In other words, without guns, crazy people will just manufacture homemade explosive devices.
Once again, we need to remind ourselves that it is not the weapons themselves that kill innocent people, but rather, the sick souls who wield them.
Well, the jury is in. Wal-mart has indeed been increasing minimum wages. These increases have contributed to an earnings shortfall. As a result, the stock has plunged from a high of around $90 a share to today's current quote of around $60 a share.
USA Today reports:
I would like to hear what Stephen Gandel has to say about the impact of minimum wage increases on Wal-Mart's stock price now.
The New York Times gushed in response:
On the contrary, if Ms. Clinton's assessment that Iran will try to cheat on the accord is correct, then, it is likewise a foregone conclusion that the US will eventually be forced to go to war with Iran. For, if it is certain that Iran is going to try to cheat on the accord, how else will the US be able to respond other than by going to war? It is obvious that the Iranians will not stop developing nuclear weapons until they are forced to stop. Why should they? So far the only pressure that has been brought to bear on them is a round of negotiations that has given them most everything they wanted. So, if it is truly imperative that they be stopped from developing nuclear weapons, we will need use force to do so. Ms. Clinton's statement is simply an acknowledgment of that reality.
But, if that is the case, then Ms Clinton' speech, far from being a "strong endorsement" of President Obama's deal, constitutes instead the strongest possible argument against the accord. For, if it is certain that the Iranians will try to cheat on the deal, then, why on earth would it make any sense for the US to enter into the deal in the first place? It would be far better to go to war with Iran immediately. To do otherwise is simply to delay the inevitable. Entering into accords with the Iranians that they will never abide by is simply the height of foolishness.
It is as if Neville Chamberlain had stepped off the plane, waving the Munich Agreement, and said: "Here is the accord I have negotiated with Herr Hitler, but I don't expect it to bring peace in our time. On the contrary, Hitler is not to be trusted one bit and certainly will attempt to violate the accord as soon as he is able." Would anyone in his right mind have concluded anything other than that Chamberlain's words implied war between Germany and England in the not too distant future? And would anyone have concluded that the agreement with such an untrustworthy character was anything to be celebrated?
The fact that Hillary Clinton, in a speech that presumably was meant to display her foreign policy credentials, should both declare her support for an agreement with the Iranians and also imply that the agreement is not worth the paper it is written on because the Iranians are completely untrustworthy and doubtlessly will try to violate the agreement at the first possible opportunity, is simply an incredible display of foreign policy ineptitude from the woman who aspires to be the leader of the free world. In essence, Hillary's speech argues that we should support President Obama's negotiation of an agreement with a party that is completely untrustworthy. With supporters like this, Obama doesn't need any enemies.
The great Soviet historian, Robert Conquest, just passed away. His obituary in WSJ is here. I was an avid reader of his histories of Stalin, The Great Terror (dealing with the Stalinist show trials and purges in the 1930's) and Harvest of Sorrow (dealing with the dekulakization and collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and its disastrous results).
These books may have overestimated (perhaps grossly so) the number of people "done in" by Stalin, but when Conquest first published The Great Terror in 1968, his was almost the only voice of his era decrying the utter villainy of Stalin's regime. In those years, the Soviet Union was viewed by idealistic Progressives (actually, dupes and useful idiots) through rose-colored glasses as a kind of utopia to which Americans should aspire.
Conquest's histories, though perhaps now superseded by later works incorporating information from Soviet archives (unavailable to Conquest when he first wrote and themselves of uncertain accuracy), supplied some of the first realistic portrayals of the horrors of Stalinist Russia.
Go it alone. Use the clout of the executive branch to make sweeping changes through executive action. For example, declare that you won't enforce the immigration laws, or have your Secretary of State negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran behind closed doors, or have the EPA announce new carbon emission rules that will force a complete reorganization of the American energy industry.
Then, get the Justice Department to issue various opinions to the effect that your executive actions are legal.
Then, if possible, get some international body to validate your executive actions, as, for example, you got the UN Security Council to ratify your deal with Iran and as you will try to get the Pope and the UN climate treaty conference in December to support the EPA's carbon emission rules.
Your strategy is to overwhelm the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government and any states that resist, to present them with a fait accompli that they will not be able to overturn. For example, the fact that the UN has already ratified your Iran nuclear deal can be used to bludgeon Congress into accepting that deal (in spite of the fact that it is the duty of the Senate, not the UN, to ratify American treaties). Likewise, your executive actions on immigration and carbon emissions will certainly be challenged in the courts, but the litigation will take years, and, by the time the Supreme Court issues its ruling, Democratic presidents may well have stuffed the Court with enough liberal judges that the Court will decide in your favor (employing, say, Chevron deference). Besides, even if the Court decides against you, your administrative changes will have become so entrenched by then that the Court's decision will be moot.
