RUTHFULLY YOURS

Credit the Geneva-based UN Watch [1] with dredging the diplomatic swamps of the United Nations to bring to light the appalling information contained in an April 23 UN press release. The soporific headline of the release: “Economic and Social Council, Opening Coordination, Management Meetings, Adopts Five Decisions, Holds Subsidiary-Body Elections [2].”

I’ll get to the bombshell in a minute. But first, for those who might not be familiar with the UN’s Economic and Social Council, best known to its intimates as ECOSOC: this is a body enshrined in the 1945 UN Charter. It consists of 54 member states, elected to three-year terms by the UN General Assembly. Within the UN, ECOSOC is no small presence. On its web site, ECOSOC describes its portfolio as including “[t]he world’s economic, social and environmental challenges,” and claims “broad responsibility for some 70% of the human and financial resources of the entire UN system, including 14 specialized agencies, 9 ‘functional’ commissions and five regional commissions.”

Thus laden with responsibilities, ECOSOC met this Wednesday, and — as mentioned in its eye-glazing press release — held elections “to fill numerous vacancies in 17 of its subsidiary bodies.”

So what? Here’s what: here’s information on that same ECOSOC meeting translated into the more forthright language of the UN Watch [1] press release:

“Iran sweeps coveted UN rights posts.”

Yes, ECOSOC has just elected Iran — again — to the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women.

ECOSOC also elected Iran to the Commission on Science and Technology for Development, and (by acclamation, which presumably means the U.S. agreed) the Commission on Population and Development. Iran is also among ECOSOC’s nominees — to be elected by the General Assembly — for the Committee for Programme Coordination.

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s relentless push for some sort of first-stage Mideast peace deal by the end of this month was dealt a strong blow by Fatah and Hamas deciding to put aside their differences and unite.

Hamas’ information office said the pact between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas political bureau leader Khaled Mashal was simply implementing the previous unity agreements signed years ago in Doha and Cairo — pacts followed by years of vicious fighting between the parties.

Abbas agreed to “start talks on forming the new transitional national unity government that will be formed within five weeks, and will be holding talks on declaring new elections that would be held at least six months after the new government is formed,” according to Hamas’ Ezzedeen Al-Qasam Brigades.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman declared this move “tantamount to a signature on the conclusion of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”

“It is impossible to make peace with Israel as well as with Hamas, a terrorist organization advocating for Israel’s destruction,” Lieberman said.

State Department press secretary Jen Psaki admitted to reporters at Wednesday’s briefing that the “timing” of the agreement was “troubling,” and at today’s briefing a journalist commented that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry “have managed to pull off the full Quixote here, or rather a double-Quixote, that is not only having tilted at the windmills, but having lost.”

Psaki placed the blame at the feet of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, noting that “if we look back at the last several months, over the course of nine months even, there are unhelpful steps that have been taken by both parties.”

“There have been ups and downs in the process throughout. And still, this process needs to work its way through,” she said.

She said Kerry called Abbas this morning. “The secretary noted that he was disappointed by the reconciliation announcement and repeated the elements that any Palestinian government would need to have, the same principles that President Abbas has long supported. President Abbas, again, they decided they would remain in touch,” she continued.

“Of course, the principles — just to reiterate what I said yesterday, but for those of you who weren’t here, the three principles are, of course, commitment to nonviolence, recognition of the state of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations between the parties,” Psaki added. “They also discussed efforts underway, those efforts that have been underway between Israelis and Palestinians to extend the negotiations. I also just wanted to reiterate that we view it as essential that both parties exercise, all sides exercise maximum restraint and avoid escalatory steps.”

Having worked on Wall Street for 47 years, what constantly amazes is how little I know about the market and how it works. Nevertheless, I feel reasonably comfortable in answering the question as to whether the market is rigged in the negative, despite allegations to the contrary by Michael Lewis in his fascinating book Flash Boys. With about 200 broker-dealers, thirteen exchanges and approximately 45 “dark pools” (off exchange trading venues), I suspect that innate competition helps subdue the natural greedy instincts of those who flock to Wall Street. Like most endeavors, the more intense the competition the more equitable the pricing. Competition, not regulation or price fixing, is the means by which capitalism best discovers fair prices. Smart people have certainly taken advantage of complexity, but that is a consequence of technology.

