Archive for the ‘social issues’ Category

Will Woke Democrats and Environmentalists scare off our allies ?

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2022

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has set off radical changes in international relationships. The US and other (not all) European nations have imposed severe sanctions on Russia designed to destroy its economy. The precedents set are not all positive. First Ukraine has defined corruption for years. The Biden family and even Mitt Romney’s family got positions on a Ukrainian gas company’s Board for lots of money and no work except influence. The “Maiden Revolution” in 2014 was engineered by the Obama CIA. It expelled a pro-Russian president duly elected in an election probably more honest than the US 2020 election. Not all agree that it was an honest process.

As Ukraine’s political crisis deepened, [Victoria] Nuland and her subordinates became more brazen in favoring the anti-Yanukovych demonstrators. Nuland noted in a speech to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation on December 13, 2013, that she had traveled to Ukraine three times in the weeks following the start of the demonstrations. Visiting the Maidan on December 5, she handed out cookies to demonstrators and expressed support for their cause.

The extent of the Obama administration’s meddling in Ukraine’s politics was breathtaking. Russian intelligence intercepted and leaked to the international media a Nuland telephone call in which she and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffey Pyatt discussed in detail their preferences for specific personnel in a post-Yanukovych government.

Ukraine has remained an economic basket case in spite of the change to a pro-western government.

The furious reaction to the invasion by US officials has alarmed some nations that have remained neutral. Some of them have been our allies, or at least friendly.

In a development that suggests trouble ahead, China’s basic approach—not endorsing Moscow’s aggression but resisting Western efforts to punish Russia—has garnered global support. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed the war on NATO. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, refused to condemn Russia. India and Vietnam, essential partners for any American strategy in the Indo-Pacific, are closer to China than the U.S. in their approach to the war.

Western arm-twisting and the powerful effect of bank sanctions ensure a certain degree of sanctions compliance and support for symbolic U.N. resolutions condemning Russian aggression. But the lack of non-Western enthusiasm for America’s approach to Mr. Putin’s war is a phenomenon that U.S. policy makers ignore at their peril.

The dominant role played by the “Woke” left and the Green New Deal enthusiasts in the Democrat Party has concerned many of them. Right now, Democrats hold all three branches of government, although narrowly.

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Is there a trend in these mass shooting events ?

Saturday, August 3rd, 2019

Today there was a mass shooting event today in El Paso Texas, in a Walmart.

There is some evidence that the mass shooting took place in a “Gun Free Zone.” This is still being sorted out. I live in Arizona and have a CCW permit, but I usually do not carry a gun. I do have one in my car. I do see quite a few shops that do not allow guns inside.

There is some evidence that that the shooter may be Hispanic, but the story resembles the New Zealand Shooter who attacked a mosque. In that case also there was a “manifesto” giving his motives.

With both of these incidents with mass shootings, there is some resemblance to the incident in Norway where a “white supremacist” attacked children at a Socialist summer camp on an island.

The Norwegian Police arrested Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian right-wing extremist,[25] on Utøya island[26] and charged him with both attacks.[27] His trial took place between 16 April and 22 June 2012 in Oslo District Court, where Breivik admitted carrying out the attacks, but denied criminal guilt and claimed the defense of necessity (jus necessitatis).[28] On 24 August, Breivik was convicted as charged and sentenced to 21 years of preventive detention in prison, the maximum sentence allowed in Norway. The sentence can be extended indefinitely as long as the prisoner is deemed a threat to society.

What is going on here?

Breivik is linked to a 1,518-page compendium entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence bearing the name “Andrew Berwick”.[31][32][151] The file was e-mailed to 1,003 addresses about 90 minutes before the bomb blast in Oslo.[152][153] Analysts described him as having Islamophobic views and a hatred of Islam,[154][155] and as someone who considered himself as a knight dedicated to stemming the tide of Muslim immigration into Europe.

