RUTHFULLY YOURS

Billingsgate Island once comprised fifty acres and was home to thirty homes, a school and a lighthouse. The island was part of a chain off Wellfleet on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod. In the early 1940s, Billingsgate Island, like Atlantis before it, disappeared under the sea. In 1872, erosion was first noticed. By 1912, the island’s residents had left and the lighthouse abandoned. Today it is but a sandbar at low tide. Its sinking beneath the waves was never thought of as a “man-caused” disaster; it was seen as a manifestation of the power of “Mother Nature.”

Thousands of representatives from 190 nations descended on Lima, Peru over the weekend for the 20th “Conference of Parties” to discuss measures that UN negotiators hope will lead to a legally enforceable global climate pact in Paris next year. The goal of this UN sponsored meeting is to keep global temperatures within 2° Centigrade (3.6° Fahrenheit) of the pre-Industrial period. To achieve that end, all fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – would have to be phased out by 2050. In many respects, the gathering is reminiscent of Bill Murray’s “Ground Hog Day,” except for the costs and the fact it dispels more hot air and other waste products into the biosphere.

No one but an idiot would claim that man has had no effect on climate. But, also, no one but a numbskull would say that natural factors like continental drift, volcanoes, ocean currents and the earth’s tilt have had no impact. Thus, we should be able to place “climate deniers” and the most mulish of climate-change advocates – like, for example, the New York Times and Al Gore – outside the room, so that an intelligent conversation and debate can be had within. Unfortunately, the decibels of the discourse on this subject have risen to such levels that there are very few left to quietly and civilly discuss climate change and to debate what actions man should take to limit emissions, but also to prepare for a changing future. In his 2007 classic, Cool It, Bjorn Lomborg made the same point: He asked: “Why [has] the debate over climate change stifled rational dialogue and killed meaningful dissent?”

On December 8, 1941 the United States Congress declared war on Japan as response to the attack on Pearl Harbor the prior day. Following the declaration, Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States, definitively bringing the United States into World War II.

On December 11, 1941 Congressional Joint Resolution Declaring That a State of War Exists Between The Government of Italy and the Government and the People of the United States and Making Provisions to Prosecute the Same, thereby declaring war against Italy ” Whereas the Government of Italy has formally declared war against the Government and the people of the United States of America. Therefore be it resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the state of war between the United States and the Government of Italy which has thus been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Government of Italy; and, to bring the conflict to a successful termination, all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States”

On December 11, 1941, the United States Congress declared war on Germany, only hours after Germany declared war on the United States following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Congressional Joint Resolution Declaring That a State of War Exists Between The Government of Germany and the Government and the People of the United States and Making Provisions To Prosecute The Same.

“Whereas the Government of Germany has formally declared war against the Government and the people of the United States of America: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the state of war between the United States and the Government of Germany which has thus been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Government of Germany; and, to bring the conflict to a successful termination, all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States.”

(Signed) Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House of Representatives
(Signed) H. A. Wallace, Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate
Approved December 11, 1941 3:05 PM E.S.T.
(Signed) Franklin D. Roosevelt[2]

I’ve borrowed Kathy Shaidle’s headline because I think that sums up John Derbyshire’s column better than the one he and his editors chose: “The Impotent Eagle.” It’s not that we are incapable of doing anything, it’s that we can’t rouse ourselves to do anything.

John was my colleague at National Review for many years, where I regarded him as a gloomier version of me, and he regarded me as a hopeless Pollyanna. Nevertheless, much of what he writes today will be familiar to readers of both After America and The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, personally autographed copies of which make kind and thoughtful Christmas presents and really aren’t as suicidally depressing as you might think. Derb’s mournful refrain was taken from a throwaway line a correspondent made re immigration:

Replied my friend:

‘I think that withdrawing birthright citizenship from the children of illegals would be a good move, and highly appropriate. I don’t see why we couldn’t do it going forward. But of course we won’t, because we can’t do anything.’

It was that closing phrase that stuck in my mind. We can’t do anything. It’s so damn true.

