Stella get a new "do" while vacationing in Mexico with Tamara's family.
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Happy, HealthyNew Year. Off To Orlando and upon our return will be bringing Dagny for a week. Go BAMA!
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I just finished the Renoir biography and now am reading Elliott Abram's new book: "Realism and Democracy - American Foreign Policy after the Arab Spring."
I am still on the first chapter which is about "40 years of America's Human Rights Policy." A few presidents and secretaries of state embraced the concept, most did not. Reagan and Schulz did and most claimed to have (Carter) but when push came to shove they were selective etc.
Senator's "Scoop" Jackson and Moynihan were the earliest proponents of the concept based on the fact that a nation founded on human rights had no option but to make it a core principle of our foreign policy.
All too often, in our desire to rid a nation of a totalitarian regime, we helped replace it with something worse.
Though I am only 62 pages into an obviously well researched book of 244 pages, written by an author who was there, I have already added deep background knowledge to my surface understanding of the mechanisms of how foreign policy is made and conducted and the players involved.
Elliott spoke here last year at the SIRC President's Day Dinner and was well received and was one of our outstanding speakers. He is the Council on Foreign Relation's Middle Eastern Expert
Elliott's message is dealing with tyrants will not work. To beat Islam, America can only do so with a better idea - democracy, and we must not turn away from support for democrats in Arab countries in favor of pragmatism.
For anyone who is interested in Elliott's insight and why so many of our foreign policy approaches have failed I commend this book.
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To the Trump haters he is dumber than a brick wall but in terms of what is happening to IQ's , say in Sweden, Trump does not appear so stupid. (See 1and 1a below.)
I need to chat with Elliott about how this meshes with our human right's polices.
Meanwhile:
Schumer and Pelosi have decided it is politically wise to be negative. To want America's GDP to remain around Obama's 1% and possibly go lower if you provide tax relief. They want more government regulations so American industry is constrained and growth is chocked with needless red tape.
They want government to grow so it can have more to say about how we live our lives and they want government to dictate our health care so we can enjoy higher costs and lower personal care and total disruption in the doctor- patient relationship.
This could be a winning strategy because a new survey reveals well educated women are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans. I suspect this is the result of what students are learning from left wing radical socialist campus faculties and their comparable companions in the mass media.
If witless women want more Democrats perhaps they hate Trump more than they love their kids and their kid's future under socialism.
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This from a good friend and fellow memo reader. Let's end 2017 on an humorous/clever note. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)https://www.steynonline.com/8334/the-great-brain-drain
The Great Brain Drain
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on Culture
Steyn on Culture
As longtime readers will have noticed, I'm increasingly bored by the daily soap opera of politics, mainly because professional politicians rarely have anything to say about anything that matters. The left nominally addresses the Great Remaking of the World - from mass immigration to transgender bathrooms - by confining itself to a few bogus sentimentalist bromides ("We've always been a nation of immigrants", "Love wins") designed to assure everyone that a) "diversity lotteries" and chain migration are a good thing; and, if you're minded to bring up problematic details, b) it's inevitable, so don't bother trying to resist. The right, on the other hand, is terrified of being demonized as racist, homophobic and whatever's next ophobic, and so finds it safer to talk about corporate tax rates.
For my own part, I'm inclined to agree with Ann Coulter:
Everyone who screwed the pooch on this one better realize fast: All that matters is immigration...Republicans who treat immigration as a back burner issue should be required to run on the issues they consider more important -- in California. See how your arguments fare in a state that's already been transformed by immigration. That's your new country.
How stupid do you have to be to carry on about taxes, defense spending, ISIS, abortion or the Ten Commandments while intentionally losing on the one issue that will determine the outcome of all these other issues? Too stupid to be of any real help.
As I said to Tucker Carlson the other night, the demographic transformation of the western world is "the biggest story of our time", and it will indeed determine all the others:
~Taxes? Big Government welfare programs depend on a high degree of social solidarity between givers and takers. If you think in France or Germany that young Mohammed and Ahmed will be willing to pay higher and higher taxes so that Jean-Pierre and Fritz can continue enjoying their present thirty-year retirements, you're deluded.
