May 24, 2015

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George Freidman of Strafor provides an overview of the world’s chaos.

A pretentious title requires a modest beginning. The world has increasingly destabilized and it is necessary to try to state, as clearly as possible, what has happened and why. This is not because the world is uniquely disorderly; it is that disorder takes a different form each time, though it is always complex.

To put it simply, a vast swath of the Eurasian landmass (understood to be Europe and Asia together) is in political, military and economic disarray. Europe and China are struggling with the consequences of the 2008 crisis, which left not only economic but institutional challenges. Russia is undergoing a geopolitical crisis in Ukraine and an economic problem at home. The Arab world, from the Levant to Iran, from the Turkish border through the Arabian Peninsula, is embroiled in politically destabilizing warfare. The Western Hemisphere is relatively stable, as is the Asian Archipelago. But Eurasia is destabilizing in multiple dimensions.

We can do an infinite regression to try to understand the cause, but let’s begin with the last systemic shift the world experienced: the end of the Cold War.

The Repercussions of the Soviet Collapse

The Cold War was a frozen conflict in one sense: The Soviet Union was contained in a line running from the North Cape of Norway to Pakistan. There was some movement, but relatively little. When the Soviet Union fell, two important things happened. First, a massive devolution occurred, freeing some formally independent states from domination by the Soviets and creating independent states within the former Soviet Union. As a result, a potentially unstable belt emerged between the Baltic and Black seas.

Meanwhile, along the southwestern border of the former Soviet Union, the demarcation line of the Cold War that generally cut through the Islamic world disappeared. Countries that were locked into place by the Cold War suddenly were able to move, and internal forces were set into motion that would, in due course, challenge the nation-states created after World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire that had been frozen by the Cold War. …

 

 

Erik Wemple is still after an answer from ABC News.

… After Politico’s Dylan Byers published his story on George Stephanopoulos’s donations to the Clinton Foundation, Washington Free Beacon staffers — including editor in chief Matthew Continetti and digital managing editor Andrew Stiles — tweeted out denunciations of ABC News, saying that they’d inquired about this matter the night before. …

… ABC News has failed to respond to numerous inquiries from the Erik Wemple Blog about this move. In the most recent e-mail, we asked ABC News spokeswoman Heather Riley whether the network had logged any run-ins with the Washington Free Beacon that would contextualize its alleged behavior. No response just yet. …

 

 

Mark Steyn has Stephie comments with the idea we turn it around and have Karl Rove hired by ABC.

Picture it the other way around:

Karl Rove is hired as an anchorman by ABC News. Whoa, you can stop right there. We’re already in the realm of the fantastical, even though it is, objectively, exactly the same as hiring Stephanopoulos.

But Rove says not to worry, my partisan days are behind me. I’m strictly Mister Even-Handed Newsman now.

And then he spends ten years as a high-profile pitchman for the George W and Jeb Bush Foundation.

And, when he interviews some guy who’s written a book on all the dodgy donations to the Jeb Bush Foundation, he doesn’t mention that he’s a member of it.

The only interesting question is whether ABC knew about all this, and colluded with Stephanopoulos in perpetrating a fraud on their audience.

As for Stephanopoulos’ regret that he didn’t go “the extra mile” in disclosure, the loyal Clinton flunkey didn’t go the initial inch-and-a-half. At the very least, he should be dropped from all election coverage between now and November 2016. There’s plenty of other stuff he could do – Kim’n’ Kanye, Bruce transitioning – where his faithful service to his longtime benefactors is of less obvious advantage.

 

 

Jennifer Rubin turns here attention to the Clinton/Blumenthal links. 

The discovery that Hillary Clinton received some 25 memos from Clinton family confidante and hatchet man Sidney Blumenthal is causing another round of angst for Democrats. It should. Why are the memos a problem?

1. They show the degree to which Hillary Clinton defied the Obama administration edicts. Told she couldn’t hire him through the front door, she let him in the back. Perhaps the Obama team will conclude she was a disloyal and problematic employee and cease making her life easier (e.g. by refusing to investigate unreported conflicts of interest).

2. Blumenthal had no foreign policy expertise and yet his unvetted memos were given credence. Clinton’s judgment in relying on him is troubling; her decision to share his views with State Department officials is worse.

3. Blumenthal was engaged in a massive conflict of interest since he was working with people attempting to do business in Libya. If Clinton knew, her behavior in circulating the memos was egregious. If not, her recklessness is once again apparent. …

 

 

Maybe there’s hope for higher ed. The University of Texas’ new president rejects the offer of a “vulgar” salary. Taxprof has the story.

Gregory Fenves recently got a big promotion, from provost to president of the University of Texas at Austin. A raise came with it. Instead of his current base of about $425,000, he was offered $1 million.

And he rejected it — as too much. … He suggested, and agreed to, $750,000.

That’s hardly chump change. But in the context of the shockingly lucrative deals that have become almost commonplace among college presidents, the sum — or, more precisely, the sentiment behind it, — is worthy of note and praise. 

Another of those deals came to light late Tuesday night, when The Wall Street Journal reported that YaleUniversity had paid its former president, Richard Levin, an “additional retirement benefit” of $8.5 million after he retired from his post in 2013. The Journal characterized this as an “unprecedented lump-sum payment” for a college president and noted that Levin’s annual compensation package during his final years at Yale was already over $1 million. …

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