Or, It’s a Good Thing We’ve Finally rid Ourselves of That Damned Cowboy, Bush.  Because no one could stand him.  And besides racism!!  And so forth.

The Poles have had a mixed history.  Sometimes they’ve been incredibly self-destructive, as with their kooky elective monarchy that gave them three partitions of the country in less than a century, with the last one fully extinguishing them as an independent state for over 120 years.  Sometimes they have nobly stood alone against the enemies of humanity, as when they fought the Soviet Union to a standstill in the 1920s, or in the Warsaw uprising in 1944 (I refer both to the general resistance and to the Polish Jews who fought in the ghetto).  Sometimes their bravery is of a character to inspire all freedom-loving men across the globe, as when their resistance fighters turned on both the Soviets and the Germans.  Sometimes they have rendered services to us all which are truly mind-blowing in their achievement, as when a bunch of Polish mathematicians deduced, solely from radio intercepts, how the German Enigma machine had to be constructed and operate . . . and then provided their reverse-engineered machines to the British.  Can anyone doubt whether Bletchley Park could have played nearly the role it did in the U-boat war — at least as soon as it did — without them?  Sometimes their nationalism has been as vicious as anything you could find anywhere else.  A good number of the Hiwis (that’s for “Hilfswillige,” or volunteers . . . to work the Nazi extermination camps) were Polish.  And after the war, the persecution of Jews continued in parts of Poland.  For those latter examples, see Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (which I reviewed here).

As of right now, however, Poland is one of our very few true friends.  They were among the most loyal participants in the Iraqi war.  They’ve provided help, both publicly and behind the scenes, on any number of initiatives near to American interests.  They are a leader in Eastern Europe, and while the struggle to overcome their disastrous history continues, they bid fair to become a rallying point in that part of the world for the forces of freedom and justice under law.

In short, Poland is one of those countries that you’d think it would be nearly per sé in America’s best interests to go to bat for.  Sort of like Israel.  We might not always like what it is they’re doing on specific points, but history offers us (and them) the background and justification to bind ourselves to each other with bands of steel.

The current administration has done just about everything it could to undermine the integrity of that relationship.  From choosing the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland (17 Sept. 1939) to tell them — by way of a telephone call; we couldn’t even have our ambassador get in his car and drive down the road — that we were not going to provide them with the missile defense shield that we had long promised and which would have helped guard them from a resurgent and very aggressive Russia, to going out of our way to hand diplomatic victory after victory to that same Russia, Dear Leader has let pass no opportunity to offend and consternate the Poles.

In a country which could deduce the internal workings and design of the Enigma machine, just from listening to the coded transmissions, is it really surprising that the Poles have figured out what we’re now worth, as an ally?

It will take generations to un-do the damage Dear Leader has wrought on the United States and its position in the world.  I pray that it does not take the crucible of war to repair the friendships he has gone out of his way to destroy.

Boy, if that post title don’t fetch ’em, I don’t know Arkansaw (to borrow a line from Twain).

Whatever it may seem like, the title of this post is not link- or click-bait.  It’s a legitimate question as we look around at 21st Century America and the world in which it exists.  I’ve commented on the dynamic before, here, and here’s another soul whose church has pretty much left him.  In the linked article, we find commentary on the American Presbyterian Church’s decision to “divest” itself from Israel.  By doing so it has aligned itself with the enemies of the one solitary democracy in an entire area of the world, the one place where Muslims can decide they’d rather be something else and not have to fear death imposed by government decree.  The one place where a homosexual can parade his preferences in the open without being sentenced to death.  The one place where the government is not run by a cabal of blood-soaked theocrats and kleptocrats.  A place where teenage girls need not concern themselves with “honor” killings winked at by the police.  Where gang rape of lower-class girls is not looked upon as something of an outdoor sport.  A place where government-backed thugs don’t go about the place burning other people’s houses of worship.

Will the Presbyterians divest themselves from Russia?  Russia’s invaded and stolen an entire geographic region — the Crimea — which dwarfs any place the Palestinian Arabs lived within the borders of modern Israel.  For that matter, Russia kicked out the Prussians and the Poles from most of its modern western reaches.  The Poles of course ejected the Germans when their country was bodily moved 150 miles west at the end of the war.  How about the Czech Republic?  It kicked the Sudeten Germans out in 1945, although those people had never been part of a modern Germany; they’d come to what was then the kingdom of Bohemia in the late Middle Ages.  So why don’t the Presbyterians divest from England?  The English have been occupying Wales since the Middle Ages, and until recently actively suppressed Welsh as a language and culture.  Come to think of it, will the church divest from California?  I seem to recall that the U.S. didn’t exactly acquire undisputed title to that place.  And while we’re at it, will the Church divest itself from companies doing business in China?  China is doing everything in its power to crush its western peoples, principally the Uyghurs and the Tibetans.  It is flooding those areas with ethnic Chinese, suppressing the local cultures and locking up local leaders willy-nilly.  The Church gets its chasuble all in a wad because of a few apartment buildings the Israelis have run up; but about the all-but-shooting war in western China what do we hear?  Crickets.

