BOOKS Comments turned off

Victor Davis Hanson :Refighting the Vietnam War Triumph Retaken shows that America’s war in Vietnam could have been won earlier at far less cost, and in fact almost was, even belatedly by 1968.

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/26/refighting-the-vietnam-war/

Military historian and Hillsdale College professor Mark Moyar has just published Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968, which is the second in what will become a massive three-volume revision of the entire Vietnam War. It is a book that should be widely read, much discussed, and reviewed in depth regardless of one’s view of that sad chapter in American diplomacy and conflict in Vietnam. 

The first book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 appeared in 2006. It gained considerable attention for its heterodox analysis of the postwar origins of communist aggression against the South, beginning with the disastrous French colonial experience and its transference to the Americans. Moyar described the Byzantine intrigue through which the Kennedy Administration inserted American ground troops into Vietnam, and why and how his successor Lyndon B. Johnson rapidly escalated the American presence.  

Moyar’s controversial argument in volume one centered on the disastrous decisions of these two administrations that ensured Americans would be sent into an uninviting distant theater of operations in the dangerous neighborhood of both communist China and Russia. Worse, they would be asked to fight under self-imposed limitations of the nuclear age in which their leaders could not achieve victory or perhaps even define it.  

Still, Moyar argued that there was nevertheless a chance to achieve a South-Korean-like solution at much less cost, one that was thrown away through a series of American blunders. Most grievous was the American support for the 1963 coup that removed South-Vietnamese strongman president Ngo Dinh Diem and led to his almost immediate assassination‚ even as he was evolving into a viable wartime leader.  

Moyar additionally deplored the biased and lockstep reporting of anti-war media, including its icons David “The Best and the Brightest” Halberstam and Neil “A Bright, Shining Lie” Sheehan, who operated on ideological premises far different from reportage in World War II and Korea. Both characteristically exaggerated American shortcomings consistent with their theme that Vietnam was an anti-colonialist war of liberation rather than a Cold War proxy fight over unilateral communist aggression. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

UPenn Law’s Race Inquisitors Seek to Silence Amy Wax The tenured law professor fights back. by Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/upenn-laws-race-inquisitors-seek-to-silence-amy-wax/

When he wryly observed that “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,” Orwell may well have had academia in mind, where challenging prevailing ideology can have a calamitous effect on one’s reputation and career—something especially true of faculty.

One ubiquitous ideology in academia now is an obsession with race, manifested in the relentless pursuit of recruiting and retaining minority students as part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion, (DEI) campaign. The campaign for diversity is based on an assumed, but unproven, assumption that diverse student populations are automatically superior to non-diverse ones, and that diversity not only benefits minority students but all students and the university as a whole. This belief is accepted by woke virtue-signaling administrators and diversocrats as a given, but it is certainly still a topic that can be questioned, critiqued, and challenged, and a faculty member has the right to not accept it as settled doctrine.

DEI bureaucracies have also had another unintended, negative side-effect, namely, that minority students are counseled to see themselves as victims of systemic racism—both in their own universities and in the country as a whole. Students have quickly realized that once they are designated as victims and given a bucket of accommodations and benefits not enjoyed by their white and Asian peers, they have become emboldened to demand further concessions—one significant one being the “right” not to be challenged or offended by the views of others that question the prevailing dogma on liberal campuses.

Actual racism—from faculty, students, and administrators—is so rare and benign that in order to identify cases where racism reveals itself, university diversocrats and the student victims they serve must assiduously ferret out examples of racist thought and behavior—including accusations of systemic racism, invisible racism, triggers, microaggressions, white privilege, and, recently, instances when faculty or students have defended law enforcement or criticized the motives and tactics of Black Lives Matter. Any challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy of these victim students and their administrative enablers are stamped down, attacked, and deemed racist and indicative of white supremacy. And when it is faculty members who dare to question affirmative action, diversity, systemic racism, and white supremacy, the wrath of the woke mob is immediate and unrelenting.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Ukraine and Our Confused Foreign Policy When idealistic goals exceed political will and materiel grasp. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ukraine-and-our-confused-foreign-policy/

“It’s time to accept that our vacation from history was over 20 years ago, and we need to get back to work strengthening our country’s security.”