What we are witnessing is nothing less than a tyrant seizing power, manipulating the executive branch of government to crush the other two federal branches of government and the states and to force upon the nation the elitist vision of one man.
The opinion rests on a dubious interpretation of the "due process" clauses in the 5th and 14th Amendments of the Constitution. The 5th Amendment reads:
The 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War to extend the force of the 5th Amendment to apply also to laws passed by the various states:
Justice Anthony Kennedy, the author of the majority opnion, argues:
If you strip away the flowery rhetoric, this reasoning boils down to the following argument:
Thus, we can see that the wording of the 5th and 14th Amendments can be used to justify rights as diverse as the right to same-sex marriage or the right to own slaves. That is, this kind of reasoning is totally unlimited and open-ended and can be used to achieve any legal outcome the justices desire. The very wording of the majority opinion in Obergefell reveals how open-ended this reasoning is: the responsibility to protect fundamental rights cannot be "reduced to any formula," the Court's exercise of "reasoned judgment" (as defined, of course, solely by the court) must be guided by "broad principles rather than specific requirements," the inquiry into fundamental rights knows no "outer boundaries," the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment "did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all its dimensions," we are constantly "learning the meaning of liberty" when we have a "new insight." In fact, there is no logical principle whatsoever that can limit the application of this type of reasoning: as long as you can plausibly characterize some law as denying you a fundamental right in violation of due process of law and get 5 Justices on the Supreme Court to agree with you, then, that law can be declared unconstitutional by the Court.
Judge Robert Bork, in his book The Tempting of America, provides a devastating critique of the "substantive due process" reasoning in the Dred Scott decision:
In sum, then, once substantive due process reasoning starts to be used, it can be used to override almost any legislative act. When this happens, we are no longer living in a state ruled by a written constitution and specific legislative acts (mere "formulas" by Justice Kennedy's reasoning), but one ruled by the whims and personal tastes of an administrative elite consisting of 5 lawyers in Washington. As Justice Scalia writes in his dissent from the majority opinion in Obergefell, when this happens, we have undergone, in essence, a "judicial putsch:"
Justice Thomas, in a separate dissent, adds:
When courts abstain from using specious substantive due process reasoning, they leave legislating to the legislative branch. Then, if voters determine that the legislature has passed a law that the voters don't like, the voters are free to elect new legislators, who can pass new legislation; that is, if the people don't like the acts their legislature has passed, they have a readily accessible recourse: elect new representatives. On the other hand, if the Court applies "substantive due process" reasoning, it substitutes its own judgment for that of the legislature. If the voters determine that they do not like the Supreme Court's decision, there is no way short of a constitutional amendment for them to reverse that decision; there is no readily available recourse.
As long as you agree with the Court's decisions, the court's use of substantive due process reasoning may be just fine with you. Over the last several decades, the Court has generally used substantive due process reasoning to invent new rights clamored for by the Progressive Left (for example, the right to abortion in Roe v Wade, and the right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell), so the Court's use of substantive due process during those years has been cheered by the Left. (In fact, most on the Left have no understanding whatsoever of the validity (or lack thereof) of the legal arguments used in decisions like Roe v Wade and Obergefell; they are interested only in getting the outcomes they want.) But, the use of specious due process reasoning is a two-edged sword that can just as easily work against Progressive goals. Suppose, for example, that Congress were to pass a law that states:
Suppose an individual teacher were to bring suit against this law, arguing that he should not be forced to join a union. Under an incorrect application of the due process clause ("substantive due process"), the court could find that not being coerced to join a union and pay union dues is a species of liberty, and denying people this liberty "could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law." Public service employee unions, like the Service Employee International Union, one of the largest supporters of various Progressive causes, would be crippled by such a decision. If this example sounds far-fetched, consider that the Supreme Court just agreed to hear a case in the 2016 term, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, that addresses the very question of whether teachers can be forced to join teachers unions and to pay union dues. Of course, we can be fairly confident that Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts, after expressing such vehement disapproval of substantive due process reasoning in Obergefell, will not apply similar reasoning in Friedrichs.
In 1973, the Supreme Court used substantive due process arguments to decide Roe v Wade. Far from resolving the question of whether abortion is a constitutional right, that decision bequeathed upon the nation decades of ongoing conflict and deep division. It is entirely likely that the Obergefell decision will do just the same. I read, for example, today that, since the Obergefell decision, support for same-sex marriage has dropped by 6%:
Now that 5 robed ephors in Washington have imposed their "reasoned judgment" on the nation and foreclosed all additional legislative debate on how states define marriage, expect further division and conflict to follow.