Perhaps it is a question of definition, but a rigged market to me suggests a cabal of likeminded people colluding to enrich themselves at the expense of the public. Instinctively, I am not a fan of High Frequency Traders, and Mr. Lewis has well articulated how they have taken advantage of the system, with little or no social or economic purpose other than personal gain. But I suspect Brad Katsuyama, as quoted in Flash Boys, is right when he says: “I think most of them have just rationalized that the market is creating the inefficiencies and they (HFTs) are just capitalizing on them.” It has been a combination of technological advances and the unintended consequences of government deregulation and regulation that allowed HFTs to work their magic.

While Cliff Asness and Michael Mendelson are quoted, in an op-ed in the April 1st edition of the Wall Street Journal, as saying that high-frequency trading has been around for 20 years, such trading clearly got a boost when the SEC passed a rule in 2005 (U.S. Regulation NMS), which made it easier to trade stocks on multiple exchanges, but also mandated better transparency and consistent access to market bids and offers, regardless of where the individual stock is traded. Its intent was to open large exchanges such as the NYSE and NASDAQ to greater competition, including “dark pools.” The consequence was an increase in high frequency trading, but with less clarity, as “dark pools” definitionally have no transparency. At the same time, the proliferation of HFTs meant that bids and offers displayed were often ephemeral, disappearing once a legitimate bid or offer was made. The front-running of orders, according to Mr. Lewis, was their motive, not providing liquidity, despite being paid to do so by some exchanges.

A few years ago, Newsweek’s glossy cover asked “Is Your Baby Racist?” The baby looking back at supermarket shoppers, airline passengers waiting for their flight and patients in the dental office had blue eyes.

The labeling of racists as white has itself become a racial stereotype. And it’s not an accidental stereotype.

Behind the left’s support for affirmative action is the belief that white racism is the only kind of racism that exists. Black racism they insist is really called “reverse racism” and is a myth made up by white people.

It’s not that the left believes that affirmative action isn’t racist. It’s that it believes that there is no such thing as racism against white people. Like the Knockout Game or white students who qualify on merit but can’t get into college because of racial diversity quotas; it’s an invalid category. A myth.

And if it’s a myth, then there’s nothing wrong with a little racial violence or a few racial preferences.

Our system isn’t immune to bouts of niche insanity. A sizable portion of Hollywood believes that their souls originated on another planet and that they will eventually gain superpowers. Much of Washington D.C. believes that money can be printed infinitely with infinite economic benefits. And the academic and non-profit establishment believes that anti-white racism doesn’t exist.

The left is delusional, but it isn’t completely insane. It doesn’t deny that black hate crimes can take place. It won’t even deny the occasional act of institutional discrimination. But it only recognizes racism as a collective phenomenon.

The debate over affirmative action is about the collective and the individual.

“It cannot be entertained as a serious proposition that all individuals of the same race think alike,” Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Schuette v. BAMN decision that permits a ban on racial affirmative action discrimination in Michigan.

But that’s exactly what the left believes.

Racism, to the left, exists systemically. It exists institutionally. It exists collectively, but not individually.

On February 23, 1942, Stefan Zweig and his young wife committed suicide together in Petrópolis, Brazil. The following day, the Brazilian government held a state funeral, attended by President Getulio Vargas. The news spread rapidly around the world, and the couple’s deaths were reported on the front page of The New York Times. Zweig had been one of the most renowned authors of his time, and his work had been translated into almost fifty languages. In the eyes of one of his friends, the novelist Irmgard Keun, “he belonged to those that suffered but who would not and could not hate. And he was one of those noble Jewish types who, thinskinned and open to harm, lives in an immaculate glass world of the spirit and lacks the capacity themselves to do harm.”1

The suicide set off a surge of emotion and a variety of reactions. Thomas Mann, the unquestioned leader of German-language writers in exile, made no secret of his indignation at what he considered an act of cowardice. In a telegram to the New York daily PM, he certainly paid tribute to his fellow writer’s talent, but he underscored the “painful breach torn in the ranks of European literary emigrants by so regrettable a weakness.” He made his point even clearer in a letter to a writer friend: “He should never have granted the Nazis this triumph, and had he had a more powerful hatred and contempt for them, he would never have done it.” Why had Zweig been unable to rebuild his life? It wasn’t for lack of means, as Mann pointed out to his daughter Erika.

This is the subject of Georges Prochnik’s The Impossible Exile, a gripping, unusually subtle, poignant, and honest study. Prochnik attempts, on the basis of an uncompromising investigation, to clarify the motives that might have driven to suicide an author who still enjoyed a rare popularity, an author who had just completed two major works, his memoir, The World of Yesterday, and Brazil: Land of the Future. He had also finished one of his most startling novellas, Chess Story, in which he finally addressed the horrors of his own time, proving that his creative verve hadn’t been in the least undermined by his ordeals. Recently he had married a loving woman, nearly thirty years his junior. And he had chosen of his own free will to leave the United States and take refuge in Brazil, a hospitable nation that had fired his imagination.