What about New Zealand?

the posts suggest that every aspect of the shootings was designed to gain maximum attention online, in part by baiting the media. The shooter live-streamed the attack itself on Facebook, and the video was quickly shared across YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. Before committing the act, he shouted, “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” a reference to Felix Kjellberg, who runs YouTube’s most subscribed-to channel. The phrase itself is a meme started by PewDiePie’s fans, and its goal is to be reprinted.\

In both cases, the shooter surrendered and was not killed. Why? They seemed to want a public forum for their causes. The El Paso shooter also surrendered. We will see what the motive was.

Post Mueller, what happens now ?

Monday, July 29th, 2019

The Mueller hearings were a huge disappointment to the Democrats, who were counting on scandal and impeachment to substitute for governing. Two leaders, Schiff and Nadler, seem unwilling to give up and try legislating. Schiff, who seems to most devoted to the Russia Hoax, has a darker side.

Schiff is the first Democrat since 1932 to represent the region.

He was an eloquent booster of McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation, seeking to put limits on some of the very expenditures that swamped his own race against former Rep. James Rogan, whom he beat by three percentage points.

(Limiting expenditures is a point Colbert needled him on. Colbert: “Isn’t that the equivalent of sleeping with a prostitute and then strangling her to hide your shame?” Schiff: “Well … I wouldn’t want to say it like that.”)

Rogan, of course was the target of massive Democrat fund raising to punish the House prosecutor for the Clinton impeachment.

That fawning “The Hill” tongue bath did not provide much for the “darker side.”

Nadler, another Clinton defender, has shed 60 pounds since his gastric bypass but he still looks about 100 pounds overweight. He is a little less strident than Schiff in public.

Where do they go from here ?

They get no help from Andrew McCarthy who demolishes their arguments.

Mueller’s anti-Trump staffers knew they were never going to be able to drive Trump from office by indicting him. The only plausible way to drive him from office was to prioritize, over all else, making the report public. Then, perhaps Congress would use it to impeach. At the very least, the 448 pages of uncharged conduct would wound Trump politically, helping lead to his defeat in 2020 — an enticing thought for someone who had, say, attended the Hillary Clinton “victory” party and expressed adulatory “awe” for acting AG (and fellow Obama holdover) Sally Yates when she insubordinately refused to enforce Trump’s border security order.

Of course, it wouldn’t be enough to get the report to Congress. The challenge was to get it there with the obstruction case still viable even though prosecutors knew they couldn’t get away with recommending an obstruction indictment. How to accomplish this? By pretending that the OLC guidance prevented prosecutors from even making a charging decision.

This resulted in the Ted Lieu question and Mueller’s answer which he had to retract after the break.

It is becoming more and more apparent that Mueller’s ‘assistant” prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann is the lead conspirator in the coup.

Weissmann is distinguished by his abysmal record as a corrupt prosecutor in several cases.

A lawyer representing whistleblowers referred Andrew Weissman to the Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG) for “corrupt legal practices”.

Weissman is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lead investigator in the Russia-Trump probe. He is the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. That was Loretta Lynch’s territory. He rose through the ranks under Mueller’s stewardship.

In 2015, civil rights attorney David Schoen referred Weisman to the IG for his handling of a case targeting the Columbo crime family. Schoen said he is not a member of a political party and there is no political motivation.

Weissman was the lead attorney in the Persico trial and he withheld exculpatory evidence, a Brady violation. Schoen said he decided to revisit the nearly two-decade-long cases based on new witness information and “recent evidence that has come to light in the last several months.”

Weissman never told the defense that a prosecution witness, Gregory Scarpa Sr., was also working for years as an FBI informant. The underworld witness was nicknamed ‘Hannibal’ and the “Grim Reaper’ and committed over 100 murders.

The judge described AUSA Weissmann’s conduct as the “myopic withholding of information” and “reprehensible and subject, perhaps, to appropriate disciplinary measures,” according to the opinion obtained by investigative reporter Sara Carter.

He further distinguished himself with a rare Unanimous Supreme Court decision reversing his conviction of Arthur Anderson in the Enron case.

With a brief, pointed and unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned Arthur Andersen’s conviction for shredding Enron accounting documents as that company was collapsing in one of the nation’s biggest corporate scandals.