~Defense spending and ISIS? More UK and Canadian Muslims have volunteered for the Islamic State than serve as soldiers of the Queen. As you can tell from their kid-glove treatment of returning jihadists, it's unlikely that these countries will still be willing to follow America into the sands of Araby as Islam becomes a bigger and bigger domestic and electoral consideration. As for the broader international order, two of the Big Five at the UN will be semi-Islamized (and, indeed, semi-Islamic nuclear powers).
~Abortion? Hispanics, we're told by Charles Krauthammer et al, are "natural conservatives", so in theory Latin-American immigration ought to be good for the pro-life lobby: After all, South America has some of the toughest anti-abortion regimes on the planet. Then again, once they get to the United States, Hispanics account for about a quarter of all abortions. So who knows?
To reprise an old line of mine from America Alone, the future belongs to those who show up for it. And, if those showing up in America, Britain, Sweden, Austria are dramatically different from the entire history of those polities, then the future will be something of a crap shoot. For example, this story from my old friends at The Spectator - "Is IQ Falling Across the West?"
According to Flynn's latest findings, the Nordic nations are projected to see national intelligence scores drop by a total of seven points by 2025.
You don't say. How'd that come about? After all, not so long ago everyone was gung-ho about 20th century upswings in IQ. Alas, Professor Timothy Bates is mystified:
What becomes of this optimism if it turns out that IQs are now falling across the developed world..? Something has happened in the last decade or so that has put progress into reverse in some countries and failed gifted children in others. We need to find out why and what to do to make sure its upward trajectory is restored.
"Something" has "happened", eh? In 1900 Sweden's foreign-born population was 0.07 per cent - or 35, 627, of whom all but 300 were from Europe or North America. By 2010 Sweden's foreign-born population was just under 15 per cent - or 1.33 million, of whom two-thirds were born outside the EU. In 2015, they admitted so many Muslim "refugees" that in the space of a single year they overtook China's "one child"-policy sex imbalance (119 boys for every girl) and in their late-teen cohort now have 123 boys for every girl. In the space of a century, from 1950 to 2050, Sweden will have gone from an homogeneous ethnic state with barely any visible minority population to a land in which ethnic Swedes will themselves be the minority.
You can't really do that sort of thing without upending everything - and I mean everything. For example, how does one observe Hanukkah in the new Gothenburg? With Molotov cocktails:
This past Saturday, a Hanukkah party at a synagogue in Goteborg, Sweden, was abruptly interrupted by Molotov cocktails. They were hurled by a gang of men in masks at the Jews, mostly teenagers, who had gathered to celebrate the holiday.
Would this be Sven and Inga heading to the Bring Your Own Molotov party? Or is it perhaps a different sort of Swede? Meanwhile, a couple of hours south:
Local police had made a much-criticised public statement advising women not to go out alone after darkness following the brutal rape of a 17-year old girl in central Malmö at the weekend.
It the third rape attack in the city in around a month, and occurred after midnight when the victim was walking through a playground area. On Sunday, the police officer leading the investigation was widely quoted in Swedish media advising women only go out in pairs or as part of a group after darkness.
So, in a country that boasts the world's first self-proclaimed "feminist government", it's unsafe for women to leave the house.
Would that be Björn and Anders after a couple of lagers and a Harvey Weinstein chick flick? Or is the sudden increase of rape due to factors more, um, vibrant and diverse?
In once boringly placid Sweden, all the indicators are going wacky. Whether or not you're in favor of wholesale demographic transformation as a matter of public policy, it would seem unlikely that you could accomplish such a thing in a couple of generations without it having some impact on IQ. In fact, it would render any comparative measure of IQ between 1950 Swedes and 2050 Swedes as completely pointless as comparing the IQ of whoever's passing through Gate Twelve at Heathrow with whoever's passing through Gate Twelve a century later from an arriving flight from an entirely different destination: The only constant is the real estate.
