December 21, 2014

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Sultan Knish writes on post-truth America.

Next month Americans will experience the fifteenth anniversary of the time that the President of the United States shook his finger at the country and informed it, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never.”

Bill Clinton was lying. But the lie was more significant than the thing that he was lying about.

When the lie came crashing down, Clinton and his defenders deconstructed the English language, questioning the meaning of every word in his sentence rather than admit that the lie was a lie.

Given a choice between telling the truth or challenging the definitions of such words as “sex” and “is”, they decided to burn their dictionary.

Clinton’s antics set the stage for a current administration which can never be caught in a lie because it’s lying all the time. Obama and his people don’t just lie, they lie about the lies and then they lie about those lies. Bringing them in to testify just clogs the filters with an extra layer of lies. …

… Obama doesn’t simply lie. He exists in a truth-free zone. He doesn’t stumble with any construction as clumsy as Kerry’s “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.” He does not start with truthful facts. His starting point is in an imaginary territory. It ends in an imaginary territory. If the two imaginary territories are different, it scarcely matters because neither place was ever real.

When he came into office Obama insisted that we had to pivot to fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan even though it was no longer in Afghanistan. He went on claiming victory over an enemy that didn’t exist while dismissing ISIS as a jayvee team even when it was capturing entire cities in Iraq.

These weren’t mere lies. This was a foreign policy being conducted in an imaginary territory. It was Wag the Dog being played out in real life. But then again what is real around Obama anyway?

Bill Clinton lied. Obama tells stories. None of these stories have anything to do with reality. Lena Dunham’s biography is a peek into a disordered mind that is incapable of grasping the concept of truth. In her world there are no facts, only stories that elicit emotional reactions. Obama’s entire career rests on the same technique of telling stories for emotional effect without any regard for reality.

ObamaCare was an ugly collectivist bureaucratic dinosaur clothed in imaginary stories. The stories about it, about the economy, about the war are still being told. Added to it are new stories about racism. The stories are passionate, compelling and appealing. They are also completely unreal.

Progressives don’t only live in a post-American world; they live in a post-Truth world. A world without facts and without truth is one in which the America that was cannot exist. …

  

 

Speaking of a post-truth world, K. C. Johnson of Duke lacrosse fame has a look at what he calls “UVA’s troubled campus culture.”

James Ceaser recently became the first UVA professor to publicly speak out regarding the deeply unhealthy climate on his campus, exposed by the publication of the now-discredited Rolling Stone article alleging multiple gang rapes at the school. (The sole source for each of these allegations appears to have been “Jackie.”) Ceaser lamented how few people on campus appeared to care about the truth, and instead bowed to the passions of the mob. Events on campus have suggested, Ceaser perceptively observed, that “far from being an end in itself, the truth on our college campuses is now treated as a mere instrument of combat. It is wielded with feigned righteousness when it promotes a preferred cause and then abandoned when it produces the opposite result. In the end, this is the sad message that universities now convey.”

Over the last several weeks, Ceaser has been a voice in the Charlottesville wilderness. The actions of President Teresa Sullivan’s administration—joined by an array of professors and, most disturbingly, by the student newspaper—have provided an almost textbook example of a campus culture gone awry, with a massive rush to judgment compounded by an inability to admit error. …

  

 

And continuing this thread, Ann Coulter wrote a column saying one in five people who write for Rolling Stone are morons.

In response to the total implosion of Rolling Stone’s preposterous story about a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia, the media have reverted to their Soviet-style reporting. They’re not even saying: We’re choosing not to talk about UVA because it’s a side show. It’s more like: UVA? That’s a school?

Not only did the UVA gang rape turn out to be a hoax, but then President Obama’s own Department of Justice completed a six-year study on college rape, and it turns out that instead of 1-in-5 college coeds being raped, the figure is 0.03-in-5.

Less than 1 percent of college students are the victim of a sexual assault — 0.6 percent to be exact — not to be confused with the 20 percent, or “one in five,” claimed by feminists and President Obama.

But neither the DOJ report, nor the UVA rape hoax have dissuaded Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill from pushing their idea that the nation is in the grip of a college rape epidemic.

This week, Gillibrand dismissed the UVA outrage, saying, “Clearly, we don’t know the facts of what did or did not happen in this case.”