The court held that the trial judge’s instructions to the jury failed to require the necessary proof that Andersen knew its actions were wrong.

But the decision represents little more than a Pyrrhic victory for Andersen, which lost its clients after being indicted on obstruction of justice charges and has no chance of returning as a viable enterprise. The accounting firm has shrunk from 28,000 employees in the United States to a skeleton crew of 200, who are attending to the final details of closing down the partnership.

28,000 people lost their jobs. The prosecutor who hid evidence was Weissmann.

In the interview with Devin Nunes, Maria Bartiromo asks the ultimate question: “who was the mastermind” behind all of these intelligence operations?

Released FOIA documents into the special counsel team of Robert Mueller revealed the remarkable trail of the 2017 entrapment scheme conducted by prosecutor Andrew Weissmann to target George Papadopoulos.

Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by the special counsel; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed {Go Deep} where George Papadopoulos was approached by a known CIA operative named Charles Tawil.

In 2017 George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona were approached in Greece by a known CIA/FBI operative, Charles Tawil. Mr. Tawil enlisted George as a business consultant, under the auspices of energy development interests, and invited him to Israel.

On June 8th, 2017, in Israel under very suspicious circumstances, where Papadopoulos felt very unnerved, Mr. Tawil hands him $10,000 in cash for future consultancy based on a $10k/month retainer.

This is a key part of the plot to destroy Trump. Read the whole thing. In fact, Papadopoulis’ book is a good place to start.

“Flying Rambo” joins the yellow vests in France. All over France !

Monday, January 7th, 2019

Although the US media are not talking about the French protests anymore, they are getting worse and more violent.

paris-riots-3

The Champs Elysees is not the only location these days. They are all over France.

PARIS (Reuters) – Emmanuel Macron intended to start the new year on the offensive against the ‘yellow vest’ protesters. Instead, the French president is reeling from more violent street demonstrations.

What began as a grassroots rebellion against diesel taxes and the high cost of living has morphed into something more perilous for Macron – an assault on his presidency and French institutions.

The anti-government protesters on Saturday used a forklift truck to force their way into a government ministry compound, torched cars near the Champs Elysees and in one violent skirmish on a bridge over the Seine punched and kicked riot police officers to the ground.

And

Generally the protests seem loosely organized, but nationwide around 50,000 to 80,000 people today according to Reuters. The protests are generally peaceful; then, later in the day, the police arrive to remove them and things turn confrontational and violent.

By the time dusk arrives most of the ordinary Yellow Vest protesters have returned home; and that’s when it seems like smaller agitating groups start burning things.

Macron may not survive this. There seem to be few of any Muslims involved. This is global warming policy at the street level

A Year in New Hampshire

Thursday, December 13th, 2018

In 1994, after my back surgery and the prolonged recovery, I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life. The young man who I had taken in as a partner before my surgery, did not want me to continue in the surgery practice as a non-operating member. I had offered to see patients in the office and to help keep the referring doctors sending patients. I still had a fair sized breast practice which includes quite a bit of office work. He was not interested. That was a bad decision on his part but I had sold him the practice before my surgery and he was free to do as he chose.

I had been interested in the area of peer review in Medicine for some years and had served on the Board of Directors of California Medical Review, Inc. This was an outgrowth of a new federal policy called “Professional Standards Review Organizations. or PSRO. It was supposed to be about quality but it was always about cost. CMRI was founded in about 1986 and is now defunct. It was useful in trying to figure out how to measure quality but go into trouble later for exaggerating their case load.

Anyway, I was interested and knew that Dartmouth Medical School had a program called “Evaluative Clinical Sciences. The Director was a well known epidemiologist named Jack Wennberg who had become famous for his study of variation in medical treatment. His original study had been of tonsillectomy in Vermont where he was state health officer. He found that the incidence of tonsillectomy varied by town but not by medical indications. IT was a function of local medical “culture.” Eventually, his work resulted in The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care.