According to a 2007 study by the Rockwool Foundation, after ten years in the Danish school system, two-thirds of students with an Arabic background remain functionally illiterate. In Bradford, Yorkshire, 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, many of whom are themselves the children of first cousins. In the new west, why even bother worrying about IQ? Professor Bates says he wants to get to the bottom of the "why" and the "what". But as I wrote eleven years ago in America Alone:
Stick a pin almost anywhere in the map, near or far: The "who" is the best indicator of the what-where-when-why.
Which is why a gay bathhouse got nixed in Luton: The mosque has more muscle.
And the more demographic transformation transforms, the more ill-advised it becomes to mention it. Before 9/11, even the BBC was happy to discuss whether the resurgence of rickets in the United Kingdom is due to Muslim dress. Sixteen years later, when UKIP bring it up, it's cited as proof they're a laughingstock. A question for Professor Bates and his colleagues is whether a society in which more and more subjects are ruled out of public discourse should expect its measures of intelligence to do anything other than head south. Thus:
The quality of what we called the student "clientele" had deteriorated so dramatically over the years that the classroom struck me as a barn full of ruminants and the curriculum as a stack of winter ensilage... The level of interest in and attention to the subjects was about as flat as a fallen arch. The ability to write a coherent English sentence was practically nonexistent; ordinary grammar was a traumatic ordeal. In fact, many native English-speakers could not produce a lucid verbal analysis of a text, let alone carry on an intelligible conversation, and some were even unable to properly pronounce common English words.
1a)
In the Mideast, Trump Gives Reality a Chance
The first step toward peace is to stop indulging the Palestinians’ fantasies of destroying Israel.
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
A lot of people are in a funk over President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The liberal media, most former government officials who’ve dealt with the Israeli–Palestinian imbroglio, and just about everyone at the United Nations appear certain that the decision had a lot to do with Mr. Trump’s disruptive nature, the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Evangelical Christians and pro-Israel Republican donors.
It’s possible that his decision was based instead on an old-fashioned understanding of the way the world works, one that would be familiar to Middle Easterners: There are winners and losers in every conflict, and Palestinians have decisively lost in their struggle with the Jews of the Holy Land. Diplomacy based on denying reality isn’t helpful.
This view runs smack into the tenets of contemporary conflict resolution, in which diplomacy tries to make losers feels like winners, so that unpleasant compromises, at least in theory, will be easier to swallow. It alleviates the guilt of a Westernized people triumphing over Arabs that has made many in Europe and even the U.S. uncomfortable with Israeli superiority. It also runs counter to an assumption held widely among Western political elites—to wit, quoting the current French ambassador to the U.N.: “Israel is the key to peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.” Israelis, in this view, must make the big compromises.
The truth is surely the opposite. Recognizing the extent and irreversibility of Palestinian defeat is the first step in the long process of salvaging Palestinian society from its paralyzing morass. Far too many Palestinians still want to pretend they haven’t lost, that the “right of return” and Jerusalem’s unsettled status give hope that the gradual erosion of Israel is still possible. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas tapped a common theme among Palestinians in his recent oration before the Organization of Islamic Cooperation when he complained that Jews “are really excellent in faking and counterfeiting history and religion.”
The biggest problem the Palestinians have is that the Israelis don’t trust them, and the Israelis cannot be ignored, sidestepped, bullied, bombed or boycotted out of eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank. Fatah, the lead organization of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the muscle behind the Palestinian Authority, has often acted publicly as if the Israelis weren’t the foreigners who truly mattered, appealing to Europeans, Russians and Americans to intercede on its behalf. Americans and Europeans have consistently encouraged this reflex by stressing their own role in resolving the conflict, usually by suggesting that they would cajole or push Israelis toward Palestinian positions.
