RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you think the Department of Education is making a mess of the student-loan program, you should see how it manages technology. Recurring failures documented by internal and external auditors have House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz warning that the agency could be Washington’s next cyber-disaster.

The education department doesn’t hold nuclear launch codes. But its vast data trove on student-loan borrowers and their parents—and the nearly $100 billion it disburses in new loans every year—are reason enough to want the bureaucrats to prevent digital intrusions. Mr. Chaffetz says the bureaucracy now holds, among other things, 139 million Social Security numbers in its digital files.

The stakes go well beyond personal privacy. Federal student loans outstanding exceed $1 trillion, and Team Obama is trying to forgive those debts. It would add injury to injury if cyber-fraudsters were able to pile on for a taxpayer plundering. A Tuesday oversight hearing will explore the department’s failure to protect its information from cyber-attack, as well as the conduct of its chief information officer.

Department of Education Inspector General Kathleen Tighe reported in November that her team has been “finding the same deficiencies over and over again” regarding information security. Since 2009 independent auditors “have found persistent IT control deficiencies in key financial systems,” she said.

The 2015 internal audit of information security revealed more problems, including an “inability to detect unauthorized devices connecting to the network.” The IG also flagged “key weaknesses” in “internal intrusion detection and prevention of system penetrations.” Specifically, her team was “able to gain full access to the Department’s network and our access went undetected” by both the contractor overseeing the system and the department’s information office.

Despite rallying the last couple days of the month, world stock markets lost about $7.5 trillion in January, amid fears of global recession. According to analysts, China’s economic growth has slowed to the range of six percent. Keep in mind, however, statistics from authoritarian regimes are suspect. What we do know is that the Shanghai Index is down 22.6% year-to-date. Emerging markets have been battered by falling commodity prices. The MSCI Index is, so far, down 14.9 percent. Brazil and Russia are in recession, if not depression. Europe’s economy is flat-lining, which comes as no surprise given the role of the state in the economy. Economic growth in the U.S. has been anemic – growing at two percent – since the end the “Great Recession” in early 2009. In fact, U.S. GDP growth has not exceeded 2.7% for ten years. Last Friday’s preliminary report on fourth quarter GDP showed growth at 0.7 percent. Free markets have been hamstrung by state intervention (i.e., healthcare, higher taxes, extraordinary low interest rates and increased EPA regulations). It has led to a loss of confidence, and a reduction in forward visibility.

Not even the 2800 delegates to the World Economic Forum in Davos (who, incidentally, flew in on 850 private jets) could lift expectations. Curiously, the theme of this year’s conference, which went from January 19th to the 23rd, was that the world is on the cusp of a fourth industrial revolution. It is generally acknowledged that the first industrial revolution began in England in the late 18th Century and extended into the second half of the 19th. The second, most would agree, began with Henry Ford’s development of the assembly line in early 1920s America. The third, according to The Economist in an April 2012 cover story, is the one we are currently in – artificial intelligence, genetics, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, robotics, etc., the same drivers mentioned two weeks ago in Davos as the fourth. It was not made clear if the business, banking, government and media elites who descended on Davos pulled a Rip Van Winkle, but world economic conditions suggest they haven’t been paying attention. Something is wrong.

The left’s greatest intellectual error is its conviction that the world can be divided into a binary power struggle in which both sides agree on the nature of the struggle, but disagree on the outcome.

For leftists of a certain generation, it was class. Marx began the Communist Manifesto by laying out a primal class struggle throughout human history. For Marxists, everything in the world could be broken down to a class struggle with the wealthy oppressors on one side and the oppressed on the other.

It didn’t matter that this model didn’t fit a reality in which Communists leaders came from wealthy backgrounds and their opponents were just as likely to be poor peasants. To the left, everything is defined by the model. Reality is an inconvenience that is suppressed with gulags and firing squads.

Today the variable is identity politics. Everything must be intersectional. There are those who stand on the right side of history, in favor of abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration. Everyone who isn’t on board is a racist, even if they’re black or Latino, a sexist, even if they’re female, or a homophobe, even if they’re gay. Once again, reality doesn’t matter. The binary struggle is the model for everything.

In more than a decade of writing about museums, first for the New York Times and now for the Wall Street Journal, I’ve reviewed history museums, science museums, political museums, and museums created by eccentric collectors. I’ve visited two museums devoted to neon signs and one to ventriloquists’ dummies, a creation-science museum and a science-fiction museum. I’ve seen human mutations preserved in glass jars and coffee beans sent to Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, a mummified cat and a fragment of Jeremy Bentham’s skin. But I haven’t seen anything quite so strange as the ways in which various Jewish communities in the United States, in Europe, and in Israel have come to depict themselves in museums.

