RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Kick it while it’s down,” say proponents of fossil-fuel divestment. That’s the new slogan, drilled and refined recently in the wake of plunging oil prices. Since fracking matured to economic competitiveness, the price of oil has been cut in half. In the last six months, the S&P 500 Energy Index has lost more than 20 percent of its value.

Today kicks off Global Divestment Day, a two-day climate-action extravaganza at colleges, universities, city halls, and public parks. At Rutgers, students are staging an “oil spill die-in.” Swarthmore students have arranged a divestment teach-in. Grandparents will gather at a hospital in Wisconsin, asking the health-care center to “divest for a grandkid.” Smith students have planned a Valentine’s Day party asking the college to “break up with fossil fuels.” One theater in Belgium will host an “action speed-dating event” for people to find fellow “rebel friends” to join in civil disobedience later that evening.

The sneers of the gatekeepers notwithstanding, a college degree isn’t a prerequisite for the presidency.

‘Were he to become president,” Howard Dean jeered this morning on MSNBC, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker “would be the first president in many generations that did not have a college degree.” This, Dean concluded was a disgrace. “He’s never finished,” he spluttered, and “the issue here is not just an issue of dancing around the question of evolution for political reasons, the issue is how well educated is this guy? And that’s a problem.”

Thus was one of the most successful politicians of recent years condemned for lack of a certificate.

It is unlikely that most of Walker’s critics will be as openly vicious as is Howard Dean, but, if Walker continues his march toward the presidency, Dean’s is an argument that is almost certain to be deployed elsewhere. Already, a search for the words “dropout” and “Scott Walker” reveals the taunt to be a favorite of left-leaning sites that are angry with Walker for his education reform; while Twitter has a sizeable contingent of users who are convinced that the republic will fall if the “uneducated” “dropout” “loser” gets anywhere near the reins of federal power. (An amusing number of these accounts have “Dr.” or “Ph.D” or “university” in their handles. The educated doth protest too much, methinks.)

It’s not about science. It’s about the culture war.

At an event in London on trade policy, Scott Walker was asked about evolution. “It’s almost a tradition now,” the moderator said, to ask “senior Republicans” if they are “comfortable with the idea of evolution.”

“I’m going to punt on that one as well,” the Wisconsin governor replied. “That’s a question a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or another.”It wasn’t a great answer, though there have been worse ones.

But it was also a bad question, even though it’s a favorite among liberal journalists in the U.S., and apparently across the pond, too.

That’s not to say Walker is wrong. It’s a pretty stupid issue to get worked up about when considering a presidential candidate. The number of public policies that hinge on whether you believe in evolution — or which theory of evolution you subscribe to — are few to none. A creationist can be brilliant on economics and foreign affairs, while a secular humanist atheist can be an addlepated nimrod on the same subjects.

That’s because the evolution question really isn’t about evolution at all. On the surface, it’s about the culture war. To borrow a phrase from the campus left, Darwinism is used to “otherize” certain people of traditional faith — and the politicians who want their vote. Many of the same people who bleat with fear over the dangers of genetically modified food, fracking, vaccines, or nuclear power and coo with childlike awe over the benefits of non-traditional medicines will nonetheless tell you they are for “science” when in fact they are simply against a certain kind of Christian having any say about anything.

For by Wise Counsel, Thou Shalt Make Thy War (Proverbs 24:6)

Always, in core matters of war and peace, timing is everything. For Israel, finally made aware that U.S.-led diplomacy with Iran never had a chance, all remaining strategic options are starkly polar. In essence, either the IDF launches a last-minute defensive strike – what international law would call “anticipatory self-defense”[1] – or the beleaguered mini-state prepares to settle in for a protracted process of mutual deterrence and (hopefully) war-free coexistence.

Escalation Dominance

Should Israel decide to decline any residual preemption options, and get ready instead for reliable and extended dissuasion of its newly nuclear adversary, certain corresponding decisions would also need to be made. Among other things, these imperatively prompt decisions would concern an ever-expanding and potentially interminable role for multilayered ballistic missile defense,[2] and a useful discontinuance of Israel’s deliberate nuclear ambiguity.[3]To be sure, it could soon become necessary for Jerusalem to convince Tehran, that Israel’s undisclosed nuclear forces are (1) substantially secure from all enemy first-strike attacks,[4] and (2) entirely capable of penetrating enemy active defenses.

I’m coming out of a week-and-a-half of sub-par health, and playing catch-up on the last few days’ news. Much of it is just new trees in the same old forest: the remorseless retreat of American power in the world – ie, “Yemen Rebels Seize U.S. Embassy Vehicles As Diplomats Flee”.

But some of it is almost too cute. In Paris, the street artist Combo has been beaten up by four “young people” who objected to his “Co-Exist” poster:

Combo declined to discuss the identity of his assailants. “It would only add fuel to the fire,” he told the French newspaper…

During a residency in Bayreuth, he grew his beard and started wearing the traditional Muslim dress—not because he was increasingly attracted to a more fundamentalist version of Islam, but, again, to disrupt established codes. To his friends asking him whether he was “going to jihad” in Lebanon, he answered, “I’m going to ji-art.”

“First I thought I was French, but I quickly understood that I was Arab, then beur (French slang for second and third generation North African), now I’m told I’m Muslim,” Combo continued, talking of the French des-integration.

On Monday I wrote about a curious British reaction to the Charlie Hebdo massacre:

The other day Wiltshire Police went to a local newsagent and demanded that, in the interests of “community cohesion”, he hand over the names of every customer who bought a copy of Charlie Hebdo… This is Mother England in 2015: You can still read samizdat literature, but your name will be entered in a state database.

