WalkAway

My post in the #WalkAway campaign.

I grew up in Connecticut, in a liberal home; but the word meant something different then. My parents were old-school liberals - Kennedy Democrats. Mom in particular had no use for Communism, and admired Soviet dissidents like Solzhenitsyn. (Another Soviet dissident of the day - a Jewish activist - would later play an important role in my own thinking.) Our family didn't follow an organized religion, although we were nominally Unitarians.

We were book-lovers and intellectuals, and Mom and Dad instilled a love of learning in my sister and me. But we were also a very troubled family. As a kid I had a love of science and a nerdy bent. (This was in the 1970s, before the computer revolution made geekiness cool. In those days, "nerd" was definitely not a compliment.) I didn't want to spend the rest of my life hiding in books, like in the Simon and Garfunkel song "I Am a Rock."

I joined the military after high school and served 10 years active duty in two branches - the Air Force and the Marines. It was a great challenge and an opportunity to grow as a person. Surrounded by all different kinds of people from very different backgrounds, I learned more than I ever would have learned in a classroom.

I was still independent and unconventional in my thinking, though, including my politics. I spent about seven years as an active member of the Green Party in California and Oregon (where it's known as the Pacific Green Party for historical reasons). This was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I liked the camaraderie and the sense of engagement. Even then, though, I probably would have identified my politics as "classical liberal" (rather than "progressive" or "leftist") - which put me firmly to the right-of-center among my fellow Greens!

As a young adult I had started to gravitate toward religion, first learning Hebrew (so as to understand the Bible better) and eventually attending synagogue services on a regular basis. The party chapter I belonged to was not anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic as far as I could tell, but I realized with growing unease that this could not be said of many of our comrades on the Left. I also noticed a strange affinity for radical Islam in some corners. The local "progressive" newspaper (oh, how I wish I'd saved that copy) ran a glowing article on the role of Islam in western Asia. That issue was published in the summer of 2001.

The September 11 attacks forced me to re-think a lot of things, but it wasn't until 2003, I think, that I officially left the Greens and joined the Democratic Party. The primaries were underway, and one of the early Democratic hopefuls was an Orthodox Jewish Senator from my home state, who struck me as a decent man and a principled liberal of the old style. I got to hear him speak once at my synagogue.

Senator Joe Lieberman dropped out of the primary on February 3, 2004, and that was my #WalkAway moment. It was clear that the Democratic Party and I were headed in different directions. I changed my registration to Republican the next day.

In the following months I began following Republican politics and learning more about conservatism. I avidly followed the freewheeling debates in National Review Online's 'The Corner'. I discovered that conservatism had nothing in common with the caricatured image presented in the news media and in TV shows like 'All in the Family'. I came to understand the importance of small government, individual liberty, and free markets. I also started to understand the role of social institutions - churches, fraternities, and even families - in a healthy, functioning Republic. And I also started to see the media bias more and more clearly.

Fast forward through the Obama years (please!) and to the recent elections. I was a Ted Cruz guy in the primaries, and did not know what to make of this Donald Trump character. I thought his supporters seemed like zealots, and a little bit unhinged. I followed the debates in the news, on the blogs, on YouTube and Facebook. And I noticed something strange: as crazy as the pro-Trump people sometimes sounded, the anti-Trump people were worse. Even among supposed Republicans and conservatives.

So I voted for Trump in the general election, not knowing what to expect, but knowing for darn sure I wasn't going to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. The Obama years had convinced me that the people at the helm of the Democratic Party were not simply misguided or over-zealous reformers - they were anti-American. The deaths at Benghazi, and the untimely demise of numerous persons inconvenient to the Clintons, convinced me that something very dark and sinister was afoot.

When I started listening to what Trump was actually saying - instead of what the media were telling me he was saying - I started to like what I was hearing. Grow the economy, fight illegal immigration, move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem - sounds great! But would a President Trump actually do any of those things?

Now we are getting our answer. In retrospect I realize that my fellow Republican voters called it right.

Our Nation - our Republic - is something unique and precious in the world. We are blessed with freedoms few other nations enjoy (even the so-called "democratic" nations of Europe), and with a rich intellectual and spiritual heritage. But we live in a difficult world, where totalitarian forces would like to see us defeated. Our security and our liberty depend on our strength as a nation.

It's good to be independent in your thinking, but it's also good to understand where other folks are coming from, and to understand the importance of traditions and of institutions. We need freedom, but we also need purpose. ("Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life." - Viktor Frankl, 'Man's Search for Meaning') We need to be individuals, but we draw strength from a larger identity. ("The enemy's will is strong because his identity is strong. And we must match his strength of purpose with strong identities of our own." - Natan Sharansky, 'Defending Identity')

The ancient Israelites walked away from slavery in Egypt, not knowing where they were headed. They wandered in the wilderness for weeks before receiving the Torah that gave their lives meaning, and years more before settling in the homeland where they would build a national identity.

The search for meaning and identity is the work of a lifetime - but the first step is to #WalkAway.