John focuses on the big headlines: the Afghan war… immigration… law enforcement in Ferguson… America can’t win wars, enforce its borders, prevent looting. He could have added a bazillion others: build a flood barrier that prevents one measly not-so-Superstorm Sandy ruining people’s lives for years after… replace the dingy decrepit dump of LaGuardia with an airport that isn’t a total embarrassment to one of the world’s great cities… upgrade the most primitive bank cards in the developed world… stiffen Republican spines to come up with plans for debt reduction that kick in before the middle of the century…

But I’m increasingly struck by how “we can’t do anything” applies to all the small stuff, too. If you’ve ever spent hours on the phone going round in circles with your health insurer over some nothing little thing, you’ll be aware that “we can’t do anything” is not a monopoly of the big geopolitical strategists. The whole joint seems to be seizing up, and it bothers me. Americans now have less health-care freedom and less banking freedom than many Continental Europeans. But let’s not get all comparative about this. In absolute terms – and certainly in comparison with the America that was – too much of daily life has become over-complicated and over-regulated and over-sclerotic, and too many people are content to string along with it. From The [Un]documented Mark Steyn:

At half-time at my standup gigs these days, I ask the audience to tweet me, and sometimes I read out these tweets in the second half, in the hope they might lead somewhere funny. On Monday, at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal, someone tweeted me – and I’m not going to name them, as I have no interest in bringing the Twitter pitchfork mobs down on anyone’s head – “Can you do something about the bar prices here being so antisemitic?”

I read this one out, even though I knew it wasn’t funny. I was interested in how someone who watched the first half of my show, which has got a fair bit in it about antisemitism, could still send me a clearly antisemitic tweet – could even include the word – and, crucially, not realise it. That tweet says: the drink prices here are too high; that will particularly upset Jews – won’t it? – because Jews love money. And the idea that Jews love money – that Jews are greedy, that Jews are misers – isn’t just a persistent myth: it’s one of the very few racist stereotypes that people will still offer up without realising that it is a racist stereotype. They just think it’s true. Isn’t it?

Which brings us to Malky Mackay, Dave Whelan and now Mario Balotelli. Mackay said: nothing like a Jew that sees money slipping through his fingers. Dave Whelan said: Jewish people chase money more than anyone else. And Balotelli reposted a tweet in which Super Mario is compared to a Jew because he’s good at grabbing coins.

These observations do not require much deconstruction. More interesting is Mackay, Whelan and Balotelli’s reaction to the trouble they got into. If I were to sum up this reaction in one word, it would be: what? As in, what’s the problem? Come on, we all know this is true. Dave Whelan in particular had a kind of injured what’s-the-world-coming-to-when-you-can’t-even-say-this attitude in his various semi-apologetic interviews, doing his best to turn the comment into a compliment – Jews, he said, are “shrewd people” – and even bringing out, hilariously, the “some of my best friends are Jewish” defence.

This is characterised as a problem in football, but I don’t think it’s in any way restricted to the sport. My brother was looking to buy a flat once, and the estate agent said to him: “Oh, I’d like to buy around here but the prices are too high and I’m not Jewish enough.” Perhaps he didn’t realise my brother was Jewish. Or, more probably, he did, and thought therefore he would appreciate the remark more.

There was a time when fat was in and thin was out. Obesity was the privilege of wealth and being thin meant being poor. In simpler societies, before slumming became a romantic pose, there was nothing attractive about not having enough to eat.

To be fat was to be part of the leisure class. Thin meant you were on the road to the poorhouse or to consumption, which meant your body was being consumed, not that you were the one doing the consuming.

Then agriculture was revolutionized and the values flipped. No one in the West was starving to death and the poorest man could still grow fat. By the time the social programs kicked in, weight no longer meant leisure.

With packaged foods widely available and jobs shifting from the factory to the desk, it was entirely possible to work hard and get fat.

On the other side of the aisle, exercise meant leisure time. The standard was set by movie stars who struggled to meet unrealistic standards because they had the time and disposable income to do it.

Fat no longer meant upper class gentry. Instead it meant lower class peasant. As with art, the widespread availability turned minimalism, and eventually the worthless and overpriced, into class signifiers. Conspicuous consumption of that which was widely available was lower class.

