising death rates. He observes that this is not the first such trend in recent Russian history. There was the decline of 1917–1923—the years of the revolution and the Russian Civil War when, Eberstadt writes, “depopulation was attributable to the collapse of birth rates, the upsurge in death rates, and the exodus of émigrés that resulted from these upheavals.” There was 1933–1934, when the Soviet population fell by nearly two million as a result of murderous forced collectivization and a man-made famine that decimated rural Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Then, from 1941 to 1946, the Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people in the war and suffered a two-thirds drop in birth rate. But the two-and-a-half decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union are the longest period of depopulation, and also the first to occur, on such a scale, in peacetime, anywhere in the world. “There is no obvious external application of state force to relieve, no obvious fateful and unnatural misfortune to weather, in the hopes of reversing this particular population decline,” writes Eberstadt. “Consequently, it is impossible to predict when (or even whether) Russia’s present, ongoing depopulation will finally come to an end.”  …

 

… For Eberstadt, who is seeking an explanation for Russia’s half-century-long period of demographic regress rather than simply the mortality crisis of the 1990s, the issue of mental health also furnishes a kind of answer. While he suggests that more research is needed to prove the link, he finds that “a relationship does exist” between the mortality mystery and the psychological well-being of Russians:

“Suffice it to say we would never expect to find premature mortality on the Russian scale in a society with Russia’s present income and educational profiles and typically Western readings on trust, happiness, radius of voluntary association, and other factors adduced to represent social capital.”

Another major clue to the psychological nature of the Russian disease is the fact that the two brief breaks in the downward spiral coincided not with periods of greater prosperity but with periods, for lack of a more data-driven description, of greater hope. The Khrushchev era, with its post-Stalin political liberalization and intensive housing construction, inspired Russians to go on living. The Gorbachev period of glasnost and revival inspired them to have babies as well. The hope might have persisted after the Soviet Union collapsed—for a brief moment it seemed that this was when the truly glorious future would materialize—but the upheaval of the 1990s dashed it so quickly and so decisively that death and birth statistics appear to reflect nothing but despair during that decade.

If this is true—if Russians are dying for lack of hope, as they seem to be—then the question that is still looking for its researcher is, Why haven’t Russians experienced hope in the last quarter century? Or, more precisely in light of the grim continuity of Russian death, What happened to Russians over the course of the Soviet century that has rendered them incapable of hope? In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt argues that totalitarian rule is truly possible only in countries that are large enough to be able to afford depopulation. The Soviet Union proved itself to be just such a country on at least three occasions in the twentieth century—teaching its citizens in the process that their lives are worthless. Is it possible that this knowledge has been passed from generation to generation enough times that most Russians are now born with it and this is why they are born with a Bangladesh-level life expectancy? Is it also possible that other post-Soviet states, by breaking off from Moscow, have reclaimed some of their ability to hope, and this is why even Russia’s closest cultural and geographic cousins, such as Belarus and Ukraine, aren’t dying off as fast? If so, Russia is dying of a broken heart—also known as cardiovascular disease.

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We’re late and long today. But the cartoons are good and we’ll take tomorrow off so you can catch up.

Pickerhead has often said we now live in a country filled with perverse incentives. This is perfectly illustrated by an article from The Atlantic on for-profit law schools. The writer seems to think this is an example of capitalism run amok, but Pickings readers know it is an example of a government that is out of control. And remember, when the government tries to do something or help someone, it always screws up. The goal was to help more aspiring lawyers find their way into the profession. The result is to saddle many of them with hundreds of thousands in debt and no degree. The operators of the schools get paid up front by the idiots in our governments. The winners are not people who formed companies that create something new. They are people who spotted a fault-line in government and found a way to exploit it. And more and more, our economy is littered with people like that.

David Frakt isn’t easily intimidated by public-speaking assignments. A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve and a defense attorney, Frakt is best known for securing the 2009 release of the teenage Guantánamo detainee Mohammad Jawad. He did so by helping to convince a military tribunal that the only evidence that Jawad had purportedly thrown a hand grenade at a passing American convoy in 2002 had been extracted by torture.

