The embarassing cyber boobs at the head of the Democratic Party

The following are the facts we know about Russian hacking of the DNC:

1. Russian hackers utilized the well-known technique of spear-phishing, a species of phishing, to obtain the credentials of individuals within the DNC. The Russian hackers then used these credentials to access the email accounts of those individuals.

   Wikipedia describes phishing and spear-phishing as follows:

   Phishing is the attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames [and] passwords, ... often for malicious reasons, by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out by email spoofing or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter personal information at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Communications purporting to be from social web sites, auction sites, banks, online payment processors or IT administrators are often used to lure victims. Phishing emails may contain links to websites that are infected with malware. ... Phishing attempts directed at specific individuals or companies have been termed spear phishing. Attackers may gather personal information about their target to increase their probability of success. This technique is, by far, the most successful on the internet today, accounting for 91% of attacks.

   This technique has been well-known for years and cyber security experts have issued detailed warnings against it. For example, Symantec, the cyber security company, issued a white paper in 2012 in which it described the technique of spear-phishing as follows:

   The more traditional technique is to send a “spear-phishing” email, containing an attachment, to the target. That attachment is a document containing an exploit which, when opened, then drops a Trojan onto the target computer. This works if the exploit is embeddable in a document. If not, then an alternative approach is to host the exploit on a Web server and then email the target with a link to that Web server. The link used is quite unique, it is not hosted on a common Web site, so it will only be encountered by the chosen target. When the target clicks on the link, the exploit is triggered and a back door is installed.

2. The DNC knew that phishing attacks were being launched against it and the FBI warned the DNC repeatedly in September and October of 2015 that their computer systems were being subjected to phishing attacks, but the DNC did little about it. As the New York Times reports:
   In September of 2015, a call [from Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the FBI] was transferred from the main DNC switchboard to the Help Desk [at the DNC; Yared Tamene, a tech support contractor at the DNC] was handed the phone by a Help Desk staff member who stated that the FBI was looking for the person in charge of technology at the DNC. [Yamene] took the call and learned that the FBI thinks the DNC has at least one compromised computer on its network and the FBI wanted to know if the DNC is aware, and, if so, what the DNC is doing about it. ... [Yamene] did say [to Agent Hawkins] that the DNC has, in the past, received phishing attack attempts. ... [W]hen Special Agent Hawkins called repeatedly in October, leaving voice mail messages for Mr. Tamene, urging him to call back, [Yamene] did not return his calls, as [he] had nothing to report.

3. Phishing attacks were also mounted against the RNC, but were thwarted by the RNC's security software. As WSJ reports:
   Russian hackers tried to penetrate the computer networks of the Republican National Committee, using the same techniques that allowed them to infiltrate its Democratic counterpart, according to U.S. officials who have been briefed on the attempted intrusion. But the intruders failed to get past security defenses on the RNC’s computer networks, the officials said. ... Until now, few details had been disclosed about the nature of the targeting of Republican organizations, especially the flagship Republican National Committee, where hackers sent so-called phishing emails last spring to an email address there. Those emails were quarantined by a filter meant to detect spam as well as potentially malicious traffic that may carry viruses or trick recipients into divulging passwords, two officials said. ... RNC officials, concerned they too might have been compromised, called a private computer security firm, which in turn called the FBI and obtained information about what kinds of malicious emails to look for, the person said. Upon inspection, the RNC found that its electronic filters had blocked emails sent to a former employee matching the description they’d been warned about.

We also know that cyber attacks by one nation on another are a fact of modern life. For example, Wikipedia describes how the United States attacked Iran with the Stuxnet virus:

Stuxnet is a malicious computer worm believed to be a jointly built American-Israeli cyberweapon, although no organization or state has officially admitted responsibility. Anonymous US officials speaking to The Washington Post claimed the worm was developed during the Bush administration to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program with what would seem like a long series of unfortunate accidents. Stuxnet specifically targets programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which allow the automation of electromechanical processes such as those used to control machinery on factory assembly lines, amusement rides, or centrifuges for separating nuclear material. Exploiting four zero-day flaws, Stuxnet functions by targeting machines using the Microsoft Windows operating system and networks, then seeking out Siemens Step7 software. Stuxnet reportedly compromised Iranian PLCs, collecting information on industrial systems and causing the fast-spinning centrifuges to tear themselves apart. Stuxnet’s design and architecture are not domain-specific and it could be tailored as a platform for attacking modern SCADA and PLC systems (e.g., in automobile assembly lines[vague] or power plants), the majority of which reside in Europe, Japan and the US. Stuxnet reportedly ruined almost one fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges.

It is also a well-known fact that the NSA, on President Obama's watch, tapped the cellphone of German Prime Minister Angela Merkel and many of her ministers.

We may summarize as follows:

The existence of phishing attacks has been well known for years and cyber security experts have published detailed descriptions about how to recognize and thwart these attacks. Security personnel at the DNC knew in September 2015 that phishing attacks had already been launched against the DNC. Those same personnel were warned repeatedly by the FBI itself in September and October 2015 that phishing attacks were being mounted against the DNC. And yet, DNC personnel did not take these attacks and warnings seriously or inform their superiors that they were being subjected to these attacks. As a result, the leaders of the DNC were so naive and uninformed that they were duped by cyber exploits that they should have recognized immediately as obvious phishing attacks. And yet, we are asked to believe that these boobs, these cyber simpletons, basically the same ones who decided to set up an insecure email server in Hillary's basement, should have been elected in November and entrusted with our entire national security apparatus.

Instead of being outraged that cyber attacks were mounted by the Russians against the DNC -- attacks of the kind that every sophisticated government, including our own, mounts every day against other governments -- we should be deeply embarrassed that leaders of the Democratic Party were so naive and unsophisticated that they were fooled by the kind of simple cyber phishing exploit that most teenagers in Silicon Valley have learned to recognize and avoid on a daily basis. Even worse, President Obama's report describing the Russian hacking and his expulsion of Russian diplomats only serve to draw even more embarrassing attention to the cyber laughing-stocks who head up the Democratic Party. Obama doesn't seem to realize that his report only serves to show what buffoons the leaders of the Democratic Party are.

The villains who attempt to influence democratic elections

We have been hearing howls from the Democrats and their allies in the liberal mainstream media about how terrible it is that Russia sought to influence the election in the United States.

And yet, no such howls went up when President Obama's State Department attempted to influence the most recent Israeli election.

If Putin is a villain for attempting to undermine Hillary Clinton, then Barack Obama must likewise be a villain for attempting to undermine Benjamin Netanyahu.

Obama's final foreign policy monstrosity

Obama's decision to have the United States abstain from the vote on the UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements on the West Bank is the most monstrous foreign policy decision an American president has made in decades.

Mr Obama once again acted unilaterally, ignoring the objections of many in the legislative branch, including senators Chuck Schumer and Richard Blumenthal from his own party. He once again ceded American sovereignty in foreign policy to the UN, the first time being when he sought approval from the UN Security Council for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran instead of seeking approval for it as a treaty in the US Senate. Mr Obama's action reveals the dangers to the United States of being a member of the UN: by simply abstaining from a vote, a single rogue President, in this case Mr Obama, can bypass the requirement to seek Senate approval for foreign treaties and allow international law to be determined. Finally, Vladimir Putin is ecstatic. The international community now has a new cudgel with which to hammer the Israelis, while at the same time Russian ally Bashar al-Assad has been restored to power and Russia has become the dominant non-Muslim player in the Middle East. Leading from behind, President Obama now weakly condemns the settlements on the West Bank, while having done nothing to stop the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria, even after drawing his infamous red line.