Liberation from text is attractive to judges as well. It increases their ability to do what they think is good. Unlike Shakespeare producers and theologians, judges are pressured by the environment in which they operate. In our adversarial system, one side -- the side with a bad argument -- has an incentive to urge departure from (or distortion of) text. It was about early non-textual expositors that John Locke wrote when he asked: "[Does] it not often happen that a man of an ordinary capacity very well understands a text or law that he reads, til he consults an expositor, or goes to counsel, who, by the time he [has] explain[ed] them, makes the words signify either nothing at all, or what he pleases?"
More on post-modernism's distortions of legal texts to come soon.
Presumably, then, Mount Holyoke would admit a person who was "born male, but does not still identify as male," but, if you are a young woman, you would not be able to request that you not be assigned said person as a roommate.
Gee, parents are going to be really happy with that one: freshman girl texts mom and dad: "I just unpacked and my roommate is walking around the room with a bra on and his - er, her?? - dick and balls hanging out. Gag me with a spoon!"
It is also interesting to note the circumlocutions we need to go through these days to identify the gender of people. Instead of calling them simply "men," we must resort to expressions like "those who were born male and still identify as male; in other words, men." (I'm still not really sure about that one. Do they mean, like, for reals men?) If I say "freshman girl" instead of "person who was born with a vagina and still identifies as a female and who is in her first year of college," is it a micro-aggresion?
I also note that the phrase in the WSJ article "[persons who are] born male and still identify as male" implies that it is possible to switch the way one gender-identifies. That is, if there is a time when one still identifies as a male, that implies that there may come a later time when one no longer identifies as a male. The WSJ article provides an example of this very phenomenon:
That is, the roommate was born female and identified as a female for most of her life, but "began identifying as male at some point."
But, if it is possible for a woman to begin identifying as male at some point, isn't it also possible for that woman to stop identifying as male at some later point? Conversely, if it is possible for a man to begin identifying as female at some point, isn't it also possible for that man to stop identifying as a female at some later point? And what implications does that have for the young woman who might be forcibly assigned the born-male-but-no-longer-identifies-as-such as a roommate? The born-male-but-no-longer-identifies-as-such obviously stopped identifying as male at some point. But, such a switch implies that it is possible for him (her?) to start identifying once again as male at some later point. And what if he (she?) does so in the middle of the night in the dark as his (her?) roommate sleeps in the bed next to him (her)? Cetera quis nescit?
It is astonishing that universities will pass a myriad of regulations to prevent young men from raping women, but, apparently, will resist taking simple common sense steps to separate young men whose gender identification has been inconstant over time from sleeping in the same room with young female roommates. Of course, exactly the same logic applies if we are talking about allowing men who (currently) gender-identify as women to use women's lavatories. If your young daughter has just walked into the women's lavatory in the park, it is quite possible that this may be the very moment at which a man who gender identifies as a woman may also walk into the lavatory and start to gender-identify as a man again, with potentially highly undesirable consequences for your daughter.
2000 years later, Ovid has once again been banished on moral grounds from the cultural center of the world, this time, New York City. As WSJ reports:
In spite of Augustus' banishment of Ovid 2000 years ago, the poet's works have been disseminated around the world and have served as an inspiration for many of the greatest masters of Western art, including the poets Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio and Shakespeare (see the table of contents in the collection of essays Reception of Ovid, edited by John Miller and Carole Newlands), the painter Titian (see here), and the sculptor Bernini (see here and here). In spite of Columbia's priggish new banishment of Ovid this summer, the poet will continue to serve as an inspiration for artists and for students of the psychology of (sometimes violent) passion and love.
And, btw, it is a sign of how utterly out of touch the Greek government is that they think that forcing the resignation of Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is a conciliatory move. It is simply laughable.
Second, the political implications of a yes vote would be deeply troubling. The troika clearly did a reverse Corleone — they made Tsipras an offer he can’t accept, and presumably did this knowingly. So the ultimatum was, in effect, a move to replace the Greek government. And even if you don’t like Syriza, that has to be disturbing for anyone who believes in European ideals.
Devaluation couldn't create much more chaos than already exists? Paul, are you kidding? The chaos has only just begun. On Friday, Greeks had free access to euros; today, Monday, they do not. If Greeks are forced to issue their own currency, then, exactly which importers, Paul, will accept payment in the worthless drachmas of a country that has shown itself completely unwilling to abide by its financial obligations, and then spat in the face of and vilified its creditors as criminals to boot?