By comparison, Frakt’s presentation in April to the Florida Coastal School of Law’s faculty and staff seemed to pose a far less daunting challenge. A law professor for several years, Frakt was a finalist for the school’s deanship, and the highlight of his two-day visit was this hour-long talk, in which he discussed his ideas for fixing what he saw as the major problems facing the school: sharply declining enrollment, drastically reduced admissions standards, and low morale among employees.

But midway through Frakt’s statistics-filled PowerPoint presentation, he was interrupted when Dennis Stone, the school’s president, entered the room. (Stone had been alerted to Frakt’s comments by e-mails and texts from faculty members in the room.) Stone told Frakt to stop “insulting” the faculty, and asked him to leave. Startled, Frakt requested that anyone in the room who felt insulted raise his or her hand. When no one did, he attempted to resume his presentation. But Stone told him that if he didn’t leave the premises immediately, security would be called. Frakt packed up his belongings and left.

What had happened? Florida Coastal is a for-profit law school, and in his presentation to its faculty, Frakt had catalogued disturbing trends in the world of for-profit legal education. This world is one in which schools accredited by the American Bar Association admit large numbers of severely underqualified students; these students in turn take out hundreds of millions of dollars in loans annually, much of which they will never be able to repay. Eventually, federal taxpayers will be stuck with the tab, even as the schools themselves continue to reap enormous profits.

There are only a small number of for-profit law schools nationwide. But a close look at them reveals that the perverse financial incentives under which they operate are merely extreme versions of those that afflict contemporary American higher education in general. And these broader systemic dysfunctions have potentially devastating consequences for a vast number of young people—and for higher education as a whole.

Florida Coastal is one of three law schools owned by the InfiLaw System, a corporate entity created in 2004 by Sterling Partners, a Chicago-based private-equity firm. InfiLaw purchased Florida Coastal in 2004, and then established ArizonaSummitLawSchool (originally known as Phoenix School of Law) in 2005 and Charlotte School of Law in 2006.

These investments were made around the same time that a set of changes in federal loan programs for financing graduate and professional education made for-profit law schools tempting opportunities. Perhaps the most important such change was an extension, in 2006, of the Federal Direct PLUS Loan program, which allowed any graduate student admitted to an accredited program to borrow the full cost of attendance—tuition plus living expenses, less any other aid—directly from the federal government. The most striking feature of the Direct PLUS Loan program is that it limits neither the amount that a school can charge for attendance nor the amount that can be borrowed in federal loans. Moreover, there is little oversight on the part of the lender—in effect, federal taxpayers—regarding whether the students taking out these loans have any reasonable prospect of ever paying them back.

This is, for a private-equity firm, a remarkably attractive arrangement: the investors get their money up front, in the form of the tuition paid for by student loans. Meanwhile, any subsequent default on those loans is somebody else’s problem—in this case, the federal government’s. The arrangement bears a notable resemblance to the subprime-mortgage-lending industry of a decade ago, with private equity playing the role of the investment banks, underqualified law students serving as the equivalent of overleveraged home buyers, and the American Bar Association standing in for the feckless ratings agencies. But there is a crucial difference. When the subprime market collapsed, legislation dedicating hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to bailing out the banks had to be passed. In this case, no such action will be necessary: the private investors have, as it were, been bailed out before the fact by our federal educational-loan system. This situation, from the perspective of Sterling Partners and other investors in higher education, comes remarkably close to the capitalist dream of privatizing profits while socializing losses. …

 

… How much debt do graduates of the three InfiLaw schools incur? The numbers are startling. According to data from the schools themselves, more than 90 percent of the 1,191 students who graduated from InfiLaw schools in 2013 carried educational debt, with a median amount, by my calculation, of approximately $204,000, when accounting for interest accrued within six months of graduation—meaning that a single year’s graduating class from these three schools was likely carrying about a quarter of a billion dollars of high-interest, non-dischargeable, taxpayer-backed debt.