It is difficult to imagine a more feckless, while at the same time a more dangerous, foreign policy performance from a president than what we have seen from Mr Obama over the last 8 years.

Our anti-Semite-in-Chief is at it again

President Obama ordered the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, to abstain from a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements on the West Bank, thereby allowing the resolution to pass.

It is difficult to stand by and watch as this man's personal prejudices become American foreign policy. The Left will fall in line without any further reflection because he is "their guy." As a result, the practice of defending Israel, which has been the consistent policy of American presidents of both parties for decades, will be tossed aside and branded as Trumpian extremism. And Jeremiah Wright style anti-Semitism will become a new plank in the platform of the Left, who will cheer attacks on Israel without even realizing that the Pied Piper Obama has led them down the road to anti-Semitism.

And all this is happening a mere couple of weeks after the Left were flinging charges of anti-Semitism at Trump himself and wringing their hands because they were so worried that Trump would destabilize American foreign policy. Now we see that it is rather Obama who is undermining American foreign policy.

Just a couple of weeks ago there was an enormous uproar on the Left because Trump took a call from the President of Taiwan, thereby deviating from a policy that had been followed for decades. Now, the Left will say nothing as our President cavalierly discards one of the most constant and distinctive features of post-WWII American foreign policy.

What other destruction will this petulant lame duck President wreak in the next month out of sour grapes because the Democrats lost the election? It is as if the Democrats are trying to smash as many of the toys as possible on the way out because they will not be allowed to play with them any more.

Why Scott Pruitt to the EPA?

Why did Donald Trump choose Scott Pruitt, the Attorney General of Oklahoma and an expert in constitutional law, to be the next head of the EPA? Perhaps the best answer to this question was given by Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University.

According to his biography on the Massey & Gail website:

The New York Times describes Professor Tribe as "arguably the most famous constitutional scholar and Supreme Court practitioner in the country." The Northwestern Law Review has opined that no one else "in American history has . . . simultaneously achieved Tribe's preeminence . . . as a practitioner and . . . scholar of constitutional law."

Professor Tribe has successfully advised leading business corporations, members of Congress, states, and many other clients on constitutional questions, statutory and administrative issues, and complex legal matters of all types. Widely admired and unusually successful as an appellate advocate, he has argued 37 cases in the U.S. Supreme Court - orally argued 35 cases and presented 2 more in which the Court ruled in his clients' favors without argument - and has lost only 13. ... Professor Tribe has written 115 books and articles, including his treatise, "American Constitutional Law," which has been cited more often than any other legal text since 1950. He helped draft the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the Marshall Islands. Professor Tribe is one of only 60 professors in the history of Harvard to be designated "University Professor," the university's highest academic title.

According to Wikipedia:

Among [Professor Tribe's] law students and research assistants while on the faculty at Harvard have been President Barack Obama (a research assistant for two years), Chief Justice John Roberts (as a law student in his classes), US Senator Ted Cruz, Chief Judge and Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan (as a research assistant).

Liberal and Democratic lawyers and legal experts have often mentioned Professor Tribe as a potential Supreme Court nominee by a Democratic president (see here).

Of the constitutionality of the Clean Power Plan promulgated by President Obama's EPA Professor Tribe has written:

I recently filed comments with the Environmental Protection Agency urging the agency to withdraw its Clean Power Plan, a regulatory proposal to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s electric power plants. In my view, coping with climate change is a vital end, but it does not justify using unconstitutional means. ... After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority. ... [T]he EPA, like every administrative agency, is constitutionally forbidden to exercise powers Congress never delegated to it in the first place. The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not. (emphasis added)

In other words, one of our nation's most respected constitutional law scholars and a potential Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court has concluded categorically that President Obama's Clean Power Plan is unconstitutional. Scott Pruitt was one of the state attorneys general who brought legal action to halt this illegal usurpation of power by the EPA. It would be difficult to imagine a candidate better qualified to rein in the unconstitutional expansion of the powers of the EPA under President Obama than Scott Pruitt.

Find the autocrat: Part 2

The mainstream media have a new favorite word: autocrat (used maybe even more frequently than their other new favorite term: alt-right).

This morning Bloomberg ran as the lead article on its website a piece entitled Modern Democracy Has Plenty of Trump Precedents by one Joshua Kurlantzick. The article argues that Donald Trump is an autocrat (this judgment seems a tad premature since he was elected less than a month ago and has not yet taken office) and compares him to other well-known autocrats around the world.

Mr Kurlantzick starts out:

According to the monitoring group Freedom House, democracy has been on the decline worldwide since the late 2000s, with the rise of elected autocrats — legitimately elected leaders who then undermine democratic institutions and culture — a major reason for freedom’s ebb. ... [These autocrats are] indeed deeply devoted to themselves and their images, making their administrations reliant on their own personal influence. And in office, they usually conform less to policy orthodoxies than politicians with traditional backgrounds.

I cannot think of a better example of someone who undermined democratic institutions, made his administration reliant on his own personal influence, and did not conform to policy orthodoxies than President Obama, who in the last 4 years has attempted to rule unilaterally, through "the pen and the phone," using executive orders and international agreements not submitted to the Senate for ratification, and encouraging his party to employ such unorthodox and undemocratic maneuvers as the reconciliation process and the nuclear option to ram through his legislative agenda and judicial nominees.

Mr Kurlantzick then proceeds to critique the way autocrats use the media:

What else do the elected autocrats have in common? They usually win elections in part by dominating the media, sometimes by buying media outlets or having allies who do so.

Mr Kurlantzick must have in mind the way Hillary Clinton's campaign sought to win the recent election by manipulating the media, for example, by having her plant in CNN, Donna Brazile, supply her with questions that CNN moderators were going to ask during a subsequent debate.

Then, Mr Kurlantzick discusses how autocrats corrupt the civil service:

In office, elected autocrats try to slowly suffocate the civil service, military bureaucracy, and other government networks that are supposed to be apolitical and which normally provide continuity across presidential administrations. They substitute clientelism for professionalism.

Here, Mr Kurlantzick must have in mind the kind of transformation that takes place when an apolitical civil service agency like the IRS is turned into a weapon to target conservative groups.

Mr Kurlantzick concludes with some fantasies from his own imagination:

It’s not hard to imagine that, as president, Trump would vocally attack judges who decided against his administration or try to stack the U.S. Department of Justice with allies whose primary qualification is loyalty.

(In other words, Bloomberg treats as news things that this guy "imagines." How embarrassing.)

Mr Kurlantzick, when you talk about attacking judges, do you have in mind the kind of attack that President Obama made on the Supreme Court when he criticized the Citizens United decision during his State of the Union address (causing Justice Alito to shake his head and mutter "Not true!")? And, when it comes to stacking the Justice Department "with allies whose primary qualification is loyalty," have you ever heard of Eric Holder, Mr Kurlantzick?

In other words, Mr Kurlantzick, if you are looking for autocrats who undermine democracy and do not abide by the rule of law, maybe a better place to start is with the Democrat Party, and President Obama and Mrs Clinton, than with Donald Trump.

The two best articles I've read on the recent campaign

The two best articles I've read on the operational and high-tech aspects of Trump's recent campaign are:

Joshua Green's profile of Steve Bannon in Bloomberg.

Steven Bertoni's profile of Jared Kushner in Forbes.