From the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles and the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and the Spertus Museum in Chicago, from the Jewish museums in London, Vienna, Berlin, Istanbul, and Israel to Holocaust museums in more cities than that, there are peculiarities in interpretation and advocacy that demand close examination. The objects on display at such institutions may range from a baseball signed by Sandy Koufax to the important Old Yiddish journal kept by a woman in 17th-century Germany, an excavated London mikveh from the 13th century (just before Jews were expelled from England), and fragments of parchment buried two millennia ago in Dead Sea caves. But all of these disparate instances disclose a surprisingly consistent self-image—one revealingly distinct from anything else in contemporary museum culture.

Before going farther, it is worth thinking briefly about origins. The great museums of the 18th and 19th centuries—the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (1891), the British Museum in London (1753), the Louvre in Paris (1792), the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg (1764), and many others—were encyclopedic in scope and ambition. Born, in part, of an imperial impulse, they aimed to demonstrate the geographical and intellectual range of great national powers by becoming repositories of some of the most precious objects on earth. Simultaneously, they were shaped by the Enlightenment conviction that both the natural and human worlds could be understood and even mastered by subjecting their diverse offerings to scientific analysis and discerning the universal laws at work in the midst of miscellany. The Enlightenment museum tried to answer great human questions: where did we come from? what is the significance of what we see? how have we come to be its overseer?

“Scientists are trying to stop Zika by destroying the main type of mosquito that carries it. They’ve genetically engineered a male mosquito whose offspring automatically die. But environmentalists are whining about eradicating a species.”

The Zika virus causes horrible birth defects – and it’s coming here. Will US authorities let ideologues stop them from wiping out the mosquito species that carries this horror?

The biggest danger is to pregnant women, whose babies are at risk of being born with abnormally small and damaged brains. Already, nearly 4,000 Brazilian newborns have been affected. Brazil, Jamaica, Colombia and El Salvador are urging women to delay getting pregnant for up to two years, and countries are being encouraged to lift their abortion bans. Zika is also linked to Guillain-Barré syndrome, which causes paralysis and nerve damage in men and women.

For now anyway, Americans have only a small worry – contracting Zika from a mosquito bite while traveling to the Caribbean or Latin America. But the World Health Organization warned on Sunday that mosquito-borne Zika will soon spread to all countries in the western hemisphere except Canada and Chile.

Unbelievably, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it has no intention of helping communities in the United States eradicate mosquitoes, even though it’s immersed in the same fight against mosquito-borne disease in other countries across the globe.

I recently took a few road trips longitudinally and latitudinally across California. The state bears little to no resemblance to what I was born into. In a word, it is now a medieval place of lords and peasants—and few in between. Or rather, as I gazed out on the California Aqueduct, the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Luis Reservoir, I realized we are like the hapless, squatter Greeks of the Dark Ages, who could not figure out who those mythical Mycenaean lords were that built huge projects still standing in their midst, long after Lord Ajax and King Odysseus disappeared into exaggeration and myth. Henry Huntington built the entire Big Creek Hydroelectric Project in the time it took our generation to go to three hearings on a proposed dam.

For all practical purposes, there are no more viable 40-acre to 150-acre family farms. You can sense their absence in a variety of subtle ways. Tractors are much bigger, because smaller plots are now combined into latifundia, and rows of trees and vines become longer. Rural houses are now homes to farm managers and renters, not farms families. One never sees families pruning or tying vines together as was common in the 1960s. I haven’t seen an owner of a farm on a tractor in over a decade.

Several developments have accelerated rapid change in the state. The long agricultural depression at the turn of the century—years of unprofitable prices for tree, vine and row crops—gave way about a decade ago to a sudden farm bonanza, especially in nut tree prices. The result was that once unprofitable land that had bankrupted the old agrarian class was absorbed by larger concerns and went through the costly process of transforming into pistachio, walnut, and almond acreages. Land prices in central California suddenly went from $5,000 an acre to $30,000 and up. Sometimes I’d like to remind the ghosts of those who went broke that the land they sold off for nothing is now quite something.

President Obama plans to visit a U.S. mosque for the first time, but the one he’s chosen has hosted at least two major jihadist leaders.

Barack Obama is in the final stretch of his time as President of the United States. It was announced on Sunday that Obama will make his first public appearance at a U.S. mosque to show solidarity with Muslims, whom many blame for all those terrorist attacks they commit.