As is apparent from the reaction of global markets today, the impact of a Grexit outside of Greece will be minor. Greece itself, however, is faced with the prospect of becoming a modern-day Albania. Given this prospect, replacing the Greek government is not such a bad option.
At least now it seems that Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande have finally called Tsipras' bluff, whereas Obama shows no signs that he is ready or able to stand up to the Supreme Leader.
For more reflections on the parallels between Chile/Allende/Pinochet and Greece/Tsipras/?, see here. See also here for the reflections of Finnish politiician Jussi Halla-aho on a junta in Greece.
In a former life in the late 70's and early 80's, I was an ABD in Classics at UC Berkeley. I have kept up my languages over the years, and recently was rereading the Metamorphoses in Latin, with Golding's translation at my side (all available through that wonderful digital resource, Perseus). I happen to think that Ovid is one of the greatest poets in the Western canon. And, as Mr Hoyem intimated in his speech, Golding's Ovid is not merely a translation of the Metamorphoses, but a work of art in its own right. Consequently, I very much enjoyed Mr Hoyem's reading of the tale of Pomona and Vertumnus. Here is the opening of the passage in Golding's stately, yet spry heptameters:
While Mr Hoyem was reading, however, I could not help but feel a sense of trepidation. It's fortunate, I kept thinking, that Pomona students these days don't seem to understand very much Elizabethan English; for, if only they understood clearly what was going on in this tale -- god lusts after wood nymph and disguises himself as an old crone to deceive the young girl; when persuasion fails, he reveals himself in all his glory and prepares to take her by force (vim parat), only to find that violence is not necessary after all (sed vi non est opus) because she has suddenly been wounded by reciprocal feelings of affection for the god revealed (nymphe mutua vulnera sensit) -- students in the audience would no doubt be "triggered" at the suggestion of sexual violence and jump to their feet and shout Mr Hoyem off the stage. One of the female graduates, it turned out, when she later came up to receive her diploma, paused to complain to President Oxtoby of the College because she felt the College had not taken her charges of sexual assault against a male student seriously enough. The juxtapostion of this young woman's protest with Pomona's tale was most striking and the potential for an unseemly explosion was high. I did not know whether Mr Hoyem was aware that he was skating on thin ice, or was consciously challenging the students.
And then I read Peggy Noonan's column last week in the Wall Street Journal. in which she writes about political correctness and repression of free speech on college campuses today and "microagressions" and "triggering." Noonan describes an article that recently appeared in the Spectator, the student newspaper of Columbia University:
I don't know where our society is headed. It is no doubt true that Ovid's Metamorphoses can be read as nothing more than a series of rape stories, one after another. On the other hand, as I have already pointed out, Ovid is generally held to be one of the greatest poets in the Western canon and his Metamorphoses are a treasure trove of Greek and Latin mythological tales. Proof of Ovid's influence can be found in the fact that many of the greatest works of Western art have been inspired by the Metamorphoses. For example, two of the greatest works of the sculptor's craft, Lorenzo Bernini's Daphne and Apollo and his Rape of Proserpine (or Persephone) stand in the Villa Borghese in Rome. These sculptural groupings are based on the very same tales from the Metamorphoses that were read by the students at Columbia. The first grouping portrays the exact moment when Apollo is about to seize Daphne and have his way with her. The girl prays to the gods to save her and they oblige by transforming (metamorphosizing) her into a tree, the laurel tree (daphne is the Greek work for laurel). This is an example of an aetiological tale, that is, a tale that describes how something -- in this case, laurel trees -- came into being; Ovid's Metamorphoses are filled with such tales. The manner in which the sculpture shows Daphne's fingers being transformed into leafy branches, her feet taking root in the ground, and bark beginning to encase her skin, is pure artistic magic. The second grouping portrays the exact moment when Pluto seizes Proserpine and carries her off to the Underworld. For centuries, viewers of Bernini's sculpture have marveled at the way in which the artist could portray so realistically Pluto's hands pressing against the soft flesh of Proserpine's side and thigh.
So, what are we to do? Like fanatical members of some post-Modern Taliban, are we to tear up every copy of Ovid and smash these great works of Bernini to pieces out of some misguided sense of puritanical zeal?
It can plausibly be argued that the post-Modern era traces its origin to the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the early 1960's. The purpose of that movement was to protest the University of California's restrictions on the freedom of expression. One of the manifestations of that movement was that students began to lace their speech with offensive obscenities to show that no form of expression was off limits. And yet now, the post-Modern movement has come full circle. The movement that started off defending the right of students to discuss any subject without limitation has devolved into a movement that itself seeks to place all kinds of restrictions on what may be discussed in our universities. Post-Modernism has now become the kind of puritanical oppressor from which the early Hippies in the days of free speech and free love sought to liberate themselves. Yes, we must vigorously prosecute the rapists, be sensitive to the experiences and feelings of rape victims, and teach Ovid's Metamorphoses with appropriate caveats ("trigger warnings," if you will), but we also must not allow misguided puritanical zeal to cause us to throw overboard the cultural and artistic heritage that has been accumulated over two thousands years of Western Civilization.