Both articles make my analysis in earlier blog posts sound like child's play. Very good reporting, Steven and Joshua.

Thiel's opinion of Obergefell

One reason why Donald Trump might be willing to consider Obergefell "settled" is because he may have been persuaded to think that way by Peter Thiel, a gay man and Trump's biggest supporter in Silicon Valley.

Peter, I would like to know what you think of the substantive due process legal reasoning of the majority opinion of Obergefell. My guess is that you agree with Scalia and Thomas and think that it is "pure applesauce." Which says nothing about your support for gay marriage.

Creative destruction in the most recent campaign

It was considered a given throughout the entire course of the recent presidential campaign that the Democrats had an enormous edge in technology over the Republicans in the areas of data science, analytics, and the set of technologies required to sway voters through social media. For example, Bloomberg reported in 2013:

During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama’s reelection team had an under-appreciated asset: Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. ... Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as “the Cave.” The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama’s surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory. ... Wagner’s team pursued a bottom-up strategy of unifying vast commercial and political databases to understand the proclivities of individual voters likely to support Obama or be open to his message, and then sought to persuade them through personalized contact via Facebook, e-mail, or a knock on the door. “I think of them as people scientists,’’ says Schmidt. “They apply scientific techniques to how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question.” Obama’s rout of Mitt Romney was a lesson in how this insight can translate into political strength.

The Democrats' edge in these disciplines turns out to have been much less important in 2016. Much more significant was the Trump campaign's ability to produce and disseminate information and narratives across the internet, an expertise in no small degree due to the presence in the Trump campaign of Steve Bannon.

Bannon, a Hollywood media mogul, had become an expert over the years in the art of creating and promoting memes and narratives through the packaging and releasing of films and books across a wide variety of media channels, including through Breitbart news and even the New York Times. This was yet another change in the landscape that the Democrats turned out to be completely blind to. They smugly assumed they had the technology advantage. The election last week was a rude awakening. They must now acknowledge that they have suddenly been completely outflanked/leapfrogged by a revolutionary new approach.

This sudden outflanking/leapfrogging of an old technology by a new technology is precisely what the economist Joseph Schumpeter was trying to capture when he coined the term "creative destruction" (schöpferische Zerstörung). As Wikipedia informs us::

According to Schumpeter, the "gale of creative destruction" describes the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one".

In other words, the Democrats' big data operation is just another example of a high-tech company grown lazy and complacent. Its incumbent technology is suddenly obsoleted by the arrival on the scene of a brash new startup. The old darling was Google's Eric Schmidt; this year's new darlings are Bannon and right-wing Peter Thiel, who, as with so many of his VC bets, made a high-risk (though calculated) wager on a revolutionary new approach and, to the dismay of all the ultra-liberal Silicon Valley entrepreneurs trying to keep pace, won big yet again.

Expect the technology war between the two parties to continue and escalate.

Find the autocrat

David Remnick begins his latest interminable bloviation in the high-brow New Yorker with the following paragraph:

The morning after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Barack Obama summoned staff members to the Oval Office. Some were fairly junior and had never been in the room before. They were sombre, hollowed out, some fighting tears, humiliated by the defeat, fearful of autocracy’s moving vans pulling up to the door.

The definition of autocracy is "a system of government by one person with absolute power." Considering that in the last 4 years, Obama has attempted to rule with "the pen and the phone" through unilateral executive orders and international agreements not submitted to the Senate for approval as treaties, I think the term "autocrat" is much better applied to him, than to Donald Trump.

Trump and Obergefell

During one of the debates, Mr Trump stated that he was "looking to appoint judges very much in the mold of [the late] Justice [Antonin] Scalia." Separately, in an interview with Chris Wallace, Mr Trump said that he would consider appointing judges who would overturn the recent Obergefell decision:

WALLACE: But — but just to button this up very quickly, sir, are you saying that if you become president, you might try to appoint justices to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage?

TRUMP: I would strongly consider that, yes.

Now Politico reports:

Donald Trump said he is “fine with” same-sex marriage ... “These cases have gone to the Supreme Court. They’ve been settled. And I’m — I’m fine with that,” he said.

As I have noted several times in this blog (for example, here), Scalia strongly dissented from the Obergefell decision, not because he was opposed to gay marriage per se, but because he considered the majority's use of substantive due process to be a judicial Putsch:

I write to call attention to this Court's threat to American democracy. ... [I]t is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. ... But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. ... This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776; the freedom to govern themselves. ... This is a naked judicial claim to legislative -- indeed, super-legislative -- power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional provision agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices' "reasoned judgment." A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.

Justice Thomas in a separate dissent adds:

I have elsewhere explained the dangerous fiction of treating the Due Process Clause as a font of substantive rights. ... . It distorts the constitutional text, which guarantees only whatever “process” is “due” before a person is deprived of life, liberty, and property. ... Worse, it invites judges to do exactly what the majority has done here — “‘roa[m] at large in the constitutional field’ guided only by their personal views” as to the “‘fundamental rights’” protected by that document. ... . By straying from the text of the Constitution, substantive due process exalts judges at the expense of the People from whom they derive their authority. ... That a “bare majority” of this Court ... is able to grant [the] wish of the petitioners, wiping out with a stroke of the keyboard the results of the political process in over 30 States, based on a provision that guarantees only “due process” is but further evidence of the danger of substantive due process.

An appropriate, intellectually consistent position for Mr Trump would have been:

Whether same-sex marriage should be legal is a matter that should be decided by the people and their legislatures. Although I personally support gay-marriage [if, in fact, that is his position, which would probably surprise many of his religious supporters], I disagree with the legal reasoning of the recent Obergefell majority opinion, which used a substantive due process argument to discover a non-existent right to same-sex marriage in the 14th Amendment. Therefore, I would support the appointment of judges who would overturn Obergefell and remand consideration of that issue to its rightful place in the Congress and the state legislatures, where gay marriage would likely be kept legal, given the current tenor of public opinion.

But that is not what Mr Trump said. That he cannot see the contradiction between a.) his promises to appoint judges who are in the mold of Scalia and therefore might consider overturning Obergefell and b.) his statement that the question of gay marriage has been settled by the Obergefell decision is disturbing and does not bode well for his ability to appoint judges in the Scalia mold.

I must admit that another intellectually defensible position for Mr Trump would be to say that, although he disagrees with the reasoning of the Obergefell decision, he would be willing to see the decision upheld out of consideration for the principle of stare decisis, the legal principle that subsequent courts should accept a rule established by a prior decision for the sake of consistency, even if the later court finds the legal arguments underpinning that rule faulty. Of course, Mr Trump was elected on the promise that he would overturn (and not preserve) many of the enactments of the Democratic Party and the judges that party appointed, so it is unknown how such a position would be received. It is unknown whether Justice Scalia would have been willing to apply stare decisis to let Obergefell stand. In its article on stare decisis, Wikipedia observes:

Justice Antonin Scalia explained the conservative view of stare decisis in a concurring and dissenting opinion joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas in 2007:

"Stare decisis is not an inexorable command" or "a mechanical formula of adherence to the latest decision." It is instead "a principle of policy," and this Court has a "considered practice" not to apply that principle of policy "as rigidly in constitutional as in nonconstitutional cases." This Court has not hesitated to overrule decisions offensive to the First Amendment, a "fixed star in our constitutional constellation," if there is one, -- and to do so promptly where fundamental error was apparent. Just three years after our erroneous decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis , the Court corrected the error in Barnette. Overruling a constitutional case decided just a few years earlier is far from unprecedented.