The overflowing table made way for micro portions and exotic but barely edible foods. Thin was in on the plate and the waistline.
In many Third World countries where feudalism never ended, the values never flipped. Instead of anorexia, teenage girls suffer from being force fed to make them more marriageable. The wealthy are fat and the feasts at the top never end.

In the West, weight stands in for class, at a time when explicit classism has become politically incorrect. When Europeans sneer at how fat Americans are, and American coastal elites sneer at the rest of the country for being fat, it’s a class putdown.

On Thanksgiving eve, the Obama administration dumped reams of mind-numbing ObamaCare regulations into the Federal Register – including yet more unilateral rewrites of the Affordable Care Act.

Dropping the rules as most Americans were busy preparing for the holiday made a mockery (again) of President Obama’s promise to have “the most transparent administration in history.” The stunt has even worked to keep most of the media from reporting on the rules.

Yet the changes these regulations make in the health-care law are substantial.

For one, the president is redefining what health plans are “adequate” for larger employers (100-plus workers) to offer under the Affordable Care Act. He’s also “asking” insurers to pay for new benefits – while warning that, if they don’t, they may be forced to.

Under the Constitution, Obama lacks any authority to make such changes to the health law, or any law. Only Congress has that power. But he’s doing it, and not for the first time.

The president has made two dozen changes to his health law by executive fiat, from delaying the employer mandate to allowing people to keep health plans that don’t meet ObamaCare standards.

In fact, the House of Representatives is suing him (after Obama explicitly challenged it to do so) for making changes without Congress’ OK.

Of course, the president says he’s merely “taking executive actions to help people.”

As Russia starts to ban Islamic texts on the grounds they incite terrorism, where does that leave the Koran itself which contains the kind of blood curdling injunctions our Western leaders simply won’t come to terms with?

News recently emerged that Russia was banning key Islamic scriptures — including Sahih Bukhari — on the charge that they promote “exclusivity [supremacism] of one of the world’s religions,” namely Islam; or, in the words of a senior assistant to the prosecutor of Tatarstan Ruslan Galliev, “a militant Islam” which “arouses ethnic, religious enmity.”

If Sahih Bukhari, a nine-volume hadith collection compiled in the 9th century and seen by Sunni Muslims as second in importance only to the Koran itself is being banned for inciting hostility, where does that leave the Koran?

After all, if Sahih Bukhari contains pro-terrorism statements attributed to the prophet of Islam and calls to kill Muslims who leave Islam, the Koran, Islam’s number one holy book itself is full of intolerance and calls for violence against non-believers. A tiny sampling of proclamations from Allah follows:
• “I will cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, so strike [them] upon the necks [behead them] and strike from them every fingertip’” (Koran 8:12).
• “Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and who do not embrace the religion of truth [Islam], until they pay the jizya with willing submissiveness and feel themselves utterly subdued” (Koran 9:29).
• “Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever you find them — seize them, besiege them, and make ready to ambush them!” (Koran 9:5).
• “Fighting has been enjoined upon you [Muslims] while it is hateful to you” (2:216).

A university president loses his job for giving young women advice on how to avoid sexual assault.

In the wake of the collapse of the Rolling Stone “gang rape” story last week, it’s time to consider what happened last month to Robert Jennings, the outgoing president of suburban Philadelphia’s Lincoln University, the nation’s first degree-granting historically black university. I note that Jennings is “outgoing” because he was just fired by his board over a four-minute YouTube excerpt of a 26-minute speech he gave to his school’s All Women’s Convocation in September.

While his attempt at fatherly advice on sex may have been inartful, it hardly justified his critics’ charge that he was blaming women for sexual assault. Nonetheless he has seen his career ruined, thanks to the highly charged atmosphere surrounding the issue of sexual assault.

Even Vice President Joe Biden cites inflated statistics that one out of five campus women has been sexually assaulted. The pitchforks that come out in such an atmosphere can chill free speech, obscure relevant aspects of the specific cases and the larger issues, and lead to politically correct reporting disasters such as those on the Duke lacrosse and Tawana Brawley cases, and now the Rolling Stone debacle on the alleged gang rape at UVA.