Gardiner is well known for insisting that Bach be played at a fast tempo. Michael O'Donnell, in his review of Gardiner's book Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, describes Mr Gardiner's philosophy as follows:
Unfortunately, a fast tempo does not pair well with the male soloists in these performances, many of whom employ a very broad vibrato. If the period of the vibrato is longer than the duration of an individual note, then often the voice does not reach the pure pitch of one note before it transitions to the next note. As a result, the male parts are often a terrible, wobbly muddle.
Frederick K. Gable describes the problem succinctly:
Gable then summarizes the verdict of musicologist Greta Moens-Haenen in her book Das Vibrato in der Musik des Barock:
Would that the vibrato of the various male soloists in these performances had been less obtrusive! The ostentatious vocal technique employed is far better suited to, say, a Verdi opera than a Bach cantata. It almost seems as if the soloists are guilty of the sin of vanity, unwilling to subordinate their vocal pyrotechnics to the greater good of the piece as a whole. One cannot help but wonder if male soloists chosen from a boys’ choir, with voices perhaps less technically skilled, but purer and lacking the broad vibrato, would do a better job.
I do not find the same problem with the female soloists or with the musicians, who sing and play their parts with little vibrato. See here for my rapturous appraisal of the aria duetto from Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn from the Gardiner CD's.
I have been on a Bach jag for quite some time now, listening to as much of the music of the great composer as I can. And, obviously, I consider Heifetz divine. But, I had never listened to the combination of Heifetz playing the Bach sonatas and partitas. In fact, I had never (to my great shame) listened to all the Bach sonatas and partitas. And my experience of Heifetz came rather through the great romantic and heroic violin concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, and Felix Mendelsohn.
So, instead of coming to the Bach pieces through Heifetz, I happened to buy Thiele's CD last year and listened to all the Bach pieces together for the first time in his brilliant interpretation on the mandolin. I immediately recognized that Thiele, like a Heifetz, was the best player of his instrument for the last, say, 100 odd years or so.
But, now I have bought the Heifetz CD and I find it stunning. But, I find that I am appreciating the Heifetz renditions of the Bach pieces all the more because I am so familiar with them from having listened to Thiele play them with such feeling, virtuosity, and verve.
Heifetz and Thiele. Each is the great modern master of his own respective instrument. Each does things with his instrument that do not seem possible for mere mortals. And when you put such virtuosity together with the Bible (as Heifetz called Bach), you surely end up with music in the castle of heaven.
BTW, for a wholly unique record of musical genius, you can listen to and watch Heifetz play the Chaconne from the Bach Violin Partita in D minor here. (I love the "Take one!" at the beginning of the tape. Did the technician think that God's fiddler was going to require more than one take?)
Hmmm. Maybe the Canadian companies backing the Keystone pipeline just needed to give a donation to the Clinton Foundation.
Oh, my bad. The pipeline supporters already did!
Of course, the pipeline supporters are, IMHO, complete idiots for making these donations for the simple fact that there is a snowball's chance in hell that Clinton, once elected, would ever approve Keystone.
Or maybe they are brilliant, having grasped that their donations will help undermine support for Hillary within the Democratic Party, which will help elect a Republican candidate, who will approve the pipeline.
What exactly is Ms. Pao saying here?
Is she saying that, if reddit currently had, say, a higher percentage of Asian and Indian males in its workforce than the percentage in the general population, then, reddit would apply some kind of "weight" or "points" against new Asian and Indian male job applicants in order to achieve a "gender-balanced and multiracial team?" Is she saying that race- and gender-based quotas are being established at reddit in the attempt to have a workforce that reflects the racial and gender makeup of American society at large?
Suppose I applied for a job at reddit (not that I ever would, given the obviously highly politicized environment there, but suppose). Suppose that, when interrogated about my views on "diversity," I said that my opinion was that race and gender were not criteria that should ever be considered in the hiring process. Suppose that I said that it was my opinion that the goal of hiring the most highly talented, intelligent, hard working employees, regardless of their race and gender, trumped the goal of having a workforce whose racial and gender makeup mirrored that of the general US population. Suppose I said that I subscribed to the philosophy of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and believed that the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race and gender is to stop discriminating on the basis of race and gender. Is Ms Pao saying that reddit would "weed me out" for holding such principled and unexceptionable views? If reddit did so, it seems obvious to me that reddit would be practicing a form of discrimination far more heinous than any of the things that Ms. Pao ever experienced at the hands of the partners at KPCB.
