Choking Freedom

President Obama has had a great couple of weeks.  With his pen and his phone and without any debate or any input from the representatives of the people, his minions continued to push and bully, take away our freedoms and affirm his commitment to "fundamentally transform America."  Using the administrative apparatus of the State, Obama did another end around, attacking business and the Second Amendment.

• Congress has effectively blocked gun control legislation, so Obama turned to the ATF which decreed that a popular form of ammunition used in hunting (5.56mm steel tipped bullets) are deemed to be armor piercing and therefore banned.  This, despite not a single fatality suffered by a law enforcement agent from this type of ammunition in more than 10 years.
• HHS and the Department of Agriculture put out statements urging people to eat less beef, due to environmental sustainability issues.  Of course, other environmentalists have been urging us to eat less fish because of overfishing.  Enjoy your alfalfa sprouts, folks.
• And the biggie--- the FCC declared that it had jurisdiction over the internet and adopted "net neutrality" rules contained within a document that is in excess of 300 pages (which the FCC has not even released yet).  Except for a few George Soros sycophants, there has been no outcry over mismanagement or unfairness over the internet.  The internet, not Obama, has fundamentally transformed America and many business and technological innovations have arisen from it----remarkably with no government assistance or interference whatsoever.  No longer.

The Obama administration has created mechanisms to wield a club in three critical areas:  finance (Dodd Frank), health care (Obamacare) and communications (Net Neutrality).  Big Brother, through the apparatus of untouchable and unaccountable bureaucracies now hold tremendous sway over key areas of our lives.   Most pernicious are provisions that grant enormous power to create rules that we didn't even get to vote on or debate.  They are handed down by fiat.  

This is truly a frightening time for the Republic. We now have the president that the founders feared-- a Latin American type dictator that has contempt for the representatives of the people and for us.  

Not surprisingly, Rand Paul won the straw pole at CPAC.  That gives us some hope.  Paul's ascension tells me that the libertarian wing of the Republican party is gaining strength at the expense of the religious right and that, I think, is a positive development.   While I do not think Paul could carry the general election (and I think he is wrong in his isolationism in foreign affairs.), his showing tells me that there is a strong current that values individual liberty over the Big Brother nanny state in America.

I am happy I can still blog without an FCC license.  That may not be the case in the future if the Obama crowd prevails.

Narratives of the Left

The Left does not have a monopoly on distortion by any means, but it seems to be willing to play that game with a brazenness that would destroy the careers of most any conservative.  The false claims that Brian Williams served up reminded me of the barrage of falsehoods presented as fact to fit the story they want to tell.   And it's not a single incident-- it's a whole litany.   As a conservative writer and thinker, I am more that happy to argue with any progressive on fact and evidence.  But when narratives are simply MADE UP,  we conservatives end up spending more time refuting simple facts instead of having a substantive debate on issues.   When you string these incidents together, you see a disturbing pattern of many on the left that recount incidents as they would HAVE WANTED THEM TO OCCUR, not as they actually did occur.  Or, worse, as Barack Obama continues to do, put forth claims with absolutely no evidence to support them, and often with the knowledge that those claims are simply false.

• Hillary Clinton is the master at this.  She asserted that she came under fire on a tarmac in Bosnia and that was simply untrue.   Similarly, she asserted that she knew what it was to be flat broke, that the former first couple was deeply in debt and almost in penury when they left the White House.  While their balance sheet may not have been in great shape, Bill was capable of garnering a hefty income from his speaking engagements and Hillary received an $8 million advance from her book.  The Clintons have never missed a meal and probably never left the top 1% that is so reviled by the Left.
• "Hands up.  Don't Shoot."  This became the bumper sticker for the supposed epidemic of deaths of black youths at the hands of overzealous, racist white cops.  The trouble is, the Ferguson incident never happened that way.  It was pretty clear from the evidence that officer Darren Wilson was assaulted by Michael Brown and Wilson was duly acquitted by a grand jury.  Still the myth lived on in the media with the St. Louis Rams and other entertainers using that to make a statement.  There has been some research that shows some patterns of persistent racism (see, e.g. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhal Mullainathan on hiring), but that's where the debate should take place--on facts and defensible research--not on incidents that simply did not happen.
• Benghazi.  Susan Rice knowingly perpetrated a falsehood in the days after the Benghazi attack, putting forth the story that the attack was a reaction to a film, "Innocence of Muslims." We know that this simply  was not true, and that it was an attack planned and executed by Al Qaeda terrorists.  It was not spontaneous Muslim rage at this film.  Rice got it completely wrong (intentionally, I believe), yet holds the position of National Security Advisor.
• "Islam is woven into the fabric of our country since its founding."   That is the latest claim by President Obama in his over the top effort to detach Islam from the orgy of burning, beheading, raping and killing that is being perpetrated by some members of Islam in the Middle East and in Europe.   I must have missed that chapter in US history.   This is patently untrue.  Whether Barack Obama likes it or not, this is, and has been, principally a Judeo-Christian nation.  What makes this country special is that other faiths are tolerated and permitted to practice without any discrimination to speak of.   Yet to say Islam is woven into the fabric of this country is a patent falsehood.

