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December 2017

EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Does Trump Threaten Science? Part 1 By Peter W. Wood

By on December 18th, 2017

The American Association of University Professors has issued a short thunderclap of a report accusing President Trump of undermining the natural sciences. By itself, this would be pretty bad, but according to the AAUP, Trump’s hatred for science extends by means of foreign policy to damaging intellectual inquiry, economic prosperity, and human health worldwide, and maybe also planetary survival. This sort of breathless denunciation may be the sort of thing one expects from soapbox speakers at Climate Change rallies, but the AAUP usually aims a little higher.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/16/does-trump-threaten-science/

This is first of three essays in [read Part II here]which I will examine the background, meaning, and import of what the AAUP has done in “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom.” In this part I present the historical context, namely the left’s attempt to brand conservatives in general as “anti-science.”

The AAUP’s route to this destination is the claim that science is at risk.

On this general point I and my organization, the National Association of Scholars (NAS), actually agree with the AAUP. We disagree, however, on a few details. Is the patient at risk of drowning or incineration? Should we assist the drowning man with a life preserver or a 200 pound anvil? Is the conflagration to be met with a fire extinguisher or a good soaking in kerosene?

I exaggerate perhaps a little. Science doesn’t really face mortal danger. No one is trying to kill it, and even if the Armies of Darkness were laying siege to all the shrines of science from Aristotle to Newton, and Francis Bacon to Stephen Hawking, science as an enterprise would continue. Darwin and Einstein wouldn’t vanish, and people would still attempt to plumb the mysteries of DNA, exo-planets, and superconductors. The thirst for knowledge cannot be drowned or burnt to cinders. Moreover, the NAS and the AAUP do agree substantially on a key point: one threat to the integrity of scientific inquiry is the politicization of science.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Does Trump Threaten Science? Part 2 By Peter W. Wood

By on December 18th, 2017

On December 7—a date presumably chosen because it is Pearl Harbor Day and thus resonates with general alarm—the American Association of University Professors issued a thirteen-page statement, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom.” The aim of the statement is to call out President Trump in particular and conservatives in general for their “anti-science” attitudes and policies. In Part I of this three-part essay, I gave the historical background to the popular leftist attack on conservatives for their “anti-science” positions. In Part II, I take a closer look at what “anti-science” really means. https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/17/does-trump-threaten-science-part-2/

Passions and Padlocks

In principle, science padlocks political passions in a cage from which they cannot escape to disrupt experiments or analysis. But that principle is often violated, and it also turns out not even to be all that good as a principle.

Sometimes those political passions protect science from running off the rails. Our rules that prevent involuntary human experimentation, for example, are grounded in respect for human life and dignity, not in science. Science pursued entirely as a quest for knowledge has no capacity to distinguish right from wrong. Curing a disease and creating a new disease are indistinguishable as far as the ends of science go. We rely on our human passions and non-scientific human reasoning to prevent science from going off in malign directions, and we rely on politics to give organization and force to those positive passions.

But once having granted the legitimacy of some non-scientific principles to govern the aims and uses of science, where do we stop? This is the deep question lurking behind most of the political contention over science.

Fracking. There is scant evidence that hydraulic fracturing is dangerous to humans or to the environment, yet politicians in some blue states, including New York, have banned it. Their position is “anti-science” plain and simple, though few would openly use that term. The opponents of fracking act on an irrational fear—though again, few would own up to its irrationality. Instead they would spin a web of “what ifs” and “maybes.” Is this this a case where an irrational fear should be given weight in light of a larger non-scientific principle? It is hard to say what that principle would be. Some prominent members of the movement avow their hostility to the extraction of any hydrocarbons from the earth on the grounds that growing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere pose a danger to health and safety. This indeed is a principle but one that stands on conjectures, hypotheses, and models that have not been treated kindly by the accumulating facts.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mueller goes over the cliff By J.R. Dunn

By on December 18th, 2017

With the news that his people illegally obtained the Trump transition emails – many of them having no conceivable bearing on his “inquiry” — Robert Mueller’s investigation proceeds even further into disintegration.