Quite frankly, if Ms. Pao's statements are a reflection of how she would go about trying to build a successful software company in Silicon Valley, judging skin pigmentation and the shape of one's genitalia to be more important than the ability to craft complex software, it is no surprise that KPCB found her wanting.
As I have written in the past, so-called "Progressives" are now seeking to poison our businesses and universities (see SCA-5) here in California with racial and gender politics. It is time for executives at Silicon Valley companies to stop groveling, get some friggin' spine, and tell these people: we are drawing a line in the sand; your racial and gender categorizing is not welcome here.
This clear-cut and unambiguous decision did not prevent the gender Stasi from trying to spin the verdict to mean the opposite of what it meant. As sfgate continues:
The NYT chimed in breathlessly:
Funny, I thought the outcome of the case, rather than "amplifying" concerns about the lack of diversity, helped lay them to rest. As an aside, I have to comment that, if what went on between a fairly geeky Ellen Pao (IMHO, at any rate) and a bunch of middle-aged VC's qualifies as "salacious," then I guess I have been seriously overestimating the excitement level in New York.
KPCB released its own statement after the verdict:
I would have simply remarked that "After careful examination of the facts, the jury determined that Ellen Pao's claims had no legal merit" and left it at that. The additional statements to the effect that "gender diversity in the workplace is an important issue" and that "KPCB remains committed to supporting women" are unseemly and unnecessary concessions that will buy no respite for KPCB from the onslaught of the gender harpies.
If KPCB had felt the need for any additional commentary on the verdict, then, what they should have said instead is: "KPCB remains committed to hiring and promoting the most intelligent, talented, hard-working people possible regardless of sex, race, sexual orientation, or any other accidental characteristic." If, instead, Silicon Valley starts hiring/promoting people because of these various characteristics, then, Silicon Valley is doomed. The goal of business then will be not the pursuit of excellence, but merely the dispensation of patronage to various special interest groups.
In an earlier blog post condemning the attempts of Jesse Jackson to strong arm high tech companies into hiring more blacks simply because they are black, I wrote:
The same argument applies to misguided and, in their own way, prejudiced efforts to promote gender diversity as an end in and of itself. The way to stop discriminating on the basis of gender is to stop discriminating on the basis of gender. KPCB's goal should not be to promote women in the workplace simply because they are women, but to promote the best and brightest, period. Be they women or be they men.
The military charges, resulting from a long-awaited but tightly guarded investigation, include desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. A conviction could lead to a dishonorable discharge from the military and, in the extreme, life in prison for Sgt. Bergdahl.
The Bergdahl affair should remind us just how bad President Obama is at negotiating with Islamic extremists. Mr Obama struck a deal with Afghan insurgents to swap five high-value Taliban prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay for a single deserter. And then afterwards, Mr Obama held a Rose Garden press conference with Bergdahl’s parents to try to place the most positive spin possible on this shameful deal. It is difficult to imagine how Mr Obama could have been any more deluded and misinformed about the costs and benefits of the deal he was entering into.
And this is the very same President Obama who is now negotiating with the mullahs in Tehran on the question of whether Iran should be allowed to have nuclear weapons. If Obama was played for so big a fool in his negotiations with the Taliban, why, in Heaven's name, should we believe that he is going to be any less inept in his bumbling eagerness to close a deal with Iran?
We have arrived at a shocking state of affairs: Mr Obama is demonstrably a terrible negotiator and sees only what he wants to see; his foreign policy in the Middle East has been nothing but one fiasco after another; and yet, now he asks us to trust him that it is a good deal to grant to Iran, a terrorist state, a license to develop nuclear weapons it can use against Israel, our best ally in the region and a bastion of Western capitalism, technology, and democracy.
And for what? What will be the Bergdahl Obama gets us in return this time?
The calculation is 1.02^80 = 4.86.
Oh no, we wouldn't want to see a chaotic situation develop in the region.
It was bad enough when we had riots in Ferguson in response to Obama's dog whistles; how bad will it be when the entire Middle East is engulfed in flames because of his dim machinations?
And here is an article by John Podhoretz, who correctly assesses the current relationship between the United States and Israel as having reached a crisis: Obama is on the verge of abandoning decades of bi-partisan American support for Israel and instead jumping into bed with the Mullahs in Tehran. And it is to distract attention from this unthinkable change of course that Obama criticizes Netanyahu's supposed "racism" (merely for urging Israeli right-wingers to go to the polls on Monday to counter a surge in Israeli Arab voters) while ignoring the far worse human rights violations that are so common in Muslim lands.
