A Lack of Will

From time to time we see a sentence or a phrase that just seems so right, so apt, that we have to share it with you. This one comes from RealClearWorld, from a column originally in Le Figaro by Renaud Girard. His writes how modernity has made the West unable to prevail in wars they once would have won.

The West engaged in costly wars in the deserts of the Hindu Kush, Mesopotamia, and the Sahel. Wars they can never win, for lack of being willing to resort to the level of cruelty of 19th century colonial expeditions.

Where did the idea of civilized, refined war come from? How absurd is that?

Historical Perspective

The unattractive people who brag that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste will try to tell you climate change is responsible for Hurricane Harvey, or responsible for making it worse. Before rushing to believe them, consider this brief historical piece from The Washington Free Beacon. Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link.

In it author Elizabeth Harrington reminds us that the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 (otherwise unnamed) was by several measures much worse, and that before human endeavor had released much carbon dioxide. In 1900, on the same Texas coast, the Galveston storm killed more people, had higher sustained winds, and a higher storm surge, she reports.

COTTonLINE believes humans don't understand enough about climate and weather to make claims about causation. One thing is certain, climates changed in times past when humans were insufficiently numerous or industrialized to have had an impact. 

What is unclear is whether present levels of human activity are sufficient to affect something as ponderously enormous as global weather. Our gut hunch is that it's unlikely, but we plainly label that a guess. 

We further guess that minor variations in solar activity, sunspots and the like, are a more likely cause of climatic variation. This because so much (some would say "all") of the world's weather is driven by solar radiation. Comparing solar impact to human impact is like comparing the Grand Canyon to a single raindrop.

Liberal Hypocrisy

Several sites are reporting that various Democrats have started speaking out against "antifa," among these is Nancy Pelosi. Let's be clear about why they've belatedly climbed aboard a bandwagon we've been on for weeks.

Democrats finally figured out that antifa was doing Trump a favor, and in the process making them look bad via guilt by association. So they decided to disassociate themselves from the direct action wing of their movement.

Antifa violence was wrong when it began and is wrong today. This we have consistently noted.

To Democrats, antifa violence was okay when it began. It only became wrong in their eyes when the public decided it was evil and associated it with Democrats. Up to that point their slogan was "no enemies on the left."

Liberal hypocrisy knows no limits.

A Cowardly Congress

Conrad Black writes, from a Canadian viewpoint, about American politics for National Review. Black supports what Trump is trying to do without being blinded to his idiosyncrasies. No so with Congress:

Three-quarters of Americans despise the Congress as tainted and ineffectual windbags wallowing in the public trough.

Having shared the public's view, Black adds his own:

In their way, the Democratic leaders have been doing their jobs. That cannot be said of Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. They have achieved nothing in seven months and have lost no opportunity to carp publicly at their president.

And he adds a prediction:

Ryan and McConnell have misled the country about their ability or intention to pass bills. If they don’t become more purposeful, the Republicans will lose the House next year, Ryan will be thrown out as speaker and House Republican leader, and the Republicans will gain a few senators but McConnell will be dumped for his duplicity. 

While it will serve both gentlemen right, as payback for their malfeasance, that outcome will do the GOP and the country no good. For their sake and ours, let's hope each can grow a pair before Congress reconvenes. They need to stop whining and either do their jobs, or resign if unable.

Houston in High Risk Area

Stephen Green, guest blogging at Instapundit, links to a Los Angeles Times article which asks why Houston is so unprepared for flooding.

Houston is built on what amounts to a massive flood plain, pitted against the tempestuous Gulf of Mexico and routinely hammered by the biggest rainstorms in the nation.

“Houston is very flat,” said Robert Gilbert, a University of Texas at Austin civil engineer who helped investigate the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “There is no way for the water to drain out.” Indeed, the city has less slope than a shower floor.

The storm was unprecedented, but the city has been deceiving itself for decades about its vulnerability to flooding, said Robert Bea, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and UC Berkeley emeritus civil engineering professor who has studied hurricane risks along the Gulf Coast.