The first anniversary of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine has come and gone, and the uncertainty about how that conflict will be resolved remains, despite the West’s cheerleading and photo-ops with Zelensky, and billions in cash and materiel sent to Ukraine. Meanwhile, China is  “strongly considering” supporting Russia with arms and ammo, Iran keeps sending Russia drones, and American support for aid to Ukraine is starting to dwindle.

The way out of this stalemate, moreover, requires choices none of which are politically palatable or possible. So here we are again, with our idealistic foreign policy reach exceeding our political will and materiel grasp.

The origins of this predicament in part lie in the still uncertain justifications for spending billions of dollars and depleting our own stockpiles of materiel. The Asia Times’s David Goldman recently posed the still unanswered questions about our reasons and intentions:

“In furtherance of what strategic interests has the United States acted in Ukraine? Is Ukraine’s NATO membership an American raison d’état? Did American strategists really believe that sanctions would shut down Russia’s economy? Did they imagine that the trading patterns of the Asian continent would shift to flow around the sanctions? Did they consider the materiel requirements of a long war that is exhausting American stockpiles? Did they consider what tripwires might elicit the use of nuclear weapons? Or did they sleepwalk into the conflict, as the European powers did in 1914?”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The two Zelenskys Zelensky is neither saint nor sinner, but a leader trying to do his best. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/25/the-two-zelenskys/

Choose your Zelensky. He can be either saint or sinner. Either valiant repairer of the liberal international order or compliant puppet of the WEF. Either a one-man defender of liberal democracy or a stooge of nefarious globalists. These are the only two Zelenskys. There’s no in-between. He’s either a Guardian editorial made dashing flesh or the willing jester of Davos Man. Take your pick.

What has happened to Volodymyr Zelensky over the past year has been extraordinary. First, of course, his nation has been subjected to the barbaric imperial aggression of its Russian neighbour, transforming Zelensky from improbable president into even more improbable commander of a war of national liberation. Then there’s been his memeification. Zelensky as virtual emblem, whether of good or ill. This global deification / demonisation of a man at war has provided a grimly fascinating insight into the tech age.

At first, the Zelensky memes were favourable, and funny. Most of them were about his testicles. ‘Things you can see from space: Amazon river, Grand Canyon, balls of Volodymyr Zelensky.’ Even Babylon Bee, which is now pretty firmly in the Zelensky-sceptical camp, was having genital-based fun at the expense of the Russians. ‘Mysterious Large Circles On Russian Radar Turn Out To Be President Zelensky’s Massive Testicles’, said a headline in February last year.

Soon, though, a divergence emerged. The virtual world came to be split between eyelash-fluttering Zelensky fanboys and girls and people who all but come out in a rash at the mere mention of the Ukrainian’s name. Between the witless gushing of media luvvies like Caitlin Moran, for whom Zelensky was a new ‘Hot Priest’ (see Fleabag; better still, don’t), and the inexplicable venom of Very Online right-wingers who started to damn Zelensky as a global welfare queen taking money from the West’s coffers to fund his probably phoney war. The shallow polarisation of what passes for public discussion in the 21st-century West had rarely been so starkly illustrated.

Both sides are projecting. Take the pro-Zelensky set. These liberal fawners over a handsome president are not really expressing solidarity with the Ukrainian struggle for national freedom. How could they, given most of them are allergic to the ideal of national sovereignty, as evidenced by their seven-year hissy fit over Brexit? No, for them Zelensky’s fight to restore Ukraine’s national integrity takes a distant second place to what they imagine he’s doing – giving voice to their views, embodying their beliefs.