In each case, we can have a discussion about the issue at hand--whether Hillary can empathize with the poor, whether and to what extend residual racism exists, whether Al Qaeda was truly on the run, and how extensive and pervasive is radical Islam in the Islamic faith.

Those are the real issues that need to be debated.  But it's hard to have an open and honest debate when you simply make stuff up.

Weekend Extravaganza

I spent a chunk of the weekend listening to actors speaking in heavy British accents (and of course, I will finish the weekend with the newest episode of Downton Abbey) in two terrific films: Mr. Turner and The Imitation Game.  If you can, see them both and it is even better to see them over the same weekend like I did, to contrast them.

Their similarities vastly outweighed their differences.  The subject matter of both are men of genius, whose genius enables them to do their work, and yet sets them far out of the mainstream.  Mr. Turner is about the eccentric 19th century painter JMW Turner.  The Imitation Game's subject is Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who led a team that cracked the Nazi enigma code and changed the course of the war.

Both films were very well acted and in each case, a principal character was teamed with a woman that loved him, and he did not or could not love her back with the same completeness and intensity.  Tim Spall did a masterful job of playing Turner and Dorothy Atkinson played his loyal housekeeper that loved him deeply.  In The Imitation Game, Benedict Cumberbatch played Alan Turing and Kiera Knightly played the woman who loved him. Without spoiling the plot, Turing is a much more sympathetic character who is able to display empathy (and actually works at it) despite his eccentricities. Turner, while able to see the world differently than most, can inexplicable turn completely cold to people (like his own daughters) that would ordinarily matter most.  Turing, on the other hand, is able to attach very intensely, which becomes his undoing.

I am fascinated by people of true genius, those who are separate and apart from us and can see the world in different ways.   I have been fortunate to meet a few during my lifetime.  They are eccentric, unusual, and sometimes difficult.  Often, they have a difficult time managing relationships and their day-to-day affairs but you can often detect an intellectual vibrancy when they walk into a room.

Both of these films do a great job of capturing very different types of genius.  But one could not help but note the similarities between them.

2014 Year End Review

2014 was the year of the polar vortex, ISIS, Ebola, planes in Asia vanishing, do-it-yourself immigration reform, plunging oil prices,  a roaring stock market and an economy that finally seemed to get its legs back after a six year swoon.  As I do every year, I will write a year end review of a year that started in the deep freeze (both weather wise and economically speaking) and ended up quite nicely.

Photograph of the Year.
This year, I decided to add a new category, limiting it to photos I actually take myself with my own camera or cell phone.  I loved this one that I took one morning on the way to work because it captured the headaches caused by the severe winter.   It was an interesting photo because it was taken in the morning and so it is not likely that alcohol was involved in this little mishap.  No one was hurt and I couldn't help but smirk a little as I imagined the conversation that would inevitably take place with her husband later in the day as she explained exactly how this happened.

Book of the Year (Fiction)
I am going to run against the crowd on this one.  Many "Best of" lists picked All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, the story of the intersecting lives of a young German soldier and a blind French girl during the closing days of WWII.  It certainly was worthy of its accolades, but my pick for the most enjoyable read of 2014 was The Unwitting by Ellen Feldman.   Set during the Cold War, it explores the separate lives we lead and secrets we keep even from our spouses.  The most overhyped and disappointing book of the year was The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell which I thought to be hard to follow, dull, and just plain weird.

Book of the Year (Nonfiction)
I may be criticized for picking a "chick book" but I liked This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett.  The title is a bit misleading because it is only partially about her marriage (and her failed one), but in large part a her memoir of her writing career and her struggles and the indignities she suffered with dignity:

And I kept on doing the impossible.  I moved home and became a waitress at a T.G.I. Friday's, where I received a special pin for being the first person at that particular branch of the restaurant to receive a perfect score on her waitress exam.  I was told I would be a shift leader in no time.  I was required to wear a funny hat.  I served fajitas to people I had gone to high school with, and I smiled. 
I did not die.