And, true to form, the Obama administration's backers in the liberal media respond to Mr Obama's dog whistle and take up the chant. For example, the New York Times writes:
Since when is it racism to point out that one's opponents are being bused in large numbers to the polls and to encourage one's supporters to turn out to cast their own votes against them.
The Obama-Holder racial politicking has now metastasized beyond the borders of America and is threatening next to poison all of global politics. Who appointed Barack Obama the arbiter of racism? God, I can't wait for him to be gone.
Here is what Netanyahu actually said:
In other words, Netanyahu is not rejecting a two-state solution in principle, but rather is saying that a two-state solution would be unviable under present circumstances for a variety of practical reasons. This does not mean that this solution will be unviable forever. Netanyahu clarified his position today:
Given the missiles launched and the tunnels dug by Palestinians from Gaza against Israel last year, such a position is perfectly reasonable and should hardly raise eyebrows. But, the Democrats insist on twisting Netanyahu's original statement into something he never meant in order to continue their smear campaign against him.
And all the while, as Obama presses his assault against Netanyahu, his best ally in the Middle East, he negotiates to give nuclear weapons to the regime that took 52 American diplomats hostage in 1979, that sponsors terrorist organizations all over the Middle East, that has set up a puppet government in Iraq, that colludes with Bashar Assad in Syria, that labels America the "Great Satan," and that denies the legitimacy of the state of Israel.
Obama has come completely unhinged.
The WSJ writes:
The White House upended decades of U.S. policy on Wednesday when it left open the possibility that it might not use its veto in the United Nations Security Council to shield Israel from unfavorable resolutions, such as the creation of a Palestinian state.
Will Obama finally draw a real line in the sand? Has Obama finally lost his temper? If Bibi abandons the two-state solution, will Obama abandon decades of US policy and withhold the US veto against the creation of a Palestinian state? it. Obama has found himself incapable of doing anything that requires real toughness and nerve, like taking out Assad or protecting Ukraine from Russian imperialism. Maybe, just maybe, withholding the United States veto in the Security Council is something Obama is tough enough to handle.
This is what so many Americans hate about Obama. He will not stand up to Putin. He will not stand up to Assad. He has completely bent over and spread for the Mullahs in Tehran, paving the way towards nuclear weapons for them and allowing them to overrun half of Iraq, while he stands by and does nothing as ISIS rampages through the other half.
But there is one person he will get tough with: Bibi, his best ally in the Middle East. Has Obama finally found someone he thinks he can bully?
Consider. Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, has expressed himself quite explicitly:
"We are not against Jews?" Khamenei asserts that "any entity ruling Palestine is illegitimate unless it is Islamic." I'm sure there are many Jews in Israel who would beg to disagree. If they did, what would Khamenei say? That they must be forcibly overcome? Killed, exterminated, if they resist? And yet, Obama seeks to smooth the path whereby this man and his nation, Israel's mortal enemy, can arm themselves with nuclear weapons. If such active efforts to arm Iran, a nation whose leader denies Israel's very right to existence, are not, effectively, anti-Semitism, I don't know what is.
Attorney General Holder has claimed that opponents of Obama are motivated by "racial animus." If it is legitimate to insinuate that the opponents of Obama are racists, then, certainly, it is equally legitimate to label a President who is undermining Israel and arming Iran with nuclear weapons an anti-Semite.
The security and integrity of her family’s electronic communications was taken seriously from the onset when it was first set up for President Clinton’s team. While the curiosity in the specifics of this set up is understandable, given what people with ill-intentions can do with such information in this day and age, there are concerns about broadcasting specific technical details about past and current practices. However, suffice it to say, robust protections were put in place and additional upgrades and techniques employed over time as they became available, including consulting and employing third party experts.
These serious assurances that "security was taken seriously" and this faux concern about revealing "specific technical details" are evasive in the most amateurish way. Every IT professional in charge of an email system knows how to set up a secure email system. Here, for example, is a primer on how to set up your own email server with your own domain. Why is it not possible for Hillary to make available her "consultants and third party experts" to explain the technicals details of her email system? Such openness would allow outside technical experts to verify the level of security inherent in Hillary's email system.