What makes Israel different?  Oh.  Right.  It’s the Jooooossss.

Jeffrey Carter, over at StockTwits (the article linked above) puts it succinctly:  “Why have traditional churches lost members?  It’s because they have lurched to the far left when it comes to official church policy.”  I’d submit it’s not just official church policy; it’s the churches’ gratuitously mixing themselves into political areas where they have no moral authority to speak and where they enjoy no identifiable expertise that makes their voices weightier than anyone else’s.  They have conflated Christianity with the furthest-left reaches of the political spectrum.

I find this odd.

The big churches increasingly embrace political positions that have demonstrated themselves across all areas of the globe, across multiple generations, and across entirely distinct cultures to be the direct causes and exacerbators not just of material and moral human misery, but of active evil.  We are now preached at, week in and week out, about the evils of capitalism.  The butcher’s bills of the Holodomor, the Great Leap forward, the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot, the grinding prison that has been Cuba since 1959 — they are never mentioned.  You’ll never hear a preacher mention how it has only been since Red China’s (however lackluster) embrace of capitalism and free markets that hundreds of millions of Chinese can hope to have reliably clean running water, or transportation beyond their villages.  It’s as if the population of India has just magically begun to flourish, and children who once would have ground their lives to dust tending herds of goats, sheep, or water buffalo may now dream of becoming engineers, doctors, scholars, or just independent businessmen.

Unfortunately Jesus doesn’t seem to have spent a great deal of time on public policy matters.  About the closest He got was His famous render-unto-Caesar dodge, when they tried to trick Him into a seditious position.  Unlike some I don’t read that as saying any more than what it says:  It permits a Christian to be a citizen.  No more, no less.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Amish and related faiths because they in fact do walk the walk, but with all that respect I think they’re taking things to excess in their disengagement from the polis.  Which is a shame because civil society has such desperate need of people who cultivate precisely the values of those groups.

So we’re left with How Would Jesus Vote? on any number of things.  Would He raise or lower the capital gains tax?  Would He use the tax code as a device to redistribute wealth, when the attempt to do so merely destroys existing wealth and discourages the creation of new?  Would He support gratuitous licensing requirements (such as hair dressers, landscapers, interior decorators, and so forth), when the demonstrable effect of those is to keep in distressed circumstances many people who might otherwise achieve economic — and thus moral — independence?  Would Jesus so arrange the social welfare net as to encourage generations of families to squander their cultural heritage, to create situations where it’s been three or four generations since anyone in the family held a job?  Would He approve of governmental programs that more or less pay teenage girls to become unwed mothers, when the single strongest predictor of all manner of adverse economic and social outcomes for adults (poverty in childhood, criminal behavior, unemployability, failure to complete high school . . . you name it) is the age of the mother at the birth of her first child?  Would Jesus support the Community Reinvestment Act, which mandates under threat of significant penalty that banks make loans to people it is known cannot hope to repay them?  How about Dodd-Frank, with its tens of thousands of regulations, large numbers of which have the intentional or ancillary effect of driving local financial institutions out of business, so that the economic engines of thousands of communities are destroyed?

Would Jesus own stock in Wal-Mart, which provides fairly good products at fairly reasonable prices to small towns all over the country, and provides tens of thousands of jobs?  It provides those jobs to people who may not have the talent or the drive to own their own businesses, and whose other options would be working for other employers where the job security is non-existent, there is no hope of advancement (unless you’re part of the family and might hope to inherit or buy), and which are subject to the wild swings of local economies.  Would Jesus turn His back on those people?

Would Jesus support Israel, or would He back Hezbullah?  Would Jesus support those people who throw acid on women’s faces for daring to show them in public?  Would He support forcible measures against those groups?

You see, I have this inability to understand a Lord and Savior who would command His children to do things that are known to cause or worsen each other’s misery.  I get it:  Jesus hated suffering and poverty.  He loved the poor and the down-trodden, but I don’t recall anything in Scripture that would support the argument that He loved them so much He wanted to see more of them, and in greater poverty and misery.  I also think I understand what he was saying in the eye-of-the-needle turn of phrase.  I don’t think He was condemning riches or the rich; I think He was warning against the temptations that riches bring, the temptations to pride, hardness of heart, oppression of one’s fellow humans.  Riches enable, after all, not only human goodness but also human iniquity.  It’s real hard to indulge feelings of malice when you’re too flat broke to worry about anything except how to pay for that next tank of gas.  I think Jesus was cautioning us against the moral pitfalls of prosperity, rather than condemning prosperity as such.