And what sort of employment outcomes are these staggering debt totals producing? According to mandatory reports that the schools filed with the ABA, of those 1,191 InfiLaw graduates, 270—nearly one-quarter—were unemployed in February of this year, nine months after graduation. And even this figure is, as a practical matter, an understatement: approximately one in eight of their putatively employed graduates were in temporary jobs created by the schools and usually funded by tuition from current students. InfiLaw is not alone in this practice: many law schools design the brief tenure of such “jobs” to coincide precisely with the ABA’s nine-month employment-status reporting deadline. In essence, the schools are requiring current students to fund temporary jobs for new graduates in order to produce deceptive employment rates that will entice potential future students to enroll. (InfiLaw argues that these jobs have “proven to be an effective springboard for unemployed graduates to gain experience and secure long-term employment.”) …

 

… InfiLaw does not disclose its finances, but law schools have traditionally been highly profitable enterprises. The reasons are straightforward: law schools are, or at least ought to be, relatively cheap to operate. The traditional lecture method of teaching allows for a high student ratio, and there is no need for expensive lab equipment or, at free-standing law schools like InfiLaw’s, other costly features of university life, such as sports teams, recreational centers, esoteric subjects pursued by an uneconomical handful of students, and so forth. Indeed, until relatively recently, many universities treated their law schools as cash cows whose surplus revenues helped subsidize the institutions’ other operations.

Thus, Sterling Partners seems to have calculated a decade ago that all it needed to make its new law-school venture profitable was large numbers of prospective law students eligible for federal student loans. What the firm must have seen at the time was, from the perspective of a profit-maximizing enterprise, a very large untapped market. Only slightly more than half of the almost 101,000 people who applied to ABA-accredited law schools in 2004 were admitted to even one of these schools. With unlimited federal educational loans available to cover the full cost of attendance at any accredited school, this meant billions of dollars of taxpayer-supplied law-school tuition revenue were being left on the table. …

 

… The only real difference between for-profit and nonprofit schools is that while for-profits are run for the benefit of their owners, nonprofits are run for the benefit of the most-powerful stakeholders within those institutions.

Consider the case of New England Law, a school of modest academic reputation that for many years produced a reasonable number of local practitioners at a non-exorbitant price. Like many similar schools, New England Law has spent years jacking up tuition and fees by leaps and bounds—after nearly doubling its price tag between 2004 and 2014, the school now costs about $44,000 a year—and graduating invariably large classes, even as the demand for legal services, and especially the legal services of graduates of low-ranked law schools, has contracted radically.

A glance at New England Law’s tax forms suggests who may have benefited most from this trajectory: John F. O’Brien, the school’s dean for the past 26 years, whom the school paid more than $873,000 in its 2012 fiscal year, the most recent yet disclosed. This is among the largest salaries of any law-school dean in the country. (By comparison, the dean at the University of Michigan Law School, a perennial top-10 institution, was reported to make less than half as much, $420,000, in 2013.) Meanwhile, the school’s graduates are burdened with crushing debt loads and job prospects only marginally less terrible than those of InfiLaw graduates. Approximately 41 percent of the students in New England Law’s 2013 graduating class had jobs as lawyers nine months after graduation, and nearly 20 percent were unemployed. …

 

… Two aphorisms from economists sum up how the story of InfiLaw, despite its idiosyncrasies, illustrates in a particularly sharp way why American higher education cannot continue down the path it has been on for more than half a century—a path of endlessly increasing costs, enabled by an unlimited supply of federal student loans. The first is Herbert Stein’s insight: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” The second is Michael Hudson’s observation: “Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.”

The applicability of these almost Zen-like adages to the structure of higher education in America helps explain why the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen predicted in 2013 that as many as half of the nation’s universities may go bankrupt in the next 15 years. And it also helps explain why Florida Coastal kicked a dean candidate off campus in the middle of his presentation to the faculty. The alternative was to let him discuss frankly the ways in which the school, like so many of America’s institutions of higher education, is based on a fundamentally unsustainable social and economic model.

Did you know an asteroid just missed earth today? And, it was discovered just days ago? We’re in the best of hands. Our governments can’t do their basic jobs, but do lots of stuff that makes things far worse. WaPo has the asteroid story.

Earth will experience a close call on Sunday, as an asteroid discovered only a few days ago is expected to safely pass very close by. The space rock will zip by our planet approximately 25,000 miles above our heads – one tenth the distance between here and the moon.