I used the term discovery advisedly. There is an entire legal sub-industry that specializes in combing through the documents of an entity to determine which are relevant to a particular legal purpose. In the old days, this process involved a lot of human labor and was very time consuming: an army of legal assistants manually read each document and determined whether it was relevant. Today, the process still involves human review, but is assisted by a variety of computer tools and is referred to by the term e-discovery. I have known about e-discovery for years. (I even interviewed once for a software engineering job at an e-discovery firm in Silicon Valley.) Wikipedia describes e-discovery as follows:
For more information about this legal specialty, you can visit the website of the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists or The eDiscovery Gold Standard, the website of e-discovery expert Daniel Gold. And here is a New York Times article that discusses state of the art in 2011; presumably, the sophistication of the software has only increased since then.
Wikipedia defines legal hold as follows:
Wikipedia defines spoliation as follows:
The exact process by which Hillary decided which emails to turn over to the State Department is unclear. She has given (for example, in her fact sheet) only brief, incomplete, and informal descriptions of that process. More important, we must take her word that the process she describes was, in fact, the process that was followed; that is, we have no independent third-party verification that she really did what she said she did. And then she deleted approximately half of all her emails.
What is clear is that it was possible -- indeed, it should have been considered standard practice -- for Hillary to have turned her email server over to an e-discovery firm to determine which emails on the server were relevant to public business at the Department of State. Such a firm would have produced an independent, third-party certification acceptable in a court of law that all relevant emails were handed over and included all relevant electronic metadata. And, btw, cost would not have been an issue: there are any number of e-discovery businesses that would have jumped at the opportunity to perform the service gratis in return for the privilege of being able to advertise that they had done so for the Secretary of State.
If Hillary did not use a certified e-discovery process, this allows an inference to be drawn that some emails may have been intentionally destroyed because Hillary had a "consciousness of guilt" with respect to such emails or some other motivation to avoid the evidence.
One thing I know, however: anything I send through my work account is permanently preserved and subject to discovery. And that is as it should be. Legal actions between entities (businesses, governmental agencies, and so on) would never be able to proceed unless those entities were forced to preserve clear records reflecting what was going on within those entities at various times.
The problem with Hillary's single, not-controlled-by-the-State-Department, email account, on the other hand, is that it allowed her to go through her emails after the fact and delete any emails that in retrospect she judged to be embarrassing, thereby making later discovery impossible.
For example, imagine if Hillary fired off a large number of emails on the night of the Benghazi attack. At the time she sent them, they may have appeared innocuous enough and they were definitely related to her official capacity, so, if she had had two accounts, she might have sent them out through her government account. The fact that she did not make use of two accounts and instead used a single email account under her sole control means that she had the opportunity with the aid of hindsight to go through all her emails and decide in retrospect whether there were particular emails that she found embarrassing and wanted to delete, thereby expunging them from public view.
This is like a CEO involved in a legal proceeding being allowed after the fact to go through the exhibits of evidence and decide which pieces he wanted filtered out. Alternatively, imagine if you had sole control over the records of your stock trades for the year. At the end of the year, you would be able to go back and decide which transactions you wanted to report and which you didn't. Nice gig if you can get it.
Hillary's argument that, even if she had used two email accounts, she still never would have been careless enough to send embarrassing emails through her government account is like a suspected house burglar telling the police not to bother dusting the place because he never would have been careless enough to leave behind fingerprints. It happens all the time that people inadvertently leave behind a paper (or, in our day and age, electronic) trail that in retrospect they wished they hadn’t. That's the whole reason why all of us are forced to leave behind these evidentiary trails in the first place. The fact that the Secretary of State through her use of a private email account for the transaction of public business was given the privilege of going back and, in essence, editing her evidentiary trail is an outrage.
Discussing an article in the New York Times written by Elizabeth Harris entitled "Lack of Diversity Persists in Admissions to Elite City Schools," the Contrarian writes:
I love that unspecific "there is widespread agreement." Has anybody asked any of the Asians? Then there are the reactions of Mayor Bill de Blasio and his Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña.
Sounds to me like they are proposing naked discrimination against the Asians. Hey Asians, how many of you know that you have now been designated as people against whom naked discrimination by the state is to be permitted and encouraged? Your dad may speak broken English and drive a cab 12 hours a day, but already you have been deemed to have too much "privilege" and you must be knocked back by having the state impose quotas on you.
In other words, the measures that would be employed by New York Democratic Mayor DeBlasio and Chancellor Fariña to make New York's technical high schools "more closely resemble the population of the city" are exactly the same kind of measures that would be employed by those California Democrats who want racial quotas established in high-tech companies and who back California constitutional amendment SCA-5, namely naked racial discrimination in favor of blacks and Hispanics and against Asians and Indians.
So, thanks for the post, Contrarian. Apparently, naked racial prejudice against high-achieving Asians and Indians is not limited to West Coast Lefties, but is a nationwide phenomenon endemic to the Democratic Party.