The city’s flood system is supposed to protect the public from a 100-year storm, but Bea calls that “a 100-year lie” because it is based on a rainfall total of 13 inches in 24 hours.

“That has happened more than eight times in the last 27 years,” Bea said. “It is wrong on two counts. It isn’t accurate about the past risk and it doesn’t reflect what will happen in the next 100 years.”

So Houston, like New Orleans, is a city built in the wrong place, founded in a time when we didn't know better. Now everyone's reaction to Houston is "it's too big to move and too expensive to fix," again like New Orleans.

Your Wednesday Snark

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, cracking wise about the troubles besetting Evergreen State and the U. of Missouri.
Glenn's headline:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEFTIST-SELF-DESTRUCTION EDITION

The news item:

Evergreen State College faces $2.1M budget shortfall, cites enrollment drop, issues layoff notices.

Glenn's comment:

As with Mizzou, you can wreck your university trying to make lefty activists happy, but they’ll never be happy because they don’t want to be happy.

"Lefty activists" are losers. They revel in their 'loserdom' and demand we stop our hateful winning. It's a demand best rejected out of hand.

Lèse-majesté

Faith, did you ever see a name that said "Irish Roman Catholic" more strongly than "Michael Brendan Dougherty"? I have not. He writes an amazing opinion about the Church for National Review, basically saying Pope Francis is a doofus. Some key quotes:

Pope Francis is a gift to the Catholic Church, especially when he says something silly, clumsy, or even stupid. He allows serious Catholics to take the papal cult less seriously than they have been doing for generations. Overall, that’s a good thing.

Francis is now something less than a symbol of religion, or the living representative of Catholic faith on earth. He’s not a sign from God for all living in this moment. Through his own loquacity, he’s reduced himself to a stereotype that has become familiar to many Catholics: He’s the old liberal, who is just appalled by the young Huns entering his religious order.

Simply put, we don’t have to listen to popes when they are talking out of their rear ends. What Francis describes as an orderly procession of liturgical reform in the 20th century will very likely one day be seen as one of the greatest spams of iconoclasm in the history of Christianity.

And the fact that Francis is so wrong on this, as on many other things, will, one hopes, break the exaggerated papal cult once and for all. (snip) For that I’m grateful.

If anything, Dougherty may be too kind to this disciple of liberation theology. Not all CEOs are created equal, that's for sure.

All Cultures Are Not Equal

Two law school profs have written a short but profound piece of social criticism for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Their basic argument: the widely-shared bourgeois culture of the late 1940s to early 1960s simply worked better for most Americans than the more libertarian culture which has replaced it. They write:

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.

These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.

Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny, opioid addiction is rare, and poverty rates are low. Those who live by the simple rules that most people used to accept may not end up rich or hold elite jobs, but their lives will go far better than they do now.

The authors are correct that most successful people in this society follow the old norms because they work better than the alternatives. Of course, those committed to 'alternative' lifestyles are outraged by the article.

WWC Remains Pro-Trump

At Townhall, Guy Benson provides a couple of lengthy quotes from a Josh Kraushaar article in National Journal, unfortunately behind a paywall. Kraushaar writes about a poll done of white working-class voters, a group Democrats desperately need to win back.

Despite the Trump turmoil in Washington, Republicans held a 10-point lead on the generic ballot (43-33 percent) among these blue-collar voters. Democrats hold a whopping 61 percent disapproval rating among these voters, with only 32 percent approving. Even Trump’s job-approval rating is a respectable 52 percent with the demographic in these swing districts.

The more uncomfortable reality is that these blue-collar voters’ resistance to the Democrats is on cultural grounds, not economic ones—a finding that studies of Obama-Trump voters have repeatedly shown. Democrats are facing a double-whammy: They’re still experiencing resistance among moderate voters in suburban swing districts over tax-and-spend economic policies. Meanwhile, small-town voters are having a tough time voting for their candidates because of a growing cultural disconnect.