Ms.  Patchett throughout was mostly able to look at her own predilections and idiosyncrasies and accept them at a level most of us struggle with.

The other nonfiction work I liked was The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison.  This is a collection of essays written by a medical actor that assists students in their diagnosis in medical school.  It explores how we are able to (or should) feel another person's pain and asks interesting questions around that and the limits to it.

Film of the Year
You can wholly discount my choice in this category since my filmgoing this year was grossly inadequate, but I liked Wild.  But as a devotee of Thoreau, I have an affinity for films or books in which people turn to nature and a basic survivalist lifestyle to gather themselves after the civilized world has overwhelmed them.  Conversely, I thought Interstellar was highly overrated, implausible, overintellectualized.....and way too long.   It badly needed the editing crew to go after it with shears.

Band of the Year
This category was the hardest to pick.  While I thought the film industry gave us slim pickings, the music business gave us a number of fresh new sounds and I don't remember a year with more good music to choose from.   The Black Keys, the Arctic Monkeys, Florence + the Machine, Arcade Fire, and Hozier all came out with some great innovative sounds.

But the group that I liked the most this year was Fitz and the Tantrums.  Their album More Than Just a Dream is one of the best albums I've heard in several years.  Out of My League and The Walker are great songs and the style borrows some from the 60's, 70's and 80's.  And the best song on the album is Moneygrabber (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3WRXYYBwRA&list=RDO3WRXYYBwRA#t=0).  It is hard to listen to that song and not hear the echo of the snappy beat of the old Jackson 5, especially if you listen to the background singers.

Concert of the Year
I didn't go to a lot of concerts this year, and missed quite a few that I would have liked, but I got at least two checked off my bucket list---Moody Blues and Earth, Wind & Fire.   But the one that I enjoyed the most was Jackson Browne.   Like the Bob Seger concert I attended last year, I found that Jackson Browne hasn't slipped at all since I first saw him in 1977,   He performed for nearly three hours and while he played some of his newer stuff, his versions of Running on Empty, The Pretender, and Doctor My Eyes resonated as much or more we me as those tunes did then.

Biggest Myth Buster of the Year
Fracking.   Predictions about peak oil, like Paul Ehrlich's predictions of the 70's that the planet would experience mass starvation because of overpopulation, the Chicken Little prognosticators have whiffed again with their predictions, vastly underestimating the power of markets and innovation to improve human existence.   While certainly the slowdown in demand for China accounted for some of the price slide, the advent of fracking and vertical drilling has had real impact on both making the US less energy dependent and the huge drop in energy prices.  Of course, these are developments that occurred without a Big Government department organized around them.  

All in all, 2014 was a good year for literature, a weak year for films, and a great year for music.  And it is a year I learned to be a little grateful for the positives---a strengthening economy and a fall in oil prices.  Moreover, I learned to be grateful for the things that DIDN'T happen.  Again, there was no terrorist attack on US soil.  There was no Ebola outbreak.   And despite the polar vortex, hell did not freeze over, although there were days it felt like it might.

Here's to a healthy, happy, prosperous 2015.

A Coherent Foreign Policy

Now that the Obama administration has, without precondition, opened diplomatic relationships with the brutal Castro dictatorship in Cuba, wouldn't the next logical step be to do the same with the DPRK?

Within days of the warm hug extended to Raul and Fidel, UN Ambassador Samantha Power called North Korea a "living nightmare," that it holds 120,000 people prisoners.  The Assistant Secretary General for Human Rights at the UN stated that North Korea is "a totalitarian system that is  brutally enforced denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association." 

totalitarian system that is characterized by brutally enforced denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association."

Hmmmmmm.  Maybe I'm missing something.   Can't much the same be said for Cuba?  It still holds 57,000 political prisoners, and denies all of the same rights, yet the United States is ready to roll out the red carpet, welcome the Castro boys to the family of nations and extend trade credits.

Maybe I just don't understand the nuances of modern diplomacy.  Is it just a matter of degree?  Is it a Western hemisphere thing?  An immigration policy thing?  An Asian thing?  A nuclear weapons thing?

It sure isn't a liberty thing.  I see no discernible difference between these two regimes on that score.  
If we follow the Obama logic for its unilateral movement on Cuba, then we should be opening up an embassy in Pyongyang  and loosening up trade restrictions because surely our policy toward North Korea "wasn't working."  This is the 3rd generation of North Korean dictators retaining their brutal grip on the north end of the Korean peninsula and nothing has changed, except North Korea now has nuclear weapons and it is still threatening, still proliferating, still brutalizing its own people.