Actually, we know quite well what happened in this case. A disturbed young woman invented a fake boyfriend and a fake gang-rape to get attention, and an incompetent journalist acted as her transcriber. It was a total hoax — just like the Duke lacrosse case, the Jamie Leigh Jones case, the Tawana Brawley case, and every other claim of white men committing gang-rape. …

 

 

The Washington Post had an interesting article on the finance industry and how it has become a “black hole” for generations of the best and brightest.

The thing Deborah Jackson remembers from her first interviews at Goldman Sachs is the slogan. It was stamped on the glass doors of the offices in the investment bank’s headquarters just off Wall Street, the lure of the place in two words, eight syllables: “Uncommon capability.”

Jackson joined Goldman in 1980, fresh from business school and steeped in the workings of government and finance. She found crackerjack colleagues and more business than she could handle. She worked in municipal finance, lending money to local governments, hospitals and nonprofits around the country. She flew first class to scout potential deals — “The issue was, can you really be productive if you’re in a tiny seat in the back?” — and when the time came to seal one, she’d welcome clients and their attorneys to Manhattan’s best restaurants.

The clients would bring their spouses and go to shows. Everyone drank good wine. Her favorite place, in the heyday, was the 21 Club, which felt like an Old World library and went heavy on red meat. More than the perks, Jackson loved the work — the shared struggle of smart people trying to help the country, even as they banked big money. “It was all about solving problems,” she said.

Years later, she would come to see it differently, growing disenchanted with an industry she didn’t think was fixing much anymore.

Economic research suggests she was onto something. Wall Street is bigger and richer than ever, the research shows, and the economy and the middle class are worse off for it. …

… It’s not that finance is inherently bad — on the contrary, a well-functioning financial system is critical to a market economy. The problem is, America’s financial system has grown much larger than it should have, based on how well the industry performs.

To understand how and why that is, think of money as water and the financial system as a series of pipes. Ideally, the pipes deliver the water from people who have stockpiled it (investors) to people who want to put it to productive use (entrepreneurs, executives, home buyers, etc.).

Over the past half-century, America’s financial industry built a whole bunch of new pipes. The sector grew six times as fast as the economy overall during the past three decades. Other advanced countries didn’t see anywhere close to that growth in their financial sectors.

Some of America’s growth was driven by Washington. Lawmakers kept encouraging financial innovation, which built a market for smarter investment bankers. They did that by changing the tax code to encourage businesses to hire financial whizzes who could spin ordinary income into certain, preferred types of investment income, and by loosening restrictions on the kinds of financial activities that the titans of Wall Street could engage in.

Extra pipes attracted better plumbers — the more the finance industry grew, the more it tugged at highly educated workers. …

 

 

Kevin Williamson on the sad condition of New York City jails.

In April I wrote about the case of Jerome Murdough, 56, a homeless ex-Marine who was remanded to RikersIsland for attempting to shelter in the stairwell of a Harlem housing project. Murdough was mentally ill, with multiple psychiatric diagnoses and what his mother referred to as “beer problems.” His bail was set bizarrely high for a homeless vagrant — $2,500 — and his mental condition necessitated oversight, with jail authorities ordering that he be checked every 15 minutes. He wasn’t. And neither was his jail cell’s heating system, which malfunctioned, and the abandoned homeless man was baked to death in captivity.

Naturally, nobody did anything wrong. Or so they said.

Thirty-five-year-old Carol Lackner is not a homeless ex-Marine, is not locked up at Rikers Island, and, unlike Murdough, has not had demanded of her bail amounting to more money than she ever is likely to see — or even the $2,500 that kept Murdough behind bars. She was released with no bail at all last week after being charged with falsifying records, filing false reports, and official misconduct. She was supposed to be watching over Murdough, but she neglected her duties, abandoned her post, and, according to prosecutors, lied about it. These are serious crimes. She was offered an indefensible plea deal — a mere misdemeanor — on the condition that she also resign from the New York Department of Corrections. She refused. …

… If Carol Lackner did in fact falsify reports and lie about leaving Jerome Murdough to be baked alive, she should never have been offered a misdemeanor deal, nor should she get away with whatever relatively light punishment she will endure if convicted on her current charges. We can tolerate many things from those invested with the power to do violence on our behalf, but we cannot tolerate lies from them. Carol Lackner, Lois Lerner and a good selection of the leadership at the IRS, corrupt Travis County prosecutor Rosemary Lehmberg (as low a specimen of human grotesquery as public life has to offer) — nobody deserves what goes on at Rikers Island, but if anybody does, that’s who it is. There’s no hole deep enough.

That’s our other national prison scandal: Who isn’t in them.