Justice Scalia then set forth in a footnote to the above paragraph a remarkable list of roughly 20 significant examples where the U.S. Supreme Court has discarded stare decisis in favor of correcting a mistake.

I hope in a later blog post to have more to say on Trump and the principle of stare decisis as it applies outside the decisions of the Supreme Court.

The Democrats' coup d'état through faits accomplis and judicial Putsch has failed

President Obama governed domestically by executive order and internationally by agreements that do not have the force of treaty. The most notable examples of domestic executive orders were:

• the Clean Power Plan in the area of climate change,
• the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) in the area of immigration,
• the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) again in the area of immigration.

The most notable examples of international agreements that do not have the force of treaty were:

• the Paris Agreement again in the area of climate change,
• the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran Nuclear Agreement, which attempts to slow down Iran's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons (although it may only simply serve to guarantee that Iran eventually acquires such weapons).

All of these executive orders and international agreements do not have any legislative sanction and can be reversed by a future president "at the stroke of a pen," a phrase we have heard repeatedly this week.

Obama's strategy was to use executive power to change conditions on the ground. Interested parties (for example, power plants or immigration authorities) would be forced to comply with and adapt to the new executive directives. Until last Tuesday night, it was anticipated that President Obama would then hand off the presidency to Hillary Clinton, who would reaffirm Obama's executive orders and international agreements. By the time a Republican president took office in the distant future, the Democrats hoped, the changes would have taken root so deeply that reversing them would, practically speaking, be impossible. They would be a fait accompli.

Legal actions prevented Obama from enforcing some of these executive actions. For example, 27 states took legal action to stop the Clean Power Plan and the United States Supreme Court has ordered the EPA to halt enforcement of the plan until a lower court rules in the lawsuit against the plan. Likewise, 26 states took legal action to enjoin implementation of both DAPA and DACA expansion and Judge Andrew S. Hanen has issued a preliminary injunction blocking the program from going into effect while that legal action proceeds. These lawsuits certainly were obstacles. Nevertheless, if Obama could pack the courts with judicial appointees who would defer to the executive branch and affirm the legal force of his executive actions and international agreements, he could overcome these legal challenges.

The most important judicial appointment the Democrats hoped to make was the replacement of Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. It was envisioned that Hillary would be elected and the Democrats would retake the Senate. Then, Hillary would submit a new nominee and the Democratic Senate, not having a filibuster-proof majority, would use the nuclear option to confirm that nominee, thereby replacing the most conservative justice on the court with a compliant liberal and changing the balance on the court for decades. For example, the Supreme Court's order to the EPA to halt enforcement of the Clean Power Plan resulted from a 5-4 decision, with Scalia voting to halt enforcement; a Hillary-appointed justice presumably would vote the other way, flipping the decision. What's more, it had been the ferocious Italian badger Scalia, who over the years had so clearly identified the dangers posed to the American constitutional order by such pernicious legal doctrines as substantive due process. For example, in his dissent from the recent Obergefell decision, wherein the Court invented a right to same-sex marriage, basing its opinion on a substantive due process interpretation of the 14th Amendment, Scalia wrote:

I write to call attention to this Court's threat to American democracy. ... [I]t is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. ... But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. ... This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776; the freedom to govern themselves. ... This is a naked judicial claim to legislative -- indeed, super-legislative -- power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional provision agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices' "reasoned judgment." A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy. (emphasis added)

Note: For a full discussion of the Obergefell decision and substantive due process in general, see my blog post here.

If the Democrats could somehow manage to forge a liberal majority on the Supreme Court and that liberal majority (a majority of an unelected committee of nine) could then wield such malleable legal principles as the substantive due process argument to obtain the results they wanted, the Democrats could manage to create a form of government whereby the American people would be tyrannized over by a thin elite of Democratic politicians and jurists, enforcing their will through the Presidency, the highest court in the land, and the enormous Federal bureaucracy. The Democrats could take an enormous step in this direction by replacing Scalia with a more liberal voice.

Obama also used strict party line votes and abused the legislative reconciliation process to ram through Obamacare without bipartisan consensus. Thus, although Obamacare did technically have legislative sanction, which was upheld by the Supreme Court, it was passed with no support from Republican senators and congressmen. Thus, a Republican Congress and a new Republican president would feel no compunction about repealing it. Once again the Democrats' hope was that, by the time a Republican Congress and President got the opportunity to repeal or substantially modify the legislation, Obamacare would be so thoroughly entrenched that changing its provisions would be too difficult. Obamacare, too, would then have become a fait accompli.

The Republicans must make a concerted effort to make clear to the American people that any chaos that results from the overturning of all these executive orders, international agreements without the force of treaties, Supreme Court decisions based on faulty legal arguments, and legislation passed without bipartisan support is not the responsibility of the incoming Republicans, but of Obama and the Democrats, who, for the last 8 years, have attempted to govern by circumventing the legislative branch of government and the rights of the states, an extraordinary abuse of power never imagined by our constitutional system. In fact, the election of Donald Trump and a Republican majority in both houses of Congress has narrowly averted the consummation of a silent revolution that was underway. Democrats could not get the cooperation of the Republican Congress or Republican state governments, so, instead of seeking consensus, as our constitutional system of checks and balances requires, they hoped to bypass the legislative branch and the states entirely by permanently occupying the presidency and packing the courts with judges who would defer to the executive. Then, they would use the crushing force of the Federal bureaucracy to enforce their vision. When one considers the revolutionary nature of the changes they were attempting, all the pleas this week from Obama and Clinton that Mr Trump abide by the "rule of law" are the height of hypocrisy.

Consider, for example, the lawlessness of Obama's executive orders in the area of immigration. Courts have found that the DAPA executive order violates the rulemaking requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act and that the Immigration and Nationality Act "flatly does not permit" deferred action.

Or consider the lawlessness of Obama's Clean Power Plan executive order. Of this plan, Laurence Tribe, who was Barack Obama's professor of constitutional law at Yale and a man who has been mentioned frequently as a potential Democratic appointee to the Supreme Court, wrote:

I recently filed comments with the Environmental Protection Agency urging the agency to withdraw its Clean Power Plan, a regulatory proposal to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s electric power plants. In my view, coping with climate change is a vital end, but it does not justify using unconstitutional means. ... After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority. ... [T]he EPA, like every administrative agency, is constitutionally forbidden to exercise powers Congress never delegated to it in the first place. The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not. (emphasis added)

JV DeLong in an article in Forbes describes the lawless Democratic strategy:

EPA also practices government by fait accompli. In their petition for a stay of the CPP [Clean Power Plan] rule, the utilities described the aftermath of a Supreme Court victory they won last year:

The day after [the Supreme] Court ruled ... that EPA had violated the Clean Air Act (“CAA”) in enacting its rule regulating fossil fuel-fired plants . . . EPA boasted in an official blog post that the Court’s decision was effectively a nullity. Because the rule had not been stayed during the years of litigation, EPA assured its supporters that ‘the majority of power plants are already in compliance or well on their way to compliance.’ Then, in reliance on EPA’s representation that most power plants had already fully complied, the D.C. Circuit responded to this Court’s remand by declining to vacate the rule that this Court had declared unlawful. . . . In short, EPA extracted ‘nearly $10 billion a year’ in compliance from power plants before this Court could even review the rule, ... and then successfully used that unlawfully-mandated-compliance to keep the rule in place even after this Court declared that the agency had violated the law.