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Financial Times: Portland near bottom in fiscal health index.

KATU:

PORTLAND, Ore. — The city of Portland is currently about $3.4 billion in debt and ranks near the bottom of a national "fiscal health index."

The Fiscal Times evaluated the finances of 116 U.S. cities with populations greater than 200,000 and ranked Portland No. 103 last year.

Officials say Portland's debt has risen by more than 20 percent over the past 10 years from $2.82 billion in 2008.

The city currently pays more than $500 million annually to service its debt, which includes both principal and interest. The city's total budget this year is $5.1 billion. ...

Go to the KATU link for a breakout and analysis of the debt from city debt manager Eric Johansen.

China / New Zealand: Concern over PRC influence in NZ.

Business Insider:

A former CIA analyst has raised the prospect of kicking New Zealand out of an international intelligence-sharing alliance, which includes the US.

Five Eyes is the name of the intelligence alliance between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that has routinely shared sensitive intelligence since 1955. But failure to respond to interference attempts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) should endanger New Zealand's membership, Peter Mattis, a former CIA China expert testified to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission last month.

"In New Zealand, both the last prime minister, Bill English, and Jacinda Ardern, have denied that there's a problem at all," Mattis, now a fellow at The Jamestown Foundation, said. ...

Jonathan Spyer: Iran's strategic response.

Jonathan Spyer:

Iran can be expected to respond with a counter-strategy of its own, designed to stymy and frustrate western and allied efforts. What form will this Iranian response take? What assets does Iran possess in the furtherance of this goal?

First of all, it is worth noting what Iran does not have: Teheran is deficient in conventional military power, and as such is especially vulnerable when challenged in this arena. The Iranians have neglected conventional military spending, in favor of emphasis on their missile program, and their expertise in the irregular warfare methods of the Revolutionary Guards Corps and its Qods Force. ...

California: New water rationing laws.

The Organic Prepper:

Governor Jerry Brown is retiring but not before he passes a few draconian laws as parting gifts for California. Two bills were signed into law on Thursday of last week to “help California be better prepared for future droughts and the effects of climate change.”

The mandatory water conservation standards will be permanent, according to their wording, and not just for use in times of crisis. To make a long story short, now that these bills are law, it’s illegal to take a shower and do a load of laundry in the same day because you’ll exceed your “ration.” ...

About Assembly Bill 1668:

The bill, until January 1, 2025, would establish 55 gallons per capita daily as the standard for indoor residential water use, beginning January 1, 2025, would establish the greater of 52.5 gallons per capita daily or a standard recommended by the department and the board as the standard for indoor residential water use, and beginning January 1, 2030, would establish the greater of 50 gallons per capita daily or a standard recommended by the department and the board as the standard for indoor residential water use. The bill would impose civil liability for a violation of an order or regulation issued pursuant to these provisions, as specified.

Sacramento Bee:

Assembly Bill 1668 by Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, D-Glendale, and Senate Bill 606 from state Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Los Angeles, give water districts more flexibility than the strict cuts mandated under Brown’s emergency drought order and will eventually allow state regulators to assess thousands of dollars in fines against jurisdictions that do not meet the goals. ...

The "decent people".

They are a class of people who believed they could discern a "decent" person by the individual's decorum and speech. Their whole world-view is based on this shallow, superficial, and trivial understanding of human nature. In reality, decent and honorable people may be plain-spoken and even at times crude. But the manners brigade will die before they'll admit they were wrong about that.

Gender and category errors.

The anti-trans social conservatives understand correctly that gender has both an external component (our reproductive organs) and an internal component (our psychological makeup), which are aligned or matched-up in a certain way in most people. What they are unable or unwilling to see is that exceptional cases may exist where the matching is different from most people. (Were this not the case, it would be the only phenomenon in all of nature that hasn't got a single exception or deviation.) They imagine that transgender people are "trying to destroy society".

Anti-trans feminists (or TERFs) make the opposite error, and deny any natural correlation between reproductive sex and innate gender identity. For them, all gender identity is "socially constructed" and the product of patriarchal stereotypes. From there, it is a short step to declaring all generalizations about men and women inherently oppressive and evil.

Of the two errors, the latter is more useful to socialists and radical leftists (who really ARE trying to destroy society) because it attacks the process of organizing our experience on the most fundamental level - it attacks reasoning itself. A botany book contains idealized diagrams of flowers, and an anatomy book contains idealized diagrams of people; no one imagines that these diagrams represent every case, or even exactly represent a single example, but they are useful tools for learning the overall properties of the thing under consideration.

It is not so difficult to say, "This is the general case, but execptions also exist. Each case is unique, and yet certain things are true of the overall population." And yet this is exactly what political correctness aims to do, with the intended and demonstrated result that the whole educational process grinds to a halt. And this is precisely what we've seen in ecucation for the past 50 years or more.

Jonah Goldberg: Mueller had better be right.

Jonah Goldberg at NRO: Mueller had better be right about the Cohen raid.