I talked to him and then applied for the Fall Semester. In September, I leased my house and moved to New Hampshire for a year. I leased a house in the Hanover area and moved in.

New Hampshire - 3 of 9

New Hampshire - 9 of 9

The house was pretty and situated on 5 acres of land. It had a barn that served as a garage and I had my car winterized as New Hampshire is cold in Winter. It was 26 below zero Thanksgiving morning.

The house was about 6 miles north of the medical school, up this highway.

New Hampshire - 4 of 9

I had my dog and a cat that some neighbor children had brought over the first day I was moving in.

SunnyBillFood

The cat and the dog got on very well and even ate from the same dish, although Sunny, the dog, ate faster and I eventually had to put Bill’s food in the basement to keep Sunny from eating it all.

Winter came quickly and the first snow was less than a month after I moved in.The house was comfortable although expensive to heat.

The land had a small stream running through it and there was a pond in front of the house.

New Hampshire - 6 of 9

That its a small bridge over the stream and the stream itself was frozen a good part of the winter.

New Hampshire - 5 of 9

The interior was nice. Here is the living room with Christmas decorations for the kids as they came to spend the holiday with me.

New Hampshire - 1 of 9

Being California kids, they had fun playing in the snow.

New Hampshire - 4 of 4

That was across the road from the junction of Grant Road and Lyme Road from the medical school.

Spring eventually came after “mud season,” which is the fifth season of New England. Graduation was fun as the older kids were there and Bill Clinton handed me my diploma.

My research project was on dialysis access surgery and I had thoughts of further study but we never got the grant I applied for. I returned to California and spent several years trying to use the same methods to analyze care of the elderly and of care of the poor, but I got no cooperation from the necessary authorities and eventually gave up on research on medical quality.

Here is the house I leased in 1994-95.

15 grant road,.

Obviously the photo was taken in summer.

My next door neighbor was a guy named Baxter Prescott and he had at least as large a property with lots of maple trees. Next to Baxter’s was his son, Tom’s, who had a home business making musical instruments, specifically recorders. He had an Apple computer connected top a milling machine and built the instruments, many using precious woods. I got to know Tom and his family while I was there. Baxter was a very interesting guy. He and his wife, Emily I think, had a nice home which was heated by a wood stove at the lowest level. The wood stove also heated their hot water, which circulated in copper tubing behind it. They had a Nigerian exchange student, enrolled at Dartmouth, living with them. He was a nice kid and worked nights in the 24 hour Dining Hall for extra money and at night so he could study.

In the Spring I helped (mostly watched) Baxter make maple syrup from his trees. He also had a pond, which in summer was a swimming hole and in winter a skating pond. He had a little gazebo for summer, which had removable walls to enclose it as a warming hut in winter. My kids were there in winter and got quite a bit of use with it. Baxter had a sort of Zamboni machine which would smooth out the ice.

They were very pleasant neighbors and I enjoyed knowing them.

Remember that Charlottesville car crash that killed a woman?

Saturday, December 8th, 2018

Remember the “White Nationalist”demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017? Many have forgotten but the trial of the driver who killed a “Democratic Socialist” demonstrator is going on now.

Why are the news media not reporting? Why do we have to read “Russia Today” articles about it?

Maybe it is not going well for the left ?

Fifteen months after the now notorious Unite the Right rally (UTR), James Alex Fields is finally having his day in court.

Fields is facing a slate of charges including first degree murder for crashing his Dodge Challenger into a crowd in downtown Charlottesville two hours after UTR was forcibly disbursed by police. He was arrested minutes after the incident, denied bail, and has been imprisoned ever since. He has also been charged with federal hate crimes, for which he will likely face prosecution next year.

Who is he ? The “Unite the Right” group is on trial.

the outcome will affect several other key cases. One such case is Sines v. Kessler, a sprawling civil suit brought on behalf of 11 plaintiffs against every key figure and organization who participated in UTR. The suit is being argued by two New York-based law firms, Boies Schiller Flexner and Kaplan Hecker & Fink, whose ethnic composition is worth noting. The suit alleges that UTR attendees conspired to commit violence because of “hate,” “racism,” and other species of badthink. The Fields trial will also likely affect the trials of four UTR attendees who were recently arrested in California and accused of “conspiracy to riot.”