The asteroid, which is approximately 60 feet in diameter, will pass closest to Earth on Sunday at 2:18 p.m. ET. Based on current calculations, astronomers suspect it will be over New Zealand at the time. While the asteroid will be too small to see with the naked eye, NASA says it might be possible for sky watchers to catch a glimpse with small telescopes.

While 2014 RC will pass extremely close to the orbiting height of our planet’s geosynchronous satellites, which are parked at a height of 22,000 miles, NASA says it does not pose any threat to the satellites because of it’s path below Earth and the satellite orbit ring. …

There is only one thing to do – start drinking. And, Pacific Standard says drinking is good for you.

Bob Welch, former star Dodgers pitcher, died in June from a heart attack at age 57. In 1981, Welch published (with George Vecsey) Five O’Clock Comes Early: A Cy Young Award-Winner Recounts His Greatest Victory, in which he detailed how he became an alcoholic at age 16: “I would get a buzz on and I would stop being afraid of girls. I was shy, but with a couple of beers in me, it was all right.”

In his early 20s, he recognized his “disease” and quit drinking. But I wonder if, like most 20-something problem drinkers (as shown by all epidemiological research), he would otherwise have outgrown his excessive drinking and drunk moderately?

If he had, he might still be alive. At least, that’s what the odds say.

Had Welch smoked, his obituaries would have mentioned it by way of explaining how a world-class athlete might have died prematurely of heart disease. But no one would dare suggest that quitting drinking might be responsible for his heart attack.

In fact, the evidence that abstinence from alcohol is a cause of heart disease and early death is irrefutable—yet this is almost unmentionable in the United States. Even as health bodies like the CDC and Dietary Guidelines for Americans(prepared by Health and Human Services) now recognize the decisive benefits from moderate drinking, each such announcement is met by an onslaught of opposition and criticism, and is always at risk of being reversed.

Noting that even drinking at non-pathological levels above recommended moderate limits gives you a better chance of a longer life than abstaining draws louder protests still. Yet that’s exactly what the evidence tells us.

Driven by the cultural residue of Temperance, most Americans still view drinking as unhealthy; many call alcohol toxic. Yet, despite drinking far less than many European nations, Americans have significantly worse health outcomes than heavier-drinking countries. (For example, despite being heavily out-drunk by the English, we have almost exactly twice their levels of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.)

After David Letterman underwent quintuple bypass surgery in 2000, he had Bryant Gumbel on his show. Letterman exercises maniacally, is resultingly skinny and long ago gave up cigars and alcohol. Confronting the slightly doughy Gumbel, Letterman bemoaned, “How come I do everything healthy and you smoke cigars and drink and I end up on the surgery table?” …

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The president is pretty laid back when dealing with enemies like Putin, ISIS, and Hamas. But he’s “enraged” with our ally Israel. Bret Stephens notes the disconnect. 

Barack Obama “has become ‘enraged’ at the Israeli government, both for its actions and for its treatment of his chief diplomat, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. ” So reports the Jerusalem Post, based on the testimony of Martin Indyk, until recently a special Middle East envoy for the president. The war in Gaza, Mr. Indyk adds, has had “a very negative impact” on Jerusalem’s relations with Washington.

Think about this. Enraged. Not “alarmed” or “concerned” or “irritated” or even “angered.” Anger is a feeling. Rage is a frenzy. Anger passes. Rage feeds on itself. Anger is specific. Rage is obsessional, neurotic.

And Mr. Obama—No Drama Obama, the president who prides himself on his cool, a man whose emotional detachment is said to explain his intellectual strength—is enraged. With Israel. Which has just been hit by several thousand unguided rockets and 30-odd terror tunnels, a 50-day war, the forced closure of its one major airport, accusations of “genocide” by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitic protests throughout Europe, general condemnation across the world. This is the country that is the object of the president’s rage.