This is not at all how it was supposed to turn out. Hillary, the DNC, and the #NeverTrumpers no doubt hoped that the special counsel would result in the ouster of Donald Trump, or at least the crippling of his administration. For his part, Mueller very likely foresaw a few easy convictions and the humiliation of a president followed by the customary best-selling book, lucrative lecture tour, and a secure place in the pantheon of left-wing heroes somewhere between Woodward, Bernstein, and Valerie Plame.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Mueller’s effort lurches unstoppably toward the abyss, while the counsel himself more and more closely resembles Captain Edward John Smith, standing rooted on the bridge while the iceberg glides inevitably closer.

The Mueller team’s lunge into criminality reveals exactly how desperate they’ve become. (and despite what you may have heard from Our Loyal Media, seizing those emails was in fact a crime – presidential transition materials remain private by federal statute. Mueller never should have been allowed near those messages.) Soon enough, they’ll be accused of more crimes than anybody they’re investigating

Even if Mueller were somehow to stumble across actual wrongdoing, the voting public would never, at this point, believe it. Donald Trump would have had to have been smuggling Russian nukes into New York on behalf of Czar Vlad to justify the activities of Mueller, Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Ohr, and company. Thanks to arrogance and his willingness to hire every Clinton zombie in the federal bureaucracy, Mueller is looking at a wrecked reputation, if not the opportunity to model an orange jumpsuit. (This, unlikely though it may seem, is in no way an impossibility, since Mueller clearly has no control over his staff and no idea what tricks they’ve been pulling, or what they might pull tomorrow.)

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Palestinians’ Lie and Count on Your Ignorance By Dan Calic

By on December 18th, 2017

In the Arab-Israel conflict, one issue which rises above every other is the accuracy of what is presented. The Palestinians are relying on people not knowing history in order to advance their narrative. Israel on the other hand is relying on people knowing history. From where I sit, over the past two or three decades, it appears most people do not know history very well. Thus, the Palestinian narrative has gained popularity and has shaped much of public opinion.

What’s especially troubling is that the mainstream media has adopted most of the Palestinian propaganda, or seems to sympathize with it. Sadly, the days of objective news reporting appear to be gone. Today’s reporting has pretty much turned into op-eds, rather than simple straightforward news.

Regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, we hear noble words such as “just solution,” “dignity,” “peace,” etc. on a regular basis. Who has fault with these?

Yet, if this conflict ever stands a chance of being resolved, isn’t it incumbent upon the world to know the actual facts and to stand for the truth, so these noble goals actually apply to its resolution?

If so, we need to understand whose narrative reflects the truth and whose are false. For this we need to unpack what we frequently hear and apply a litmus test.

For example:

CLAIM: Palestinians are an ethnically unique people or nationality

The Facts:
The Palestinians are Arabs. They are a mix of Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrian, etc. Several hundred thousand of them were displaced, many by choice, as result of the 1948 and 1967 wars. In both wars, the goal of the Arab nations was to destroy the Jewish state. They failed. Eventually their tactics changed. Not that destroying Israel militarily was dropped, it remains their goal. However, in 1964 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), was formed for the specific purpose of destroying the Jewish state of Israel.

After the devastating defeat in the Six Day War, and the refusal of the surrounding Arab nations to absorb the displaced Arabs, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat embarked on a campaign to bring their plight to the world stage. Part of his effort included calling them “Palestinians.” This took root and the world bought into calling them Palestinians to this day.

Answer to the claim: FALSE

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Why I Quit Teaching By David Solway

By on December 18th, 2017

Some years back, I decided I had to quit the teaching profession to which I had dedicated half my life. The modern academy, I felt, was so far gone that restoration was no longer possible. Indeed, I now believe that complete collapse is the only hope for the future, but as Woody Allen said about death, I’d rather not be there when it happens.