The fact that Mueller referred this to the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York rather than fold it into his own investigation suggests that whatever he found may not be central to his probe. If Mueller had reason to believe that he had Cohen dead to rights on the “collusion” stuff, he probably wouldn’t have farmed this out to a different prosecutor.

On the other hand, the fact that U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman agreed with Mueller’s interpretation and sought a warrant from a judge and that the judge agreed to grant one suggests that Cohen is in trouble. ...

Via Instapundit.

FBI raids New York office of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

Breitbart: FBI raids office of Michael Cohen.

The F.B.I. raided President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen’s office on Monday, seizing records related to “several topics including payments to” porn-star Stormy Daniels, the New York Times reported.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan had obtained the search warrant, after receiving a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller. Cohen’s lawyer called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary,” according to the Times.

The search does not appear to be related to the special counsel investigating Russian meddling and potential collusion by the Trump campaign, but a separate investigation that might have resulted from information he uncovered and handed over to prosecutors in New York.

Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen Ryan, said the F.B.I. seized “privileged communications” between Cohen and his clients. ...

PJ Media: Trump furious over raids.

The FBI raided the office and residence of President Trump's longtime personal attorney, confidant and "fixer" today, prompting an angry reaction from the president and caution from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who advocated that special counsel Robert Mueller be able to stay the course in his investigation.

About a dozen agents were reportedly involved in serving multiple warrants on Michael Cohen's office, his home and the Loew's Regency hotel where he has been staying, seizing his computer, phone, emails, tax documents, business records and related materials.

Cohen has publicly admitted to making a $130,000 payment, from his home equity line of credit, to adult-film star Stormy Daniels in October 2016 in return for her silence about an alleged 2006 affair between Trump and Daniels, and to setting up a limited-liability company in Delaware to make the payment 10 days before the money transfer. The payment was flagged by Cohen's bank in a suspicious activity report at the time.

An outstanding question is whether investigators determine the payment was an undisclosed "in kind" campaign contribution intended to influence the outcome of the election, which would violate the $2,700 contribution limit as well as disclosure rules. ...

Fox: Trump attacks Mueller "witch hunt".

"It's a disgraceful situation. It's a total witch hunt," said Trump, who claimed that he had "given over a million pages in documents to the special counsel. They continue to just go forward ... and I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now. Actually it's much more than that. You could say right after I won the [2016 Republican] nomination it started."

Trump also accused Mueller's investigators of being "the most biased group of people [with] the biggest conflicts of interest" and said Attorney General Jeff Sessions "made a terrible mistake for the country" when he recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation last year. ...

Popehat: What we can infer immediately.

1. According to Cohen's own lawyer, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York (widely regarded within itself as being the most important and prestigious U.S. Attorney's Office in the country) secured the search warrants for the FBI. Assuming this report is correct, that means that a very mainstream U.S. Attorney's Office — not just Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office — thought that there was enough for a search warrant here.

2. Moreover, it's not just that the office thought that there was enough for a search warrant. They thought there was enough for a search warrant of an attorney's office for that attorney's client communications. That's a very fraught and extraordinary move that requires multiple levels of authorization within the Department of Justice. ...

Fake news master Christopher Blair tells all.

Boston Globe: Fake news creator did it for our own good.

Blair says he was raised a Massachusetts Democrat. When the economy crashed in 2008, he lost work and struggled to support his family. He blamed it on President George W. Bush. Social media and online forums became welcome places to vent his anger. Busta Troll was born after the election of Barack Obama, and was triggered, Blair says, by the rise of the Tea Party movement that arose in opposition. Online, he found himself aligning with a small offshoot of people who live to goad and prank and maybe silence extreme conservatives.

In 2014, Blair, as Busta Troll, pulled off a prank that won him wide admiration in that community. The United States had just traded five Taliban prisoners for Bowe Bergdahl, an Army soldier captured in Afghanistan after deserting his post. The prisoner swap ignited anger in far-right groups, and a Facebook page dedicated to the issue quickly became a “dumping ground for bilious accusations against Bergdahl and anti-Obama chatter,” according to the Los Angeles Times, which wrote about it at the time. ...

Related: Fake news creator Jestin Coler (NPR, November 2016).

Check the facts - and we will tell you how!

That's one way to approach fact-checking.  My approach is a little different.

Why did this ostensibly neutral, public-spirited presentation use specifically the example of Muslims and Christmas trees?  Why is Google presented as the single solution to the fact-checking problem?

To be sure, questionable stories about Islam, as with any other topic, should be fact-checked, and false information about Islam (as with any other topic) can do great damage.  Google is one of many tools available for this purpose.

We can all agree on the importance of getting your facts straight, but there is a lot more to it than this video would suggest - and I suspect that the presentation has an agenda of its own.

Parkland victim's family unwelcome at rally.

Gateway Pundit:

The family of slain Parkland student Meadow Pollack was disinvited from speaking at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, DC. The family is not pushing gun control, but rather securing our schools and protecting our children. ...

Go to the link for Hunter Pollack's speech.