Think about this some more. In the summer in which Mr. Obama became “enraged” with Israel, Islamic State terrorists seized Mosul and massacred Shiite soldiers in open pits, Russian separatists shot down a civilian jetliner, Hamas executed 18 “collaborators” in broad daylight, Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria came close to encircling Aleppo with the aim of starving the city into submission, a brave American journalist had his throat slit on YouTube by a British jihadist, Russian troops openly invaded Ukraine, and Chinese jets harassed U.S. surveillance planes over international waters.

Mr. Obama or his administration responded to these events with varying degrees of concern, censure and indignation. But rage? …

One of our current problems is we have a president who is truly ignorant of history. Victor Davis Hanson is our guide.

… What explains Obama’s confusion?

A lack of knowledge of basic history explains a lot. Obama or his speechwriters have often seemed confused about the liberation of Auschwitz, “Polish death camps,” the political history of Texas, or the linguistic relationship between Austria and Germany. Obama reassured us during the Bowe Bergdahl affair that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt all similarly got American prisoners back when their wars ended — except that none of them were in office when the Revolutionary War, Civil War, or World War II officially ended.

Contrary to Obama’s assertion, President Rutherford B. Hayes never dismissed the potential of the telephone. Obama once praised the city of Cordoba as part of a proud Islamic tradition of tolerance during the brutal Spanish Inquisition — forgetting that by the beginning of the Inquisition an almost exclusively Christian Cordoba had few Muslims left.

A Pollyannaish belief in historical predetermination seems to substitute for action. If Obama believes that evil should be absent in the 21st century, or that the arc of the moral universe must always bend toward justice, or that being on the wrong side of history has consequences, then he may think inanimate forces can take care of things as we need merely watch.

In truth, history is messier. Unfortunately, only force will stop seventh-century monsters like the Islamic State from killing thousands more innocents. Obama may think that reminding Putin that he is now in the 21st century will so embarrass the dictator that he will back off from Ukraine. But the brutish Putin may think that not being labeled a 21st-century civilized sophisticate is a compliment.

In 1935, French foreign minister Pierre Laval warned Joseph Stalin that the Pope would admonish him to go easy on Catholics — as if such moral lectures worked in the supposedly civilized 20th century. Stalin quickly disabused Laval of that naiveté. “The Pope?” Stalin asked, “How many divisions has he got?”  …

Ron Fournier gets a turn too.

… Instead of clarity, we get condescending lectures, like the one Obama gave rich supporters about a messy world and social media.

Rather than decisiveness, the White House stalls with defensive spin, such as this gem from senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer: “There’s no timetable for solving these problems that’s going to meet the cable-news cycle.” As if the enemy is CNN, and not ISIS, which has proven to be more nimble and quick than Obama.

The White House public relations staff must think Americans are pretty dumb. How else do you explain the way chief spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri defended Obama for playing golf immediately after an address about the slaughter of journalist James Foley? “His concern for the Foleys and Jim,” Palmieri said, “was evident to all who saw and heard his statement.” Yes, just as evident as what else the world saw that day: the president’s golf cart, his golf clothes, and his wide, sporty smile. 

The racially charged protests in Ferguson brought more second-guessing of Obama, as conservative and liberal partisans objected to his balanced approach. I found his tone refreshing in describing the conflict between a mostly African-American community and a majority-white police department, but Obama seems less clear-eyed about the international stage. 

He tries to manage the world as he hopes it will be, rather than lead the world as it is. Yes, foreign policy is hard. These issues are both historic and existential. The American public is fickle. Congress is all but useless. And our allies in Europe are loathe to lead—or even to pay a fair price for fighting threats closer to their borders than our own.

 But that’s why only one person gets to be president of the United States, and, presumably, that’s why Obama asked twice to be elected. He wanted the job. He knew its challenges (including the existence of social media). He thought he could lead. When does he get started?

Ron Fournier used to be a certified media liberal, but he is no more. But. the NY Times’ Frank Bruni is still a card carrier. What does he think of his hero?

There are things that you think and things that you say.

There’s what you reckon with privately and what you utter publicly.

There are discussions suitable for a lecture hall and those that befit the bully pulpit.

These sets overlap but aren’t the same. Has President Obama lost sight of that?

It’s a question fairly asked after his statement last week that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with Islamic extremists in Syria. Not having a strategy, at least a fixed, definitive one, is understandable. The options aren’t great, the answers aren’t easy and the stakes are enormous.

