Category Archives: Education

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Obama’s Shame

216 Comments

Probably not a great post title, because he has none, but Roger Simon has thoughts on the different responses of Trump versus Obama to Iranians seeking freedom:

The students and others marching in the streets to overthrow these tyrants desperately wanted America’s help, specifically the support of our “oh-so-liberal-progressive” president. they shouted, “Obama, Obama, are you with us or are you with them?”

Obama was silent.

I can’t think of a moment I was more disgusted by the acts (inaction actually) of an American president. What did he stand for? What did we stand for?

Well, who knows? What we do know is he wanted to deal with Iran his way — whether to get the glory for himself or for other even less attractive reasons we will never know. He was secretly communicating with Ahmadinejad and Khamenei even before he took office, hinting at accommodation.

He wanted an Iran deal and he got it, the Iranian people and the U.S. Constitution be damned. (I have met several of the student demonstrators from that period who spent years being tortured in Tehran’s Evin Prison. Their faces resembled Picassos of the Cubist Period. They were the lucky ones. Their brothers and sisters just disappeared.)

Obama was silent for those students and millions of other decent Iranians. He wanted his deal so much that, as we know, he sent still more millions to the mullahs in cash, so they could use those dollars in any untraceable manner they wished — such as funding Hezbollah and the Houthis.

And speaking of Hezbollah, we all know now, due to reporting about Project Cassandra by Josh Meyer at Politico, that Obama was so determined to make his creepy deal that he acceded to the mullahs’ demand to pull the FBI off a detailed investigation of the Hezbollah thugs’ extensive involvement in the U.S. drug trade. Are we sick yet?

I was sick at the time. He gets one thing wrong, though: His colleagues were never “liberals.” They were simply leftists purloining the term, and they have no problem with fascism, as long as it’s a fascism they find sufficiently anti-Western.

[Sunday-morning update, from Phoenix]

Say you want a revolution?

During some demonstrations, crowds chanted “Seyed Ali shame on you, let go of power” and “Sorry Seyed Ali, it’s time to go.” In Tehran, protesters faced a mural of Mr. Khamenei and shouted “Death to you.” Openly targeting Mr. Khamenei, who is considered God’s representative on Earth, is a crime that carries the death penalty.

In a number of cities, demonstrators have expressed nostalgia for the last monarchical rulers of Iran, the Pahlavi dynasty, by evoking the name of its founder Reza Shah. Many Iranians consider Reza Shah to be the father of modern Iran and his era is associated with a time of economic prosperity. . . .

Here are some slogans being chanted at the protests, translated into English:

“We don’t want an Islamic Republic, we don’t want it, we don’t want it.”

“They are using Islam as an excuse to drive people crazy.”

“Independence, Freedom, Iranian Republic.”

“Reformists, hard-liners, Game is over.”

“We are all Iranians, we don’t accept Arabs.”

“We are getting poor and clerics are driving fancy cars.”

“Reza Shah, Rest in Peace.”

“We will die but we will take Iran back.”

“Come out to the streets Iranians, shout for your rights.”

“Death to the Revolutionary Guards.”

While seeing the mullahs overthrown would be almost forty years overdue, seeing the tears of Obama and Valerie Jarrett would add a little extra frisson.

[January 2nd update]

An Iranian revolution of national dignity:

After nearly four decades of plunderous and fanatical Islamist rule, Iranians are desperate to become a normal nation-state once more, and they refuse to be exploited for an ideological cause that long ago lost its luster. It is a watershed moment in Iran’s history: The illusion of reform within the current theocratic system has finally been shattered. Iranians, you might say, are determined to make Iran great again.

Their movement is attuned to the worldwide spirit of nationalist renewal. From the U.S. to India, and from South Africa to Britain, political leaders and the voters who elect them are reaffirming the enduring value of the nation-state. Iran hasn’t been immured from these developments, as the slogans of the current protests indicate. No longer using the rights-based lexicon of votes and recounts, Iranians are instead demanding national dignity from a regime that for too long has subjugated Iranian-ness to its Shiite, revolutionary mission.

It’s notable, for example, that protestors chant “We Will Die to Get Iran Back,” “Not Gaza, Not Lebanon, My Life Only for Iran,” and “Let Syria Be, Do Something for Me.” Put another way: The people are tired of paying the price for the regime’s efforts to remake the region in its own image and challenge U.S. “hegemony.” Some have even taken to chanting “Reza Shah, Bless Your Soul,” expressing gratitude and nostalgia for the Pahlavi era, which saw the modern, pro-Western nation-state of Iran emerge from the shambles of the Persian Empire.

Trump’s message would seem to fit just fine with this mood.

[Afternoon update]

[Bumped]

For some reason, former Obama officials want us to ignore the protests in Iran.

Gee, what reason could that possibly be?