To win back control in the lower chamber, they will need to win Republican-held seats both in the suburbs and in small-town America. It’s not an either-or proposition.

The once-solid "Blue Wall" might be history. People don't like being called "deplorable." Politico has the basic poll document. Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link.

A Lot of Unpopular

Writing for Fox News, the always interesting Newt Gingrich puts President Trump's current poll numbers into context.

The most recent average of polls has President Trump at 39 percent approval.

Macron was at 64 percent approval in June. Now, less than two months later, he has fallen to 36 percent....BELOW TRUMP.

Macron is not alone. The elite media has also failed to inform viewers that the approval ratings of other world leaders have been recorded at similarly low levels in recent months.

For example, British Prime Minister Theresa May earned a 34 percent satisfaction rate, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had a July approval rating of 34.2 percent, and the Democratic Party in the United States received 38 percent approval in June.

All of these approval ratings are lower than President Trump’s - but you don’t see the elite media fighting to break that news story.

There is a lot of unpopular going around these days, eh? Trump is still popular with those who voted for him. Heck, he was unpopular when he was elected, if our polls are to be believed. Perhaps those polls don't merit serious consideration.

WaPo: Antifa Violent in Berkeley

File this under the heading "Stories Appearing in Unexpected Outlets." The Washington Post heads an article as follows:

Black-clad antifa attack peaceful right wing demonstrators in Berkeley

Give WaPo credit for reporting something that does not support their basic narrative line. You have to wonder how this got past the editors.

The article actually supports the Trump assertion there is ugly violence on both sides. Amazing when you think how much crap he's had to take for claiming - accurately, it seems - both sides were at fault in Charlottesville.

Serving the Left's Interests

John Hinderaker, senior blogger at Power Line, asks the question "What is the difference between neo-Nazis and Communists?" Why is the press obsessed with the former and not the latter? I think you'll find his answer interesting.

It seems blindingly obvious that the answer is: hyping neo-Nazis became an opportunity to serve the Left’s interests in January of this year, based on leftists’ more or less insane association between neo-Nazis and American conservatives, while hyping the American Communist Party does not–and will not at any time in the future–serve the Left’s interests. That is the difference.

Particularly since there are many more Communists than neo-Nazis in the U.S., and have been for the last century.

Welcome Home, Part II

Nearly a week ago we cited a Bloomberg article on Millennials moving to the suburbs. Today Bloomberg is back with a panel discussing that very topic. One member, Justin Fox, states it plain:

1. The fact that millennials weren’t buying homes or cars a few years ago was more the product of economic hard times than an expression of changing tastes.


2. The supply of walkable, transit-friendly neighborhoods in the U.S. is limited, and it’s really hard for political reasons to add density to them or build more of them.

As we long ago learned to say in geometry class, "QED, suburbs ... here come the Millennials!"

Man, oh, man, does that spasm the backsides of urban planners who love high density designs. Urban planning, I'm forced to conclude, shares a basic flaw with socialism: both suffer from a fatal misunderstanding of human nature.

Urban planners admire the organized societies of bees and want humans to conform to a similar model of hive-like living. We are much more diverse than worker bees, and refuse to conform.

Saturday Snickers

Steven Hayward's weekly collection for Power Line of cartoons, captioned photos, and generalized snark has arrived. My favorites described:

Cartoon of a black couple sitting at the table holding a newspaper with the headline "7 Dead, 38 Wounded in Weekend Shootings Across Chicago." A voice balloon shows the man saying:

... And we're upset about statues?

Photo of a Bruce Lee statue on the Seattle waterfront, captioned with offensively bad grammar:

Seattle needs to remove this statue of Bruce Lee, who's (sic) name reminds me of Robert Lee, who's (sic) name reminds me of Robert E. Lee. So offensive.

A poster bearing this slogan:

Tearing down statues of

Christopher Columbus does

not go far enough. 

The entire District of

Columbia must be removed.

Quadruple Photoshop © of color image of Trump and B/W image of Obama. In each the Trump image approaches and then overlaps Obama until, in cel 4, Obama is no longer seen. The caption:

The Best Eclipse Ever!