Testimony for the defense is going on.

On Aug. 12, 2017, a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville turned deadly when a 20-year-old Ohio man allegedly accelerated his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and leaving 19 others injured, five critically.

Now, some of the same right-wing groups involved in those events in Charlottesville are planning another protest to coincide with the anniversary this weekend. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and the city of Charlottesville declared states of emergency ahead of this weekend’s anniversary. The governor said in a press conference Wednesday he will allow agencies to call in the National Guard to assist in security efforts.

That was ABC at the time. What does the defense say ? First the Prosecution.

The prosecution isn’t pulling any punches. The facts are not on their side, so they are going in for maximum emotional effect. During her 20-minute opening statement, Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s attorney Nina Antony stressed the gruesome nature of victim’s injuries, and suggested that Fields had premeditated the whole thing, mentioning that three months before UTR, Fields had posted an image of a car running into a crowd of people on Instagram. “Fields was here in Charlottesville with anger and images of violence fixed in his mind.”

Now the Defense.

Hill did provide some useful details about Fields’ activities and interactions in the two hours between the time when UTR was forcibly (and illegally) dispersed and when the car crash happened. Fields left Lee Park by walking west–the safer way–and returned to the UTR staging ground at McIntyre Park. He went back to his car at the McDonald’s up the road (presumably this one). At the Shell gas station across the street, he met three other UTR attendees, who needed to get back to their cars, all parked in the still-dangerous downtown. Fields volunteered to give them a lift back to their cars. Dropping them off, Fields and his new acquaintances resolved to meet up later for lunch.

Next: a rifle toting leftist testifies.

The defense called Dwayne Dixon, an “anti-racist activist,” to testify about his actions that day, and about a Facebook post, in which Dixon claimed that he had used an AR-15 rifle “to chase off James fields from our block… before he attacked the marchers.”

And: (more…)

Tomorrow may be “black Saturday” in Paris.

Friday, December 7th, 2018

The protests that have convulsed Paris for two weeks, may hit a peak or be stopped tomorrow.

Carte_Paris-Desktop

The arrondissements of Paris are marked in this map. The police are calling in reinforcements and a confrontation is coming.

Fearing that an “enormous violence” will be part of “Act IV” of the mobilization of the “Yellow Jackets,” authorities have announced the mobilization of “exceptional measures” of more than 65,000 security forces deployed throughout France, and putting the finishing touches the security presence already in Paris.

As the fourth Saturday of mobilization of the “Yellow Jackets” approaches, l’Elyssee dreads that “an enormous violence” will explode in Paris this weekend. Throughout France, the calls to gather in Paris and demolish the current establishment rule are multiplying. Last week, a young man encountered by Le Figaro near the Saint-Lazare station was shouting: “This is not a protest, this is the Revolution!” Tuedsay night, on BFM T, one of the leaders of the movement, Eric Drouet, had even declared wanting to “return” to l’Eyssee Saturday.

There is talk of a “no confidence vote” in the Parliament.

The actual government — the Prime Minister and other Ministers — are, however, proposed by the President and then voted on by the legislature. So they do rely on legislative support.

So the PM Phillipe, the Minister of the Interior Castaner, etc., could be in danger due to a no-confidence vote. Macron would just have to reshuffle the cabinet and bring in a few new people while kicking old ones out and submit them for approval by the legislature.

As that article I translated yesterday mentioned, there is already talk that Phillipe might be on his way out, and talk that an even larger reshuffling is coming. This was before the report of a no-confidence vote. The source said that if Saturday’s protests are violent, we could see Macron forced to shake up the government — “In the best case, by the time of the European elections, in the worst case, by Christmas.”

We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

Is Paris Burning ?

Sunday, December 2nd, 2018

toulouse

A famous request from Adolf Hitler was also the tile of a book about the liberation of Paris in 1944, and might be a question about the riots of this week by the “Yellow Vests”

There is not a single media report about the Yellow Vest demonstrations in Paris and France that I’ve read or watched that has not been slanted by Fake News.