‘Gutless.”

That word perfectly describes Obama’s “policy” on the Keystone XL pipeline. That this adjective rolled off the tongue of a union boss makes it as delicious as it is accurate.

“In another gutless move, the Administration is delaying a finding on whether the pipeline is in the national interest,” said Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. “This certainly is no example of profiles in courage. It’s clear the Administration needs to grow a set of antlers, or perhaps take a lesson from Popeye and eat some spinach.”

Terry O’Sullivan is right. And so are the eleven Senate Democrats who wrote Obama on April 10 to express their exasperation with his relentless dithering on this vital matter.

“This process has been exhaustive in its time, breadth, and scope. It has already taken much longer than anyone can reasonably justify,” reads the letter, signed by Alaska’s Mark Begich, North Carolina’s Kay Hagan, Arkansas’s Mark Pryor, and eight others. As they specify, this situation “has involved two applications, five federal reviews, multiple open comment periods, and numerous opportunities for consultation and comment at either public forums or at staff-level meetings.”

Any piece of paper on Obama’s desk that bears the word “Keystone” surely gets emblazoned by a rubber stamp that reads, “Continue the research.”

On September 19, 2008, TransCanada first applied to build Keystone. Its paperwork arrived a bit late for President George W. Bush’s endorsement. Besides, Bush was busy nationalizing companies back then. So Obama then tackled this matter — at the speed of molasses. He subsequently has raised the paralysis of analysis to a fine art.

In the five years and three months that Obama has pondered Keystone, FDR could have built almost four Pentagons. President Roosevelt needed just 16 months to erect what remains — at 6.5 million square feet — Earth’s largest office building.

There are at least 42,000 reasons to approve Keystone. The U.S. State Department expects 16,100 direct construction jobs. Another 26,000 indirect spots await Americans who would fabricate steel pipes, produce “yellow iron” earth-moving equipment, and sell Keystone’s workers everything from hot food to cool drinks.

Buying friendly Canadian oil enriches our NATO allies next door while channeling petrodollars away from misogynists in Saudi Arabia and Marxists in Venezuela. And increased supplies decrease the price of petroleum. This should help Vladimir Putin focus on his budget rather than the Ukrainian frontier.

I think we all know what Barack Obama’s foreign-policy strategy coming into office was.

Step 1: Be Barack Obama (and not George W. Bush).

Step 2: ????

Step 3: World peace!

(With apologies to South Park.)

As a candidate, Obama held a huge campaign rally in, of all places, Berlin, touting his bona fides as a citizen of the world. The crowd went wild, as he talked at length about a world without walls (you had to be there). As president, in his first major speech abroad, Obama suggested to a Cairo audience that the fact America elected him was all the proof anyone should need that America had turned the page.

It all seems very strange now in retrospect, but in his defense, you can understand how seductive this notion must have been. The whole world — at least the parts of it that Obama listens to — was telling him that replacing George W. Bush with Barack Obama was just the ticket for what ailed the planet. The fervor was all so detached from facts on the ground that the Nobel Committee even gave Obama a Peace Prize for the stuff they were sure he was going to do, eventually. (One clue that Obama’s cult of personality didn’t actually translate into tangible results on the world stage should have been his failure to win the 2016 Olympics for his hometown of Chicago, despite being the first president to personally lobby for it.)

It’s hard not to admire Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s brazenness.
Two weeks ago, Abbas signed on to 15 international agreements that among other things require the PA to respect human rights and punish war criminals.

And this week, he signed a unity deal with two genocidal terror groups all of whose leaders are war criminals. Every leader of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two parties that signed the deal with the PLO, are war criminals. Under the Geneva Conventions, which Abbas signed onto just a couple of weeks ago, he is required to put them on trial, for their war crimes.

Here it is worth noting that under the Geneva Conventions, every single rocket launch from Gaza into Israeli territory is a separate war crime.

Abbas was only able to sign the Geneva Conventions on the one hand, and the unity deal with terrorist war criminals on the other, because he is utterly convinced that neither the US nor the European Union will hold him accountable for his actions. He is completely certain that neither the Americans nor the Europeans are serious about their professed commitments to upholding international law.