Photo of a reporter in a newroom, saying:

At this point, if Trump came out in favor of oxygen,

Democrats would suffocate themselves.

Lilla, Pro and Con

On August 12 we wrote about a Wall Street Journal article by Mark Lilla which argued against Democrats' identity group politics and, at least implicitly, in favor of an economic or social class basis for their politics. Very clearly this was going to stimulate considerable push-back from those committed to the status quo.

Washington Monthly runs an article by Nancy LeTourneau which argues, with some justice, that racism is not simply color-coded economics. She writes:

In a rational world it is hard to come up with a logical reason for racism—especially if you are looking for one true explanation. A lot of (mostly white) people solve that problem by suggesting that it is a result of economic disenfranchisement. There is a layer truth to that.

There are a whole host of questions that such a view doesn’t even begin to address. For example, how does it explain racism among the upper classes? How does it explain the persistent discrepancy of outcomes in everything from criminal justice to employment to education to health that tend to be systemically rooted and persist regardless of the economic plight of white people?

All of this is to say that Lilla has identified but one layer on which the construct of racism has been built. If he stops there and assumes that enough white people will dispense with racism when their economic plight is improved, he is very badly mistaken.

True enough, racism is more than economics. It exists wherever multiple "types" of people exist side-by-side. We've recently written about racism in China, it is well-known in India, the Japanese practice it with gusto, the Arabs against Africans, etc. Tribalism is more of the same, and it's ubiquitous.

At its most primitive, the behavior is the defense of "our" DNA and those like ours against the DNA of "others" however defined or recognized. A pessimist would be tempted to hypothesize racism is hard-wired into human genetics, a battle to be fought surely, but never won.

While Lilla may be wrong about the underlying construct of racism, he may nevertheless be correct in his Rx for the Democrats, assuming they want to win elections. Doing so requires the votes of large numbers of the white majority.

Read Lilla as advocating a political strategy, not necessarily as a scientific explanation of racism, genderism, or whatever discriminatory process is the focus. I believe he is trying to design a "tent" big enough to cover an electoral majority of Americans.

Economics may be the practical way for Democrats to accomplish that larger "tent," FDR certainly thought so. Hating on whites has the opposite effect, it shrinks the electoral "tent."

Update on Turkey

French news service Agence France Presse reports the opposition to Erdogan's increasingly autocratic rule in Turkey has become more unified and better organized. That opposition is the secular Republican People's Party (CHP).

Erdogan, who started out as a reformer, has morphed into an embryonic sultan. He once famously said "Democracy is like a streetcar, when you reach your destination you get off." His behavior in office suggests he has not changed that ominous view. All who were sad to see Turkey losing its democracy and decidedly western flavor will cheer this news.

The Arpaio Pardon

Multiple sources are reporting President Trump has pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Paul Mirengoff, who blogs at Power Line, describes the situation under which Arpaio was convicted of contempt of court. It is relatively clear it was a politically motivated prosecution, just as the pardon is likewise politically motivated.

Sheriff Joe was a zealous enforcer of immigration law during the Obama era. It was a time when the federal government, at the President's behest, chose not to enforce the full spectrum of existing federal immigration law.

Most COTTonLINE readers would probably support a prosecution of former President Obama for dereliction of duty. For failure to carry out his oath to enforce a federal law he found politically inexpedient and/or distasteful. That prosecution isn't going to happen.

We now have a President who promised to enforce existing immigration law, and is doing so with vigor. The Arpaio pardon is logical given the platform on which Trump was elected.

Meanwhile the senior Senator from Arpaio's home state of AZ, supposed Republican John McCain, continues to demonstrate RINO qualities by criticizing the President for the pardon and the ex-sheriff for enforcing the law.

NYT: Affirmative Action a Failure

Lucianne.com links to a National Review article by David French which is, in turn, based on a data-rich article in The New York Times. The Times article documents that decades of affirmative action have failed to gain proportional representation for blacks and Hispanics in the nation's universities and colleges.