In the CPP litigation, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that EPA had the same game plan in mind – force expensive compliance during the leisurely course of appeal, and then contend that things have become so convoluted that there is no going back. It is the strategy of ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, not just of EPA.

Finally, consider how Obama, instead of seeking ratification of significant, formal international agreements as treaties in the United States Senate, as he is constitutionally required to do, sought to bypass the Senate entirely because he knew his agreements would not garner the 2/3 of the votes required for treaty ratification. For his agreement with the Iranians Obama instead sought validation from the United Nations, an international body that has no sovereign power in the United States. This is a simply extraordinary example of an attempt to circumvent the rules of government laid out by the American Constitution and to substitute for the prerogatives of the Senate the authority of a super-national body! Of Obama's actions, Fred Fleitz writes in the National Review:

Knowing that a bipartisan majority of Congress opposed the nuclear deal and that the U.S. Senate would never ratify it as a treaty, the Obama administration arranged to go around the Senate by negotiating the deal as an executive agreement endorsed by the U.N. Security Council. Because Security Council resolutions are binding on all U.N. members, it could therefore be argued that the nuclear deal was binding on the United States even though it had not been ratified by the Senate. But that is not how our constitutional order works. American presidents historically have decided which international agreements are to be treated as treaties, but the Iran deal specified that it be ratified by the Iranian parliament. If President Obama wanted to make a long-term international agreement binding on the United States, he needs consent from Congress. Anything else is a serious affront to the Constitution, and no U.N. endorsement changes that.

Of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation writes:

While Presidents should have a certain amount of discretion to choose the legal form of international agreements they are negotiating, President Obama has placed his desire to achieve an international environmental win above governmental comity and historical U.S. treaty practice. Major environmental treaties that have significant domestic impacts should not be developed and approved by the executive alone. An agreement with far-reaching domestic consequences like the Paris Protocol will lack democratic legitimacy unless the Senate or Congress as a whole, representing the will of the American people, gives its approval.

Thus, it is not the lawlessness of Trump we need to worry about. It is not Trump who over the last 8 years has been governing unconstitutionally, but rather Obama and the Democrats! Say what you will about the loutishness and lack of qualifications of Donald Trump, a man for whom I did not vote myself. His election has prevented a thin layer of lawless (and, apparently, thoroughly corrupt) Democratic elites, who were packing the courts, manipulating the vast and crushing power of Federal bureaucracies like the EPA and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and disregarding the constitutionally guaranteed prerogatives of the Senate, and who were also enabled by a compliant and naive left-wing press, from perpetrating a silent coup d'état on the American people. In trying to work their mischief, these Democrats have honed powerful new tools like executive orders, international agreements without the force of treaties, the nuclear option (which ends the filibuster and undermines bipartisan comity in the Senate), the reconciliation process, and substantive due process. The Democrats may now argue that the Republicans should refrain from using these tools (and they may be right). But, it must always be remembered that it was ruthless Democrats who first perfected their use. What incentive do Republicans now have to refrain from using these tools when they know that Democrats like the absolutely shameless Harry Reid, if they return to power, will not hesitate to take these tools up again?

So, now, hopefully, the first thing Mr Trump will do is replace Justice Scalia with a justice in the Scalia tradition, thereby shoring up the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court.

Aside: All I can say is that the Democrats had better pray for the extended good health of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice whom smug liberals have named The Notorious RBG. Their haughty gloating may have been premature. If she should pass away or become mentally incompetent to serve on the Supreme Court -- and her recent "ill-advised" comments about Mr Trump have given signs that her mind is beginning to go -- Mr Trump will get to use the nuclear option to replace her with yet another justice in the Scalia mold, thereby tipping the balance of the Court back in favor of jurists who do not believe in the Democrats' tyrannical circumvention of the legislative branch. How ironic it would be if her last thought, as she passed into the darkness, were the insults she, confident of a Hillary victory, had flung so stupidly against the man who will appoint her replacement.

Subsequent to this Supreme Court appointment, I hope that Mr Trump will rapidly proceed to the dismantling of Obama's unilateral executive orders and international agreements, emphasizing to the American people that any chaos that ensues from this dismantling must be laid squarely at the feet of Obama, who for 8 years has ruled as a lawless tyrant.

Inclusiveness for all! (except for the almost 50% of the population who voted for Trump)

A FoxNews article reports that Matt Maloney, founder of GrubHub, sent out a letter to his employees bemoaning the election of The Donald. Here are some excerpts:

While demeaning, insulting and ridiculing minorities, immigrants, and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr Trump, I want to be clear that this behavior and these views have no place at GrubHub. Had he worked here, many of his comments would have resulted in his immediate termination. We have worked for years cultivating a culture of support and inclusiveness. ... I firmly believe that we must bring together different perspectives to continue innovating -- including all genders, races, ethnicities, and sexual, cultural or ideological preferences. ... We do not tolerate hateful attitudes on our team.

When Mr Maloney talks about inclusiveness, what he really means is inclusiveness for everyone except for those in Hillary's basket of deplorables. For example, his inclusiveness presumably would not extend to those who, like Brendan Eich (see here and here and here), donated to the campaign in favor of Proposition 8, because, perhaps on religious grounds, they believed that gay marriage should be banned in California. Until quite recently, holding the belief that marriage was an institution between a man and a woman was unremarkable in California. Now, apparently, holding such beliefs in good faith in a workplace like GrubHub means that one needs to fear, like Brendan Eich, for his/her job.

Mr Maloney talks about the need to include all ideological perspectives. But, when confronted with a truly different ideological perspective, Trumpism, for example, Mr Maloney stomps his foot like a spoiled child, and insists that it be removed from his presence. He will not tolerate it, he avers, in the very same letter in which he urges tolerance for all ideological preferences. The utterly illogical nature of his statement does not seem to occur to him, so blinded is he by his rage that the election did not turn out the way he and all his liberal San Francisco friends imagined it would (it should, it had to).

But maybe the reason it turned out so differently than you imagined, Mr Maloney, is because your own intolerant attitudes have caused so many people in your employ to conceal their true ideological preferences out of abject fear that you would react to them in precisely the manner you have. You have no clue how undemocratic and even totalitarian the tone of your letter is. This is the kind of talk one would have expected during the lowest days of the Terror during the French Revolution. An employee doesn't believe in gay marriage? Well then, to the guillotine with him!

Imagine the chilling effect that your email had on all those employees of yours who actually did vote for Donald Trump. And yes, Mr Maloney, even in San Francisco, that group likely amounted to as many as 20 percent of your employees. According to the Fox News article, you felt vindicated in having written your letter because many of your employees personally thanked you for the note. But, given the threatening and intolerant tone of your email, do you really think that the fraction of your employees who actually voted for Trump would dare to express any objection to it?

Finally, to all stockholders in GrubHub, I give this piece of advice: sell your shares now. If there is one hard and fast rule that every CEO should abide by it is: KEEP POLITICS OUT OF THE WORKPLACE! That Mr Maloney was unable to control his personal rage and allowed it to cause him to violate this fundamental rule calls into question his ability to exercise calm judgment while conducting GrubHub's business in the heat of battle. This does not bode well for the long-term success of the company.

It's probably best to just end it all right now

David Remnick in the New Yorker:

All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.

Mr Remnick, it's probably best to just end it all right now.

Oh, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments

Oh, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that is taking place on the floors of software companies across Silicon Valley this morning! (Except maybe at Peter Thiel's office.)