But announcing as much? It’s hard to see any percentage in that. It gives no comfort to Americans. It puts no fear in our enemies.

Just as curious was what Obama followed that up with.

Speaking at a fund-raiser on Friday, he told donors, “If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart.” He had that much right.

But it wasn’t the whole of his message. In a statement of the obvious, he also said, “The world has always been messy.” And he coupled that with a needless comparison, advising Americans to bear in mind that the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the rapacity of Putin, the bedlam in Libya and the rest of it were “not something that is comparable to the challenges we faced during the Cold War.” …

Michael Barone posts on the president who is uninterested in other people. 

Some time ago I contrasted the reaction a conservative would get if he were in the same room with the two most consequential politicians of the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.

If you were in a room with Bill Clinton, he would discover the one issue out of 100 on which you agreed; he would probe you with questions, comments, suggestions; and he would tell you that you enabled him to understand it far better than he ever had before.

If you were in a room with Rudy Giuliani, he would discover the one issue out of 100 on which you disagreed; he would ask pointed questions and pepper you with objections; he would tell you that you are wrong on the facts and wrong on the law, and that you needed to admit you were utterly mistaken.

The difference is partly a matter of personality and temperament, and of regional style: Southern affability, New York prickliness. …

… The ability to read other people comes more easily if you’re interested in others, curious to learn what makes them tick. It comes harder or not at all if you’re transfixed with your image of yourself.

Which seems to be the case with Barack Obama. Not only is he not much interested in the details of public policy, as Jay Cost argues persuasively in a recent article for the Weekly Standard. He is also, as even his admirers concede, not much inclined to schmooze with other politicians, even his fellow Democrats. …

… Obama critics have pointed out his fondness for the first person singular. He said “I,” “me,” or “my” 63 times in his 1,631-word eulogy for Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye. He spoke twice as long about his own family experiences as the heroism for which Inouye was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani succeeded in large part because they were curious about other people different from themselves. Barack Obama prefers to look in the mirror.

Another liberal, Dana Milbank, is unnerved by the president’s happy talk.

Obama has been giving Americans a pep talk, essentially counseling them not to let international turmoil get in the way of the domestic economic recovery. “The world has always been messy,” he said Friday. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.”

So we wouldn’t have fussed over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine if not for Facebook? Or worried about terrorists taking over much of Syria and Iraq if not for Twitter? This explanation, following Obama’s indiscrete admission Thursday that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for military action against ISIS, adds to the impression that Obama is disengaged.

In short, Americans would worry less if Obama worried more.

A poll released last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 54 percent of the public thinks Obama is “not tough enough” in foreign policy. Americans are not necessarily asking for more military action — Pew’s polls also have found a record number of Americans saying the United States should mind its own business — but they seem to be craving clarity. As National Journal’s Ron Fournier put it: “While people don’t want their president to be hawkish, they hate to see him weakish.”

Richard Fernandez posts in the Belmont Club about the urgency in putting out fires.

… One of the most interesting things about the Battle of Midway in 1942 was that it was just as much lost by the Japanese firemen as it was won by USN aviators. The most powerful ship in the Japanese fleet was the Akagi. It was hit by only one bomb, a 1,000 pounder dropped by Lt. Richard Best. No one on the bridge at first believed that a single hit could pose a serious danger to the huge ship. The fire it started just under the smashed deck elevator was for some minutes unobserved — until the gasoline which had been sloshing around the hanger from punctured gas tanks reached it. And then a deadly chain initiated. The fire set off one armed aircraft after the other, like a string of Chinese firecrackers. All of a sudden the blaze was out of control. The fiery fingers of the conflagration crept ever downward to the magazines and gasoline fuel tanks. By dawn the next day the Akagi was nothing but a lump of slag and scuttled by the escorting destroyers.

The main reasons for the Akagi‘s loss were later ascribed to the early destruction of its fire isolation curtains and the absence of a working foam suppression system. They didn’t smother the blaze when they had the chance. Then they ran out of time. And then they ran out of ship. When facing a fire, the golden rule is hit it as hard as you can while it is small. Once you start playing the “fierce minimalist” with fire, it is apt to get away from you.