David French writes an explanation for why affirmative action has failed. As he says, it never had a chance to succeed. Some key quotes:

After decades of affirmative action, billions of dollars invested in finding, mentoring, and recruiting minority students, and extraordinary levels of effort and experimentation, black and Hispanic students are “more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago”. White and Asian students, on the other hand, remain overrepresented as a percentage of the population, with Asian students most overrepresented of all.

On the one hand, these statistics represent a staggering failure. It’s difficult to overstate the modern campus obsession with diversity.

On the other hand, however, one wonders whether failure was inevitable. Not even the most aggressive of affirmative-action programs can find students who don’t exist. And when it comes to college admissions, the problem isn’t a lack of collegiate demand for qualified minority students but rather a serious deficiency in supply.

Here’s an interesting fact. The cohort that’s most overrepresented in American colleges and universities, Asian Americans, also happens to have the lowest percentage of nonmarital births in the United States. In fact, the the greater the percentage of nonmarital births, the worse the educational outcomes. Only 16.4 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander children are born into nonmarried households. For white, Hispanic, and black Americans the percentages are 29.2, 53, and 70.6, respectively.

There’s abundant evidence that even vast increases in public spending on education hasn’t led to corresponding increases in test scores, and when you understand how education really works, it’s easy to understand why. One of the most common characteristics of high-achieving students is they come from families that prioritize academic success.

And yet, in places like California, if the public colleges and universities can't get Hispanic kids to come, stay, succeed and graduate, Hispanic legislators will cut funding, campuses will close, and people will be laid off. Administrators are desperate to succeed, for the most selfish of reasons, but to date haven't figured out how to make it happen.

Like Yelling 'Go, Niners' in an Oakland Bar

Instapundit links to an article in Campus Reform which reports a Clemson University Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing who holds some radical views. From the August 16 Facebook post of Bart Knijnenburg comes the following:

All trump supporters, nay, all Republicans, are racist scum.

In another post, Knijnenburg equates President Donald Trump, Trump voters, the GOP, and Steve Bannon to “Nazis,” the “KKK,” and the “Alt-right,” declaring that they are “all racists.”

I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy. Violent or non-violent. This needs to stop, by any means necessary. #PunchNazis.

For those who don't know the location, Clemson is located in South Carolina, between Charlotte and Atlanta. That qualifies as Deep South in my book. His too, for he writes:

You should come live in the south for a while. It's exhausting,

SC has many Trump supporters and many Republicans, a majority of his fellow citizens. Saying such things in a red state with a documented history of dealing violently with trouble-makers can be high-risk behavior.

Believing what he does, you'd think just going to the store would make Knijnenburg's skin crawl. Does he feel invincible, or perhaps suicidal?

My guess: he's looking for work in a blue state like MD or MA. I wish him luck, both he and SC will be happier if he finds it.

Rising Home Prices = More Mobile Homes

CNBC's Diana Olick reports the supply of low priced homes is lower than it has been for a long time.

Home prices are higher at virtually every price point, but the gains are biggest at the low end where demand is highest.

The median price of a home sold in July hit $258,300, the highest July price on record, according to the National Association of Realtors. The Realtors divide sales figures into six different price "buckets" in their monthly report. Sales in the range of $100,000 or below were down 14 percent compared with a year ago, while sales of million-dollar and higher homes jumped nearly 20 percent.

Basically, this means more people will be living in the mis-named "mobile homes." Not to be confused with recreational vehicles, these homes are anything but truly mobile, typically being moved only once. Some end up on foundations, others perch somewhat precariously on cement blocks.

It is affordable housing mass produced in factories. Particularly in rural areas, dropping a single-wide, or if more affluent, double-wide mobile home on a lot or in the parent's farmyard does the job for many.

Those who can't afford the lot and who don't have a relative to 'park' beside may rent a space in a mobile home park while owning their 'coach.' It isn't luxury living and even when coach and land are both owned not much of an investment, but it does provide affordable shelter.