I am, as I have mentioned elsewhere, no theologian.  But a Christianity that works to establish and promote systems of human organization that have accounted for nine figures of corpses in less than a century, and which have as their stated goal the destruction of individual humans’ moral agency and their yoking to the harness of the faceless behemoth that is the modern nation-state, is not a Christianity that I can accept as serious moral system.  It is certainly not a moral system which I recognize as having a claim upon my allegiance.

I do not see, however, that American churches’ embrace of the extreme leftist positions on nearly every question of public interest out there can be characterized otherwise than as affirmative efforts toward that establishment and promotion.

A few days ago the odds-on favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination was fielding meatball questions at a staged love-fest CNN “Townhall” for her recent book (the book in which she omits her eight years in the U.S. Senate, years in which she voted to authorize the use of military force against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq).  As any reasonably attentive person might have expected would happen, the subject of guns came up.  Never letting pass a chance to use a human tragedy to score political points, the conversation was steered onto school shootings, and how American parents are supposedly cowering in fear lest something that happens once in a blue moon at a tiny proportion of the country’s tens of thousands of schools might happen to their beloved chickabiddies.

Our Not-Candidate made the following statement, having first prefaced it with a bunch of bromides about thoughtful conversations, difficult balancing of competing values etc. etc. etc.:  “We cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”  Althouse has a typically helpful de-construction of the remark and the context in which she made it.  Placed in that context it becomes plain that the words mean precisely what they say.  Holding a belief — as opposed to acting on it, such as by loading up a trunkful of semi-automatic weapons (supposedly brilliant, Our Not-Candidate repeatedly referred to “automatic weapons” in her speech, while in actuality not a single “school shooting” has involved an automatic weapon) — and expressing that belief is now a “terrorizing” act.  Specifically it “terrorizes the majority of the people.”  I strongly doubt it terrorizes any of the folks with whom this person runs, since they tend to have hired armed guards to protect them.  I also strongly doubt it terrorizes many other people outside the Upper West Side or Manhattan Beach.  But we’ll leave the counting of terror victims to another day; if anyone is terrorized we must act, right?  How do we combat something so awful that it terrorizes the “majority of the people”?  Why, we don’t permit that viewpoint to be held.

As Althouse points out, you can’t really prevent people from holding beliefs (a thought which must cause Our Not-Candidate endless frustration).  So precisely what does “we can’t let” actually mean, in practical terms?  What sort of approach to “thoughtful conversations,” “hard choices,” and “competing values” does it suggest might be the choice of a future administration headed by this person?

Admittedly that’s a tough call.  Holding the American presidency is a state of existence so unlike any other set of relationships to the surrounding world that it’s just not, except in the rarest cases, very possible to state with certainty how a particular person is going to behave once in it.  Any attempt to do so must necessarily be as much tea-leaf-reading as anything else.  But it’s not impossible.  There do arise, from time to time, situations in which a putative president is presented with a set of facts and the choice of how to react.  How he makes that choice can be illuminating of how his mind works.  The longer a person has been in public life the more such data points there will be.  Our Not-Candidate has been in public life for a very long time.  Even so, we needn’t fire up our Wayback Machine to find some of them.

There exists a group which proclaims itself “ready for” Our Not-Candidate.  They even have cutesy logos, hip gear, and so forth.  Of course there’s absolutely no coordination at all going on between this group of concerned-but-enthusiastic citizens and the operatives for Our Not-Candidate (you know, the ones she sends to herd The New York Times back onto the reservation).  They just happen to think she’s the messiah, is all, and like all true evangelicals, they’re proud for the world to know it.  The personality cult aspect of it all just begs for satire, and in a country that for the moment has a First Amendment, what begs for satire gets it.  What was the reaction?  Why, a threat of legal coercion, of course.  Without, you know, actually having a basis for it, they still made the threat, but backed down once they saw their target had competent counsel.  What, we Joe Bloggses of the world may ask ourselves, would have become if the person threatened had not had access to that legal assistance?

One of the poses Our Not-Candidate likes to strike is that of standing up for females (because War on Wymyn, dontcha know) and children, and especially female children.  Unless they’re rape victims, it seems.  Once upon a time Our Not-Candidate represented a fellow charged with raping a young (12) girl.  She appears to have represented him zealously within the confines of the law — as was her ethical obligation.  She got the only physical evidence excluded, and apparently gratefully used one of the oldest defense lawyer’s tricks in the book: she attacked the victim.  Successfully, or at least successfully enough that he beat the rape charge, and got him time served (a couple of months, at that point) on a lesser charge.  It appears that she did her job, no more and no less.