For the Israelis, this has seemed a surreal stage play. The Fatah leadership is well aware that only the Israeli security services have kept the West Bank from going the way of the Gaza Strip, where Fatah’s vastly better-armed forces were easily overwhelmed by Hamas in 2007. Fatah’s secular police state—and that is what the Palestinian Authority is—has proved, so far, no match for Hamas.
Western diplomacy has failed abysmally to recognize the profound split between Palestinian fundamentalists and secularists and played wistfully to the hope that a deeply corrupt Fatah oligarchy could conclude a permanent peace accord with Israel. This delusion’s concomitant bet: Such a deal would terminally weaken Hamas, since the secularists would have finally brought home the mutton.
The most important point, however, is always ignored. Competent, transparent, nonviolent Palestinian governance is the only chance Palestinian society has of escaping the fundamentalist critique that has undermined oligarchs across the Arab world. Fearful of playing the imperialists and keenly aware of the efficiency of having a police state as a partner, Americans, Europeans and Israelis have failed to use the leverage of financial aid to set standards for Palestinian governance on the West Bank and in Gaza.
Palestinian Muslims are no different than other Muslim Arabs. Religious militancy has grown astronomically over the past 40 years as the ruling secular elites have calcified into corrupt, hypocritical, heavy-handed autocracies. Westerners have not dealt with this well, since it defies the top-down approach inherent in diplomacy—and also because fundamentalists terrify them. Yet the past ought to tell Americans and Europeans that a two-state solution to the Israel–Palestinian clash isn’t going to happen before Palestinians reconcile in a functioning democracy that doesn’t scare their Jewish neighbors. The overwhelming burden here is upon the Palestinians.
The most valuable American contribution to the peace process, so far only episodically delivered, is to remind the Palestinians that they first have to get their own house in order and the Israelis that they have to care about how Palestinians treat their own. Too often, the Israelis have viewed the Palestinians—and Arab Muslims in general—as the ineducable “other,” who is best left to his own rules so long as Israelis aren’t killed. Any Israeli effort to control Palestinian-on-Palestinian abuse will surely be met with a hail-storm of censure from the West. But the Israelis ought to take a longer view. Barrier or no barrier, they are going to live with the Palestinians forever. Israel should certainly want to correct its enormous mistake of allowing Yasser Arafat, the father of Palestinian nationalism, to import his thugocracy into the West Bank and Gaza.
Most Arabs have adjusted, however reluctantly, to the permanence of Zion. They did so four decades ago when Egypt, slowly collapsing under its own military dictatorship, checked out of the war. Americans, Europeans and Israelis—not “the Arabs”—are primarily responsible for elongating the big Palestinian delusions about the “right of return” and a sovereign East Jerusalem. It’s way past time they stopped. Mr. Trump’s decision, whatever the motivation, is a step forward.
Mr. Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
2)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++If you're not familiar with the work of Steven Wright, he's the famous Erudite (comic) scientist who once said: "I woke up one morning, and all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates."
His mind sees things differently than most of us do. . ..
Here are some of his gems:
1 - I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
2 - Borrow money from pessimists -- they don't expect it back.
3 - Half the people you know are below average.
4 - 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
5 - 82.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
6 - A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.
7 - A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
8 - If you want the rainbow, you got to put up with the rain.
9 - All those who believe in psycho kinesis, raise my hand.
10 - The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
11 - I almost had a psychic girlfriend, ...... But she left me before we met.
12 - OK, so what's the speed of dark?
13 - How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?
14 - If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
15 - Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
16 - When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
17 - Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
18 - Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.
19 - I intend to live forever... So far, so good.
20 - If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?
21 - Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
22 - What happens if you get scared half to death twice?
23 - My mechanic told me, "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder."
24 - Why do psychics have to ask you for your name.
25 - If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
26 - A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
27 - Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
28 - The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.
29 - To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
30 - The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
31 - The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.
32 - The colder the x-ray table, the more of your body is required to be on it.
33 - Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don't have film.
34 - If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
And the all-time favorite -
35 - If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?