They’re so vain they think this war is about them. Zelensky has become ‘the standard bearer for liberal democracy’, said the Financial Times. He isn’t only battling Russian aggression, but the broader ‘authoritarianism’ of the 21st century. Tell that to the brave young Ukrainians on the frontlines, I dare you – that they’re laying down their lives for the pompous ‘liberal’ pretensions of FT types as much as for their own right to self-determination. Zelensky’s Ukraine has given many of us a ‘renewed sense of unity and purpose’, said one observer. This sad war has an upside, hinted the NYT: it proves that ‘liberalism has some life left’. A writer for the i was more shameless still, marshalling Ukrainians into battle with, you guessed it, Brexit. Where Brexit implied the EU was a spent force, and that the future would be populist, Zelensky’s fight reminds us of the ‘absolute moral imperative’ of modern Europe, he said. European unity is ‘the dream which now moves [Ukrainians] as they throw their bodies in front of Russian tanks’.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence. Journalists should stop saying that the evidence is just correlational by Jonathan Haidt

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic?utm_medium=email

A big story last week was the partial release of the CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller. As I showed in my Feb. 16 Substack post, the big surprise in the CDC data is that COVID didn’t have much effect on the overall trends, which just kept marching on as they have since around 2012. Teens were already socially distanced by 2019, which might explain why COVID restrictions added little to their rates of mental illness, on average. (Of course, many individuals suffered greatly). 

Most of the news coverage last week noted that the trends pre-dated covid, and many of them mentioned social media as a potential cause. A few of them then did the standard thing that journalists have been doing for years, saying essentially “gosh, we just don’t know if it’s social media, because the evidence is all correlational and the correlations are really small.” For example, Derek Thompson, one of my favorite data-oriented journalists, wrote a widely read essay in The Atlantic on the multiplicity of possible causes. In a section titled Why is it so hard to prove that social media and smartphones are destroying teen mental health? he noted that “the academic literature on social media’s harms is complicated” and he then quoted one of the main academics studying the issue—Jeff Hancock, of Stanford University: “There’s been absolutely hundreds of [social-media and mental-health] studies, almost all showing pretty small effects.”

In this post, I will show that Thompson’s skepticism was justified in 2019 but is not justified in 2023. A lot of new work has been published since 2019, and there has been a recent and surprising convergence among the leading opponents in the debate (including Hancock and me). There is now a great deal of evidence that social media is a substantial cause, not just a tiny correlate, of depression and anxiety, and therefore of behaviors related to depression and anxiety, including self-harm and suicide.

First, I must offer two stage-setting comments:

Social media is not the only cause; my larger story is about the rewiring of childhood that began in the 1990s and accelerated in the early 2010s. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FACT CHECK: Pete Buttigieg Is a ‘Capable and Competent’ Leader Verdict: There is no evidence to support this claim by Andrew Stiles and Thaleigha Rampersad

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/fact-check-pete-buttigieg-is-a-capable-and-competent-leader/

Claim: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, sometimes referred to as Alfred E. Neuman, is a “capable and competent” leader who can stand up to former president Donald Trump.

Who said it: The Lincoln Project, sometimes referred to as the Lincoln Pervert Project. “Until capable and competent leaders stand up to Trump, he will continue to deflect,” the controversial super PAC wrote in a tweet that linked to an article about Buttigieg blaming Trump for the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

Context: The Lincoln Project is comprised of Democratic activists and extremely online “former Republicans” who enjoy grifting almost as much as they enjoy acting like boorish man-children. They will support any politician who appeals to their donors—rich liberals driven insane by Trump—and Buttigieg is one of the most beloved Democrats among this particular demographic.

Analysis: We couldn’t find any evidence to support the claim that Buttigieg is a “capable and competent” leader, just as we couldn’t find any evidence to support claims that the transportation secretary is a “star of Biden’s cabinet.” There has been a multitude of transportation-related scandals on his watch, and he has handled each one of them with the political deftness of a humanoid McKinsey consultant who learns Norwegian in his spare time.