The White House announced that Obama would be visiting the Islamic Society of Baltimore, which is located in Woodlawn, Maryland, just west of Baltimore. The ISB started in 1969 as a prayer group at Johns Hopkins University, which is located in Baltimore, according to the mosque’s website. A little more than a decade later, the community purchased an eight acre plot of land where the mosque is now located, as well as a school and a multi-purpose hall.

The vision of the ISB is “to be the anchor of a growing Muslim community with diverse backgrounds, democratically governed, relating to one another with inclusiveness and tolerance, and interacting with neighbors in an Islamic exemplary manner.”

Background information about the ISB uncovered a singularly alarming fact: two of the greatest supporters and promoters of a global Islamic caliphate spoke at ISB at least once, according to a “former regular.” This person commented that because it is located near Washington, D.C., “often celebrity guest speakers show up out of the blue. Like Dr. Israr Ahmed, Anwar al-Awlaki and many others.”

Did you know that since a will is considered a court document, anyone, regardless of connection to the deceased, can request a copy of it and for a fee, become privy to that person’s most intimate and final decisions regarding legacy and heirs? An article in the Times of Jan 30th reveals the full names of David Bowie’s beneficiaries including his widow, children, personal assistant, children’s nanny, business manager, lawyer and executor. It includes the exact amounts of these bequests so if any criminals scan the obituary pages for new marks, The Times will have facilitated their search. It further specifies the location of some of the real estate bequeathed to heirs. If the legatees had won the lottery, they would be entitled to withhold their own identities and remain private citizens in matters that concern no one but themselves. But the thoughtful act of responsibly providing for our loved ones before dying comes with the penalty of stripping us of our fundamental right to privacy.

Is this what the law intended? Historically, probating wills through the court goes back to English Common Law and was meant to insure that claimants and creditors would have knowledge of and access to the estate of the deceased. By going thru the courts, wills now become subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Since executors are paid to inform all those who are mentioned in the will, it is creditors who benefit most from its public nature. Why not change the law so that public death notices are mandatory and those who feel they have claims on the deceased should go to court to show cause for getting access to their will. If we object to our phone calls being harvested and monitored even for national security purposes, there are questions we should be asking about our current system of probate.

One of the great scandals in the world of philanthropy is the fact that Mohandas K. Gandhi, the great apostle of nonviolence, was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which instead has gone to such figures as the murdering jihadist maniac Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, who has spent part of his subsequent time in the White House conducting an illegal war in Libya, reinvading Iraq, and assassinating the occasional U.S. citizen.

Timing is everything, of course. The unhappy fact is that Mr. Gandhi was not an especially effective advocate of nonviolence, at home or abroad, and he reached the height of his celebrity at a time when the world was nose-deep in blood from the carnage of the Second World War. During much of that time (1939–43) the Nobel committee had the good taste to forgo offering peace prizes. Mr. Gandhi outlived the peace-price moratorium, but not by much, and a young Hindu radical who didn’t get the nonviolence message assassinated him in 1948 (no peace prize that year, either) in revenge for the violence-plagued partition of India, in which at least a half a million people died.

Sometimes, it just isn’t your year.

The diversity racket — and it is a racket — depends entirely upon keeping prestigious, powerful, and, above all, wealthy institutions in a state of political agitation and moral panic. It’s Hollywood’s turn this time around, and the manufactured controversy is the lack of black nominees for the top honors at the Academy Awards.

Several high-profile black actors, including Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, announced that they would not attend this year’s Academy Awards, absenting themselves in protest. The black host of the ceremony, Chris Rock, will attend, as will the black president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs. Ice Cube, a black rapper and actor who is in the interesting position of having this year produced a well-regarded film about his own career starring his son as himself, scoffed at the controversy, with some appreciation for the fact that being a movie star is a pretty good life, regardless of whether one is celebrated at the very pinnacle of celebrity culture: “It’s like crying about not having enough icing on your cake,” Mr. Cube said. “It’s just ridiculous.”

Delta Flight Attendants Brawl at 37,000 Feet J. Christian Adams

A Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to Minneapolis had to make an unscheduled landing in Utah because two flight female flight attendants got into a fistfight at 37,000 feet.

The Boeing 757 was south of Salt Lake City when the fist fight broke out between Delta employees servicing the flight. The pilot asked air traffic control for a diversion to Salt Lake City because he “wanted to hear from his flight attendants,” according to the Aviation Herald. Delta Air Lines Flight 2598 then diverted to Salt Lake City and safely landed.