Three reasons determined my course of action. For one thing, administration had come to deal less with academic issues and more with rules of conduct and punitive codes of behavior, as if it were a policing body rather than an arm of the teaching profession. Woe betide the (male) student accused of sexual assault or misconduct; the administration will convene an extra-judicial tribunal to punish or expel the accused, often with a low burden of proof. It will find ways to shut down conservative speakers. It will browbeat faculty and students to attend sensitivity training sessions on matters of race and gender. It will strike task forces to deal with imaginary issues like campus rape culture and propose draconian measures to contain a raging fantasy. The administration is now beset by two basic compulsions: to expand its reach at the expense of the academic community and to ensure compliance with the puritanical norms of the day. I thought it prudent to take early retirement rather than wait for the guillotine to descend.

For another, colleagues were increasingly buying into the politically correct mantras circulating in the cultural climate. The dubious axioms of “social justice” and equality of outcome, the postmodern campaign against the Western tradition of learning, and the Marxist critique of capitalism now superseded the original purpose of the university to seek out truth, to pursue the impartial study of historical events and movements, and to remain faithful to the rigors of disciplined scholarship. Most of my colleagues were rote members of the left-liberal orthodoxy: pro-Islam, pro-unfettered immigration, pro-abortion, pro-feminist, anti-conservative, anti-Zionist, and anti-white. Departmental committees were now basing their hiring protocols not on demonstrated merit, but on minority and gender identities, leading to marked pedagogical decline. Professional hypocrisy could be glaring. Case in point: The most recent hire speaking at a department meeting was a white woman advocating for more brown and black faces on staff – though, as a recent hire, she had never thought of stepping aside in favor of minority candidates vying for her position. In any event, faculties were and are progressively defined by firebrands on the one hand and soyboys on the other – partisans rather than pedagogues, plaster saints all. I found I could no longer respect the majority of people I had to work with.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Resistance’ Members, Including Former Obama Officials, Threaten to ‘Take to the Streets’ if Trump Fires Mueller By Debra Heine

By on December 18th, 2017

In what looked like a coordinated messaging campaign over the weekend, the organized left threatened to “take to the streets” if and when President Trump fires Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

MarchForTruth was the “central organizing account” for the 150+ cities that demonstrated on June 3, 2017, “to call for urgency & transparency on #TrumpRussia.”

Soros-backed MoveOn.Org is organizing “emergency ‘Nobody is Above the Law’ rallies around the country” in the event Trump fires Mueller.

The anti-Trumpers have been in a lather over the possibility that the president could fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller before Christmas, after Congress leaves Washington for the winter recess.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that he has no plans to fire Mueller, but that didn’t stop Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) from repeating the “rumor” on California’s KQED News on Friday.

“The rumor on the Hill when I left yesterday was that the president was going to make a significant speech at the end of next week. And on December 22, when we are out of D.C., he was going to fire Robert Mueller,” Speier said.

Some prominent members of the Resistance spread the message this weekend, including President Obama’s former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. Attorney Walter Shaub, who resigned in July, was one of the first to tweet about “taking the streets” on Friday.

Shaub blocked everyone who reacted negatively to his hysterical tweet — including this writer, who wondered how he had managed to miss Hillary Clinton’s many ethical lapses while she was secretary of state (when he was Obama’s ethics czar).

Shaub later tweeted: “This tweet apparently triggered the tiki torch crowd. My theory is people with violent tendencies will hear violence in the language of peaceful protest. But you literally have to agree to the policy of nonviolence and complying with all law enforcement orders to sign up, so…”

Because everyone who finds him ridiculous is apparently a white supremacist.

Left-wing celebs soon jumped on the bandwagon.

Rob Reiner (aka “Meathead”) on Saturday morning urged his followers to prepare to “take the streets.”

George Takei encouraged “massive and sustained protests.”

Attorney and law professor Seth Abramson went on a long Twitter rant over the rumored firing, calling it a “constitutional crisis” and “actual emergency.”

Naturally, he too called upon his followers to “take to the streets.”