[Wednesday-morning update]

Wow, even Leon Panetta is criticizing Obama’s pussilanimity (and that’s putting it kindly) in 2009.

[Update a few minutes later]

Are the Iranian regime’s days numbered?

I hope so. Of course, everyone’s days are numbered, the only issue is the size of the number.

[Bumped again]

[Update a while later]

Meanwhile, the quislings at the NYT regret that the protesters won’t pay attention to the government’s call for calm.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More thoughts on Obama’s and the media’s perfidy from The Federalist:

The initial coverage of these historic protests—or in some cases, the lack of it—was scandalous. The New York Times’s Thomas Erdbrink, in particular, veered into revolting Walter Duranty territory. Looking back at the paper’s coverage of Iran, it’s unsurprising.

“For many years,” the reporter wrote only last month, “many Iranians were cynical about their leaders, but that is changing thanks to Trump and the Saudi crown prince.” Every unfiltered report from Iran told a different story.

Actually, thanks to Trump, the Times’ coverage swerved unconvincingly from “The protests are only small and and not worth your attention’” to “These protests are about economic woes and have nothing to do with political disputes and are not worth your attention” to the “Violence is the protesters’ fault because they won’t listen to the regime’s calls for calm.” All of this is particularly offputting when you consider how hard some in the media worked to make the Iran deal a reality.

You don’t say.

[Thursday-morning update]

The brittle Iranian regime faces a new revolt:

Considering the context, 2018’s Iranian public outrage rates as double dismal. In the last nine years the Iranian regime has not moderated, as the Obama Administration contended it would. Rather, the mullah regime has fossilized, dishing out the same violent, repressive, rip-off poison it dished nine years ago.

But here’s a difference that’s dangerous for the ayatollahs. In 2018 the robed dictators know they are a brittle fossil, ripe for collapse. Why? Well, Donald Trump is the U.S. president, not a Barack Obama-type supplicant who fervently believes a nuclear weapons deal with Iranian militants is the ultimate in peacenik presidential legacies.

The result of the dismal domestic political and economic morass and the presence of the Trump Administration: Iran’s dictators enter 2018 thoroughly shaken.

Yup. As with the Soviet Union in 1981, there’s a new sheriff in town.

[Friday-morning update]

What a Soviet dissident thinks about Iran:

In an interview this week, Sharansky told me Macron’s response to the Iranian unrest reminded him of the appeasement crowd during the Cold War. It was the kind of thinking that led former president Gerald Ford to refuse a meeting with the Soviet author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

“It reminds me of the arguments against Reagan,” Sharansky told me. “All those battles we thought we already won, we have to fight them again.”

Yup.

[Bumped, again]

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Corporate Tax Rate Arms Race

14 Comments

A https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/12/21/ladies-gentlemen-take-places/ is good for all of us.

As I noted on Twitter, many people, ignorant of economics, are going to be surprised at how little reducing corporate tax rates will have on government revenue. Because corporations don’t pay taxes; they only collect them.

Corporations will “pay” less tax, but shareholders and employees will end up paying more, because their income will go up, and the increased economic growth from reduced prices will result in additional revenue as well.

Business, Culinary, Education, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Nutrition Coalition

7 Comments

Nina Teichholz has started a new organization to restore sanity to government dietary guidelines.

Dr. Sarah Hallberg and I are reaching out to you to ask you to support a group called The Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit based in Washington, DC, which has the sole of aim of reforming the decades-old Dietary Guidelines for Americans so that they are evidence-based, i.e., based on rigorous clinical trial science.

That’s why we are asking for an Inaugural Gift, to help our fundraising launch: a tax-deductible gift of $5, $10, $50 or whatever you can afford. DONATE HERE.

We need your support to educate policy makers, influencers and the public about the problems with the guidelines, so that people suffering from obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, among other nutrition-related diseases, get the sound nutritional advice that they need to become healthy.

The current guidelines have long been based upon weak science that has since been contradicted in large, government-funded clinical trials. Some of that original bad advice has been overturned: e.g., the caps on cholesterol were finally dropped in 2015.

These recommendations do not just lack a foundation in rigorous evidence. In some cases, they have been demonstrated to cause actual harm, particularly for those with metabolic diseases.
Will you make a tax-deductible gift of just $5 to reform the Guidelines?

Although you may think that no one relies on the government for their dietary advice, the reality is that the Guidelines are taught to/by nearly all healthcare practitioners—dieticians, nutritionists, doctors—working on the front line with patients. The Guidelines reach you, your family and your colleagues.

That’s why we need the Nutrition Coalition, and why our accomplishments are so important:

  • In 2015, we proposed to the U.S. Congress that it mandate the first-ever outside peer-review of the Guidelines, by the National Academy of Medicine. Congress not only passed this mandate but also allocated $1 million for the study.
  • That National Academy study came out just recently, with very strong language about how the Guidelines “lack scientific rigor” and fail to use a state-of the art systematic review methodology.
  • Congressman Andy Harris wrote an op-ed on the Academy report, with the headline: “Mandate is clear: Flawed dietary guidelines process must be reformed.”