Abbas is sure that for both the Obama administration and the EU, maintaining support for the PLO far outweighs any concern they have for abiding by the law of nations. He believes this because he has watched them make excuses for the PLO and its leaders for the past two decades.

When it comes to the Palestinians, the Western powers are always perfectly willing to throw out their allegiance to law – international law and their domestic statutes – to continue supporting the PLO in the name of a peace process, which by now, everyone understands is entirely fictional.

Why do they do this?

They do it because the peace process gives them a way to ignore and wish away the pathologies of the Islamic and Arab world.

We knew very little about Barack Obama when he ran for president because he’d accomplished nothing of importance before he did.

We knew he voted “present” when faced with controversy, had served as a law school professor, and had been a “community organizer” in Chicago, though, what such a person was, we couldn’t say. We knew that he had no experience in the military, business, economics or foreign policy. We knew he was a liberal, but we really didn’t know him at all.

More than five years into his presidency, we know him all too well. There’s a weariness setting in the country, something like Jimmy Carter’s malaise, but more important is the common realization that another presidency like his must not occur.

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To prevent another Obama-type presidency, we need to insist that the next Republican candidate meet certain criteria — and not those the political consultant class foists off on us every four years. Their criteria, such as “electability,” are entirely subjective (and their candidates end up losing anyway). Presidential candidates can’t be judged like an Olympic ice-skating event.

There are at least 20 or 30 Republicans who want to run in 2016. At least six of them could be named without stopping to think, because they’ve either been around the track before or have done nothing but campaign since entering the national stage.

But it’s hard to see how the field has improved over the last two presidential races. In 2007 and 2011, Republicans were celebrating the ‘strength” of their bench just as they are today. But the primaries only served to determine who was the tallest dwarf and, in 2012, to damage the eventual nominee. If that happens again — and it looks as if it will, given the current gaggle of “front-runners” and wannabes — the Republicans can be sure of losing again.

The most essential factor a candidate needs to be worthy of support isn’t race or gender. It’s encompassed in the kind of competence and political skill that can only result from the right education, experience and training.

Harvard student Sandra Y.L. Korn recently proposed in The Harvard Crimson that academics should be stopped if their research is deemed oppressive. Arguing that “academic justice” should replace “academic freedom,” she writes: “If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom’?”

In other words, Korn would have the university cease to be a forum for open debate and free inquiry in the name of justice, as defined by mainstream liberal academia.

Unfortunately, this is already a reality in most universities across America, where academics and university administrators alike are trying, often successfully, to discredit and prohibit certain ideas and ways of thinking. Particularly in the humanities, many ideas are no longer considered legitimate, and debate over them is de facto non-existent. In order to delegitimize researchers who are out of line, academics brand them with one of several terms that have emerged from social science theory.

Most people outside academia are unaware that being called ‘hegemonic’ is the insult du jour.
The first term, “hegemonic,” is frequently used in history courses, literary criticism, and gender studies. Hegemony, of course, is a legitimate word that is often useful in describing consistency and uniformity. However, most people outside academia are unaware that being called ‘hegemonic’ is the insult du jour. It strongly implies that you are close-minded and perhaps even bigoted. This term may be applied to offences ranging from referencing the habits or dress of a cultural group to discussing the views held by a religion (and daring to question them—so long as the religion in question is not Christianity).

To do these things is to “essentialize” those people by speaking about them broadly and being so bold as to imply that they may share a practice or belief in a general sense. It is the insult of those who would have every department in academia broken down into sub-departments ad infinitum in order to avoid saying anything general about anything, resulting in verbal and intellectual paralysis.

This strategy of labeling has been particularly successful in its application to middle-eastern and Islamic studies. Any author, or student, who does not join in the liberal narrative about Islamic culture—which includes unwavering support for Palestinians, the absolute equality of men and women in Islam, and an insistence on the peaceful nature of the religion despite any violent tendencies in its foundation— will find themselves labeled an “orientalist.”

Write anything else and you will find yourself labeled an orientalist and no graduate course will touch your work with a ten-foot pole.
Edward Said popularized this term in his 1978 post-colonial work Orientalism. According to many of my colleagues, an orientalist is a person who writes about the Middle East from a “western perspective,” which is when one does not unquestioningly support and affirm Middle Eastern and Islamic culture. This does not mean that westerners are excluded from writing about the Middle East and Islam. A westerner can do so successfully so long as their research is void of criticism. Write anything else and you will find yourself labeled an orientalist and no graduate course will touch your work with a ten-foot pole.