Worst of all, Eric Holder, Obama’s disgraced former attorney general, also called for massive protests if Trump ends the witch hunt:
CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Another Escalation in the Judicial War What will happen when a Senate majority votes in unison against every presidential nominee? By Ilya Shapiro

By on December 18th, 2017

With last week’s confirmations of Don Willett and James Ho to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, President Trump set a record for most appellate judges confirmed in a president’s first year. Twelve judges have joined the federal circuit courts in 2017, beating by one the record previously held by Presidents Kennedy and Nixon. The quality of these new appointees is exceptional, with seven having clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court and six appearing on Mr. Trump’s impressive list of potential high-court candidates.

Add Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation, and that’s quite a year. Even after Candidate Trump released his list of prospective justices, conservative legal elites were not at all confident that President Trump would—or would be able to—execute a concerted plan to put a stamp on the judicial branch. Credit goes to White House counsel Don McGahn, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley —and to the president, who deferred to their legal expertise and political strategy.

At the same time, with only six confirmed district-court judges, Mr. Trump’s total number of judicial appointments stands at 19, not even close to a record. While President Obama didn’t prioritize judges in his first term, George W. Bush filled 28 slots on the federal bench his rookie year and Bill Clinton 27 (plus Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ). Ronald Reagan had 40 lower-court judges confirmed his first year, along with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Many executive-branch positions remain vacant because Mr. Trump has not put forth nominees. Not so for judges. With 58 judicial nominations, Mr. Trump is second to George W. Bush at this point. Instead, the problem is that Senate Democrats have demanded “cloture” votes on all but one of the nominees. That is, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has forced votes on whether to proceed to a final vote, each of which eats up 30 hours of Senate floor time. That’s been the case even for district-court nominees, the closest of whose confirmation votes was 79-16 (the nays notably including potential 2020 presidential contenders Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren ).

Not surprisingly, the votes on most of the circuit judges were much closer. Ralph Erickson sailed through to the Eighth Circuit 95-1, with only Ms. Warren in the negative. Kevin Newsom of the 11th Circuit somehow drew 16 Democratic ayes, for a 66-31 tally. But the others have faced a blue wall. With the occasional exception of Democrats representing states Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly, the votes were essentially party-line. While the average Bush and Obama circuit nominee received about 90% of senators’ vote—many confirmed unanimously or by voice vote—Mr. Trump’s have averaged less than 60%, and have all been subjected to both cloture and roll-call votes. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats Against Tax Reform Unlike the past, the GOP has had no help passing these tax cuts.

By on December 18th, 2017

Republicans are poised this week to cut taxes for most American workers and businesses, fulfilling a core campaign promise. But before the House and Senate vote, it’s worth noting that they may do so without a single Democrat in support. How has the party of the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s and the co-writers of the Reagan reform in the 1980s become implacably opposed to pro-growth tax policy?

A little history shows how remarkable this is. The Kennedy marginal tax-rate cuts were pushed by White House economist Walter Heller and powered the economic expansion for another half-decade. In the 1981 tax debate, William Brodhead of Michigan and other Ways and Means Democrats offered an amendment that cut the top rate on investment income to 50% from 70% in the first year.

The 1986 tax reform was driven as much by Democrats as by Ronald Reagan. Dick Gephardt and Dan Rostenkowski helped move it through the House, and Bill Bradley was a leading architect in the Senate. Thirty-three Democrats voted for the bill that passed the Senate 74-23 and cut the top marginal income tax rate to 28%.

Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993, but after his re-election he compromised with Newt Gingrich in 1997 to cut the capital-gains tax rate to 20% from 28%. That drove investment and growth through the rest of the decade. Even as recently as 2001, a dozen Democrats in the Senate and 28 in the House compromised with George W. Bush to cut the top income-tax rate to 35%.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah’s billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House’s desire for a nuclear deal with Iran. By Josh Meyer

By on December 18th, 2017

Part I
A global threat emerges
How Hezbollah turned to trafficking cocaine and laundering money through used cars to finance its expansion.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

They followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash, and traced what they believed to be the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

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