Thoroughly distasteful stuff, all of it, but I submit she would have been perfectly justified in taking the approach that she was just doing her job, however icky it was.  In the Anglosphere we have this curious notion that everyone accused of a crime, no matter how terrible, has the right to competent counsel and a vigorous defense that is entitled to make use of every legally-valid, not-unethical stratagem to fight the charges.  You don’t have to pretend to like it; you don’t have to pretend that it’s ennobling; you don’t have to pretend that it operates only to protect the innocent.  The logic the Anglo-American adversarial legal system is not to guard against false negatives, but rather against false positives.

The fact remains, however, that her defense of this child rapist — and it seems she knew he was guilty as sin — destroyed the victim’s childhood.

The system worked as designed for Our Not-Candidate’s client.  However disturbing her role in the story was, Our Not-Candidate can legitimately state she performed well the role assigned to her.  Trouble was, she doesn’t appear to have been all that disturbed by it, and her re-telling of the episode, roughly a decade later, doesn’t jibe very well with the image she’s presented over the decades.  And as interesting as are her words is her tone.  A tone of voice captured.  On tape.  Archived tape.  Tape that exists in the public records of a public library operated by a public university.  Tape that can surface years later, a lifetime later, at awkward moments for someone who wishes for the illusion to continue.  A newspaper (you know, part of that “press” mentioned in the First Amendment) went digging through the archives, out at the University of Arkansas, and found them.  They were granted unrestricted access to and use of the tapes.  And they reported what they found.

What happens next is instructive.  The dean of libraries at the university sends a take-down demand to the newspaper, and notifies it that its privileges have been “suspended” for violating some sort of library policy.  Did we mention this person gave $500 to Our Not-Candidate’s unsuccessful run for the White House, back in 2007?  Granted, $500 isn’t much from the candidate’s perspective, but speaking from my own, any candidate about whom I’m sufficiently enthused to part with $500 is a candidate in whose fortunes I really have made a major investment, beyond the purely financial aspect.  Fortunately this particular newspaper also has competent counsel, and is declining to accept without protest this pretty transparent effort to bury Our Not-Candidate’s past.

Two data points, the common element of which is a transparently unmerited threat to use processes of legal coercion against private citizens or organizations whose sin is to tell the truth, or expose the fatuity, of Our Not-Candidate.  Technically Our Not-Candidate is a private citizen herself, for the moment.  How, we can be forgiven for asking ourselves, would she be likely to respond to such situations when it’s not just some second-tier government hack in Arkansas she can send to run interference, but the entire United States Department of Justice, backed by shoals of alphabet-soup federal agencies that she can deploy to silence her critics?

Does that suggest any range of meanings which Our Not-Candidate herself assigns to the notion of “not letting people hold viewpoints”?

All else being equal, in a world in which nothing is ever really certain until it’s already happened (and then sometimes not even then), I suppose you have to opt for being able to see what’s coming at you before it gets there.  All else being equal, again, I guess you would want to see what’s coming as far out as you can.  The reason for both is so that you can take evasive action, or hunker down behind whatever you can for shelter.  But what if whatever it is that’s coming your way you can neither avoid nor mitigate?

Via the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this morning, we have a report on something with the titillating name Baltic Dry Index.  Like many things with a geographic name these days, it’s about well more than just the Baltic.  It’s an index that tracks the price of shipping dry bulk commodities very long distances in ships of different classes — Handysize (35–50,000 d.w.t.), Supramax (50–60,000 d.w.t.), Panamax (the largest that will fit through the Panama Canal, it is a physical dimension rather than a load specification, although the most common size is 65–80,000 d.w.t.), and Capesize (too big for the Suez or Panama; we’re talking about something in the 150,000 d.w.t. range . . . folks, that’s Real Damn Big, by anyone’s standards).  The index measures how much it costs per ton per mile to move things like coal, ores, grains, and the like.  Things that are the basic materials used to make just about anything durable, and stay alive while doing so.  Since shipping space is a not easily expandable on a quick-turn basis (it takes a day or so to make an 18-wheeler’s cab and trailer; it takes months to build, fit out, and pass an ore-carrier), the more people want to ship and the greater amounts they want to ship, the higher the price for any given shipping route.  The less is being shipped and by the fewer people, the lower the cost.