Americans follow the Guidelines, but their health has not improved. The process of drafting the Guidelines needs reform — but we need your help to support the sustained campaign this effort will require.

If you would like to DONATE to our worthy cause, so that ALL people have the chance to be healthy again, please CLICK HERE to make your tax-deductible donation!!!

Check out our website, along with our extremely strong Board of Directors and Scientific Council. We are launching with a serious team, and we aim for real reform. If you would like to make a significant contribution or have questions, please contact our Executive Director, Christina Hartman, at chartman@nutritioncoalition.us

Seems like a very worthy cause.

Business, Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Warlock Hunt

41 Comments

Claire Berlinski (who we almost got to have coffee with in Paris a year ago), on #MeToo and if it’s gone too far:

If you are reading this, it means I have found an outlet that has not just fired an editor for sexual harassment. This article circulated from publication to publication, like old-fashioned samizdat, and was rejected repeatedly with a sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I agree with you. But no.” Friends have urged me not to publish it under my own name, vividly describing the mob that will tear me from limb to limb and leave the dingoes to pick over my flesh. It says something, doesn’t it, that I’ve been more hesitant to speak about this than I’ve been of getting on the wrong side of the mafia, al-Qaeda, or the Kremlin?

But speak I must. It now takes only one accusation to destroy a man’s life. Just one for him to be tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing him his livelihood and social respectability. We are on a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity. The punishment for sexual harassment is so grave that clearly this crime—like any other serious crime—requires an unambiguous definition. We have nothing of the sort.

…In recent weeks, I’ve acquired new powers. I have cast my mind over the ways I could use them. I could now, on a whim, destroy the career of an Oxford don who at a drunken Christmas party danced with me, grabbed a handful of my bum, and slurred, “I’ve been dying to do this to Berlinski all term!” That is precisely what happened. I am telling the truth. I will be believed—as I should be.

But here is the thing. I did not freeze, nor was I terrified. I was amused and flattered and thought little of it. I knew full well he’d been dying to do that. Our tutorials—which took place one-on-one, with no chaperones—were livelier intellectually for that sublimated undercurrent. He was an Oxford don and so had power over me, sensu strictu. I was a 20-year-old undergraduate. But I also had power over him—power sufficient to cause a venerable don to make a perfect fool of himself at a Christmas party. Unsurprisingly, I loved having that power. But now I have too much power. I have the power to destroy someone whose tutorials were invaluable to me and shaped my entire intellectual life much for the better. This is a power I do not want and should not have.

Yup. Read the whole thing.

[Update a while later]

The wandering eye is just part of the human anatomy.

Yup. We can control our behavior and fidelity, but it’s really hard not to look.

Plus, the up side of office flirtation.

And so far, so good for Claire.

[Monday-morning update]

Are women really victims?

Feminists of my mother’s generation resisted furiously the claims that women were too timid, too fragile, too neurotic and too easily upset to function in the public sphere. They won this battle. Sisters began doing it for themselves. Women took their places alongside men in boardrooms and political arenas, on lecture hall podiums and in operating theatres, in courts of law and in armies.

This is currently under threat from a cultural shift within feminism which has shifted the aim from female empowerment to status-by-victimhood. It threatens to undo the progress made for women, valorise fragility, discourage resilience, weaponise victimhood and fatally undermine gender relations. It’s not good for women to be treated as fragile victims rather than competent actors in the public sphere. It’s not good for either sex for men to become afraid that talking to women, complimenting women, criticising women, flirting with women or touching women in friendly greeting could destroy their careers and reputations.

You don’t say. One of the women who tells their story is my friend Amy Alkon.

[Update a few minutes later]

Judith Curry relates her own experiences in the context of the climate debate:

If you see ‘misogyny’ everywhere (even from other females!), then perhaps you need to step back and reflect. What is being objected to is not your gender but your behavior: your attempt to gain fame and build a career based on ‘victim’ status, your unfounded attacks on serious and responsible scientists in your field, and your irrational statements and general intolerance of anyone who is not in your ‘club’. This negative reaction to your behavior is not sexual harassment (or any kind of harassment) or discrimination.
.
Climate science has developed a perverse incentive structure that seems to reward this kind of unethical, bullying behavior — and I’m seeing more and more female scientists taking full advantage of this.

Unfortunately true. There are a lot of women in space and tech that I follow on Twitter, but I avoid getting into political discussions with them.

[Tuesday-afternoon update]

Sarah Hoyt: The sexual-harassment frenzy is madness, and must stop.

[Bumped]

[Wednesday-morning update]

Can we be honest about women?

[Bumped again]