During the worst part of the fire season in southern California, strong Santa Ana winds will blow carpets of burning embers across eight-lane freeways. During the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park, hot embers managed to cross the Lewis Canyon, a natural canyon up to a mile wide and 600 feet (180 m) deep. In Australia, firebreaks are less effective against eucalyptus forest fires, since intense fires in tinder-dry eucalyptus forest spread through flying embers, which can be carried by the winds to trigger new blazes several kilometres away.

This almost exactly describes the problem the president finds himself in. Every blaze we now see around us appeared to be only a humble ember until recently. Only two years ago Obama was ridiculing Romney for thinking Russia would be a problem. Only this year he was describing ISIS as a junior varsity team. Today the Ukraine is being invaded. Islamists are swimming in the U.S. Embassy pool in Libya. Just yesterday ISIS posted video of a second beheaded American journalist on YouTube.  And those thousands of “American”, “British” and “Australian” jihadis drifting back — those are your sparks right there.

What happened? Somehow yesterday’s gentle campfires are now raging conflagrations. It would seem that of the two presidents, Franklin Roosevelt may have had the better understanding of fire. The president may think he’s in control. But maybe he’s not.  The important thing is for the president’s supporters to stop kidding themselves.  They’ve wasted enough time already without getting lost in catchphrases like “fierce minimalist.”

We like to close the week with late night humor from Andy Malcolm. But, he has not posted yet so for humor, Mr. Malcolm quotes the president and then follows with his thoughts in bold type.

… Obama on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “We are not taking military action to solve the Ukrainian problem.” Did anyone in Negotiation 101 ever mention that leaders rarely get what they want by announcing out of the gate what they will not do?

“President Putin and Russia have repeatedly passed by potential off-ramps to resolve this diplomatically. And so in our consultations with our European allies and partners, my expectation is that we will take additional (sanction) steps primarily because we have not seen any meaningful action on the part of Russia to actually try to resolve this in diplomatic fashion.

“And I think that the sanctions that we’ve already applied have been effective.” How exactly have they been effective if you’ve seen no ‘meaningful action on the part of Russia’?

And what evidence do you have of Russian suffering from your sanctions? “Are there long lines of people trying to emigrate into Russia?”

We saved for last a quote from Vice President Joe Biden’s speech to Detroit union members on Monday: “So, folks, it’s time to take back America!” Wait! What? From whom? You and Barack have been in charge these past 2,052 days.

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Kevin Williamson writes on a Florida program that grants $5,700 tax credits to parents who send their children to private schools. Or course the teacher’s union is suing to halt the program.  

… This isn’t about religion; it’s about protecting the narrow financial interests of a monopolistic public-sector cartel that produces a whole lot of six-figure salaries, $28-an-hour baby-sitters, and $90,000-a-year shop teachers. You think it’s not about the money? Consider that Florida uses a similar system to provide pre-kindergarten education to 140,000 low-income children, about 40 percent of whom are in religiously affiliated schools. Florida offers college scholarships, too, which students are free to use at religious institutions. (Three of Florida’s historically black colleges are Christian schools — shall we revoke their students’ federal aid?) Nobody is filing any lawsuits about college scholarships — the union goons are not looking out for anything but their own selfish interests.

Which would be more or less fine, if they didn’t stink quite so much when it comes to educating children.

We know they do a terrible job. The data show that they do a terrible job. And, most significant, they know that they do a terrible job, too: That’s why they do not want families to be allowed to choose. Given a choice, 70,000 low-income Florida families are saying “No” to the monopoly. If more families are allowed to choose, more are going to tell the cartel to pound sand, thus putting its members at a higher risk of being forced to work for market wages.

And let’s remember who these families and children are: 100 percent low-income, 75 percent minority, 60 percent single-parent families, heavily immigrant black and brown families earning on average about half of the median income.

Underpaid, you might say.

Ricochet writes on a subversive conspiracy to provide good education. It comes from HillsdaleCollege.