This should not come as a surprise. Riding a bicycle and wanting to be president after serving eight years as mayor of South Bend, the fourth-largest city in Indiana, do not make someone qualified to run the U.S. Department of Transportation

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Voters Want A Trump-DeSantis Primary Battle In 2024: I&I/TIPP Terry Jones

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/27/voters-want-a-trump-desantis-primary-battle-in-2024-ii-tipp/

If you’re wondering who Republican voters want to see square off in next year’s presidential primaries, it’s probably no big secret. As the latest polling data from I&I/TIPP show, a solid majority of registered GOP voters and independents who lean Republican, or Republican primary voters, say they want to see former President Donald Trump and current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis duke it out on the primary trail.

In the latest poll, taken of 1,155 registered voters from Feb. 1-3, 397 were identified as GOP primary voters. They were asked to respond to the following statement: “I would like to see a primary contest between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.” They were given a choice to “agree strongly,” “agree somewhat,” “disagree somewhat,” “disagree strongly,” and “not sure.”

The margin of error for the sub-sample is +/-5 percentage points.

The answer that came back: an emphatic “yes.” By 61% to 23%, voters said they’d like to see DeSantis and Trump joust in the campaign, with 26% saying they agree “strongly” while 35% saying they agree “somewhat” strongly.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Words Matter––so Do Accurate Posting Dates! by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/26780/words-matter-so-do-accurate-posting-dates

goudsmit.pundicity.com  lindagoudsmit.com 

Since the 2020 election a great deal has been written about information, disinformation, and misinformation. Very little attention is being paid to the newest threat in the information wars––omission of the year in online posting dates. We live in the 21st-century age of digitized, computerized information technology. In the beginning, articles posted online followed established journalistic practices, and journalism’s classic 5W + H formula. Articles answered six questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Today, online journalism is eliminating the When. I began asking the question, Why? 

For print journalism, the When has two components––the dateline and the actual events described in the article. The dateline refers to when the story was filed or written, not necessarily the dates of events described in the article. Datelines followed the month/day/year date convention, and appeared on the first line of an article before the text. 

In online reporting, especially blogs and websites, the dateline often refers to the posting date. In the summer of 2022, I began noticing the year was MISSING in the dateline. Sometimes the date was presented as an equally useless and ridiculous “3 hours ago” or “3 days ago.” At first I assumed it was a typo, but soon realized there was a change to the default date convention. As a writer, researcher, and political analyst, the change was so egregious, I assumed the new date conventions had to be a form over content esthetic decision, made by the same foolish designers who decided hard-to-read gray font was superior to easy-to-read black font! I was wrong.

I lodged my first complaint directly with WordPress, on June 4, 2022. WordPress is a free and open-source content management system used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2021. The message read:

I am a researcher, author, and political analyst. It is absolutely maddening that articles are being published with a date that does not include the YEAR. Every event happens in its historical context. “3 hours ago” or “3 days ago” or “3 months ago” is meaningless without the year. Equally meaningless is “April 10” if the article has been saved and used for reference two years after publication. Information is rendered useless without an accurate posting/publishing date that MUST include the YEAR. Please address this extremely exasperating error on all the platforms you service – the problem is becoming ubiquitous.  

WordPress.com is the hosted version of WordPress. Its customer support “Happiness Engineers“ answered:

Hi there,

Your support request has been submitted to our team of Happiness Engineers. Rest assured that your email arrived safely and our support team will be in touch as soon as we can.

If you have any new details, or happen to find the answer yourself in the mean time, just reply to this email directly to keep us updated. Additionally, you might want to check out our daily webinars – https://wordpress.com/webinars – and our support documentation – https://wordpress.com/support.

Thank you for your patience and we’ll be in touch soon!