Barrons reported that donations to Hillary from employees at so-called millennial firms (the Barrons Next 50 index) outpaced donations to The Donald from those same firms by a factor of 50-1. How can all these advanced thinkers possibly continue to live in a country that elected The Donald?!?

I work with two people, D and T, both very intelligent software engineers. T is one of those very skilled high-tech workers who have immigrated legally from China.

D says to T: "After last night's election, I think I am going to have to move to China."

I comment: "T is probably thinking: Be my guest."

T, who struggles sometimes with English, simply smiles and nods her head in agreement.

Congratulations Ro!

Congratulations to Ro Khanna on his landslide victory in the 17th Congressional District, my district. Silicon Valley is finally free of that old Democratic millstone Mike Honda!

Potential Trump cabinet appointees?

Maybe Victor Hanson for Secretary of Defense or State and Peter Thiel at Treasury?

Democratic hypocrisies coming soon to a theater near you

The Democrats will insist that elections do not necessarily have consequences. For weeks, Democrats have been insisting that The Donald should accept the will of the people as expressed through the outcome of the presidential election; now, like Peter Beinart this morning, they will insist that some things "are too precious to be put to a popular vote."

The Democrats will begin to appreciate the virtues of obstructionism. Alternatively, they will praise the virtues of bipartisanship.

After having pushed through Obamacare by a strict party line vote, the Democrats will bewail legislation passed along strict party line votes.

The Democrats will defend the use of the filibuster to block judicial nominees. For close to a year now, the Democrats have threatened to use the nuclear option to fill Antonin Scalia's seat on the SCOTUS as soon as Hillary was elected and they retook control of the Senate; now, Democrats will be outraged and cry foul when The Donald nominates a conservative and the Republicans use the nuclear option to fill Antonin Scalia's seat on the SCOTUS.

After 4 years of Obama using the phone and the pen to govern by executive order, the Democrats will bemoan presidential government by executive order.

After allowing President Obama to foist on the United States international deals on climate change and Iran's nuclear weapons without Senate ratification, the Democrats will now insist that all international deals be ratified as treaties by the Senate.

After having insisted for quite some time now that only Black Lives Matter, Democrats will suddenly realize that they need to pay attention to the plight of white, middle class voters, too (just so long as those deplorable troglodytes don't adopt extreme positions, like opposing gay marriage, or objecting to abortion on demand, or something equally benighted).

After Hillary and her PACs spent twice as much as Donald, the Democrats will insist once again that we must pass campaign finance reform.

After having been the beneficiary of nonstop, blatantly partisan, pro-Hillary media coverage during the campaign, the Democrats will once again denounce the biased political coverage of FoxNews.

After defending the rapist Bill Clinton for decades, the Democrats will find unfit for office a president who is guilty of serious sexual offenses against women.

And last, but not least: After not uttering a word of criticism during 8 years of Obama megadeficits, Paul Krugman will become a fanatical deficit hawk.

Full disclosure: I voted for neither Crooked Hillary nor for The Donald.

I can't believe how stupid Trump and Hillary are

Where was Peter Thiel when Trump needed him? SFGate has published a tweet from Edward Snowden refuting Donald Trump's desperate claim that the FBI could not have reviewed the emails on Huma's server so quickly. Every second year CS student knows that comparing hashes was the obvious way to eliminate all duplicate emails. Interestingly, SFGate seems to think Snowden's remarks are the brilliant insight of some great genius.

Of course, Trump's ignorance is matched by Hillary's, who (along with her lawyers, ferchrissakes?) thought that her server was secure because it was "on property guarded by the Secret Service."

And we are going to elect one of these two buffoons to be leader of the free world.

New pieces of shit

One day back in my hippy days, I got into a heated philosophical discussion with my parents. I told them that they were "overly materialistic." Gesticulating around the room, I shouted "Look around you at all these possessions that you have accumulated. They are just pieces of shit." Presumably, my point was that I was morally superior to them because I cared nothing for the base, physical things in life, but instead had my mind's eye firmly set on objects in the higher spiritual plane.

So, for the rest of her life, whenever I acquired any new possession -- a new car, or a new piece of furniture, or expensive new fishing gear -- my mother would say to me: "Oh, so you've acquired some new pieces of shit, huh?"

My mother has been dead for several years, rest her soul. But, this morning, as I stood in our backyard admiring the new teak patio furniture that had just been delivered to our house, she called out from the grave "Ah, I see you've acquired some new pieces of shit." Touché, Mom.

The Kleene Closure of Sexualities

Here's a wonderful quote from an article on sfgate entitled White Cal students blocked at Sather Gate in 'safe space' protest:

LGBQIA+ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex and Asexuality. The "+" symbol encompasses all other sexualities, sexes and genders not previously mentioned.

I guess the + sign is meant as a kind of Kleene Closure of Sexualities. Except then it probably should be written as LGBQIA*.

It would save a lot of characters if they just wrote S* to stand for "whatever kind of Sexuality you can come up with, including no sexuality at all". But, then, that would be thought to include regular old vanilla heterosexuality, which would be undesirable, since the tolerance for sexual diversity exhibited by the Cal student protesters most assuredly doesn't extend to heterosexuality, just as their tolerance for racial diversity doesn't extend to whites.

And then there is this other article from sfgate Oberlin activist students want conversations instead of exams, no below-'C' grades.

Oberlin students: when even sfgate is amused, you have gone too far.

The vicious slanders issuing from the Left

My Democratic cousin sent me a link to the recent column written by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, entitled The Singular Danger of Trump, adding:

Although not uttered aloud, if you listen to the resonating sounds of "Sieg Heil!, Heil Trump!! and combine it with a coincidental cry of "America First" it is so reminiscent of "Deutschland Uber Alles!!!" This 1930's Social Darwinian era has returned. Emotions are once again "trumping" wisdom!!

Maybe Cousin should have used a few more exclamation points to emphasize the dangers of a Trump presidency.

I am no supporter of Donald Trump and will not vote for him in November (nor will I vote for Hillary Clinton). But the portrayal of him as a second Hitler is unfair (to say the least) and tarnishes the reputation of those who make such a comparison instead of revealing any truth about Donald Trump's character.

I find that my friends on the Left go to further and further extremes to slander those who disagree with them: everyone who finds fault with Obama's policies (for example, the obviously flawed and failing Obamacare) is a racist; everyone who thinks we need to do a better job of staunching the flow of illegal aliens into our country is a bigot; everyone who thinks that it is not unreasonable to worry about the dangers posed by Islamic extremism is a second Hitler.

Dana Milbank writes that Trump "hesitated to disavow David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan," while he conveniently forgets to mention Hillary Clinton's eulogy of Robert Byrd, the Senate Democrat Majority Leader who was a former member of and recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan.

Note: I find a column that labels the reference to Hillary's eulogy as a "canard." The column does not contain any refutation of the fact that Byrd was a member of a racist organization at one time in his life or that Hillary praised him as a "mentor" (these facts are irrefutable), but rather merely devotes itself to energetically impugning the character or Republicans for having had the temerity to point out the obvious comparison.

Furthermore, if anyone should be compared to Hitler, Hillary Clinton is probably the more suitable candidate, inasmuch as she has made no secret of her "enormous admiration" for Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, whose eugenicist ideology was carried out by the Nazis when they exterminated millions of people whom they judged to be undesirables.