Further, sea shipping costs are less susceptible to at least certain kinds of price distortions than other forms of transport.  I’m thinking specifically about an owner’s practical ability to withdraw his capacity from the marketplace and thereby maintain artificial scarcity.  If you don’t have enough freight to keep your locomotives and cars busy at your price point, you park them on a siding somewhere until you need them again.  Very low out-of-service maintenance.  Ditto heavy trucking.  Keep the battery charged, make sure the engine block doesn’t freeze, and have some maintenance guy come along a couple of times a month and start it up for 30 minutes to keep the seals wet.  That’s of course over-simplified, but not by much.  Ship owners can’t just pull a ship out of service when the shipping price per ton per nautical mile falls below whatever they want to charge.  A ship that is not actively loading, un-loading, or underway is a ship that is losing its owners phenomenal amounts of money.  There is a reason why you don’t see merchant equivalents of the James River Ghost Fleet.  Private owners can’t afford to keep inactive ships afloat, so they get sifted downstream through progressively less scrupulous, more neglectful owners, and generally end their days on a beach in South Asia somewhere, being chopped to bits.

In short, because the commodities whose shipping costs it tracks are so basic to so many manufacturing processes, the Baltic Dry Index makes a very reliable leading economic indicator.  Its fluctuations express themselves in the general economy with an 8-12 month lag time.

And it’s dropping through the floor.  Since the beginning of the year it’s dropped by roughly 50%, to less than 1,000.  Back in 2008 it was at nearly 12,000.  Add this to the U.S. economy having shrunk at an annualized rate of 1.0% in the first quarter, Japan cranking up its value-added tax (in the run-up to the increase’s effective date, Japan Went Shopping, delivering a (deceptive) “growth” of 6% annualized), Vladimir Putin holding a gun to Europe’s head in the shape of natural gas prices (Germany’s trade with Russia has imploded by 16% year-on-year since the onset of the latest Ukrainian crisis), and the Middle East about to explode all over everyone, and it’s hard to find something to be upbeat about.

The leading edge of the glacier is headed this way.  Fasten your seatbelts accordingly.

We keep hearing, from the usual suspects, how we’re not supposed to pour scorn on Hillary Clinton for . . . well, for pretty much anything.

The White House travel office debacle, in which she had most of the senior staffer fired so she could hire her buddies?  Yawn.  Her getting fired by her boss, the House Judiciary Committee chief counsel, because she hid documents and files, with the intention of denying the right to counsel and then pretended they didn’t exist?  So what?  Her doing pretty much exactly the same thing with the Rose Law Firm billing records — claiming they were “lost” for months and months, until they mysteriously surfaced . . . in her private office?  War on wymyn, obviously.  Her willing participation in the destruction of women who had the temerity to suggest that her husband (now disbarred for perjury) was a lying sack of shit who preyed on female employees?  Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.  Asking just what the billy hell she as Secretary of State was doing in the weeks and hours leading up the slaughter of a United States ambassador in Behghazi?  What difference does it make, at this point? to coin a phrase.  Her famous expression of contempt when someone pointed out to her that Hillarycare would bankrupt enormous numbers of small businesses (by the way, that snort was: “I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized business in the country.”)?  You didn’t build that anyway, buddy.  Leaving out of her memoirs her time as a U.S. senator?  Racism!

None of her prior behavior, in other words, is supposed to be relevant to whether she ought to become the most powerful person in the world, a position in which even tiny character flaws become of critical importance to billions of people all across the globe.  It’s grotesquely unfair that anyone would even mention these “speed bumps” on the road to Hillary’s Apotheosis.  Gentle Reader may not even have realized it, but even The New York Times has been transgressing.  Seriously.  That hard-hitting journalistic watch-dog that has well earned its reputation for shining an unblinking — an absolutely unblinking, I’ll have you know — light on the misdeeds of politicians of all stripes, has been unfairly going after Poor Hillary.  So she sends some of her goons to have a little sit-down with them, to make sure they don’t stray from The Narrative.  According to The Washington Free Beacon:  “Sources said the meeting included Clinton advisers Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, as well as Times Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan and national political reporter Amy Chozick, who has been on the Clinton beat for the paper.  During the closed-door gathering, Clinton aides reportedly griped about the paper’s coverage of the potential 2016 candidate, arguing that Clinton has left public office and should not be subjected to harsh scrutiny, according to a source familiar with the discussions.”

So the NYT — a corporation, by the way — sits down to make sure they’ve got their story straight with a candidate for the presidency (kindly do not ask me to accept the proposition that she’s not running).  This would be the same NYT which has assured us that permitting “corporate money” in elections — unless it’s from the lamestream media or labor unions, of course (their money apparently is of a different character) — is just the harbinger of the End of the Republic dontcha know.  This would be the same corporation as to which the prohibition on coordinating outsider participants’ actions (and money) with the candidates themselves remains in effect, even after Citizens United (which was, by the way, about a film critical of . . . Hillary).

All that, however, is just the icing on the cake, so to speak.  My antennae went up when Huma Abedin was mentioned as being one of Clinton’s advisors present.  Huma is most widely known for having entered into a marriage of convenience with one of the most distasteful members of Congress, someone so egregious that, although a Democrat, he can’t get elected even in New York City any more.  She not only entered into a marriage of convenience with this ass-hat, she bore his child.  All in eery resemblance to her mentor, Hillary.  Most of the commentary about this woman is of the salacious kind, speculating that she’s actually Hillary’s homosexual companion &c. &c. &c.  You know the script.