I wish somebody would explain this all to me.

The Beat Goes On

I confess that I have never quite seen a foreign policy grand strategy like this one.   In keeping with our posture of turn our backs on our friends and offer unilateral concessions to our foes, the Obama administration once again, without consulting Congress, grants the Cuban tyranny legitimacy by re-establishing diplomatic relations.

This follows the "reset" button with Russia in which we threw our allies Poland and the Czech Republic under the bus by suddenly scrapping missile defense in Europe and then promising Medvdev "flexibility" after the elections.    After those warming gestures, we were treated to Russian tanks in the Crimea.  

Then we loosened up sanctions against Iran, hoping that gesture would show that we are acting in good faith and that showing them warmth would coax them into giving up their nuclear program.  Of course, the Iranians pocketed the concession, and now the NEW deadline is July 1, 2015.  Don't hold your breath, fellas.

Yet, we continue to harangue Israel on the settlements and have even considered sanctions against them.  No such remonstrations against Cuba for its human rights violations.  Hmmmm.

Now, without any concessions on elections, a free press, or human rights or any of the things we at least used to care about, the Obama administration is restoring diplomatic relations, reasoning that "what we have been doing for 50 years wasn't working."  It actually did work.  Cuba was isolated and largely contained.  With the mortality tables telling us that the Cuban government is about to transition the octogenarian Castro brothers out of office, the Obama administration shrewdly deemed it a wise policy to open up the economic floodgates to ensure that the pesky island stays in Communist hands for another 50 years.  Indeed, less than 24 hours after Obama's announcement, Raul was affirming his country's commitment to Communism.

But, I've been accused of taking an unduly harsh view of Team Obama's acumen with respect to foreign policy matters.   So let's look at the bright side and the possible benefits of this new relationship with Cuba.  In particular, I thought of a few reasons why Obama and some others might welcome this development.

• Having gotten the hang of ruling by fiat, Obama might want some ideas on how to keep a regime going for 50 years.
• Cuba does have universal health care, so he might be eager to learn how they got their website to work.
• Jerry Reinsdorf will no longer have to pay money under the table to get quality ballplayers on his roster.
• Another nice, warm place to golf.
• Ideas for best practices for state owned enterprises.
• Maybe another Mariel boatlift to dovetail with the administrations's immigration policies.
• And, of course, the cigars.

It is a sad reflection that on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this administration's policies have gone a long way toward rescuing expansionist Russia and Communism  out of the dustbin of history.

Ferguson

"What we see in Ferguson is not restricted to Ferguson."
Eric Holder

What did we see in Ferguson, exactly?   A multi-racial grand jury decided that we saw a police officer following his training and appropriately defending himself against a 6'4", 300 lb violent criminal that happened to be black.

Who is responsible for the death of Michael Brown?  Michael Brown and no one else.

And what we see in Ferguson is more people acting violently because they don't like facing that reality.  Personal responsibility is a bitch.

Unlike the Trayvon Martin case where Zimmerman was not a professional and had an opportunity to avoid a confrontation, this case is unambiguous.   Brown was going for Officer Darren Wilson's service revolver, leaving him very few options other than the use of deadly force.  The liberal press continues to use the word "unarmed" to described Mr. Brown, but the stark fact is that Mr. Brown was ONLY unarmed because officer Wilson got to his revolver before Mr. Brown did.

The liberals and the looters WANT a different narrative.   They want the story to read that an overzealous redneck, racist, trigger happy cop gunned down a poor, innocent unarmed African American.  Unfortunately, no matter how they attempted to distort the facts, they don't fit that narrative.   And because they are desperately trying to tell a different story, they do a great disservice to the black community and the rule of law in Ferguson and elsewhere.  

No matter what race you are, the easiest way to avoid getting shot by a cop is to cooperate and, for God's sake, don't assault an officer.  It's that simple.  Secondly, burning cars and looting are bad responses to outcomes we don't like.  Michael Brown apparently committed several crimes.  It was a sad and unfortunate consequence that he paid for those crimes with his life.  But none of the prosecutor, the grand jury or Officer Wilson are responsible for his death, nor is the vestiges of racism.  Mr. Brown ultimately made bad choices and the responsibility rests with him.

I agree with Mr. Holder that what we see in Ferguson is not limited to Ferguson.   It is an attempt to deflect responsibility for bad outcomes away from the person that is ultimately responsible for those outcomes.