Jennings, who to no avail apologized for his comments before his firing, still insists that his critics are taking the YouTube video out of context. But even the truncated version casts doubt on why he has been ridden out of town on a rail. The video excerpt begins with Jennings saying he’s going to let the women in on “a little secret”: “Men treat you, treat women the way women allow us to treat them. . . . We will use you up, if you allow us to use you up,” he said. “Well, guess what? When it comes time for us to make that final decision, we’re going to go down the hall and marry that girl with the long dress on. That’s one we’re going to take home to Mama. There is something about the way you carry yourself and respect yourself that commands and demands respect from us.” At this point, the video shows the female crowd clapping in agreement.

When I first read that Hillary Clinton said we should have “empathy” [1] for our enemies, my first thought was — is she senile? Who is she talking about? Empathy for Hitler? Pol Pot? Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Surely if we only empathized with the ISIS leader a bit more, they wouldn’t be slicing off as many heads or placing as many women in sexual slavery, not to mention shooting large groups after having had them dig their own mass graves, Nazi-style. All that business about global jihad and caliphates and “see you in New York” would go away with a little sympathy. (Cue Mick Jagger [2].)

Yes, I know sympathy is often defined as “feeling for” someone and empathy “feeling into,” but let’s not get bogged down in minor distinctions. It’s hard for anyone with basic morality to have empathy or sympathy for ruthless transnational mass murderers motivated by extreme religious fanaticism. On Fox News Sunday, even Hillary’s normally complaisant supporter Jane Harman seemed repelled. George Will [3] rose to her defense (sort of) by explaining Hillary’s peculiar word choice by saying Clinton employed “gaseous new-age rhetoric” about respect and empathy. True enough, and witty, but I suspect it’s more than that. Why would her mind even go in that direction?

Hillary, as most know now, is not a master of the English language in general She misspeaks herself frequently or simply reacts, as in the “what difference does it make?” outburst about Benghazi. In this way she is following in the footsteps of Bush 43 and Obama, neither of whom could be mistaken for Demosthenes [4], although Obama had some Greek pretensions in his scenic design [5] preferences.

Bush stumbled with words because of weak linguistic facility he often joked about. For Obama it was something considerably worse, almost always to do with deception. He frequently lies and almost never speaks with candor, so ultimately the normal reaction is to tune him out, as most have at this point.

For Hillary, the problem is she no longer knows what she thinks — an absolute prescription for filling a void with “gaseous new-age rhetoric.” These days, it’s the first thing that comes to mind. You can almost see the wheels grinding when asked a question:

There is some blame to go around in nearly all racial confrontations. Why the body of Michael Brown was left in the street for hours seems inexplicable. The apparent chokehold that contributed to the death of Eric Garner, with the benefit of video hindsight, does not seem to square with the de facto exoneration of the officer involved. In contrast, there has been absolutely no credible evidence that the unfortunate shooting of Michael Brown was not in self-defense.

Instead, most of the protests about Ferguson are based on untruth and the lessons are therefore surrealistic. Indeed, the reductionist messages of Ferguson from the street, the media, and the Justice Department seem to appear twofold. In hindsight, Officer Darren Wilson apparently made two postmodern mistakes. One, when he saw Michael Brown strangely walking down the middle of the street — and collated that behavior and his appearance with breaking information of a suspect on the loose who had just strong-armed a clerk and robbed the store — he stopped to investigate. Had Wilson simply waved and passed Brown by — and ignored the prior possible felony act and the misdemeanor that he was watching in progress — then Brown would never have had an opportunity to assault him. Brown would not have been shot. And the Ferguson chain of events would never have been jump-started on that particular day.

Some of the public may think that the lessons of Michael Brown — and Trayvon Martin — are that it is unwise to commit a crime and then assault an officer, or confront a stranger in the rain and slug him in the head and get into a tussle, given that such targets may be armed and may respond with deadly force. But I think critics would privately respond that in Al Sharpton’s America both cases instead advise to take the beating [1] and do not dare use a firearm for self-protection from assault on the chance the attacker is unarmed. In retrospect, Zimmerman might have preferred to have been “whoop-assed,” [2] or Wilson preferred being slugged than to become lifelong targeted pariahs [3].