What is much, much more bothersome than how Huma chooses to get her jollies is her politics and her family’s politics.  In fact, in many ways it’s kind of convenient that the public kerfuffle about her, her husband, and her bedroom preferences is of the potty-mouth variety.  It conveniently distracts from the serious concerns about her politics and associations.  To sum it up, both from her own actions as an adult and by her intimate family connections there is no reason to suppose that this woman is anything other than a Muslim Brotherhood operative.

Here’s a long post by Andrew McCarthy over at Ordered Liberty.  To borrow from the Blogfather, read it all.  All of it.  And follow the links.  First: the top-level summary:  “Soon, however, it was demonstrated beyond cavil that Abedin herself, like other members of her family, has a disturbingly close association with Abdullah Omar Naseef – a wealthy Saudi financier of al-Qaeda and Brotherhood eminence.  At that point, most of the craven GOP emirate stuck its head back in the sand with hopes that the issue would just go away, while the Left reverted to its knee-jerk ‘McCarthyism’ shrieks — along with the demeaning characterization of Abedin, who is actually a top policy adviser, as a flunky who merely helps Madame Secretary decide which ‘handbag’ goes best with that day’s outfit.”  I’ve pulled the links in that quoted language, but please go there and click through.  It makes for some extremely sobering reading.

The one thing which runs true through Islam is that, like other cults (Jim Jones, anyone?) and criminal conspiracies (e.g. the Mafia), once you’re in you don’t get out, or at least not out alive.  Even that poor Christian woman in the Sudan who was born Christian is considered an apostate because the Religion of Peace still considers her one of their own.  And she was condemned to death for it.  See also, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who lives under armed protection for her apostasy.  I therefore refuse to consider the possibility that this Abedin woman has abandoned the politics and active associations (we’re not talking about just beer-drinking buddies, people) which she took with her for twelve years, from the time she first went to work in the Clinton White House in 1996 until she joined Hillary at State in 2009.  Please do not insult what little intelligence I enjoy by asking me to pretend that is likely or even possible.

Were Clinton to be elected, and were she to keep this Abedin woman by her side, it would not be the first time that an enemy agent has been insinuated into alarmingly senior positions.  Harry Dexter White was only one of many.  But this would be the first time that an organization actively considering itself in a shooting war with the United States has placed an operative literally at a president’s elbow, and with privileged access to that president’s ear.

Why does Clinton keep her around?  I’m not aware of any behavior from her — other than her hostility to Israel, which sets her apart from her cultural and political allies exactly not at all — to suggest an underlying sympathy with the Muslim Brotherhood, in contrast to Dear Leader, who expressed “relief” when it took over in Egypt.  But let’s go ahead and ignore all the peculiarities created by her association, such as the apparent coordination of the Benghazi attacks from Egypt, Clinton’s strange lassitude in protecting American assets in Libya from known threats, and then her knowingly lying about the nature and organization of those attacks, repeatedly attributing them to some penny-ante film-maker when she had long since known the truth.

Let’s write all that off to unfortunate coincidence and look just at the appearances, for God’s sake.  The American lamestream media may be willing to fly cover for her, but does she truly think the rest of the world’s press is as supine as its American cousins?  The British press in particular has a generations-old tradition of truckling to no one, at home or abroad.  When NATO allies are struggling with organized criminal activity from the Religion of Peace, and trying desperately to keep the lid on massive unassimilated populations, does Clinton really think they’re going to turn a blind eye to a Muslim Brotherhood operator in the Oval Office?  Pray do not forget, Best Beloved, the extent to which our intelligence operations’ effectiveness depends on  the sharing of information with our allies.  Does Clinton actually think that those allies are going to share critical and sensitive information with an America that has a direct line back to the Brotherhood?

If the past thirteen years have suggested anything, it’s that no American president can go it alone for any prolonged period.  One of the larger sticks that the lamestream media and its Democrat bosses used to beat Bush 43 was that our allies weren’t with us.  Dear Leader, the Light Warrior Himself, has discovered that the rest of the world thinks he’s a joke, and that in consequence he can accomplish nothing beyond platitudes.

Granted, Hillary’s got more raw intelligence in her fingernail clippings than Dear Leader has ever suspected might exist, but our greatest presidents have not been our most intelligent.  They’ve been those with the most profound judgment.  How in the world is keeping this Abedin woman in her vest pocket evidence of any sort of good judgment, at all?

I guess we’re supposed to ignore that as well.