I’ve been reluctant to write about Hillsdale’s conspiracy to educate our K-12 children, for fear of betraying one of the most effective schemes to restore the Republic ever devised by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

But, since public education is a perpetual topic of debate here among the center-right (see here, here, and here), I thought readers might like to know about my kids’ public charter school, which teaches a classical curriculum provided by Hillsdale College. Yes, that Hillsdale. The Hillsdale of Ricochet’s own Paul Rahe, the online courses on The Constitution and The Great Books, Imprimis, and the most excellent Hillsdale Dialogue interviews by Hugh Hewitt of President Larry Arnn and other members of the faculty.

When my daughter began her career at The Vanguard School as a freshman, we didn’t even know the curriculum was provided by Hillsdale. We only knew that Vanguard was the top-performing high school in Colorado as measured by standardized test scores, college attendance by graduates, and scholarship earnings of its graduates. Vanguard’s first graduating class of 22 students earned over two million dollars in scholarships.

We were also unaware that the school appears to be a job-placement program for Hillsdale graduates, who have been, uniformly, some of the best teachers (and most decent people) from whom my daughter has ever had the privilege of learning. And since she’s been educated in charter schools since 3rd grade, that’s saying something.

What does $6,000 per pupil of tax funding (roughly the going rate in Colorado) buy you? Allow me to share just a sampling of the freshman reading list (see a complete listing for all grades here): …

Roger Simon says patriotism is not the last refuge of scoundrels, it is global warming.

Samuel Johnson had it wrong when he famously said that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels!”

“Global warming is the last refuge of scoundrels!”

(Or “climate change” or “extreme weather” or “bad storms” or whatever the euphemism du jour happens to be.)

Of course, the good doctor can be excused, opining as he did in the late 18th century, long before Al of Gore emerged from a massage parlor to warn of us of impending ecological doom if we didn’t mend our ways (and start some lucrative carbon offset funds that would net him millions, or is it billions, before they disappeared in a haze of corruption somewhere in the bowels of a Beijing bank, so help me Al Jazeera).

But never fear — climate change is back, this time on the back of our president, who has emerged not from a massage parlor but from the golf course — where else? — to guide us into the promised land of clean energy.  According to — where else? — the New York Times: …

Jonathan Tobin has good news for polar bears and bad news for algore. 

That some of Al Gore’s global warming predictions turned out to be bogus is no longer much of a surprise. As far back as seven years ago, a British court ruled that Gore’s Oscar-winning environmentalist documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, contained several errors and exaggerations that illustrated the alarmist spirit that motivated the filmmaker. But the news about nature contradicting another one of the former vice president’s predictions should not so much encourage skeptics about global warming theories as inspire both sides in this controversy to lower their voices and to be a little less sanguine about computer models, whether they predict warming or cooling.

The report in yesterday’s Daily Mail concerns the extent of the ice cap covering the Arctic. Gore had warned in 2007 while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that within seven years the ice cap would vanish in summer. However, satellite photographs confirm that not only has the ice not vanished, in the last two years it has increased somewhere between 43 and 62 percent since 2012. It turns out that in that time some 1.715 million square kilometers of the Arctic are now covered by ice that were water during the 2012 presidential campaign.

Does this mean that global warning is a myth? Not necessarily. Scientists say 2012 was a year of “freak weather” and that the cooling since then is a regression to the mean rather than a complete reversal of past warming trends that some say remain in place in the long term. But since the evidence shows that the ice cap is larger than at any point since 2006, it’s certainly worth noting. …

Here’s the Daily Mail article.

… The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and IceDataCenter, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.

This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.

Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.

The satellite images published here are taken from a further authoritative source, the University of Illinois’s Cryosphere project.

They show that as well as becoming more extensive, the ice has grown more concentrated, with the purple areas – denoting regions where the ice pack is most dense – increasing markedly.

Crucially, the ice is also thicker, and therefore more resilient to future melting. Professor Andrew Shepherd, of LeedsUniversity, an expert in climate satellite monitoring, said yesterday: ‘It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.

‘It seems that an unusually cool summer in 2013 allowed more ice to survive through to last winter. This means that the Arctic sea ice pack is thicker and stronger than usual, and this should be taken into account when making predictions of its future extent.’ …