Milbank writes: "If Marco Rubio or John Kasich were the Republican nominee, I suspect we would now be writing Clinton’s political obituary." Stop, please! If Rubio or Kasich were running, Milbank would be slandering them just as viciously and "creatively" as Democrats slandered the milquetoast Mitt Romney in 2008, of whom we were told that he didn't pay any taxes for 10 years (a bold-faced lie from then Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, which the Washington Post awarded, albeit belatedly, 4 Pinocchios).

It is unfortunate that we must choose between two utterly unpalatable candidates this election. If this is the best we can do, then America is in deep trouble. But, the vicious lies and slanders that issue from the Democratic side serve only to deepen the alienation between the two parties at a time when it is incumbent on them to work together to solve the very serious problems this country faces, for example, our ever mounting debt and unfunded liabilities, which former US Comptroller General David Walker estimated at $56 trillion dollars in 2009 and which have grown inexorably since under Obama. If we are desperately worried about the rising seas overwhelming us (to the point where some on the Left advocate criminal charges against any who express even the slightest doubt about climate change), then, why are we not likewise desperately worried about our rising debts?

Democrats seem to think that they can say the most vile things about their brethren on the right, and then, sit down with them later at the negotiating table and receive their cheerful cooperation.

The ongoing war of progressives against high tech

I've written about the liberal war on Silicon Valley numerous times before (for example, here and here and here and here). As Noah Smith on Bloomberg reports, the war continues:

Unlike progressives in New York City, who are often big supporters of density, San Francisco progressives have decided to focus on kicking the tech industry out of the city. Booting tech back to wherever it came from seems like a natural way of restoring the old equilibrium. Sadly, efforts to push tech employees out will fail, and will end up hurting the city's low-income residents even more.

For example, activists have proposed levying a 1.5 percent payroll tax on tech companies only. The initiative will probably not become law, but it clearly indicates that tech-bashing is the order of the day.

When is the Republican Party going to wake up to the fact that high-tech workers in Silicon Valley and San Francisco are ripe for the picking due to the anti-high-tech policies of California's out-of-control, radical, liberal Democrats?

Prominent Hindu Indian-American declares support for Republican Party

While I do not support Donald Trump's candidacy for President, I nevertheless applaud the remarks made by Shalabh Kumar, chairman of the Republican Hindu Coalition, in his statement in support of Trump and other Republican candidates in 2016.

I have written in the past (for example, here) that the Republican Party, and not the Democratic party, is the natural home of Hindu immigrants from India and other immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe.

Everywhere you look in Silicon Valley, you see Indian, Chinese, and Eastern European (ICEE) immigrants helping to build the high-tech economy. All are here as legal immigrants and many have become American citizens. The education level, technical and engineering skills, and earning power in these populations is significantly higher than what is found in other ethnic communities. Since these ICEE immigrants mostly work in high-tech companies with well-defined HR procedures, they are not paid in cash under the table, like many illegal aliens are, and therefore pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes. My guess is that they also make much less use of social services than illegal aliens do. As a group, they generally place a very high value on education, so that the school districts where ICEE immigrant families preponderate often have outstanding public schools, with little gang activity. (Think of Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, California, or Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, California, where Asian students make up approximately 85% of students and which are among the best public high schools in California. As a result, property values in the attendance areas of those schools are sky high.) All the software companies I have ever worked for in Silicon Valley have always drawn and continue to draw extensively on this pool of ICEE immigrants and they often form the backbone of software development teams throughout the Valley.

In my opinion, ICEE immigrants are natural constituents of the Republican Party. My experience is that they have conservative family values. They believe that one should get ahead through hard work, not government handouts. They understand the financial mess the US finds itself in and find it repugnant. Their value system is decidedly entrepreneurial and meritocratic. Statements like President Obama's "You didn't build that" are counterintuitive to them.

Having observed firsthand the distinctive characteristics of ICEE immigrants and citizens here in Silicon Valley and having concluded that the natural home for them is the Republican Party, I was very pleased to read Mr Kumar's statements confirming my observations. Of the Hindu Indian-American community in the United States, he writes:

We as a people, and I as businessman, believe that both material and spiritual human prosperity come from a system in which individuals are free to pursue their dreams and aspirations, where private enterprise creates economic expansion and jobs, and where government involvement in the lives of the citizenry is limited. Human development comes from individuals, families and communities, and not from government, which only spends taxpayers’ money without much regard for its value.

Some four million Hindus reside in the United States. As a group, we have a higher per capita income than any other group. We also have the highest average education levels, the highest proportion of people employed as managers, the highest number of entrepreneurs (one in seven), the largest donations to charity, and are the least dependent on government. Self-sufficiency is a given in our community, and we don’t spend more than we earn. Hindu-Americans pay almost $50 billion per year in taxes, and we expect the government to be as judicious with its income as we are as individuals.

In recognizing the vibrancy of the Indian-American community, we must acknowledge one factor in our success: education. Although there are many problems with the public education system in this country, lack of access for minorities is not one. The access is there. Most Indian- Americans grow up attending urban public schools. Why is it, then, that Indian-Americans succeed in the very schools that others do not?

It is the ethos of our culture. We eagerly take advantage of opportunities when they are presented. To us, this is a civic duty, and we as a people have a responsibility to the nation that has afforded us so many opportunities to better ourselves. This obligation is represented in the Republican Party platform, while the Democratic Party platform focuses on ethnic victimhood.

The Republican Party needs to do much more outreach to the Hindu Indian-American community and to Chinese and Eastern European immigrants, the ICEE communities, in particular, here in Silicon Valley. These groups have the potential to form an important bloc in conservative politics in the United States in the coming years.

Obama's inflammatory rhetoric

Speaking on the situation in New Orleans, President Obama said: ""We don't need inflammatory rhetoric. We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda."

Can you believe the obtuseness of this our supposedly most intelligent president ever? After fanning the flames of racial division for months with his own inflammatory rhetoric about systemic racism in police departments across America, after endlessly trying to advance his own agenda and score political points by throwing around careless accusations, Obama has the temerity to admonish others to show restraint.

If there is violence at the Republican Convention starting today, it will be on Obama's head.

Visigoth and Syrian refugees and other thoughts about walls

I've been reading The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians by the eminent Roman, Byzantine, and early medieval historian J.B. Bury, published in 1928. Maybe Obama and Merkel should read a little ancient history. They would discover that, when wars spring up in the East, are allowed to blaze out of control, and send waves of foreign refugees flooding into Europe, serious consequences, including the downfalls of great empires, can ensue.