It has (usually) not been deliberate, I gather, and nobody has said anything factually wrong; what is the problem is the fact that (very) important stuff has been omitted.

It is not wrong to say that the demonstrations were caused by the government’s decision to raise gas prices. What is missing is that this is just one of several draconian measures dating back half a year, i.e., ‘tis the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

It requires someone on the scene to describe what has really been happening.

For the past four to five months, the French government has done nothing but double down on bringing more and more gratuitous oppression and more and more unwarranted persecution measures down on the necks the nation’s drivers and motorcycle riders.

In fact, the imposition of ever harsher rules has been going on for the past decade and a half or so — whether the government was on the right or on the left — and that is why the choice of les gilets jaunes (the yellow jackets) by the demonstrators is particularly ironic.

The 2008 law (under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy) requiring the presence of high-visibility vests (gilets de haute visibilité) aka security vests (gilets de sécurité) in every vehicle — hardly an unreasonable rule, for sure, as similar ones exist throughout the continent — was just another example of the myriad of evermore-onerous rules for car and motorcycle owners over the past 15 years, and so the government in effect provided the 2018 rebels with their uniforms.

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Is Trump the herald of “Localism?”

Wednesday, July 25th, 2018

Donald Trump is the source of great pain on the left and also in the professional politician class of the GOP.

Why ?

He was an outsider in GOP politics but the GOP politicians had failed a lot of the voters, including me. Like Ross Perot in 1992, he attracted a lot of people who were tired of being taken for granted by the regular politicians.

Now there are some interesting theories of what is happening.

Henry Kissinger, who knows Trump personally, has said some interesting things about him.

The 93-year-old Nobel laureate told CBS show Face The Nation that the Republican’s unconventional style could be an asset and an ‘extraordinary opportunity’ for the US.

‘Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came into office, at the same time, extraordinary opportunity,’ Kissinger said.

‘And I believe he has the possibility of going down in history as a very considerable president,’ he added.

Naturally, this has disturbed some of the usual Trump opponents.

Now, as Donald Trump signals that he wants a more cooperative relationship with Moscow, the 93-year-old Kissinger is positioning himself as a potential intermediary — meeting with the president-elect in private and flattering him in public. Like Trump, Kissinger has also cast doubt on intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia sought to sway the election in Trump’s favor, telling a recent interviewer: “They were hacking, but the use they allegedly made of this hacking eludes me.”

The headline, of course, smears Kissinger, always hated by the left, as “a longtime Putin confidant.”

What is going on ?

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America’s Principle Agent Problem.

Friday, November 10th, 2017

Instapundit frequently links to another story of government incompetence with the comment “We have the worst ruling class in our history.”

There are so many examples, it is hard to list them but I will try with a few.

First, let’s have a definition.

The principal–agent problem, in political science and economics, (also known as agency dilemma or the agency problem) occurs when one person or entity (the “agent”) is able to make decisions on behalf of, or that impact, another person or entity: the “principal”.[1] This dilemma exists in circumstances where agents are motivated to act in their own best interests, which are contrary to those of their principals, and is an example of moral hazard.

The Founders were well aware of this problem and tried to protect the citizens with certain provisions of the Constitution.

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

This provision was violated by Barack Obama who spent billions to subsidize insurance companies to support his “Affordable Care Act” which was not successful.

Of course, the Amendments were intended to protect the rights of the people but the one that has been ignored for 100 years is the Tenth.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Civil War largely ended Federalism.

In recent years, political parties have mislead their voters, the worst offender being the Republican Party. The Democrats posture as the party of the working man but it has become a party with two wings, the rich who want social liberties, and the poor who want to be taken care of. Jay Cost has written a good book about the Democrats Party called, “Spoiled Rotten, which explains the current policies of the party which has adopted “Identity politics” in which race and victim status has become a principal focus. My own review of the book is here.