The Daily Mail’s Amanda Williams reports today that this was not a one-off idiosyncracy by some bozo coppers in one county, but came from the very top:

National Anti-Terror Unit Handed List Of Charlie Hebdo Stockists To Local Forces Who Then Went Round Demanding To Know Who Bought Copies

The man responsible for this decision is Sir Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, who holds the additional responsibility of “national police lead for preventing extremism”. A Chief Commissar for Preventing Extremism is a title that not so long ago one would have had to go to Eastern Europe or a banana republic to find. But it is now held by a British policeman. Nevertheless, Sir Peter would like us to know that he thinks, somewhere way down the chain of command, some of the lads may have gotten a little carried away:

Anti-terror units handed local police officers the names of British newsagents who stocked the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in the wake of the Paris attacks.

But the decision by some forces to then visit the outlets and quiz shopkeepers about who bought the publication was ‘overzealous and unnecessary’, Britain’s anti-terror police chief has said.

Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and national police lead for preventing extremism, said he was now urgently clarifying guidance to all UK forces.

Today’s funniest news item comes to us courtesy of the Washington Post. Here’s the headline:

As Scott Walker Mulls White House Bid, Questions Linger Over College Exit [1]

Not a side-splitter, I admit, but I did savor the humor. Listen:

MILWAUKEE — Scott Walker was gone. Dropped out. And in the spring of his senior year.
In 1990, that news stunned [stunned!] his friends at Marquette University [2]. Walker, the campus’s suit-wearing, Reagan-loving politico — who enjoyed the place so much that he had run for student body president — had left without graduating.

Gosh. I mean, you don’t say. This, you will have noticed, is the tone that newspapers reserve for Serious Revelations. The short sentences. Staccato. Ernest Hemingway meets Bob Woodward.

It’s the sort of prose that is wheeled out when an 18 ½ minute gap [3] is discovered in the president’s secret tapes of his Oval Office conversations. This is serious, possums, pay attention!

But what did WaPo have for us? That Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin and likely GOP presidential candidate, decided to leave college without graduating.

Wow. And they meant it to sting.

As damaging revelations go, this does not even rise to the non-story that Mitt Romney had transported a family pet on the roof of his car. (By the way, the pooch, as Ann Romney recalled [4], “loved it.”)

No, the news that Scott Walker concluded that he had better things to do than hang about the ivied halls of Marquette University is about on a par with the revelation that Harry S. Truman had no middle name or that he had been a tailor, not a swell.

My own feeling — and I suspect that it is a feeling that will be shared by many Americans (though perhaps not those in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Berkeley, California) — is that, given the corrupt nature of American academia, the less exposed a presidential candidate is to so-called higher education, the better.

Would you like to know why the Washington Post commissioned this flaccid hit job? All is revealed in this sentence:

Since 1993, [Scott Walker] has run 11 races for state legislature, county executive and governor — including a highly unusual recall election in 2012 — and he has won them all.

Yikes. The GOP just might run someone who is not an off-the-rack, ready-to-wear guaranteed loser like John McCain or Jeb Bush. Maybe, just maybe, they have wised up. Maybe they will run someone of demonstrated political savvy who is a genuine but non-scary conservative and is by all accounts a likable chap. What then?

The faint acrid scent you discern rising from this fetid little piece of partisan slobber is the smell of desperation. That, of course, is what makes it funny. Scott Walker left college and got a job. Stop the presses! Maybe the WaPo gumshoes or Hillary’s (or Jeb’s) “opposition research” will discover that he bullied some creep in second grade or that he drank a beer when he was 18. Jeesh.

And so it begins: in the pages of the Washington Post, this pathetic “hit piece” by David Fahrenthold on Scott Walker of Wisconsin — a “human interest” story that has only one purpose: to marginalize the governor and establish for the coastal Democrats that he is not one of “us,” just as the WaPo story about Romney and his dog did. The headline alone gives the game away: As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit.

We can’t have “questions lingering” about a man who might one day be president now, can we? So here we go with this thoroughly nasty piece of work that brings shame and disgrace on both its writer and the newspaper:

In 1990, that news stunned his friends at Marquette University. Walker, the campus’s suit-wearing, Reagan-loving politico — who enjoyed the place so much that he had run for student body president — had left without graduating.

Another Obama foreign policy success.

Islamic State insurgents took control on Thursday of large parts of the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, threatening an air base where U.S. Marines are training Iraqi troops, officials said.

Al-Baghdadi, about 85 km (50 miles) northwest of Ramadi in Anbar province, has been besieged for months by the radical Sunni Islamist militants who captured vast swathes of northern and western Iraq last year.

Militants attacked al-Baghdadi from two directions earlier in the day and then advanced on the town, intelligence sources and officials in the Jazeera and Badiya operations commands said.

The officials said another group of insurgents then attacked the heavily-guarded Ain al-Asad air base five km southwest of the town, but were unable to break into it.

About 320 U.S. Marines are training members of the Iraqi 7th Division at the base, which has been struck by mortar fire on at least one previous occasion since December.

A new study is causing shockwaves amongst the climate alarmism community.

According to Slate.com, we are about to enter the “The United States of Megadrought.” The article shows the following graphs of historical, current, and projected moisture balances in the Central Plains and Southwest regions (negative numbers indicate dry conditions, with the magnitude indicating the degree of dryness).Look closely at these plots. First off, both regions were generally drier in the past than over the last several decades. In addition, there appears to be no clear anthropogenic climate change signature in either of these datasets. All we appear to be seeing of late is variability well within the historical record.

Yet the climate modeling efforts suggest we are about to go off the megadrought cliff in the near future. Who knows? Predictions cannot be refuted until they fail to pass. But given the poor performance of climate models to date, we should be very skeptical of any climate modeling projections — and we certainly should not be basing any policy on the models.