The [Visigoths] were seized by panic and firmly believed that there was no safety for them [from the invading Huns] north of the Danube. They determined to withdraw southward beyond that river and seek the shelter of the Roman Empire. This was a very critical decision: it led to events which determined the course of the history of the Roman Empire. Accordingly they sent an ambassador to the Emperor Valens, who was then staying at Antioch, beseeching him to allow the nation to cross the river and grant them lands in the provinces of the Balkan peninsula. It was the year 376. In the meantime their families abandoned their homes and encamped along the shores of the lower Danube, ready to cross the moment the Romans permitted them. The situation was highly embarrassing for the Emperor and his government. It was unique: they had no experience to guide them in dealing with it. It was pressing; some decision must be come to immediately; there was no time for ripe deliberation. The opinion of ministers and councillors was naturally divided, but it was finally decided to accede to the request of the Goths and to receive them as new subjects on Roman soil. The decision was reached with much hesitation and only after many searchings of heart; but we may be certain that the Emperor and his advisers did not in the least realise or imagine the difficulties of the task to which their consent committed them. To settle peacefully within their borders a nation of perhaps 80,000 or more barbarians was a problem which could be solved only by most careful organisation requiring long preparation. In recent times Europe has had some experience of the enormous difficulties of dealing with crowds of refugees, and of the elaborate organisation which is necessary. Take, for instance, the case of the thousands of Asiatic Greeks who fled from the Turks and sought refuge in European Greece. [Bury refers here to the expulsion of Anatolian Greeks from the Turkish mainland that took place, roughly, in the years 1914 to 1922.] Here it was simply a case of affording food and shelter to people of the same race, but it taxed the whole resources of the Greek Government to solve it. The problem that met Valens was vastly different and more difficult. Quite suddenly, without any time for thinking out the problem or for any preparation, he was called on to admit into his dominions a foreign nation, of barbarous habits, armed and warlike, conscious of their national unity: to provide them with food, and to find them habitations. The Roman state was highly organised, but naturally there was no organisation to deal with an abnormal demand of this kind, which could not have been anticipated. As might have been expected, when the barbarians crossed the river and encamped in Lower Moesia (Bulgaria) all kinds of difficulties and deplorable incidents occurred. The military and civil officials were quite unequal to coping with the situation, and no wonder. War was the result, a war lasting nearly two years and culminating in A.D. 378 in the great battle of Hadrianople, which is one of the landmarks of history.

Bury, J. B.. The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians (Kindle Locations 575-597). Albion Press. Kindle Edition.

As Wikipedia observes, the battle of Hadrianople "is often considered the start of the process which led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century."

The scenes are all too familiar. Visigoth refugees huddle on the northern banks of the Danube, fleeing the onslaught of the Huns behind them and longing to reach the opposite southern shore, controlled by the "humane" Romans. In our own day, Syrian refugees huddle on the shores of the Mediterranean in Turkey, fleeing the onslaught of ISIS behind them and longing to reach a Greek island or the European mainland across the water. Officials are confused about what to do. Should the refugees be admitted? Their plight is heart-wrenching. But in language, culture, and religion they are vastly different from the local residents who will be forced to take them in. Also, they come from a place where warfare is a way of life and they are habituated to the ways of violence. Finally, the decision is made to admit them. They flood in. "All kinds of difficulties and deplorable incidents" ensue. Eventually, the refugees become alienated from their hosts and turn against them (as we have seen in France, in its capital Paris and just yesterday in Nice). An act of humanitarianism on behalf of the refugees ends up undermining the stability of the very government that welcomed the refugees in.

This is by no means an argument in favor of not taking refugees in. Rather, it is simply a statement of how complicated the situation can become and how unintended consequences can result from the best of intentions. One is forced at least to acknowledge that, when one reflects on the fact that the Roman emperors could have continued to use the Danube as a barrier to keep the Visigoths out, thereby possibly preserving their Empire, that the Roman emperor Hadrian constructed the wall named after him to separate Romans from barbarians in Northern England, and that the Chinese constructed the Great Wall to stem the raids and invasions of the various nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppe, maybe Donald Trump's proposal to build a wall or other kind of barrier across our southern border to prevent illegal Mexican migrants from flooding into our nation doesn't sound so hare-brained after all.

Against both Trump and Sanders

I don't understand why Donald Trump is vilified when he says he wants to put a wall up to keep Mexican workers out, but Bernie Sanders is lionized when he criticizes NAFTA for sending American jobs to Mexico. They are both saying essentially the same thing, namely, that free trade is bad, protectionism is good, and American jobs should be reserved for Americans.

I disagree with both of them. I do not believe in privileging American workers simply because they are Americans. If American workers can't compete in the global marketplace, they deserve to lose their jobs. Jobs should go where it makes the most economic sense for businesses to locate them. If a young Mexican (or Indian or Chinese) female can do the same job as an old white American male for less money, then, that job should go to Mexico (or India or China).

See here for more about the interesting (and disconcerting) similarities between Trump and Sanders (and, as it turns out, the Brexiters). The article at this link also provides additional links to other articles by various writers at the Foundation for Economic Education, a free-market think tank. These additional articles also make persuasive arguments that Trump and Sanders and the Brexiters are all reading from the same protectionist and xenophobic script.

Note: No, this does not mean I support Hillary.

Bravo, business leaders

Bravo, Jeff Immelt.

Bravo, Lowell McAdam, too.

Bravo, Joe Rosenberg, too.

The Republican candidates ought to latch on to the pragmatic, forward-looking, technologically advanced narratives being advanced by these business leaders. Immelt and McAdam show what the American economy should (and must) look like as we look forward. Bernie is lost in the mists of the socialist 1930's.

A misquote and a quote, both worth thinking about

Imagine the hypocrisy of an Administration that requires everyone to prove that they have bought health care insurance but opposes laws requiring everyone to prove they are citizens in order to vote. Then imagine the additional irony of the fact that undocumented aliens who cannot prove their citizenship may receive health care benefits paid for by those who are forced to buy health care insurance because they are citizens. These observations are sometimes attributed to Ben Stein, but this attribution is incorrect. The observations are, nonetheless, worth thinking about. I have added the relevant documentary links.

In just the last two tax years alone, my wife and I have paid in excess of $6000 in additional 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax to support Obamacare. This is not our payment for health insurance for ourselves or our children, which we are happy to pay and is separate, but an additional tax that we pay to support the health insurance of others. And yet, if we complain about being forced to pay this tax, we are thought of as troglodytes or neanderthals for being unwilling to contribute our "fair share" of the upkeep of the brave new progressive world. This all reminds me of the other observation, this one correctly attributed to Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money to spend."

Minimum wage lunacy from California's Democratic overseers

The increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour in California is not only an outrageous tax imposed by our Democratic overseers on all the citizens of California (including the most vulnerable, for example, retired seniors living on fixed incomes), but also makes no economic sense. Increasing the minimum wage by such a large amount will merely serve to create an enormous incentive to replace unskilled workers in the workplace with robots and automation. Since highly skilled and highly compensated knowledge workers create these robots and automation, increasing the minimum wage will simply boost demand for those workers while driving down demand for low skill minimum wage workers, who now will become too expensive to employ relative to their skill level. This will inevitably result in higher unemployment for those low skill workers and a lower average wage, thereby actually increasing wage inequality.

If the Democrats had intentionally set out to hasten the spread of the kind of technological unemployment identified by Erik Brynjolfsson, they could not have chosen a better mechanism for doing so than by raising the minimum wage so dramatically. California Democrats claim to be acting on behalf of the little guy, when, in fact, they are driving the little guy right out of work.

RIP Nino

I was deeply saddened to hear of the death on Saturday of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. As should be evident from my post on the recent Obergefell decision, I had great admiration for Justice Scalia's tightly-reasoned arguments based on originalist principles. Insofar as his originalism tended to conserve the original meaning and value of the Constitution, he was perhaps the greatest conservative mind of our time and his passing should be mourned by us all.

As for what will happen next, Mr Obama has every right to send a nominee up to the Senate to replace Justice Scalia. The Senate likewise has every right to decline to confirm that nominee. In particular, even if Mr Obama sends up a nominee with impeccable credentials, the nominee may be rejected on the grounds that the Senate does not find his/her judicial philosophy to be suitable for the duties of a Justice (or because of insufficient clarity about his/her judicial philosophy). We have been taught by our Democratic colleagues that rejecting a judicial nominee on such grounds is ok. For, it was they who in 1987 refused to confirm Robert Bork on the grounds that his judicial philosophy was unacceptable and in spite of the fact that Mr Bork was a jurist of unimpeachable qualifications.