I firmly believe there are comparisons which are beyond humans’ capacity to make moral distinction.  “Which is worse?” we ask, and forever people will parse the tiniest facts.  Today, the 70th anniversary of D-Day, is as good an occasion as any to point out that the which-was-worse industry has an inexhaustible mother lode in the Stalin-Hitler comparison (on which I commented here).

One of the worst indictments of Southeast Asian societies — apart from the tens of millions of corpses intentionally done to death by their elites — is their enthusiastic embrace of the sex industry.  From organized brothel tours for middle-aged Japanese businessmen to being a mecca for American pederasts, that part of the world has a stinking, suppurating sore right spang smack in the middle of its face.  And of course notwithstanding the occasional hunk of red meat thrown to the activists — the token raid on some out-of-the-way bordello — you have to take as a given that officialdom is thoroughly compromised.  The industry could not function as prominently as it does were they not in it up to the elbows.

I suppose you could make the argument that if those societies want to legalize the sex trade in whatever manner they please, we in the West ought to kindly bugger off.  There are in fact legitimate arguments you can make along those lines, and some of the people making them are women who are actively engaged in the sex trade themselves.

Whatever else might be said for or against the industry generally, I think you have to draw the line at recruiting by kidnapping or sale.  [And for me as well, recruiting by caste.  There are castes in India the females of which are prostitutes.  That’s what they do, it’s what they’re destined to do from the moment of their birth.  I decline to accept that as a valid cultural expression.  But that’s just me.]  Kidnapping or sale into prostitution, however, I would submit are 100%, no-counter-argument-valid, off-the-charts unacceptable.  Everywhere, by anyone, under any circumstances.  Those are not, by the way, peculiar to Southeast Asian societies or the modern world.  Mark Twain writes of the slave markets — and the girls for sale there — of Constantinople in The Innocents Abroad, in 1867.  In Rome slave girls were regularly bought and sold for such purposes.  For centuries the Tartars raided deep into Russia, looking for pretty girls to carry off.  I would suggest, however, that so far from legitimizing by association the practice, the existence of those practices are indictments of those societies, and reasons to damp down any cultural admiration for them we might otherwise feel.

Let’s go ahead and damn the kidnappers, the buyers, the brokers, the brothel owners who will whore out a captive 13-year-old, and the customers who leeringly keep the whole ship afloat.  While she may have come from a brutal world (her family may have had the choice between selling her into prostitution or watching her starve to death), while she may exist in a brutal world even outside the special hell that is her life, I think we all can agree that the people who do to her what is done to her are guilty of sins for which they will one day have to pay, if not in this world then in the next.

These girls and women are subject to the worst exploitation of their physical persons, which is about all they have in this world.  How contemptible is it, then, that they are not only directly exploited by their captors and their captors’ customers . . . but indirectly by those who nominally are there to help them?

It emerges that the patron saint — so to speak — of the anti-sex-trafficking industry is nothing more than a fraud.  At least some of her spokespeople are frauds, coached to lie about their lives and their stories.  And why?  Well, let’s just say that Somaly Mam, whose story of sale into sex slavery turns out to be manufactured from whole cloth, has been doing herself mighty proud.  Jet-setting around the world, meeting with all the bigwigs (for which she must be appropriately dressed, of course), staying at the most posh hotels.  The book deals, the movie rights, the rubbing elbows with people whose names are household words all over the world, getting showered with awards by the likes of CNN, Glamour, and Fortune.  If the actual girls rescued from sex slavery get short shrift . . . well, Humpty-Dumpty couldn’t be put back together again, and besides isn’t there a major conference in Prague next spring we’ve got to get ready for?  At least they’re not being locked up for enjoyment by some decrepit, diseased paper-pusher from Yokohama on a package tour of Thai kiddie brothels.

The linked article over at The Atlantic deals principally with how Nick Kristof let himself get used by this woman, and how the rest of the media-war-on-wymyn industry gleefully sang her praises.  Honestly I can’t say any of that part of the story surprises me.  The manufactured hero-of-the-moment, not infrequently created by the media themselves, is of too ancient vintage to be news any more.  But what kind of a filthy bastard, what kind of human scum, do you have to be to use the juvenile sex slaves of these hell-holes of the world as your ladder to fame and wealth?

These girls are twice exploited, and I think it’s an open question which set of blood-suckers is the more cynical, the more reprehensible.

Damn them all, in any event.