– The WordPress.com Support Team

This email is a service from Automattic.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe and Jill Went Up the Hill By David Solway

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/02/25/joe-and-jill-went-up-the-hill-n1673867

“Ultimately, this is the Biden trademark: a corrupt and geriatric incompetent in the White House, and a vain First Lady devoid of intellectual substance who passes herself off as a scholar. Everything about such people is meretricious, or in popular parlance, “fake.” Such is current American leadership in both politics and education, a tale of broken crowns and failed policies hurtling down the historical gradient.”

Joe and Jill went up the hill, and who knows when they’ll come tumbling down. The nation may careen well before they do. Much has already been said about the devastating policies and tenure of Joe Biden. Simply put, he is unarguably the worst president the U.S. has ever suffered, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama notwithstanding. Here I will focus on the other half of the Biden tandem, a woman of scholarly pretensions without foundation, the ineffable Dr. Jill.

The adulation Jill Biden has received for so flimsy a dubious accomplishment as a paper doctorate in a derelict field like Education Studies is utterly misplaced, whether it is the mentally impregnable Whoopi Goldberg thinking that Jill Biden was a medical doctor and should be considered for Surgeon General or a sports announcer for an NFL game, as Megyn Kelly notes, ingratiatingly remarking that “Dr. Jill Biden” was in attendance. I watched that game between the Eagles and the 49ers and nearly turned off the set when the fawning announcer asserted his bona fides.

The title of Dr. linked to Jill Biden certainly seems inappropriate. Recently, my wife Janice Fiamengo posted a Substack article critical of the First Lady’s doctoral thesis from the University of Delaware, Student Retention in the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs, a document running to a risible 80 pages, not counting reference pages and appendices. Additionally, the Literature Review does not identify disagreements and contrary viewpoints in the education literature, as is standard practice, nor does her Methodology section indicate the limits of her analytical procedure, also standard practice. These, as well as thin citation, inadequate research, and generally poor writing, as Wall Street Journal film critic Kyle Smith has shown, are crucial problems.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu’s Judicial Reform Doesn’t Go Far Enough Israel should establish rules of standing and recognize the distinction between policy and law. By Michael B. Mukasey

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/netanyahus-judicial-reform-doesnt-go-far-enough-reasonableness-attorney-general-standing-knesset-policy-supreme-court-2d3d1664?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Judges and attorneys general throughout the world—I’ve served in both capacities in the U.S.—wield substantial authority. In any sound legal system, such authority is subject to clear, objective limits. That seemingly unexceptional principle might help clarify the debate roiling Israel over the country’s Supreme Court justices and attorney general, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposals to change that authority and the method of selecting justices.

Unlike the U.S., Israel doesn’t have a constitution to constrain court rulings. It doesn’t require that a party bringing a case have standing—a direct and personal stake in the outcome of the dispute. In Israel, anyone may file a case on any issue, which raises the ante in the current debate. Nor do Israeli courts recognize the distinction between legal issues—resolved in the U.S. by courts—and policy issues, including military tactics and cabinet appointments, which in the U.S. are left to the political branches.

Moreover, Israel’s Supreme Court has taken on the authority to base its decisions on whatever it determines is “reasonable.” The court has applied even that tenuous standard inconsistently. In 1999, when Prime Minister Netanyahu tried to close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s headquarters in Jerusalem, the court held that the step was unreasonable because parliamentary elections were only months away. But five days before the 2022 parliamentary elections, the court sustained the power of Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s government to enter into an agreement yielding portions of what were claimed to be Israel’s territorial waters to Lebanon.

The Supreme Court’s authority often is exercised in tandem with that of Israel’s attorney general, who serves a six-year term and isn’t part of the elected government. Since 2000, the attorney general’s role as legal adviser to the government has expanded into legal authority over the government. Israel’s courts treat any directive by the attorney general as legally binding on the government. Initially by attorney general directive in 2002, and later by order of the government in 2009, the attorney general has the authority to control the legal advisers within each ministry and government office. In addition, the attorney general may appear in court to argue against the government’s position and can ban the government from seeking private counsel to defend its policies. In such cases, the government’s own lawyer in effect denies it representation.