The Republicans have gradually become the party of small business but the interests of small business are not being considered as paramount as the party seems to be evolving into another party of professional politicians whose personal interest trumps (so to speak) the interests of the voters. The result has been the rebellion of the Tea Party and more recently the election of Dave Brat, an economics professor, to Congress defeating Eric Cantor, a member of the GOP leadership, in 2014.

The election of Donald Trump has presented the GOP Congress with a crisis to which many have responded by retiring. One wonders what the next step of their career will be. Few, I suspect, will return home to the district that elected them. Most will remain in DC as Cantor has done.

Immediately thereafter, Cantor accepted a position as vice chairman of investment bank Moelis & Company. and,

In February 2015, the firm opened its Washington DC office, following the hire of Eric Cantor, former House Majority Leader, in September 2014.

The “Swamp” as President Trump describes it.

Other examples of the decline of the ruling class are easy to find.

A former professor at West Point, the Army’s Military Academy described the decline in standards at that institution.

The US Navy has had a series of catastrophic ship incidents an analysis is here.

As you will see over and over; yes there is individual failure, but this is actually a systemic failure. No one gets to be OOD overnight. No one gets to be the senior officer in CIC by fogging a mirror. These are, in theory, highly trained professionals who have invested years to be standing that watch. At a minimum, the basics should be instinct, should be expected – should be reinforced by the entire watch team because that is what we do. This did not happen in isolation. This is not the first time any of this took place.

Why, on this ship on this watch, did this happen? What were the conditions that created such an environment?

The rest is horrifying. What has happened to competence ?

The Transportation Security Administration has improved their success at detecting violations to only 80% failure.

Back in 2015, the TSA failed 67 of 70 tests that were conducted around the nation, which involved undercover officers smuggling banned items through security. That’s right, they have a ~95% failure rate. At least up until recently, the TSA has been consistent. In July a similar test was conducted, where 16 of 17 tests were failed, which is a similar failure rate.

I simply can’t wrap my head around how this is acceptable. Earlier in the year we saw the federal government imposing ridiculous (and dangerous) bans on electronics for flights from the Middle East to the US, while for flights departing the US, 95% of weapons go undetected.

Information is now coming out about the latest tests conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, in which undercover agents brought weapons through TSA checkpoint. This time around they’re not revealing exact numbers, but rather are only giving ballpark figures.

Then, of course, we had the botched implementation of Obamacare and its web site registration system.

Though the Obama administration tried to cover up the full extent of the website failure in the days following its launch, the lengthy HHS document tells a tale of complete collapse. It was forced out of this secretive administration by our November 25, 2013, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. Judicial Watch filed suit after HHS refused to respond to our October 7, 2013, FOIA request seeking the following information:

Any and all records concerning, regarding, or related to the number of individuals that purchased health insurance through Healthcare.gov between October 1, 2013, and October 4, 2013.

A simple request – that was stonewalled for over six months. Now we know why. This document shows that, on its first full day of operation, October 1, 2013, Obamacare’s Healthcare.gov received only one enrollment! That’s one – out of 334 million Americans. On the second day, 48% of registrations failed to process.

Billions were spent on this disaster. The Oregon state program failed completely

Oregon, under then-Gov. John Kitzhaber, aspired to create a shining model for other ObamaCare exchanges, but instead, it became its poster child of dysfunction. After spending more than $300 million in federal taxpayer dollars, Oregon pulled the plug last year and decided to default to the federal exchange.

The state is now embroiled in lawsuits with its primary vendor, Oracle, and current and former Oregon officials are the subject of congressional and other federal investigations. Depending upon the outcome of those investigations, Congress could demand that the state to pay back the $300 million it spent on a project that numerous reports show was fraught with mismanagement and political maneuverings.

Kitzhaber was an ER doc and may have returned to that occupation after his adventures as Governor.

The failure of Congress to repeal Obamacare is one more example of incompetence. The reaction of Republican Congress persons to Trump after his election suggests where their loyalties lie. The Swamp.

I think Angelo Codevilla’s piece about “The Ruling Class” has the best explanation.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.