Because, according to someone employed by Occidental College and rejoicing in the name of Danielle Dirks, who is identified as a professor, a student accused of sexual assault “fit the profile of other rapists on campus in that he had a high GPA in high school, was his class valedictorian, was on [a sports] team, and was ‘from a good family.'”  Ah yes:  The smart ones, the ones who can reason their way through written sexual conduct policies and have memories sufficiently capacious to keep them in mind while half-looped and trying to get some . . . those are the ones you’ve got to come down on.  Professor Dirks is an assistant professor of sociology, concerning herself “with fundamental questions about justice and inequality in America, with a special focus on racial and gender inequality.”  Which of course makes her a perfect person to evaluate whether two drunk kids screwing in a dorm room is a quasi-criminal offense.  <sound of blowing snot>

After the police investigated the girl’s accusations and the district attorney’s office determined, “Witnesses were interviewed and agreed that the victim and suspect were both drunk, however, that they were both willing participants exercising bad judgment …. It would be reasonable for [Doe] to conclude based on their communications and [the accuser’s] actions that, even though she was intoxicated, she could still exercise reasonable judgment,” and declined to prosecute for that reason (remember, Gentle Reader, that mutual consent means as a matter of law that no sexual assault took place; under civil law a “battery” is an offensive intentional touching and an “assault” is the intentional placing in reasonable fear of imminent bodily harm, and if you consent to it then it defies all logic to assert that it was either offensive or caused you fear; all of which is to say that it didn’t happen), the student accused was put through the Holder-era DOJ-mandated kangaroo kampus kourt process.

Occidental hired an outside investigator and then an outside lone ranger “adjudicator” to run a due-process-free farce in which the accused had no effective right of confrontation.  The “adjudicator” found that “more likely than not” the accuser in fact gave every indication she wanted to have sex, but that because she was drunk (so was the accused, remember) her consent was ineffective.  This is notwithstanding Occidental’s own definition of “incapacitated”:  “cannot make an informed and rational decision to engage in sexual activity because s/he lacks conscious knowledge of the nature of the act (e.g., to understand the who, what, when, where, why or how of the sexual interaction) and/or is physically helpless.”   All the above quotations are taken from this report from F.I.R.E. (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a 501(c)(3) eminently worthy of Gentle Reader’s donation and support), and at the link they quote the district attorney’s summary of the accuser’s protracted written communication with the accused, including expressing an intention to sneak out of her dorm and into his for the purpose of having sex.

Occidental expelled the accused, who has filed a lawsuit.  Bless the judge’s little pointy head, a stay has issued, so for the time being the accused is still enrolled.  The accused student has enlisted F.I.R.E.’s support, and I hope they provide it with gusto.  As their vice president’s letter to the college president observed, using the “standard” (I decline to give it the dignity of omitting quotation marks) and the evidence on hand, the girl was guilty of sexually assaulting the guy.  The college promised a response by mid-May; none has been forthcoming.

This story terrifies me.  I have, as I have mentioned repeatedly on this blog, three boys who more likely than not will attend college at some point.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but I would anticipate they’re going to want to get laid at some point along the line.  These are the stakes, though, if they either make the effort or succeed.  What makes it all the more frightening is that at least one of my boys has emotional development issues which impair his ability to read social cues.  Oh sure, he’s not a recluse, or socially inappropriate or anything, but he will never have the finely-tuned sensibilities to make on-the-fly accurate assessments of what other people are telling him with their expressions, tones, body language, meta-conversations, whatever.  He’ll have to think his way through them one step at a time, every step of the way, according to algorithms that he will have to sit down and work out.  And he will make mistakes.

Add in the complexity of not just social interaction, but sexually-overtoned social interaction, and the degree to which these judgment decisions (“Does she want to or not?”) are nearly invariably made at the very outer margins of social awareness and my boy is going to step on landmines.  Not because he’s evil or a sexual predator, but because he’s mis-read the “thanks but no thanks,” response that was given to his advances.  And he’s mis-read them not because he’s interpreting through the prism of a sexual perversion but because he lacks the wiring to read them in the first place.  As surely as night follows the day, unless one stumbles across a woman of the sort who generally does not exist off the set of a pornographic movie (I once, 25 or so years ago, saw a tongue-in-cheek article on “The Ontology of Porn,” and I wish now I’d kept it; a brief Google search was unsuccessful), he is going to end up doing something that could very easily put him on the wrong end of one of these farcical processes.

To borrow a recent observation from Instapundit, “These lawsuits seem to be a growth industry. If I were a plaintiff’s lawyer in a college town, I’d be putting ads on park benches: FALSELY ACCUSED OF SEXUAL ASSAULT? SUE THE B*ST*RDS!”  I’d not only sue the college itself, but I’d sue the accuser and every last individual involved in the process, including the Danielle Dirkses, these lone ranger “adjudicators,” and the outside “investigators.”  Remind them that “justice” necessarily contemplates the possibility that your accuser is not telling the truth, and “equality” means no one is exempt from having to be confronted by the accused.

Let’s eat into those endowments and the dear professors’ home equity in seven-figure bites and see how long before they start to push back against the DOJ.